You’re supposed to gather up the legs into loops, then put your toes through, and release the material as you draw the tights up your legs. That’s what someone told me anyway. It sounds easy but I’ve never been able to get the hang of it, so I sort of half do it, but end up pretty much pulling them on as if they were trousers. I’m sure I’m not doing it right anyway. At least when they’re 70 dernier you can get away with it, if you’re careful.

They don’t really fit me, but then nothing does. By the time I’ve pulled everything up as far as it’ll go I’m puffing slightly, and starting to sweat, so I lie on my bed for a little while and stare at the ceiling.

Do I look good for you tonight?
Will you accuse me as I hide?

I bought the skirt in the back of a gift shop just off Oxford Street on a trip to Forbidden Planet. There’s a few racks of imported Indian-print clothes there. I brought them to the counter and paid and got out, breath heaving, into the cold winter air. I’d thought I’d kept calm as the Indian woman ran my card through, but I’m sure my face was red. But I had them.

The skirt is long and patchwork; predominantly black, with sections of a paisley-like print, sections of black velvet, and some that are almost filigree. The waist is elasticated, so I knew I could wear it, and has a drawstring with nice metal ends on it. (I’m sure they have a proper name, but I don’t know it.)

I like the way it moves around my legs as I walk and turn, feeling the weave of the carpet through the soles of my tights. But I go back to the bed and pull off my T-shirt and put on the top I got from the same shop.

The censorship of my skin
Is screaming inside and from within

It’s a little tight across the shoulders, and the sleeves aren’t quite long enough, but it was the biggest size they had. It’s pretty though. I like the embroidery patterns on it, and if I stand really straight and set my shoulders just so, it doesn’t feel that tight. So posture counts for something I suppose.

I’m careful not to look in the mirror. It would only depress me. But the clothes let me feel free for a little while, and if I just catch my reflection in the darkness of the window as I turn, I can almost see a feminine silhouette.

And I wish I had been born a girl
Instead of what I am.

There’s a single bang on the door on the ground floor. That’s Ken, with Dave, come to give me a lift to the game. He only ever does one knock, but it’s a hard one, rattling the door in the frame. I go back to my bedroom and pull the skirt down over my hips and let it drop, and pull my usual black jeans on over my tights, and a thick jumper on over the blouse, because the church hall is cold on winter evenings. I’d already planned to do this, thinking myself quite brave, in a pathetic way, I suppose. I put my trainers on, grab my backpack and clatter downstairs.

There’s no-one at the door, of course. Ken would have knocked and returned immediately to the warmth and shelter of the car. A flash of headlamps tells me where they are as I pull the door locked, and I head over and get in the back, shoving detritus out of the way, my knees crammed into the back of the passenger seat in front. I hurry to get the seatbelt on, struggling to find the latch, because Dave’s driving scares me, and it’s foggy tonight.

“You all right Paul?” Ken tilts around in the passenger seat to ask me. He has a friendly, if unshaven, face, and gorgeous, long red hair.

“Yeah.” I grin back. Ken turns back to face front.

“Now I’m going to drive extra-special carefully tonight ’cause the visibility’s so bad,” Dave informs me as he lurches out into the traffic. I grab the handle over the window.

“Good,” I manage to say, through gritted teeth. He gives me a look in the mirror that’s all mischief, but once out on the main road he settles down and is true to his word.

“You know, you really should close your curtains at night,” Ken adds, twisting around again briefly to make it clear he’s talking to me. “Or people are going to be able to look in from the road.”

It feels like my heart is stopping. In the darkness of the back of the car at least they can’t see my face flushing, as I can feel it is. I should say something. I know I should say something, anything, preferably something witty and disarming; but I feel paralysed, and I can only look out at the houses and streetlamps looming past out of the fog.

“So what are you doing to us tonight?” Dave asked Ken, transparently changing the subject.

“As if I’d tell you!”

Yes I wish I had been born a girl
And not this mess of a man.
And not this mess of a man.

I know what it means of course. I’m not stupid, but I’m increasingly careless, even though I still dare not even step outside the door. Somehow, some stupid part of me wanted to be seen, wanted to force the issue and make me actually, finally do something about it. But as Dave and Ken talk about the hardware upgrades they’re going to need to play some new game that’s coming out for the PC, I know that’s not going to happen today, and I’m relieved. Because I’m not ready.

I’m not ready. And I don’t know that I ever will be. It’s all impossible and stupid anyway.

Ken has the keys, so we’re usually the first to arrive, but tonight Simon is already waiting outside, tall and gangling, leaning against the railing by the door to the hall, reading a book under the security light and apparently oblivious to the cold. His breath clouds around the book in his hands. He will have walked here, as usual. He lives the closest, but it would still have been a twenty minute walk, I know.

“Took you long enough,” he says, as we escape the car and approach the door.

“No it didn’t, you’re early,” Ken objects, throwing a big grin and jangling the keys. “Out of the way, I want to get inside.”

Simon merely tilts his book up against his chest and peers down (through the fog from his height) at the clearly unobstructed doorway.

“I thought I’d better drive carefully ’cause of the fog,” Dave excuses himself. “An’ Paul ’ere gets scared if I don’t, so…” He shrugs a ‘what can you do’ as Ken gets the door open and disappears inside. Dave follows.

Simon looks at me, as if I need to give an explanation too.

“I had to get changed,” I say, truthfully.

“Yeah, that’n’all,” Dave calls back, already inside. My heart hammers again for a moment, scared he might say more.

“Ah,” Simon nods sagely, as if taking in a great truth, and waits for me to pass him, so I do. Ken has already turned the lights on and is trying to coax the inadequate heater into life. It clearly involves swearing and dire imprecations, but eventually it starts making a noise. It’s something. Heat is implicitly promised for the future. In any case it seems to satisfy Ken, who comes back to where Dave and Simon have been pulling desks together and claims his space. I’ve been fetching chairs.

“Whose turn is it to make tea?” Ken wants to know. He’s setting up his DM’s screen, so it’s safe for him to ask.

“Paul’s isn’t it?” Simon suggests, depositing his character sheet and his ornate dice-box onto the desk in his usual place.

“Is it?” I ask, taking my seat opposite him.

“Oh God,” Ken mutters.

“I’ll do it right this time, I promise!” I say. “I don’t drink the stuff. How’m I s’posed to know I’m doing it right?”

“It’s so easy! I don’t even know how you could get it wrong!”

“I’ll do it when everyone’s here,” I promise.

The door is flung open dramatically. Lee practically bounces in. He even says “Sproing!” as he comes to a halt.

“Shut the fucking door!” Ken yells back without even looking to see who it is.

Lee reaches back precariously and shoves the door shut. “Aw, you’re just jealous ’cause I’ve got a girlfriend.” He looks the part. Of all of us he looks the most normal, takes the most care over his appearance. Neat black hair, expensive black leather coat that he unslings from his shoulders with casual ease.

“Yeah? Has this one finished her GCSEs?” Simon asks cuttingly. We’re never going to let Lee forget that one.

“Ye-e-es,” Lee retorts sulkily.

“And when are you going to tell her you’re a closet role-player?”

“Fuck off.” He takes his seat. “Who’s making the tea this week?” I raise my hand. “Oh fuck.”

“Look, if you want to do it–”

“You’re going to bloody learn how to make a cup of tea if it kills us,” Simon says.

“Your XP depends on it,” Dave points out.

“Erk.”

“No XP for anyone unless I get a good cup of tea this week,” Ken declares.

“Hey!” Lee and Dave object at the same time.

“You stupid–” Lee smacked Dave’s shoulder “– putting the idea into his head.”

“Not to put you under any pressure or anything,” Ken says to me brightly. I bury my head in my hands.

The door opens again and James steps in. “Hi guys,” he says.

“Hi, James,” Ken calls out, still not turning. He’s busy sorting out pieces of paper behind his screen.

“Hi,” others call, variously.

“Bit nippy out there tonight, isn’t it?” James asks, pacing over.

“You could call it that,” Ken replies. “I call it fucking freezing.”

James has a slow, easy walk. As he walks he unwraps the lower half of his face from his scarf and pulls his woollen hat off. He’s got long blond hair, down over his shoulders. He probably looks more like his current character than any of us, but for the pink glow in his cheeks from walking in the freezing fog, and the cheap anorak and worn-out jeans and trainers.

“Right, everyone’s here,” Ken declares. “Tea.”

“Oh, great,” James beams, taking his seat next to mine. “Who’s making it?”

“One for each person who’s having a cup, and one for the pot.”

“Yeah, I know. I remember that bit.”

This is so embarrassing. Simon is standing over me while I make the tea. And I do mean over me. I feel like a slow-witted child.

“Now, get the mugs–”

“I know! Jesus.”

“Just remember to pour the water into the teapot while it’s actually boiling this time.”

I’ve got half an ear on proceedings out in the main part of the hall. Dave is boring everyone including the DM (which is always a bad idea) by trying out everything he knows as a gamer to see if the big shiny sword he picked up in the battle last session is magical or not. Things his typical combat-monster character could never know. I can tell from Ken’s expression that this is not a good way to get XP, but he’s probably only letting it go on because he’s waiting for the tea before actually starting, and probably finds it mildly amusing to lead Dave around a bit with little hints and instructions to roll D20, that he might be on to something. I don’t know why Dave never gets this. There are two possibilities: the sword is magical, and Ken made a secret detect magic roll on Dave’s behalf that failed, or it’s not magic and the secret roll was actually fake. Either way, he’s not going to find out anything useful going at it like this.

Or he might trigger an evil curse that’ll blight the rest of that character’s brief but event-filled life. That’s entirely possible, when Ken’s DMing. And things like that are always happening to Dave’s characters. Roll-play doesn’t get well rewarded here.

“Kettle’s boiling,” Simon points out.

“Right.” I pick it up off the stand and, as instructed, pour straight into the teapot. “How much?”

Simon is looming over it. He glides around the church hall’s small kitchen like a ghost. “Keep going… That much.”

I put the lid on the pot. “How long do we wait?”

Ken sniffs his mug cautiously, then blows over the liquid, then takes a sip. An eyebrow raises and he nods, ever so minutely, and sets the mug down. “So, you all wake up after an uneventful night, except for Lotan–”

“I stood the last watch,” Dave puts in.

“Lotan is sitting at the cave mouth apparently toying with his weapon.”

Dave blows a raspberry at him.

“Roll for observation. Minus two.”

“Everyone?” Lee asks.

“Just Lotan.”

“Why minus two?”

“Because you’ve been sitting there half the night instead of sleeping after a hard day yesterday, and the tide’s coming in and waves are crashing against the cliffs and there’s seagulls calling and–”

“All right, all right.” Dave rolls.

“I think I’m being generous. It’s really hard to hear what might be going on inside the cave unless you’re really paying attention.”

“Failed it,” Dave declares, clearly feeling hard done by with that minus two.

“He seems to be so engrossed in what he’s doing he hasn’t noticed that you’re awake.”

“Oh!” Simon says, picking up the cue instantly. “Try to sneak up on him, of course!” He grins. He has a slow, evil grin that seems to almost wrap itself halfway around his face.

“You bastard,” Dave says.

“Have you got Move Silently?”

“Ye-e-eah.”

“Okay, you can do that without too much trouble. What are the rest of you doing?”

“Oh, I’m watching this,” I say.

“Yeah, I’m watching too,” Lee says.

“I’m probably not really awake yet anyway,” James adds. He’s rolling a spliff on his Magic User’s reference manual. All I can see is green stuff going into it.

“What do you want to do?” Ken asks Simon.

“Oh, I just want to come up behind him and cover his eyes.” Grin. It’s quite alarming.

Dave doesn’t look happy about it.

“All right, you can roll for surprise.”

Dave rolls. “Yess.” He glares at Simon. “I’m swinging my sword at whoever it is I can hear coming up behind me.”

“Ooh!” Simon exclaims.

“Barak, you roll surprise.”

Roll. “No, I’m not surprised.” He doesn’t sound it either.

“Are you really trying to hit him?” Ken asks Dave.

“Yeah!”

“At the last minute Lotan hears Barak creeping up behind him and swings his sword at him. You’re not wearing armour are you?” Ken asks Simon.

“I don’t own any armour.” Grin. Simon seems to relish the possibility of an imminent demise for his character.

“Okay, roll it.”

Dave rolls. “Fifteen.”

“I just manage to zip back out of the way,” Simon says.

“Don’t ever come up behind me like that,” Dave says, in character and trying to sound hard. It doesn’t work, because he really is angry, and his face is a little red.

“Oi, you catch anything for breakfast?” Simon asks Dave insolently, in character.

“No. Bugger off.”

“What you been doin’ all night ’part from strokin’ your sword?” Simon switches back into his normal voice. “I come back into the cave. Oi, Samila,” he resumes the annoying goblin voice, “make breakfast.”

“What?” Lee protests, not making much effort at the voice, beyond making it sound a little spoilt and petulant. “Why does it have to be me? Why don’t you ask her?” he concludes, pointing at me.

“We don’t have any food anyway,” I point out, lightening my own voice. Not too much. Not as much as when I’m practicing alone. “We should be moving. We’ve got to find a boat and get off this island.”

“Glad someone’s remembered,” Ken mutters, a little meta.

James lights his spliff. This is the one occasion I actually don’t mind passively smoking, a little. He doesn’t use any tobacco, or hardly any because I can’t smell it, just the green stuff — I’m so ignorant of the terminology — so it doesn’t smell horrible like cigarettes. I know it’ll make me heady and a tiny bit disinhibited, which is okay, as long as it’s in character.

“I go outside the cave,” I say to Ken. “I get my pack together and go down to the water’s edge and pay my observances to the Goddess.”

“Oh, that’s what you call it,” Lee says.

He’s sitting next to me, so I pick up a player’s reference and bat him lightly over the head with it.

“Ow, that hurt!”

“You deserve it.”

“Bitch!”

“Tart.”

“Hey, you know, a girl’s gotta make a living,” Lee says, shrugging. I can hardly keep a grin off my face.

“Now now, girls, there’s no need to fight over me,” Dave cuts in.

Lee and I both give him a withering look, in unison. It’s perfect.

“I’m going down to the water,” I say again, firmly.

“Do the rest of you stay in the cave?” Ken asks.

“No, I want some air,” Lee says.

“Yeah, I’ll wander out as well, have a piss behind a rock somewhere,” James supplies laconically.

“What’s wrong with this cave?” Simon asks. “It’s nice in here! All damp and drippy.”

“We all ignore the gnome and go outside,” Lee says.

“I’m not a gnome!”

“It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day. What do you do? Well, apart from Taniel, she’s down at the water’s edge already doing something, I don’t know, some elvish prancing about or something.”

“I’m not prancing!” I object.

“But, eventually, you all get your shit together and you’re ready to move on.”

“I’m being very serene,” I point out.

“I still haven’t had breakfast!” Simon observes.

“(You can prance serenely can’t you?)” Lee asks me, whispering. “(You are an elf after all–)”

“Which way do you go?” Ken asks pointedly.

“(I’m not prancing!)”

“I’ll have you know I have a very high metabolism. If I don’t eat something soon I’ll starve to death!”

“Good,” Dave mutters. But he’s got over himself now and chases it with a quick smile.

“I guess we carry on along the coast, if there’s a path,” I say.

“Are you looking for a path?”

“Okay,” I say, catching on.

He rolls a die behind his screen. “Yeah, you can see a really narrow path climbing up away from the beach to the south. It wasn’t obvious, so you think it might be a smuggler’s trail.”

“I think we should go that way,” I say in character. “I start heading that way.”

“Why are we going that way?” Lotan wants to know.

“It’s the way we need to go,” I answer enigmatically.

“You don’t want to go back the way we came do you?” Samila backs me up. “I speed up so I can catch up to Taniel,” Lee narrates. “Come on boys, keep up. You don’t want to miss all the fun.”

I sit alone in the cockpit. The night sea is calm and glimmering in the light of the moon. It is peaceful, but the air full of sound. There is the wind, gentle though it is; there is the slight flutter in the sail that tells me I need to adjust the sail trim slightly, so I do it; there is a creak from the wood as it takes up the tension; there is the rush of water along the hull; and there is the immanent sussuration of the sea itself, almost not a sound at all, but a sense, a comfort, the feeling that I’m coming home.

“This is a nice dream,” I say quietly. My voice is light and clear. I know without looking that my body, too, is light and agile and graceful. I know it from the way I’m sitting: alert but relaxed at once. I have a poise I don’t think I have ever known. I can tell, even sitting still, for now I hardly dare move in case I break the spell and wake up. Even with the sea and the wind and the little sounds of the boat, my own breathing comes to me loud and pregnant. I don’t want this to end. I don’t want this to end. My body. I can feel it. I can feel what it is. I don’t want this to end. I don’t want to wake up in that lumpen shroud of flesh. Ever. Ever. Ever. My breath is a mantra.

There’s a change in the wind. It stirs the charms braided in my hair and flutters the sail hard, and if I don’t do something the boom will come over and the boat will turn and stop with uncomfortable haste. Quickly, without thinking, I haul on the line and turn the tiller and the boat comes back on course. Hopefully the sleepers below won’t have been disturbed. I make the line fast, satisfied.

I’m standing in the cockpit. I knew how to do that. The wind changed and I knew exactly what to do; I, who has never been on a vessel smaller than a cross-channel ferry, and that only once. But I can feel the texture of the deck under my bare feet. I can taste the sea air, I can taste how it changed with the wind. The boat rocks slightly against the gentle waves and I move with it automatically.

I couldn’t name more than a fraction of the things I can see on this boat, but I know what they do, and I know that this is a good ship. Or boat. I remember reading once there’s some question as to what precisely constitutes the difference between a boat and a ship, so I don’t feel so bad for not precisely knowing in which category this one resides. I guess that it’s about ten metres long, and I can feel that it is well-made, to a solid, classical design. It’s fast and smooth and it’s been well looked after by the smugglers from whom we stole it.

My hand… Upon my breast. I can feel the warmth of it through my linen tunic. The bump of my nipple. Half emboldened by the feeling that the dream won’t end so easily, half terrified by the simple, tactile reality of everything that it might not, that it feels so unlike a dream, I move my hand down. I have to, even though I know this is always where dreams like this end. But it’s never been so full, so real, so detailed before. Still I wonder: How can I know that? Maybe I just forget, and all my dreams are this real. My hand goes down; under the tunic, outside the loose canvas trousers, to discover what I already know, because I know this body, like I know how to sail. There is no surprise, just the quiet confirmation of something long known; but still; upon discovering through the canvas a smooth curve of me, and not the horrible outgrowths of flesh that always, always felt to me like a hideous deformity; I grin, I sigh, I giggle a little and stop myself, my hand on my mouth, surprised by the sound again, and afraid to wake anyone.

I sit and I let my head tip back to look at the stars. My hair, with its little burdens, falls back around my neck and I bring my hand up, this time, to my face, to feel the smooth curve of my jaw, how sensitive my lips are, my cheekbones, and back to my ear, tracing the line where it begins, a clean, short curve to a slight cartilaginous point. It’s sensitive there, and very intimate. And down the other side, around to a small unpierced lobe. No surprise, but a tiny reminder that, although I am female, I am not human.

I find I’m sitting still again, as if waiting for it all to end. But time passes slowly, with no dreamlike elisions to the next main event. The night wheels on with every gust of wind, every wave, every breath of my own in its natural succession, and more and more I begin to believe that this is not a dream, and despite my wishes that it’ll never end, now I’m scared, because this is something impossible, and if I’m not dreaming I must be hallucinating, or delusional or something, and if that’s not true, then I must be here. And that’s impossible.

It had been a good gaming night. We’d walked along the coast until we’d come to a tiny harbour that would have been all but invisible from the sea, and you practically had to walk into it from land before you saw it as well. It was clearly the slavers’ main landing port. Luckily they hadn’t heard the news of our escape. That wasn’t entirely luck, of course, as we’d left no-one at the camp in any position to report the breakout. If anyone had been sent there from the port to find out, they hadn’t returned yet.

There were three sailing boats in the harbour. I made my first sailing roll of the campaign and was able to declare one of them to be the best, and the one we were going to steal. But first, we had to set fire to the others. We didn’t want any pursuers, and besides, these were the bad guys. You’ve got to put the bad guys out of action; that’s what it’s about.

It would be an exaggeration to say everything went off without a hitch. We waited until twilight, then I boarded the boat we wanted and dispatched the two guys already there quietly enough, and I was quietly making the boat ready to go when whoosh, up went one of the other boats, right on time, and out came the slavers from their hut, but instead of them all going to the boat that was on fire, they divided and went to all three boats. The second boat went up in flames, but the rest of the party was cut off from us. Suddenly it all got very busy. I had to let go the last mooring and set the sail all at once and get the boat moving away from the jetty before we were boarded. (Thankfully I’d said the magic words before starting: “Is there enough wind in here to sail the ship out?” so Ken couldn’t ambush me at this point by saying there was none at all.) (Actually, had that happened I’d have had to argue that my successful Sailing role meant my character wouldn’t have been too stupid to think of that in advance even if I had been. I might have won that argument, but it would have sucked for role-play.)

The others, seeing what was happening, made a break for the harbour mouth. I made a good sailing roll and got the boat close enough to the wall for them to jump aboard, and we were away, into the open sea.

Barak hadn’t made it, but along the way Lotan, Samila and Kerilas seemed to have picked up an NPC. She’d been chained up belowdecks on the second boat. Kudos to Dave for being anal enough to go below and check. After all, we were supposed to be the good guys. Incinerating your rescuees wasn’t considered good form. Time had been gettingi short. The slavers were coming and James and Simon had wanted to just set light to the boat and go. The delay was probably what did for Barak, but Simon didn’t seem too displeased to be left with a new character to roll up. In role-playing terms it was a good way to go: Lots of good role-playing, lots of interplay, and pacy action, and tactics on our part that *almost* worked, and the little runt (Barak, that is) went down with a good fight.

We got lots of good XP for it anyway, so my tea couldn’t have been that awful. I advanced a class on my Priest side, although the only priestly thing I’d done was a Healing on Kerilas, who’d taken some damage, once we were out to sea. Oh, and I said prayers for Barak. I made sure to mention that.

The sky lightens and the wind gets a little stronger, and for a while I’m joined by a large bird of prey of some sort. We can’t be too far from land, I think, because it’s clear he’s not a seabird. A coastal hunter, maybe. He stands on the gunwale proudly. His white chest plumage stirs and fluffs in the wind, and catches the first pink beams of the sun.

“You’re beautiful, aren’t you?” I say, and of course he ignores me. He’s almost close enough for me to stroke his feathers, but something tells me that would be unwise. So we sit and enjoy the dawn together.

I spend a little time just staring at my hands. Long, delicate fingers, and smooth, smooth skin. These are my hands; I’ve known them all my life. And yet, they’re so different from my hands. I try to explore this dual awareness, but I understand so little of what I’m feeling. I have no specific memories that belong to this place, and yet I know this is my body, and I know how to sail a craft like this single-handed, but I don’t remember the lessons.

The bird — I think he’s a falcon — makes a little sound and I look at him, but he’s intent on the view ahead. Looking past him I can now see the merest shadow of land against the horizon.

“I guess that’s where we’re going,” I say. After all, I’ve been keeping the course all night, and we’re making good time. “You might as well enjoy the free ride.”

As I watch, the line resolves itself more firmly as dark cliffs edged here and there with pink where the sun’s light catches them. Then, closer still, I can just discern specks of white, rising and diving and wheeling before the cliffs. The falcon leans forwards and starts to unfurl his wings, as if he can almost taste the distant sea birds. Then, without any parting vocalisation, he beats his wings and lifts away from the boat and powers away ahead of us, low over the waves, towards the waiting prey.

Someone is coming up from belowdecks. Footfalls on the steps inside the low door, then the door itself is pushed open. A man, tall and elegant, somehow even in that position, extricates himself from the cabin up into the cockpit. No, not a man, I correct myself. An elf, like me. Only, not like me. He has long fine white hair tucked in under a fur he’s wrapped around his shoulders, and a beautiful perfect face. It has the look about it of immeasurable age, and yet it is the face of a young man. His eyes are dark, and I realise suddenly they have no whites, but a too-large-seeming pupil and an iris of striking blue filling the entire visible eyeball.

He stares back at me, and I can see suddenly he’s afraid.

“Taniel,” he says softly.

I nod. “Kerilas,” I answer. It has to be.

He nods, but his eyes don’t leave me. “Paul,” he says, even more quietly, as if the sky might hear him.

“James,” I answer.

“What the hell is going on?” He’s just able to keep calm. I can see the struggle in his face. He’s on the edge of panic.

“I don’t know,” I whisper back. “I’ve been here for hours,” I point out, remembering that he will have only just woken up. “I thought I was dreaming but I’m not!” Now I’m saying it aloud, and hearing my own voice, at once familiar and completely different. It makes it all so much more real. Hearing the way my voice is shaking.

“It’s not a dream,” he echoes.

I think he’s really on the verge of panic. So I say, “Sit down. Don’t stand in the cockpit unless you’re doing something.”

He obeys, sitting across from me. He’s glad, it seems to me, that someone’s taking charge, even in such a small way as this. My advantage of a few hours is I can be calmer. He’s trying so hard not to panic.

“I was just suddenly here,” I say. “I thought I was dreaming, but it’s not stopping. It feels so real. Everything. Everything feels completely real. And… I know what I’m doing. I mean, I’ve been holding course all night.”

“Where to?”

In answer I look forward. He follows my gaze. The cliffs are high and jagged here; there’s no-where immediately evident where we can put in. “There, I guess. Wherever that is. The next island in the chain.” I remember from Ken’s description: We’re on the end of a chain of small volcanic islands called the Cat’s Tail that lead, if we follow them South-South-West for a few more days, into the heart of the Jeodin archipelago. “The point is, I knew how,” I say urgently. “I’ve never sailed a boat in my life, but I know how to do it.”

“How can this be happening?” he wants to know.

“I don’t know,” I say quickly. “I mean, I was awake, and I didn’t see anything… I don’t know, any kind of transition. No wavy lines or anything.”

He can chuckle at that. “Here, you must be cold,” he says suddenly, standing and removing the fur from his shoulders. I realise that I have been feeling cold. It crept up on me with the dawn, while I was lulled by the sea’s voice and the falcon’s company. He sits again, next to me, and wraps the fur around me, and I’m glad to let him do it, and ironically it’s now that I start shivering, and he keeps his arm around me. I can’t believe how safe that makes me feel. “You feeling better?”

I nod. I can hardly tell him that I feel wonderful.

“God, it must have been awful, being on your own all night. Why didn’t you wake someone?”

“I…” I’m a little lost for words. “I don’t know,” I admit after a while. “I didn’t know if anyone else… You know.”

“Yeah.”

“And I really thought it had to be a dream, for ages. I thought…” I run out of words again. It’s interesting, I think, that he’s immediately so protective of me, and how easily I let myself snuggle in the crook of his arm. It was as if that little exchange of body-language went on without either of us really thinking about it. Now I am thinking about it I get self-conscious, of course, and move to sit more upright.

Not without a little regret. It’s funny, I think, that he’d never have made these little gestures before… before I was in this female form.

“Yeah, sorry Paulie, I’m not sure what I was thinking there,” James says.

“It… It’s okay. Look, you’re going to get cold now.” It would be another hour or two before the sun had any real warmth in it, I reckon.

“Nah, I’m okay. Anyway, I’ll go and get another one if I get too cold. There’s loads of these furs down below.”

I nod, accepting it. “God, this is so weird.”

“‘Don’t panic,’” he says. “‘Don’t panic.’” He’s quoting Arthur Dent, of course.

“‘This isn’t panic, this is culture shock,’” I quote back. “‘You wait ’til I’ve settled in and got my bearings a bit. Then I’ll start panicking!’”

It makes him laugh a little anyway. Something familiar, something shared. And it does help.

“You know, I have to say, you look quite pretty like that,” James says.

“Er…” I can’t help smiling. “Thanks. Oh, and so do you. I mean, handsome I guess.”

It’s his turn to smile a little shyly. “No, what I mean is… you’re a girl.”

“I, uh, I noticed,” I say, noncommittally.

“So, um, are you okay? I mean, I think if that happened to me I’d go crazy, I reckon.”

“Early days,” I say. “Right now I’m thinking more about the fact I’m not entirely human, you know? And neither are you.”

“Oh, God, yeah,” he says, almost absently raising a hand to his ear, exploring how it comes to a tip. I remember doing the same myself earlier. I think the points of his ears are more prominent though. “God…”

“So, what colour eyes have I got?” I ask suddenly, to distract him.

“Green,” he tells me.

“Of course they are.”

“They’ve got this funny… It’s like they’re too big? The pupil and iris is so big you can’t see the whites at all.”

“Yeah, you’re the same,” I say.

“Yeah? Wow. That’s so weird.

“Yeah, I know. Good night vision,” I add, remembering how bright the stars had seemed, and the bioluminescence of the sea.

“What c–”

“Blue,” I say. “A bit darker than yours are normally.”

“Yours are kind of chibi I have to say,” he adds. “Big and pretty and…” He trails off, suddenly shy.

I chuckle. “All ready for my big scene with the tentacled sea monster?”

“Oh, don’t,” he says, and falls silent.

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Maybe that isn’t funny.” I start shivering again. He’s shivering too, I see. “Look, I’m not being funny or anything, but can you hold me again, like before?”

“Er, yeah, sure.”

“It… I think it helped a bit,” I say. He turned a bit and I lean against him again. Then I sit up and pass him some of the fur. “Look, it’s big enough. Wrap it round both of us.”

He obeys, and I snuggle in against his side under the fur. I was being selfish, but I suddenly see how it helps him too. It’s easier for him if he can feel he has someone to protect. It gives him something to do, someone to be strong for. His forearm rests across my belly. It feels indescribable, to feel so protected. I have a little flashback suddenly. I’m snuggling like this against my father, and it’s his arm lying passively but strong and protective over my tummy, and falling asleep like that, lulled by the rocking of the ship.

“But I’m a girl!” Lee wails for about the eighteen billionth time. Well, maybe the third. Or fourth. “What am I s’posed to do now?”

“Well if I were you, I’d play with my breasts,” James points out, having about exhausted the sensible, intelligent and sympathetic responses. “Seriously.”

“What? Oh, yeah, that’s a thought.” Lee’s usual sardonic grin flashes suddenly from the petite Asian-looking girl’s face. It’s kind of weird. Given the right cue, Lee could always be depended to switch into showman-mode. “No! Wait! You’re trying to distract me!”

“Well your breasts are trying to distract me!” James retorts.

“Stop looking at my breasts! Oh God, what am I saying?” He buries his face in his hands again.

Samila is a rather well-endowed young woman. That’s how Lee had described her anyway, at the start of the campaign: “Big charisma, big eyes, big smile, big…” He had tried not to say it but eventually he had to: “Bazoongas.” Big grin.

“You really are a simple creature, aren’t you?” Ken had observed dryly.

“Yup.”

Back in the present James says, “Anyway, the same thing happened to Paul here, and he’s not freaking out like you are.”

I can feel my face bursting out in a blush. “So where’s Simon?” I ask, to change the subject. We’re all accounted for otherwise; myself, James, Lee, Dave, who’s sitting next to Lee on the other side of the cockpit looking uncomfortable and scared. Lotan, it surprises no-one, is this huge guy, the absolute epitome of the muscle-bound warrior hero. We’ve always joked about how he almost always plays characters like that, just as everyone jokes that I almost always play female characters (these things do not go unnoticed after a while), but the sheer physical presence of someone that tall and that well-built takes some getting used to; not least by Dave, it would appear from the slightly glazed expression on his face. Samila — Lee — Samila, whatever, looks like a child by his side.

We’re still in the water. I had heaved-to and dropped anchor and furled the sails when the other two came up on deck, so we could talk and I didn’t have to worry about what the boat was doing.

“His character died,” James says.

“Yeah, but that was before…” Lee starts. “I dunno, before whatever-the-fuck it was that just happened to us.”

“There’s someone still asleep downstairs,” Dave says finally.

“Oh…” I start. “That’ll be the NPC you picked up. What was her name?”

“Uh…” James starts.

“I can’t remember,” Dave says.

Lee looks blank as well.

“Oh this is good,” I say. “You think Simon’ll be… I dunno, her?”

“Why should he be?”

“Because we’re all here apart from him!”

“And Ken,” Lee says. “If this has happened to all of us, what the hell’s happened to him?”

We look at each other for a few moments then, as one, slowly look into the sky.

“No, that’s ridiculous,” James says.

“Any more than this is?” Lee snaps back.

“If he’s up there, we’re in really big trouble,” Dave says quietly, still looking at the sky.

“He’s not up there, don’t be stupid,” James insists.

“Anyway, what about Simon?” I ask again. “Barak died, so what… is he dead now?”

“Maybe nothing happened to him. Maybe he’s back at the hall wondering what the hell happened to all of us.” Dave says.

“Are we still at the hall?” Lee wonders. “I thought we’d finished and gone home.”

“So did I,” I say.

“Do you remember going home?” Dave asks.

“I’m not sure,” James says. I just shake my head. So does Lee. “I think I was walking in the fog, but it might have been before. God, I might have dreamed that since being here for all I know!” He’s sounding frustrated and scared again

“I thought I was dreaming,” I say, “so I thought I had to have gone to bed but… I can’t remember. It’s vague. I remember XP being given out,” I add.

“Yeah, I remember that too,” Lee says.

“Yeah,” adds Dave. “Fucking Hell, this is insane!” he yells suddenly, standing and alarming Lee in the process.

“Yes, it’s insane,” James snaps back. “But it doesn’t do any good to just go on about it, does it? Now sit down.”

They glare at each other for a few moments, then Dave sits back down, sulkily.

“We’ve got to decide what we’re going to do,” James says.

“I don’t know that we should be trying to do anything,” Dave answers. “I mean, none of this is real, is it? It can’t be. We’re obviously in some kind of… I don’t know, shared hallucination or something.”

James sighs irritably. I find myself putting my hand on his, as if to say, ‘be calm, you’re scaring me.’ And he does calm down. Strange, to have a power like that, but I did it automatically, like I operate the boat, automatically.

It doesn’t go unnoticed. “What…? Is something going on here I don’t know about?” Lee asks, pointing quickly between the two of us.

“No,” I say.

“Don’t be so fucking stupid,” James adds more forcefully.

“Must be an elf thing,” Lee quips to Dave.

“Oh, shut it,” James says tiredly, and pulls his hand back. “That’s what it’s going to be now, is it? If it’s not about fucking it’s an elf thing?”

“Oh come on, I was only joking!”

It’s a funny thing; I suddenly notice how Lee and Dave — rather Samila and Lotan, I suppose — look much more highly sexed than James/Kerilas and, I presume, myself. I haven’t seen a reflection of myself yet, but I can look down and see that I’m not very curvy, compared to Samila anyway. And Kerilas has an ethereal, androgynous beauty. I do wonder if I have it too. Somehow I can’t believe it.

But already I can see there’s a gulf opening between us and the other two… The humans. It’s… It’s astonishing how quickly something like that can happen, how someone turns into ‘us’, and someone else turns into ‘them’.

“I have another question,” Dave says a little later. The formality with which he speaks is weirdly at odds with his muscular, barbaric visage. “Where’s the loo?”

We all stare at him. I don’t know what to think.

“You still think this is a hallucination?” James says acidly.

“You know, I think I prefer you when you’re smoking grass,” Dave bites back.

“Yeah, so do I.” James sulks a little, acknowledging the point, after a fashion.

“Oh shut up, both of you!” I snap. “You’re like fucking children.” It’s surprising enough that they both do actually subside.

“Maybe it’s down below?” Lee suggests.

“I looked before I came up,” Dave replies.

“Well, can’t you just pee over the side or something?” Lee follows up, then a realisation creeps over his face. “Oh shit!”

James starts giggling, but I poke him to make him stop. Lee buries his head in his hands again.

Dave looks confused. “I don’t… Oh, I see,” he says, getting Lee’s predicament a little late. “Oh man, I–”

“Oh fucking hell!” Lee wails. He looks at me, as if I might have some solution. I just shrug and mouth ‘I don’t know!’ I don’t know. I suppose, I think, smiling at the thought, it simply had yet to become a pressing issue.

Thing is, I’ve never peed standing up. I never could bring myself to do it, even as a child. So it was going to become a pressing issue sooner or later anyway.

“I was going to say,” Dave struggles back into the conversation, then gets shy as everyone’s looking at him again. “I don’t only have to pee anyway.”

“Ah,” James says.

“I mean, where do we go? What are we supposed use to wipe our bottoms?” Dave asks, rather plaintively. “What did people do before they had toilet paper?”

We’re all stumped by this.

I start giggling. I can’t help it, and I know it’s especially silly because I don’t have any better idea than anyone else. It’s simply the juxtaposition of this huge, rather buff, warrior type fretting primly about not having any toilet paper. I can’t help it.

“It’s not funny!” Dave protests.

“I know!” I manage through my giggles. “I know! I’m sorry…” It’s no use.

“Shut up!”

“I’m trying to…”

“She’s got the giggles,” I hear James say. All I can do is nod and try to hide my face.

“He,” Lee reminds him.

I sigh. Well, it stopped my giggling fit. I share a look with Lee for a moment. Even I don’t know what expression I’m showing. Finally I look away.

“Maybe you just use your hand,” James wonders aloud. That gets a chorus of horrified reactions, from myself included. “You’d wash your hands afterwards!” James protests. “With… something! I don’t know. Have they invented soap?”

“God knows,” Lee mutters. “Maybe you’re supposed to jump in the sea and do it. We’d pull you out again, wouldn’t we guys?” Big grin. Again, it’s so weird to see such a Lee-ish expression in that pretty face. “We wouldn’t sail away or nothing.”

“Yeah, and what if there are sharks?”

“Mmm, or tentacled sea monsters,” Lee elaborates.

“That’s not funny,” James and I say in unison. Then I ruin it by starting to giggle again.

“You’re getting hysterical,” Lee informs me, unnecessarily. “Stop being so girly.”

I stick my tongue out at her.

“Ew! Forked tongue!” Lee gasps, pointing.

“What? Bloody isn’t!” I object. But then I have to check, damn her; feeling inside my mouth and then sticking my tongue out again so I can feel it with my fingers.

“Haha, madeyercheck,” Lee cackles.

“Cow.”

We’re interrupted by the cabin door opening. A young woman climbs out onto the deck carrying a small woven bag of something. She has the flat features and complexion that makes me instantly think, ~Southern Islander. She’s a long way from home.~ I don’t know where that information came from. The same place as the shipcraft, I suppose.

“Good morning,” she says, a little formally. “I’m sorry I slept so late.”

“That’s all right,” James replies. “You’d been through a lot.”

~That’s not English,~ I realise. We glance between us quickly, absorbing that. James looks especially surprised, because his reply hadn’t been in English either, but the same language she had used.

The young woman smiles, then comes to the side of the cockpit next to me, climbs up on the seat, turns, hitches up her skirts and sits on the gunwale, her rear end overhanging the water… And right there and then does her business.

I’m frozen in surprise and embarrassment. I just look away quickly. Down. Anywhere but at her. I can see the others doing the same thing.

“Are we heading South?” she asks conversationally.

“Uh… yes,” I manage. “Up the Cat’s Tail into Jeodin.” The foreign words trip out of my mouth easily.

“I’m so happy to be away from that place I don’t care where we’re going,” she says. None of us have anything we can add to that, so she finishes what she’s doing in silence, opens the bag she brought up on deck and wipes herself with a clump of something off-white. It looks like wool, although I’m still trying to avert my eyes, without trying to look too much like I’m averting my eyes. It’s clear she has no taboos about this sort of thing at all. “We’re nearly out of bumwool,” she comments matter-of-factly, dropping what she just used over the side of the boat. She pulls the drawstring tight on the bag and stands up, letting her skirts fall. “I’ll see if there’s any more in the cabin.”

And back down into the cabin she goes, leaving the four of us unable quite to look at each other, stunned.

Lee’s the first to find her voice. His voice. (Whatever.) “Okay, there is no way I would have dreamed that.”

“There you go then,” James says to Dave.

“It’s all right, I found some more!” the young woman yells up from inside the cabin.

“I’ll wait until we hit land, thank you,” Dave says stiffly.

“That could be a few days yet,” I point out.

“Why? I thought we were going there?” He points at the rocky island lying about a mile to starboard.

“We can’t, there’s no-where to land. There’s nothing there but birds and cliffs,” I point out.

“How do you know? We haven’t been all the way around–”

“I know!” I insist. “I remember. I don’t know how, but I’ve… I’ve sailed around here before.”

“You might as well get it over with,” James says to Dave, not being sarcastic this time. “Look, there’s going to be ten thousand things that are going to be weird as fuck to us, and this is, like, two on the list. We’re on a boat, there’s no private loo, so you go over the side and you wipe your arse with bumwool.” He used the word the girl had used, in that language. “Get used to it. All of us. And no joking or making fun, alright?”

“Yeah,” I murmur. Suddenly I realise how tired I’m feeling. And I can smell… “Can I smell cooking?” I ask aloud.

“I think our friend has found something to eat as well.” It smells like sausages, of all things.

“She did wash her hands, didn’t she?” Lee asks, suddenly.

None of us know the answer to that. Maybe there’s something to wash them with in the cabin, but I suspect we’re all thinking that number three on the list might well be reduced expectations of personal hygeine.

Oh, but the cooking sausages smell good. “There must be some kind of barbecue arrangement down there,” James speculates. “It’s not like there’s going to be gas.”

“Tell you what, I’ll go down and find out,” I say. “I’m tired anyway, I might see if I can get a little sleep.”

“See if she’s making enough for all of us, or just herself,” Lee says. “I’m starving.”

I get up and go down, leaving the fur with James. There is indeed a barbecue arrangement; a small curved-bottomed tray on a gimbal with charcoal burning in the bottom. The girl is standing by it, tending the meat with a wooden spatula.

“I’m sorry, Miss; I could only find this in the stores,” she says. “Perhaps we can catch some fish today, and I’ll cook it for you.” She smiles brightly in the gloom inside the cabin. “The others will all eat meat, won’t they?”

“Um…” I begin, dumbly. I don’t eat meat? That’s a bitter blow. “As far as I know they do. I’m not hungry anyway,” I lie. The smell of the lamb sizzling is doing things inside my stomach, and for a moment I’m actually not sure if I’m hungry or nauseous. And if I don’t eat meat, then, is that religious or biological? I did define the character as a sea-elf after all. “I was just looking for somewhere I can sleep for a while,” I finish.

In answer, she points toward the double-berth I can just see in the bows. There are, as James had mentioned earlier, plenty of furs, and it’s looking increasingly inviting. “You should sit. You’re in the way,” she tells me, but she smiles too.

“Okay,” I say, and edge around her and head toward the berths at the front.

“There is some fruit,” the girl says, then. “It’s only dried but it might be better than nothing.”

“I’m really not hungry,” I say. “Is there some water somewhere though?” I’m glad she seems to have taken it upon herself to ‘keep house’ as it were. Her simple competence in these little things while the four of us are floundering around is so reassuring. It’s the classic role of an NPC dragged onto an adventure of course, which makes me think: Is that just her destiny now? If Dave hadn’t been anal enough to slow the game down by checking belowdecks on that other boat, would she even exist?

But she seems like a whole, real woman. The play of expressions on her face speaks of simple reality. The texture of her skin, the freckles, the way she shoves her hair behind her ears carelessly before she reaches to pull a leather flask off the small shelf over the barbecue. She hands it to me.

“Thank you,” I say, and I take a few sips. I had intially thought to take a good long drink, but an instinct stops me. “How much have we got, do you know?” I ask.

“I think we have enough for about five days,” she says, taking the flask back from me.

“We should make landfall before then,” I say. Then, “What is your name?” I ask, impulsively. “In the rush last night no-one got around to telling me.” I try an apologetic smile.

“I’m Jalese, Miss,” she replies, looking at me a little curiously.

“Jalese. That’s pretty. I’m Taniel, by the way.”

“Yes, I know,” she says.

Damn. Obviously we did have some conversation where names were exchanged the previous night — in her memory anyway.

“I won’t forget again,” I promise. “I’m very tired. We’re all… We’re all a bit disoriented,” I explain. “Something happened to us back there, while we were escaping. I don’t understand it yet. Our memories aren’t quite… all there.”

“I understand, Miss. Perhaps we should just rest today,”

“Yes,” I agree. “Maybe that’s a good idea.”

“I’ll wake you if we need you,” she reassures me.

“Thank you. Have you spent a lot of time on boats?” I ask. She squints at me, slightly comically. “I’m sorry, that was a stupid question,” I say. “I’m having a very strange day.”

“Go to sleep, Miss.”

Fur, I have decided, is a very nice material to sleep in. I’m not sure what kind of fur it is, but it’s very soft. I hope, if I’m not supposed to eat meat, that it’s at least okay for me to use fur. Jalese didn’t seem to think it odd of me anyway.

And, I tell myself, we’re in a primitive society, and fur is still a necessary material, so the whole modern attitude to the use of fur doesn’t apply. I tell myself. It’s simply practical.

About the last thing I remember before falling asleep was squirming out of my tunic and trousers, and being naked in all that fur, feeling it tickle and caress me all over. I’ve never been a sensual person, but I started to feel that this could change now. Or at least later, because I really did need to sleep.

I was so tired I didn’t even remember to be afraid that I might wake up back home in that horrible body.

“So then what happened, we climbed all the way to the top of this mountain, only to find the old man got there before us, sitting there happy as you like on this tatty old rug he’s put down where it’s a bit flat. Now we knew there was no way he could’ve got past us on foot, ’cause we were, you know, hot-footing it ourselves.”

Lee isn’t speaking English. He’s telling the story to Jalese. His idiomatic way of speaking translates surprisingly well.

I had slept the whole of the rest of the morning. It’s mid-afternoon now, and rain is pattering on the deck above us. Everyone has crowded into the cabin to stay dry. Lee is the only one standing, telling the story to Jalese, who’s sitting on her bunk, listening. Dave’s in his bunk nearer the stern of the boat, sleeping, I think, and James, I discover belatedly, is lying next to me in the double-bunk space of the bow. He’s lying the other way around though, with his feet not far from my head as I wake. So at least I got to find out if male elves’ feet smell. (They don’t, of course.)

I shuffle around under the furs in the small space so I’m facing the same way and can join in the conversation.

“Anyway, Gyrefalcon straight away spots that the old rug this guy’s sitting on is the same as the one in the shop–”

“It’s a flying carpet!” Jalese exclaims, instantly getting it.

“Yep, it’s an actual genuine flying carpet. Now, Gyrefalcon hasn’t said anything at this point. He’s the only one who’s figured it out, and he’s wondering, either this guy is a complete amateur, being so obvious about it and all, or he’s a sorceror, and he’s taunting us, ’cause he knows we’ve got to get to — uh — Dal Teng is it?”

“Yes,” Jalese confirms.

“Dal Teng in three days or it’ll be too late to save Hanima, so… Anyway, Gyrefalcon’s figured this out, and he’s thinking, you can’t just steal a flying carpet, ’cause they’re loyal to their masters until death, you know?”

Jalese nods. “So you’ve got to kill its master,” she says.

“Aha. Or, persuade him to give you a lift!” Lee says triumphantly.

“A sorceror? Persuade a sorceror to…” Jalese is astonished.

“Who’s Gyrefalcon?” I whisper to James, in English.

“He’s Simon’s character in the last Jeodin campaign we did. It was before you joined the group,” James replies.

“Ohhh. Should Lee be–”

“Don’t see any harm. It’s just a story to her, innit?” He stretches lazily.

“So what happened? In the campaign?”

“Lee’s telling it, isn’t he?” He grins. “It was all about discovering this conspiracy to take over the world, and it turned out it was actually headed by Kaleshha. She’s like the goddess of war or something, so it got to a point where we were so high level we walked into her main temple and said ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’”

“In those words? To a goddess?”

“Yup. So she came and had a go, and it turned out she — uh — was hard enough.”

“Ah.”

“Almost, ’cause we did actually defeat her. We didn’t kill her, you can’t just kill deities, it’s considered bad form or something, but she was badly weakened and buried under a volcano. And all of us got killed, except Gyrefalcon, who just about managed to get to safety with Hanima on that magic carpet when the temple got swallowed up by the lava. Hanima was his girlfriend,” he explained. “NPC. She was like a princess or something that Kaleshha was holding hostage.”

“Oh, right.”

“Anyway, so they went off and married and inherited, I dunno, half a kingdom or something, had kids and lived happily ever after. That’s how the campaign ended.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Yeah, that was a really good one. Shame you missed it, really.”

“No, I mean, Simon got the girl. Wow.”

James laughs. “Emotional attachments formed in life or death situations. You know how it is.”

I chuckle too, and turn over onto my back, just in time remembering to make sure I’m covering myself. I’m half listening to Lee telling the story of the battle of wits between Gyrefalcon and the sorceror on the mountain-top. I’m half thinking. “Where’d he get the name from? Gyrefalcon, I mean.” I use the Jeodine translation Lee had used. “Is that a falcon of some sort?”

“Yeah, that’s right. ‘Gyrefalcon,’” he says in English. “I mean, his character had a proper name and all, but we never used it. Gyrefalcon was like a nickname I suppose. I remember he brought a picture in. A gyre falcon is a kind of falcon, amazingly enough.” James explains. “It’s bigger than most falcons, and it’s got mostly white feathers, ’specially on its breast.”

I find myself taking a deep superstitious breath, my suspicion confirmed. The large white-breasted bird of prey that shared an hour or so of the morning with me, before flying off in search of food.

“This is a world,” I say quietly to James, “where magic is real; the gods are real; spells work.”

“Yeah.”

“And omens can be real and not just in our imagination. Right?”

“Makes sense.”

“I think I saw a gyre falcon this morning, before anyone else was awake.”

James sits up so fast he forgets his head is under a beam, and he hits the back of it quite painfully. He almost doesn’t notice, staring at me.

“Really? You saw that? What did it do?”

“It just stood on the gunwale for a while. I think — I thought it was hitching a lift to that island, you know, with all the birds. When we got within sight of it, he just flew off.”

“Who flew off?” Lee wants to know, his story interrupted.

“A gyre falcon,” James replies. They both speak in the native language, whatever it’s called. Jeodinese? I speculate. Jeodine? “Taniel saw it this morning.”

“Oooh, spooky,” Lee agrees. He switches to English. “You don’t think…”

“Simon’s character in this campaign died,” James sums up. “He still has another character alive in this world, at this time.”

“And wherever he is, he must be alone, thinking it only happened to him,” I add. “We have to find him.”

The following morning we are all more than rested and starting to understand what ‘cabin fever’ means. Lotan… Dave had managed to spear a couple of fairly large fish with a boat harpoon in the night, so we had one of them barbecued for breakfast, which Jalese managed to make into something interesting with the dried fruit and some tangy spices and sweet potato she found in the small food store. It was delicious, and we were hungry. I was very hungry. I’d missed out on the sausages.

So after breakfast I head up on deck with Lee and James while Dave crashes out on his bunk after sitting the night watch, and Jalese starts the process of filleting and curing the other fish. I get to play captain, this time, yelling out instructions to the other two to raise the gaff and open the sail, get the anchor up and the sail unfurled and… about halfway through I find I’ve switched to Jeodine because I can explain what I want better, and they get on and do it, and within a few minutes we’re under way. We have to sail quite close to the wind for this gaff rig. The feeling as the sail suddenly fills and the rigging takes up the strain and the whole vessel tightens and banks, making us dive to the other side of the cockpit to counterbalance it, is exhilarating. I can almost feel the patterns of air pressure sucking our little boat forward. I can see it in Samila’s and Kerilas’s faces too. Samila — Lee looks the happiest I’ve seen her since we came here, enjoying the speed and the wind in her hair. I show her the ropes — literally — letting her have the tiller and the boom line or whatever it’s called in English so she can feel how the boat handles. I don’t think she has any residual memory of sailing a boat the way I have, so this is new. I look at Samila’s face again; ethnically, she’s not of Jeodin, I can recognise now: She’s a mainlander.

“How do you know which direction to go?” she yells in my ear.

“I’m not sure,” I reply honestly. “I just do. I know we have to go South-South-West. We might miss some of the islands in the Tail, but we’ll hit the central archipelago no problem.”

“But there’s no compass or maps or anything!”

“I know. I can just tell. North is…” I close my eyes a moment and point. “That way.” I open my eyes. I’m pointing off the starboard stern.

“Bloody sea elves,” she says, disconcertingly with Lee’s usual grin.

“Let the line out a little, you’re heading too far to starboard. Just ease it out a bit.”

She obeys, getting the feel of it. “Yeah, I see.”

“This is a good wind,” I declare. I wonder how long our luck is going to last. I watch Kerilas for a while, satisfied that Samila’s keeping course. Kerilas stands at the bow, disdaining any hand-hold, which seems reckless to me, but he seems the embodiment of grace and poise. I consider that he may be testing precisely that.

“I’m just saying I don’t think it’s a great idea just sailing right into a busy port before we find out more about what actually goes on there!” Lotan is saying, again. “What do you say?” he asks Kerilas.

We’ve been sailing for three days. Supplies are running low. We can catch fish, but out here we can’t catch any fruit or vegetables. Or bumwool for that matter, which is a source of growing anxiety on board. Someone’s using too much.

Apart from anything else, we’re sick of the sight of each other. I’m probably doing better than any of us, with the possible exception of Jalese. I’m kept busiest running the boat; doing things or giving orders; and I suppose Taniel was always used to it anyway. Everyone else is getting snappy.

We’re off the coast of another island; a larger one this time, big enough to support a population. We’ve sailed past fishing harbours and have found a larger (but not very large) trading port which Jalese says is Port Denhall, and that she lived there for a while and it’s okay (not her words). The name sounds vaguely familiar, but no particular alarm bells are going off. Still, we’re sitting off the coast by a mile or so, unsure.

“Well, what do you suggest?” Kerilas says. It’s ironic given the James we were used to back home how he’s apparently settled into a position of authority. I’m in charge of the boat, but Kerilas is the one who we all seem to turn to to make the calls. Not that there’s been that many for him to make while we’ve been at sea.

“Can’t we put in somewhere out of the way and walk into town?”

“I think that’s a very bad idea,” Jalese says. We’re talking in Jeodine all the time now, not least in deference to her. We’re using our character names all the time as well. When I stop to think about it it’s still remarkable how easily it all comes to us. We all feel like we’ve been called these names all our lives. It’s that dual-awareness again.

“Why?” Kerilas asks. He’s not being combative; he wants to know.

“We’ll have to leave enough people to guard the boat itself,” Jalese points out, as if that should have been obvious. “And anyway, anywhere we can put in is going to be a fishing harbour. We’re not going to find anywhere deserted.”

“We can’t afford the harbourmaster fees,” Samila says. She’s been quiet for the last two days, taking to moping about belowdecks by herself when she could. “In case anyone forgot, we haven’t got any money. We haven’t got anything we can sell to make money. I still think we should sell the boat.”

“No!” Jalese and I say in unison.

“Samila’s right,” Kerilas points out. “We literally don’t have any money. We can’t even go into a market to buy food, and no, we’re not going to start stealing,” he adds. “The only thing of value we have is this boat.”

“And then what?” I ask hotly. “We’re going to be stuck on this island, that’s then what! If you don’t have a ship or a boat of some kind you’re not mobile! We might as well settle down and become sheep farmers.”

“There’s worse things we could do,” Kerilas says.

I just stare at him, amazed. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

“I think we might have to sell the boat, Taniel,” he says. I start huffing. “Listen, we can properly equip ourselves then. We can get some decent clothes and… and weapons I suppose, and whatever else we need, then maybe we can buy passage on a ship–”

Jalese is shaking her head.

“Why not? What’s wrong with that plan?”

“You want to get taken by pirates again, don’t you?” she says, stressing on the ‘again’ pointedly. I notice that she’s saying ‘you’ and not ‘we’. I also note that I don’t remember Ken saying how we were all captured in the first place. All in different ways, I think, meeting up at the holding camp. I–

Flash to a memory. Chaos and fire on a wooden ship. People are fighting. My father bundling me into a hidey-hole. My father…? I can’t make his face out, but I know it was the last time I saw him alive. I’m afraid. ~How long ago was that?~

“Listen to me,” Jalese continues, “we don’t have to pay harbourmaster fees up front. The boat itself is surety, you see? We can go ashore and then who knows what could turn up? We might find some other way to pay the fee and get what we need and move on. And if we don’t then… then I suppose we might try to find a buyer.”

Everyone’s thinking about that. “We can’t just sit out here forever,” Lotan points out. “I think that’s the fairest option,” he adds, looking at me. “We’re not going to get anything done out here.”

“We must still do everything we can to keep the boat,” Jalese insists.

“What do you think, Sami?” Kerilas asks Samila.

Samila just waves a hand. ‘Don’t care,’ the gesture says.

Kerilas looks at me thoughtfully.

Finally I sigh. “Whatever. I still think it’s a bad idea. We could get stranded ashore.”

“Yes, it’s a risk,” he agrees. “I don’t think we have another option right now. We are running out of supplies.”

That point at least is unanswerable.

“Will you take us into the harbour please?” he asks directly.

I bite my lip and nod. “Okay, ready-about.” We need to bring the boat about and zig-zag towards the harbour mouth. It’s called ‘tacking’ in English, I believe. Seeing everyone’s face saying ‘ready’, I announce, “About we go,” and turn us around onto the other tack. The boom swings across above our ducked heads and the sail refills.

“Weren’t they supposed to send out a pilot or something?” Samila asks as we pass the harbour mouth.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “I think we’re too small. No danger of us grounding.”

“Oh. Okay.”

We have no oars, and no engine of course, so I have to bring us straight into a landing under sail. Now we really find out if I have access to proper sailing skills. I spot a man on the quayside with what looks like a large white solid tennis raquet, waving it at us and pointing with it. I get the idea, trusting that I’m right, and head towards the part of the quay he’s indicating.

It appears I do know what I’m doing, because I bring our boat up to the quay so gently Lotan and Samila can just step lightly ashore and tie us up against a mooring post at each end.

The harbourmaster — I presume it’s the harbourmaster — is already waiting for us, and he’s just the first in line. I begin to worry. Are we in trouble already? Is this place so piss-poor and small that a boat our size is a major event? It doesn’t look like it. Maybe it’s just a quiet day.

Thankfully, Kerilas steps forward to meet the officials and their bodyguards or whatever they are. Jalese stays at his side. I think Jalese has sensed by now that we don’t really know what we’re doing. We seem to discover what competencies we have as and when they’re needed. I’m very happy to keep myself busy getting the boat in order to be left in the care of the harbourmaster. But I start to feel that something’s wrong; as if someone’s watching me; as if someone’s touching me.

I shake it off as paranoia and finish what I’m doing. By the time I’m finished the conversation with the harbour officials seems to be over too, and a funny little guy is standing on the quay near our bow doing some kind of incantation, and occasionally sprinkling water over the gunwales from a vial.

“What’s he doing?” I ask Kerilas, who’s come back to the side of the boat to help me out, if I needed it.

“He’s making a Binding,” Kerilas tells me. “We can’t take the boat anywhere until the fee’s paid, basically.”

“Oh, right.” I look at the little man again, a little more critically. ~Magic. Of course. Magic is real here.~

~Aren’t I supposed to be able to do magic?~ It honestly hadn’t occurred to me to wonder before now.

Kerilas lowered his voice and leaned close, so only I could hear him. “I think I can dispel it, if I had to. I’m not sure. I think I’d only find out if I had to try, and I’d rather not.”

“Yeah,” I agree.

“Can’t you feel it? You must be able to feel it, what he’s doing.”

I look at him a moment, then make myself relax, and put a hand on the gunwale. There is something different. It’s very difficult to isolate, like trying to use a sense one has never used. I know there’s something there but I don’t know how to make sense of it, but there are lines of force emanating from that man — suddenly not little or funny-looking at all, I feel — like tendrils or… more like a loom, back and forth, back and forth, making a strong, impenetrable fabric that is in part the quay and in part our boat, and with a lurch I recognise the source of the feeling I had earlier, the strange sense of invasion. I get a flash, a sense that ‘how dare he?! How dare he touch me there!’ and I want to stop him–

Words are coming out of my mouth, in another language again. I can feel the pulse of what he’s doing in my hand, and I push–

Kerilas’s hand on mine, on the gunwale, distracting me, breaking whatever it was I was doing. “It’s okay,” he says in English. “Let him finish.”

I stare at him stupidly for a few seconds. Back in the world of light and sound and touch. “Shit, that was…” I begin. I look again at the funny little man. He’s giving me a cold stare, then he turns back and resumes what he’s doing. There are a few other people by the quayside who have stopped and stared as well. “Fuck.” I’m shivering. My skin is trying to get goose-pimples. The air around us suddenly feels like just before a thunderstorm. “I don’t even know what that was.” All I know, suddenly, is that I want to get off this vessel. What had surrounded me and felt an extension of me was suddenly a little strange and uncomfortable. ~It’ll pass when the Binding’s lifted,~ I know, but it still makes me shiver.

Kerilas sees my mood, and offers a hand to help me over the gunwale. I take it, and after my feet land on the quay I’m glad of it, because it feels like the land is moving. I’m glad to keep hold of Kerilas’s arm as he starts leading me up to where the others have gathered. As we walk, the little man finishes his job. He starts to turn away, but I call him. “Excuse me,” I say, or at least the Jeodine equivalent — a more literal translation might be ‘hey you there’, but my intent was polite. “I apologise for what happened a moment ago,” I say. “I didn’t mean to interfere.”

“I understand, Mistress,” he replies formally. He has a surprisingly friendly voice. And the word ‘Mistress’ is a specific salutation, I understand: he’s addressing me as the boat’s master, but in the feminine of course. “The Neri are intimately bound with their vessels. I thought as you stayed aboard you were prepared. I apologise for the necessary intrusion.”

I can only stare at him, aware that I’m blushing, but I hardly know why. He nods and takes his leave, moving to catch up with the other port officials.

“It’s all right,” Kerilas is saying, still in English. “Come on, we need to figure out what to do next.”

“Er… Okay.”

“Port fees are a Crown a day, however much that is–”

“One gold piece?”

“I’d guess. Here’s the kicker: Market starts the day after tomorrow and goes on ten nights. Until then we’re going to have a bastard of a job buying much of anything in the way of supplies.”

“Even if we had money,” I remark.

“Well, quite. Gives us a couple of days to get our bearings and figure out how we can make some spending money without selling the boat. Worst case–”

“I know.” Worst case we sell the boat anyway, and Market would probably be the best opportunity to do it, and the best chance to find someone reasonably reputable to take us on up the Tail.

“Reminds me, can you sing?”

“What?”

“Jalese wanted to know.”

We crowd around the noticeboard standing by the quayside. It’s my first look at Jeodine writing.

“They have paper,” Samila’s saying as I approach.

“Yeah, but not toilet paper,” Lotan complains, but even he’s in on the joke now.

“Yeah, it’s probably expensive. Meanwhile they’ve got wool coming out of their ears…”

“That wasn’t a pleasant image!”

“What?” Samila mimes pulling an invisible tuft of wool from her ear, looking at it curiously, and twisting around as if to wipe her bottom with it, and gets a friendly, chiding shove from Lotan. At least she seems a little cheerier now we’re ashore. I’m still feeling distinctly wobbly. The ground keeps trying to pitch and roll under my feet, and I keep hanging on to Kerilas for now.

I pay attention to the noticeboard. Again, there’s the dissociation of the writing being at the same time alien and familiar and even legible. It’s pictogrammatic and written vertically, a little like Chinese I suppose, but it clearly isn’t chinese; if anything it reminds me more of hieroglyphs. My English-thinking brain can’t relate it to the language we’ve been speaking more and more in the past few days. It doesn’t work like that, it isn’t a representation of the spoken form.

There are notices from the harbourmaster, and a schedule of regular ferries further up the Cat’s Tail, including one direct to Jeodin City itself; another with a list of the local bylaws or whatever they called them. There were itineraries, goods for sale, goods wanted, cargoes — “Aha…” I begin.

“You know, their numbering system is shit,” Samila says, looking at the same material. “This is worse than Roman. You couldn’t do arithmetic with this! I’m amazed they can even count higher than their fingers!”

Still, there is enough here to figure out the calendar system. I’m aware of Jalese wandering off a little way, clearly bemused at how fixated we are with the information on the board, and we hadn’t even begun to take in the actual content yet.

“How can they be so sure of their schedules?” Kerilas muses to himself.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Everything’s sail, right? There’s no steamships or anything like that.”

“We haven’t seen any–”

“There aren’t. And sailing is horribly unpredictable. If the wind drops you can be stuck out there for weeks. How can they know months in advance that the market ships — marketeers,” he restates, finding and using the Jeodine word, “are going to arrive on that specific day?” He jabs at the date written on the yellowing schedule.

“I suppose I could invent Arabic numerals for them,” Samila proposes, still on her own hobby-horse.

“Why not?” Lotan asks. “Or hire yourself out as a — I don’t know, but I bet they have people especially to do their number-work.”

“You mean, like accountants?” Samila asks, a little sarcastically.

“Among other things, I’m sure.”

“Transcribe to civilised numbers, do the math, transcribe back, yeah… yeah, I’d probably have an advantage, unless their lot are already doing something like that. It’s probably a guild secret or something. I’m talking about basic stuff. Any one of us could do it.”

“I don’t suppose anyone wants a web designer?” I ask hopefully. It gets a little round of laughter anyway. “But I’ve got leet AJAX coding skillz!” I protest.

“You think arithmetic might be a guild secret?” Kerilas asks.

“Just a thought. Something…” She taps her head twice, “Something seems to ring right about it. Huh. If that’s right, then going around doing people’s maths for money is liable to get me into trouble, isn’t it.”

“How can you keep arithmetic a secret?” I ask, astonished.

“Well look. You teach people numbers like that for a start. You give them such a fucked-up complicated numbers system that gets so deep in their heads it doesn’t even occur to them that numbers are something you can manipulate. They must have a high level of literacy or they wouldn’t bother with the noticeboard at all, but… Make it hard for people to figure out numbers… what they owe, what they’re owed, how much things really cost, then offer to do it for them, for a percentage of course, and guess who works out the percentage…”

“Shit.”

“Hey.” Samila grins at me a little manically. “We can use this. I think.”

“You’re talking about ripping people off?” Lotan asks.

“Nah, just not getting ripped off ourselves, mainly.”

“Hey, where’s Jalese gone?” I wonder.

“Isn’t she…” Kerilas trails off, seeing she isn’t.

“Oh, I see her,” I say, indicating with my head the direction she’s gone, towards a row of buildings near the quayside. At least one of them looked like it could be a tavern or café or inn or whatever, their painted white and terracotta walls radiant in the late afternoon sun, like the other houses and warehouses and traders’ buildings climbing up the steep valley walls out of the harbour. “I’ll go and talk to her,” I say, and disengage from Kerilas to go into pursuit. “I guess we’ll be over there,” I add, pointing at the inn towards which Jalese seems to be walking.

“Okay, we’ll find you in a bit.”

“Jalese?” I say, coming up behind her. She stops and turns. “Um, are you leaving?”

She sighs and runs her fingers through her hair. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Do you want me to?” She uses the form of ‘you’ that means all of us, not including her.

“No!” I say quickly. “Look, um. I know we’re a bit weird.” I try a self-deprecating smile. She does have a smile in return, which is reassuring. “I suppose you’ve noticed we don’t really… Um, We don’t really know what we’re doing half the time.” She nods. “So, you know, if you want to say that’s it, I don’t blame you, I really don’t. But if you don’t, we could really… use your help.”

“What happened to you back there?” she asks directly, at last.

“I don’t know. We don’t know.”

I don’t want to say ‘we’re really from another world, we’ve taken over these bodies but we didn’t mean to, honest.’ I can see that not being entirely understood. And that’s without adding that ‘in fact I’m not sure this world is even real; our friend Ken just made it up for a game.’

“It’s like a kind of–” I want to say ‘amnesia’, but Jeodine doesn’t have an exact word. “Forgetting,” I manage. “I don’t remember anything, unless there’s something to remind me, then stuff comes back, like knowing how to sail a ship. I mean, I think I’m supposed to be some kind of magic user; I didn’t even remember that until just now. That guy doing the Binding on the boat–”

“You’re a novice shamaness of the Neria,” Jalese says patiently.

“I am? What… I mean, how do you know?”

“What did you think these were for?” she asks, reaching to my face suddenly and touching one of the charms braided into my hair.

“I thought they were just charms. You know, good-luck charms, talismens, something like that.”

“Well, we could make use of some good luck, don’t you think?” she says.

“Um–”

“I’ve seen you do this,” she says, and reaches to me again, and carefully unbraids one of the plaits near my temple, to free a charm, “and hold it in your hand like so,” she says, taking my hand and placing the charm on my open palm. “You did it the first night, as we were getting away, don’t you remember?”

The charm is a tiny spiral shell, exquisite and beautiful. It reminds me I really want to find a mirror at some point, and see what I really look like. My hand closes over it, but I can still see it, and I can feel it, as if my flesh has become liquid and flows through the inner chambers of the vacated shell; the memory of the creature that once lived there lingers, which for a moment feels slightly macabre. And the sea; the whole weight of the ocean, the crushing mass, but enfolding and protecting and cradling. “Oh, the Goddess,” I whisper aloud. “I can… I…” I don’t know. Back home I was never religious, and I never understood people who were, but I know this tiny token is a touch of the Goddess. I can feel her presence. We’re not in the sea, but we’re still in her influence, as is the whole of Jeodin, of course. “The Neri are my race,” I say aloud. “Maritime elves.” She nods. “But the Neria faith — the Goddess — it started with the Neri, but it’s widespread among humans now isn’t it?” She nods again. “Most people in Jeodin are probably adherents, aren’t they?”

“Including me, Miss.”

That would explain her deference to me, these last few days. A deference I hardly felt I deserved, but there it was. “I really don’t know what I’m doing,” I say, opening my palm again. I’m shocked to find that the shell has in fact embedded itself halfway into my flesh. It’s quite painless, but that sensation I had of being able to feel all the way through it must have been more literal than I’d thought. I touch it carefully with a finger of my other hand. It’s definitely fixed in there. I couldn’t tear it off without pulling away a chunk of my palm with it. “Oh bloody hell,” I say in English.

“Excuse my presumption in unbraiding it. You must cast now.”

“I don’t know–”

“Might I suggest a simple intercession of good fortune, for the five of us?” Jalese says.

“Er, like… like a prayer?” I wonder aloud. I close and open my hand, feeling the slight tug of the shell as my skin flexes around it.

“Tsheb Cal…” Jalese prompts.

I recognise it. “Tsheb Cal aceteron,” I hear myself saying. Another language. “Alem ti tarasi Taniel…” “Ocean Mother, hear me. I am thy daughter Taniel. We are children adrift in a strange ocean. Send us good winds and fair bounty, and show us our path…” I am about to say ‘home’, but I hold it back, ending the plea there. I raise my hand and open my palm, and the shell is gone. “That’s it?” I ask in Jeodine, then I stagger, feeling suddenly woozy. Jalese catches me and steadies me. “It’s all right, I’m still a bit, uh, landsick.”

“No, it’s the spell. I think it worked. Shall we find out?” She grins. She seemed to be catching that grin off Samira.

“How?”

“Over there,” Jalese says, and keeping custody of my arm, leads me towards the inn at the end of the row of buildings. “I have been here before, a couple of years ago before I was captured,” she says. “The first piece of luck will be that Hethan still has something I know he had then. The second piece of luck will be that he’ll remember me and let us borrow it.” She leads me through the tables and chairs arranged outside the front like a French café and pushes the door open and pulls me into the building.

“The third piece of luck will be if he needs extra help over Market,” she adds quietly, leaning close. Then she grins, lets go of me and goes up to the bar alone, leaving me in the middle of the room to look around like an idiot. Thankfully there aren’t many people here at this hour. A couple of young women are talking at a table near a window. They’re wearing pretty, folky-type dresses I suppose, and interrupt their conversation to glance at me curiously for a moment. It makes me feel self-conscious about the rough undyed linen trousers that are too short in the leg, and tunic and sandals that are all I have. I smile awkwardly and look elsewhere, thinking I have to start working on my aloof, unattainable elf-maiden look sometime before someone figures out I’m faking.

My first impression is that it is almost reassuringly like the bar of a nice English seaside pub, then I start noticing the differences. The obvious ones come first of course: No Sky Sports, no jukebox, no fruit machines. No carpet, but a slate tile floor. There is a bar, but it’s tiny, more like a counter, barely allowing two people at a time to stand at it. Instead there are more tables and chairs. I think this might be quite upmarket back home; catering to a more middle-class type of pubgoer, with children maybe. I have no idea where it’s positioned in this culture. There is a raised area to the side of the bar — or rather, the bar is to the side of the raised area, which looks suspiciously like a small stage.

“Here you are,” Jalese says, returning to my side and putting something in my hands. It’s an exquisitely carved wooden box, approximately triangular in shape, but with much ornamentation carved so finely it seems almost as if it had grown that way. There are a lot of strings on one side, twenty or so at a glance, with a pattern of holes behind them. “Oh, I see,” I say unnecessarily, identifying it as a musical instrument.

“Let’s sit down,” Jalese says, and steers me towards the fireplace. It doesn’t have an open fire, rather an iron stove of some kind, turned down low but still giving off a little heat.

I sit, and find myself automatically crossing one leg over the other and placing the instrument comfortably along my thigh and cradled by my left arm. “Yes, this is familiar.”

“I thought it might be. My mother told me, all Neri learn to play this as children. Hethan got this in lieu of payment from a Neri couple while I was here last. I think they must have been very poor, to give away something like this for a room for a few nights, don’t you?”

“I… I suppose.” I pick at some of the strings, seeking a physical memory, and there it is. I run my thumbnail back across all the strings, and then I’m tuning it, turning the little ivory handles by tiny increments and doing another light strum, reiteratively until I know, somehow, it’s right. It sounds a little like a hand harp, but more resonant, with the chamber behind the strings. Perhaps more like a lute with no neck and far too many strings. I don’t know how else to describe it. There’s a complex, rich tone to the notes that I find almost achingly familiar. “Uh, do you know any tunes that I… that you think I ought to know?”

“Oh, let’s see, what about the Selkie’s Lament?”

“How does it go?”

“Um…” The way she smiled, an apology and warning in advance from someone who considers themselves not one of Nature’s singers, was so familiar — even English, maybe — that I can’t help smiling back. She starts humming a tune quietly, not wanting anyone else to overhear. I listen for a while. It sounds simple and plaintive. I pluck a couple of strings experimentally, getting the right note but… It’s the wrong technique. The notes Jalese are singing are long, and I sustain it by quickly and repeatedly plucking a string with three fingers in turn. It also lets me move seamlessly to another string, to change to a different note.

“Ah…” I hear myself say.

“No, that’s right,” Jalese stops to say.

“Don’t stop.”

She carries on. I’m staring at the instrument, at once hyperfocusing and trying to let this happen. I need to concentrate, but at the same time I know if I try to think too hard about what I’m doing I’m not going to be able to do it. I never learned to play an instrument–

My mother, teaching me. We’re in a cabin in the stern of a ship, yet I seem to be cradled in the crook of a branch in a tree. It’s a juxtaposition of memories I can’t quite understand. Diamond-leaded windows give a view of clouds like iron, and a sea that’s black, like oil.

“Huh…” I begin. I’m playing a harmony on the lower notes with my thumb, alongside the main melody. One thumb note to every three with my fingers. Every now and then it strikes a resonant mode in the box that makes a particular chord sing out more richly than those around it. Jalese has gone quiet, listening. I know this, but I can’t see her because my eyes are filling with tears suddenly. “I know this,” I say. “I remember learning it.” Tears are tracking down my face. “I was with my mother.” But my mother is a manager of a clothes shop. Her musical aspirations don’t go beyond Happy Birthday and a few Christmas carols. This Elven lady in my memory, I’m a child, leaning back in her arms, her hands are guiding mine onto the strings. No, wasn’t I leaning in the branches of a tree? I can’t see her face. How can she be ‘mother’ in my memory?

Another memory; it must be years later. I’m playing alone, in the same room. This time the windows are open, stirring the muslin curtains in the warm breeze. Pink blossom swirls in the air. We must be in some tropical waters, because the sea is azure blue and, I know if I were to lean out and look down, would be clear down to the shallow bed, barely deep enough for the ship. I don’t need to look. It’s time to practice.

“You’re starting to remember,” Jalese says gently.

“This…” Tears are still running. “This is impossible.” I am still playing, but I come to the end of the song and stop.

“Music brings old memories forward.”

“No, but…” I hold my thought. These are memories of being Taniel. Growing up. If these memories are real, she must be real. She’s a real person. But now it’s me. I’m here, in her place, like a burglar reading a private diary.

And I know something else now. This instrument — I remember its name now; it means something like ‘box-harp’ — this instrument is not merely the same type as that which I learned on. It is the same instrument. A little more battered now than in my memory, but I recognise the worn carvings from when they were fresh. I remember the faded paintings of sinuous, stylised dolphins. I remember when it was new. I remember helping my mother paint the dolphins.

“This is mine,” I say through the tears. “I learned to play on this actual one.” I manage to look up at Jalese now. She’s staring at me, surprised and concerned. “The… You said you were here when someone used this to pay for a room?” She nods. “What do you remember? Who were they? Where did they go next?”

“I… I don’t remember that much. I just remember seeing them talking to Hethan and passing it over. I wasn’t close enough.”

I look at her for a moment, then stand up abruptly and go to the bar, carrying the box-harp. I use the back of my hand to quickly dry my eyes a little. I can see a way out through the back of the bar into a larger room. “Excuse me,” I say, (or rather ‘Hey, you,’ I suppose). It gets the innkeeper’s attention anyway, as he comes into view and approaches the bar.

“Miss?”

“Do you remember anything about the people who gave you this?” I ask, showing him the box-harp. “Did they say who they were? Where they were going?”

“What’s it to–”

“This was mine, as a child.”

He gives me a frankly disbelieving look.

“How much do you want for it?” I ask, partly because I want it, and partly to reassure him I’m not going to just try to take it without paying. To reinforce this I actually place the instrument down on the bar. It proves surprisingly difficult to take my hands off it. “Please? And did the people who gave it to you say anything at all about where they were going? Maybe they might have left a message?”

“Oh, I can’t remember if they said anything, Miss. It was a long time ago.”

I bite my lip in frustration, wanting to yell out to him, ‘they must have said something!’ I just say, “How… How much do you want for it then?”

“Oh, let’s see, a nice box-harp like that?” And I know he’s going to rip me off. It’s the same voice you get from a builder or a car repairman. “I reckon that could fetch say ten Crowns?”

Ten Crowns. Ten days of harbour fees. That’s the only point of reference I have, but it must be a lot of money. Infinitely more than I have anyway.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I say, and turn for the door.

“Oh now wait, Miss,” he calls me, as I reach the door.

Right on time. I sigh and turn back to him. “Is this haggling?” I ask. “Please excuse my ignorance but I’ve lost a great deal of my memory, and I don’t think I’ve ever had to haggle before anyway, so I’m not going to be very good at it.” I have his attention anyway, so I come slowly back to the bar. “We escaped from slavers down the Tail five days ago. I have literally nothing, sir. I have the clothes you see me in and the boat we came in, which we’re going to lose if we can’t pay the harbour fees and at the moment I don’t know how we’re going to do that. If you can name a fair price for that, I’ll try to find the money before we have to leave. If we can leave.” I reach the bar. “Hethan, is it?” I ask, for confirmation. He nods; it’s his name. “My name is Taniel. Did the people who gave this to you ever mention my name? Taniel? They might have been my parents. I thought they were dead. They might have thought I was dead.” ~This was mine. They wouldn’t have just sold it, would they? If they were my parents?~

I watch his face. I don’t think he’s an uncompassionate man, but he’s doubtless seen his share of fakes and hustlers and charletans, and how does he know I’m not just another, after all?

I’m aware of Jalese quietly coming up to my side.

“Taniel?” he confirms.

“Yes.”

“What were your parents’ names?”

“I can’t remember.” I bite my lip again. “It may come to me later. I’m sorry, I’m obviously wasting your time.” I turn back for the door.

“You can play that thing,” he says, stating a fact.

“Apparently,” I say.

“No, you can. I heard you playing earlier. Can you sing?”

“I–”

“Of course she can sing,” Jalese picks this moment to intervene, giving me a quick nudge to stop me denying it. “Have you ever met a Neri who couldn’t sing like a siren? And ten Crowns is an outrageous amount to ask for a familyship box-harp, Hethan. If you could’ve sold it for anything worthwhile you would have done it years ago, and done this place up a bit.”

“Oh,” I say quietly to her, “this is how you haggle, is it?”

“Shush.” That word is the same in English. “Hethan, it’s Market in two days. You need some more hands around the place anyway.”

“Jallie, do you want your old job back?” Hethan asks her, as if acknowledging something at which she had only hinted.

“It would really help,” Jalese admits. “Just for Market. You know how busy it gets at Market. And Taniel can play the box-harp, and sing–”

“Bu–” I start, but I get a sharper nudge in the ribs and shut up.

“And when she’s not she can help around the place too,” Jalese says. “Basic wages, bed and board plus tips?”

Hethan looks at us both for a few moments. “All right,” he says, “but only because Beni’s just had her baby, so I was short anyway.”

“Beni had a baby?” Jalese crowed. “Who’s the dad?”

“Some boy off a marketeer, she says. Daft girl. I think they’re still friends though; he’ll probably come in with the Market.”

“Oh, I’ll have to see her.”

“All right, so you two can work here during Market, and if the takings are good enough, I might just let you have the box-harp for nothing. How’s that?” He looks at me.

“Oh,” I say. “Thank you. That’s very kind.” ~It’s that easy to get a job here?~

I get another nudge. “Actually, we were hoping we could start today,” Jalese says. She knows she’s pushing it now. Even I can tell, from Hethan’s face. “Taniel needs to learn how we do things anyway,” she adds hopefully, and follows it with a pretty smile.

I take the cue and try to match her smile.

Hethan sighs, then chuckles a little. “You really have nothing?” he asks. He sighs again. “All right. You can start by getting all the rooms properly cleaned.”

“Yes, sir–”

“Now. You know where everything is, Jallie.”

“We’ll start now,” she promises. Hethan shakes his head and wanders back into his back-room. He’s left the box-harp on the bar-top. “See?” Jalese asks me.

“See what?”

“Weren’t we ever so lucky?” She grins. “I think your spell worked.”

“Ohhhh.” ~That’s how it works.~

“Beni’s off for her baby, Market’s starting in two days, and it’ll start getting busy tomorrow anyway as the island traders come in, and that box-harp wasn’t just any old box-harp, it was yours–”

“Wait a minute, that’s all stuff that was set ages ago. I only just did that spell!”

“Yes, and?”

I stare at her. ~That’s how it works?~ I’m thinking. ~Did I just fuck with causality?~ That’s not rational, and I know it. Rationalisation, it has to be.

And another thought: The harp. It’s only got sentimental value, it doesn’t make sense for my parents, if they were my — Taniel’s — parents, to just trade it for a couple of nights in an inn, unless they thought I might come here and find it. That reduces the problem from one of ludicrous coincidence or ‘luck’ anyway.

“Come on,” Jalese says. “We have to start. Get your box-harp, and I’ll show you where we’re sleeping tonight.”

“What about the others?”

She stops again and looks at me. “I was pushing it as it is. I don’t think I can get them jobs here too. They’ll sort themselves out.”

“You think? They’re just as confused as I am.”

“Your spell took them in too, didn’t it?”

“I… Did it? Maybe it did…”

“Something will turn up, then.” And that, there, was a statement of faith, I suppose. The simple, practical acceptance of possibly causality-breaking magic being thrown around by a complete novice.

There are eight guest bedrooms, and it takes Jalese and I the rest of the afternoon to clean them all and make them ready for occupation. Jalese’s surprised at how much she has to show me what to do, but I think I’m a net contributor to the effort by the time we hit the second room. By the time we’ve done all eight I feel exhausted and all I want to do is go down to the basement where we’d set up sleeping pallets for myself, and just sleep. But on the way down Hethan calls us into the back room. Someone in the bar has been asking after us. Jalese pokes her head around the corner briefly and confirms that it’s the others of our group and declares that they can wait. We need to get clean. We’re filthy and sweaty from doing the rooms so Jalese pulls me down to the basement.

Oh, and they do have soap in Jeodin. It’s made out of whale oil. So are the candles and the lamp oil and Goddess-knows what else. I try to relax and not have a hissy fit about this. Presumably whales aren’t endangered here; the hunting techiques would be too primitive, I hope, to do that kind of damage. Unless they use magic, but maybe the Goddess would have a thing or two to say about that. I wonder. I try to tell myself that nevertheless it’s going to be a major part of the economy for an island chain like this, and there really aren’t any alternatives. It still feels wrong to me.

And yet, it’s good to have soap, even though it does smell odd. And light when the sun goes down. Even though that smells a bit odd too.

I decide to ask something that’s been increasingly bothering me. “Do you know if it’s all right for me to, er, take these charms out so I can wash my hair?” I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be done with all the charms and braids in place so I don’t end up with soap and stuff trapped in there as well; but what with the dust and sweat from the cleaning work, and several days in sea air and spray before that, and whatever and how long before that, I can feel it needs a wash, badly.

“Yes, I think so. Wait a moment.” She goes into a storeroom. I follow to the door. It turns out the store room holds a number of clothes. “These were left by accident by guests,” Jalese explains, looking for something in a pile on the table in the centre of the room. “They’re kept in case the people who left them come back and want them back, but we can borrow them if we like, and get out of these horrible things. At least until we can buy something at Market.”

“Oh, that sounds like such a good idea.” I must have said it with a lot of feeling because she looks back at me with a grin. Then she finds what she’s looking for and comes back out, handing it to me. It’s a small silk handkerchief; so small I might imagine it belonging to a child.

“From what I’ve heard, it’s all right to take them out and wrap them in silk,” Jalese explains. “I don’t think you even have to wear them in your hair like you do. A lot of younger Neriae do it but I’ve never seen the elders doing it.”

“Oh. all right. I’ll get them out then. It’s been running me like a nut for days.” ‘Driving me nuts’, as an idiom, doesn’t translate to Jeodine very elegantly, and Jalese gives me a very odd look. I shrug and take the handkerchief, with a look of thanks, and stand at the counter to start unravelling my hair. “It’s probably supposed to be a fashion statement or something,” I mutter.

“I’ll help you do that,” she says.

“Oh…” Suddenly I’m blushing. “I… Yes please, okay, if that’s… If that’s appropriate.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?” she queries innocently. “Come and sit here.”

She indicates the bench next to the rough old table. I obey, bringing the handkerchief with me and laying it on the table. “I don’t know,” I say, as she starts. She remains standing so my head is at a comfortable height for her to work with. “I wasn’t sure.”

“It’s not safe for you to remove them yourself unless you’re going to cast,” she explains. “They will attempt to couple. Like you saw before?”

I nod, remembering the weirdness of the shell apparently growing in my flesh.

The first charm comes out, and she drops it quickly onto the handkerchief, and continues unravelling and separating the braid it was in. “You’ve forgotten so much, haven’t you teya?” Teya. I recognise the word. It’s a term of endearment, like ‘dear’ I suppose. “How old are you? Do you know?”

I shake my head. ~Twenty two,~ I could say, but something in me warns me not to. “I don’t know. How old do you think I am?”

Another charm comes out. “It’s always hard with Neri. Hm. Ninety–”

“What?” I exclaim, in English at it turns out. I turn to stare at her. “You think I’m ninety years old?”

“Maybe eighty.” She shrugs. “I can’t tell. You seem short for your age, but you can’t be in your fifties, you’re–” She stops herself and indicates with a gentle hand I should turn back around so she can concentrate on my hair.

Whatever it was she didn’t want to say it. I subside. “I don’t feel that old,” I say.

She liberates another charm and strokes my hair down. I sit with my thoughts, and soon realise there are tears in my eyes again.

“Did your mother do this for you as well?” Jalese asks.

“I suppose so. I… I think so.” Yes, there’s a familiarity to this scene, to the hands of a woman gently moving over my hair. But might that not have been my real mother, when I was a small child? “I can’t see her face,” I say aloud. “When I remember her, I can never see her face.”

Jalese rests her hand against my head for a moment, a gesture I recognise as commisseration. But I seriously don’t know whether the fact I can’t see my — Taniel’s mother’s face upsets me more than it would if I could. If I could turn around in a lucid memory and look on the face of an elven woman and know her to be my mother. I have a mother already.

But these flashbacks are getting — worse? More frequent anyway. I don’t know if I want to call them worse. Or why am I not trying to deny them? Why aren’t I avoiding reawakening these memories?

What is there in them that I’m craving?

And I know Kerilas and Samila and Lotan — rather, James, Lee and Dave, I forcibly remind myself — are upstairs in the bar waiting for us, and I don’t feel in the slightest bit like I want to hurry to meet them. Partly I really am just very tired. And we were all stuck on that tiny boat for days until this afternoon anyway and it’s just nice to have a little more space, and Jalese is such easy company.

She finishes getting the charms out of my hair. I survey them briefly on the handkerchief. There are shells and pebbles and bits of bone and teeth and tiny carvings in ivory and wood. Goddess knows what I must have looked like with them in my hair. Hell of a fashion statement. Jalese is still unravelling and untangling the braids. I tie together the corners of the handkerchief to make a simple pouch and Jalese finds a leather thong for me to tie it to and put around my neck.

How one bathes in Jeodin — at least if one is poor and living under an inn — is by crouching or kneeling naked with a sponge in one’s hand in in a wide, shallow tray of soapy water in front of the stove. For a moment I think of my bath and electric shower at home, but then I get on with it before the water gets cold. There’s even shampoo, of a sort, which I suspect also has more than a touch of whale-oil about it, but I use it nonetheless. It feels so good to get clean.

I think this is the first time since those quiet hours before dawn the day we arrived that I have been left entirely on my own. Jalese had bathed first, and has gone back to the store room to find some clothes we can borrow. Besides a little furtive exploring under the furs in my bunk, this is the first opportunity I have to really examine this body; this miraculous body that’s slim and smooth and agile and long-limbed without being gangly. And female, female, female.

It seems ironic, perhaps even farcical, that even with all the impossible things that have happened I still have to hide. I have to hide this joy I feel. My chest aches with it. My breasts — aren’t much to get excited about compared to, say, Samila’s; unless you’re me. I love the way they move. I love the sensitivity of them, even if it hurts if I hit them on something. I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all. I’m fascinated by my waist, and the new configuration of my hips; standing next to the tray on the slatted wooden mat, just exploring the shape of my pelvis. My hips aren’t especially wide, but I have a definite figure. Just not quite so definite as Samila’s. I have to remind myself that would be a pointless comparison, and I don’t envy her the discomfort she must be having from her larger breasts.

And below, between my legs, of course. Smooth flesh (I suppose being hairless down there as well as everywhere else except my head is another Elf thing) and a slit. I probe, gently. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe I was expecting the touch to arouse me more, but it mostly just feels strange and right at the same time. I don’t have anything I can relate this to; nothing in my old body which could be compared to this, so it’s confusing and maybe a little frustrating. I don’t even know if or how different I am from a human female, down there.

This body is everything I might have wished for. The best I could have realistically expected if I ever got around to starting to fix it back home couldn’t have compared to this. But now I think, at least it would have been mine. I don’t know what I feel about this body. I love it. I feel already like I inhabit it more perfectly than I have ever known. And yet, Taniel’s memories keep surfacing, flashing at the slightest stimuli. I know she was a real person, she had her own life, full of joy and love, and then full of pain and loss and enslavement and Goddess knows what happened to her in that camp. And I start to feel a little like an intruder and a thief. And maybe I had no right to explore the way I just did.

I squat quickly to rinse my hands off a final time in the soapy water and empty the tray carefully down the drain.

(They have sewers and drains, even in a little market town like this! Go Jeodin!)

“It took you long enough,” Lotan says as we cross the bar to where they’re sitting. I have the box-harp in my hand. “What were you two doing–”

Samila turns to look, having had her back to us. “Bloody Hell!” she exclaims, lapsing into English. “You brush up nice don’t you?”

I don’t really know what to say to that, so I just smile.

“Both of you,” Samila continues, switching back to Jeodine for Jalese’s benefit. “You look really nice.”

“Thank you,” I say. “It’s amazing what a bath and a change of clothes can do, I guess.”

“Come on then, give us a twirl,” Lotan says, in English.

I roll my eyes at him, but I oblige for the group, doing a little turn, enough to make the long skirt flare out a little. I’m wearing, basically, a full-length dress made of a rich dark-blue dyed linen with a lace-up bodice and a white under-tunic with long sleeves and no collar, and lace ties rather than buttons. Jalese picked it out for me and now I wonder if she deliberately overdressed me for the occasion. She herself is plainly dressed in a grey quilted skirt and tunic, and perhaps that is a slightly mischievous look on her face. I find it remarkable that a garment as nice as this could have been left behind by accident, but as Jalese said, once a ship leaves its mooring you can’t just quickly go back for something you’ve forgotten or left with someone to wash, and you may not be back this way in months or years.

“They’ve got baths here?” Samila catches on, with evident hunger.

“For very small values of. Jalese, do you think they can–”

“We thought we might as well stay here the night anyway,” Kerilas says. “It’s only two Torcs a night. I presume they’ve got washing facilities for the guests.”

“Yes,” Jalese agrees. “I’ll show you. Do you want to do that now?”

“Yes!” Samila agrees.

“Sami, why don’t you go now, and we’ll catch up with Taniel here?” Kerilas suggests.

“Okay. Sounds good to me.” She practically bounds to her feet, picks up a cloth bag she didn’t have when we docked and follows Jalese out of the bar towards the stairs.

“So… you two got jobs here, right?” Lotan asks, to confirm.

“Yeah,” I say. I move to sit in Samila’s vacated seat, but Kerilas gets up suddenly and takes my hand and leads me around to the more comfortable seat next to him and seats me. Seriously gentlemanly. I blush and stammer “Th-Thank-you.”

“You really do look lovely tonight,” he says. I’m sure my face has gone completely pink, if a Neri complexion can do that. I sit, and he resumes his seat.

Lotan, sitting across from me, is grinning. “So how come you’re so dressed up?” he asks.

“Oh…” Then I remember. “It’s my big debut tonight, didn’t you hear?”

“What?”

“Hethan didn’t get the flyers out?” I ask with mock indignation. “I seem to be able to play this,” I continue, raising the box-harp, “so I’d better warn you, I’m probably going to start shortly. Only problem is I don’t know any of the local music.” ~For a very large value of ‘local’,~ I think to myself. I’m not sure why, but I don’t feel like I want to talk about the flashbacks I got earlier, the memories evoked by playing this instrument.

“Well, you could always play stuff from home, I guess,” Kerilas suggests.

“You want me to?” There aren’t that many other customers in the inn at the moment. I don’t know if I should expect it to pick up later. The two young women that were here earlier have gone. There are a few couples now, and a family with two girls and a boy that I’d guess are between eight and twelve years old. “Are you going to tip me if I do?” I add coyly.

“Tip you over, more like,” Lotan teases.

“I’ll probably be crap at it anyway. I seem to be able to play native songs because it’s here, you know?” I tap the side of my head. They both nod. They must be going through similar processes of learning what memories and skills they have. “As long as someone hums it or something so I’m reminded. I don’t know if it’ll work if I try to play something from home. Might give it a try though. So anyway you’re staying here as guests, right?” I ask them both. “Where’d you get the money?”

“Oh, we got jobs,” Lotan says. “Well, me and Sam did anyway. I can’t believe it, it’s so easy to get a job around here!”

“Yeah, I found that,” I say.

“It’s like, you just go up to someone who looks busy and say ‘do you need another hand?’ and they’ll either say yes or point you to someone who’ll say yes. I’m helping with building the pontoons for the market ships. Did you know? The way they do it is we put all these pontoon jetties down across half the harbour and the marketeers come in and moor up and you — we — walk out to them, right out across the harbour itself, and from one ship to the other like a huge floating mall. I think it’s going to be fantastic.” He’s slipped into Jeodine somewhere in the middle of that, but certain words like ‘mall’ still poked through in English. “We were so lucky everything’s gearing up for Market. Sam’s doing something with the team putting up the awnings I think.”

“What about you?” I ask Kerilas. From his face I already know the answer.

He just shakes his head.

“Why not? Do you know?”

He sighs, then leans forward to talk to me more privately. “In case you forgot, my character’s– I mean, I’m a dark elf.”

“Oh.” I had forgotten. It wasn’t as if he was actually dark. As in, the image I’d had in my head while we were playing before was one from a sourcebook I remembered reading a few years before; with jet-black skin and brightly glowing eyes and long white hair. Kerilas has the hair, at least, but he’s pale and fey, with those large blue eyes, and actually very beautiful, I thought.

“You’ve been getting some funny reactions all day,” Lotan agrees. “Everyone knows dark elves are supposed to be evil, right?”

“Yeah, but you’re not!” I point out unnecessarily.

But Kerilas looks doubtful. “I think it’s only ’cause this is Jeodin I haven’t been lynched already,” he says. “It’s a diverse society. It’s how it came about, I mean, for a long time I think people came to Jeodin because they were being oppressed at home, you know? I’ve seen a bunch of human ethnicities here, that I’d recognise from home. Arabic, Chinese, Anglo, Nordic, African. That’s not what they are here of course, but that’s what they look like to us, and this is just a little market port. And we’re not the only elves in town either.”

“We’re not?”

He shakes his head. “I must have seen, I don’t know, eight or nine others. It’s obvious, they’re as fully integrated into this society as any human. And I saw three types, I think. Marine, like you, and woodland, and there were a couple of another kind I saw, but I’m not sure. They were small, they might have just been woodlander kids. I didn’t see anyone else like me at all.”

“People were just suspicious of you,” Lotan says in support. “Ignore them.”

“Well that’s just it.” He sighs, falling into thought.

“What?” I prompt.

“Nothing. It’s okay.”

“No it isn’t,” I say. “What are you thinking?”

He looks at me a little oddly. “Have either of you been getting… I don’t know, like flashbacks?”

“Yes,” I say quickly.

“Yeah, me too,” Lotan says.

“What are you remembering?” He’s asking me.

“Uh.” I hadn’t been ready to talk about this. “Growing up on a familyship.” I interject the Jeodine word there, having heard it earlier. “My — um — Taniel’s parents I guess. Learning to play the box-harp.”

“Lotan?”

He shrugs. “Growing up, like Tani says. On a farm somewhere. I think we raised goats or something. There were mountains…” He pauses, caught in some recollection.

Kerilas nods. “I’ve got more than just growing up. I defined my character to be evil,” he says. “That’s how I was going to play him. He joined in the escape because he saw the opportunity. He was just going to use the rest of the party, go along with things only as long as it suited him, only for what it would get him, even if that meant good things coming out of it. Kerilas is not a very nice person. He’s completely self-serving.”

“Yeah, but that’s not you,” I insist. “It’s just the character. That doesn’t matter now.”

He looks at me intensely again. “Doesn’t it?”

“No!”

“Does Taniel matter?”

I can’t answer to that, of course. And that’s answer enough.

“Thing is, I know why he’s evil. I created the backstory, okay? With Ken. I know what happened to him. But now I’m — remembering it, like it happened to me.”

Fuck,“ Lotan says.

“There’s just so much,” Kerilas says. “I mean, I’m old. Hundreds of years old. There’s so much. Most of it isn’t clear yet but… What I can tell…” He shivers. “And I think, I’ve only got, what? Twenty three years of my own memories and it’s…” He snaps his fingers. It’s ephemeral. “Not much to stand against all that…”

Kerilas is scared. I can’t think of anything I can say to him. I take his hand, knowing as I do it I could never have been so demonstrative or personal before. He squeezes my hand, accepting the contact.

I suppose I am lucky: Taniel was expressly someone I would have wished I could be. Playing her in the game was wholly vicarious. Even so, the reality of her body and her memories, the few of them that have surfaced (so far), is sometimes more intense than I know how to deal with.

“I know you’d never hurt anyone,” I say.

“I think I already have.”

And he looks at me; the briefest of glances, but enough that my stomach lurches. It feels like when a ship comes off the top of a wave. I don’t know what he means by that. Surely if he’d– if Kerilas had done something to Taniel, before, there’d be some residual reaction. I’d know! Wouldn’t I? I’d feel it somehow. But I haven’t found any memories more recent than that fire on the familyship. My father pushing me into a hidey-hole. Kerilas isn’t a part of those memories, and there’s nothing since. He was a prisoner too, like us!

He looks away and pulls his hand back. “I don’t know. Everything’s muddled. There’s just so much. There’s just so much.”

Hethan is making gestures at me. The bar has got busier while we were talking, and at some point an interrupt in Hethan’s mind triggered, saying ‘there needs to be music now.’

I get the message. “Sorry guys. I’ve got to earn my keep,” I excuse myself and stand to make my way to the small stage. The moment I put a foot on the stage, it seems, the noise level in the bar drops. ~Oh shit,~ I think, and turn around to see a room full of expectant faces. ~Oh deep shit.~

I manage to unfreeze myself and smile, trying to point out to myself that it’s really not that many people. Only, oh, thirty or forty? “Hello,” I say. From some deep recess of my subconscious I’m pushed to bob a little curtsey. “I haven’t played for an audience before so… be kind and I’ll try not to suck too much.”

Confused faces, except for Kerilas and Lotan, damn them, who are grinning broadly. I don’t think Jeodine uses ‘suck’ in that context. “I mean, I’ll try to play well.” I get out.

I think I’d better just play. I only know one song, so I find a way to hold the box-harp while standing. It has a dent in its bottom that sits comfortably at my waist. I start playing Selkie’s Lament again. I just try to forget the audience and concentrate on the music, and out it comes. Again, like before, it’s not removed from me. I remember learning it. I remember playing it before. I remember playing on deck on a warm summer evening and a still moonlit sea. My eyes are closed, and I think I’m moving a little to the music. I have to not think about that or I’ll get self-conscious. I have to concentrate on what my fingers are doing, and play.

Selkie’s Lament is not a short song, but eventually it has to end and I open my eyes. Everyone is still watching me, and the bar is quiet. I smile as if to say ‘that’s it,’ and a sigh ripples through the bar. I think that means they liked it. Lotan claps once, then a second time, hesitantly, realising no-one else is joining him, before Kerilas thumps his arm to make him stop.

“Thank you,” I say. “I’m going to try something different now. This might not work. This is something I heard a long way away. I haven’t tried to play it before.” I smile again and concentrate on the box-harp and see if I can play the opening bars to Street Spirit. I fumble the first time and try again starting from a different note. It comes out wrong again, and dissonant, but I stare at the instrument and suddenly figure out why. The notes are spaced differently. No wonder it sounded strange. You probably couldn’t even play Selkie’s Lament on a piano, for the same reason. It would sound out of tune. “Sorry sorry,” I say aloud. “That’s not going to work. All right, I’m going to stop now so Hethan can sell you more drinks and food.” That gets smiles and a few laughs. “And I’ll come and play some more later on.”

I escape off the stage and make it as far as the table Kerilas and Lotan are sitting at. “Fuck,” I say. “That was embarrassing.”

“No, it was good, the one you played,” Kerilas said.

“What happened with the other one? What was it?” Lotan asks.

“That was supposed to be Street Spirit. You can’t play it on this.”

“Why not?”

“I need to get hold of Jalese,” I mutter, turning away from the table to look for Jalese. Hethan himself is taking orders at the tables, as is another young woman I haven’t been introduced to yet.

“The musical scale is different,” Kerilas explains to Lotan behind me.

“I should’ve thought of it,” I mutter.

“You haven’t had musical training back home, have you?” Kerilas asks.

I shake my head, then turn to look at him. “Have you?”

“Parents made me had piano lessons when I was younger,” he says, shrugging. “I didn’t keep it up. You should talk to Sam about it.”

“What do you mean it’s different?” Lotan asks.

“You know what a piano keyboard looks like?” Kerilas explains.

“Yeah…”

“Okay, so a simple scale is,” and he sings quietly, “do re me fa so la te do” up the octave. “Eight notes, got it?”

“And the black notes,” I add. “Where is Jalese?” Helping Samila, I remember, slightly annoyed.

“Yes, and the black notes,” Kerilas agrees laconically. “Tani, can you play a scale on that thing?”

“Um…” I have to shift my attention properly. “Sure.” I sit and rest the box-harp on my thigh and play a scale.

“See?” Kerilas says, to both of us. “That’s sixteen notes, total, from one note to the same note higher up. And that’s a straight sequence isn’t it? There’s no major or minor keys.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Yes, I’m right. I remember,” Kerilas says. Of course, it’s reasonable to think that he has memories of music too. “May I?” he asks, holding out his hand for the box-harp.

I actually hesitate for a moment, then I shake myself of the silliness and hand it to him. He hefts it, and shifts his sitting posture so he can rest it on his own thigh and plays a few notes, a scale, then a phrase out of Selkie’s Lament, then something I haven’t heard before, played with a completely different fingering technique.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” he says, sounding very distant.

“It brings back memories doesn’t it?” I say.

He stops playing and passes the box-harp back to me in silence. “Yes,” he says, quietly. Then he clears his throat. I can only guess that his memories are less pleasant than mine. “You could re-tune it to play our music, I reckon,” he says. “You’d have to keep tuning it back and forth though, which would suck. Be better to get a second one. There’s Jalese if you’re still looking for her,” he adds, looking past my shoulder. “Why?”

I turn to look. Jalese’s appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh, finally. I need her to teach me more Jeodin songs,” I explain, and get up and head through the bar towards her.

“I have to serve food. Hethan’s–”

“Yeah I know. It’ll just take a minute. You saw how quickly I picked it up last time.”

“And your friend’s upstairs in her room. She’s upset about something.”

“Uh…” Samila. Damn it, I don’t have time for this. “Did she say what?”

Jalese shakes her head. “She wouldn’t tell me. She says I won’t understand.”

I look back towards the bar. “I’ve got to play. We can’t afford to lose this work.”

“I know.” She bites her lip, thinking. “You really don’t remember any other songs?”

I shake my head. “But it’s really quick. You just have to remind me. I can’t keep playing Selkie’s Lament all night. People are going to notice!”

“Oh that depends how much wine they pour through their gills,” Jalese comments dryly.

I blink a couple of times at the unfamiliar idiom. “I don’t think it’s that kind of place,” I say.

“Oh, suddenly you know all about it?” she quips back, with a smile to remind me she’s not being mean.

“Well, there are kids in there. People aren’t going to get really drunk around them are they?” My reasoning actually makes her hesitate. “Look, you could’ve taught me a song by now instead of explaining why you haven’t got time to teach me a song,” I point out.

“Um–”

I play my trump. “Otherwise I’ll have to pull you onstage in front of everyone to teach me,” I say.

“You wouldn’t!”

I grin. “Look, I’ll talk to Kerilas. He can go up and see Samila, find out what’s up.”

“I don’t think that’s appropriate!”

“No, it’s… It’s all right. He’s her friend. They’ve known each other a long time. Longer than she’s known me anyway.”

She looks at me oddly. “But he’s Reki,” she points out, as if it should be obvious. The word for a dark elf.

I stare at her. “So? You were on a sloop with him for four days–”

“It’s different at sea. The ship comes first.” Her words have the weight of proverb. She stares at me critically. “How could you possibly forget that? You’re Neri.”

“Kerilas is all right,” I insist, trying not to get sidetracked. “He wouldn’t do anything. He’s my friend, I trust him.”

“He’s too familiar with you, Miss,” Jalese says, interjecting some of that formality she used on our first day.

“Me?” I stare back at her. “You think me and him… No. No, we’re not like that.”

“I should hope not. It’s not correct.”

We’re just looking at each other. Neither of us know what to say any more.

“Not like what?” Samila says, making me jump. She must have come down the stairs quietly while we were arguing. She’s standing at the bottom, almost hanging onto the wall, almost hiding behind it as if she might bolt back upstairs.

“Nothing,” Jalese says. “Are you feeling better?”

Samila shrugs. She’s clean and her hair’s practically shining like a black grand piano, and she’s wearing a pretty, if a little folksy dress with a bodice front that on her creates quite a cleavage. I’m almost envious. “Just thought I’d better get it over with,” she says.

“What?” Jalese wonders.

But finally I get it. “Ohh.” This would be the first time Lee’s ever worn female clothing then, as opposed to the anonymous tunic and trousers we had from the camp. “You look great,” I say, trying to be reassuring.

“R-Really?”

“Really. Doesn’t she, Jalese?”

“What? Yes, I suppose so. You look very pretty. Why, is there someone here you’re trying to impress?” She gives me a look. I shake my head minutely.

“I feel like a right fucking narner,” Samila says in English.

“You don’t look it,” I promise her. “Trust me.”

“How can you just–” Samila starts, in Jeodine, then catches herself with a glance to Jalese. “How can you just do this girl stuff like it’s nothing?” she asks me in English.“

“It’s not nothing,” I say carefully, replying in English. “It’s just what we have to do okay?”

“I know,” she sighs morosely.

“I mean, what choice do we have?” I press. “Look, you’re not going to have any problems. You look lovely. Really you do.”

She shivers and folds her arms around her breasts, as if trying to hide them.

“I just need Jalese to teach me a few more songs quickly so I can play tonight,” I continue, deliberately changing the subject and switching back to Jeodine, for Jalese’s benefit.

“Songs?”

“Yes I’m… employed,” I explain, showing Samila the box-harp.

“You’re kidding!” Her hands automatically reach for the instrument and I hand it to her. Odd that I feel no hesitation in doing so, compared to Kerilas.

“Why don’t you sit in? Kerilas said you know music, back home.”

“Uh…” She looks between Jalese and myself. “Okay.” She picks out a scale on the box-harp. “Whoah, that’s funky.” All her awkwardness seemed to have just vanished, as she engrossed herself in the instrument.

“Jalese?” I ask. “It’ll only take a little while.”

“I hate to be the one to say this,” Samila says, still plinking on the box-harp, “but there’s too many notes.”

“We noticed.”

Jalese sighs. “All right. But we can’t spend too long. Hethan’s going to get impatient as it is.” She walks off, towards the stairs to the basement. I glance at Samila and follow.

It does go quickly. There’s still that emotional tug as I catch on to each song. Strong flashbacks to times in the past when Taniel has played them. But I’m prepared for them now, and I’m focused on getting them remembered so I can go out there and play them.

“No, you have to sing this,” Jalese explains patiently, to the Dugong Song. It’s a lullaby. “People will expect it.”

“All right, I’ll try.”

“Try now.” And she starts singing the song again. I play, as I have been, and then I join in with the words, uncertainly at first but she matches me and encourages me. “That’s right,” she says, leaving me to sing alone. Only, I’m not singing alone, I realise. Samila is singing too, softly, from where she’s sitting in the corner of the store room. “Don’t stop,” Jalese whispers at me, and goes to Samila’s side. “It’s supposed to be a happy song,” she points out to Samila.

“I know.”

“It’s a children’s song. What does it remind you of?”

I don’t hear her reply. She’s talking too softly into Jalese’s ear, and I’m still singing and playing. But Jalese stands and comes back over to me. “Go upstairs and play. You’ve got enough now?” I nod. “We’ll come upstairs soon.”

“Okay.”

Port Denhall approximately triples in size when Market comes in. That’s not just in numbers of people. Jalese tells me to go and watch as the marketeer ships arrive and I take myself off to find a vantage point on the small headland above the harbour mouth. I know that Lotan and Samila are down there somewhere, part of it all. I don’t know where Kerilas is.

‘Market’ appears to be a small floating town in its own right. I count something like twenty craft approaching Denhall’s small harbour. Dominating the flotilla are four sizeable wooden sailing ships, with three masts, banking and sliding into the narrow harbour like dancers.

I notice one of the ships is different: It’s at least as long as the others but wider; so wide I wonder if it might be a catamaran sitting low in the water, laden with cargo, but I can’t tell from my vantage. It just looks faster, with curves that just look so right; less like a made thing and more like a creature of the open ocean. It has triangular sails, in contrast to the square and gaff rigging among the other ships. They shimmer in the sun, iridescent, like the wings of a dragonfly. It’s a Neri familyship. If I didn’t just know it I’d know it had to be. I long to see it up close.

Following after them came a collection of barques, yawls (I’m gradually picking up the vocabulary) and sloops barely bigger than our own, steering themselves to their places on the pontoon jetties expertly under sail alone. There are other ships; faster, sharper ships with gun-ports; one of them a Neri ship too, I think. They don’t come into the harbour. Some drop anchor just outside; some tack back out into the open sea again, clearly on a patrolling pattern.

People are scurrying around like crazy on the quay and the pontoon jetties. Lanterns are being lit. I have to head back down now; Hethan wants me installed by the hearth with the box-harp in time for when the new customers start arriving. I can already see why he needed extra hands; and also why he didn’t, really, when he first took Jalese and myself on. We weren’t going to get away with not paying attention to the customers tonight.

“Have you talked to Sam yet?” Kerilas asks, as I take a break from playing that evening. Jalese’s brought me another of these creamy, fruity drinks that I can only describe as a smoothie of some sort, but it’s about a micron away from being a milk shake too. The flavours are all of Jeodin though, with cinnamon and something else I can’t place at all but which I suspect is making me a little less inhibited.

“Sam? What about?”

“Oh come off it, Tani, what do you think?” He leans close. “Do you want me to sit here and talk aloud about how you’re not really a girl?” he asks me in English.

I give him a nasty look. “I think people would believe their eyes over the word of a dark elf, don’t you?” I fire back, cattily. I can see that one hit home. After all, I only need to grow an exhibitionist streak for about three seconds and no-one in the area is going to have any doubt as to my sex. “Keri, we’re not even human any more. How come we’re not talking about that? Why is whether I’m a boy or a girl so important?”

“Because it is, and you know it,” he says quietly. “You’re using that to avoid the subject.”

I sigh and slouch back in my chair and pick at a few notes on the box-harp. “I don’t know what there is to talk about,” I say. My voice sounds petulant even to my own ears. “It happened. I didn’t ask for it. I just thought it would be best if I got on with it, you know?”

“Just like that? You thought you’d get on with it just like that?”

“Well…” I shrug. “What else am I going to do? We’ve got to adapt, haven’t we?”

He gives me a long, long look. Aloud he only says, “Well, you’re ‘adapting’ an awful lot better than Sami is, that’s all I can say.” He continues that Look. “Listen, all I’m saying is, Sam’s having a hard time with this, and right now you’ve got more in common with him than anyone else on this planet. I’m sorry if this breaks in on all the fun you’re having ‘adapting’–”

“Oh fuck off.”

“Don’t be so immature. It’s not very elvish, is it?”

In answer I pick out the tune of the first line of ‘You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog’ on the box-harp. He grins and gives me a shove I probably deserve. I’m smiling too.

“I just want you to talk to him,” he says, more emolliently.

I look away and stare at the flickering light in the stove window. And, dammit, I’ve got Hound Dog stuck in my head. “I wouldn’t know what to say,” I say.

“Then listen. That’s the point anyway.”

“I s’pose. Everything’s so busy at the moment–”

“You’re not too busy for this. He’s still your friend, isn’t he?”

I look back at Kerilas. Finally I nod.

I meant to go up to Samila’s bedroom that night after finishing work, but I had to help Jalese and Hethan clean up the bar and by the time I can get away and go upstairs it’s too late. Really. The sky is starting to lighten away to the East and my soft knocking on her door receives no reply. She has her own room, apart from Kerilas and Lotan. Hethan clearly didn’t think any other arrangement was suitably respectable. So I go back down to the basement and my own pallet. Or rather ours, as Jalese and I have pushed ours together. The nights get cold here, down in that basement, and it’s just cosier. In the total darkness her body seems almost luminous. I think my body temperature might be lower than human normal, but I feel fine and I sleep so comfortably in her warm glow.

The following morning at breakfast she’s being ratty. I did try, but she just snapped a “Leave me alone,” at me, so I beat a retreat.

We’ve taken to having breakfast together — the five of us, with Jalese and myself nominally serving — in the inn’s rear courtyard while it’s quiet before the rest of the guests wake up. It’s a nice place to catch the early warmth of the sun. The old olive trees gnarl their branches above us.

We ought to get together at some point and count up how much money we’ve got, whether we can afford the harbour fees we’re racking up as well as the supplies we came in for in the first place. I think we’ll be okay. I’m getting lots of money through tips (via Hethan, as it turns out, but Jalese says he’s straight about these things. Otherwise word would get around and no-one would perform here.) I’m also getting my daily wage for the other work I’m doing at the inn, and it’s adding up nicely, all the while I’m paying practically nothing for my keep. So on day two of Market I get some time and wander down to the harbour itself to see if I can find some more clothes. Something that’ll be mine and not things some stranger just left behind.

I walk down the pontoons between marketeer vessels. It’s pleasantly cool under the awnings, and the movement of the pontoons on the water gives an immediate feeling of rightness. It had taken me two nights to shift the feeling that the ground was moving while I lay in bed. A few feet onto the pontoons and I feel more at ease already.

I’m naturally drawn first to the familyship I saw docking the day before. I reach up and run my hand along the smooth wooden hull as I walk. It feels almost like glass. Yes, there are recollections here. This isn’t home, but it’s very like the place I grew up. There are resonances here. Strange and alien to a part of me, but homely and familiar as well. They’ve done something I’ve never seen before, and actually lowered a wide portion of the side of the hull like a drawbridge to the jetty. There’s a kind of stepped ramp on the inside leading into the interior of the ship itself. I step in between the living ribs of the ship. The deck overhead has been opened out as well, so it’s still light and airy. I browse idly among the goods on sale, trying not to appear nosy, but there’s another Neri here. A young male sea elf, seeming almost ostentatiously androgynous and being studiedly unintrusive. I’m not the only shopper here, but I think he’s watching me.

Finally I go over to him. “Excuse me, do you have clothing for women?” Amazingly, given the circumstances and everything that’s happened to me, I feel just as shy and embarrassed at asking this now as I ever did in my previous life.

And just to fit in with my nerves, he gives me a funny look, then answers in a different language, “Go up on deck, Miss. Everything’s there.” His eyes are large, and a limpid grey-green, and there are no whites visible, which reminds me mine are the same.

“Thank you.”

~That must be Elvish,~ I realise suddenly, feeling his eyes on me as I go. It’s a more sibilant, musical language. Although it had no particular tune, it was almost as if the simple sentence was like the line of a song. I find the stairs and go up on deck. There are lengths of fabric in gorgeous, irridescent colours, some as light and as fine as a spider’s web, ranging to others that are as heavy and luxurious as velvet. There are complete, made garments as well. The fabrics are lovely, the workmanship even to my eyes is clearly superb, so much so that the borrowed dress I’m wearing feels almost like patched together rags. They don’t have prints, so if there’s a pattern, it’s embroidered in with exquisite attention to detail.

But — and it’s curious that I should feel guilty about this — while the fabrics are lovely, I’m not at all taken by the styles. This is clearly very upmarket, in the context of Jeodin. It isn’t only elves that wear these sorts of clothes, but it’s shouts an elvish aesthetic that I’m a little surprised to discover I don’t share. They’re too ‘flowy’, or something. I’m struggling to understand what about it isn’t working for me. They don’t seem familiar either. They’re not like the clothes in my occasional flashbacks. They’re too impractical. You couldn’t wear them while working or just moving around on board. Which suddenly brings a small epiphany. Of course, these clothes for sale are made for a land-based human idea of what elvish clothes should be like for formal wear.

I sigh and look around for something more practical. I spot a Neri couple up on the bridge of the ship. They seem engrossed in each other, so I edge a little closer in their direction. There’s something — very old about them, although at first sight they look like a young couple. Something about the extreme economy and intensity of movement and gesture seems to speak of ages. He strokes the line of her ear to the tip, and it’s the most erotic thing I’ve ever seen. I turn away, blushing, and look at more fabrics. I wonder about buying some and who I can find to make them into a more practical, fitting style.

“What is your name, child?” a voice asks from behind. I turn. It’s the woman who was up on the bridge. I hadn’t heard her approach at all. She’s tall…

“Um,” I stammer. “Taniel.” Up close she is beautiful, more beautiful than I could have imagined, with luminous serenity and grace. I look for any sign of age on her face and there is none but I feel like I’m face to face with antiquity.

She stands almost a head taller than me, and is clothed in a surprisingly simple tunic and leggings. My brain rebels at the prosaic clothing for a moment, wanting to insist ‘white samite, white samite’. A single toroidal stone of pale translucent pink rests at her throat upon a tiny silver chain. She has no other jewellery.

“Your Satthei?”

“I… I don’t know.” I feel like I’m six years old, standing in front of the headmistress at school, being asked questions I don’t even understand.

“You don’t know?” she asks, incredulous.

~Satthei,~ I remember. It means ship. It also means mother. They’re the same thing. I stare around me anew. The gnarling, woven branches of the gunwales are alive. The ribs like branches below. The true living ship, mostly hidden under the surface cladding. The riddle of my memory is answered. I lay in my mother’s arms. I lay in the branches of the ship, where they branch sinuously in the stern, near the bole. They are the same. They are Bound. A Satthei is the joined entity.

She’s asking me who my mother is.

“I don’t know,” I repeat. “I can’t remember. There was a fire.”

“Oh.” Her reaction is clearly honestly emotional. “Taniel…” She seems to be trying to remember. “Oh of course, dear little Tani. You were thought to be dead.”

I just stare at her.

“We have met before,” she says. “I am Satthey Fareis. Don’t you remember?”

I shake my head. “Are you–”

She shakes her own head. “We met briefly when you were very small. I’m not so surprised you don’t remember. But you should not have…” She trails off.

“You knew my parents,” I prod her.

She nods. “Satthei Encelion. Where have you been all this time?”

“I don’t know.”

Her face changes then, and becomes still, as she puts it together, presumably with more detail and context than I yet have. I was taken by slavers. That much was in my character’s introduction. I don’t have any recollection of what happened in that time. “No. No. Come inside, teya, we must talk.”

“I’m not sure–”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“I was just trying to buy some new clothes. I… I’ve got to go back to work soon.”

“Work? Where are you working? What is your situation?”

“I’m… I’m all right. I’m working at the inn over there.” I point across the harbour to where the inn is visible, the white exterior of the terrace shining in the noon sun.

“Hethan’s place?”

I nod.

“He’s honest, as far as I know. What do you do there?”

“I, er, I play box-harp and sing, and I help out with the cleaning and stuff.” I can feel the English idioms grating in Elvish, but it’s all new to me.

“How long?”

“Only three days. We stole a boat to escape. It’s there, see?” I point it out along the quayside, almost lost amongst the other masts. “We’re trying to earn enough money to get what we need and pay the harbour fees and then–”

“We?”

“My friends. We… We came here together.”

“Neri?”

“No.” I catch my breath. I’m easily gabbling away and if I’m not careful I’ll say too much. “Uh, three humans and another elf,” I say incompletely. “We escaped together. I can’t leave them,” I add, starting to feel that this woman is making plans for me. “I… I won’t leave them.” As she looks at me I feel like a recalcitrant child. “I just… I just wanted to buy some new clothes,” I finish lamely.

“Taniel, teya, don’t you realise? You were missing for more than twenty years. You were given up for dead. I can’t just leave you to go back to working in an inn–”

~Twenty years in captivity?~ I stare at her, utterly shocked.

“Oh you poor dear,” she says, and takes my hand, and in a moment she’s hugging me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. Just confused. “Oh you poor little thing.”

“I’m… I’m all right.” I pull myself free. ~Twenty years?~ My breath is coming short. Suddenly there’s no air on this deck.

I run. I can’t even rationalise it, but I run. I break away from her and clatter down the stairs to the middle deck and out onto the pontoon and all the way back to the inn without stopping. Jalese practically catches me inside the doorway and I just start crying helplessly. I’m barely aware that she gives Hethan a look before she brings me downstairs to our shared pallet, and there she just holds me while I cry.

After a couple of hours I pull myself together sufficiently to go back upstairs. It’s getting busy already. At this hour it’s mostly townspeople who have spent the afternoon shopping and are meeting at the inn to compare the spoils. There will be a couple more days of this before the — more serious to some — commercial side of Market becomes more prevalent. The down-to-earth trading of livestock and crops and textiles. But first, the local inhabitants’ pent-up thirst for the latest luxuries must be assuaged. From the amount of buying that’s going on it can be assumed that Port Denhall is prosperous in its own right. I really haven’t seen much of it, I realise. Apart from a few short excursions I’ve pretty much been kept busy in the inn.

I’m being kept busy now, which is good. Alternately helping out Jalese with the serving and settling down to play a few tunes is keeping the memory of my encounter aboard the familyship nicely at a distance.

“You know what’s weird?” Lotan is saying. He’s had a bit to drink. I’m on one of my breaks. “We’ve been here… How long have we been here now?”

I start counting back. Samila gets there first. “A week. No. Eight days I think.”

“This is the eighth,” Kerilas confirms, taking his seat. He’s late.

“Jesus. Anyway, right, so we — somehow — jumped into this bloody roleplaying game and we’ve been here eight days and we haven’t been in a single fight yet!”

“Speak for yourself,” Kerilas says, and slouches back tiredly.

“But don’t you think that’s odd? Go eight days in a campaign and not even a single hit on the wandering monster table? That’s bad DMing there, that is.”

“Shit, what happened to you?” Samila says suddenly, staring at Kerilas. I take a proper look. Kerilas had positioned himself in a shadow, so it wasn’t immediately obvious, but he has bruises on his face.

“Nothing. Forget about it.”

“Fuck that!” Lotan objects. “Who did that? I’ll fucking smash their–”

“No you won’t!” Kerilas insists. “I said, forget it.”

Where’ve you even been going during the days?“ Samila prods.

“No-where.”

“Well, perhaps you shouldn’t,” she says.

Kerilas just sighs.

I stare at him. I don’t know what to say.

“Look, we’re a group,” Samila tells him. “That means you don’t wander off and get into fights on your own. You’ll get yourself killed.”

“Never split the party,” Lotan adds.

“Oh fuck off,” Kerilas mutters.

“Where do you go in the day?” Samila demands again.

Kerilas bites his lip. “I got a job,” he admits.

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter. Nothing to do with this. This just happened on the way here. Tani, get us a drink, would you?”

“I can probably Heal you…”

He shakes his head. “It’s okay. Don’t waste it. Drink?”

I sigh. “Okay.”

“And are you playing any more tonight?”

“Yeah, in a bit. I’m just taking a break.”

He nods. “That’ll be nice.”

I stand up and go to the counter.

By the time I return Kerilas is talking. I wonder what he’s already said. “We’re not heroes. We play heroes in a game because that’s the closest we’re ever going to get. We create these grand narratives for our characters to distract us from our own shapeless little lives for a few hours because it’s better than going mindless in front of a television. In the real world we just get on as best as we can, don’t we? And this world…” he prods the table a couple of times. “This world is real. We have to accept that. We have to accept the reality we’re presented with. It’s the least insane choice we have. And that means it’s really just little us, getting on as best we can. We’re not heroes.”

I don’t know what I feel about this. I see a tear fall down Samila’s face though, before she angrily wipes it away with her hand.

“So what do we do?” Samila asks, her voice shaking a little. She’s just holding it in. “Settle down here? Get jobs, make friends, raise families, live out our lives here as ordinary people?”

“There are worse things we could do,” Kerilas says.“There are worse places we could find ourselves.” And Kerilas would have the hardest time of any of us making a place here. Jeodin is the most open, the most tolerant society on this world. Anywhere else he’d already be dead.

I still don’t say anything about what happened earlier. The things the Satthei said to me. She met me once when I was little. She wants — no, that’s not strong enough: She intends to take me with her, on the ship. I know she does.

I think I don’t want to be in Port Denhall very much longer. I’ve discovered, to my own surprise, that I enjoy working in the inn, and the place seems nice enough. But after meeting the Satthei I don’t know. I really, really don’t know what I ought to be feeling about that. I just feel that we should be gone. We should be out and free on the ocean as soon as we’re equipped.

I think I’m longing for the sea.

“What about Gyrefalcon?” I ask aloud. “We’re supposed to be trying to find him, aren’t we? Simon’s out there somewhere.”

“Oh…” Kerilas says, as if remembering. He sighs. “Do you think it’s really likely?”

“Why not?”

He sighs. “You’re thinking that our world has primacy,” he says. “You think, ‘Simon must be here, because we were all playing the game,’ right? So we must all be here.”

“Yeah…”

“Look at it this way instead: Taniel, Samila, Lotan, and Kerilas were all being held in that slaver camp. Ken actually said it in the intro: They were held for a long time in appallingly abusive conditions being trained for something… horrible.” He fixes us all with a look. “He didn’t go into any details, he didn’t need to, it was just a way to signal to us as players that it’s a place we really needed to get out of.”

“Oh God…” Samila says.

“I don’t think they got out. I think it destroyed them,” Kerilas says. “Kerilas, Samila, Lotan, Taniel, it destroyed them. It traumatised them and it broke them, whatever happened back there. And that’s when the game started, for us, and that’s when we were pulled in.”

“Oh God,” Samila says again. She sounds short of breath.

“And just maybe that’s when we were invented,” Kerilas finishes.

“No!” Lotan objects. “That’s stupid. I’m not going to believe that!”

“Anyway my point is–”

“How do we know each other then?” Lotan cries, breaking to his feet. “How do we remember all this stuff that hasn’t even been invented yet here? Electricity, the internet, airplanes, cars…” he flounders a little. “Football, for Christ’s sake. Christ, for Christ’s sake!” he adds in a moment of inspiration. “There’s a whole real world we came from–”

“And a whole real world we’re in now,” Kerilas says gently. “With box-harps and elf-ships and songs,” he looks at me briefly, “and stories and legends all their own, and… and bumwool. Sit down, Lotan. Please?”

Lotan sighs, but he takes his seat again.

“What about global warming?” Samila asks. “Who would invent that? Who in this world could invent that?”

“Maybe…” Kerilas sighs. He’s thought about this. “Maybe they thought, if we came from a world with no future, we wouldn’t want to go back. Too much.”

Lotan tuts irritably.

“It’s not that hopeless,” Samila protests quietly.

Kerilas just holds her gaze until she drops her eyes.

“My point is,” Kerilas tries again, “Gyrefalcon wasn’t there. He didn’t share in whatever our characters went through. Maybe Barak did, but he died. There’s no reason to think Simon would come through.”

“No, your point is, Simon isn’t even real. Neither’s Ken, neither’s anyone else we know back home!” Lotan protests angrily. “Our families… Anyone!”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Jesus, listen to yourself! I can’t…” Lotan gets to his feet again. “I can’t sit here and listen to this. You’re saying we’re imaginary too, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Imaginary friends, from an imaginary world, made up by these poor bastards,” he indicates us four, “as an escape from… from whatever it is that was happening to them on that island. And at least two of them were magic users and were there a long time. A really long time.”

Lotan stares at him in palpable disgust. “D’you really hate the world– our world that much?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, but pushes away through the bar and outside.

None of us follow him. I don’t know why I don’t; I can’t begin to speculate about the other two.

“It’s just a theory,” Kerilas says.

“I was there… I mean, Taniel was abducted over twenty years ago,” I say, repeating what Satthei Fareis told me.

“Kerilas was there longer than that.”

I look at Samila. Her character isn’t even supposed to be that old. She looks distraught, trying to hold back tears.

“I’d better check up on Lotan,” Kerilas says. “Make sure he doesn’t do something stupid.” He gives me a look, and a glance aside to Samila. I sigh and nod and he goes.

We sit in silence for a little while.

“He seems to think we should be talking about something,” Samila mutters.

“Heh. Yeah.”

Silence.

“Samila–” I begin.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Sorry, I–”

“Just Sam, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Sami at a pinch.” A weak attempt at Lee’s old grin.

She looks uncomfortable in her dress, as if she doesn’t quite know what to do with her legs. (‘Put them together for a start,’ I want to say.) The bodice is done up very tightly; I guess in an attempt to minimise bounce. I’m doing the same thing and I’m not half so well endowed.

“Someone around here needs to invent the brassiere,” I say, to try to lighten the mood.

Sam does manage a chuckle. “Fucking right.”

“I can’t remember, there’s some engineering principle behind it, isn’t there? Counterwei– No, that’s not it.”

“Cantilever,” Sam says. “Same as suspension bridges.”

“Oh yeah, right,” I say, thinking she’s joking.

“No, seriously. Yeah, chances are no-one’s invented it yet, ’xcept the elves, probably keeping it to themselves.”

“Elf Boobs Don’t Sag,” I pronounce. She laughs out loud at that.

“Probably right, too.”

“You seem to know a lot about bras,” I comment dryly.

“Only from the outside.” There’s that grin again. “Ain’t nothin’ you can teach me about taking someone else’s bra off with one hand.”

I have to laugh. It’s so Lee. “There you go then. Invent the bra, make a billion Crowns, and start building a network of suspension bridges between the islands, put all the Marketeers out of business.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It could work!” I protest, wilfully disregarding the engineering challenges and limitations of the available materials. After all, any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology, right?

We fall silent again.

She starts, “Of all the things I’ve loved and lost, I miss my dick the most.”

She’s trying to put a brave face on things, I suppose. Making everything into a joke so it doesn’t hurt so much. Just like Lee would.

“Personally I think they’re overrated,” I say. Even with the joke-prim voice it might just be the most daring thing I ever said.

“Speak for yerself, missus,” she bats back. “I’ll have you know I have a deep and very meaningful relationship with my little fella. I promise you, the reunion will be very… touching.” Grin.

“Ew!”

Silence.

“I keep crying for no reason,” she says. “Get started and I can’t stop. It’s driving me nuts.”

“Yeah, me too,” I say. I have to say something.

“You think it’s the hormones?”

I shrug. “I don’t think you’re crying for no reason,” I say. “I mean, I think you’ve got plenty of reasons to be crying. We all have. You shouldn’t be ashamed.”

“Oh, it’s not… that’s not what I mean. I just hate not being in control of myself, you know? I hate it. I feel like everything’s… I don’t know. It’s like I’m trying to walk on ice all the time, you know? There’s me,” she puts a hand up, “and there’s this stupid body,” the other hand, two feet away, “doing it’s own thing. Some… stupid little thing sets me off and… Look, I’m fucking doing it again.” There are tears starting from her eyes. “I hate this. I hate being out of control like this. All the fucking time.”

She tries to wipe away the tears with the heel of her hand. I don’t know what to do for a while. Then I think, I’m being stupid. It’s really very simple. So I try to put my arm around her shoulders.

“Leave me alone!” she snaps, and shakes me loose.

“Sam, listen, you’re not going to do this boys don’t cry bullshit, okay?”

She sniffles.

“It is bullshit. You know that, don’t you? You’ve got to let this out or–”

“I’m letting it out all the fucking time! That’s the point, you idiot!” Sam snaps. “I really think I’m going crazy here!” She sniffles again. “On top of everything else I don’t even know when I’m supposed to be due.”

“Due?” I ask, stupidly. Then I catch up. “Oh.”

“God, you can be dense sometimes, Paul. You telling me it never entered your mind?”

“I…” I don’t have an answer to that. It actually hadn’t entered my mind.

Sam shrugs. “Maybe it’s different for elves.”

I laugh unintentionally. There’s an idea for a filk in that, I suspect. “Check out the ears,” I say, still trying to lighten the mood. “For all I know I get Ponn Farr every seven years and if I don’t get laid I get PMT for a whole year.”

“Ow, yeah.” Sam grins. “Okay yeah, that would be bad.”

“I mean at least you’ve got some idea what’s coming. I… Let’s face it we’re talking about a nonhuman biology here. I have no idea what my body’s going to do next.”

“Heh.”

“What?”

“You said ‘my body.’”

“So? It’s just…” I shrug and look away to hide my blush. I’m aware of her looking at me for a while.

Then she sighs, dropping it. “Yeah, maybe this isn’t normal. Maybe this is PMT. Jenny used to say it was actually a relief when her period started.” Jenny was one of Lee’s former girlfriends. She’d even tried role-playing for a couple of sessions. I liked her, but I think she thought I was weird. “Oh God.” Sam laughs incongruously at something.

“What?”

“Picture. Arwen in Sainsbury’s buying a packet of tampons.”

I chuckle. “Oh God, what do people use here?”

“I have no idea,” Sam admits. “More fucking bumwool or something, I don’t know. I mean, who’m I supposed to ask?”

“Ask Jalese,” I say, glad I can say something useful at least. “She already knows we’re odd.”

“Yeah? How odd?”

“I told her we’ve got amnesia. Haven’t said, you know, we’re from another world or anything. She knows it’s not the whole story but she’s okay with it. She’ll understand if you ask.”

Sam shudders. “Oh God. I just… I’m fucking dreading it, you know?”

“Half the adult population goes through it every month, Sam. How bad can it be?”

She gives me another look like I’ve said something really stupid again. Maybe I did. At least Lee has had girlfriends. He’s actually going to know more about this sort of thing than me. Even if it’s just ‘from the outside’, like the bra thing.

“Whoah there, easy tiger!” I exclaim, dancing back out of the way of Lotan’s sword without dropping the covered dish I’m carrying.

“Whups-a-daisy, missed-ya,” Lotan replies, grinning and saluting with his sword. He’s not wearing his tunic, and is all shiny musculature. Probably impressive if you’re into that sort of thing.

“What’re you doing anyway?” I ask, still getting myself back together. For a big guy he’d turned so fast to the sound I made behind him. His sword seemed almost to dart through the air at me.

“Practicing.”

“Ri-ight.” I carry on with bringing the dish to the table. Kerilas and Sam are already sitting there.

“God, he’s such a wanker,” Sam mutters as I set the dish down. She doesn’t even look up, supporting her head with her hands at her temples.

“Headache?” I ask.

Sam nods, still not raising her head.

“He just likes playing with his weapon,” Kerilas observes dryly.

“I heard that!” Lotan’s voice reaches back towards the table.

“Well, you can stop now,” Kerilas calls back. “Breakfast is up. What is it?” he asks me.

I lift the lid. “Sautéed mackerel and sweet potato, sort of. Various herbs. Help yourselves.” I take my seat and start loading up a platter.

“Smells good anyway. Could almost be home,” he says, scooping up his share. “Not that we’ve really got the climate for al fresco breakfasts back home.” He grins at Sam, who’s mostly unresponsive.

“Not that I ever had mackerel for breakfast back home,” I add. “Sort of thing my grandparents used to do. Or kippers or something. I was never a seafood sort of person, you know?”

“Hey, you find out what this no-meat thing’s about yet?”

I shake my head and pop a piece of fish in my mouth. “Not yet. Jalese didn’t know; just says Neri don’t eat land animals. I ask why, she looks at me funny.” I shrug. “God, I could kill for a burger.”

“Mmm.”

“Or bacon.”

“Bacon burger!”

I shake my head. “Bacon sarnies and ketchup and sausages and a fried egg.”

“And black pudding.”

“Oh yeah!”

“That a little smile I see?” Kerilas verbally prods Sam.

She raises her head. There is a little smile, slightly pained. She says one word. “Pizza.”

“Pizza,” Kerilas and I repeat, like an invocation.

“You know, that’s got to be doable with local ingredients,” Kerilas begins.

“Pizza?” Lotan’s voice drifts over.

“Oi, you having any of this then?” Kerilas calls back. “I mean, if you don’t want your share–”

Lotan puts his sword back in its scabbard and trots over. “Oh, I thought you meant you’ve got pizza.”

“Ew, put something on your top, you smelly barbarian!” I admonish him.

He stops, thinks for a moment, then says “I’ll be back,” in a thick Austrian accent and trots back to where he’d left his tunic.

Kerilas is looking at me and smiling about something. “What?” I ask.

“Nothing.” Smug bastard. “Sami, you having anything?”

Sam shrugs. She’s been staring vacantly at the food. “I’m not really hungry.”

“Well you should be. And actually this is pretty good,” Kerilas reports.

Lotan returns, having pulled his clean tunic on over his sweaty body. Lovely. He takes a place on the other side of the table, thankfully, and starts pulling food onto his platter.

“I said I’m not hungry,” Sam says, her voice tight. Next to her, I notice her hand pressing against her abdomen.

“Did you get any sleep last night?” Kerilas asks her. She looks like she didn’t. “Sam–”

“Just leave it, all right?” Sam snaps. “I don’t need this.” She gets up, abruptly, starting towards the inn door. “You’re not my mother, don’t try to be.”

Kerilas sighs.

“Must be the time of month,” Lotan observes wryly around a mouthful of fish and potato.

The reaction from Samila is instant and extreme. She turns back and barges right at him and starts hitting him, aiming blows at his head.

“Hey!” Lotan objects. A couple of blows land before he starts blocking her. “Hey hey! Stop that!” He grabs her tiny wrists and shoves her away from him easily, and she lands hard on her back-side a few feet away. “What you do that for?”

“Just shut your mouth!” Samila screams back at him. “Shut your fucking mouth!” She’s crying through it. She scrambles to her feet and it looks like she might run at him again, fists balled ready to punch, but she backs away and runs back into the inn.

I look where she’s gone, not sure what to do.

“You see that? She bloody attacked– Ow!”

I look back at Lotan, to see him put a hand to his head.

“You’re an arsehole,” Kerilas says simply. “Why are you an arsehole?”

“God, I was only joking– Ow!” Kerilas jabs at Lotan’s head with a finger. The movement is so fast Lotan can’t catch it or dodge it.

“Why are you an arsehole?” Kerilas demands again. “Tani, will you please go and see if Sam’s okay?” he sounds irritable, as if he shouldn’t have to ask.

“Uh… Yeah,” I stammer, and head for the door almost at a run, to get away from the tension between the two men.

“Look, it was just– Ow!”

“Why are you an arsehole?”

I escape inside the inn and follow the sound of crying to the clothing store-room, but Jalese meets me suddenly at the door.

“I will deal with this,” she tells me.

“I–”

“It’s all right, Miss,” she says, reassuringly. I can see Samila crying in the corner behind me. Jalese smiles apologetically. “This is for humans,” she says. That hurts. It’s not as if I’m enthusiastic about dealing with Samila right now, but to be excluded like that, because I’m not human now. That hurts.

“Uh…” I start. Jalese starts to turn back into the room. “Wait,” I say. “She… You remember I said we’ve forgotten stuff?” I say quietly. “Like, I forgot how to play box-harp?” Jalese comes back and nods, looking at me. “She may not remember what to do,” I gabble out. “So she’s afraid, and ashamed about it.”

“Why would she be ashamed?” she asks, honestly puzzled.

How to begin? “She’s a Mainlander, isn’t she?” I point out, inventing furiously and hoping the facts as Jalese knows them won’t contradict me. “They’re taught to think it’s dirty.”

Jalese sighs and nods. “Okay.” Good guess.

I blink. “Okay? You said ‘okay?’” Despite everything that’s going on I notice that.

“That was right wasn’t it? I’ve heard you say that?”

“Uh, yes. That’s right.”

She smiles and backs into the room and closes the door in my face.

After clearing up the remains of the abandoned breakfast — Kerilas and Lotan have gone, presumably to whatever jobs they’re doing — I go out shopping again; or that’s what I tell myself. I’m not really in the mood to buy anything and I want to stay clear of the Neri ship, so I end up wandering along the quayside all the way to the harbour mouth to sit on the low, wide wall and look at the sea.

In fact, I’m distracted by the boys and girls playing on the rocky shore just beyond the harbour. I can’t see any adults keeping an eye on them. Naked and bronzed, the children clamber around the boulders and shale and rock pools with utter self-assurance, each absorbed in whatever fluidly-imagined game or scenario they’re playing at any given moment, or distracted by something found in a pool, or a pattern in a rock, or a new shell. One of the girls is a Neri, I think; from this distance distinguished only by her long cloud-grey hair, like my own, incongruous on a child’s form.

I think they must be mostly marketeer children, arrived with Market and taking the opportunity to run around where there’s space to do so, and to re-establish friendships usually separated by the water between the ships at sea and the longer, slower relationships with those left in port, that might only meet for a few days twice or three times a year. It’s all familiar to me, as if, years ago, Taniel must have been like that Neri girl running half-wild with the human children on a landfall. But I remember, the human children Taniel would have played with would be geriatrically old now, those that were still alive.

“Hey, Tani-baby!” Sam calls lazily across the bar when I step back into the cool of the inn’s interior. “You’re back.” She’s lounging on a comfy chair near the stove with something in her arms.

“Is it all right?” I ask, feeling catty. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to intrude on a human thing.”

“Aw c’mon, don’t be like that! That wasn’t my idea, was it?”

I sigh and cross over to where she’s sitting. “I s’pose. Not as if I was going to be any use anyway. Where did you get that?” I ask, seeing the small baby sleeping in her arms.

“Ah, funny you should ask that,” Sam extemporised. “Come on, sit down.”

I sit in one of the other chairs.

“It’s Beni’s little one. In’t she the sweetest thing?” Sam twisted fractionally so I could see the baby’s face. “She and Jalese just went off to talk to Hethan about stuff. I think Jalese’s looking to get her old job back permanently.”

“Can’t say I blame her,” I say.

“So muggins here got left holding the baby.”

“Well, what can I say?” I say. “You look very maternal.”

Sam sticks her tongue out at me. “I’ve always been a softie for babies,” she says, looking at the baby’s face. “Put me in a girlskin and drop someone’s baby in my lap and suddenly people say I look maternal. I’m not doing anything different. Go figure.”

“Ew, girlskin? That’s an image I didn’t need.”

“Bit Silence of the Lambs innit.” She flashes one of Lee’s grins at me. “I dunno, feels a bit like that sometimes. Like I’ve been sewn into this skin and now that’s all anyone’s ever going to see.”

I can only stare at her, for expressing in so few words what I’ve felt my whole life. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” I say quietly. Let her think I’m like her; feeling this only now. “So how are you feeling now?” I ask, feeling awkward about it but thinking I probably should. “You look better.”

“Mmm.”

“And you didn’t go to work!” I add, suddenly realising.

“No, well, Jalese basically threatened to get Hethan to tie me to my bed if I tried–”

“What?”

“And then she made this nice tea, see?” She points to an empty cup on the table next to her. “She said it would help me relax, which is a hell of an understatement. After the first cup I could hardly stand, and she just keeps it coming. I dunno what’s in it, but it does exactly what it says on the tin.” She smiles wryly. “They were both drinking it too. We were having a right laugh. Maybe it’s just recreational. Anyway apparently it’s normal for women to not do physical work while they’re, you know…”

“Oh, no, I didn’t know that.”

Sam shrugs, carefully so as to not disturb the baby. “Good for a skive, innit?” she says.

“So it’s started then,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Anyway, it’ll be an interesting experiment, won’t it?” she says brightly. “You know how women like to say ‘oh you men, you couldn’t handle it.’ I guess now we’ll know.”

“I thought that was childbirth,” I point out.

“So not gonna happen.”

“Well, you never know,” I say, possibly not helpfully.

“Look, if I get pregnant it’s ’cause I’ve been raped. And I’ll get rid of it first chance I get. Got that?”

“Um–”

“Got that?” Sam follows up insistantly.

“Okay, I got it.”

“I’m not into guys, okay? Not now, not ever.”

“Okay. I didn’t mean–”

Sam sighs. “Yeah, I know. I’m just…” She trails off.

“Yeah.”

So it turns out that now Beni’s had her baby, the father has persuaded her to go with him when Market ships out, and she’s decided to go, with her newborn baby. This is apparently a rational thing to do, which I can’t argue with, I suppose, having seen the marketeer kids playing earlier. He’s quite wealthy by shore standards, and he’s been pretty much plying her with gifts ever since Market got into port, which she’s been happy to recite to me. Sam indicates with a gesture she’s already heard all this. Gifts which, in the Jeodine fashion it seems, are largely of a practical nature and seem almost calculated to make it easy for her to say no: A house, for the Goddess’s sake! So she could move out of her parents’ place. Money, clothes, furniture, all imported from elsewhere in Jeodin.

“Why would he give you a house if he wants you to go away with him?” I ask. It doesn’t seem logical.

Beni just looks at me as if I’m the crazy one. Jalese has to explain. There’s no ‘seems’ about it. Apparently in Jeodin it’s extremely bad form to ask someone to live with you if the circumstances of the person being asked make it hard for them to refuse. In Jeodine logic, it seems, a ‘yes’ is meaningless unless it’s at least equally easy for the person to say ‘no,’ and it’s evolved into quite a courtly tradition, it seems, of ostentatiously wooing the prospective new family member.

I can go with that, and I say so.

“Well of course,” Beni points out. “It’s a Neri custom, isn’t it?” With that tone, as if wondering why I don’t already know that. “She said you’d forgotten everything,” Beni says sympathetically.

So it turns out this isn’t just for romantic couples, but any time one family offers to take in a member of another, for whatever reason. ‘Family’ itself seems to have a looser definition than I’m used to — either they don’t have marriage at all or they do, but its equivalent is pathologically applied to any kind of committed relationship, whether or not they’re blood-related or want to procreate or whatever. Older children often go to be fostered by another family for a few years, usually locally, in the same community, and for this to happen they are wooed in this fashion, and apparently given every incentive to say no, in the hope that they’ll say yes out of genuine enthusiasm. Naturally, good well-liked kids can expect lots of offers; and the others… It seems very strange to me, and I’m not sure I go with that.

Anyway, the upshot is that Hethan needs to take someone on permanently, and Jalese’s got first-refusal, and she’s considering taking it; and if she can settle long enough maybe a local family will make an offer.

I guess the luck is still playing out.

“You probably should take it,” I admit. “I don’t know what we’re doing. We’re just trying to make enough money to get supplies and pay the harbourmaster fees and move on, but I don’t know where. We haven’t got any big plans.” I still want to try to find Gyrefalcon, despite what Kerilas said. But I don’t say that. I don’t say either how I think I’m hungering to be at sea again, to be a speck tossed on its vastness, to feel the deck moving beneath my feet.

I’m halfway through only the third song of the evening when I realise Hethan is waving at me to stop. Everyone turns to look at him, but he just beckons, ‘come here.’

I feel a flutter in my stomach, that I’m in trouble for something and it must be pretty bad if he’s making me stop in the middle of a song. So I collect myself and give a look to Kerilas and Lotan at their usual table, and step off the stage to go and see what’s up.

Hethan practically pulls me into the back room. He seems excited rather than angry, though, saying I have a visitor. Jalese is there already, attending a tall Neri, standing in the centre of the room. I think he’s a he, but his appearance and dress is quite androgynous and he has that ethereal beauty I’m still trying to work on. Immediately I know this must be about my encounter with Fareis the previous day. I hadn’t told anyone about that, not even Jalese. I’m not sure why.

“Um, hello?” I say. I can hear how nervous my voice sounds.

“Mistress Taniel,” he begins. His voice is light and delicate. In fact, I think it’s unbroken, but I haven’t really spoken to a male Neri before, so for all I know their voices don’t break. “My name is Deidas, child of Satthei Fareis. My mother has asked me to bring you gifts and hopes you may consider favourably an offer to be joined and to sojourn with us.”

I stare at him. He’s at least a head taller than I am. So this is how it comes. She wants to take me into her ship, into her family. “I don’t want to,” I say. “My friends…”

“Indeed. I’m not here to try to persuade you myself,” he says, letting his speech become less formal. “The Satthei asks merely that you accept these gifts and that you would come to the ship tomorrow evening as a guest, that you and she may talk. She has asked me to convey her regret for causing you alarm yesterday.”

“I don’t think–”

“Tani,” Jalese interrupts me. “You mustn’t refuse the gifts. It’s a great honour.”

“Quite so,” Deidas confirms smoothly. “It is understood that through some calamity you have come to forget much about the ways of our people. Therefore, the first of the Satthei’s gifts to you are a selection of books.” He turns to the table in the corner, where I belatedly notice are arranged a number of items, and returns carrying two books. Examples, as I can see more still on the table, in an open box of a design I know will be waterproof when sealed. There are rich fabrics and made-clothes and jewellery and boots and boxes containing I’ve-no-idea-what. I can see a long recurved bow leaning against the wall next to the table, and next to a beautiful dress in deep turquoise. It’s evident that Deidas must have spent a significant time arranging the gifts before I was called in.

He shows the books to me; paper bound in a fine wood veneer cover, hinged, with strangely familiar names inlaid in the wood. “These give accounts of some of the history and stories of the Neri. Stories that still shape the way we live today.”

I take one. It’s surprisingly light, and closes with a clasp. I open it, and thick coarse-grained pages open before me. Pages with exquisitely calligraphed text and almost luminous hand-painted illustrations; lacking realistic perspective, like Medieval art, but rich in colour and detail and symbolism I can only guess at. It’s a book of stories for a child; and it’s a thing of almost transcendant beauty.

“And as well as all this stuff, she’s paid our harbourmaster fees, right to the end of the month,” I say, finding and waving the piece of paper from the harbourmaster’s office that confirms this. “The sloop’s been checked over by her shipwright, and completely reprovisioned, and made over into my name, registered here at Denhall as salvage.”

“We can leave whenever we want,” Kerilas interprets.

“Yeah!”

He and Sam and I are out in the courtyard the following morning, finishing breakfast. I can hear Lotan practicing again behind me, which he’s gone back to after eating his share. Swish-thuk. Swish-swish-swish-thuk.

I’m wearing one of my new outfits. The weather’s cooler today, and I chose a warm, grey overdress going to below my knees with slits in the wide skirt to show the bright Aegean blue silk underskirts. A matching undertunic, visible above the collar of the dress, and leggings, and my new boots. It feels very comfortable.

“And this is all no-obligation?” Kerilas asks, openly skeptical.

“Yeah, that’s how it works, isn’t it Sam? Remember what Beni was saying yesterday?”

“So are you going to go with her?” Sam asks.

“’Course not.”

“Why not?” Kerilas asks.

I stare at him. “What do you mean, why not? I’m… I mean, we’re a group, aren’t we?”

Swish-swish-thuk.

“I still think we should be looking for Gyrefalcon,” I say. “I didn’t think we were just going to be staying here. Sam?”

“I don’t know what I want to do any more,” Sam says.

“You’ve got to think long-term,” Kerilas tells me. “You need to learn how to be Neri, and she’s offering–”

I hear the door behind me being flung open, and Jalese’s voice: “Hey Tani, Hethan wants–”

Silence.

“Oh shit, no!” Lotan cries out.

“Oh fuck,” Sam breathes, and launches herself out of her chair. I turn in time to see Jalese crumple to the ground. Lotan’s sword is covered in blood.

“I didn’t mean–” Lotan is saying. Sam is already running to Jalese’s fallen body. I’m closer, and I scramble across, shoving Lotan aside roughly. Suddenly there’s blood everywhere, frothing from a deep puncture wound under Jalese’s left breast. “I didn’t mean to!”

Her eyes meet mine for a moment, then she passes out.

~I know what to do.~

I pull the little bag of charms off from around my neck and yank it open and grab the first thing my fingers find. Sam is by my side. She’s doing some First Aid stuff, tearing Jalese’s tunic open and jamming her hand practically into the wound. Good. Not enough. I remember how to start. In that other language. Not Elvish, I know now. Even older. “Ocean Mother, hear me–”

“It was an accident!” Lotan cries out, behind me.

“Shut the fuck up!” Sam yells at him.

Distracted I have to begin again. There’s an interestingly-shaped pebble, worn smooth, embedded in my hand, as if it had grown there all my life. My palm-print whorls across the featureless stone. “Ocean Mother, hear me. Jalese your… devout child is innocent of this harm. Let it be your will that this wound is undone. Let it be your will–” “Sam!”

Sam moves her hand aside from the wound long enough for me to put mine to it.

The stone is gone.

I can feel the pressure of her blood against my palm. I can feel her heartbeat becoming erratic. And a taint of something cold and burning.

“It’s not working!” Lotan complains, still behind me.

I withdraw my hand and Sam instantly replaces it. I pull another charm out. My hand is shaking. Covered in blood.

“No wait, her bleeding’s stopping!” Lotan says, his voice full of hope. The spurting from under Sam’s hand is slowing down.

“It’s ’cause she’s lost too much blood, you idiot,” Sam retorts bitterly. Blood is soaking into the wooden decking, into the soil, into my clothes and Sam’s. “Her heart–” She starts CPR. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump…

I lose count. “Ocean Mother, hear me,” I say quickly. Sam’s attempts are totally inadequate and she knows it. She’s just trying to keep the brain alive while I get it together with the Goddess. “Jalese is our friend. Jalese is my friend. I beseech you spare her from our own carelessness. She deserves to live. She deserves to live. She deserves to live.” “What I tell you three times is true,” I add in English while Sam is blowing into Jalese’s mouth. The charm is gone. I didn’t even notice what it was.

There’s no more blood coming.

“Wait–” Sam says, sitting up. I look at her, and down. Jalese’s eyes are open. “Just hang on,” Sam is telling her. “We’re fixing you.” She lifts her hand gingerly away from the wound.

There is no wound. I wipe the blood on the surface away and there’s just unbroken skin where the deep slot between her ribs had been. But her skin is horribly pale. Her face is pale and clammy.

“No, wait!” Sam calls out to Jalese again. She’s passed out again. “Wait! Stay with me! Tani, do it again!”

“I don’t know–” Something tells me, it’s not cumulative. It doesn’t work like that.

“DO IT!”

I tip all the remaining charms out onto my hand and clap my other hand over them. I press them together, more the image of a prayer from home.

Sam yells, “You’ve got to replace the lost blood! What sort of fucking stupid deity doesn’t realise that!”

I’m jabbering away, trying to find another form of words.

“Just fucking do it!” Sam yells.

I pull my hands apart and place them both down over Jalese’s chest. “Just fucking do it, you bitch,” I hiss, echoing Sam’s sentiment. My hands hurt more than I can believe. “Just fucking do it, you bitch,” I say again, and push again. I’m feeling dizzy, as if I’m going to be sick, and my breath won’t come. “Just fucking–” I have to force in a breath. “Do it.”

“Tani,” Sam says. Her voice has changed. All I can see is a curl of Jalese’s hair, fallen across her face, stirring slightly in the wind. There’s nothing else. I can still feel all the charms rooted in the flesh of both my hands.

“Just fucking–” The waste of it. The stupid random waste of it.

“Tani, stop,” Sam tries again.

“Do it. Do it. Do it.”

“She’s gone.”

And then, it’s a strange lightheaded feeling. I can feel myself fainting; my body losing the strength to even sit upright, and falling, and nothing.

The bed is moving properly. Comfortable. But I know what it means immediately: I’m on water. I’m on a ship. The movement is too stately, too damped, for a small boat. I’m in a bed that’s more of a cot, with lovingly carved railings.

And then the memory. All the blood, soaking in everywhere. It smelled hot and metallic. And a lock of Jalese’s hair moving in the tiny breeze. I feel sick and dizzy and fevered. And my hands. My hands are in agony. It builds and builds as I approach wakefulness, and all I want to do is retreat back to sleep.

“No, you must wake, child,” a voice says. A gentle, wise female voice I recognise. I open my eyes. Satthei Fareis, of course, seated decoratively on the window seat next to my cot. “Lie quietly, dear. You need your strength.”

“It hurts!”

“I know. Shh.” She helps me to sit up, piling pillows behind me. They’re made of pristine silk. “Oh my dear, what were you thinking?”

My hands hurt so much. They feel like they’re trying to explode, shot through with shards. My wrists are tied with ribbon to the sides of the cot. “Why are my hands tied?” I demand, but I can turn them over and see… The charms are still embedded, and my hands are swollen around them and through them, somehow. “Oh my God,” I can’t help saying, in English. I can see my blood pulsing through the translucent creamy face of a shell. “Oh god that’s…” I can’t even finish. I want to throw up, but my stomach is empty.

“You were trying to tear them out,” Fareis says. “Now you’re awake, if you promise to leave them alone I’ll untie you.”

I nod, and she unties the ribbons. My hands itch deeply, somewhere under the pain.

“We’re going to try to decouple the charms tomorrow,” Fareis says. “You have to be awake.”

“All right.”

“I’m afraid you must endure this a little longer, and try regardless to build up strength. It will be difficult.”

“How long–”

“Two nights.”

“Where is… Uh, everyone? I’m on your ship?”

“Of course. You’re in one of our guest cabins.” The windows are open and I can hear people’s voices and footsteps on the jetty. Market goes on. For some reason I’m relieved; I’d thought for a moment that we might be far out to sea.

“What about my friends?”

“Your friend Samila is here with us. I believe she’s on deck at the moment. The Reki has been captured. The harbourmaster is holding him in one of their cells ashore.”

~The Reki?~ Dark elf, of course. “Kerilas? But… it wasn’t him! He didn’t do it! Lotan did it!”

“Samila says the same thing, but the Reki talent for enchantment is considerable. You’re scratching,” she adds.

I look down. I’ve actually drawn a line of blood along my forearm, rubbing my palm down it. I can’t close my fingers or make a fist.

“He didn’t do it!” I insist. “He didn’t enchant anyone, I don’t think he’d even know how! What about Lotan?”

“Lotan is the young man with the sword?” I nod. “Yes, Samila mentioned him too. She says he ran away.”

“Well, he did it! It was an accident. Really, it was a total accident, but it was him. Kerilas wasn’t even there!”

“Shh, dear. You have to be calm.”

“You’re not listening to me!”

“Must I make you sleep before you do further damage to yourself?” she says, a harder tone to her voice. “The matter is in the hands of the harbourmaster. I have no part in shore justice. You’ve been brought here because no-one ashore is able to treat your injuries and they would only make things worse if they tried. Now, you must be calm. You made an astonishing effort to save your friend, not to mention a foolhardy one, I might add. It’s going to take time for you to heal.”

I’m too tired, and my hands hurt so much, so I just slump back and sigh irritably. I automatically try to clench my fingers, but I’m reminded not to do it painfully by a trapped nerve.

“Why didn’t it work?” I ask. I can hear the plaintive sound in my voice. “Why didn’t… Why wouldn’t the Goddess save her?”

“Ah.” It sounds like she’s heard this question many times before.

“What did I do wrong?”

“You did nothing wrong. At least, not before it was too late anyway.” She gestures at my hands. The last desperate, mad thing. “What you did was remarkable. What Samila did was remarkable. The way she described it, a nonmagical way to keep her alive longer for you to work. It was brilliant. I’ve kept her busy the last two days training all of us in what she did.” She means the CPR, I realise. “It was just too deep a wound, and too fast.” She touches her hand to my arm, but it makes my wrist muscles tense and that triggers a shooting pain all the way up my arm and into my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says, and withdraws her hand. “You must understand, dear; those we call gods and goddesses are beings with limits just as we are. You must not assume the Goddess chose not to save her. She did much at your asking. The wound was healed, but blood cannot be called from emptiness, even by the Goddess.”

I sigh. I don’t care about the tears. “At least you didn’t say she has a plan.”

Fareis looks at me, puzzled. “Why would I say that?”

I shake my head. I’m so tired.

“Go back to sleep,” Fareis says gently, as if she heard my thought. “I will tell Samila you have been awake.”

I just feel so empty.

“Would you like me to help you to sleep?”

I don’t think I can sleep on my own. The pain from my hands is too great. Who could fall asleep with their hands held in a fire? I just nod.

“Let me help you settle again then,” she says, and she assists as I carefully lie myself down again. “And,” she says, placing her fingertips on my forehead. She probably says more, but I never hear it.

Sam is there the next time I wake up. She’s sitting in the same window-seat Fareis was occupying the last time, reading a book. It looks like one of the ones I was given, with the inlaid wood veneer cover. She’s found some elvish-style tight work trousers or leggings and a medium-length tunic with a bodice, and looks quite smart.

It’s night, but the windows are still open. It’s warm and there are smells of cooking spices and oils and things in the air. The pain swells again as I rise to full wakefulness. I don’t think it’s any better at all.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hey you.” She looks tired and worried. But then Lee’s old grin flashes through. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hold your hand.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” She does put the book down and lean over me to untie the ribbons around my wrist again. “I assume you’re not getting a taste for elvish bondage?”

“You assume correctl– Ow fuck!”

“Sorry. Here, sit up.”

“Having said that, I’m not sure I’m getting any benefit out of being untied,” I mutter. “It’s not as if I can do anything with them. God, this sucks.” She helps with the pillows so I can sit up comfortably. It’s amazing just how much you do with your hands that you don’t even think about.

“I don’t know why they can’t put some kind of dressing on them,” Sam says. “At least, you know, so you’ve got some padding. They just say they have to have sea air.”

“Probably right.” I sit back against the pillows, having to breath a little heavily. “I just feel so drained.”

Sam resumes her place on the window seat. “I’m not surprised. Listen, I’ve been listening to them talking. They think it’s going to be a long time before you’re really well again. I mean, it could be weeks or months.”

I sigh. “She said something about decoupling tomorrow? I think that’s something to do with getting these out?”

Sam nods. “You’ve taken real damage though. And you’re going to take more when they do it. I think it’s going to be messy. No help from the Goddess.”

“Well, shit.” I close my eyes for a moment. I think it’s only a moment. “What’re you reading anyway?”

“Oh…” She picks up the book she’s been reading and shows me. “Fairy tales. Getting a culture upload.”

“Heh. Hey, you read Elvish?”

She raises her eyebrows, looking at me. “Apparently I do. Want me to read to you?”

“I think I can read.”

“Yeah, but you can’t turn pages, can you?” She smiles.

“Yeah,” I say after a pause. “I’d like that. Bit later though. I think I’m going to have to go to sleep again soon.”

Sam nods and puts the book down.

“Sam. Are you okay?”

“Not really.” Her voice is strained.

“Tell me.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it. You just need to get better.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

Sam still hesitates.

“Sami, I’m not sure I trust Satthei Fareis,” I say, doubly careful to be speaking in English.

“She seems to be doing everything she can to help,” Sam says.

“I know. It’s just a feeling. Tell me what’s going on, please?”

So she tells me, and it’s pretty much what Fareis said: Lotan ran away, the fucker, and hasn’t been seen since. Meanwhile everyone just assumes Kerilas did it because he’s a dark elf. He might be executed. And no-one’s listening to Sam saying Kerilas had nothing to do with it. Obviously she’s under an enchantment, they’re saying. “I think they mean, like, Stockholm Syndrome or something. By any other name.”

“This is so fucked up.”

“Yeah,” Sam agrees.

“They’re going to execute him!” It doesn’t seem real. It’s like a joke or something. “I can’t believe Lotan ran away. That’s just so… It’s so weak.”

“He panicked. I probably would too if I’d just done something like that. Jalese dead and you looked really… You stopped breathing for a while.”

“Shit.”

“Don’t call the Goddess a bitch again, huh?”

“You think she understands English?”

Sam sighs. “Look on the bright side; at least I haven’t got PMT any more.”

“Heh.” ~Oh.~ She meets my gaze for a few moments, almost expressionless. “You okay?”

She nods. “Don’t worry, I’ve done my comedy gross-out scene. Shame you missed it really, it was quite tasteless. Vomit may have been involved.”

“Sam, I’m sorry–”

“It’s okay. Everything’s under control. Actually I feel a lot better. A lot more…” She mimes a calm sea. It’s a Jeodine gesture. “In control. I mean, yeah, I’m getting cramps in places I’m not supposed to have places, but it’s not too bad, I guess. Dunno what all the fuss is about, really.”

Grin. She’s covering again. Making light of it, as she always does. And maybe that’s really the best way, especially when there’s so much to hold together right now. She’s the only one of us who’s intact and functioning at this moment.

“We buried Jalese day before yesterday,” Sam says, changing the subject. “Sea burial.”

It makes me cry a little. “I miss her.”

“Yeah, she was a good ’un.”

“We really fucked up, didn’t we? We’re just shit at this.”

We sit in silence. I want to grieve for Jalese properly but my head is full of how much my hands hurt.

Sam says suddenly, “You know, I keep waiting for a funny little old guy to turn up.” She turns suddenly to sit along the window seat, so she can look outside. I think she might be crying, but she wants to hide it. “He’d tell us where the bad guys are. He’d tell us what we have to do, set us off on some quest so we can… So we can go home.”

I don’t know what to say.

“I just feel like we’ve been abandoned. I mean, what’s the point? Why do this to us? Why bring us here and just dump us?”

“Anyway.” Sam clears her throat and levers herself off the window seat and edges around the cot. “Do you want to go for a walk or not?”

“What?”

“Fareis said if you feel up to it you should get up and get some air.”

I really feel too tired. “I haven’t got anything to wear,” I point out.

“Yeah you have.” She opens a cupboard recessed into the wall. I can see clothes; my clothes, that Fareis had sent me. “We brought all your stuff here. Did you actually get a chance to look through it last night?”

“Not really.”

She pulls one of the prettier dresses out and looks at it. The white one with the embroidery almost like shell markings, and a blush of pink in the wide skirt. “I hate to admit this but I think I’m envious.”

“You wear it then.”

“Wouldn’t work. Anyway yeah, there’s all sorts of practical stuff too, stuff like tunics and leggings and boots and underwear and stuff. Not the poncy stuff they sell to the local aristos, but c’mon, you gotta admit this is cute!” He waves the pretty dress at me again.

“It’s nice,” I say noncommittally.

“Oh g’wan!”

“Sam–”

“Oh y’will!”

In answer I just raise my useless hands a little.

“It’s okay, I’ll help you. Fareis did say you need to get exercise when you can.”

Still I hesitate.

“Look, I’ve been looking after you most of the last two days. There’s no point being shy now.”

“Oh that’s… good to know,” I say sarcastically.

She just grins at me. “’Sides, you’re in Jeodin. Get used to it.”

I sigh. “Okay, yeah, maybe it’s a good idea. Hey, did you say ‘underwear’?” I ask hopefully.

“For Jeodine values of.” She grins. “Undertunics, underskirts, that sort of thing,” she uses the Jeodin words for the garments, injected into the English sentence. “And one or two things that look a bit like petticoats, I suppose. I — Actually I think that goes with the dress. I saw some girl on deck wearing a combo like that earlier.” She looks at me, failing to entirely repress another grin. “’Course, it might have been a boy. Can never be quite sure with elves, can you?”

She gets a raspberry blown at her for that.

Sam’s right, of course. It was hard work, but I do feel better now I’m up on deck. And if I do say it myself this dress is rather gorgeous. Pity my hands look like barnacled reefs right now and I can’t touch anything. But the sea air is helping, I think. They’re throbbing less anyway.

It’s a warm evening, and the deck is lit by coloured paper lanterns. In fact, all of the ships and boats in the harbour are similarly decorated. The mizzen deck has been cleared of stalls and is laid out with food and a space for dancing. There are elves and humans together down there, mixing freely. Sam and I are, for the moment, alone on the bridge. I don’t think old sailing ships back home had a direct access from belowdecks to the bridge, but this one does, in a small stairway leading up from the cabin where I’d been put. But then, there are many ways in which a Neri familyship would differ from any sailing ship back home. It is, after all, a family ship.

Trading is over for the day; this is the time for meeting friends, eating out, listening to music. I haven’t seen Market like this before now; I’d always been in the inn playing on the box-harp for the inn’s customers.

Which reminds me: “Where’s my box-harp?” I ask Sam.

“It’s here. It’s downstairs packed away.”

“All right.” It’s not as if I’m in any condition to play right now.

I take the time to look across the harbour, at all the other lanterned ships, and the lights along the quayside. I can see the inn, and I wonder what Hethan’s doing having lost both Jalese and myself in that manner. Not to mention having to deal with what happened on his premises.

“Are you all right?” Sam asks.

“Just a bit cold,” I admit.

Sam does something then that completely surprises me. Standing behind me, she runs her hands through under my arms and around my waist and clasps them together at my tummy. And I lean back, accepting the embrace, which also completely surprises me.

“Is that better?” she asks.

“Yes.” I don’t mention that I think the warming effect may be more down to blush response than actual thermal exchange. In any case, she does feel warm, that close to me.

Impulsively I turn around, in Sam’s embrace. Carefully I put my hands behind my back, resting their backs against the folds of the dress’s skirt over my bottom.

She really is beautiful, I think, with that suggestion of luminosity humans seem to have after dark, through these eyes. She has those beautiful large dark brown eyes, and lovely long black hair, currently tied back in a simple ponytail.

I move forwards to kiss her. But she moves back and disengages her arms, stepping back out of reach.

“I don’t think that would be appropriate,” she says.

“I’m sorry.” Now I feel wretched and rejected, like the only other time I ever tried to kiss a girl. “I was being stupid.” I turn away again, finding something across the harbour to look at. Some of my hair falls across my face. I try to shake it back. “Do you still see Paul when you look at me?”

She comes up close beside me. “No,” she says. And her hand moves the stray hairs away from my face and gently behind my ear and I feel like I’m going to melt into a puddle on the deck. “That’s not it at all.” I look at her face again. She’s watching me intently. “I just would never take advantage,” she says. Then she leans forward and kisses my forehead.

I’m blushing; because implied in that she’s saying I am attractive, and that’s something I’ve never been. At least, not in any way I could believe it, or want it.

She straightens and resumes her intent gaze. “You know it’s funny. Since we’ve been here I’ve watched you becoming more and more you every day. It’s like you’re finally coming into focus. Does that make sense?”

I can’t answer that.

“How long have you wanted to be a girl, Paul?”

My breath stops. I want to run away. I want to hide. I’m afraid, suddenly.

But I stay. I keep her gaze and I whisper, “All my life.”

She nods. “Thought so.” And that’s it. As simple as that. I have to breathe again, hard. I’m feeling dizzy and delirious. I’ve told someone. I’ve finally told someone.

“You understand, I never did,” she says. “Not once. I can’t — be like this the rest of my life, Tani. It’s not going to work.”

“I know.”

“I guess you do.” She smiles, letting it go for now. “Maybe we should join the party,” she says.

“Taniel, child. I’m glad to see you up. How are you feeling?” Satthei Fareis is all warm solicitousness. “Now, if you feel tired or overwrought you mustn’t hesitate to say, and we can have you back in your bed straight away. No-one will think it rude of you.”

“Thank you, Satthei,” I reply.

“You’re looking so pretty tonight. I knew this dress would suit you. It was my daughter’s.”

“Thank you,” I say again. “You’ve been very kind.” Somehow I feel that a curtsey is called for, so I dip into one. She watches with a curious expression.

“How charming,” she says. “Where did you ever learn that, I wonder?”

~Imitating my cousins, when I was little,~ I don’t say. That’s from my — Paul’s — childhood memory. There’s no echoing familiarity in the action from Taniel’s memories. The curtsey as a gesture must be unknown here, although Fareis seemed to recognise it.

There’s hardly time for me to invent an answer before she’s whisking me around the deck introducing me to everyone; the ship-family and their guests for the evening, both Neri and human. I keep my own hands safely behind my back and allow her hand behind my shoulder guide me from encounter to encounter. Unfamiliar names mingle; I catch enough to understand this is the nobility of Port Denhall. I am something of a minor celebrity, it turns out. A few people I recognise from the audience when I was playing at the inn. Most are completely unfamiliar to me, but they know me by reputation now, for what I did trying to save Jalese. I’m starting to feel a little like an exhibit.

“Where’s Sam?” I wonder aloud, suddenly missing her.

“I’m here.”

I turn quickly. She’s been right behind me all along. Fareis hasn’t been introducing her when she’s been introducing me.

“Come along, dear,” Fareis says. “There’s someone here you might actually want to meet.” The humoured look in her eyes tells me she knows my feelings about the rest of the introductions. She guides me to the last group. There’s one man I recognise: A human, the harbourmaster. “Taniel dear, this is Harbourmaster Merresan.”

And the harbourmaster is essentially chief of police around here too, I remember. “Good evening, sir,” I say.

“Mistress Taniel, daughter of Encelion,” he replies formally. “I’m so glad to see you recovering from your recent ordeal.”

“I’m grateful to Satthei Fareis,” I say. I wonder if there’s a better way to broach the subject on my mind other than to just come out and say it. “Jalese was a very dear friend, even though I only knew her for a few days.”

“From what I understand, you did everything possible and more to save her.”

“So did Sam,” I say, pointedly moving aside slightly to reveal her. I don’t like how everyone seems to be ignoring her — not pointedly, just extending basic courtesies as one does when one isn’t really interested. “I’ve been told you’re holding one of my other friends for her death?”

“That’s correct. The Reki–”

“His name is Kerilas,” I point out. “Why are you holding him? He didn’t do it.” I catch him glancing past my shoulder at where I know Fareis is standing. “Excuse me,” I object, and turn to take in Fareis as well. “If you think I’m being enchanted to remember it wrongly, isn’t there some test you could perform to check that? Because at the moment it just looks to me like you’ve decided he’s guilty because he’s Reki and you can’t be bothered to look beyond that.”

“Taniel, dear, I think you’re tired. Maybe you would like to retire for the–”

“No! You’re talking about killing one of my friends for something he didn’t do!”

“Weren’t you told?” the harbourmaster asks. “He surrendered hmself yesterday. He confessed.”

I stare at him, astonished. I glance at Sam and she nods. “But… But that doesn’t make sense. Why would he do that? Unless… He must have been tortured–”

“How dare you!”

“Taniel, that’s enough,” Fareis cuts in. literally pulling me away. “If you can’t show basic manners–”

“But he didn’t do it!” I protest. She’s propelling me away from the harbourmaster’s group. I’ve made her angry. I can hardly resist; my hands might as well be bound for all the use they are right now. “I’m not your daughter!” Tears are coming to my eyes; my face is hot with humiliation.

She stops and turns me around and puts her face close to mine. “No, you’re not. I would not tolerate such behaviour from a child of mine.” She pulls me through a door into an atrium space, and through there into the room with my cot, where she releases me. Then she turns to Sam, who has followed us both in, and says to her quietly, but not too quietly for me to hear, “Keep her under control or I will, is that understood?”

“Yes, Satthei,” Sam says meekly.

“I will tell Harbourmaster Merresan you are not yourself,” Fareis says to me, and leaves, pulling the door closed behind her.

~Well, no shit,~ I think sourly to myself.

“Well, that was good,” Sam says.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I did, just not today. I managed not to trip over one of their big taboo subjects though. You don’t go around saying stuff like that, Tani. You might as well have accused him of buggering his own kids.”

“Yeah, well, just because they won’t talk about it doesn’t mean they don’t do it.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Why else would he confess to something like that? We can’t just let them kill him, Sam!”

“What do you suggest we do? You’re crippled, I never was much use with weapons even in the game. I looked at where they’re keeping him. We’re not going to pull off a jailbreak here. Not the two of us. And even if we could, where would we go? Our boat’s bound in port and even if it wasn’t it’s seriously blocked in by Marketeers. We can’t get off the island.”

It’s as if I can feel myself deflating. I sit on the window seat by my cot. “We’d do it if it was the game,” I point out.

“Well, it’s not, is it?” She sighs. “Even if it was? In this situation? Yeah, we’d try it, and we’d be rolling up new characters next session. Kobayashi Maru. Ken wouldn’t’ve let it come to this unless James wanted to pull out.”

“Dave’s character wouldn’t have run away like that,” I point out. “He builds combat monsters. They’re bloody annoying but they don’t fucking run away.”

“God knows what he’s going through,” Sam says. “You know it was an accident, don’t you?”

“Yes. That’s no excuse. You don’t just run away. I swear, if they execute Keri I’ll fucking kill him myself.”

“Don’t swear to it,” Sam warns.

“Well, he’s not my favourite person right now, okay?”

“Yeah, and this is a world with real magic and real gods that walk the Earth. Just be careful what you swear to. Something out there might just decide to hold you to it.”

“Fuck it!”

“You’re not going to help Kerilas by going round acting like a jerk!” Sam tells me. “I know, you’re feeling helpless and frustrated right now.”

“Oh, you noticed.”

“Listen. I’ve been thinking, now you’re up and about, you’ll be okay here. Why don’t I go and look for him?”

“Who?”

“Lotan, of course.”

“And do what? Persuade him to come back and face certain death?”

“He’s human. They’re more likely to be lenient; believe it was an accident. I think I should at least try to talk to him, don’t you?”

“They’ll just say he’s enchanted too.” I stare at her. “I don’t know.” I take a breath. “I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

“Fareis. If you go I think she’ll set sail and take me away. I’m not in any position to stop her, am I?”

I don’t say what scares me even more: Some stranger helping me eat and dress and go to the loo and wash. This is horrible, being dependent like this.

I read once about some girl with no arms learning to do everything with her feet. I wonder how long that takes. At least, I’m told, my disability is only temporary.

Well, it has to be temporary. I couldn’t bear this pain for long.

Sam looked thoughtful for a few moments. “Well, she won’t sail before Market ships out anyway. Look, if she wanted to shut me out, she’d have done it already, don’t you think? Even with the ship in harbour if they don’t want me on board I ain’t coming aboard, am I?”

I sigh, resigned. “How many more days are there? I’ve lost track.”

“Three more nights, after tonight. I’ll be back before then whatever happens.”

“Unless he runs you through, that is. You know how he likes to wave his weapon around,” I say spitefully.

“Don’t be stupid, Tani.”

“What makes you think you’ll find him?”

“I’ll find him if he wants to be found. I doubt he’s gone far. I reckon he’s out there trying to figure out how he can fix this. And you know Dave. He’s just not that smart.”

“He can’t fix it. Jalese’s dead.” It hurts to remember. “You can’t just fix that.”

Sam sighs. “I know. Look, all you have to do is stay here, let them heal you, and behave yourself. No more calling the harbourmaster a pervert, for a start.”

“You’d already decided to do this when I woke up.” I’m tempted to say how scared I am of having a stranger looking after me, to guilt Sam into staying.

“Dave’s our friend too. I can’t just not try. If he comes forward he could save Kerilas and probably get off himself.”

“I don’t want him to get off!” I scream, surprising myself.

Sam sits tiredly. “Tani, it was an accident.”

“And she was just an NPC, right?”

“I’m not saying that!”

“You’re thinking it.”

“Oh fuck off.” Sam stands again and walks to the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I can’t talk to you like this.” She opens the door, and hesitates on the way out. She looks back at me. “It was an accident. He’s not getting off scot free, not if I have anything to do with it. But he doesn’t deserve to die. Neither does Kerilas.”

“Don’t leave me alone,” I beg. Now the rage has gone, I feel shivery and desolated and afraid.

“You’re safe here ’til I get back.”

I can feel my eyes stinging, about to cry. I couldn’t bear that now. I squeeze my eyes shut to stop it.

I hear the door close, and Sam’s footsteps receding outside.

“Why do I have to be awake?” I ask. I can just tell this is going to really hurt.

“You must be awake to reject the charms from your body,” the healer says. He is a male Neri shaman, distinguished primarily to my eyes by his simple white robe. Such garb looks almost as out of place here as it would back home. His age is impossible to guess at. He has that look about him shared by Fareis of enormous age, but he has the face of a beautiful young man. “You will have chosen them and bonded with them out of love for the Goddess. You must be awake to renounce them.” He looks at me sympathetically. “You must hate them.”

“That’s not going to be a problem,” I say lightly.

He and Fareis stare at me as if I’d just said something bizarre.

“They are bound to your flesh with your love for the Goddess,” Fareis reminds me. “It will be difficult to do this without hate for the Goddess.”

“You may become apostate,” the shaman adds.

How do I say to them that a fortnight ago the Goddess was, to me, a fictional abstract; some minor detail in my character’s backstory to allow her access to a list of cleric spells up to a certain level? How do I explain to them that I come from a culture where belief in a single, omnipotent God is the norm, even though I don’t share that belief? The pantheon of limited beings of this culture are, I understand, literally real; but while that makes them powerful beings to respect or fear, questions of faith and love just don’t arise. How can I tell them what I think of a Goddess who answers offerings and prayers made by blunderingly, faithlessly, following the motions?

I say nothing.

“Charm magic is often favoured by the young,” the shaman says. “It is faster, more accessible, but it can be dangerous, as you’ve seen.”

“Like the dark side,” I say.

“Dark side?” He looks at me puzzled. Immediately I know I said something nonsensical. Of course it would not be possible to work magic that would be contrary to the will of the Goddess, and she is considered generally benign.

“Nothing. Never mind,” I say. “I think we can safely say I’ve grown out of charm magic.” In fact, I’m thinking, if I don’t have to cast another spell ever, it’ll be too soon. It all seems so mechanical in the game. You can role-play around that to spice it up in a session, but ultimately it’s machinistic and useful.

I look at my hands, with the mess of charms embedded and growing agonizingly into my swollen palms and fingers. This is just weird shit. Even the luck spell that seemed to work; it was just too weird. The luck that followed needed to have been set up months, even years in the past. I suddenly think; it could just as easily have put Jalese in that slaver ship hold for us to find, so she could take me right back to the inn where she once worked, where Taniel’s old box-harp was resting behind the bar, where the innkeeper just happened to have a vacancy for Market because someone who normally worked there just happened to have just given birth…

My luck was paid for with Jalese’s life.

I am never doing magic again.

“Shall we get on with it then?” I ask.

“Shitty death that HURTS!” I can hear myself screaming in English. Then the sounds I’m making don’t belong to any language; I’m just screaming and crying at once. It hurts so much I don’t notice for several seconds that the shaman has stopped twisting six inch spikes into my right hand. That’s what it felt like anyway, or what I imagine it would feel like. My whole arm is wrenched by spasms.

I’m reclining in a low chair in what looks like a treatment room. Already the long white tunic that’s all I’m wearing is soaking with sweat and he’s barely started.

“Teya, you must help,” Fareis reminds me, again. She’s sitting so that my head rests in her lap. I can feel my hair wet with sweat probably staining her tunic.

“’Fraid I’m prob’ly scaring off customers,” I say, breathlessly.

“I don’t understand, love. What did you say?”

I realise I was still speaking English. “I’m sorry. I said I must be scaring away people who want to buy things.” My voice shakes.

“It’s no matter. Now, you must remember to concentrate on rejecting the charm as the shaman works.”

“I was! I was trying to but it hurts so much!” Everything disappears but the pain.

“I know.”

I take some deep breaths. “You did this once.”

“A very long time ago.” She shows me her young-looking, unblemished hand. “The flesh regenerates, but you’ll remember the pain for a very long time.”

“Regenerates. Of course it does.” I should have figured that out.

“And I had only coupled one charm,” Fareis continues. “I know of no-one who has ever done what you have done.”

“No one else was ever this stupid. Wouldn’t it be easier to just chop my hands off?” I ask, feeling shivery and mad. Anything would be better than what I’d just been through. “They’ll grow back, right?”

“Yes, eventually. And there is a lot of pain along that way as well.” She sounds like she’s speaking from experience; but then she always does. “Would you be an invalid so long, given the choice?”

It says something for the pain that it’s actually tempting.

“This way is the quickest to a full recovery,” the shaman says. “We may yet have to amputate if you can’t reject them.”

“All right. I’ll try again.”

“Your pain comes from your attachment to these charms,” the shaman says. “You must reject them utterly. It will be less painful.”

“I am!”

“Shh, teya” Fareis says, stroking the sweat-stained hair back from my brow. “I know this will be difficult, but you must recall a time when someone treated you cruelly.”

I can’t think of anything. I suppose I haven’t had that bad a life, when I hear about the sort of things that happen to other people.

“What about the slavers?” Fareis asks. “When you think about what they did to you, what do you feel? What do you want to do to them?”

I feel nothing about that. “I… I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything about that.”

“Nothing? For twenty two years you remember nothing?”

I look up at her inverted face, her wondering eyes. “No, Satthei. Nothing,” I say, breathless with pain, still. “I remember as far back as being on the boat with my friends. We escaped from them together. I don’t remember anything before that. Just a few memories from when I was a child.”

She looks up, over me, and I follow where she looks, to see her exchanging a glance with the shaman.

“I have seen this sometimes,” the shaman says to her. “I have seen this in humans, when they have been seriously mishandled. Many children that were recovered from the Reki had no memory of their treatment. The Reki that were questioned swore to their deaths they had not used spells of forgetting. I believe it. It would have been counter to the aims of their project.”

“You were there?”

“I was a novice, apprenticed on a rescue ship. We did what we could. Some of them never regained their memories or their former selves. Those that did persuaded me that forgetting may have been a mercy.”

Fareis sighs. “They can’t be thinking they can start that again here.”

“A research outpost?” the shaman speculates. “It’s possible the slavers weren’t even aware.”

“But if they’re taking Neri children now?” Fareis is talking quietly, but she is angry. “There isn’t a mark on her,” Fareis insists, as if I’m not even present. I suppose she had every opportunity to check while I was unconscious.

“Except she’s been induced,” the shaman points out.

Fareis nods sadly. “We can slow her down, almost stop her as long as she stays with us, but–”

“Induced?” I ask, trying not to sound like I’m panicking. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“Shh, teya. Don’t worry about that now. We will talk about these things another day,” she says, taking both myself and the shaman in with a look “Tani, dear, you must–”

“What do you mean induced?” I demand again, trying to sit up. Fareis gives up and helps me to sit upright.

“How can she not know?” the shaman asks me.

“She said she’s forgotten much,” Fareis tells him.

“Even how her body–?”

“Hello!” I call. “She’s right here!”

Fareis looks like she’s thinking. She comes to a decision and moves around to my side. “Tani, child; your body is maturing too early. You should not have had your puberty induced at so young an age.” I stare at her eyes, hardly comprehending what she’s saying. “I cannot believe your Satthei would have done this. But the Reki–”

“I’m a child?” I ask. It comes out as a whisper. She’s been calling me that all along. I thought it was just a figure of speech. “You’re saying I’m a child?”

“Oh my dear, yes of course you are.” She strokes my hair gently, and I let her. It’s so hard not to; she’s so beautiful and gentle and kind. I inhale as her wrist comes close to my nose. She smells of home. “Of course you are. I’m so sorry. What that Reki did is… unpardonable,” she says.

~She means Kerilas,~ I realise, and I understand what she’s accusing him of. The thought hits me in my stomach. I feel dizzy. “He didn’t do anything!” I protest. My voice sounds so far away I have to shout. “You’re lying! He didn’t do anything to me! He was a captive too!”

“Are you sure?” she asks me sorrowfully. I just glare back at her. I won’t believe it. “Now, turn what you’re feeling onto the charms. Quickly.”

She’s obviously misinterpreting my look. I stare at her, appalled. “You’re… You are lying! You’re just saying that because you want me to hate him! I won’t! I won’t!” My voice wavers.

“Satthei, stop” the shaman says. “The enchantment is too strong.”

“There’s no enchantment!” I yell at him, crying.

“Shh, Tani,” Fareis says, stroking my hair again. Her smell is so soothing. But her voice is sad. “All right. Lie down and rest, my dear.”

~I won that one,~ I think, lying back and feeling a little triumphant.

“We may have to amputate, then,” the shaman says to Fareis. “We can’t leave them in for the time it’ll take to dispel the enchantment.”

“It’s always horrible when I have to try awaken hate in someone so young,” Fareis answers him. “Perhaps it would be better. She has enough heart wounds to heal as it is.” She strokes my hair as she talks.

I feel bad now. They’re trying to help me, after all, and asking for nothing in return. And if they amputate I’ll be crippled for months… Maybe years, how long does a Neri hand take to grow back anyway? And there is something. Something that I’ve kept and not allowed myself to think about for a long time. I know I can hate. “Wait,” I say. “I’ll try one more time.”

“It’s all right, child. No more pain. Sleep now.” And I remember, she can put me to sleep with a gesture. “When you wake–”

“No!” I cry out. “I’ll try again. Wait!”

I turn my attention from the two of them and stare at one of the charms on my right hand; the shell that the shaman had been trying to remove earlier. It’s on the second joint of my index finger.

Tim Manor.

It wasn’t that he actually beat me up, that often. Although, thinking that, I flash to the time he shoved me up so hard against the wall of the school changing room that the back of my head smacked hard against the bricks. I remember they were painted yellow; it must have been a long time ago, because the paint was chipped and dull and the bricks looked like old teeth. He was so strong, it didn’t seem possible to resist him, but I tried, once. He had been needling me and needling me for about a week until finally I tried to hit him. I threw a punch at his head. He just grabbed the front of my shirt and held me at arm’s length while everyone in the class laughed. Then the teacher arrived, asked what happened, and I got sent to the headmaster’s office for starting a fight. Three day suspension.

He was smart like that. I wish I could say he was just a stupid jerk, but he wasn’t. He was intelligent, he knew how to manipulate people, and he wanted to hurt me, and he knew better than to trust only to physical assaults to do it. He just had to say things, the most ridiculous things, and everyone seemed to want to believe him. The whole school believed I was gay, because he said it. For a while I even pretended to have a girlfriend. People would ask me about her. I think they were testing me. I’d have to make up so much detail about her, but that was easy. I just had to make her the person I wanted to be. But now I think back I’m not so sure people were as fooled as I thought they were at the time.

Oh I’d forgotten this. I’d forgotten how he’d manipulated me and my best friend into fighting each other. How had it come to that? I still can’t remember what was said, what was done, to push me to the point of grabbing a metre long branch and trying to smash it into my best friend’s face.

And the fantasies I had. In my impotent rage I would daydream how I would destroy Tim Manor. Gifting myself powers in my imagination to flay the skin from his body with a glance. More prosaically, just imagining myself with a big stick, hitting him, and hitting him, and hitting him, until his head was a pulpy mass. I would picture it in exquisite detail.

I thought I’d left this behind; so much so I hadn’t even remembered it until now. I wanted to let it go. I wanted to forget it, to not let myself be driven by this. And I did it. I let it go, I thought. But it’s all welling back so strongly I’m crying the way I did then, when I knew no-one could see me.

So let him be bound in a shell, in a pebble, in a piece of dried bladderwrack. Let him be bound in that tooth, in the tiny abstract-seeming carving made from driftwood, in that ivory seahorse– I scream as the shaman touches it, and I accidentally try to clench my other hand, but I focus, I push a piece of Tim Manor into the carving.

And it’s free. The shaman almost seems to slide it out of my flesh as if pulling a key from a lock. It doesn’t even hurt. Blood pushes out through the wound left behind. The shaman drops the ivory carving into a lead jar.

“Very good, Taniel! That’s so good!” Fareis exclaims.

“Quickly, another,” I pant, and focus on the driftwood. In my peripheral vision I see the shaman, sensing where my attention is. I think I can co-ordinate this, and I feel myself pushing another piece of Tim Manor into the wooden shape in time with when the shaman touches it. “Got you now, you fucking bastard,” I say in English. It comes out harder, soaked in my blood, splintering in my flesh, but it comes out. The blood from my hand is dripping onto my thigh. “Another. I don’t know how long I can do this!”

The shaman starts to reach his fingers for the bladderwrack.

“No! Shell!” I shout. That’s what I’m focusing on. I can feel its chambers intersecting my blood vessels. “This is really going to hurt,” I say through my clenched teeth. I’m feeling dizzy and sick.

“Yes,” the shaman agrees.

I remember how I wanted to make his head explode. I remember how I’d focus so hard on the back of his head I got a migraine. The shell. Let the shell be that worthless fucking scrote’s skull and I’ll make it explode now! “Oh fucking Christ Almighty!” I scream from the pain, but I keep glaring at it, as if forcing the scream into laser beams from my eyes. I’ll blow it into so many pieces they’ll be finding them in the woodwork for decades. But even now, even now in this place with all this magic, I can’t make so much as a tiny seashell explode with the power of my mind. But it does come free, hanging with blood and skin and strands of muscle. The pain is excruciating. The shaman has to use a tiny knife to cut a string of some body tissue. I want to pass out. It’s a vertiginous feeling. I don’t want to speculate but I think it was a tendon or a ligament from the finger joint. I can never remember the difference. I can’t believe how much blood there is from the wounds on my hand. Why aren’t they doing anything about them?

“You’re being so brave, Taniel,” Fareis’s voice says, from miles away.

“Fuck that, this is payback,” I mutter. I realise I said it in English, but I don’t care to translate. Breathlessly I call out, “Next!”

It would be nice to say that all the hate and anger I — apparently — still feel for Tim Manor was purged away, all into that little lead jar where I know he can never hurt me again.

It’s not true.

I had let it go. I thought I had, but there it is, infecting my brain now as strongly as it ever did, even though all the charms have been removed. I hate feeling like this. All the memories of helplessness, of humiliating myself by letting him win all the time, by lashing out stupidly instead of just ignoring him like people said I should, like it was easy to do that. People can be so stupid.

When I left secondary school I put Tim Manor in a little box and locked it tight and hid it away. Now I’ve opened it again. All the shit he made me feel about myself, all the hate I learned how to feel, and I never once understood why he did it. As far as I can tell it was just malice. It’s incomprehensible. I’ve never experienced anything like it since getting out of that school, giving the lie to all those stupid fuckers who say school (read: ‘bullies’) ‘prepare you for the real world.’ My experience has been that in the real world you don’t find malice like that. Even if abuse and cruelty can be called preparation and training, instead of doing the damage from which the morons say it inoculates you, it would be superfluous.

I want to put him away again, in that little lead jar. I want to melt it down into slag with all the bloody charms still in it, and drop it in the deepest ocean trench. But he’s not in that jar. That was just a fiction, to get the charms out of my flesh, a way to tap the wellspring of hate he opened in me. He’s still here, in my head. I have to put him away again, somehow. I’m not going to let him poison me here.

I’m not.

I’m a child.

The ship dips and rises in the water. In the harbour the movement is so gentle you might miss it, but it’s there. I remember that the last charm came out about an hour after the first, I think. I fainted afterwards and I woke up here, back in my cot, in between clean muslin sheets and wearing a clean long light tunic.

I’m a child.

Restless, I sit up and look at my bandaged hands. I can move my fingers inside the bandage slightly, and I have the use of my left thumb. There’s some pain, but it’s an ordinary sort of pain, as wounds are flexed and bandage-material tugs against flesh. I’d have complained about it before, but in comparison to the searing, nerve-spiking pain when the charms were embedded there it’s actually a relief. These are ordinary wounds.

I figure out where the catch is and open the side of the cot so I can swing my legs out and stand up. I can open the cupboard with my clothes in. I catch sight of my face in the tall mirror on the inside of the door.

Mirrors are rare in Jeodin; not because they’re magical, like in certain books I’ve read; simply because they’re expensive and difficult to make well. Even this one has slight concentric arcs of distortion, cut as it was from a large disc of blown glass, and a slight golden tint. That information just bubbles up at random. This is the first time I’ve really had a chance to use a full-length mirror.

I stand for a full minute, studying my face. It’s a little chubby, like a teenager’s. The proportions are just off the human norm. Just a little anime, I decide. The eyes are weird, looking at them close-up, like the eyeballs are slightly magnified behind my eyelids. A small triangular chin and a faintly forward-jutting face. Not unpleasant, but ever so slightly not quite human, and definitely a little childlike. ‘Chibi,’ Kerilas said once. I can kind of see his point. I turn my head and push my hair back behind my ear so I can see it. The little point towards the top and back. When I see it I still irrationally expect it to be latex and have to touch it to be sure, to feel the edge of my fingernail right to the sensitive tip.

I take a step back and grab the back of my tunic with my better hand, between the thumb and the bandage, and bend over to pull the tunic off over my head. I stand up straight to look at myself, naked in the mirror. Now I can see it. If it was human I would say it was the body of a slightly underweight girl of thirteen or fourteen at the most. Hairless, lean, narrow-hipped, small-breasted, but still an unmistakeably developing female figure. I look with a curious dual awareness: I don’t know if this is voyeuristic of me, or if this is my body and I have every right to be familiar with it. I don’t know which point of view is mine any more.

“I don’t want you to see him,” Fareis says bluntly. We’re sitting in her cabin. The stern windows and the view beyond of the harbour are arrayed behind her.

“Satthei, with respect, I’m not asking for permission,” I say, and get a sharp gaze back for it, but she doesn’t immediately dispute it. “I’m grateful to you for helping me, but I haven’t accepted your suits for me to join this ship,” I remind her. I’m trying to be very proper and calm and grown-up, and just hope it doesn’t make me seem even more ridiculous. I sit prim and upright across from her in the smartest day dress I own — a gift from her of course. It took me an age to get it on with bandaged and hurting hands, but I wanted to prove I could do it by myself. “I wanted to talk about this with you because it seems only polite to do so, and because I value your counsel, but my mind is made up.”

I’ve made her eyebrow lift. Not a bad reaction to get from someone who’s been witness to the rise and fall of empires.

“What counsel?” she asks.

“I understand Reki did something horrible a long time ago,” I say. “I’m afraid my memory isn’t intact; if I was ever taught it, I’ve forgotten. Something involving human children? Would you please tell me what they did that makes people hate them so much?”

“Ah.” She nods slowly and then she tells me what happened seven centuries earlier, halfway across the world. And I have no difficulty agreeing with her that it was terrible, hateful, pitiful. And yet, nothing I hear is beyond what I know humans have committed against their own children, in my world, except perhaps in the use of magic.

I say nothing of this. I think it might be beyond imagining in this world that humans could do such things. Instead I say, “What part did Kerilas play in that?”

“None, surely. That nest was exterminated.”

“All of them?”

“Down to the last infant,” she says, without even a flicker of irony. “I know what you’re thinking. No Reki alive today can justly be held responsible for that crime, even by ancestry. That is precisely why every last infant was destroyed. Now? Six hundred and thirty eight Reki live freely in Jeodin and have caused no trouble that’s come to my attention.”

“Six hundred and thirty eight? That’s… precise.”

Fareis smiles thinly. “They are observed. For the most part they are orphans of the Jeodine Founding War and raised by a Neri Satthei, or the descendants of those orphans, and have never had contact with what passes for Reki society. I know your Satthei raised a Reki female many years ago, long before you were born.” She smiles again, a little more warmly.

“It’s an experiment,” I realise aloud. They want to know if the Reki’s propensity for evil is inherent or cultural.

She nods. “And so far we are encouraged. You must learn to be a little less quick to to judge, Taniel. As for Kerilas… He would have made six hundred and thirty nine. Don’t forget, he did turn himself in and confess to Jalese’s murder.”

“Satthei, I haven’t forgotten; that’s precisely why I have to speak to him. I know he didn’t do it. I must learn from him why he confessed. Aren’t you curious about that yourself? Surely it matters to you if the wrong person is punished and the one who really did it gets away with it?”

“I have nothing to do with shoreside justice.”

“Satthei, you can’t avoid it,” I say. “If you dropped Port Denhall from your trading route it would fall to destitution. That makes everyone who lives here eager to make sure you get what you want as long as you’re here. And you want me. There are people who saw the gifts Deidas brought for me. And there are people who heard me say I wouldn’t go with you if it would mean leaving my friends. Now one of them’s dead, another’s facing execution, the third ran away and the fourth’s gone after him and neither of them have been seen since, and suddenly I’m alone, aren’t I?”

I’ve truly managed to surprise her, I think. “I wouldn’t penalise Denhall if you refused,” she says, sounding shocked. “There’s no logic to that.”

I shrug. “Humans are foolish,” I say.

Fareis thinks for a long moment.

“I will send Deidas with you,” she says, and I know I’ve won.

“All right,” I agree, reminding her I have a choice about that.

“And while you’re there, you can deliver your own apology to the harbourmaster for your conduct last night,” she adds. She had to put that in.

“Yes, I’ll do that,” I say.

“It sits ill with me to allow this,” she says. “I don’t like the thought of you in his presence.”

“That’s because you think he induced me,” I challenge.

She nods.

“Why do you think it was him and not someone else?”

“Because you are Bound to him.”

“He’s my friend,” I say. “That’s all. We escaped from the slavers together. There’s no Binding.”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t believe it.

“How have they been treating you?”

“All right I s’pose. The food’s a bit shit.”

“They haven’t been beating you up or–”

“No. Nothing like that. These are giving me a headache though.” He waves at the bars in front of him.

I stand for a moment and reach out towards them with the backs of my hands. Even through the bandages I can feel the poisonous cold. “Iron,” I say. “Oh crap, I forgot about that.” I withdraw my hand.

“Yeah. Oh, also? It fucks up spellcasting. It’s probably not a coincidence.”

“Mistress Taniel, please keep away from the bars,” Deidas warns me.

I sit down again.

Kerilas and I are speaking in English. He should have no reason to lie in front of the guard and Deidas. Kerilas is sitting in his cell. I’m on the other side of the bars, in a simple wooden chair matching his own.

Kerilas looks at Deidas. “I see Queen Bee’s sent along a drone to watch us,” he observes dryly.

“Keri, don’t.”

“Have you accepted her offer yet?”

I shake my head.

“You should. She’ll look after you okay.”

“I don’t need looking after, I want to stay with you and Sam.”

He gives me a look. “How is Sam?”

“I don’t know. She’s gone, she… said she was going to find Lotan, get him to come in and give himself up. I haven’t seen her since day before yesterday.”

Silence.

“You know, I think these people are on the brink of an industrial revolution,” Kerilas says, conversationally. “Funny thing is, they’ve been on the brink of an industrial revolution for at least a thousand years. Now, isn’t that interesting?”

“They told me you confessed,” I say. I won’t let him divert me. He won’t meet my eyes. “Why?”

“Iron bars in a jail, steel sword blades, arrow heads, that sort of thing, it’s a bit of a pain, an occasional hazard, but it’s not a serious threat to a way of life. On the other hand, once you’re building railroads from one end of a continent to another, iron-hulled steamships, factories, what-have-you, and all the trees you have to cut down for the furnaces… You’re really going to start making it difficult for certain people to get around.”

“Stop fucking about, James. Lo– Dave killed Jalese. It was an accident, for fuck’s sake. Why did you confess to it? Who put you up to that?”

“No-one.” He meets my eyes now.

“Then why?” He’s being so calm, so analytical and cold it scares me.

“Has anyone told you yet what the Reki did?”

“Stop changing the subject.”

“I’m not changing the subject.” He fixes my gaze. “I bet they didn’t tell you why.” He smiles, fey. “Can you imagine how intoxicating it is to have such complete power over someone that you can control her every emotional response as you would play a musical instrument. Gifting her with an intensity and purity and harmony of feeling she could never have known in a lifetime of farming and fucking and raising kids. Of course you must never quite break her. After all, a broken instrument doesn’t make good musi–”

I step off the chair and hurl it at the bars, almost heedless of my own scream of pain at using my hands like that. But I don’t have the strength of my rage, and the chair bounces harmlessly off the bars and clatters to the floor.

Deidas and the guard come fowards, wary and protective. “What did he say to you?” Deidas demands.

I’m standing, shaking and breathing heavily. I can’t account for that sudden rage. It just seemed to flood out of me, without volition.

“Nothing true,” I say, glaring at Kerilas’s eyes. “He’s trying to make this easier for me.”

“Who can teach the lamb to run as fast as it ever can, Taniel? The shepherd or the wolf?”

“You don’t have to become evil!” I protest, still shaking. “You have a brain. You have a choice! You can fight it!”

“Fight what? Kerilas?” His blue eyes fixate me. “Could you fight Taniel?”

I stare at him. It’s a nonsensical question. I suppose that’s the point. “I refuse to believe that an entire race of people can be inherently evil,” I say. It’s the only thing I can think of.

“Bzzt! Logic error! Lose five points. Back home race is just a social construct. There’s more genetic variation in a single troop of bonobos than the entire human race. Here?” He grins. It’s horrible. “Compare us to humans we’re practically immortal and eternally youthful. We’re faster, smarter, stronger, more determined, more passionate, harder to kill, inevitably more experienced, and dammit we’re just prettier. It really, really, isn’t fair, is it? All they’ve got is this astonishing fecundity. Like the bonobos. To quote the good doctor, they’re practically born pregnant. It shouldn’t be surprising the Neri see them as a resource to be managed.”

I wasn’t sure I heard him right. “The Neri?”

“Are the shepherds. At least here in Jeodin.” Still, all I can do is stare. “I want to think it’s a bad thing but honestly I’m not sure. We know what happens when humans are left in charge of a world.” He smiles again, wryly. “The Reki, however, are not interested in husbandry. We’re not afraid that humans might outshine us. We long to see how brightly they can shine.” I can’t help remembering Jalese, luminous in the night. I huddled around her flame. “We are promethean. Of course we must be punished; this is accepted.”

“Kerilas, shut up. You’re monologuing.”

He stares at me. I actually managed to surprise him. His expression breaks into a real smile, and then he’s chuckling.

“Did you know I’m a child?” I ask, once he falls silent.

He nods slowly.

“When did you know?”

“From the start. It’s obvious.”

I can’t look at him. I look down, blushing. “It wasn’t obvious to me.”

“Teya, I’m sorry.”

I look back up at him. “What for? You didn’t do anything.”

He just regards me calmly.

“All right,” I say, my voice shaking. “What did you do? How did you do it?” I set my jaw to speak clearly. “Describe it clearly. I have a right to know.”

And after a while it’s his turn to look down, unable to answer.

“You don’t know,” I say, feeling vindicated. “You have no idea.”

“I’m sure it will come back to me next time,” he says. His voice is low and flat. And he looks at me again; iron-cold.

Kerilas was executed two days later, on the last day of Market.

There’s a cold wind from the North. The sky is a mottled grey sheet sliding South over the mastheads in the harbour. When the tide turns, Market sails.

Kerilas and I speak one more time, on the edge of the small lawn set aside for the purpose in the harbourmaster’s garden. There’s just us, and Master Merresan, and a few guards in their ostentatious uniforms, and a guy who looks like a healer or doctor or something equally sarcastic. At least executions aren’t a spectator sport in Jeodin. A small thing to be grateful for. They take their executions seriously here. There are rules. Kerilas could have refused to have me present. He’s permitted it, on condition I follow those rules.

He actually seems cheerful. “Hey I’ve got an idea,” he says, when he first sees me. “Let’s pretend to be terribly British about this. You know, stiff upper lip and all that. It’ll be a laugh.”

“Uh. Okay,” I manage. “I’ll try.”

“Look,” he says, showing me three six-sided dice in his hand, marked in Jeodine pictograms. “Guard lent me these. All ready to roll up a fresh one. What d’you reckon? I fancy doing a halfling next. You know, a bit waayy, a little bit wooah.” He grins. “Nah seriously, don’t leave that there, mate, I’ll nick anything, me.”

“James–”

“Shh.” He smiles. “You’re going with the Satthei?”

I nod. Sam and Lotan haven’t reappeared. “I don’t have any choice, do I?”

“It might be the best thing, Tani,” he continues. “You’ll learn how to be Neri properly–”

“But I don’t want–”

“Shh. You’re a threat to her if you don’t go with her. You don’t want that.” He smiles at my look of incomprehension. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? Think about it. She’s Queen Bee. Last thing she wants is potential feral Satthei out there.”

I don’t really follow what he’s talking about, and I don’t care. “But… I want to stay with you. And Sami…” I can’t bring myself to include Lotan. I hope Sam can’t find him. I hope I never have to see him again. I hope he’s killed himself out of remorse and is lying dead and forgotten in a ditch somewhere.

Goddess, but I can hear my own voice, and my own thoughts, sounding like a child’s, a spoilt teenager’s; not at all the voice of the elegant Neri woman I thought I was being. I never fooled anyone.

Kerilas shook his head. “Didn’t you listen to what I said last time?”

“But that wasn’t you speaking!”

“It will be,” he says. He nods, affirming it. “It will be. You have to understand, this is the best way it could end, for me. This way I get to not be a monster.”

My eyes feel like they’re burning. I’m trying not to cry. For him.

“You wouldn’t let it happen,” I protest. “I know you wouldn’t.”

“This is me not letting it happen,” he points out. “Give me this, Tani. I need your help,” he swallows, “to make sure I go through with it.”

“It’s not fair. Lotan should be here instead of you,” I say bitterly.

“No,” Kerilas says. “He’s young and stupid–” He stops, thoughtfully. “Isn’t that strange? We’re the same age as well.” He shrugs. “He’s young and stupid and hot-headed, but he’s just picked up a lot of XP. He might even end up being worth keeping around.” He grins. “You never know.”

“How can you be so cheerful?” I blurt out, not meaning to.

“Oh that’ll be this potion whatsisface over there gave me earlier. Not sure what’s in it, but I’m a leetle bit high.” He gestures ‘a little bit’ with a thumb and forefinger, grinning. “Thank fuck it works on elves. Definitely a strong euphoric. Hey, maybe I’ll do a write-up for Erowid when I get back. ’Course, I’ll have to skip a bit on the come-down.”

“Fuck’s sake, Keri–”

“He offered. I accepted. My choice. They seem pretty keen on giving you — well, me — every chance to get through this with dignity. Seems to be a cultural thing about a good death and redemption. I think I’m impressed. You know, if you’re going to do the whole state-murder thing, you might as well do it with a little class.”

I can’t help the sob that escapes from me.

“Did they tell you what happens now?” he asks me.

I nod.

“Will you stay with me?”

I nod again. “And I’ll be terr’bly, terr’bly British,” I say, laying the accent on thick.

“Good show, old bean.” Another grin, just acknowledging the joke without leaving it. “Come on then, let’s get it over with before this stuff wears off.”

I want to protest, but I let him take my still-bandaged hand gently and lead me across the lawn to the doctor, or whatever he is, standing next to a small, waist-high table. The guards are a nearby, but for the time being at least they are an unintrusive presence. It’s a surreal moment. Almost as if he’s some kind of twisted barman, the doctor unstoppers a vial of some clear liquid and pours it into a small cup, then pours a small quantity of red wine over it from a jug.

“They say it works almost instantly,” Kerilas tells me while the ‘barman’ pours. “That’s got to be some kind of neurotoxin, I reckon. Probably get it off something growing in the coral.” He looks at me. “Don’t think about even touching it.”

“It’s ready,” the doctor says.

“Thank you,” Kerilas answers, and lifts up the cup.

If he does anything other than drink the contents of that cup, the guards will act, and dignity will be lost. This was explained to me before I stepped on the lawn, that it was equally within my power to rob him of that dignity, by trying to stop him drinking, by drinking it myself, whatever. Presumably it was explained to Kerilas as well.

“This is the worst day of your life,” he says to me, “and you’ve never looked more beautiful.” With his other hand he strokes my hair back behind my ear. “Maybe the Reki have a point.” He smiles, and as if it’s nothing more than a glass of water he drinks down the contents of the cup.

Two deep breaths, looking, searching into my eyes, then he faints and falls, to be caught and lowered gently to the ground by one of the guards; his head propped up by the guard’s thigh. The doctor kneels next to him and puts a finger to his throat.

And waits. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds, and he stands up and nods to Master Merresan, and to me.

He’s dead. Even knowing it was coming I can’t believe it. I just stare at Kerilas’s body as the guard gently lays down his head.

I sob. I can’t help it, but I press my hand to my mouth and hold the rest in. I won’t cry now, or rail, or do anything else to rob his dignity. I’ll keep doing the British thing, at least until I’m out of here. I suppose it’s the Jeodine thing as well; the one culture having inspired the other, whichever way around it was, I’m not sure any more.

“You must leave now,” Master Merresan says to me, having come up to my side.

“Yes, of course.” Kerilas’s hair is stirring in the breeze, like Jalese’s did. I don’t understand how such a movement can seem so consequential, except that all other movement is gone. His face looks so restful and so beautiful.

“He made a fine end, Mistress Taniel,” Master Merresan says. “It will be recorded.”

“He still didn’t do it,” I say deliberately and quietly, not making an undignified scene, just stating a fact. “I think he was the most gentle person I’ve ever known.” I hold his gaze for a moment longer, then walk alone off the lawn towards the gates.

On the quayside, on the way back to Satthei Fareis, I see two familiar figures sitting on a bench. A shapely, petite woman dressed incongruously in mannish leather, and a muscular, well-built young man, towering over the woman, in a belted tunic and leggings. They stand as I approach. I wonder who they see. A young Neri woman, finely dressed, with bandages on her hands and hair plaited down her back, and hopefully carrying an opacity of expression learned from her elders. No. A child, a sulking teenager, wearing clothes that are too grown-up for her. Maybe not. Fareis chose them for me, after all.

“You’re late,” I say to Lotan as I pass. I don’t stop. I don’t even want to know how he reacts to my words, my studied disdain. I don’t want to hear the excuses. I don’t want to think he might be laughing at my childish indignation.