A Succession of Bad Days (27 page)

“Buttons over the left eye.” Grue sounds cheerful, not Grue-is-always-cheerful cheerful, but entirely cheerful. Grue was one of Halt’s students, this might be additions to the family from Grue’s point of view.

“Those hats are for formal occasions.” Halt produces pieces
of card, each with four buttons. “The label of custom is two buttons, vertically arranged in the hat band. Circles filled with embroidery if you must.”

I take my card, take the hat off, take a careful look, turn out to be a bit slower than Zora turning up the lights. The black in the buttons is something very shiny, set in metal. The black stuff looks like it has depth, it can’t, but it looks
enough like it does that I peer at the back of the buttons on the card.

“Thank you, Halt.” We all say it at more or less the same time. Dove, whose buttons are red and gold, three red and three gold, is just barely controlling a fit of giggles.

What’s funny?

Tell you later.

Chloris has white and green, Zora a very changeable purple, light or dark, more or less red or blue, depending on the angle
of the light.

“Is dinner — ” it really is only just about dinner time — “a formal occasion?” Chloris asks.

“Today, it might be,” Halt says, clearly pleased.

No one says anything at dinner, in the very Creek way where you don’t say anything because taking any kind of formal notice wouldn’t be polite.

Zora manages to shift into Zora fourteen days later. If there’s a visible change, I can’t see it.
Whatever it is, Grue agrees that it’s real, and spends some time talking Zora out of going straight for trying to turn into a tree.

Chloris takes another three days past that. Chloris produces visible changes, hair shifting a couple of green shades lighter. Over the next month, the darker of the two greens goes silver, the implausible silver of molten aluminium in a vacuum, not the hair colour
that gets called silver, a change that makes Chloris giddy, just ‘happy’ isn’t enough.

Dove, twenty-one days into trying, quietly stands up and looks like they rose more lightly. It’s not a big change, but visible, sharper of face and springier of motion. ‘Springier’ comes out in the classes with Block, whose eyes crinkle a tiny amount before noting that excellence may be expected of a combination
of youth and treachery.

Day twenty-eight, I have the clever notion that I might be going about this wrong. It’s the right
kind
of idea, I think, but I am, after all, not a dot. I’m trying to make theory work as practice.

Wind up walking out the door of the house in my head, Dove’s head, our head, up the jumbled rocks, down to the loose smooth grey cobbles of the beach. I find a cobble about the
right size for Edgar’s head, and lug it back to the flat space outside the door into the dim quiet of the back garden. Searching around in the jumbled rocks provides rocks I can pile up as legs and torso and arms. Stubby arms. The big round cobble goes on top of the pile.

I put clothes on it, Creek-style pants and wrapped jacket, what I’ve been wearing this winter. Wouldn’t work with material
rocks or material pants. Haven’t got a hat. Hrmm. I fish a hat out of the house, stick — they stay where I put them — a couple of teeny black pebbles on the brim.

Back up to the beach. It’s always very dim, always the same temperature, I would have felt cold, but I don’t, not anymore. Even if I let go of the house, let go of the circulation with Dove, let go of most of Edgar, really, I’m fine.

The water’s colder than the air, but still, it’s fine. I don’t go out very far, there’s a sort of bay, and out past the bay-mouth bar, this long sand-spit, it’s deep. There are things down there, I can feel them. Not evil, not angry, but
hungry
would be a good bet. I can stay in the bay, it’s got enough to eat for now.

It takes a bunch of trips. There’s some weed that does for hair, there’s a couple
round smooth polished bits of shell for eyes, there’s bits of carapace, scattered about on the bottom, that I can drape over the shoulders of the stones. It’s not the real thing, but it’ll do as a stand-in, and Edgar’s going to need armour.

I have no idea how Halt does this, anything like this, with that spider in the way.

Squeezing through a spider would be really insanely fiddly.

The pile of
rocks looks right, it’s Edgar, I’ve got the gaps and the seams out of it, it’d be a presentable statue in a memorial garden, it’s getting so the colours are right, it’s one even composition now, all the same kind of stone. The bits of carapace are sitting beside it, I don’t understand armour. Edgar’s still going to need it, but it’s going to have to wait.

“Praise then stone and the basis of being,”
Dove says behind me.

I turn around. Dove’s just stepped out of the open door, head tipped, just a little, looking at the statue. “You didn’t ask Wake for the whole poem?”

“Didn’t realize there was a whole poem.”

“They think there are nine elements, where Wake’s from. Stone’s the bottom one, the one everything else sits on.”

I nod, well, sorta. It makes sense, I mean, stone’s just chemicals, but
if you’re starting before you’ve got the idea of chemicals or charge, it’s the most durable stuff, and there’s an awful lot of it, and everything else is piled on top of it most of the time.

“This hatching?” Dove doesn’t sound worried. There are flames in Dove’s hair, individual red-and-crimson ones, tucked behind each ear like feathers, and you can see gold fire coiling in Dove’s eyes.

“Making
sure I don’t lose Edgar when I do hatch.” The jacket and pants are beside the statue, right now. Checking for seams. None left, it’s one solid Edgar.

“I think that’s what happened to Halt, lost the human. Probably twice.”

“Twice?” Dove doesn’t sound doubtful, just curious.

“Grandma Halt’s stuffed through that spider. I don’t think the spider was voluntary, it’s a lot of trouble and no benefit
I can see. Pretty sure that’s a lost human. I just have the feeling there was one before that, Halt’d have to have had a lot of practice to be able to get Grandma Halt through the spider.”

“Can I put some plants back here?”

“Sure.”

Boxwood and dusk-roses in red and gold and pearl-grey and midnight blue, you won’t find the last three colours growing anywhere material, and tiny flowers like stars
in dark, dark green leaves for ground cover. The statue’s got a plinth, too. And I think those are yew trees, up toward the rocks.

Dove’s really warm. We’re a bit more balanced, hugging like this. “Aren’t you a fright,” isn’t supposed to sound affectionate, but Dove doesn’t leave anything but affection in it. “Do I get to make Edgar-requests?”

“Taller?”

Dove’s head shakes. The fire-feathers, well,
say tickle. Weird sensation.

“Great strapping lads haven’t worked so well,” Dove says. “Edgar’s doing entirely fine for looking at, and you’ve continued the trend.” Dove’s chin lifts, pointing at the statue.

“Edgar will be a lot happier not worrying about broken ribs from a hug.”

Dove snorts. “Not to mention getting out in front of Block’s exercise program.”

“That, too.” Edgar’s statue’s muscle
definition is implausible. Implausible isn’t going to stop Block trying, and Block’s got, we’ve got, a long time. I’d rather sooner than later.

“Under-equipped for a Creek?” Edgar’d be stuttering that, it’s a lot easier to think about when I don’t have to be Edgar.

“Some,” Dove says. “Prehensile, generally, and can spiral both directions, specifically, are ahead of size by my preferences. Retractile,
if you do worry about size.”

No wonder Kynefrid looked so astonished after that first tavern visit. “Can you wait for a bit?”

Dove nods.

It takes awhile to find the right rock, long enough that I grab a snack. Mustn’t think of Dove as tasty. Dove
smells
tasty, but that’s short-term thinking. Much more sensible to have that hunger become Edgar’s urge for squishy mammal skin contact.

Dove’s sitting
on a bench by the door that wasn’t there before, but that’s fine, it’s just furniture, a memory of wood and iron.

Adding the rock is only a little complicated, getting the statue right meant a lot of practice.

I look over at Dove, then I try to look inquisitive. Dove smiles, nods, stands up, extends a hand.

“Done for now?”

“Done for now.” Time to be Edgar again. I mean, I am Edgar, if Edgar is
anything that talks, it’s just as accurate to say
material
, at least until I hatch.

“Good,” Dove, taking the hand I’ve just now got to take. “It’s been three days, only person not looking concerned is Halt.”

I’m saying “Three days?” as we step back through the door and I’m sitting up in my bed in the Round House.

Wake had four months in the schedule for learning shape-shifting. It takes me a few days, but I manage to feel better about my thirty-one days after learning that, and Zora only barely manages to avoid being smug.

Wake manages to look pleased, greatly to the credit of Wake’s name as a teacher. It’s more and more obvious that the teachers are juggling teaching us and running all over the
Second Commonweal doing things they’re the only people available to do. “The work of Independents summarizes as ‘is it safe?’, ‘can we make it safe?’ and ‘is it good for anything?’” Wake says.

Somewhere around the third day of getting used to, call it the material advancements, Dove picks me up and hugs me, might be as hard as the feeling asks, rather than as hard as Dove can, but I’d have needed
medical treatment before either way. Now I can just hug back.

It’s an improvement.

Getting used to being hugged with my feet off the floor, well, I’m willing to practise.

Wake’s cheerful resumption of teaching us everything about mud, well. We need to know. But I couldn’t call it an improvement.

Wake alternates with Grue; just because we can manage to turn into ourselves doesn’t mean we’re done
with shape-shifting. Grue starts discussing control and broad alterations of metabolism in between having us practise shifting on short notice, or into versions of ourselves that aren’t tired or hungry and only aren’t tired or hungry, no other change. That’s a lot, much tougher to do than it sounds like it ought to be. You
know
you’re tired in some really basic way.

It takes about a décade to
get used to being so much stronger. I only break one plate. Turns out Creeks get strong, the kids are like kids anywhere, the horseshoe-bending thews come on in youth. So they’re all sympathetic and random folks in the refectory tell me stories about the time they pulled their shirt-sleeve over their head when they were fourteen. I try to give suitably Creekly answers. Nobody looks offended.

Wake has everybody else break a plate, and runs us through fix-things-through-alternative-probabilities mending of them, the tiny-small version of pulling the Tall Woods into existence from far away in chance. Zora suggests we do it linked up, so that way we can agree on the colour. This works; the mended, never-broken, there’s probably a specific word in some language somewhere, plates are all the
same colour. They’re not, quite, the same colour as the other plates, but they’re all exactly the same as each other.

Wake looks visibly pleased, which is a surprise. This is supposed to be an easy thing to do. I ask. Apparently we may be asked to do this again, in the presence of people with colour-measuring devices, having potentially demolished a large old branch of probability theory as applied
to the Power.

Aside from the plate, it’s as though everything became lighter. Including Steam, who gives me an appalled look the first time we do push-hands, after. “Doesn’t show when Ed’s dressed,” Dove says, and there’s a two décade supply of appalled, severe, and displeased looks from nearly everyone in the new battalion. Student-buttons or not, the Line considers Dove one of theirs. Saying
anything won’t help me, so I don’t. Chloris and Zora individually produce a few “Bath!” remarks when the appalled starts to slide into actively disapproving. That runs into descriptions of the bathtub at the Round House and, in a few days, tentative questions from our host gean about how hard was the tub to make? Is blue the only colour?

Blossom, who apparently has ‘think of something’ for a syllabus
that afternoon, says “What colour were you thinking of?” and then “We’re not
that
short of iron,” and we go make a big green tub that’s only green for the outer five millimetres or so. Managing the whole diffusion thing is trickier that way, it feels slippery, but the whole thing still feels easier, in that ‘done this before’ sort of way. Which doesn’t make any sense. Zora did the tub; I’ve done
window panels, we all did window panels, but the windows were made as clear as we could. It still feels easier. Might just be like the drain-gates; those were horrible the first time, but knowing they worked last time counts for a lot.

Zora makes the drain-plugs out of nickel, solid nickel. Low domes forty centimetres across still weigh more than thirty kilos. “Durable,” the person who runs the
bathhouse says, in what I’m nearly sure are completely approving tones.

The bathhouse roof is not meant to come off; “We could pick the whole building up?” doesn’t really sound like a question when Chloris asks it, and there are concerned faces. Blossom takes a couple hours to have us practise the ‘further away in a funny direction’ thing on some unwanted hunks of rock in a corner of the stone-yard.
We produce some gravel and a couple hundred kilogrammes of stone dust. Trickier than it looks. Blossom then slides the tub far enough away in that odd direction it’d be too small to hold most loaves of bread and floats it into the bathhouse, because ‘further away in funny directions’ and ’lighter' have nothing to do with each other.

Four days later we do the other three tubs; something about heat
retention and ease of cleaning, officially, plus someone in our host-gean having located some scrap iron, an old keg of older nails rusted into a single mass in the dim corner of a cellar. I suspect it’s got something to do with everybody wanting to use the shiny new tub, but can hardly complain. I’ve been using Zora’s splendid first example of the type for a season.

It’s quietly studious, mostly,
the winter. I get better at everything in fits and starts. It seems to be either that or some things are easy and some things are hard to impossible. Happy to take ‘some progress everywhere’.

Dove has trouble with the book parts, just as expected. If Dove can’t hold it, it’s not quite real. ‘Hands’ goes a long way, any exercise of the Power counts as ’hands', but words on the page, as a collection
of facts, frustrate Dove. It’s not that Dove has trouble reading; can read fine, will read for fun. About one in twenty in the Creeks can’t, far more tactile in how they learn than Dove is, by no means stupid people but turning symbols into words doesn’t work for them. There’s not much to be done for it; the Book-gesith got mightily concerned about it, generations back, and there’s been some
prying at the problem ever since, but whatever went into the Creeks is somewhat less talky and somewhat more clever of hand than the general average of people.

Learning all these mineral names would never have been my favourite thing, either, but I got decent enough at memorizing stuff. How much water to how much solid in what kind of glue, that sort of thing, or how fast you want the lathe to
be turning for what diameter of workpiece and what that means about where you put the belt on the pulleys.

It’s surprisingly easy to just…eat the book. You don’t consume the physical book, but getting a complete copy into your metaphysical self is not a whole lot harder than picking up the physical book, only in some sideways-to-your-talent sort of way. It’s also surprisingly useless, since all
you’ve got is a record of what’s in the book, right down to the tea-stains and inky thumb-print smudges. You’ve still got to read the thing and do the work of understanding. The only real advantage is not having to carry the book around.

“Producing a tangible copy is next year,” Wake says. “Lamentable handwriting has been perpetuated for millennia in this way.”

Eating the book, well, the library
in the shared half of our mind started as a vague notion that there would be common knowledge. Books make a good metaphor, and it turns out we don’t both have to learn something. If we can get it into the common half, it’s really there for both of us. Having the metaphorical metaphysical page there to add to the idea of a book in our joint head makes the whole memorization process much easier for
Dove, too, that’s close enough to hands in some way the physical book isn’t.

It’s easier if we both do it, and it’s easier still if we do the book-lift a page at a time, so we spend a lot of time sitting in a window sharing a book. Usually sharing eyes. Books, big reference books full of the names of dirt particularly, get in the way of resting your head in somebody’s lap.

It took about five days
of watching us fuss with this for Chloris to hiss and produce an illusion-binding of an odd flowing book-stand thing that completely solved the one lap problem. “If you’re going to go using one set of eyes
anyway
,” Chloris had said. I’d said thank you very carefully. Dove had said thank you, too, rather gently.

The other head-on-lap problem is that my neck is too short. Top of my head against
Dove’s leg works fine, as long as I don’t get too tranced out and start trying to match Dove’s double heartbeat.

Grue had pointed out, second shape-shifting class after I figured out how to shape-shift at all, that I’d stopped having a heartbeat. Grue looked amused. I’d gone over a bit of what I’d done, and there’d been a solemn nod and no reduction in Grue’s apparent lurking desire to giggle.
The Edgar-statue is apparently a shape-anchor, it’s not unknown, it’s a good way to make sure you’ve got a stable default, though it’s likely to make turning into a tree harder than otherwise. I’ll take it, all the same, unsuspected preference for a distributed circulatory system and all.

Zora has a couple really bad days, wailing-and-snorfling sorts of days. The news that Zora’s oldest sister
is having a baby sets it off. As news, it’s good news; Zora’s been asked to come visit for the naming, and the combination of the tactful absence of ‘come home’ in the letter, along with the recognition that maybe Zora won’t be able to travel, and the sudden crashing awareness that, if Zora survives sorcery, Zora’s going to outlive the incipient kid put Zora through the Independent loss of family
thing in one abrupt realization. Well, outlive, it’s not precisely immediate loss. The awareness of not being around for the kid growing up might have been the worst part. I wind up doing a lot of back patting and saying ‘there-there’, at neither of which am I any kind of skilled.

Dove mostly seems to be getting better, inside. Getting those Line-troopers out of the hospital in Headwaters did
something good. They were hurt under Dove’s authority, and that matters.

It’s not, it’s increasingly obviously not, completely splendid in there, Dove’s experiencing sorcery school, the entire ‘try not to kill yourself, real-dead-in-the-deadline, turn into another form of life’ reality of the whole, not the individual days, as a relaxing change. Not even close to making the best of it, either,
that way some people have of not expecting their life to be reasonable. So far as I can tell, it’s plain factual.

Expressing concern mostly gets my hair ruffled. “The Captain suggested I give it time; Halt cautioned me not to be in a hurry. Going to try listening to advice for a change.”

I give a solemn nod my best try, then pick Dove up and twirl. It’s become a surprisingly easy thing to do.

Not like there isn’t enough space in here.

The result is an amazing grin and Dove picking me up and twirling me about, which is hardly grounds for complaint.

We get Zora’s best try at looking indulgent. Zora’s about decided looking nauseated doesn’t work.

Somewhere in there I get a straightforward letter from Flaed. I suppose it’s technically a reply, I did write back, but there’s no real mention
of that letter. Flaed’s sorry for having had so much trouble with the idea that I might be a sorcerer, not that the knowledge doesn’t still trouble Flaed’s understanding but it wasn’t expressed well. That takes half a page or so, plus a wish that studying isn’t too awful. Then there’s a couple pages of reasonably linear descriptions of where Flaed is and what the doings have been.

It’s friendly,
I’m glad to see it, and I have to think about whether or not it’s a good idea to pretend as much as it would feel like pretending to answer. It’s not like I can write about the mechanics of shape-shifting for small talk. “Making stuff,” Dove says. “Just what, no how.”

I nod, and slide
Thanks,
and a quantity of affection toward Dove. That advice makes it much easier to write a letter; there’s the
bathtubs, there’s the fact of Block’s exercises, let’s call them exercises, though that isn’t working so well for Zora lately, it’s very obvious that the whole point is an ability to kill people and that bothers Zora in ways increasingly difficult to ignore as the exercises feel less and less like theory. We’ve made some copper pans and a stack of baking sheets for ourselves, swapped someone their
old copper water tank for a foamed-glass one. Blossom and Wake have to be getting bored running wards for us, but if they are, it doesn’t show. They’re both emphatic that the plan won’t change about that; wards are one of the last things, after we’ve got connecting as a truly firm habit.

I do the head-tip thing, what would be onto Dove’s shoulder without five metres’ distance between us on the
windowsill. Dove’s head tips sideways back. There’s a real sense in which Dove’s always right there.

Chloris makes, I don’t know what to call it. It’s a noise. I don’t think it’s at the pen or the writing, Chloris made a switchable illusion of a writing desk and is sitting at it, working on the kind of notes that Chloris finds work best for remembering lists of facts. The desk is really simple,
just a seat and a writing surface, no drawers or any moving parts, but it gives me ideas about how Halt manages to always have that chair.

Zora, who is lying down past me, head into the room with the book on the floor, looks up at Chloris and says “We could get better at shape-shifting and take turns being the burly lad?”

You can feel the spike of something from Chloris, I’m not sure that wasn’t
physical movement in Chloris’ hair, and then control coming down, face, temper, tongue. It gets your attention.

“I am not
prim
, I don’t think you can go collect half a barge team in a tavern and properly expect them to take entirely sequential turns, I can manage to be gracious refusing enquiries I should never have considered to accept, I can even mostly encompass this awareness that our course
of study requires me to become something inhuman.”