This is a sequel to my earlier novella, "The Family that Plays Together." It's set with Morpheus's kind permission in his Travel Agency universe. Thanks to Morpheus for his comments on the rough draft.
Five years after the events of "The Family that Plays Together", Leslie and Taylor return to Serenikha's world. But getting home again might not be as easy...
My psychic link with Serenikha had held steady all through high school, growing no stronger but no weaker, ever since my first trip to her world. I still shared dreams with her, and I still had occasional moments of aphasia, where I couldn’t think of a word in English, only in one of Serenikha’s languages. And then, my first semester in college, it suddenly seemed to get a lot weaker — I shared no dreams at all with her, and had much less aphasia than usual.
This is a sequel to my earlier novella, "The Family that Plays Together." It's set with Morpheus's kind permission in his Travel Agency universe. Thanks to Morpheus for his comments on the rough draft.
My latest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.
Serenikha and I had met in a dreamscape modeled on Muir Woods, which both of us had gone hiking in though not at the same time. We were sitting side-by-side on a sequoia log, my feet dangling in the air and her tail trailing along the ground for several feet.
“So what else is new?” she asked, after she’d updated me on the gossip circulating in the Dragon Emperor’s palace.
“Not much,” I said; “I finalized my plans for Spring Break with Josh and Omar. We’re splitting the rent on a beach house down at Pacific Grove. I’m not sure what the magic level is there, so we might not share any dreams next week.”
“It’s just a week, though, right?”
“Yeah — uhh. I feel like I’m waking up. Something’s waking me up...”
There was a weird noise coming from nowhere and everywhere. For some reason I couldn’t identify it at first, until Serenikha said: “It sounds like your phone’s ringing. Talk to you later, if you can’t sleep through it?”
“It just might be important,” I said. “Bye,” and woke up already groping on the bedside table for my phone.
“Who’s this?” I mumbled.
“It’s Taylor. Were you still asleep?”
I glanced at the clock: 8:39. “I don’t have any morning classes this semester, remember?” I tried to sleep late so I could overlap my sleep hours more with Serenikha’s. It was around midnight in the Dragon Emperor’s palace.
“Sorry! I can call back tomorrow —”
“No, I’m already awake. What is it?”
“Next week is your Spring Break, right?”
“Yes.” I started to tell her about the beach house plan, but she interrupted:
“Tell them you’ve got to cancel. Make up whatever family emergency excuse you need —”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. But I’ve got something better.”
“This had better be good.”
“Oh, it is. You remember what I told you at Christmas, about the portal Mr. G. made back in October...?”
I hadn’t seen Taylor since we’d both been at Mom and Dad’s house for Christmas. She was super busy these days with a double major in International Studies and Magic. Of course, only the International Studies part would appear on her diploma or her resumé, but her magical skills were at least equally real, and they were a big part of how she planned to earn her living.
During our first trip to Mr. G.‘s world, which was also my last, we’d run into some trouble, getting our souls magically entangled with our hosts in Mr. G.’s world. Taylor and Mom and Dad got sorted out within a few months, but my soul was still entangled with Serenikha, the naga princess I’d swapped bodies with for a few days when I was fourteen.
While he was working on getting our souls untangled, Mr. G. noticed that Taylor had a talent for magic. When he offered to start teaching her, he told us that there were apparently a couple of dozen young people like her — children of parents who’d visited Mr. G.'s world multiple times, and particularly while the mother was pregnant. He gave her private lessons every couple of weeks while she was in high school, and arranged a scholarship for her to Kinnison College, a small liberal-arts school in Oregon where he was a visiting professor — under a variety of names and faces, a different one every semester to hear Taylor tell it. How he managed to give lectures and seminars in Spores Ferry, Oregon every weekday, and also run at least seven Travel Agency branches around the world, I don’t know and I’m not convinced Taylor knew either, though she made mysterious, knowing comments about it sometimes.
Last Christmas, she’d told us about a field trip she and the other magic students had taken with Professor G. to a state park in southern Idaho. Our world doesn’t have nearly as much magic as Mr. G.'s world, and what it has tends to concentrate or clump up in certain places. And those places shift around — which explains why the various Travel Agency branches have to keep moving their offices from one place in a given city to another, and sometimes to abandon some cities entirely. On a particular weekend in October, a really high concentration of magic was building up in this particular park, and Professor G. wanted to demonstrate a spell that, until now, hadn’t even been possible in our world except on a very small scale.
He’d opened a direct portal to his native world, and led his students through it for a brief excursion before they returned a few hours later. I’d been there before, of course, and Mom and Dad had been there dozens of times, and at first what Taylor told us hadn’t seemed so extraordinary — until we realized that she’d been in that world in her own body. Not borrowing the body of another person, a native of that world, but physically traveling there with her own body, clothes and luggage. She showed us the photos from her trip: a castle by a waterfall, a couple of elves, a herd of unicorns — even a distant, blurry photo of a dragon in flight.
“That day you took me and Leslie to the other world for the first time, Mr. G. had just started opening physical portals, but they were tiny and only stayed open for a second or two. Just enough to bring a pixie like Maella through or send her home again. But now, when we have a big buildup like the one in Idaho back in October, we can open portals eight or ten feet wide and keep them open for hours. She promised she’d teach us the theory behind those portals next semester, and maybe we’d be able to open them ourselves by the next time a big magic buildup occurs somewhere in North America.”
And now, apparently, it was happening again.
“How’d you like to visit Serenikha in person?”
“That,” I said, “would be the awesomest thing since awesome was invented.”
“Next Monday, in Yosemite Park, there’s going to be a big buildup. I should be able to open a portal to some secluded place near the capital of the Dragon Empire — I can use your link with Serenikha to help focus it — and we can go through, go into the city, and call on Serenikha at the palace. We’ll need to be back at the portal within a day, but I calculate I ought to be able to keep it open at least that long, and make it invisible to anybody else when we aren’t using it.”
“I’ll tell her we’re coming, next time I see her.” Hopefully that night, but almost certainly sometime before Monday, I’d share another dream with Serenikha; I usually did so five or six times a week, these days.
“You do that, and tell her to arrange some code phrase we can give to the guards on duty outside the palace, so they know we’re Serenikha’s friends and not some random peasants come to gawk at royalty.”
I thought of something. “How are we going to talk to people? When you visit Mr. G.'s world normally, he gives you the language skills of the person you’re swapping bodies with...”
“I can work that spell myself, now. And you’ve got your link with Serenikha; you can speak her languages in dreams, and with just a little nudge from me you should be able to do it waking as well.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll pack tonight, and leave right after my last class on Friday. Where do you want to meet?”
I’d seen Taylor demonstrate a few small tricks during her last couple of years in high school and her first years in college — levitating a gold bracelet, summoning hundreds of squirrels to our back yard, making our neighbor’s mean dog fall asleep in mid-bark. But the first thing she did that really impressed me was right after my first semester in college, when she’d been at Kinnison College for a couple of years.
My link with Serenikha had held steady all through high school, growing no stronger but no weaker, ever since my first trip to her world. I still shared dreams with her, and I still had occasional moments of aphasia, where I couldn’t think of a word in English, only in one of Serenikha’s languages. And then, my first semester in college, it suddenly seemed to get a lot weaker — I shared no dreams at all with her, and had much less aphasia than usual, which was nice in terms of favorably impressing my professors and the new friends I was making. But I was saddened, too: Serenikha had become my best friend over the last few years, we were almost as close as I was to Taylor — or even closer, in the last couple of years since Taylor had gone off to college and her magic studies, which I couldn’t share. And though I was hopeful that if our link broke, I’d be able to swap bodies with people in her world again, and visit her sometime, it still wouldn’t be the same as the psychic link we’d shared for so long.
And then, when I went home for Christmas, I shared a dream with Serenikha the very first night. She was frantic with worry, having not heard from me in three months, and I told her I didn’t know why.
The next morning at breakfast, I told Mom, Dad and Taylor about it, and Taylor figured out what was going on. “I’ll come with you, your first day back — you start back a couple of days before I do, anyway — and I’ll see if my idea is correct.”
It was. The freshman boys' dorm was smack in the middle of a dead-magic area that covered the whole southeast part of campus. Taylor was able to spot that right away, and what was even better, she used her magic to talk the administrators into letting me move into another dorm, one that lay comfortably inside the live-magic area that also included the administration building.
After that, she’d visited my campus at the beginning of each semester to survey the latest configuration of magic areas and figure out which dorm I should be in, and if necessary sweet-talk the administrators into letting me live there. Right now I was sleeping in the highest-magic area on campus, and though it was nice to share dreams with Serenikha almost every night, it also made my aphasia worse when I was in the dorm or the nearest classroom buildings. (I was a better or worse class participant depending on which building a classroom was in and whether I could count on my command of English when I spoke up. “Why are you so quiet this semester?” Professor Avery had asked me a couple of weeks ago. “I know you have ideas about this stuff, you had such incisive questions last semester.” I couldn’t give him the real answer.)
Predictably, I dreamed with Serenikha that night after my phone conversation with Taylor. “I’ve got great news,” I told her when I found myself on the foot-bridge over the West Garden in the Dragon Emperor’s palace, seeing her slither up the foot-path toward me. “Taylor says she can open a physical portal and I can come see you in person.”
“When?” She clapped her hands eagerly.
“Three days from now. She says she’ll open a portal outside the city, and we’ll walk to the palace — you’ll need to tell the guards we’re coming, so they’re expecting us and will let us in to see you.”
“I’ll make arrangements as soon as I wake up. Oh, this will be wonderful! You’ve seen the palace gardens in Autumn, but never in Spring. And you can finally meet little Osalikha!”
I’d seen dream-images of her baby daughter, but it would be wonderful to see the real Osalikha, and maybe even hold her in my arms. I remembered the whole year and more Serenikha was pregnant or incubating her egg, how her anxiety and excitement had been so infectious, and how I’d been just as interested in the mothers and their little children I happened to see at the grocery store or on the bus as any pregnant woman; I still took more interest in babies than most guys my age, and I thought that was due as much to my link with Serenikha as to Mom and Dad’s gender-neutral parenting.
We talked for a subjective hour or more before I woke up. I showered and got ready for class; in just a few hours I’d be on the road.
First, I drove to Mom and Dad’s house, to spend the night and to borrow their camping equipment. (And incidentally do a couple of loads of laundry.) It was on the way to Yosemite for me, but out of the way for Taylor, so I’d meet her near the park entrance Saturday afternoon.
“I thought you were going in on a beach house with Josh and Omar?” Dad asked.
“Change of plans,” I said. “I’ll still pitch in my part of the rent if they can’t find somebody else at the last minute, I don’t want to leave them hanging, but I’m going camping in Yosemite with Taylor.”
“Aha,” Mom said. “And when was Taylor going to tell us about this?”
“Probably sometime today,” I said. “She said she’d be busy and wouldn’t get away until tomorrow morning...”
“Is this something to do with her magic studies?” Dad asked.
I’d just started to explain when Taylor called Mom’s cell phone.
“Good evening... Yes, Leslie was just starting to tell us about that... Uh huh... Is Professor G. going to be there?... Hmm... Are you sure this is a good idea?... Well, yes, I know you can handle that, but — have you thought about the language aspect? Good, of course... And what about clothes?... I guess that will work, even if it’s not an exact match... Yes, I’ll send them with him... Sure, it’s a cosmopolitan city, they’re used to seeing people in all kinds of clothes... And money?... You seem to have thought of everything... Well, be safe! You too. Bye.”
Mom hung up. “I’ll just go dig through Taylor’s closet,” she said, “there are a couple of kimonos that she wants me to send with you. Your dad can help you get the camping equipment loaded in the car.”
“I guess now would be better than tomorrow morning,” Dad said. “Just let me get dressed.”
I still hadn’t undressed yet, just taken off my shoes at the door as was usual even when we were having guests over who weren’t naturists. After being at school all semester, where everybody wore clothes all the time and you had to wear at least a towel even on the way to and from the shower, it felt slightly odd seeing Mom and Dad naked, though not for long before it started feeling homelike instead. Once Dad and I got the camping equipment into my trunk, and Mom handed me a couple of kimonos to hang up in the back seat, Dad and I undressed and we sat down to supper.
“I’m a little concerned about this trip,” Mom said. “Taylor said Mr. G. isn’t providing a local guide as he does for his normal vacation packages.”
“But we’ll be going to a city where we know people,” I argued. “Just from the one time I’ve been there, I know Serenikha and Pientao, and Lady Hanuseri and Kinuko. And Taylor’s been to that area a couple more times, and she’s also been local guide for visitors from there coming to California; she knows several other people we can ask for help if we run into trouble.” (Taylor had worked for Mr. G.'s travel agency every summer since she was seventeen.)
“I know. Just be careful, okay?”
“We will.”
Next morning, I loaded up my clean clothes and a few more things Mom and Dad thought of that we might need — a first-aid kit, a GPS, some of Mom’s jewelry that we could sell for more draconic currency if we ran out, insect repellent and sunblock — and drove out. “I wish we could go with you,” Dad said, “but we can’t take time off work on such short notice. Tell Taylor to give us more warning next time, if she can.”
I made good time and was in Yosemite by early afternoon. I sat at one of the picnic tables near the lot where I’d parked, and texted Taylor to tell her where I was, then ate the burrito I’d bought at a drive-through while I waited for her. She got there about an hour later.
“The peak magic area is over here,” she said, spreading out a map of the park on the picnic table. “I think the closest camping area is here, and this is the access road for it...”
A few minutes later we were at the park office reserving a camping spot in that area, and we had our camp set up by nightfall.
“Why come in today rather than tomorrow?” I asked, nailing in a tent stake. “You said the, um... suavikh? I mean, the magic surge — that it would be on Monday...?”
“I can’t be sure exactly when,” she amended. She might have mentioned that earlier. “Monday afternoon is most likely, but it could be a few hours earlier or later, maybe even tomorrow or Tuesday. I wanted to be here early so I could feel it when it begins. Last October we got there a little late, past the peak of the surge, and Professor G. could only keep the portal open for a few hours. If I catch this one on the upswing, I should be able to keep it open for over a day, enough time for a good visit.”
“I’ll let Serenikha know tonight, if I see her while... um... uleri?”
“Uleri means dreaming, right?” She had a good memory for my aphasic moments. “Oh, you will, unless she’s suffering insomnia. Even here we’ve got more ambient magic than than you’ve probably ever spent a night with, as you can tell by how bad your aphasia is. I bet you’ll probably get some spillover from Serenikha’s emotions, and she’ll get some from you, but I don’t know how we can test for that... hmm, maybe if you keep a log book and compare notes with her when we see her...”
We lay out on blankets looking at the stars for a while before we crawled into our tents to sleep.
“I think our link is getting stronger,” Serenikha told me that night. We’d met in a dreamscape based on The Dying Earth, which I’d just been reading. “I keep forgetting the real words I was trying to say and saying stuff in English instead.”
“Me too, in reverse. I think our link is the same as ever, but it affects us more when I’m in a high-magic area. And Taylor says this park I’m sleeping in is one of the highest-magic areas she’s ever seen.”
“I wonder if it will get even stronger when we meet in person?” she said, suddenly looking doubtful. “Perhaps we should seek the Gray One’s advice before you come.”
“Taylor has him on speed-dial,” I said, “but who knows if he’ll answer...”
Thanks for reading. I'll post part two in about a week.
If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)
“Shall I go and turn him over to the guard? Or castrate him myself?”
“Take him somewhere else first,” one of the other women pleaded. “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”
My latest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.
Sunday after breakfast, Taylor wanted to go hiking into the highest-magic area. “During the surge there might even be enough magic for a portal spell here at our campsite, but it’ll last longer if we find the highest-magic spot we can.” So we rubbed on more insect repellent and sunblock, secured our campsite against bears, and set out. We stuck to the trails at first, as long as they were taking us toward the high-magic area, but when the trail curved around away from it, Taylor insisted we leave it; I followed her cautiously, hoping we wouldn’t run into any park rangers.
We hadn’t been able to get reception on our phones, but Taylor said she could contact Mr. G. by magic once we got into the magic-rich area. “Or here at the campsite, too, but I want seclusion to cast the spell.” When we stopped to rest in a clearing ten or fifteen minutes from the trail, she declared she was ready to try that.
She hefted the mage’s staff she’d made in her sophomore year, which she’d been using as a walking-stick on our hike, and tapped several points around a circle. I sat on a fallen log and watched. After a few minutes of her muttering mystic incantations, she suddenly got a look of surprise on her face, and said: “Professor, this is Taylor Kendricks... I wanted to ask you something about Leslie’s link with Serenikha... Yes... Sorry if this is a bad time... Thank you. Well, it’s this: what do you think would happen if Leslie and Serenikha meet in person?... I mean, through a portal like the one you made last October... Yes, we’ve got a big magic surge here in Yosemite... That’s why I’m using magic, because my cell doesn’t get reception here... No, sir, I calculated it myself. I haven’t done a precise measurement yet but it feels like eight or nine hundred thaums per square meter, almost enough for a portal spell... Yes, sir, of course I’ll make sure... Oh... That’s good to know... We’ll keep that in mind... Thank you, professor. Good day.”
Her eyes lost the distant look they’d taken on during the conversation, and she focused on me again. “She says it should be safe for you to visit Serenikha, but you probably shouldn’t sleep within a couple of hundred yards of each other, since your link gets stronger when you dream. And she wants me to make a series of measurements of the magic levels here and back off on making the portal if they don’t show the trend I calculated for them back in Spores Ferry.”
“Lao,” I said. She took it as the affirmative it was without inquiring as to its exact meaning, and I didn’t realize until later that I hadn’t spoken in English.
“So I’m not sure this is the best site for the portal, but I’m going to make my first measurement here, and then we’ll move on a little way and make another one. You can log the measurements on the map.”
That kept us busy for the rest of the day. We returned to our campsite exhausted and ate a little more before crawling into our tents just after sunset. But Taylor was confident that we’d found an ideal spot for the portal, one where it would last a day and a half at least based on the rate of changes in magic levels.
I told Serenikha about that during our dream that night.
“I so look forward to seeing you!” she said. “I’ve spoken with the captain of the guard. They are expecting you, but you should know the passwords as well: tomorrow it is ‘Light of the thunder-stone’ and the next day it will be ‘Where the carp hid himself’.”
I repeated them until I was sure of them. “We’ll probably be there tomorrow.”
Monday morning, we hiked into the woods not long after breakfast, and reached the clearing Taylor had selected an hour later. “This is it,” she exclaimed, after casting a measurement spell. “The magic level’s almost high enough for me to start opening the portal.”
We changed from our hiking clothes into the kimonos; Taylor’s old kimono was a little small on me, but she worked an enchantment to make it fit. She worked another measurement spell every twenty or thirty minutes for the next few hours, and seemed satisfied with the results. We ate the snacks we’d brought with us and made short excursions here and there between measurements.
Finally she looked around and said: “Okay, I think this is the best spot for the portal. Sit over there somewhere and give me room to work.”
I did as I was told, sitting down on a stump and opening my pack to take out a bag of trail mix. I watched Taylor work, clearing the leaves and needles from the ground in a small space, and then pouring a thin line of powdered chalk in a circle, and walking around it clockwise and counterclockwise, tapping her staff at its edge, again and again.
The short shadows of midday were lengthening as Taylor spoke her incantations, gathering and shaping the power all around us. The portal still wasn’t visible when I felt a sudden wave of amusement and burst out laughing, for no obvious reason; moments later I realized that Serenikha had just heard something funny. Taylor shot me an annoyed glance, and returned to concentrating on the portal.
And then it became visible, a swirling darkness at the center of the chalk circle, growing gradually more coherent: a circle or, I soon realized, a sphere hanging in the air and not quite touching the ground. It seemed like the entrance to a long tunnel, and at the far end I could barely make out a spot of light. Even though I was expecting it, I felt surprise and shock, and wondered if that was spillover from Serenikha too; I’d have to ask her later if she’d seen or heard something surprising about now.
“That’s it,” Taylor said, striking the edge of the circle with her staff one more time. “Let’s go.” And she stepped into the chalk circle, and another step took her into the tunnel; she seemed to grow rapidly smaller until I could barely see her. I picked up both our bags and followed her.
How long it took us to pass through the tunnel, I don’t know. I say “tunnel” but there weren’t exactly walls around us; it was only that I had a sense of motion, though I wasn’t walking. The spaces around us were open and in the distance, in various directions, I could see dimly-lit images of myself and Taylor, distorted as in funhouse mirrors. The real Taylor, or at least an image of her that was correctly proportioned, was far ahead of me, and beyond her was a point of brighter light; that was what I seemed to be heading toward.
Part of the reason I can’t remember the passage very well might be that I was distracted by a numb, empty feeling, like something was missing. I was still trying to analyze that feeling when I caught sight of clearer, sharper images up ahead; moments later I found myself stepping forward, completing the motion I had begun in the clearing in Yosemite.
I stepped onto a mosaic-tile floor under a high roof. The empty feeling was gone. Taylor was right in front of me and I had to sidestep to avoid running into her. We were surrounded by women, young and old, nagini, kitsune, human, elf and others — most of them naked and immersed in pools of water, and the others apparently in the process of getting dressed or undressed. Several were screaming. But all that was background noise, because my attention was immediately and inescapably drawn to a young nagini with blue and green banded scales, coiled up near the edge of one of the pools: Serenikha. Her attention was no less fixed on me. “Leslie!” she called out over the noise of the other women screaming, “I didn’t expect you quite so early.”
I would have asked Taylor why she’d opened the portal directly into the women’s baths in the Dragon Emperor’s palace, instead of to a secluded place on the outskirts of the capital as she’d planned, but she was uttering frantic incantations and I didn’t want to interrupt her. “I didn’t expect this either,” I said. “I’m sure Taylor can explain, but —”
Just then one of the larger human women, who was mostly dressed, grappled me and locked my arms behind my back, twisting me so I faced toward a wall, away from Serenikha and most of the other women. She started frog-marching me toward the door, but Serenikha yelled: “No, leave him alone — well, you can blindfold him, I suppose, if it makes you feel any better...”
“Sorry,” I said to my captor, “we really didn’t mean to intrude this way.” She didn’t reply, but held me while a kitsune in a green nightgown approached me and tied a large piece of cloth around my eyes. It wasn’t designed as a blindfold, I think, because it covered not only my eyes but almost my whole face.
Then Taylor’s incantation suddenly ceased, and she spoke up in Draconic: “I apologize for the intrusion, Your Highness, ladies of the court. I am the Tenacious One, a wizard of that other world all of you have heard of and some of you have visited, and this is Leslie Kendricks, the Princess Serenikha’s soul-twin. She has been expecting us.”
“Yes, that’s right, everybody calm down,” Serenikha said. “Sienpai, let him go!”
“He’s a man, Your Highness, he’s not supposed to be here,” my captor, apparently named Sienpai, replied. “Shall I go and turn him over to the guard? Or castrate him myself?”
“Take him somewhere else first,” one of the other women pleaded. “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”
“There’ll be no castrating anybody,” Serenikha said firmly. “Let him go. That’s an order. — But Leslie, you’d better keep your blindfold on until I tell you.”
“Sure thing,” I said, and belatedly added “Your Highness.” Sienpai let go of my arms and muttered close to my ear, “I’ll be watching you close, boy.”
“Tay— ah, Tenacious One,” Serenikha said, “could you lead your brother over to the bench there and help him sit down? We can talk while I dry off and get dressed, and then I’ll take you to the guest rooms I’ve had prepared. You look tired from your journey. — And you, Michiko, stop that screaming. One would think you’d never seen a man before.”
(In retrospect, I think Serenikha had been infected by my own casual attitude toward nudity, from being raised by Mom and Dad. It wasn’t something she learned back home in her father’s kingdom, still less since she’d moved here.)
The last of the screams gave way to intermittent sobs as Taylor took me by the hand and helped me find a seat. Serenikha spoke again in a more normal tone, but between the makeshift blindfold that completely covered my ears, and the background noise, I couldn’t hear everything she or Taylor said. I sat quietly and tried to look inoffensive.
A couple of minutes later Serenikha said, “Come — I’ll show you to your rooms.” Taylor took my hand and I stood up, following her until Serenikha said, “You can take off the blindfold now.”
I removed it, realizing it was actually one of those sari-camisoles that nagini wear to cover their breasts. We were in a hallway outside the baths, one that seemed familiar from the dreams I’d shared with Serenikha if not from my previous visit to the palace five years ago.
Serenikha led the way, and several other ladies of the court walked with us, including Sienpai and a young kitsune. “Tenacious One, you’ll be in the women’s quarters, down this way, not far from my own chambers. Leslie, I arranged a room for you in the men’s guest quarters — it should be quite far enough from mine, according to what the Gray One said.”
“Are you not going to punish him in any way for intruding in the women’s baths?” Sienpai said. “Or this mage?”
“I’m sure it was an honest mistake,” Serenikha said, and Taylor added:
“I thought I had the portal focused on Kinuko’s garden on Chrysanthemum Street. But I guess Leslie’s link with you was so strong, there in that high-magic area, that it influenced the spell and made the portal open up right where you were.”
“See?” Serenikha said. “Nothing to worry about. Besides, Leslie used to be me, I mean he borrowed my body for a while, so you haven’t got anything he hasn’t had before.”
“I’m truly sorry to have intruded,” I said to Sienpai and the other women. “I’d like to make amends if I may... Taylor, you said that —” She gave me a brief glare, and I remembered she was calling herself the Tenacious One here. I gave her an apologetic look and went on: “— ah, when you came here in the body of a young mage in the Gray One’s homeland last semester, you learned to cast a transformation spell...?”
“Yes...? Oh. I see what you’re getting at.”
“Would it satisfy you, Sienpai, if I were to take the form of a nagini for the duration of my visit?”
She looked flummoxed. “I... I suppose so.”
“I can do that,” Taylor confirmed. “Just give us a quiet place to work and a quarter of an hour.”
“I know just the place,” Serenikha said.
I had more than one reason for asking Taylor to transform me. One, as a man I wouldn’t be allowed to hang out with Serenikha as much or go to all the places she normally went; we’d only be allowed to meet in certain places in the palace. Two — since I’d arrived here, my legs had started to feel weird, like they ought to be a snake-tail. It wasn’t nearly as bad as when I’d temporarily wound up in my own body while still having Serenikha’s body-image, while the Patient One was meddling with the Gray One’s spell, but I feared it might get that bad if I spent much time near Serenikha. And three, of course, I hoped it might mollify Serenikha’s friends whom I’d offended.
Serenikha showed us to a small room off the next hallway. “Will this be acceptable?”
Taylor nodded. “We’ll be out again in a few minutes.” I followed her in, and she shut the door behind us.
“You’d better take your shoes and socks and underwear off,” she said, “or they’ll get torn up when your legs transform.”
“I’ll just take all this off,” I said. “The kimono would hang way down my tail and get in the way.” I still had the sari-camisole they’d used as a blindfold.
While I was undressing, Taylor took off her own shoes, socks and panties, but left her kimono on for the moment. She had me stand in the center of the room, and she poured out more chalk-dust in a circle around us. Then she started tapping her staff at various points around the circle and uttering incantations. In a pause between incantations, she said: “This is going to feel weird. Don’t freak out, okay?”
“Okay.”
When she resumed her incantations, and touched each of my feet in turn with the tip of her staff, my flesh started to melt and flow. It did feel weird, weirder in a way than it had felt to wake up in Serenikha’s body five years ago, but it also felt strangely right; that nagging feeling of a split tail went away and I didn’t even lose my balance for a moment as my tail merged and extended further behind me. “Don’t mess with the chalk circle!” Taylor warned me, and I coiled my tail under me. The changes spread up my torso from there, my hips widening, my waist narrowing, belly-button disappearing, skin darkening, breasts forming... I couldn’t see my face changing, but I felt it.
“There,” Taylor said, “now my turn.” I’d guessed what she was going to do from the way she’d taken off her shoes and so forth; she repeated the process with herself, and made herself into another nagini. She still looked almost the same from the waist up, except that her skin and hair were darker. Our scales had the same pattern, alternating coral-pink, yellow and teal.
“I thought it would be odd to introduce ourselves as sisters if I were a human and you were a nagini,” she explained as she broke the chalk circle with her staff.
“It would raise a few eyebrows, maybe,” I said, working on winding the sari-camisole around my breasts and over my shoulders. “Just one question before we go face the world in our hot new nagini bodies.”
“Yes?”
“The Tenacious One?” I raised my own eyebrow curiously.
“The other magic students gave me that name,” she said proudly. “Do you like it?”
“It fits well enough. A lot better than ‘The Patient One’, anyway.” We shared a bitter laugh over that; the naga mage’s impatience was primarily responsible for mine and Serenikha’s tangled souls.
We picked up our luggage and slithered out into the hall. There was a young kitsune girl there; she bowed to us and said: “I am Michiko. Her Highness asked me to show you to your room, when you were finished...”
“Lead on,” I said.
She led us down a couple of hallways to a large bedroom, with a bed large enough for three or four humans or at least two naga, as well as a couple of low sofas and a lot of cushions along the floor next to a couple of low tables. There was an open archway to another parlor or sitting room beyond.
“This is to be your room, O Tenacious One,” Michiko said, bowing again. “Leslie Kendricks, since you have graciously agreed to sacrifice your manhood to express your anguish at violating the maidenly modesty of Her Highness' ladies-in-waiting, Her Highness has given orders that another room in the women’s quarters is to be prepared for you. However, it will not be ready for an hour or so. In the meanwhile, she begs that you will deign to share your sister’s chamber for the moment.”
Taylor and I glanced at each other. “It’s fine with me if you want to share,” Taylor said, “now that we’re both girls. This is a huge room; I’d feel kind of lost in it...”
“I know what you mean,” I said, “but I have a feeling you’ll be sharing it with several servants a lot of the time.” I’d spent several days in a suite this big at the naga embassy during my first ill-fated trip to this world, and I’d had a couple of servants and a chaperon assigned to me in my guise as Serenikha. “Can you let Serenikha — I mean, Her Highness — know that we’re okay with sharing?”
“I shall tell her of your wishes, Leslie Kendricks.” She bowed again and withdrew.
Taylor rummaged through the wardrobe and cabinets, and found another sari-camisole; she changed out of her kimono into that, or tried to. She got mixed up with it, and I had to help her wind it and tuck it in.
“I can’t believe I need my little brother to show me how to put on a bra,” Taylor muttered, and then, looking at me curiously, “I can’t believe you still remember how to put one of these on after five years.”
“I don’t think I’m remembering from my last trip, exactly. It’s probably my link with Serenikha, giving me access to her grooming skills the way I can speak her languages.”
She nodded. “Now that you’re close together, I’d like to study your link some more. Professor G., I mean the Gray One, she taught us about you last semester — she didn’t use your names, of course, but I knew who she was talking about. She said there’s never been anybody else quite like you, though a bunch of mages have tried forging psychic links between people and had varying degrees of success.”
“Feel free to look all you want, but don’t touch. It works okay how it is, I don’t want us to start randomly swapping bodies again or something.”
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“I think the transformation spell is interacting with your link with Serenikha. It’s making you look more like her.”
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We were tired from our long hike, and Taylor was especially tired after casting several spells, so she laid down on the bed to take a nap. Though there was room for me there as well, I sprawled out on the sofa instead and relaxed, but didn’t fall asleep.
A little while later, a servant tiptoed in and seemed to hesitate, wondering if we were awake. I sat up and looked at her.
“My lady,” she said, “do you or your sister require any refreshment?”
“My sister’s asleep,” I said. “I’d like some tea, if you don’t mind.”
“I shall bring it at once, my lady. Her Highness bid me to say that when you and your sister are rested, she will receive you in her chambers.”
“All right,” I said, “or if you get me some paper so I can leave my sister a note, I’ll slither along and see Serenikha now.”
She returned with a pot of tea and paper, ink, inkstone, water, brushes, sand — all the stuff you needed to write before pencils or ballpoint pens were invented. I hadn’t had occasion to use them during my brief earlier visit, but I found, on picking up the block of ink and the inkstone and looking at them, that I remembered how to use them — another skill I’d unconsciously picked up from Serenikha. I wasn’t sure if Taylor had given herself knowledge of written Draconic as well as spoken, so I wrote my message both in Draconic and in English, and left it on the little table by the bed, along with the pot of tea.
I followed the servant down more long, twisty hallways to a large room brightly lit by skylights. Serenikha uncoiled and slithered toward me as I entered.
“Leslie,” she said, “you look lovely. But where is the Tenacious One?”
“Taking a nap,” I said. “I expect she’ll be along later, when she’s rested from casting all those spells.” I didn’t ask her how she’d recognized me; it was obvious after a moment’s thought.
Several of the women I’d seen for a moment in the baths were there with Serenikha, along with a couple of others I recognized: Bhavalikha, an older nagini who had been my chaperon during my previous visit, and Shiyama, the bonsai kodama my Dad had swapped bodies with during that trip. She and Serenikha had become friends while they were visiting my world in mine and my Dad’s bodies, and Serenikha had kept me posted about her during our dreams over the years.
Sienpai, the tall woman who’d wanted to castrate me, was staring at me now. “Is this the man who intruded on us in the baths?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Serenikha said acerbically. I didn’t mention that for someone without our link it might not be.
Sienpai just smiled and nodded briefly. “This satisfies honor,” she said.
Serenikha ignored that. “You can only stay for about a day, is that right? I’ve got everything planned — you’re here earlier than I expected, so we’ll have more time to visit as you don’t have to travel halfway across the city to get here from your portal. Would you like to see Osalikha?”
“Would I!” I’d seen Serenikha’s dream-image of her any number of times since she was hatched, but I’d never thought I could see her in person. Standing this close to Serenikha, I could feel the overflow of her maternal feelings toward her baby daughter stronger than ever.
“Tiaopai, go to the nursery and see if Osalikha is awake. If so, inform Dhamarikha that I would like to see her.”
The servant — one I’d met when she was working at the naga embassy years ago — nodded and went out. Serenikha gestured me toward one of the empty seats, and we coiled our tails and relaxed.
“I’d like to ask you about something,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Just about the time you arrived here, I started having strange feelings in my tail... you recall how it was when the Patient One put us back in our own bodies but did not undo the spell that made us comfortable in the other one’s body?”
“Do I ever! Yes, I had it too — just after I got here, I started feeling like my legs ought to be a tail. Not as bad as it was back then, not enough to keep me from walking, but I think it made me a little clumsier, so I had to walk more carefully.”
“Ah. Yes, it was like that for me too — until an hour or so ago.”
“About the time when — uh, the Tenacious One transformed me?”
“I think so, yes. The feeling suddenly went away not long after we left you in that alcove so she could work her magic.”
I nodded. “And my tail stopped feeling wrong once it was, well, a tail.” I didn’t ask her if she’d had a sensation of a phantom penis, or mention my momentary sensation of phantom breasts; maybe if we’d been alone, but she hadn’t sent away all the other ladies-in-waiting and servants, and anyway the worst part of the dysphoria I’d suffered was in my tail. I mean, my legs.
“I remember that feeling,” Shiyama said, “or something like it, when the meddling mage pulled me back into my own body for a few intermittent moments... When I first arrived in your father’s body, I felt crippled to not have the link to my tree. But I quickly grew used to it, and pleased with my new stature and strength; and then I felt wrong when I returned to my own body out of season, my tree feeling like a hugely diseased limb and my mobile body small and distorted.”
I nodded. “What about, um, Tisicho and Altimeth?” They were the kitsune and sea-elf that Taylor and Mom had swapped with that time. “Have you heard from them recently?”
“I invited them to my wedding,” Serenikha said, “and Tisicho came, though Altimeth was at sea at the time. Altimeth paid his respects at the palace when he returned from that voyage, a few months later; but I have not seen them since.”
I wasn’t surprised, since I hadn’t heard her talk about them during our dreams. But what Shiyama had said reminded me about them and made me curious.
Just then another nagini slithered in, older than Serenikha but younger than Bhavalikha, and holding a squirming naga baby. Her torso was about the size of a human baby at four or five months old, but her tail was as long as my arm; she wore a simple white satin sari-camisole on her chest and a diaper wrapped around the end of her tail. My heart melted at the sight of her.
The nurse or nanny brought her over to where we were coiling and held her out; she looked around and reached out for her mommy. Serenikha took her, and she gurgled happily. “O, Mommy’s little Sakhi is in a good mood today! This is a very exciting day, little Sakhi. This is your uncle Leslie, whom I have told you all about.”
Shiyama smiled at that, but I was barely aware of it, my attention focused on the tiny form in Serenikha’s arms. She was coiling her tail around her mommy’s right arm, and with her right fist she dug into her mommy’s sari-camisole and untucked the end, so it came loose on that side.
“What,” Serenikha said in mock indignation, “are you hungry again already? Did nursie Dhamarikha not have enough for you? Oh, very well, if you must...” She loosened the sari the rest of the way and let Sakhi nurse.
I sat close to Serenikha, watching her nurse her baby, vaguely aware of the ladies-in-waiting chatting about something. When Sakhi had had enough milk to satisfy her, Serenikha asked, “Would you like to hold her?”
I held out my arms. “Come see Uncle Leslie?” Sakhi looked at me curiously for a few moments, then held out her arms and uncoiled her tail from around Serenikha’s arm. I took her gingerly and held her in my arms, her head lying against my right breast; her tail coiled around my left arm. She watched my face intently for a little while, and then grabbed hold of my sari and tugged at it.
Serenikha laughed, and so did I; I wasn’t sure how much of my amusement was directly from watching Sakhi and how much was spillover from Serenikha, nor did I care. “Sorry, little one, there’s no milk in these breasts. You’ve had two breakfasts today already, isn’t that enough for you?”
She remained hopeful, however, and kept tugging clumsily at my sari until it came loose. I decided to let her find out for herself that my breasts were empty; I might not able to really nurse her, but I was curious about what it felt like, and I figured this would be the next closest thing.
That was how Taylor found us when she came in, escorted by Tiaopai.
“This is my sister,” I said, remembering that nobody here had seen her since she transformed, “the Tenacious One.”
“Sakhi, stop being so greedy and say hello to your aunt,” Serenikha said.
Sakhi gave up in disappointment about then, and looked up at the sound of her mother’s voice. Taylor slithered over next to us.
“This is your baby girl? Um, Osalikha?”
“That’s her nagini-name,” Serenikha confided. “She also has a passel of dragon and kitsune names given by her father and paternal aunts and godmothers. If you hear Pientao talking about Satien, he means Osalikha.”
Taylor looked around the room, and then back at Sakhi resting in my arms and looking back at her. She said gravely to Sakhi, “It is good to meet you, little princess.” Then, to Serenikha: “Would you introduce me to the other ladies of your court, Highness?”
“Oh, yes — I am remiss today, everything has happened so fast. Everyone, this is Leslie Kendricks, who has the other half of my soul. This is his sister, the Tenacious One, who has transformed herself and her brother into nagini to do honor to my court. Honored visitors, you already know Bhavalikha, who came with me from my homeland when I first arrived at the embassy. This is Lady Sienpai, a cousin of my husband, Prince Pientao. Lady Michiko is a cousin of Lady Hanuseri, whom you know...” She introduced us to all the ladies present, including some who hadn’t been in the baths when we arrived. There were some women she didn’t introduce, and I inferred they were servants — it wasn’t always obvious, though on average the ladies had fancier clothes and hairdos than the servants.
After that we all went out to one of the many gardens around the palace, and ate lunch. After looking alertly around for a while, and babbling earnestly at intervals, Sakhi fell asleep in my arms, and I surrendered her to Dhamarikha to take back to the nursery.
“I planned a dinner in your honor for tonight,” Serenikha said, “though I wasn’t quite sure you’d be here in time. You should return to your room a couple of hours ahead of time to refresh yourselves and dress for dinner; I’ll send servants to help you.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to give you another room?”
“No, we’d rather share a room,” Taylor said, putting a hand on mine. “It’s been five years since I had a sister, and I was a man at the time. So I’m looking forward to some girl talk.”
“We used to share a room, when we were little,” I added. That was when we lived in the apartment on San Salvador Avenue, before Mom and Dad bought the house they lived in now, when I was seven and Taylor was nine.
“If you wish to use the baths before dinner, you should probably go now,” Serenikha said. “I’ll join you... my bath this morning was kind of interrupted.” She smiled, as if to show there were no hard feelings about that.
“Oh!” Taylor gasped, “I forgot all about the portal... it’s still open there in the baths!”
“I’ve had eunuchs posted at the door since everyone cleared out,” Serenikha said. “No one should have disturbed it.”
“I’ll work on it, make it dormant so nobody can stumble into it by accident.”
Since Serenikha wasn’t the only one who hadn’t gotten as clean as they wanted before our sudden arrival, several others returned to the baths with us. Taylor went in alone, first, to work on the portal and make it safe so nobody could wander into it by accident. She was in there what seemed like a long time, though I hadn’t any clock — I’d left my cellphone in my luggage in our room. Serenikha, Shiyama and I chatted about palace gossip, but after a while I grew distracted and didn’t contribute much to the conversation, thinking about how long a time Taylor was taking with the portal.
Then she slithered out, wearing what I was sure was a fake smile.
“All done,” she said. “Come on in, the water’s fine.”
I followed her, seeing that the portal was gone or at least invisible. “You hid it so nobody can stumble into it?” I asked.
“Yep!” Again, too forcibly cheerful to be real. I waited until we were undressed and in the bath, and made sure I was closer to Taylor than anybody else. All the other women wanted to be close to Serenikha, it seemed, so it wasn’t hard to let some of them get between me and her.
“What gives?” I whispered to Taylor, our voices covered, I hoped, by the louder conversation from the other end of the bath.
“Something’s wrong with the portal,” she said, “it’s too small.”
“What?”
“When I came in here it had already shrunk down to about eight inches in diameter. And it was still shrinking... I tried to enlarge it, but I only got it up to about two feet wide before it shrank again. I think the magic level on the other side is fluctuating more than I expected — it might fall so low the portal collapses entirely, or it might increase enough that I can get us home through it...”
“Shit.”
“So I closed it down to a couple of nanometers,” (that word was in English), “and hopefully that will avoid depleting the local level of magic over there so it has a chance to build up again. But we’ll need to leave as soon as I can get it working again.”
“If you can get it working again.” I realized I was breathing too fast, and willed myself to calm down.
“Don’t panic,” she said. “We might miss the rest of the semester, but we’re not going to be stuck here for the rest of our lives. The worlds are getting closer together and there’s one of those magic surges in North America every few months, one somewhere in the world almost every month... if this portal collapses, I can get the Gray One or some of my fellow students to help me open another one somewhere else.”
“Good... I guess.”
Shiyama swam over and splashed us. “What is so interesting that it cannot be shared?” she teased.
“Oh, nothing much,” Taylor said with another fake smile. “I was reminding her how Dad used to give us baths when we were small.”
“A boy and a girl together?” She sounded interested, not shocked.
“It was when we were very small,” I said. “I barely remember it.” I’d seen photos of us in the bath, me at two and Taylor almost four, but the photo-images had replaced the real memories by now.
We scrubbed each other’s backs, and chatted about inconsequential things. Gradually other women started getting out of the baths and drying off, and Taylor and I followed. Shiyama showed us where there were wraps and robes we could wear back to our room, and Serenikha said she had assigned servants to lay out our clothes for dinner on the bed.
“And they’ll help you do your hair and so forth, too — just ring the bell when you are ready.”
“We will,” Taylor said. “But I shall linger here for a few moments to check on the portal spell. And — if possible, Your Highness, I would like to speak with you privately before dinner, or perhaps after.”
“Before dinner, then. I’ll come to your room when I’ve finished dressing.”
I stayed with Taylor while everyone else put on their wraps or robes and left. She took up her staff and pointed it at a spot in the middle of the air, roughly where the portal had been, and started chanting. A minute later a tiny sphere of darkness appeared and expanded, then a dim greenish light appeared in the center of the sphere. But it got no bigger than a foot across before she withdrew her staff and let it shrink to almost nothing again.
“It’s not recovered yet,” she sighed. “Well, we might as well eat something.”
The servants were still braiding our hair and plaiting ivory rods into it when Serenikha called. Another servant came in and said, “My ladies, Her Highness the Princess Serenikha is here.”
“Send her in,” I said, and a moment later she slithered in.
“You said you wished to speak with me privately, O Tenacious One?” she asked.
“Yes,” Taylor said. She told Serenikha what she’d told me about the portal; she switched to English, probably so the servants wouldn’t understand.
“Oh, no! Then you’ll be unable to go home?”
“For a little while, perhaps — but I hope the portal will recover enough for us to pass through it by the time dinner is over. And if not, I should be able to open another portal to somewhere in our world within a month or two.”
“You are welcome to stay at the palace as long as you need to, of course. And if you need anything, any materials for your spells or a large space to work, it is yours for the asking. Or I could ask one of the other mages at court to assist you.”
“I’ll just need access to the women’s baths later in the evening and maybe during the night. I hope the portal will be recovered enough to dilate fully within two or three hours, after dinner, but if not I will get up several times during the night to check on it; and we will have to leave quickly when the opportunity arises, without taking time for goodbyes.”
“I wish you could stay as long as you’d planned,” Serenikha said after a moment’s thought, “but I hope you will not be forced to stay longer. In any case, you are welcome... Is there anything else?”
“I think that’s it.”
The nagini hairdressers kept working on our hair; they were almost done when Serenikha remarked: “I see that you’ve changed Leslie’s scales... are you going to change your own to match?”
“What?” I asked, and Taylor looked startled. She twisted her head around to look at my tail, causing Talarikha to pull her hair; I, being perhaps more at home in a nagini body, moved my tail instead so I could look at it without moving my head. Sure enough, there at the end the last few bands were green and blue, like Serenikha’s, instead of the coral-pink, yellow and teal pattern that Taylor had given us when she cast the transformation spell.
“Hmm,” Taylor said, peering close at me, and then, with a glance at Serenikha: “Aha.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m not sure yet... Let’s keep an eye on it and see if your scales keep changing.”
“You know something,” I said; “spit it out!”
“Well... I think the transformation spell is interacting with your link with Serenikha. It’s making you look more like her.”
“Can you stop it?” Serenikha asked, and I added: “What part of look don’t touch don’t you understand?”
“Sorry! I didn’t think it would... I mean, even the Gray One doesn’t fully understand how your link works, how am I supposed to figure it out with less than a hundredth of his experience?”
“For now, you can avoid casting any more spells on me,” I said, forgetting that I was the one who’d asked her to transform me. “Is this going to turn me into Serenikha’s twin?”
“If we wind up staying here until I have a chance to open another portal... probably so. But I can break it and recast it more carefully, so it doesn’t get tangled with your link next time. And it would wear off by itself anyway, it’s not permanent.”
“I don’t mind having Leslie be my twin,” Serenikha said, “but we’ll need to tell people about it, and ensure that we dress distinctly so people don’t get us mixed up.”
“And if you break it, Sienpai and her friends will be upset about me being the man who spied on them in their bath,” I added. “I guess we can leave it alone... but you’d better talk to the Gray One about it before long.”
“I’ll contact him this evening, if we aren’t home by then.”
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The guards wouldn’t let the Knowing One in to the women’s quarters, though, until he transformed himself into a woman, or maybe put on an illusion of being a woman; I had a suspicion it was the latter, given how fast the change was effected and the way “she” walked.
My latest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.
Dinner that night was not the huge, elaborate event I’d attended during my previous visit, when Serenikha’s uncle Ravadh had made me impersonate her at several public functions (including the first half of her betrothal with Pientao). There were only a couple of dozen people present, several of the ladies we’d seen in Serenikha’s chamber or in the baths, plus Pientao and a matching number of men, most of whom I vaguely recognized from images in our shared dreams but hadn’t met during my previous visit. We were seated alternately man and woman, with Pientao at the head of the table and Serenikha to his right, then a mage who was introduced as the Knowing One between Serenikha and Taylor, one of Pientao’s cousins between Taylor and me, and so on around the table.
When Serenikha introduced us to Pientao just before dinner, he said: “Leslie? Oh, yes, Serenikha’s told me to expect you. I told the guards to let me know when you arrived, though, right after they showed you to your rooms.”
“We, ah, didn’t arrive at the main entrance of the palace,” Taylor said, and Serenikha explained how the portal had opened up in the wrong place because of our link interfering with Taylor’s spell. She didn’t mention the little detail that we’d appeared in the baths while she and most of her ladies were naked, though.
“Oh. Well, it’s good to meet you again. Somehow I thought you were a human man, though?” He glanced at Serenikha.
“I usually am; my sister transformed me so I could visit with Her Highness without any suspicion of impropriety.”
“Good. I mean, I trust her, but you know what the palace is like: it produces more gossip than imperial edicts.”
I suspected some of that gossip would sooner or later reach him with some garbled version of our arrival in the middle of Serenikha’s bath; hopefully we’d be gone by then.
During dinner itself I didn’t have much chance to talk to Serenikha or Pientao; I talked some with my neighbors on either side, Pientao’s cousin and a naga nobleman whose name I’ve since forgotten, and some with Michiko and her fiancé Teruyama, across the table. Musicians were playing at the other end of the room, which was nice in a way, but the music kept me from hearing anyone who wasn’t right next to me. I tried to be a good conversational partner, answering a lot of questions from the naga nobleman about America and Earth, and finding unexpected support from Teruyama, who said he’d visited our world twice. But I was more than a little distracted, thinking about the portal and whether Taylor would be able to get it open again.
The Knowing One wanted to come with us to the baths to see the portal. The guards wouldn’t let him in to the women’s quarters, though, until he transformed himself into a woman, or maybe put on an illusion of being a woman; I had a suspicion it was the latter, given how fast the change was effected and the way “she” walked. She, or he, followed me and Taylor to the baths, talking shop with Taylor in terms that were mostly over my head, though I’d picked up a few things from listening to the Gray One and Taylor over the years.
“I think the problem is that the magic level on the other side of the portal has dropped a lot faster than I expected,” Taylor said.
“What was it when you opened the portal?”
“Fourteen hundred thaums per square meter, and still rising. I needed at least eleven hundred thaums to open a basic minimal portal, but more to get it to open usefully wide and stay open long enough for a decent visit...”
By this time my tail was completely banded with blue and green, but I hadn’t said anything to Taylor about it; she needed to concentrate on the portal. If we could get home to a lower-magic area, that should break the transformation by itself.
Taylor pointed with her staff to the spot in midair where the portal had been, and the Knowing One peered closely at it and nodded. “Let’s see you try to dilate it,” she said, and Taylor started working, while the Knowing One and I backed up to give her room.
She chanted and waved her staff in complex spiraling motions, and the portal began to open again. But it didn’t get very far, maybe eight or ten inches, before it narrowed almost to invisibility again. She kept working, a determined expression on her face, and got it to open a couple of feet wider this time, only to have it close down.
“I think I see,” the Knowing One said. “Shall I give it a try?”
“Go ahead,” Taylor said.
She didn’t use a staff, but I think the large pearl she took from around her neck might have served the same purpose; she waved it in the air in patterns similar to the ones Taylor had used, but she chanted something different. (I’d heard Taylor do that portal-chant three times now and though I didn’t understand it, I could recognize it by now.) But this time the portal didn’t even open two inches before it closed again.
“It’s still there,” she said, “but probably we’ve used up the ambient magic in the region on the other side, trying to get it open. We’ll need to let it build up again... we should try again tomorrow at dawn.”
“There’s plenty of magic here, right?” I asked. “Is there maybe a way to send some of that magic through the portal, to make up for the lack of it over there?”
Taylor looked startled, and the Knowing One said, “I don’t know. I’ve heard of these portals but never seen one, and I’m not sure how they work... but it’s worth a try. We’ll have to wait at least a few hours before we can even open it enough to send power through, though.”
“Let’s meet back here at midnight,” Taylor proposed, and the Knowing One agreed.
We started back to the dining hall, where most of the other guests at Serenikha and Pientao’s dinner were watching the after-dinner puppet show. “Weren’t you going to contact the Gray One next, if you couldn’t get it open?” I asked. “You could ask him if sending magic through the portal would work.”
“I will,” Taylor said, “after I rest a few minutes.”
We caught the tail end of the puppet show, and then the party broke up. Some of the women who didn’t live in the palace went home with their husbands or brothers; others returned to the women’s quarters with us, and we wound up in Serenikha’s parlor, all except Taylor who said she was going to our room to contact the Gray One. I’d offered to come with her, but she said she wanted to be alone; I was afraid that meant she’d be bluntly talking with him about bad news she didn’t want me to hear, but I tried to put those fears aside and focus on hanging out with my best friend.
My resemblance to Serenikha was getting pretty noticeable now; I’d had to loosen and refasten my sari to accommodate my slightly larger breasts, and not long after we settled down onto couches and cushions in Serenikha’s parlor, Bhavalikha said:
“What did you do to your scales, Leslie?”
“It’s a spell Taylor worked — it’s making me more like Serenikha.”
She looked closely at me. “Yes, I can see it in your face now too; you look like her cousin Radhena, but I didn’t notice any resemblance earlier.”
“She does, doesn’t she?” Serenikha said. “The Tenacious One said that her spell to turn Leslie into a nagini was doing that because Leslie’s soul and mine are coiled together.”
“It’s not doing anything to you, my dear, is it?” Bhavalikha looked apprehensively at Serenikha, who laughed.
“Oh, no, and I suppose it won’t do Leslie any harm after she goes home. You don’t have enough magic to transform people there, do you?”
“Nowhere near enough.”
“But Kinuko says there is more magic in the other world every year,” Michiko said. “Is this intertwining of your souls affecting you more than it used to?”
“Well, more now than ever, because we’re in the same world together,” I said. “But over the last few years — maybe so.” We were sharing dreams more often this last year than we’d done while I was in high school, but most of that was because Taylor had helped me get into the highest-magic dorm on campus.
None of us knew enough about magic to say anything more substantive than that, but it didn’t keep Michiko and an elf named Theremisia from offering more speculations, some of which made me twitch my tail uncomfortably, and Serenikha too. After a little too much of that, she said suddenly: “Who is for riddles?”
Several of the women eagerly cried out, none more than Michiko, and we took turns offering riddles which the others tried to guess. I wasn’t very good at it, as a lot of the riddles required a cultural context which I didn’t have quite enough of despite my link with Serenikha, but once or twice I had an intuition about the answer that turned out to be right, though I’d been too diffident of my own reasoning to speak up. When my turn came, I offered them one of the riddles from The Hobbit, the one about mail-armor that doesn’t clink. Michiko got it at last, though it kept them guessing for a while.
Then the party broke up, and we straggled back to our rooms. I found Taylor already asleep, so I couldn’t ask her what she’d learned from the Gray One. I took off my sari and slid in beside her, and was soon asleep despite my worries.
I woke up to find Taylor picking up her staff to go. “You can rest,” she said. “If I get the portal open I’ll send a servant to get you.”
“No,” I said, “what if you can only keep it open for a couple of minutes?” I hastily dressed, grabbed our luggage, which we’d hardly touched, and followed her to the baths.
The Knowing One, again in the guise of a white-haired but unwrinkled woman, was waiting for us. “Have you seen anything?” Taylor asked.
“Nothing definitive. I wanted to wait for you. It does look stronger than it did a few hours ago, though.”
“Let’s try it,” and she started waving her staff and chanting. I slithered over to the wall and sat back on my coiled tail.
I watched them work, and thought. Another idea occurred to me, something to suggest if this didn’t work, but I didn’t want to interrupt them with it now. Then just as the portal began to open slightly, I noticed a dampness in the front of my sari. I felt it and realized it was just over my right nipple, and there was a fainter dampness in front of the other nipple... I put a finger to my sari, then held it up to my mouth and licked it. Milk.
Of course. Serenikha was nursing little Sakhi, so as the spell made me more like her, I’d started lactating. I wondered if my face looked like hers already; was there a mirror around here...?
By this time Taylor had the portal open, but only about three inches wide. The Knowing One was standing beside Taylor and a few feet to her left, chanting and waving her left hand while she held the big pearl in her right, and light was pouring out of the pearl into the portal. But from the expressions on their faces, I wasn’t sure it was going right. I spotted a large mirror over by another wall, but just as I uncoiled and started slithering over there to take a look, the portal suddenly flared larger, and I stopped dead. It wasn’t expanding smoothly in its spherical form as I’d seen it do before, here or in the clearing back in Yosemite; it was reaching out ragged tendrils, ranging from a few inches to over ten feet long, most of which receded into the central mass as quickly as they extended. And there was a humming noise I hadn’t heard the earlier times, which fluctuated deeper and higher in pitch as the tendrils flared and retracted. Taylor and the Knowing One backed away from the portal, but kept working on it. Now the tendrils were waving around, and Taylor yelled “Stop feeding it!” The light stopped coming from the pearl a few seconds later, and moments after that, the portal collapsed and vanished.
Everything was quiet. Taylor and the Knowing One kept looking at the place where the portal had been; after a few seconds, Taylor lowered her staff to the ground and the Knowing One put the pearl necklace back around her neck.
“What happened?”
“Feeding extra power into the portal destabilized it,” Taylor said. “It wouldn’t have been safe to go through it like that... and once we stopped feeding it, it collapsed. There’s nothing left to work with; we’ll have to make another portal in a month or two when the conditions are right.”
“So... what did I miss, earlier? When you talked with the Gray One?”
“He said he’d never tried feeding power through a portal, but it might work. I still think it might, if we had a portal that wasn’t on the verge of collapse to begin with.”
“Did he say anything about this transformation spell? By the way, do I look exactly like Serenikha already?”
“Hmm... no, but you’re more like her sister than her cousin. You’ll probably be her twin by morning. The Gray One said it shouldn’t be a problem if we could get the portal open again — when we went home, the spell would dissipate without enough magic to sustain it and you’d go back to normal. But since we’re staying here... he told me some things to check on, some diagnostic tests to run. We’ll do that in the morning, after I get some sleep.”
“All right.”
We left the baths, and in the corridor outside we found not only the night-shift guards, but a couple of sleepless women, including Sienpai.
“What happened?” she asked. “We heard a loud noise from the baths, and then shouting...”
“We tried to open the portal and it didn’t work,” Taylor said. “We’ll be imposing on Her Highness' hospitality for a while longer, I suppose.”
“Oh,” I said, “could I get some breast pads? Or a sari designed for nursing mothers? My nipples are leaking.”
Taylor and the Knowing One had told the eunuch guards that there was no more reason to keep people out of the baths, but they said they couldn’t stand down until Her Highness said so. The next morning Taylor slept late, having worn herself out working on the portal, so I quietly got up and went to the baths; but I found several other women waiting, some of them arguing with the guards, who said they couldn’t let anyone in but a mage unless the princess said so. When I arrived, someone said: “Your Highness, tell them to let us in —”
But Shiyama interrupted, and said: “You’re Leslie, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. She nodded.
“I could tell by your hair and nails. Serenikha had the servants take out her hair ornaments and re-plait it before she went to bed, but it looks like you slept in them. And you’re still wearing yesterday’s nail polish, which went with your old pink and yellow scales.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t figure out how to get them out and I’m not used to having servants.” And I hadn’t worn nail polish since I was a little boy, too trusting of my willfully gender-blind parents to realize that it would get me laughed off the playground.
When Serenikha arrived, I told her what had happened, and she dismissed the guards so everyone could go in and bathe. “I’m sorry you aren’t able to go home,” she said, “but I’ll try to make your longer visit a pleasant one. We can go on an expedition into the countryside, or at least out into the city. And if you stay another month, you will be here for Wushao’s wedding; that is to be the event of the season... And we can have so much fun being twins!”
“Yeah,” I said, “about that... I don’t just look like you. Does Sakhi nurse more on the right side than the left?”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“Because I seem to be leaking more from my right breast.”
“Oh! Would you like to nurse Sakhi?”
“...Could I?” I’d wanted to, but it seemed too intimate a thing to ask, even of so close a friend as Serenikha.
“Right after we bathe!”
But it wasn’t right afterward. Taylor slithered in to the baths looking bedraggled, and answered a few more of Serenikha’s questions than I’d been able to. No, she didn’t know exactly when the next magic surge would let us go home. Yes, the transformation spell might last a lot longer than intended if it had gotten really tangled up with our psychic link, but she didn’t think it was that bad. Probably it was still a separate spell that was being influenced by the presence of the link.
After we returned to our rooms to dress, we gathered for breakfast in Serenikha’s “small” dining room — there were nearly as many people present as at last night’s dinner, all of them women. Dhamarikha brought Sakhi in after a few minutes, and did a double take when she saw me and Serenikha next to each other — a lot of people had been doing that.
“Good morning, Sakhi!” Serenikha said, and I added: “I hope you’re hungry.”
Sakhi didn’t hesitate between us; she reached out her arms toward her mommy. Serenikha loosened her sari and let her nurse, and then held her out toward me; Sakhi looked at me with wide eyes for a few moments before she uncoiled her tail from around her mommy’s arm.
“Remember me, little one? Uncle Leslie? I look different today, but surprise! I’ve got milk for you this time.” I loosened my sari and let her nurse.
She was hungry. Man, I think if Taylor had bespelled every woman in the court to lactate all at once, that baby would have done full justice to the menu.
Taylor smiled and shook her head. “That’s another thing I never thought my little brother would do before me.”
“You just know that if we tell Mom and Dad about this, they’re going to take it as an occasion to ask us when we’re going to settle down and give them grandchildren.”
“Good point. They won’t hear about it from me... But, you know, when you’re finished with that we really should go cast those diagnostic spells and figure out what’s up with the twin-transformation thing.”
So when Sakhi had sucked every drop of milk she could out of me, I handed her over to Michiko, who said she hadn’t held her for several days, and Taylor and I returned to our room.
She drew another chalk circle, and had me coil up in it, and slithered around tapping the circle with her staff, much as I’d seen her and the Gray One doing for several types of spell. After a few minutes I felt a tingling in my right cheek, then saw little flecks of light in the corners of my eyes, and heard a ringing in my ears, and tasted something like bitter tea; I reported these sensations, as Taylor had asked me to, and at some of them she nodded, at others she looked perplexed. Finally my left breast glowed softly amber through the thick cloth of my new maternity sari, and then faded.
“Well,” Taylor said, as she put down her staff and rested. “...You can break the circle now.”
“Give it to me straight, doc; am I gonna live?”
“You’ll probably outlive all the kids in your dorm,” she said. “But you’ll spend your last few centuries as a nagini.”
“Oh, I already knew that.” Mr. G. had told me that whenever Serenikha or I died, whichever was first, we’d pop into the other one’s body, probably ending up in a sort of time-share arrangement. It was a weird thing to look forward to, but I figured I had several decades more to get used to the idea. “But what about this transformation spell?”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “The transformation spell is apparently getting tangled up with your link to Serenikha. Maybe the Gray One could disentangle it, but I don’t think I should try. And it looks like that might have made it permanent; at least it’s not going to wear off as soon as it normally would. It will keep you in sync with Serenikha as long as you’re both in a high-magic area — such as almost anywhere in this world. Once we go home, you’ll revert to your old self; but over the next few decades, as magic levels in our world rise, you’ll have to avoid high-magic areas if you want to remain human and male, and eventually you’d have a hard time finding low-magic areas anymore.”
“Not sure why I’d want to, since I’d age so much slower as a nagini.”
“Even after magic levels in our world rise as high as they are here, I expect a nagini slithering down the sidewalk would draw some attention. Not to mention that during the transitional period, you might be switching back and forth several times a day as you go to work and go home, or even just staying in one place while magic levels fluctuate.”
“Well, maybe I’ll migrate over here.”
“You seem to be taking this very calmly.”
“It’s not as weird as the stuff I’ve already had to get used to, really. And the consequences are decades away — most of them anyway. If Serenikha doesn’t mind me being her twin, why should I?”
“Why indeed?”
“And I figure I’ll get a second opinion from the Gray One when we go home. You could be wrong, right?”
“Quite possibly. The Gray One gave me that diagnostic spell, but... some of the results were just weird, not anything he told me might happen. We’ll see.”
I'll post part five next Monday or Tuesday, probably.
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“I like being a nagini well enough, just on the physical level, but — well, I don’t know how other people in my country will react.... Even if people are getting used to seeing magical stuff happen, they might stare at me a lot.”
My latest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.
Taylor wanted to stay in and rest after that, and asked the servant to bring her some lunch. “I’ve got another spell I need to cast in the evening,” she said. “Give Serenikha my apologies about dinner.” I went back to Serenikha’s chambers, and found she wasn’t there, but she’d left a servant with orders to show me to Wushao’s section of the women’s quarters, where she was visiting.
I’ve spoken so far, perhaps, as if Serenikha and the ladies of her court were the only residents of the women’s quarters. No; they had their own little neighborhood of rooms within it, but there were other neighborhoods (they were way too big and complex to call suites or apartments) where the other princesses lived, the emperor’s wives, sisters, daughters and daughters-in-law, each with their own little circle of companions. Some of these neighborhoods were practically deserted at the moment, because the princess who occupied them was away from the capital, living with her husband in the provincial town he was governor of or the foreign capital he was ambassador to.
The servant led me through one of these empty, poorly-lit sections of the palace on the way to Wushao’s quarters. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I asked.
“This is the shortest way,” she said, and with an apologetic glance at me: “Perhaps my lady would prefer a longer way that is more beautiful to behold?”
“No, the shortest is fine with me.” We came to a pair of double doors, which she unlatched to let me through, and into a brighter-lit corridor, down which a couple of other servants were rolling a cart full of pitchers, bowls and dishes. The servant led me back the way they had come, and paused outside a wide door.
“Wait here and I will announce you,” she said, and went in. I sat back on my coiled tail and waited, but not for long; she emerged from the door gestured me forward, and I slithered in.
“Oh my, she does look exactly like you!” Wushao had been sitting on a sofa in the middle of the room, surrounded by other women mostly near her age with a few older; she stood up when she saw me come in.
“Hello,” I said. “We’ve met before, but —”
“Yes, I know; Serenikha told me. And she told me how you came here and turned into her twin but I could hardly believe it...”
Serenikha gestured to the empty seat beside her, and I joined her as Wushao sat back down too. “Where is your sister?” Serenikha asked.
“Resting; she said not to expect her at dinner either.”
“What did she find out about the spell?”
I hesitated, not wanting to talk about our link there in front of all those other people. “I’ll tell you when we’re alone.”
Her face fell; she could figure out that meant it was bad news. I tried to change the subject. “So, Wushao... Serenikha told me that you were going to be married?”
“Yes; to Lord Tirishu. A tengu nobleman from the northeastern province.”
“What is he like?”
“He’s not a bad sort for a tengu, I suppose. He’s not much older than me, and reasonably good-looking, and not as silly as some other tengu I’ve met, even if he does insist on wearing that ridiculous little hat.”
I supposed it was an arranged marriage to cement an alliance between Wushao’s father, the Emperor, and Lord Tirishu’s people — like Serenikha’s marriage to Pientao. Serenikha seemed to be happier in her arranged marriage than I would have expected, but she and Pientao didn’t get on so well as Mom and Dad, either; they hadn’t slept together since Sakhi was conceived, and weren’t planning to share a bed again until she was weaned and it was time to try again for a son. The whole arranged marriage thing seemed weird to me, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of it if Wushao was okay with it, as she seemed to be.
“So what do you have planned for the next month?”
They told me about the parties, picnics and expeditions into the countryside they had planned; they had to be worked in around the banquets Lord Tirishu was invited to, which Wushao would have to attend and where Pientao and Serenikha, though sometimes invited, were usually not seated close to Wushao and Lord Tirishu.
“Since you’re staying for a while longer, I’ll have Pientao try to get you invitations to them too; you can sit with us.”
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to sit through a lot of banquets like the one I’d attended during my last visit, even if I was sitting close to Serenikha and could talk with her. But I didn’t tell Serenikha I didn’t want to go.
After lunch, Serenikha and I went over to the nursery, which was near Wushao’s quarters. There were several small children running around, mostly humans or elves plus one adorable kitsune girl who only had one tail yet. Dhamarikha and a couple of human nurses were taking care of the little babies in another room; we found Osalikha and a human baby lying on a big blanket over cushions in the floor. The human was just starting to crawl a little, lifting his head and pushing along though his arms and legs weren’t really coordinated yet. Osalikha was propped up on her arms, but not slithering yet; she smiled and babbled when we slithered into the room. Serenikha scooped her up and swooped her through the air, making her giggle and Dhamarikha frown disapprovingly.
“You’ll have her vomiting all over,” she warned.
“Will you, Sakhi? No, you have a strong stomach like Mommy.” And Sakhi didn’t vomit while Serenikha was playing with her. No, she waited and did that after her mommy handed her to me to hold.
My disgust at the baby-vomit running down my left side was ameliorated by the spillover from Serenikha’s amusement. She was valiantly trying not to laugh, but I didn’t have any reason not to, and once I started she couldn’t hold it in any longer either; Dhamarikha looked at us like we were crazy. After she and the other servants helped me get cleaned up, we sprawled on the floor and played with Sakhi and the little boy, whose name was Tenshi; he was Sakhi’s cousin, the youngest son of one of Pientao and Wushao’s older brothers. I’d flick the tip of my tail this way and that and let him try to catch it in his tiny hand; he was so determined I finally had to let him “get” me.
After we’d nursed Sakhi again, and seen her settled down for her afternoon nap, we returned to our rooms to get ready for dinner. I found Taylor reading a book she’d brought from home, and snacking on some sweetbread the servants had brought her.
“Are you feeling better? Want to join us for dinner?”
“Yes and no. I had a note from the Knowing One, inviting me to dine with him and a couple of other mages, so I’ll be meeting them over in the north wing in a couple of hours. And you need to keep tomorrow morning free: the Gray One’s going to visit then and take a look at your transformation spell, if I can arrange it. And we’re going to talk to Mom and Dad then, too.”
“What do you mean, if you can arrange it?”
“I talked to him earlier today, and he’s agreed to come if I can find him a host body. I was going to ask the Knowing One when I see him. I figure we’ll swap me with Mom, and the Knowing One with the Gray One. Then you can visit with Mom and the Gray One can figure out what’s up with your spell, and then I can swap with Dad and you can hang out with him for a while. The Gray One telephoned them after I talked to him last night, and they’re going to come to his office tomorrow evening — which will be late morning here — so he can swap them with me one at a time.”
None of them could swap with me, because my link with Serenikha made it too dangerous to cast the body-swapping spell on either of us. Maybe I’d wind up in Dad’s body, Serenikha in mine, and Dad in Serenikha’s; or maybe Serenikha and I would share Dad’s body and one of our bodies would be vacant... the Gray One couldn’t predict what would happen.
So we got ready for dinner, and I joined Serenikha, Wushao and others a little later. Taylor still wasn’t back from her dinner when I returned to the room after dining and playing with Sakhi some more.
Serenikha and I dreamed that night of Yosemite Park; I met her slithering along one of the trails overlooking a small canyon. I told her what Taylor had said about the transformation spell. “I didn’t want to tell you in front of all those courtiers and servants,” I explained. “I don’t see how you can stand to have them around all the time.”
“It’s what we’re used to, I suppose. I was surprised when you first told me how you live without servants, nobody around but your parents and sister, and them usually in other rooms. But — what about this transformation? It’s going to make you into my twin permanently, once the magic levels in your world rise high enough?”
“That’s what Taylor thinks. Tomorrow the Gray One’s going to take a look for himself and maybe he’ll have a solution. Or a different diagnosis.”
“Does that bother you?”
“I like being a nagini well enough, just on the physical level, but — well, I don’t know how other people in my country will react. Probably by the time the levels are high enough for me to turn into a nagini again, magic won’t be a secret anymore, so it should be okay. But even if people are getting used to seeing magical stuff happen, they might stare at me a lot... I guess I’ll wait and see how it works out. If things get too hot for me back home, can I come back here?”
“Of course... I don’t understand how magic is still such a secret in your world even now, though. Kinuko tells me that magic has been possible over there for over thirty years, and the Gray One’s sent thousands of people between worlds... how can that many people keep a secret?”
I shrugged. “It’s not the secret it used to be, but most people who hear about it third-hand dismiss it as a crazy urban legend. People who’ve experienced the magic first hand don’t often talk about it openly, because they can’t prove it or demonstrate it; they just give their friends a strong but vague recommendation for the Gray One’s agency. His reputation spreads by word of mouth, and then the repeat customers get together on the forum and talk about what they saw in your world and what bodies they had and what they want to see next time. And the forum’s not hidden, but when strangers stumble across it they just assume the forumites are talking about some obscure game they aren’t familiar with.”
“Maybe when your sister opens another portal, I’ll come through with you — just for a quick look around before the portal closes again.”
“Let’s ask Taylor if that will work.”
“So where are we meeting the Knowing One?” I asked Taylor the next morning after breakfast.
“There’s a room in the north wing we can use. The Knowing One agreed to swap bodies with the Gray One — he’s eager to see our world, even if it’s just for a couple of hours — but he didn’t want to come to the women’s quarters again if it wasn’t necessary.”
“Wuss.”
Taylor grinned back at me. “Not everybody’s as gender-blind as you and me.”
“It’s not like he’d even suffer dysphoria from turning himself into a girl. He was just using an illusion, and even that was too threatening to his masculinity!”
She looked sharply at me. “How’d you know?”
“The way he walked, and how fast he changed — just a few seconds, not like the fifteen or twenty minutes it took when you transformed me.”
“It wouldn’t have taken as long to transform you into a human girl as a nagini. And a more experienced mage could transform somebody faster than me. But — yeah, I think you’re right. He is kind of a wuss, but he’s doing us a favor, so don’t tell him that to his face.”
“I won’t.”
It took us half an hour to slither through the women’s quarters and the central part of the palace to the north wing, where the Knowing One was waiting. Taylor seemed to mostly know her way around, though she hesitated a couple of times and had to ask passing servants for directions. Each time they offered to escort us, but Taylor declined.
We arrived at a curtained door just off one of the gardens, and Taylor pulled the bell-rope outside. The Knowing One parted the curtains a few moments later.
“Come in, O Tenacious One. I have prepared the space as you requested.”
He led us through a small parlor crowded with furniture, with a window onto the garden, into a larger windowless room that was nearly bare except for some calligraphy banners hanging from the walls, and a couple of chairs designed for naga over by the door. There were three large semicircles of blue chalk laid out on the floor.
“Looks good,” Taylor said. She pulled her cell phone out of her fanny pack — we’d adjusted all the power saving options and still had a little bit of battery power left, more on hers than on mine — and checked the time. “It’s nearly six-thirty back home. Time to begin. Get into your circle, close it up, and follow my lead... Leslie, you can rest over there for now,” gesturing to the naga-chair. I settled down and watched.
They closed up the circles around them with more chalk, and then Taylor began chanting; every little while the Knowing One echoed something she’d said. She waved her staff in complex motions, and the Knowing One waved his pearl in similar but not, I thought, identical patterns; and then Taylor struck the edge of her circle with her staff.
Then she blinked and looked around in momentary confusion, glancing around the room and back at her coiled tail.
“Ms. G. told me Taylor had turned herself into a nagini. So does this count as my twelfth distinct species, because I’ve never been a naga before, or not, because Taylor’s really human under this enchantment?”
The Knowing One, or rather the Gray One, I realized, smiled in amusement. “You can count it however you like. But however you count it, Ray will soon be tied with you again.”
(Mom and Dad had this thing going where they kept a running count of the number of distinct species they’d been members of during their thirty-plus visits to this world. They’d been tied at eleven for two or three years, and every year before their anniversary trip they’d tease each other about pulling ahead; but they kept ending up wearing bodies of the same kinds they’d worn several times before, usually elf, dwarf or centaur.)
“Hi, Mom. Hi, Mr. G.” I got up and slithered over close to the circle where Mom was coiled up in Taylor’s body.
“Is that you, Leslie? Tell me what’s been going on! Ms. G. told me some of what Taylor had told her, but it wasn’t very clear...”
So I explained as best I could, though I didn’t understand all the technical details of the magic. The Gray One listened and nodded, and asked a couple of questions — he asked me to repeat what I’d said to Taylor about the sensations I felt during the diagnostic spell, for instance.
“Oh, Leslie!,” Mom said, “I’m sorry about all this. I wish I could hug you, but Ms. G. said we weren’t to break the circles, because we need to swap a couple more times so your dad can visit as well.”
“Air hug?” I suggested, and we did that.
“If you’re ready,” the Gray One said, “I’ll work another diagnostic spell.”
“Sure.”
“Go ahead and get into your circle and close it up.”
I slithered into the third semicircle and completed it with chalk, then waited while the Gray One cast his spell. I could tell it was different from the one he’d given Leslie to cast; the gestures he made with the Knowing One’s pearl were different, and the sensations I got from it were different too. My vision went dim for a minute or so and I heard soft rustling noises all around me, which faded as I started smelling something rancid — fortunately that didn’t last long before it gave way to a sweeter smell and sharper vision. I gave the Gray One a running commentary on all this, and finally he said: “You can break your circle.”
“What did you figure out?”
“Taylor was right,” he said, “your transformation is definitely entangled with your link to Serenikha. That will make it very hard, and perhaps dangerous, to try to remove it. But there’s some good news too.”
“There is?”
“Yes. It can’t safely be removed, but it can be tweaked; your sister or I could adjust the target form part of the spell, and you’d change into that form, whatever it might be. And then over the course of one to three days, probably, you’d change into Serenikha’s twin again. I think most forms would probably last several days, because the first form the Tenacious One gave you was already a nagini, and the synchronization with Serenikha’s form didn’t have so far to go.”
“So...” I remembered the idea I’d had earlier, and hadn’t mentioned to Taylor until it was too late. “If you changed me into a pixie, I’d stay a pixie for several days?”
“Hmm... you’d start growing to Serenikha’s size right away, and probably within a day your legs would start fusing into a naga-tail, and your wings would shrink. But you’d probably remain small enough for your wings to support you for several hours, at least.”
“Long enough to fly through a little portal, like you used for Maella?”
He smiled. “That’s a clever idea. I’ll have to mention that to the Tenacious One. If you and your sister change into pixies, you’d be able to use a small portal and wouldn’t have to wait for a peak magic surge.”
“I thought of it earlier, when Taylor was trying to open the portal and couldn’t get it open more than a few inches. But I didn’t want to interrupt her while she was working, and then the portal collapsed, and not long after that we realized my transformation wasn’t working like it was supposed to... so I didn’t mention it.”
“Well, let that be a lesson — share your ideas even if you are afraid they might be stupid.”
We hashed out some more details, and then he kept quiet while Mom and I talked for a while longer. She asked me what else had been going on, and I told her something about the formal dinners, but mostly I spent the rest of our visit squeeing over how adorable Osalikha was, and showing her the photos I’d taken on my cellphone (whose battery died while I was showing them to her, so I didn’t get to show them to Dad).
Then Taylor and the Gray One swapped back with Mom and the Knowing One, and then Taylor swapped herself with Dad. She asked me some of the same questions Mom had, though not quite as many, because Taylor had been explaining things while she was in Mom’s body. And I told Dad what the Gray One had just figured out.
“So we’ll probably be home sooner than we thought, if Taylor can just turn us into pixies and open a little bitty portal. She won’t have to wait months for that; maybe within in a week or so. The Gray One said he’d keep us posted about magic levels near your house and near our campsite at Yosemite.”
“How long did you pay for your camping spot ahead of time?” Dad asked.
“Oh!... um, just a few days. We expected we’d be back through the portal on Tuesday, and we’d probably go home that night.”
“Tell me how to find your camping spot. Your mother and I will go to Yosemite, retrieve the camping equipment and shuttle your cars home.”
“Oh... won’t you miss work? You don’t have to do that. Just pay for a few days extra on our camping spot and we can pay you back.”
We argued about that but Dad was firm. I told her where our camping spot was.
“This is an interesting body,” Dad said, looking back at her tail. “I’ve never been a naga before, of either sex. Too bad I’m stuck in this little circle.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. Taylor said it would make it easier to do the swaps that way, and she needed to conserve energy what with doing so many spells in a few hours.”
“So... do you think this really counts as another species? Or is it just another human body, even if it’s transformed into a naga at the moment?”
“Not this again,” I groaned.
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I know it’s bad manners to laugh at one’s own jokes, especially hoary old chestnuts like that, but Serenikha’s amusement poured through our link so strongly that I couldn’t suppress my giggles for more than a moment, and then we kept setting each other off.
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The Knowing One was subdued when he returned from the Gray One’s body, and didn’t interrupt my conversation with Dad. He scuffed a gap in the circle he’d been enclosed in, murmured something about being back in half an hour, and left the room.
When Taylor returned to her body, she looked around, didn’t see the Knowing One, and gave me a sly smile.
“What?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you later,” she said as the Knowing One came back in, accompanied by a servant bearing a tray with a pot of tea and several cups. I told her what the Gray One had said about us turning into pixies and going through a small portal.
“Yes, he told me after he swapped back and I was in Dad’s body. Which was kind of gross, actually, even though I’ve been in male bodies like a dozen times. I guess it’s different when it’s your parents... Mom’s body felt kind of weird too.”
“Because it was almost but not quite like your own?” I guessed.
“No,” she said in English, blushing, “it was because I couldn’t stop thinking about Mom and Dad conceiving me. I know they did, of course, but usually I manage not to think about it... Anyway,” switching back to Draconic with an apologetic look at the Knowing One, “I could take us back tonight if we weren’t particular about where we ended up. But if we’re turning into pixies, we’ll have to leave most of our stuff behind. All our clothes, certainly. So we’ll be naked when we turn back into our usual selves, which might be inconvenient in some places. I wouldn’t want to hike to our campsite naked from anywhere in Yosemite, for instance —”
I interrupted and told her Mom and Dad were going to get our cars and stuff from the campsite.
“Oh, good. Well, my point is I either need to open the portal to somewhere safe like Mom and Dad’s house, or else I need to talk to the Gray One ahead of time and have him, or Mom or Dad, or one of my classmates meet us at a secluded portal site with clothes and stuff. So that will probably take a few days.”
We finished our tea, and thanked the Knowing One for helping us out.
“It was fascinating,” he said. “Perhaps on some future occasion I will visit your world for a longer time.”
“If you come during the summer the Tenacious One can show you around,” I said. “She’s one of the Gray One’s local guides when she’s not in school.”
We left the Knowing One’s apartments and headed back toward the women’s quarters. But I’d never been in that area but once, and Taylor had been there a couple of times but she was tired from casting several spells; we soon got lost.
“I could work a directional spell using your link to Serenikha,” Taylor suggested when we’d come to a dead end in yet another corridor.
“No!” I said. “No messing with the link. You didn’t think the transformation would affect it, but it did, and you didn’t think the portal would be affected by it, but it was. Can’t you just cast a spell to tell you which direction is north?”
“There’s probably a spell for that, but I haven’t learned it. Hmm... maybe we can use your link without casting a spell. Try closing your eyes and just guessing where Serenikha is.”
I wasn’t too confident about that, but it couldn’t be worse than picking a direction at random. We turned left at the next intersection of corridors, and then went straight at the next one, and left again. Then, luckily, we ran into a servant who was able to escort us back to the women’s quarters and Serenikha’s neighborhood. (We’d been going the wrong direction.)
That afternoon Serenikha and her ladies, including me and Taylor, went out with Wushao and her ladies on a picnic excursion. We rode in open carriages from the palace to a large park in the upriver part of the city; the palace security guards had cordoned off a glade by the river for the use of the princesses and their courtiers and servants. (I realized that Taylor and I were courtiers now; it was a weird feeling.) We played a couple of tossing-games with odd little things more like badminton birdies than balls, except we were using bare hands rather than rackets, and us nagini sometimes used our tails; I was better at it than Taylor. By the end of the second game I was about as good as Serenikha, though not as good as Sienpai or a couple of the women on Wushao’s team. They beat us in two games out of three, after which we ate lunch, and the losing team had to pay a forfeit, spending the afternoon composing poems in honor of Wushao. Mine wasn’t great, but I surprised myself at how easily I wrote it, never having written any poetry before. It certainly wasn’t as bad as the one Taylor sweated over for an hour and a half, which was something like (translating back into English):
Wushao, the dragon princess,
Has not a face at which one winces.
And so on. At least mine scanned. Serenikha’s was pretty good too, but I wouldn’t do her any favors trying to translate it into English and making it sound almost as lame as Taylor’s.
When I reflected on how easily I’d come up with my poem, I suspected that I’d picked up some of that skill from Serenikha through my link. Later, I decided to test my suspicion. “Knock knock,” I said in English.
“Who’s there?” Serenikha responded with hardly a moment’s pause.
“Orange.”
“Orange who?” She didn’t hesitate, but she did look a little puzzled.
“Orange you glad to see me?”
She stared at me for a moment and then burst out laughing. And I know it’s bad manners to laugh at one’s own jokes, especially hoary old chestnuts like that, but Serenikha’s amusement poured through our link so strongly that I couldn’t suppress my giggles for more than a moment, and then we kept setting each other off. Sienpai had been looking jealously at me from the moment we started talking in English, but she didn’t dare say anything that might sound like she was criticizing Serenikha. When Serenikha noticed that, our amusement suddenly turned into contrition, and Serenikha said in Draconic:
“I’m sorry, but that joke depends on wordplay in English. It won’t be easy to turn into Draconic.”
I explained why I’d done that. “I think we’re picking up each other’s skills through the link. I’d never written any poetry before, nor Taylor either, but you saw how well I did compared to her. And I knew how to tie a sari, or nurse, without you explaining it... I wanted to see if you were getting skills from me, not just knowing how to speak English but recognizing joke-patterns and things like that. Did you remember hearing that joke before?”
“No, never, or I wouldn’t have laughed so hard. And I don’t know why I knew to say Who’s there? or Orange who?, but I did.”
Serenikha still felt bad about excluding her other friends from the joke, so we spent half an hour figuring out how to create knock-knock jokes in Draconic. We worked out this pattern:
“Announce a guest.”
“Who calls upon my mistress?”
“So-and-so.”
“So-and-so of what province?”
“So-and-so of such-a-place.” — where this last phrase was a pun, sounding like some other phrase or sentence.
Michiko picked this up quickly and came up with a dozen hilarious announce-a-guest jokes, which unfortunately I can’t share with you any more than we could share the orange knock-knock joke with her. (Meta jokes like the interrupting cow, however, carried over just fine.)
One of Wushao’s courtiers said there were a family of pixies living somewhere in that park, but though some of us walked through the woods after we’d recited our poems, we never saw any of them. We returned to the palace a little after sunset.
When we were alone in our chamber and getting ready for bed, I suddenly remembered something and asked Taylor:
“What were you grinning at right after you came back to your own body? Something you didn’t want to talk about in front of the Knowing One?”
“Oh,” she said, and laughed. “The body the Gray One was wearing when he swapped with the Knowing One was female, older than Mom, and about forty pounds overweight. The Knowing One wasn’t best pleased, but he didn’t complain; I’ll give him that.”
The next morning during breakfast, I told Serenikha about our plan to turn into pixies and go home through a tiny portal, and Taylor filled her in on more details.
“We’ll probably have a chance to open a small portal somewhere safe within the next five to ten days. The Gray One is going to keep me informed about the fluctuations of magic levels at several potential portal sites.” One of those was Mom and Dad’s house; another was in the nature preserve on the campus of Kinnison College, and the others of course were in the offices of several west coast Travel Agency branches. (There were others, but they’d decided to focus on ones within a day’s drive of Mom and Dad’s house, where our cars were. If we arrived naked in the Travel Agency office in Boston, for instance, getting to California quickly without ID could be a problem, even if Mr. G.'s local employees could get us clothes and money.)
Serenikha let Sakhi have all the milk she could get, and let her have a turn at me. That was one ravenous baby; of course a nagini her age is twice as massive as a human baby at the same stage of development, most of it in her tail. When I’d done nursing, and had burped her, I asked what Serenikha’s plans were for the day.
“We can’t see Wushao today,” she said, “she and a few of the ladies of her court are making a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Haoshu, and won’t be back until late tomorrow. I thought we’d relax around the palace today, then go up the river tomorrow, and meet Wushao and her ladies on their way back from the shrine.”
We played peek-a-boo with Sakhi until it was time to let Dhamarikha change her diaper and take her back to the nursery for a nap, and sang songs, and made up more announce-a-guest jokes, and managed to fill the time until evening in various ways. Taylor excused herself for a while after lunch to talk to the Gray One, and told me afterward that she didn’t have an exact date and time for the portal yet but the Gray One thought there might be an opportunity within the next two or three days. “Just maybe we’ll be back in time for classes on Monday.”
The next day, we bathed early and gathered in the carriage drive; Serenikha’s carriages took us to the river, not to the main docks where the sea-going ships exchanged cargoes with the riverboats, but further upriver to the imperial family’s private docks. Here we boarded Serenikha’s barge and ate breakfast while the boatmen rowed us upriver.
The river twisted and turned as we got out of the city and into the countryside. Larger riverboats passed us both ways, but there were fewer of the small boats than there had been. The flat country around the city was starting to give way to hills visible in the distance on either side of the river by midday, and the hills were getting closer and looking bigger when the captain of the barge announced that we were almost to our destination.
There was another fancily ornamented barge tied up to the docks there, along with several smaller boats, but there was still room for us too, and we walked and slithered ashore a few minutes later.
“Where are we meeting Wushao?” I asked.
“Right around here,” Serenikha said. “She should be coming down the road from the shrine within the next couple of hours; that’s her barge tied up there.”
We went into a nearby tea-house, and posted a couple of servants along the road to tell us when Wushao and her party were approaching. We’d eaten, and some of us were on our third cup of tea when Taylor said: “She’s almost here,” and a few moments later one of the servants came running in and said: “Her Highness the Princess Wushao is approaching. We have told her you are here.”
“Excellent!” Serenikha said. And maybe ten minutes after that, Wushao and her ladies came in to the tea-house, calling out their orders to the proprietor’s children and servants, and greetings to us; everything was pleasant confusion for while.
One of Wushao’s ladies approached me, asking diffidently: “Beg pardon, my lady, but are you Her Highness the Princess Serenikha, or her friend from the other world?”
“I’m Leslie,” I said. “Which of us were you looking for?”, expecting of course that she wanted Serenikha, who was sitting further up the table between Shiyama and Wushao.
“You, my lady. Or perhaps your sister, the mage... is that her over there?”
“Yes, that’s her.” Besides Serenikha, Taylor and me there were only two other nagini present, both of them a good deal older.
“I had a question about your home — about the other world. Is it true that high-born ladies can marry whoever they like?”
“We don’t exactly have high-born and low-born in my country,” I explained; “we’ve got rich people and poor people, but some of the rich people were born poor, or their grandparents were, and some of the poor people are children and grandchildren of rich people who frittered away their money... anyway, however much money you’ve got, you can marry anybody who’s willing to marry you. — But some other countries in my world are different, they still have arranged marriages and like that.”
“Oh! And —” her voice dropped to a whisper, “when you go there, you become somebody else?”
“Yes — for a day or two or up to a month, however long you wish, you’d swap bodies with someone in my world who wants to visit here. I think Kinuko of Chrysanthemum Street is still the Gray One’s agent for this region —”
“And you might swap with anybody, even a tengu or —” her voice dropped even lower, “a man?”
“Well, no and yes. I mean, people from my world coming here might swap with a tengu. But if you’re coming to my world you can be sure you’ll be human. No telling if you’ll be a man or woman, though. Or even a boy or girl, though there aren’t as many children visiting your world.”
I told her some more about my world, and asked her a few questions about herself; her name was Pengshu and she was from a provincial noble family, having been sent to court when she was fourteen (the same age I first swapped with Serenikha) to hang out with the princesses, pick up some social polish and hopefully find a rich husband.
The ladies of Serenikha’s and Wushao’s courts mixed things up on the way back, several of us including me riding back to the palace on Wushao’s barge, while several of Wushao’s ladies rode back on Serenikha’s. Back at the palace, we dined together in the larger dining hall between Wushao’s neighborhood and Princess Taoshai’s; Taylor and I were seated at the same table with Wushao and Serenikha, but not very close to them.
After dinner, when Taylor had excused herself to go to our room and contact the Gray One, I hung around a while longer. Serenikha sent for Sakhi, and Dhamarikha brought her in; Serenikha and I both took a turn nursing her, and beaming at her while Wushao’s ladies admired her alertness and her remarkable resemblance to her mommy (and her uncle).
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Taylor looked so worried and guilty that I had to give her a hug. “Come on. We can’t do anything until we talk to the Gray One, but for now, you need to relax. How about a game of — Tag! You’re it.”
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The next morning, Taylor told me how she had talked with the Gray One and gotten an updated estimate for when we could go home. And “home” it would be: there’d probably be a small magic surge around Mom and Dad’s neighborhood in a couple of days, roughly simultaneous with small surges in hundreds of other, less convenient places. “I’ll aim for the backyard,” Taylor said as we slithered to the baths. “The fence and hedge mean the neighbors can’t spy on us, and the odds of a satellite looking in the right place just at the moment we come though is slim enough.”
“Maybe right under the eucalyptus?” I suggested.
“Maybe, but it’s safer to be out in the open for when we transform. If secrecy were the highest priority I’d open it into my old bedroom, but a couple of pixies expanding into full-size humans within seconds... it’s less likely to lead to injury if we’re not in a room full of furniture. Or too close to a tree trunk. And if some NSA spook does see us appear suddenly, they’ll probably think it’s a camera malfunction anyway.”
(Of course, when the Project Eeffoc documents were declassified a few years ago, we found out that certain agencies already knew about Mr. G. and the other world by this time; Mom and Dad might have been the target of their interest if we’d been spotted coming through a portal in their yard. But those documents show they didn’t find out about the portals until a couple of years later, when one of Taylor’s classmates indiscreetly opened one from a jail cell she’d been locked up in for being drunk and disorderly.)
We passed the day uneventfully, sitting around gossiping and composing poetry with Serenikha and her ladies, playing with Sakhi and nursing her, slithering around the gardens after a picnic lunch. I began to wonder how Serenikha or any of the princesses or ladies-in-waiting could stand this sort of life; I thought the monotony would get to me after a few weeks, never mind years. We didn’t see Wushao most of the day; in the evening, Serenikha went to a banquet where Wushao and Tirishu would be the guests of honor, but she hadn’t been able to get us invitations on such short notice.
Not long after Serenikha and some of her ladies left for the banquet, Taylor and I ate a quiet dinner with some other ladies who hadn’t been invited, including Shiyama and Bhavalikha. Then Taylor went to our room to talk with the Gray One, and I sat playing sientsu, a board game I’d learned the last time I was here, with Shiyama.
I did better than I expected, but Shiyama was still winning. She was about to capture sixteen of my stones in one move if I couldn’t block her; I was staring at the board trying to find a way out when Taylor rushed in.
“Heads up, Leslie, we’ve got a portal site! Ladies, it was good to meet you — good to see you again, Bhavalikha — tell Serenikha we’re sorry we couldn’t say goodbye, but we’ll be back for another visit when these portals are more reliable.”
“We can’t stay until after Serenikha gets back from the banquet?” I asked.
“No. The next opening might be after school starts back on Monday, and it might not be as good a site. This one’s perfect, right in Mom and Dad’s yard like we planned.”
“All right. Here or in our room?”
“I’ve got things set up in our room. Hurry! And — Bhavalikha, would you come along and do us a favor? Toss some of our smaller possessions through the portal after us, as long as it stays open?”
“I will be happy to oblige,” Bhavalikha said, and slithered along after us.
Shiyama followed too. “I’m stronger than I look,” she remarked.
When we reached our room, Taylor told me to slither into one of the semicircles she’d drawn, and then closed it up around me. She started working on tweaking the transformation spell. Nothing happened for several minutes, but then — a lot sooner than I’d seen any results when she transformed me the first time — I suddenly felt my tail shortening and splitting down the middle, and a strange sensation in my shoulders, and the room, furniture and people all seemed to grow hugely larger around me. I looked down at myself and twisted my head to look over my shoulder.
I had green skin like Maella’s, and a good figure, with breasts proportionally smaller than the ones I’d had as Serenikha. My hair was violet, though, and not as long as Maella’s hair had been, and my wings were a translucent green. I had a little tuft of violet pubic hair, though I thought I remembered Maella having none; but it was five years ago and I might have misremembered.
“A girl pixie?” I asked.
“We are still in the women’s quarters,” Taylor said primly. “And it won’t matter, you’ll be changing back to your usual self in a few minutes.”
“Not complaining, just commenting.”
“Hush while I transform myself. You can leave the circle if you like.”
I experimented with my wings, flapping and then rapidly vibrating them until I lifted off. I practiced flying; it didn’t seem to come quite as naturally as slithering or coiling in my nagini body, but I didn’t crash into anything. Shiyama looked at me in fascination.
Taylor took about fifteen or twenty minutes to transform herself; she first reverted to her human base form, which was quick but not instantaneous, and then changed herself into a pixie, which took a lot longer. I realized we hadn’t told Bhavalikha and Shiyama what they were supposed to toss through the portal after us; I hovered by Bhavalikha’s ear and whispered to her, and we looked through the luggage, picking out small items and ordering them from most to least valuable. It was mostly our wallets, Mom’s jewelry, and our cell phones with their dead batteries and the photos from our first few days here.
The most interesting thing about Taylor’s transformation wasn’t the startling color scheme, her cerulean blue skin, bubblegum pink hair and reddish-orange wings; it was that her mage’s staff shrank down with her, to what would have seemed toothpick size if I’d been my usual self.
“Time for the portal... Oh, good, you’ve got the luggage sorted. You can stash all the big stuff in storage somewhere until we come back.”
She made a new, smaller chalk circle for the portal spell. It was about nine inches across, and looked like one of the larger circles shrunk down to pixie-scale. When she’d been working on the portal spell for several minutes, and the tiny black sphere had appeared and was starting to grow, the door burst open, and I saw Sienpai standing in the doorway. She had a green pixie riding on her shoulder, which surprised me because I’d never seen any pixies around the court. And the pixie looked familiar somehow, though I’d never met any pixies but Maella. I realized her hair and wings were just like mine, too. The pixie took off from Sienpai’s shoulder and flew toward me, alighting right next to me on the arm of the sofa.
“Well! It looks like we’re still twins.”
“Serenikha!” I’d already known it was her, on some level, the moment I saw her. I was consciously sure of it when I heard her voice, even though it didn’t sound like her nagini-voice.
Taylor interrupted the portal spell, perhaps in astonishment at seeing and hearing all this, and the little black sphere vanished. “Oh, no! Serenikha, I’m sorry — I had no idea —”
“The Gray One didn’t warn us about this,” I said.
“Every day brings its surprises,” she said with a laugh. “And this was not an entirely unpleasant surprise. Flying is wonderful, and this unexpected transformation certainly enlivened an otherwise dull banquet. But... it could lead to certain inconveniences, perhaps?”
“I’ll change you back right away,” Taylor said. “Or — maybe I should consult with the Gray One again before I tweak the spell again?”
“You do that,” I suggested.
“And while you’re working on that,” Serenikha began; then, switching to English: “Tag — you’re it!” She lightly tapped me on the forearm and took off, zooming across the room toward the bed. I froze in surprise for a moment, then leaped into the air and buzzed after her.
We wove around the posts and curtains of the bed several times, then Serenikha broke toward Bhavalikha, flying around her and then toward Sienpai, who was still standing in the doorway. I’d partly anticipated that move, and had cut around the other side of Bhavalikha, gaining several inches on her. I caught up with her just as she tried to dodge around Sienpai’s shoulder, tagged her on the foot, and zoomed off down the hallway with Serenikha in pursuit. We buzzed over and around the heads of astonished servants and courtiers, around a couple of corridors and through an open room to a window and into one of the gardens that was enclosed within the women’s quarters. Here it seemed we’d really come into our element as we dodged among the branches of trees and shrubs, tagging and re-tagging one another until we both sank down in exhaustion on a limb of a maple, close to the trunk.
“That was fun,” I said.
“The most fun I’ve had in months,” she agreed.
“But we should probably get back to the room and let Taylor turn us into nagini again. Or give us the bad news if we’re stuck this way.”
“That might not be so bad,” she said meditatively, but then: “Oh, no! Sakhi!”
“We can’t give her much milk like this,” I conceded. “I wonder if we’re lactating at all?”
“We need to change back.”
“Let’s go.”
We flew through the nearest open window and found our way back toward the room I shared with Taylor. We hadn’t quite reached it when we found Sienpai, or she found us.
“Your Highness!” she said, glancing back and forth at us.
We hovered in the air in front of her; I pointed at Serenikha and said, “She’s the princess.”
“The Tenacious One asked us to find you.”
“Lead on.”
So we returned to the room, where Taylor, still in pixie-form, was standing in a pixie-sized circle and tapping its perimeter with her staff. Bhavalikha and Shiyama weren’t there, but they returned a few minutes later; Shiyama started to say: “I searched the — oh, there you are.”
Then Taylor finished her spell and relaxed; she looked at me and Serenikha, broke the circle with her staff and stepped toward us.
“I think our pixie brains are affecting us,” she said. “It was really hard not to fly off and play tag with you two... but I made myself stay here and try to contact the Gray One.”
“And what did she say?”
“I haven’t been able to contact her. I’ll try again in an hour or two.”
“So can you change us back?” Serenikha asked.
“I could try. But — I’d really rather consult the Gray One first. There’ve already been too many unexpected side-effects from your psychic link.”
Serenikha sighed and I felt a wave of maternal anxiety. I put a consoling hand on her arm.
“Dhamarikha can nurse her for now,” I said, “and — just think of how we can amuse her in these forms!”
She smiled a little at that.
Sienpai broke in: “Does this mean that Her Highness will have to remain a pixie for some time?”
“I hope just a few hours,” Taylor said. “But yes.”
“And she transformed, away there in the east wing banquet hall, because you cast this spell on Leslie here?”
“Yes. I didn’t realize, but... I think maybe their psychic link conveyed the transformation spell on Leslie to Serenikha as well. The same thing that made Leslie change to match Serenikha made her change to match Leslie, when I transformed her just now.”
“So how would it work if we went home?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I hope you’d revert to your usual self — well, I’m sure you would if we were in a low-magic area, almost anywhere in our world just now. And I hope Serenikha would revert to her usual self... but I can’t be sure. She might be stuck as a pixie; I couldn’t risk that, so I aborted the portal spell.”
She looked so worried and guilty that I had to give her a hug. “Come on. We can’t do anything until we talk to the Gray One, but for now, you need to relax. How about a game of — Tag! You’re it.”
And I was off, with Serenikha and (I glanced back to be sure) Taylor zooming after me.
“I think we’re lost again,” Taylor said.
“We just need to get into a busier part of the palace,” Serenikha rejoined. “I’m sure I’ll recognize something.”
Our game of tag had led us through dark and dimly-lit rooms and hallways, out into moonlit gardens and back into open windows, through familiar and vaguely-familiar areas into a section of the palace none of us had ever seen. And in the disused section we were taking a breather in now, there weren’t any people to ask directions of; the last one we’d seen was an old servant who had chased us away with a broom and hadn’t stopped to listen. (Apparently, I found out later when I talked to Tiaopai, the palace kitchens had once had a problem with pixies moving in and stealing food, and some of the older servants still remembered and resented it.)
“Well, we’ll find more people around in the morning. And in daylight we can fly higher up and figure out where we are. Let’s rest until then,” I suggested. “And maybe Taylor can talk to the Gray One and figure out how to change us back, and... um... on second thought, maybe we’d better get back to our rooms before we change back.”
“Probably,” Taylor agreed, and yawned. “I left my staff behind in our room, anyway. I wonder if it grew to normal size when I got out of range or if it’ll stay that way as long as I’m a pixie...”
“Say,” I said, “we should find you another staff.”
“Why?”
“Because,” I said in English, “if you had two, they would be pixie sticks.”
Serenikha giggled with a puzzled expression; she felt my amusement through our link but she didn’t have the context to understand the joke herself. Taylor groaned and punched me lightly in the arm. “Being a pixie has made you entirely too silly.”
“Guilty as charged.”
After we’d rested a few minutes, we started looking for a comfortable place to sleep. We found a bedroom whose door was ajar, and curled up in a cleft between the pillows. I think Serenikha and I both fell asleep at the same moment; Taylor told me later that she had never regretted our psychic link more than when she heard our synchronous snoring.
We had shared hundreds of lucid dreams over the last five years, which were far more vivid than our ordinary solitary dreams. This one was as much more vivid than our usual shared dreams as they were than our solitary dreams.
We flew in formation through a dreamscape of shared memories, pervaded with emotions: Leslie’s panic during the pop quiz in chemistry his first week in college, feeling that he was out of his depth and would disgrace himself by flunking out in his first semester; Serenikha’s pain and anxiety when she squeezed the egg that would hatch into Osalikha from her cloaca, while Dhamarikha coached her and Bhavalikha held her hands; Leslie’s nervous excitement when he picked up Katie Sorensen for their first date, and his mortification when his aphasia kicked into high gear during dinner; Serenikha’s lust and fear the night she consummated her marriage with Pientao, who’d been temporarily transformed into a naga by the Patient One; Leslie’s numb acceptance when the Gray One told him how he and Serenikha were permanently linked...
“This is who we are,” we said.
...Serenikha’s wonder at her first sight of the Dragon Empire’s capital from the deck of her uncle’s ship; Leslie’s embarrassment when he went to school wearing barrettes in his hair and was mercilessly teased by both boys and girls; Serenikha weeping into her pillow after her father told her she must go to a foreign country, marry a foreign prince, and never see home again...
“It’s a wonder we turned out halfway sane,” we muttered.
...Leslie and his family sitting naked and unashamed around the dining table, playing Fluxx and laughing hysterically at their sudden changes of fortune; Serenikha helping the older sister she adored dress for her wedding; Leslie and Taylor watching scary movies with Uncle Dave and lying awake in the dark afterward...
“But it wasn’t all bad, was it?” we said more cheerily.
...Serenikha coiled up next to her nurse, listening to her tell stories about clever and courageous naga of old times; Leslie reaching up to touch the nose of the roan mare in his grandparents' stable; Serenikha playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in her father’s palace...
“Oh, we’d forgotten about this stuff.”
...Leslie’s delight at saying “Want supper,” to Mommy, and seeing that she actually understood him; Serenikha’s sense of accomplishment at learning to slither with her torso upright; Leslie’s frustration at walking two steps and falling on his face...
“Not much difference at this end, is there?”
...Leslie or Serenikha floating in warm darkness — an egg carefully incubated by her mother and nurses, or the womb inside his mother’s body? Perhaps it didn’t matter; our mothers' love permeated the amniotic fluid either way.
I posted this chapter early because I'll be busy tomorrow. The next chapter will probably go up on February 1.
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We sat up and stretched our arms and wings. “Okay, we’re up,” we said with both mouths, and were sorry when we saw Taylor’s startled, worried look.
My latest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.
We opened our eyes, all four of them, and yawned.
“About time you sleepyheads woke up,” Taylor said. She was perched on the edge of the pillow above us, the soles of her dangling feet a paler blue than the rest of her skin.
We sat up and stretched our arms and wings. “Okay, we’re up,” we said with both mouths, and were sorry when we saw Taylor’s startled, worried look. So we glanced at ourselves ruefully and continued with just one mouth: “You want to go outside and look around?”
“Seems like a good idea.”
We all took off and flew through the nearest open window.
“I wonder if your link is getting stronger,” Taylor mused as we hovered a couple of hundred feet above the palace. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you talk simultaneously.”
“It is,” we said, careful to use just one mouth.
“Well, hopefully it will get weaker again when we’re back in our own world... Serenikha, do you recognize anything?”
We hadn’t been flying for long, and hadn’t seen much of the palace from an aerial perspective in the twilight or moonlight. We had a little trouble remembering which body was called Serenikha, but we picked what we thought was the right one and said with that mouth, “The sun is that way, and the women’s quarters are in the south wing, so they must be in that direction.”
Taylor nodded and flew after us. A few minutes later we found a garden we recognized, and an open window onto a corridor near our rooms. We hesitated a moment between Leslie’s room and Serenikha’s, but headed toward Leslie’s when we remembered that Taylor had left her staff there.
On our way, we met Bhavalikha and Michiko, apparently on their way to the baths. “Your Highness!” Bhavalikha said, “where have you been?”
“We went out flying and explored some parts of the palace we hadn’t seen before,” we said with the mouth that was probably Serenikha’s. “Don’t worry.”
“I can’t help worrying. Everyone is talking about how you transformed in the middle of the banquet and then flew all around with a couple of other pixies... when is the Tenacious One going to change you back?”
“Soon,” Taylor said. “If we don’t get interrupted again.”
And soon we were in Taylor and Leslie’s room. She found her staff, still pixie-sized, lying in the spell-circle she’d used last night.
“Wait a few minutes while I contact the Gray One,” she said, and we flew over to sit on the edge of the bed, looking out at the vast gulf between the bed and the sofa, and Taylor’s tiny spell-circle in the midst of it. It reminded us of games Leslie and Taylor had played years ago, with our Fisher-Price toy people standing on the edge of Taylor’s dresser and pretending the space between it and the bed was the Grand Canyon.
Being pixies was more fun than being nagini or human, we decided, but we had to be able to nurse Sakhi. Maybe we could get Taylor to turn her into a baby pixie, and adjust us so we’d lactate? But that might not be a long-term solution; without a psychic link to entangle with, the transformation spell on Sakhi probably wouldn’t last as long as the one on us. We’d have to ask Taylor or the Gray One when they weren’t busy.
And... on further thought, we didn’t want to abandon all our responsibilities as Serenikha and Leslie. It did make sense to have the mages turn us back, if they could. But did it have to be right away?
We heard one side of a conversation there below us, and fluttered down near the spell-circle to listen closer.
“...They don’t have exact clocks here, so I can’t be sure if it was at the same time I changed Leslie or a minute or two later... Yes, whenever it happened, it was all over in a few seconds. Not hours like when Leslie synced with Serenikha... No, the portal spell was working fine, but I didn’t want to go home and leave Serenikha like this... I haven’t tried yet, I wanted to talk to you first... Okay, I’ll try that and get back to you... Actually, why not just tell them I had a little problem with the portal and I’ll try again soon. They don’t need to know the gory details... Thanks.”
Taylor fluttered into the air and settled down again outside the spell-circle. “The Gray One gave me some tests to do. Leslie, get into that circle and I’ll make a new one for Serenikha.”
We flew one body into the circle she’d vacated, and stood still with the other as Taylor drew a new circle around it. Then she started casting a spell on the one we thought was probably Leslie. Before we felt or saw any physical change, we got a feeling like our skin color was wrong, somehow; it shouldn’t be green, but something else... Then a minute or two later, the skin of that body turned chalk-white, and a few seconds later the other body’s skin faded from dark green to light green to white.
“Hmm,” Taylor said, and walked over to the circle enclosing Serenikha. She chanted for several minutes and struck the circle with her staff, and the hair of that body turned pink, followed moments later by the hair of the other. Again, we felt a vague dissatisfaction with our violet hair a minute or so before it actually changed.
“I think that was faster, wasn’t it?” Taylor asked.
“Yes,” we said, absent-mindedly using both mouths. Taylor looked worried again.
“All right, I think there’s room for both of you in this circle,” gesturing with her staff at the one the Serenikha body was standing in. “Let me try something else.” We flew the Leslie body over to stand next to the other one; much closer than we would have stood to anyone else, though the circle was wide enough we could have stood a little further apart.
Taylor looked at us and began chanting and waving her staff again. This time the feeling of wrongness was much more acute, more distressing and — more familiar. We’d felt something a lot like it when the Patient One tried to swap us back prematurely, when Serenikha had been in her own nagini body but felt like she should have a human male body. We looked at one another anxiously. Our breasts were too large, weren’t they? No, we shouldn’t even have breasts... Then both bodies changed at once, those too-large breasts shrinking to nothing, hips narrowing, each clitoris enlarging and changing its structure while the vagina everted into a scrotal sac...
That felt physically satisfying, but as soon as our breasts were gone we missed them for another reason. “You’re going the wrong way!” we said. “We need to be able to nurse Sakhi, remember?”
“Quiet, let me concentrate,” Taylor said, but she looked even more worried. “Something’s different about your link, and it’s not just the way the transformation spell has gotten entangled with it.”
“It’s a lot stronger,” we said with both mouths.
“No shit,” she muttered. “Anyway, I can turn you back into lactating nagini as soon as I’ve got a spell-circle big enough to hold you. Go sit on the bed while I work.”
We got bored pretty quickly, and snuck off to play tag again. We tried to be more cautious about being seen; we were male at the moment, and we remembered the uproar there was last time a man was seen in the women’s quarters. And we found that tag wasn’t much fun now that our link was so strong; we couldn’t surprise ourselves. So instead we practiced fancy flying maneuvers, initially staying in the suite of rooms assigned to Taylor and Leslie, but venturing carefully out into the corridor after looking both ways and seeing no one. We stayed near the high ceilings, trusting that people usually don’t look upward unless they have a particular reason to.
We flew in tightening and widening spirals down the hall, passing a couple of servants with a cart of dishes who didn’t seem to notice us, and a couple of ladies on their way back to their rooms from the baths. It occurred to us that we had been sticking close together since our link strengthened, and we wondered if that was really necessary. With one body we flew out a window into the nearest garden, and with the other we stayed indoors, slipping into one room and then another and watching the oblivious people below us. We didn’t get confused by the completely different scenes presented to each pair of eyes, or the different conversations each body might overhear: a lady in her chamber instructing a servant how she wanted her hair done for the day, a couple of early risers breakfasting in the garden and gossiping about our sudden transformation in the middle of the banquet.
After a while we sent the nearest body back to Taylor’s room to see if she was ready for us. She wasn’t in the room, but her staff was leaning against the bed, back to full size, and a large circle had been drawn on the floor. We started searching for her with both bodies, bringing the other one in from the garden. In a nearby corridor we found her, back in her previous nagini form; we flew down and hovered in front of her.
“Are you ready for us?”
“Yes, for the last ten minutes! Where’s — are you Serenikha or Leslie?”
We shrugged. “We split up to search for you. He’ll be back at the room by the time we get there.”
She narrowed her eyes at us. “Something is very weird about your link today... do you intuitively know where he is?”
“Yes.”
“Leslie didn’t, a few nights ago when we were lost in the north wing. He had a vague feeling of what direction you were in but he didn’t feel sure about it, and the vague feeling turned out to be wrong. And now... Oh shit. We all slept right next to each other last night!”
“Yes...”
“And the Gray One said for you two not to sleep within a couple of hundred yards of each other! We’ve got to figure out what happened...”
“Don’t worry. It’s good.”
“Leslie’s my little brother and I’m entitled to worry about him.”
“I know.” (“We know” didn’t seem like the right thing to say, though it was true.)
We returned to the room, where our other body was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the vast circle. “Serenikha, go sit in the circle too, but not too close to Leslie... Leslie, why don’t you move over a bit and make room. And when your tails start growing out, try not to scuff the chalk.”
We positioned our bodies about three yards apart and two yards from the edges of the circle, and Taylor went to work. After she’d been chanting for a few minutes, our legs started to feel like a split tail — we’d felt that before, all right — and our penises to feel superfluous. And we felt the hugeness of our surroundings more acutely than we’d felt it since we first became pixies. So it felt satisfying when our legs started merging into naga-tails, even before we had grown very much; we coiled them as they grew to keep them from scuffing the chalk. Soon both bodies looked like Serenikha.
“Can we nurse?” we asked, and squeezed the right breast of each body with its left hand. We nodded in satisfaction at the drops of milk that emerged. “Good. Let’s go see Sakhi.”
“You’re going to freak Dhamarikha out if you go in there talking in unison like that. You’re freaking me out... it was odd enough when it was just a short phrase now and then, but seriously, what is up with you two?”
“We’re... both of us.”
“Okay... stay right there. I’m going to talk to the Gray One again.”
Soon we overheard her side of the conversation:
“...The results of those transformation tests were pretty much what we expected, and I’ve got them turned back into twin nagini, but now we’ve got another problem. Last night, I don’t recall if I mentioned, we flew around a lot in pixie form, and got lost, and just sort of bedded down where we found ourselves when we got sleepy. And — yeah, we kind of forgot about how they weren’t supposed to dream too close to each other... No, ma’am, I should have remembered, you’re right... Well, they’re talking in unison a lot. Not every time they open their mouths but fairly often. And Serenikha said she knew intuitively where Leslie was. And... just now they said ‘We’re both of us.’ I think they might be merging into a group-mind or something... Would you? Thanks, I’ll — Oh. That would be great, I’m getting a little tired.”
She fell silent; she was coiled so most of her tail was in front of her, and she leaned forward, her arms resting on the coil of her tail.
“Stay right there. The Gray One’s coming.”
“All right.” We used only one mouth that time, to try to reassure her.
A few minutes later Taylor suddenly stood up straighter and looked at us. “Good morning,” she said. “Let’s have a look at your link, shall we?”
“Gray One?” we said with one mouth.
“Yes. Before I start casting diagnostic spells, tell me what feels different about your link now.”
We weren’t sure we wanted to be totally honest with her. Taylor had been acting like our stronger link was a bad thing, and she wanted to weaken it to how it was before. “What are you going to do?” we said with the body on the left.
“I don’t know yet. It depends on what I find out and what you want.”
“You won’t do anything without us saying it’s okay?” we said with the right mouth.
“Probably not — unless I think you’re in danger and not thinking clearly.”
“We’re thinking more clearly than before,” we said with the left body. “Both of us know everything that either of us knew, and other things we’d forgotten,” with the right. “And we can see out of all four eyes, and when we’re pixies we can fly in perfect formation. And —” (hesitating, trying to find the right words, and switching mouths when we resumed) “— when Taylor transformed us, we could feel it. Not just feel our bodies changing, but... we think we felt the spell working, too.”
“That is intriguing. Did you feel some unfamiliar sensation before your bodies started visibly changing?”
“Not a sensation, exactly. It was more of an emotion, or a disconnect between what we felt and what we thought we should feel. Like when the Patient One put us back in the right bodies at the wrong time, and our legs felt wrong... our self-image changed before our bodies changed physically.”
“Hmm... You said you can see out of all four eyes? You mean that both of you see what either of you sees?”
“That’s right.”
“Leslie, please turn to face away from me; Serenikha, you’re to look at me.” We arranged our bodies as he instructed. “And now... Leslie, how many fingers am I holding up?”
“Four,” we said with the head that was turned away.
“Interesting. I’m going to transform you again, and I want each of you to raise your right hand as soon as you feel your self-image changing as you described. Keep your eyes closed throughout the process, and make sure you’re not touching... just as you are is fine.”
We closed all our eyes and waited. Several minutes later we felt something shifting inside, and we raised our right hands; we realized our tails felt wrong, like squished-together pairs of legs. Then they were legs, and we had something dangling between them.
“You’re going to change us back soon, right? Sakhi needs a feeding.” The human nurses could help Dhamarikha in a pinch, but human milk wasn’t ideal for a naga baby.
“Yes, right away. You can open your eyes now.”
We turned and looked at our bodies: both looked like Leslie had looked when we arrived in the baths.
“All right, I’ll change you back into Serenikha-twins. Just a few moments... why don’t we do that same test again, just for fun. Close your eyes and raise your hands when you feel the change starting.”
It was more than a few moments, but faster than when Taylor transformed us. We were soon back in mommy-form.
“Can we take a break while we nurse Sakhi, please?”
“All right. Will you want to go to where she is, or have the nurse bring here here? I’ll come with you, or stay and watch, either way.”
We pulled the bell-rope, which one of our bodies could just reach from inside the circle, and summoned a servant. “Have Dhamarikha bring Sakhi here, right away if she’s not asleep, or else as soon as she wakes up.”
“Is Bhavalikha around the palace?” the Gray One asked, before the servant left. “Or if not her —”
“She’s here, probably not far away.”
“Good. Miss, please find Bhavalikha and send her here as well, as soon as you’ve delivered your mistress’s message to Dhamarikha.”
When the servant had gone, we asked: “What do you think? Taylor was freaking out about it. But we like it this way.”
She sighed. “I’m not sure what to think. I need to cast some diagnostic spells; if we find that Sakhi is asleep, I’ll do that next, otherwise it can wait until after you nurse her. Do you feel like you’re still two people who can communicate much better than before, or one person with two bodies?”
We hesitated, not sure how honest to be. But she’d probably figure it out once she started casting diagnostic spells. “It’s hard to say exactly. One and a half people, maybe?”
She nodded absently, and looked down at herself. “We should probably get dressed, shouldn’t we?”
“Can we break the circle?”
“Oh, yes, go ahead.”
So we found sari-camisoles and got dressed, helping out the Gray One when she couldn’t figure out how to loop and tie hers. While we were working on that, the Gray One said: “When Bhavalikha gets here — or perhaps after you’re done nursing Sakhi — I want Leslie to go into another room with me, while Serenikha stays here with Bhavalikha. I want to see if you can carry on two conversations at once without arousing Bhavalikha’s suspicions.”
“We can probably do that.”
We’d just gotten decent when Dhamarikha came in carrying Sakhi. She was alertly looking around, and when she saw us, she reached out her little arms. We picked her up with one body, and with the other body’s arms we loosened the sari we’d just put on the body that was holding Sakhi, so she could nurse. She’d drained one breast and we’d shifted her to the other breast on the same body when Bhavalikha arrived.
“Is now a good time, Leslie?” the Gray One asked.
“Hmm? Oh, yes,” we said with the body that wasn’t nursing Sakhi.
“Then let’s go into the next room, or wherever we can talk privately.”
We went into the sitting room attached to our bedroom, and the Gray One closed the door behind us. “Are you still aware of Serenikha and her surroundings?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s find out,” she said in English, “if you can carry on a conversation in English with me and in another language with Bhavalikha.”
“I don’t see why not,” we said to her in English, and to Bhavalikha, in our other native language: “What have people been saying about me, Bhali?”
“Oh... I’ve heard a couple of different stories about how you transformed during the banquet and what happened after that. Someone said you flew around the room a couple of times and sprinkled pixie dust on the food...” said Bhavalikha, while the Gray One asked: “You said you felt like one-and-a-half people. Can you elaborate on that?”
I replied, “It’s like I want everything Leslie and Serenikha want, and I know everything they know, but I can look at Serenikha’s problems with Leslie’s eyes and Leslie’s problems with Serenikha’s eyes, and they don’t bother me as much,” while listening half in horror and half in amused detachment to several other ridiculous rumors about what I’d done since becoming a pixie. I didn’t even know what pixie dust was, exactly, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t manifested or excreted any, either as Serenikha or Leslie. “Don’t believe that,” I told Bhavalikha. “I did fly around a little, just getting used to my wings, but when I figured out what must have happened I perched on Sienpai’s shoulders and asked her to bring me here.”
“Well, you shouldn’t hole up here with the Tenacious One, you should circulate and talk to people, contradict the rumors. Sienpai and I sent Wushao and Tirishu a note of apology on your behalf, but you should pay her a visit now that you’re a naga again.” The Gray One looked thoughtful, and said: “How far does this, hmm, detachment go? Do you still care about getting back before the end of Spring Break?”
“I’ll do that soon,” I said to Bhavalikha. “When the little gaping maw has drained this breast I’ll let her have a go at Leslie, and you and I will go pay a call on Wushao.” And to the Gray One I added: “Yes, but if I can’t get back in time it won’t be devastating.” Privately, we were worried that if Leslie went home it would weaken our link to what it had been before. But maybe it would get this strong again over time, as the worlds got closer. And we couldn’t put our life as Leslie on hold while we waited for that.
Bhavalikha was satisfied with that, and settled back quietly to wait for me to finish nursing Sakhi. We were satisfied too, not that we’d been particularly worried about getting the two conversations confused, and we spent the next couple of minutes singing a silly song for Sakhi while we continued talking with the Gray One as Leslie.
The Gray One asked us more about what our link felt like now and whether it felt like it had been strengthening ever since Leslie arrived in this world. Finally she said: “I’ll cast those diagnostic spells now, if you don’t mind.”
“Serenikha has to go do damage control,” I said, “apologizing to people for transforming in public, dispelling rumors and so forth. And she wants me to nurse Sakhi and watch her while she’s busy with that.” We slithered the Leslie body toward the door, and burped Sakhi with the other body.
“Serenikha,” the Gray One said as we entered the bedroom, “I need to cast those diagnostic spells sooner rather than later. I’m supposed to swap back with the Tenacious One in another couple of hours.”
Bhavalikha looked confused, and we realized we hadn’t told her Taylor had swapped with the Gray One. We sighed with both mouths, and said with Serenikha’s:
“All right, if it won’t take more than a couple of hours we can visit Wushao afterward. Bhavalikha, please send Wushao a note and let her know I’ll visit her around lunchtime if she wishes, or at any later time that suits her better.”
The Gray One waited impatiently while we gave Sakhi the milk in Leslie’s breasts. Then we laid her down on the bed to play, and let Dhamarikha watch her while the Gray One drew a circle around both our bodies and cast her diagnostic spells.
We got various sudden sharp sensations, most of them affecting both bodies at once and equally, but sometimes differently: for instance, at one point we felt like our Serenikha back was being rubbed with sandpaper while our Leslie back had oil or warm milk or something dripping down it. We duly reported each of these sensations to the Gray One. At last a twisty strand of light appeared in the air between our heads, glowing first one color and then another, through the whole spectrum, and gradually settling on bright white.
“What does that mean?” we asked when the Gray One scuffed a gap in the circle and said we could move.
“Do you want to dismiss the nurse?”
“Very well... Dhamarikha, you may go. Sakhi will remain with us for now.”
With the body that we weren’t talking to the Gray One with we slithered onto the bed and encircled Sakhi, who was rolling over on her back and then onto her belly; she babbled excitedly and reached for our tail. We flicked it back and forth a couple of times before letting her grab hold of it.
“Your link is clearly much stronger,” the Gray One said. “On every level... Parts of your souls are directly connected that were only indirectly connected, the last time I examined your link. — Which was several years ago, now that I think about it. I should be checking you more often, but it appeared to have stabilized after the first year...”
“How is it going to work when Leslie goes home?” we asked.
She shrugged. “Impossible to say ahead of time... it must grow weaker, or at least affect you less strongly, with one of you in a low-magic area. But probably stronger than it was before Leslie came here. We could do a preliminary test, you know... see how strongly your link affects you when you’re thousands of miles apart in the same world. Mention it to the Tenacious One when she returns... If there’s nothing else, I’ll be going now.” And soon she swapped back with Taylor.
“What did she find out?” Taylor asked, and we told her. She nodded tensely.
“I phoned Mom and Dad while I was in the Gray One’s body,” she said. “They’re disappointed that we’ll be a little later getting home but not too worried, I think.”
“Did you tell them about our link?”
“No, I didn’t want to worry them any more. Let’s do that test the Gray One mentioned, putting thousands of miles between you —”
“Not now! We’re getting hungry, and Serenikha should meet with Wushao soon.”
“Hmm... I’m pretty hungry too. Let’s call the servants and ask for something. And there’s no reason we shouldn’t test it while Serenikha is meeting with Wushao.”
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)
“Well, that was a complete waste of time,” Taylor said. “Do you know why the Knowing One used an illusion instead of a transformation when he came to see the portal here in the women’s quarters?”
“Um, I thought we’d decided that was because he’s a wuss?”
A short chapter this time; that's just how the scene breaks fell. The next one will be longer.
My latest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.
A little later, we slithered into Wushao’s neighborhood, accompanied by Sienpai and Shiyama. Wushao had replied with effusive alacrity to the note we’d sent by Bhavalikha. Sakhi was lying down for her nap in the nursery. With our other body, we were in the room we shared with Taylor, watching her cast another portal spell.
This one was supposed to open to another place in this same world. It would be night there on the other side of the world, and we suggested waiting until night when it would be daytime at our destination, but Taylor was impatient to be doing something. “I feel guilty about letting you two get so tangled up. I want to see if I can help.”
“It’s not a bad thing,” we said. “You don’t need to feel bad about it.”
“I’ll worry about my little brother as much as I please, thank you.”
So she opened the portal; it looked much the same as the one that had brought us to Serenikha’s world, but it opened up faster and appeared to be easier for Taylor to manage. Once it had reached full size, she said: “You go through first.”
Not without some trepidation, we slithered into it. I was moving through a tunnel for a timeless moment, and then slithering through a grassy moonlit field. We slithered forward a few yards to get clear of the portal, and looked back to see Taylor emerging from it a moment later.
Wushao was greeting us warmly, and calling for the servants to bring in the dishes. “I hope you’re not angry about the banquet?” we said.
“I know it wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It was the Tenacious One, wasn’t it? She cast a spell on Leslie, and it affected you too...?”
“It wasn’t really her fault either,” we said, though perhaps it partly was. I was distracted by the several seconds when I was only Serenikha, and couldn’t feel Leslie. Then we felt both of ourselves again, and remembered that timeless passage through the portal — which wasn’t timeless, apparently, if we could judge from how long it felt like we’d lost half of ourselves.
“Can you still feel your link with Serenikha just as strongly?” Taylor asked, after she’d looked around to make sure we were alone. As our eyes adjusted to the dim moonlight we saw that we were near a riverbank, below a cliff down which a waterfall was tumbling. We remembered the photos Taylor had shown us of her trip back in October; this might have been the same place, though the dim moonlight made it hard to be sure.
“Now, yes. But we lost contact for a few moments when we were passing through the portal.” We remembered that strange empty feeling we’d had when Leslie was passing through the portal from Yosemite to the palace baths; that must have been the same thing, though we hadn’t realized what it was at the time. (We’d felt it both as Serenikha and Leslie, but while we were separate people we’d never compared notes on that, there was too much else going on.)
“Hmm. Maybe that means you’ll separate from her when you go home. Or it could be it’s just the in-between space that affects you that way. Can you still see everything Serenikha sees, and hear what she hears and so forth?”
“Yes. She’s talking to Wushao, telling her some of what happened last night and this morning.” We were leaving out some details of how our link had strengthened, after seeing how much it distressed Taylor. Perhaps Wushao would be just as upset.
“That sounds like so much fun!” Wushao said. “I wish I could have joined you.”
“Can you turn Wushao into a pixie for a while?” we asked Taylor.
“What? — Uh, technically yes. But it might be a bad idea. I’m afraid we might be in trouble for turning Serenikha into a pixie, and she’s just the emperor’s daughter-in-law; if I change his daughter...”
“The Tenacious One would be happy to transform you, but she’s afraid your father might not like it,” we said to Wushao, and to Taylor: “She looks disappointed, but resigned.”
“So when will Leslie and the Tenacious One be going home?” Wushao asked. “Weren’t they planning to leave last night?”
“The Tenacious One didn’t want to go off and leave me in pixie form,” we explained, and asked Taylor: “So, are we going to have to wait for a magic surge and a full-sized portal?”
“I hope not. I’m going to consult with the Knowing One and the other court mages in the next day or two, and we’ll see if any of them can help out on Serenikha’s end. Or if they can swap with the Gray One so she can help. We need a mage here — I mean, back at the palace — to turn her back into a nagini once we go through. And she’ll want us to time it so she’s somewhere private when she turns into a pixie.”
“So I’ll turn into a human guy, once I’m back in low-magic territory, and then —” We suddenly realized something. “Wouldn’t our link turn Serenikha into a copy of Leslie?”
Taylor’s mouth opened in an O. “Oh, wow... maybe.” She paused. “Probably, even. The spell that’s entangled with your link would be trying to sync up your bodies, but it can’t keep you in pixie or nagini form for lack of power, so it would have to change Serenikha instead. Not all at once, probably, but over the course of a few days, like when your scales and face changed.”
“Or maybe faster than that, if our link is still stronger after I go home.”
“Maybe. Let’s get back.”
We went back through the portal spell to our room in the palace. We lost contact with ourselves for a moment as Leslie was going through the portal.
Wushao realized we were upset about something, but she didn’t know what. We couldn’t tell her what we’d just learned and how without telling her about our stronger link, and she had enough stress from her impending marriage without that.
Taylor was busy that evening and much of the next day meeting with the Knowing One and other mages at the court and in the city. She returned to our room late that evening from a meeting with the Knowing One, looking frustrated and disgusted.
“Well, that was a complete waste of time,” she said. “Do you know why the Knowing One used an illusion instead of a transformation when he came to see the portal here in the women’s quarters?”
“Um, I thought we’d decided that was because he’s a wuss?”
“Well, that too. But when I asked him if he could turn Serenikha back into her nagini self after you and I go home and she probably turns into a copy of you, he hemmed and hawed and asked me a bunch of questions about your link and the spell that’s gotten tangled with it, and finally, when I pressed him, he admitted that he couldn’t do a transformation spell. He doesn’t know how and he probably doesn’t have the power for it. And when I asked if he’d play host for the Gray One again, he refused — politely and at great length, wasting even more of my time.”
“So who else do we know who can work with the transformation spell?”
“I’m not sure. I’m going to talk to all the other mages I know or can get the Knowing One to introduce me to. It might take a few days.”
We hadn’t realized before how unusual Taylor’s power level was. Neither of the other two mages she talked with the next day could work a transformation spell. Then she went to visit a kappa called the Deep One the day after that, who agreed to try to help.
She returned to the palace with Taylor, and they sent a message to us where we were playing with Sakhi. After we’d nursed her again, and sent her to lie down for a nap, we brought both our bodies to Taylor’s room, where she and the Deep One were waiting. The Deep One was tall for a kappa, but still much shorter a typical human woman; her scales were a dark blue, fading to lighter blue at her hands and feet, and she wore a peach-colored kimono, which was soaking wet and kept dripping on the floor. She had with her a large bucket of water, and a sponge which she periodically squeezed out atop her head.
The mages drew circles around each of our bodies, and Taylor showed the Deep One the link spell.
“You see, there’s the template for the form the transformation spell is imposing.”
“I see. The princess has a template that’s identical to her natural form, and the other one — your brother? — has an identical template, superimposed on his natural form. So if we change one the other changes to match it?”
“That’s what I thought at first, but no. Look closer. I think there’s only one template; it just looks like there’s two identical ones because of the way you’re looking at it. See, if we tweak it a little, say to give her purple scales —” She did something with her staff and we felt that our scales ought to be different a few moments before their actual color changed. “Then both of them change at once. There used to be some delay, but it’s dropped over the last few days from hours to seconds and now to nothing at all. Here, you try it.”
The Deep One frowned, waved one of those big glowing pearls the mages around here seemed to prefer over staffs, and muttered an incantation. Nothing happened.
“It’s slippery,” she said. “Why isn’t it reacting?”
“What were you trying to do?”
“Change her eye color — I thought I’d start small. But the template’s not changing.”
“Show me again how you’re doing it...”
The Deep One cast the spell again, and then Taylor said: “No, you need to adjust the third and fifth lines there because of the way the transformation’s entangled with the psychic link...”
After some discussion that was over our heads, the Deep One tried twice more to change our eye color. The third time, we felt an odd not-exactly-sensation about our eyes, and moments later the Deep One and Taylor nodded in satisfaction. “That’s done it,” the Deep One said, and put down her pearl to pick up the sponge and dampen her skin. “It’s not quite the same as the transformation spell I learned from my mentor, but I think I understand it well enough now.”
“Then will you try something more ambitious?” we asked. “Maybe turn us into pixies and back into nagini?”
“Perhaps.” She looked at Taylor, who shook her head.
“We need to test out what you’d be doing after Leslie and I go home to our own world. And then — you might need to turn Serenikha from a pixie to a nagini, but more likely from a human. I suspect that once Leslie goes home, and reverts to his natural state, Serenikha will become a copy of him — like this:” and she began another spell, which turned us back into Leslie-form a few minutes later. We concentrated on the way the spell changed our self-image before it changed our bodies. We felt like there was something important there we almost understood.
The Deep One looked a little embarrassed to see us male and naked from the waist down, so Taylor grabbed a couple of robes out of one of the cabinets and tossed them into the circles for us to put on. While we did that, she and the Deep One talked about the spell, and then the Deep One tried turning us back into nagini.
This time we could feel our self-image changing earlier, a good four or five minutes before the physical changes began. And it occurred to us for the first time to wonder — could it work the other way around?
“That’s good,” Taylor said. “We don’t know for sure if it will work the same way when you’re just casting the spell on Serenikha and Leslie’s in a low-magic area in another world, but there’s no way to test that ahead of time. Shall I send you a message as soon as I know when I can open another pixie-sized portal?”
“Yes, of course. I can come to the palace any time with three or four hours' notice.”
We all thanked her, and Taylor escorted her out of the palace while we went to hang out with Shiyama and Sienpai with one body and to attend a banquet Princess Taoshai had invited us to with the other.
Later that night, after Taylor was asleep, we got out of beds and slithered over to the mirrors. There wasn’t much light, but we didn’t need a lot. We thought back to how it had felt when the mages had transformed us, and we tried to recreate that feeling — that our self-image was something separate from us, something that mages could touch and mold into another shape, making our physical body change in imitation of it. And if they could change it, why couldn’t we? Maybe it would be like our heartbeat, something we couldn’t affect directly, but then maybe it would be like breathing. We wanted to try.
“We aren’t nagini,” we said to ourselves, “not just nagini. We’re also human and male: that’s part of us too. We remember what it feels like to be that way...”
And after a few minutes of thinking that way, we started to feel something like we’d felt earlier, when the mages were transforming us. Something like, but not quite the same. No physical change followed.
Well, we could try again later.
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We were being Serenikha with both bodies at the moment.
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Two days later, Taylor came into the parlor where we were playing the riddle-game with Shiyama, Michiko and others. “I’ve got it, Your Highness. I can open another portal this afternoon, about five hours hence — I’ve already sent a message to the Deep One. Where’s Leslie?”
Actually, we were being Serenikha with both bodies at the moment — the other one was playing a ball-tossing game in the Peach Garden with Wushao and some of her courtiers — and the one we had there talking to Taylor had probably been Leslie’s. But we didn’t want to say so, since the women we were playing riddles with thought they were playing with Serenikha. We prevaricated, saying: “She’s in the Peach Garden with Pengshu and some others.”
“Well, set aside some time to see us off and then have the Deep One transform you back into the right kind of body. Make sure Leslie comes back in plenty of time.”
“Of course. We’ll both be in your quarters in a couple of hours. You’re welcome to stay...”
“No, thank you, I have things to do to get ready.” She slithered out of the room again, and Theremisia muttered “How rude!”
“Be patient with her,” we said; “mages have so many arcane matters demanding their attention, they can’t always remember less important matters, like manners.”
We had kept trying to use the spell Taylor had left on us to transform ourselves, when we could get a rare moment of privacy with both bodies. (Privacy with one body wasn’t too hard, but if we succeeded, both bodies would undoubtedly transform at once.) Finally, last night after Taylor went to sleep, we’d achieved some limited success: we got our breasts to grow larger, then smaller again. But when we tried to make our bodies like Leslie’s original body, it didn’t quite work. It felt like we were about to change, but the feeling passed and we were still the same nagini.
The next morning, we’d told Taylor about our partial success; she was dumbfounded, and wanted to see us change ourselves. We begged off just then, as the body with which we’d slept in Serenikha’s chamber wasn’t alone. And hours had passed without a good opportunity to have both bodies alone with Taylor.
When we’d arrived in Wushao’s neighborhood we had told her we would spend the whole afternoon and evening with her, as she had invited us to. Now we knew we needed to bring that body back early, but since we still hadn’t explained to Wushao about our stronger link, we needed to send a note “to tell Serenikha” that the Tenacious One needed her help. We wrote it out and entrusted it to Sienpai, privately warning her that Leslie was impersonating Serenikha and she needed to address her as such. After she delivered the note, we made our excuses to Wushao and her courtiers, and returned to our chambers.
After nursing Sakhi again, we went to Taylor’s room with both bodies. She was busy casting a spell of some kind, so we let ourselves in quietly and coiled up in a corner away from her spell circle. A few minutes later she finished the spell — with no apparent effect — and broke the circle.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “The magic levels over there are rising faster than I thought; we can go back pretty soon. Maybe before the Deep One arrives; Serenikha, will you be okay hanging out here in pixie-form — or Leslie-form — until she gets here?”
“Sure,” we said. “And maybe I can change back on my own.”
“Right, you said you’d — um — you’d gotten your breasts to grow, during the night?”
“And then we shrank them back down to normal size. We tried to change other things but couldn’t get it to work.”
“Try again now, please.”
So we concentrated on our memories of being Leslie, and tried to feel what it was like to have that kind of body — walking on two separate legs, nothing wobbling around on our chest when we moved, those things dangling between our legs... Taylor watched us intently, and that felt a little distracting, so we closed all our eyes and concentrated on kinesthetic memory.
Then something gave way and we knew we should have that body. Our legs felt weird, being squished together and coiled up like that... and then they uncoiled on their own and started to separate... We opened our eyes, looking at each other: it was a sight we’d seen in mirrors often when we were Leslie.
“Wow,” Taylor said softly. “How are you even doing that? You’re not casting a spell, it doesn’t look like... but... Huh. Let me draw a spell circle around you, and then do it again while I work a diagnostic spell.”
“Okay.”
We stood there patiently while she drew the circle and began the spell. She paused after waving her staff and chanting for a while, and said: “Okay, now transform again. Back into Serenikha, or, I don’t know, maybe pixies again?”
We thought it would be easier to change back into Serenikha-form, since it was one of the two forms we knew best. We concentrated on what that felt like, and after a few minutes felt our self-image click over to that: now our legs and penises felt wrong, but not for long before they merged into the naga-tails we ought to have. Just after we felt our self-image really change, a beam of light shone from the sternum of one body to the sternum of the other; the light twisted around in the air and changed colors before fading.
“That’s... huh. You remember how I said your transformation spell has a component that holds the form it’s trying to impose on you? And it’s easier to change that form than to remove the spell or recast it, now that it’s tangled with your psychic link? It looks like you’ve learned to manipulate that form.”
“So that’s good, right? We won’t need the Deep One’s help.”
“Maybe. I’d like to have her here just in case. Are you sure you’ll still be able to do that self-transformation when your psychic link is weakened by being in two different worlds?”
We shrugged with one set of shoulders. “Maybe? We’ll have to try and see.”
“Well, try it after we leave, and if you can’t do it on your own, get the Deep One to help you. Here, try changing into pixies; that will save my energy for opening the portal...”
So we thought back to how it had felt to be pixies, and tried to convince ourselves that that was what we ought to be right now. After a few minutes we felt way too large and wingless, and then we were shrinking down to a comfortable size and growing our wings back. We had green skin and violet hair, the same as before, and we looked at each other in satisfaction and nodded before we took off and flew up to look Taylor in the eyes.
“Wow, you two are good. That’s the fastest transformation I’ve seen yet. One of the other students in my class was faster than any of the rest of us, when we came to this world on the field trip to practice high-power spells, but you’re faster than him by a minute or two... I wish we still had our cellphones running so I could time you. Next time, we need to bring actual wristwatches so the batteries will last longer.”
“Are you going to change yourself before or after opening the portal?” we asked, flying spirals around each other and a larger circle around Taylor.
“Now, I guess. Stay back out of my circle...” And she drew another circle around herself, and started working on the transformation. We watched, trying to see if we could tell how she was doing it the way we’d felt her and the Deep One changing us, but we couldn’t see or hear anything except the usual staff-waving and chanting, and couldn’t feel anything unusual.
After about fifteen minutes of that, she started shrinking, grew wings, and split her tail into legs. Her staff shrank with her. This time she had scarlet skin and wings, and dark blue hair.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll rest, maybe take a short nap, and then work the portal spell.” She broke the circle with her staff, then flew over to the bed and laid down on one of the pillows, which was big enough to be a bed for any five pixies. “Don’t let me sleep too long,” she said. “Wake me up when the Deep One gets here, or in an hour if she hasn’t gotten here yet.”
The bed curtains were too heavy for us to pull closed, but we doused two of the lamps so it got dimmer, and then flew spirals around each other in parts of the suite that weren’t visible from Taylor’s pillow, so we wouldn’t disturb her. We didn’t have a clock as accurate as the ones on our dead-battery cellphones, but there was an hourglass on a shelf; it took both of our bodies to flip it over.
When about half the sand had run out, a servant came in and looked around, and was apparently about to turn and leave again when we flew down and hovered in front of her.
“Oh! Ah... is that you, my lady?”
“I am Princess Serenikha,” we said with one mouth.
“Oh. That kappa mage called the Deep One is here to see the Tenacious One.”
“Send her in,” we said with the other mouth. She curtsied and left; a few moments later the Deep One came in, and we flew down to her eye level with one body while we flew over to Taylor’s pillow to wake her with the other.
“The Tenacious One will be with us shortly,” we said to the Deep One, and to Taylor: “Wake up, sis, the Deep One’s here,” and we shook her shoulder. She opened her eyes.
“And I’d only just gotten to sleep... oh well. I think I’m rested enough to cast the portal spell now.” We took off and flew over to hover in front of the Deep One.
“Are you ready, Tenacious One?” she asked.
“Yes, unless you want to rest a few minutes after your journey. Not too long; we need to go through during the optimal period, when magic levels are safely high at our destination.”
“Oh,” we said, “we forgot to ask — where are you opening it to?”
“The back office of the Travel Agency in Santa Cruz.”
“So the Gray One will be there to meet us?”
“No, the Santa Cruz branch is run by the Imperturbable One; he graduated from Kinnison College five or six years ago, before I started there, but I met him when Professor G. invited him to give a talk to the freshman class my first semester. He’s good.”
“And he’ll have clothes for us?”
She shrugged. “They might not fit perfectly, but yeah. He’s gonna give us a ride to Mom and Dad’s house after he closes the office for the day.”
We were feeling a keen anticipation and also a deep apprehension. We wanted to see Mom and Dad and our college friends again, and we wanted to get back to school before we missed any more classes. But we were worried about how being in different worlds would affect our link. Would we still be us?
Only one way to find out.
Taylor drew a pixie-sized spell circle on the floor, while we showed the Deep One our luggage and asked her to throw our valuables through the portal after us. When we’d finished that, we all sat on the edge of the bed and watched Taylor cast the portal spell. Being in pixie form with lots of energy to burn, and nervous about how our link was going to be affected by this separation, we got really fidgety long before she finished casting it, and we took off and flew around the room, looking at the Taylor and the tiny portal (still smaller than a pixie’s fist) from different angles, then alighting on the bed again and dancing for a while... The Deep One seemed both amused by our antics and annoyed at being distracted when she wanted to concentrate on how Taylor was working that spell.
Finally, Taylor got the portal open as wide as it would go — more than twice our height. “That’s that,” she said, resting on her staff for a moment. “Come on, Leslie, let’s go.”
She started toward the portal, but before she went through it we called out with both voices: “Wait!”
She turned and looked at us, where we’d fluttered down and alighted near her spell-circle. “What is it?”
“Which of us is supposed to be Leslie?”
She stared at us silently for a few moments. “You mean you don’t know?”
“We kind of lost track; it didn’t seem important. We can be Leslie or Serenikha with either body, or with both at once if we need to. But when you were showing the Deep One how our transformation spell worked, you said you could see our true forms underlying the form the spell was imposing on us...?”
“Yeah, I can. Give me a minute.”
She worked on the portal again for a bit, and then stepped outside the portal spell-circle and said: “Okay, stand a little further apart... good. Now hold still.” She drew separate circles around each of us and then worked another spell, much simpler and shorter than the one she’d used to transform us.
“Okay, you’re coming with me,” she said, pointing at our body on the left, “and you’re staying here. Got it?”
“Sure,” we said with the mouth on the body she’d identified as Leslie’s. “Can we break the circles now?”
“Come on.” She took off and flew the ten inches or so to the portal and into it. We looked at each other for a moment, then sent our Leslie-body through the portal after her.
And then I was only me, flying through the portal-tunnel and out into a vast dark space. I couldn’t see where I was going, and I ran into Taylor, who was already turning back into her human self, though she hadn’t quite reached her full size. I bounced off her, feeling myself already growing too heavy for my wings to support me, and managed to land semi-gracefully on the floor before I lost the ability to fly entirely.
I was nearly back to my full height and mostly back to my usual light tan color when the room suddenly lit up. Taylor was standing by the light switch, almost full size but still growing a little. Her staff seemed to have reverted to full size faster than her.
“Get clear of the portal,” she said, just as a cellphone flew out of it and hit me in the ankle.
“Ow,” I said, and stepped away.
By the time the other cellphone and both our wallets had flown out of the portal, Taylor and I were both back to normal. At least physically. I was feeling a huge gap in myself, unable to feel Serenikha’s body or share her thoughts, but I was able to function. Our phones were followed by a few more small items from our luggage before the portal collapsed.
“How are you feeling?” Taylor asked. “Can you still see through Serenikha’s eyes and all?”
“No... I can hardly feel her at all. At first I thought our link was broken, but now... it’s like my arm has just gone to sleep, instead of getting cut off.”
“Thanks for that lovely image. Is it as uncomfortable as that makes it sound?”
I thought for a moment. “I can get used to it, I guess. It’s just the way things were before, only now I know something better is possible and I kind of miss it.”
She shook her head. “That was really creepy, the way you two seemed to merge into one person. I’m glad you’re back.”
“I was never gone.”
“I know, but... never mind. Let’s find those clothes the Imperturbable One said he’d leave here for us.”
But on searching the room — which contained only a couple of filing cabinets and a stack of cardboard boxes — we found no clothes or anything we could use for clothes.
“Are we sure we’re in his office and not, say, the insurance agent’s next door?”
“Um... I think so. Look,” she pulled one of the files from the filing cabinet, “it’s a rental agreement between the Gray & Isaacson Travel Agency and Hsung Leasing.”
“So we’re either in his office or his landlord’s office.”
“His,” she confirmed, pulling another file and finding phone bills in the name of the Gray & Isaacson Travel Agency. “Let’s see if he left the clothes somewhere else.”
We left the storage room and explored the rest of the office, which was equally dark and deserted. It was night here, a little after one a.m. we discovered when we found a clock. And we couldn’t find anything more clothes-like than some hand-towels in the kitchenette.
We did manage to find a USB charger cord in one of the desk drawers, and we started charging Taylor’s cellphone. We debated calling the Imperturbable One at home, either on the cell once it charged a bit or on the office landline, but decided to wait until sometime after dawn. “He’s already doing us a massive favor,” Taylor said, “so let’s not piss him off by waking him in the middle of the night. Probably he was expecting us to arrive during working hours.”
After a while, I curled up on the sofa in the lobby and took a nap, while Taylor turned on the computer and web-surfed. She shook my shoulder and woke me just as it was getting light outside.
“We probably shouldn’t be naked here in the lobby when people might come look in the windows at us,” she suggested.
“Yeah, I guess so.” I had something to tell her, but it could wait a few minutes.
We moved back to the storage room and sat down to wait.
“I called the Imperturbable One, told him we were here and and asked him to bring some extra clothes. He apologized and said he meant to leave them at the office yesterday, but forgot and left them in his car... anyway, he’ll come in early and give us a ride to his condo, if we want, so we can sleep in a real bed while he works. Then he’ll give us a ride to Mom and Dad’s house.”
“Good. Um... about my link with Serenikha? You know how I share dreams with her?”
“Yes?”
“Well, in this dream I was us. I mean we were both me... we were like we were the last few days in her world. We shared everything, not just the stuff we wanted to deliberately show or tell each other.”
“And now?” She looked worried.
“Now I’m just me again. But I remember everything that happened to Serenikha between the time we left and the time she fell asleep.”
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)
Reminding myself of what I needed to do helped keep my mind off the huge empty feeling, the hole in my heart where my other self should be.
On further thought, I think I put the chapter break between 10 and 11 in an awkward place. Maybe I should have split them earlier, or lumped them together into one overlong chapter. Anyway, if you find the opening scene here confusing, try going back and re-reading the end of chapter 10 first.
My other self disappeared through the portal and I was suddenly just me. Still a pixie, but only me.
The Deep One took one of the cellphones and threw it into the portal, then the other, then one by one she threw in several of Leslie and Taylor’s other small possessions. I reminded myself that I would need to have the servants move the backpacks to a safe storage area.
Reminding myself of what I needed to do helped keep my mind off the huge empty feeling, the hole in my heart where my other self should be. I would have helped throw things into the portal, but most of them seemed too big for me to lift.
Not long after the Deep One ran out of small items to throw in, the portal shrank quickly to nothing. The Deep One looked at me, where I had perched on the edge of the bed again to get out of her way.
“Are you ready for me to change you back, Your Highness?” she asked. “I had expected that, if the Tenacious One was right, you would have transformed into a human man by now.”
“I think I will, if we don’t do something to stop it,” I said. “But it might take some time. We changed quickly when we were close together, but now that he’s so far away...” I thought about how I felt and how I ought to feel. Being a pixie, a female pixie, felt right; if I was going to change into a copy of Leslie, I’d probably start feeling what they call gender dysphoria in English a few minutes before the change happened. “Let me try changing myself first, and if I can’t, you can change me.” I closed my eyes and remembered my familiar nagini body, the shape I’d worn nearly all my life — a little different in the last couple of years, since I’d hatched Sakhi and been nursing her, but still recognizably the same shape I’d always had, except for a few days as Leslie five years ago and some hours in pixie form just lately... it seemed odd at first, the idea of not having wings, of having a naga-tail instead of legs, but I didn’t have to think about it for long before it was suddenly the other way around, and my wings and legs felt strange. Then I was growing, and my legs were fusing, and everything felt right again.
“I’ve got it,” I said cheerily. “Thank you for coming, O Deep One. I may need your help later on, if I can’t make this stick. But for now, you may go if you like; I will send for you if I need you. Or you may join me and the ladies of my court for dinner.”
“I would like to accept, Your Highness, but I have another appointment. Good evening.”
I put on a sari and slithered out of the room. After I’d found Talarikha and told her what to do with Leslie and Taylor’s backpacks, I went to the nursery, where Sakhi had just woken from a nap. I held her, and nursed her, and sang to her, trying not to think about the gaping emptiness that was Leslie’s absence. I knew I’d see him in dreams again, probably that night or certainly within a few nights, but we’d secretly hoped that our stronger link would hold us together even after he returned to his world. No such luck, apparently.
But after a while, when Sakhi got sleepy again and I put her down for a nap, I started feeling a little odd. It didn’t take long to identify that feeling: I was feeling I ought to be shaped like Leslie. And I wasn’t quite sure, but I thought my breasts might have shrunk a bit while I was playing with Sakhi.
I concentrated on my old, original self-image until that feeling went away, and my breasts returned to their normal size. Was I going to have to keep doing that every few hours for the rest of my life?
I ate supper with Sienpai, Michiko and the other ladies of my court, but I didn’t tell them what I was feeling and thinking, not yet. I said I was tired and wanted to retire early; I knew Leslie would be trying to get to bed early too, to get back on a reasonably sleep schedule for his California time zone, and I wanted to make sure we shared enough sleep time to dream together.
As I lay there waiting for sleep, I felt my self-image begin to waver, and my body begin to change. This time, alone and under the covers, I didn’t resist it; I think I was already male and halfway to human by the time I fell asleep.
We were pixies again, flying through the trees in a dense forest. We spiraled around tree-trunks and over branches, buzzing squirrels and deer and laughing maniacally as they ran from us. Then, without any obvious transition, we were flying through the Santa Cruz branch of the Travel Agency. There were our Leslie self and Taylor, looking around and not finding any clothes; they didn’t seem to see us. We flew around a corner and were in the palace, hovering over our Serenikha self, who was slithering toward the nursery. That reminded us of all she’d been doing in the last few hours. Could we talk to her? We tried, but she didn’t seem to see or hear us. We got bored and flew out into the garden...
“So Serenikha can stay in nagini form, but it takes concentration?”
“Yeah, she has to concentrate to change back whenever she feels herself starting to change. I think she’ll have to do that four or five times a day, if she had to do it twice in the last few hours of the day.”
“I hope it won’t be that often all the time — it will probably be less often when you’re in a lower-magic area. Travel Agency offices are always in high-magic areas, so most places should be better than this.”
“Like my dorm?”
“Yes, that’s higher-magic than most parts of your campus but definitely less than this office.”
Just then we heard a voice: “Taylor? Are you decent?”
“No!” Taylor called back. “That’s why I asked you to bring us some clothes.”
“All right. I’m going to leave them outside the door here, and go back to the lobby.”
Taylor rolled her eyes. I opened the door and saw a pile of clothes in the floor, and a tall guy’s back disappearing around the corner.
We got dressed, and went out to the lobby. The Imperturbable One looked at us and said: “Sorry that stuff doesn’t fit. Professor G. didn’t tell me your exact sizes, so I had to guess.”
“No need to apologize,” I said, though my pants were so baggy I’d had to cut an extra hole in the belt with a staple-remover I’d found in the storage room. “How much do we owe you for this stuff?”
“I think I’ve got the receipts in the car, you can pay me back later. Most of it’s from a thrift store, except the underwear.” He’d given us unopened plastic packages of boxer shorts and panties. “Just donate whatever doesn’t fit you. Come on, I’ll give you a ride to my condo and you can get a nap.”
Once we were in the car, he said to Taylor, who was sitting up front next to him: “So you managed to open up a portal by yourself? And you went through it? That was either really brilliant or really stupid. Maybe both.”
“Well, here we are now,” Taylor said. “No worse for wear.” But she glanced over her shoulder at me when she said that; I smiled reassuringly.
“Why did you need new clothes? Professor G. didn’t explain that part.”
“Well, I didn’t have enough power for a full-sized portal...” She explained on the way to his condo, and that led to a much longer explanation of our adventures in the last couple of weeks; I pitched in now and then, though we didn’t tell him all the details about my link with Serenikha or how it had changed. We wound up sitting and drinking coffee in his living room, telling him the last of it.
“This is fascinating,” he said, looking at a clock, “but I need to get back and open up the Travel Agency for business. Make yourselves at home, help yourself to the food in the cabinets or the refrigerator; I’ll be back a little after five.”
The Imperturbable One pulled into Mom and Dad’s driveway a little after seven-thirty that evening. I had dozed off during the drive, after listening to Taylor and the older mage talk for a while, but I didn’t share a dream with Serenikha; it was late morning in the palace, and she must be awake. I woke when we got off the expressway onto surface roads, probably because of the change in noise level and acceleration, and found that Taylor and the Imperturbable One (she was calling him “Ike” now; I wondered irrelevantly if he had his customers call him “Mr. I.”?) were still talking, more animatedly than ever. They’d been talking about places in the other world they’d been when I fell asleep; now they were talking about their favorite movies...
I thought I could see what was going on, and didn’t contribute to the conversation except when Taylor noticed I was awake and asked me if I remembered what movie it was that had Kat Denning playing a centaur. (I didn’t.)
“No, I haven’t seen that one,” the Imperturbable One (or Ike) said; “but if you thought the centaurs were unusually authentic, I’m guessing it’s more likely the screenwriter or director who’s been to the other world, rather than Kat Denning. I know the Audacious One — do you know him? He opened a Travel Agency office in Los Angeles a few years ago. Anyway, he’s been doing a special promotion, saying that this exotic country’s Chamber of Commerce wants Hollywood to set more movies there so they’re offering low-cost vacations to writers, directors and so forth... all part of the plan, you know, getting people used to the idea of the other world before the worlds run smack into each other.”
“I bet the screenwriter would have — oh, hey, turn right at that blue house with the lawn gnomes.”
And then we were on Mom and Dad’s street, and a minute later in front of their house. With my car, Taylor’s, Mom’s and Dad’s all in the driveway there wasn’t room for Ike’s car too, and Taylor told him to park on the street.
I got out and walked up to the front door. Taylor and Ike were coming along behind me, slower, still talking; I gave them some distance to be alone for a few moments. Mom opened the door before I had time to knock more than once, and threw her arms around me.
“I’m so glad you’re home safe!” And, when she had done hugging me for the moment, she jogged down the driveway toward Taylor.
“Hi, Dad,” I said. “We’re back.”
“It’s good to see you. What’s happened in the last, hmm, four days? That’s the last time Ms. G. called us with an update. Your sister called this morning to say you were back, and again a few minutes ago, but she didn’t give us a lot of details.”
“But you have to stay for supper,” Mom was saying, as she, Taylor and Ike approached the door. Dad and I got inside and out of their way.
“I’ve got a long drive home, and I need to work tomorrow... I can stay for maybe half an hour but not long,” Ike said.
“No luggage?” Dad asked.
“No, just our cellphones. And the jewelry Mom gave us — the rest, with some clothes and stuff, is in storage at the palace until Taylor can open another big portal. We had to come back as pixies through a little bitty portal.”
“At least take a cup of coffee or tea while you’re here,” Mom urged.
“I can do that,” Ike said. “Thank you.”
I went and changed into some better-fitting clothes from the closet of my old bedroom, and when I came back, Ike was talking to Mom and Dad; Taylor had apparently gone to change clothes too.
“I wasn’t there when they came back,” he was saying, “that was in the middle of the night, apparently. They called me from my office first thing in the morning to tell me they were there...”
So I filled them in on what happened, but I didn’t want to get into the whole thing about my link with Serenikha just then, because I knew it would be a long discussion and it would be interrupted when Ike had to leave. I was about to pay Ike for the clothes and shoes he’d gotten us when Taylor came in, having changed clothes as well.
“So,” I said, “should I make the check out to ‘the Imperturbable One’? Or do your customers call you ‘Mr. I.’?”
He coughed in embarrassment. “I, uh, usually only go by ‘the Imperturbable One’ when I’m in the other world. People don’t take you seriously as a mage unless you have a name like that. And the Gray One can get away with being all mysterious and calling himself ‘Mr. G.’ or ‘Ms. G.’ or ‘Professor G.’, but — well, my customers call me Mr. Isaacson and my friends call me Ike.”
“Your parents must be long-time customers of Mr. G.,” Dad said. “Anyone we might know?”
He ducked his head slightly as he said, “Well, I think my father was more into it than my mom. I don’t remember him, he left us when I was a baby... My mom only went to the other world just the once, when she was pregnant with me and didn’t know it yet, and she didn’t like it. I didn’t find out about it until Mr. G. found me and told me I’d won a free vacation, the summer after I’d graduated from high school... and when I got back from spending a week over there as a domovoi, he told me that I had some talent for magic because my parents had been customers of his back when Mom was pregnant with me. When I told Mom about it, she told me a little bit more about my father than I’d ever heard before, but still not much, and about how she’d gone to the other world with him once...”
He wound up staying a lot longer than he’d said he could, through supper and for a little while longer; and I think he talked more with Taylor than with any of the rest of us, which strengthened the suspicions I’d formed during our drive to Mom and Dad’s house. Mom and Dad regaled him with stories about their travels in the other world, and Taylor and I told them about our visit with Serenikha, though we left a lot of details out on the first telling. We exchanged negotiating glances as we got to the point in the story where my link with Serenikha got so strong, and I went on from there without mentioning it yet.
Finally, Ike said he really had to get home. Dad gave him a cup of coffee for the road, and after lingering for a while at the door with Taylor, while Mom, Dad and I hung discreetly back, he left.
Taylor waved at him one more time and then closed the door. When she turned toward us, I saw that Mom was on the point of asking her something — a question Taylor might not be ready to answer. I decided to take the heat off her.
“So,” I said, “there’s something I forgot to mention earlier. About my link with Serenikha...”
That's all; thanks for reading and commenting. In two or three weeks, probably, I'll start serializing a 23,000 word novella in Morpheus's Twisted universe. It's a semi-sequel to my Twisted Throwback, about Emily's Uncle Jack and cousin Tim, but it should stand alone tolerably well.
If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)