Aster was the one to answer the door and came to find me with a tic underneath one eye. “One of the humans is here.” She reported gruffly. “A girl. Not the same one as last time.”
“Shelby?” I looked up in considerable surprise. “Show her in, please. Did she say what she needed?”
“Just to talk.” Something about my body language seemed to calm Aster down and her shoulders dropped from their irritable hunch. “I’ll bring her here.”
“Thank you.”
After Angie’s visit, I wasn’t about to stand on ceremony so I kept working; rolling knoppi skins and laying them under a damp towel. I still had my formal claws since there was no point in changing them until my manicure grew out some more so I was putting off having to wrap them as long as possible.
Shelby was dressed in leggings, shearling-lined boots, and an oversized University of Rochester hoodie when Aster brought her over. I was instantly jealous. I’d floated the idea of having someone bring my athleisure clothes back from the Earth-side apartment when we were making plans for the personnel transfer, but Efa had shot that idea down in flames. I might get away with wearing them in Red Harbour in the dead of winter while we were snowed in, but not anywhere we might possibly have a dignified visitor.
That said, I realized this might not be an official visit. Shelby looked a little shifty, like she was getting away with something, as she looked around the apartment with surprise.
“Alessa, wow,” she breathed. “This place is so much bigger than the room we got.”
Huh. I wondered if Angie had noticed that.
“I suppose that makes sense. You’ve got a smaller group.” I patted a nearby cushion so she’d sit and stop turning in circles. This was at least familiar. Shelby wasn’t the type to hide her feelings. “What’s up?”
“I, uh…” She took the offered seat and fiddled with the drawstrings on her hoodie. “...the others don’t really know I’m here,” she confessed. “Emil does. He’s covering for me, but the others don’t.”
“I figured,” I said, glancing down at her clothes and she snorted out a laugh.
“Okay, I guess it’s obvious.” She looked at the little round of dough I was rolling out. “What are you making?”
“Knoppi.” I considered the wrapper for a minute, trying to come up with the most succinct description. “Sort of like if pierogi and bao had a baby.”
“Oh, do they not send food here?” She glanced under the damp towel I was using to keep the wrappers workable. “Do you want help? I can fold if you want.”
I was starting to realize that Shelby didn’t have an agenda. She wasn’t stalling for time or waiting for a good moment to broach a subject. She was just visiting.
I wondered what that meant about the other apartment.
“Sure. I’ll show you one first.”
Then, for a little while, we didn’t do much except make dumplings. Shelby knew what she was doing and was almost faster at stuffing them that I was at rolling them. I wasn’t expecting that since she’d seemed to live off takeout and takeout leftovers when we worked together.
She slowed down towards the end though.
“Sorry for showing up unannounced,” she admitted quietly. “I didn’t really expect you’d let me in.”
I stopped my work and considered her. “Why not? We’ve been friendly in the past. You haven’t done anything to change that.”
“Well, Ms. Deveraux was just here and she’s such a consistent bitch about you.” Shelby huffed and pinched the knoppi in her hands shut with more force than absolutely necessary. I was surprised to hear her say that. I also hadn't realized other people noticed. “She came back saying you threatened her and, I’m sorry, but that didn’t sound like you at all. Emil said she probably deserved it,” she added the last a bit more quietly, like Angie might hear.
“That’s not quite what happened.” I noticed Coryfae leaving the bedroom and moving with a certain predatory interest. “Although I can see how she might think so. She was in danger, but it wasn’t my doing.”
“So what did happen?” Shelby asked. “I know we aren’t close or anything, but I think I have a good sense of who you are. I never really understood what the Directors’ problem with you was -except maybe Angie- but I know you’re not like the way they’ve been talking.”
Coryfae smoothly took a spot at the table I’d been using as a workspace and Shelby jumped at the sudden intrusion.
“Deveraux called Lady Alessandra’s honor into question,” she answered for me and only someone who knew her could spot the dangerous glitter in her eyes. She was feeling Shelby out.
“She accused me of buying my internship,” I clarified, knowing where Shelby was likely to take that statement and also wanting to leave the things Angie almost said about my father out of it. Coryfae didn’t need that information refreshed in her mind otherwise she’d engineer an opportunity for Angie to finish digging her grave.
“I did hear that the Deputy Director does something like that.” Shelby scrunched up her face. “It still seems excessive though. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but they talk about you like you’re Lucrezia Borgia or something and Amos acts like you saved us just to make him look bad.” She rolled her eyes at the idea. “Dick,” she added.
I was vaguely flattered.
“Out of curiosity, what do you think Angie’s problem is?” I asked. I’d thought she was taking her cue from Markham, but if I’d done something to offend her personally then I wanted to know about it.
“Oh, um.” Shelby stared at the knoppi she was wrapping. “Well, let me ask you something first. Are you white?”
I blinked rapidly. “I… probably not?” I did not care to get into my entire history. “I was adopted, but my biological parents are anonymous. I’m mixed, but I don’t know my exact heritage. One of my parents was likely white given the demographics of the community I was surrendered in. Why do you ask?
“Okay, that’s what I thought,” she sighed in relief. “Um, I hope this isn’t insulting though, but I think it’s because you kind of look a little like a white girl with a spray tan and you’re always wearing locs or braids. Angie had to work really hard to get where she is and I know she had to compromise some things about how she presents herself in order to do it. You know how some people get about ‘ethnic’ hair and ‘ethnic’ voices?”
I did, a bit.
Some of the girls in my boarding school had attempted to give me a crash course in human racial politics, but they were between fifteen and eighteen years old so it was hardly comprehensive.
It wasn’t explicitly stated during our classes, but I learned enough from them to understand that the etiquette and diction we were taught was white-coded behavior.
I’d been enrolled in an immersive language program where the students were predominantly people of color and I’d learned a great deal from them, including the sort of microaggressions that I could expect living in American society as a visibly brown person.
My school friends were the reason I knew that I’d messed up when I shouted at Amos. Brinkerman, though, had made it a special point when we were in the early employment discussions to inform me that I could do whatever I wanted with my hair and that if I was confronted by anyone on the subject then I was to report it to him and the problem would go away. So I’d stopped thinking about it and wore my hair as I pleased.
Had I caused a new problem for myself without realizing it? I knew something about how to handle being seen as too brown, but not being brown enough wasn’t something I had any existing frame of reference for.
“She’s the reason you don’t see a lot of that at BIR,” Shelby continued. “Director Markham is nice and all, but he wouldn’t think of it on his own. He’s that generation of white guy; not actively harmful by himself, but he’s not exactly woke either so he’s not going to intervene in institutional racism unless someone explicitly points it out to him. He relies on Angie to call bullshit on the stuff he doesn’t notice. I know it really bugs her when she sees rich white kids appropriating Black culture.”
I sort of knew about that. I’d been insulated from that kind of thing by where I’d grown up and who my people were, but it was a common topic at school in the dormitory after-hours.
I just hadn’t realized just how well I passed as white. I could get pretty light if I stayed out of the sun and, in retrospect, I had been spending an awful lot of time indoors this past year. In previous years, I’d spent my summers in Anwyn and always came back to school deeply tan. This time I went straight to my internship.
“I’m sorry to have given her that impression.” I didn’t have any clue what to do about fixing it yet. I was myself. I didn’t want to force myself into any other shape to make someone else happy and that was what it sounded like Angie had been forced to do.
Some of the anger I’d been suppressing in the back of my heart loosened up and began to drain at long last. It was good to have more context for this misunderstanding. I felt more positive about future interactions with her, at least. We still had some things to work through, but this was a better place to start from.
Shelby waved the apology off. “That’s not really your fault. You can’t help the conclusions people jump to and I think she’ll figure it out once she’s actually around you some more. She’s already coming around. Most of what we all knew about you was what Amos had to say and he’s really starting to lose the plot lately.” There she grimaced. “Director Markham leans on him a lot so he’s got more influence than maybe he should, but we’re all starting to question the stuff he’s been saying.”
Interesting. This was turning out to be a very productive visit.
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“Thank you for sharing that with me. Do you have any questions I can answer for you?” I asked carefully. She’d given me a lot just now and I’d feel bad about asking for more without sharing something in return.
“Oh, tons, but I don’t know that I want to ask them like this.” Shelby pulled her hood up and smiled. She looked a little pained and embarrassed. “Seems fake, you know? I mostly came to get out of the room for a little bit. Although…” She looked at the water dispenser. “...could you maybe explain how the kitchen stuff works? We have some extra supplies because we didn’t know if we’d be able to eat the food here, but so far no one’s been able to figure out what the sand pit thingie does.”
I smiled, happy that it was a problem that I could easily solve. “Of course. We’re almost ready to steam these so it’s a good opportunity.”
Coryfae stood by and watched with an indulgent air as I walked Shelby through the mechanics of cooking on the sands.
For steaming, we removed the sand basin and traded it out for a metal mesh to set the steaming baskets on top of. Within minutes the entire apartment smelled like a mineral spring.
“This is so cool.” Shelby bounced in place as she watched the water bubble underneath the basket. “Is that how they heat this place? Emil thought it was geothermal energy or magic, but I got to talk to one of the stewards a little bit. We had trouble understanding each other, but he said the heat was in the walls and I know the Romans used to do something similar.”
“There’s a very hot natural spring below the settlement,” Coryfae finally re-entered the conversation. “There are magical heat regulators in place here and there along the network to make it hotter or cooler --although those are used sparingly. Each one has to be charged daily by hand. That is why the residential areas are located deep within the mountain and the public areas are often very cold. Dwarves don’t produce many magic users and their magical reserves aren’t large.”
What she did not mention is that the lion’s share of the Dwarven wise folk’s time went into the creation and maintenance of the many, many pleasure gardens in Ravnvaldr. They didn’t have a lot of patience for utilitarian maintenance tasks. That sort of thing got left to apprentices and new immigrants.
I sat back on my heels as a thought occurred to me. Shelby was hanging on Coryfae’s every word so I had a moment to organize the idea in my head.
Any heating and cooling solution dependent on fossil fuel was right out. Air quality was a constant concern for the Dwarves and they lived long enough that the possibility of climate change wasn’t a far-off problem for future people the way it was for humans.
Dwarves weren’t native to Anwyn. The first dwarven colonists had emigrated through their veil over four hundred years ago. There were still dwarves on their homeworld but they’d become totally dependent on Ravnvaldr’s aid shipments. The surface was unlivable; barren and wracked by constant megastorms.
Over three quarters of what the Ravnvaldr dwarves imported went to supply the last dwarrow kingdom of Svartalfheim and things were getting bad enough there that my father had received a quiet warning from Ylem that his father, High King Valos, was preparing to lead the final evacuation to Anwyn as soon as they could locate and prepare another colony site.
I didn’t know if the dwarves had been responsible for the ecological collapse of their homeworld, but I did know that they would not entertain even the slightest possibility of repeating their own history in these new lands. So they’d need a sustainable solution like hydroelectricity or perhaps very sturdy solar panels.
I thought about an urban farming initiative I’d toured with Brinkerman once. It was totally off the grid; aquaponics in a big metal shipping container fed by a couple of solar panels. It hadn’t been of much interest to me at the time. Tapama was the bread basket of Anwyn after all, but Jorgumandr was a different story.
Coryfae waited until Shelby had exhausted herself and reluctantly returned back to the BIR apartment. Then she turned to me. “Well?” she asked, not bothering to hide the smile tugging at her mouth.
“Sweetwater?” I called into the bathroom, where he was happily floating in the bath with his kinswomen. “Do you feel up to writing a letter for me?”
He popped his head onto the tiled ledge of the bath. Marshlander men were colorful to begin with, but the water made his scales shine like gems. “I am revived, my Lady,” he declared. “I will be with you shortly!”
The first letter was for my mother. Between her and Brinkerman, once he was back, I’d know if my idea was something achievable and what it would take to broker such a deal. This was going to be worth more than raw metal and dyestuffs for sure.
Mom must have been watching her letterbox because we received a reply almost at once; a quick note that read;
‘Fascinating, sweetheart. Urban farming and solar is a bit too far after my time for me to say anything right away, but I’ll show your proposal to your father and the elders. We’ll ask around and give you an update tomorrow. In the meantime, Mr. Brinkerman has returned from his leave. I’ve included a letter from him for you.’
“Why is he back already? He was supposed to take another week off.” I muttered to myself and found the letter in question underneath mom’s note. It was a sheet of legal paper that read in typical Brinkerman fashion:
‘Lessy, what the actual fuck happened while I was out?’
I had to write that reply myself.
Sweetwater was conversant in English, but his handwriting wasn’t very good yet. Fortunately our supply exchange had included a supply of ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils so I was able to do it without much trouble. Even so, It took me almost until Efa woke up and came to dress me for dinner to get the entire upsetting tale onto paper.
“Do you mind if I read this?” Coryfae asked as I handed it over to be folded and sealed. Sealing official correspondence took magic I didn’t have. Sweetwater could do it in a pinch, but he didn’t have much magical talent and I didn’t like asking him to wear himself out for no reason. “Catherine and Eran weren’t able to tell me exactly what happened at BIR, just that you were let go from your internship.”
I hid my miserable blush with my hands. Coryfae had arranged it for me so she was going to take anything that went wrong on their end personally. “It’s all right. You can read it.”
She stuck close as Kayt and Efa dressed me up in green velvet. Kayt styled my hair into a deceptively simple updo held in place by emerald-studded gold pins. The dress was warm enough that I could wear a lighter netted wrap with a beaded fringe and tiny bells that sang as I walked.
Coryfae finished just as Efa and Kayt started to lay out Larkspur’s evening dress. She set the stack of papers down with a thump and a blank expression I did not like to see.
“Madams,” she addressed Efa and Kayt. “I will be taking Mage Larkspur’s place at table tonight. Please forgive my short notice.”
It was gratifying when they looked first to me.
“Go ahead. Larkspur needs more rest,” I told them. I’d been trying to come up with an excuse to let her stay behind anyway. Tunnels were usually opened by at least four powerful magi. She’d only had herself and two minor assistants. “Let Aster know.”
Kayt curtsied and hurried off while Efa went to peruse Coryfae’s luggage.
“Are you sure?” I asked Coryfae once we were alone. “This was supposed to be a vacation for you.”
“That was the excuse I gave your mother,” Coryfae sniffed as she folded the letter for Brinkerman and pressed her thumb to the back of it. Pale blue light shimmered around the edges of her nail and left behind a simple geometric pattern that acted as a seal. “I don’t take vacations.”
“You should.” I handed her a plate of dumplings. “If you’re coming to dinner then eat something now and promise me you won’t do anything awful.”
“I won’t embarrass you, dear,” she said, which was not the same thing at all. Still, it was likely all I’d get out of her.
----------------------------------------
Mercifully, the seating order changed that evening and I couldn’t see my fellow humans at all from where we sat. Coryfae and I were slightly further down the table to make room for Ylem’s visiting grandchildren and their promised friends.
Akan was seated next to me again and wild to tell me about an exhibition she’d seen the night before. It sounded amazing and I was sorry to have missed it. Dwarves were amazing illusionists, but they didn’t often give repeat performances. If you asked one then they’d tell you art is more precious when it is fleeting, but I thought it was really so the audience who’d managed to see it would have something to brag about.
The illusionist had apparently created a singing chorus of birds who sang a very silly song about about a wolf who wanted to make friends with a rabbit and didn’t understand why the rabbit wasn’t interested. Akan had just gotten to describing how the illusionist had made a tree sprout from the ground when I heard a commotion at the hall entrance.
Everyone, including me, turned to look. Someone, an elf I didn’t know from the looks of it, had stopped in the entrance. His company had been following close behind and plowed into his back. They’d ended up knocking over the small table the hall stewards used to keep track of the seating arrangements.
“Anyone you know?” Akan asked me conspiratorially.
“I don’t think so.” I considered him.
He was big, even for an elf, and his back was to me. He had the straight chestnut colored hair of a northerner and he wore it in a long tail laid over his shoulder.
There were two other elves with him; shorter men who looked like they could be Kayt’s older brothers except they were probably married going by the possessive hand one kept on the hip of the other.
That was rare. They all had hunters’ mantles and hunters rarely married amongst themselves.
Not every elf clan was wealthy enough to keep all their children. In fact most elves moved between clans at least once if only for genetic diversity. Harou was an exception due to the size of our territory and the fact that my father was one of the five regional land wardens of Tapama. We almost always needed more people so our children rarely left home unless they really wanted to. As a result, they rarely lacked romantic options.
Hunters had no clan beyond their individual teams. They were usually orphans, youngsters whose clan couldn’t support them beyond childhood, or they just didn’t get along with their families for some reason. That was rare, given how clingy elves could be with their social unit, but it did happen.
They all travelled a lot. Hunters went wherever monsters needed cutting back. It wasn’t an occupation for growing old in, but they made a good living at it while they were young. Eventually they either recruited enough members to found their own small clan or, more often, married into the family of someone they met during their travels.
I was glad to see more elves. Ravnvaldr wasn’t a confined society by any means, but I knew my household would be glad to have normal people around to socialize with.
The stewards eventually righted their materials and began seating people again. The hunters ended up across from Coryfae and I. I turned to wave hello -the table was too wide for talking- and got my good look at the big man’s face.
He was --he was very handsome with pale hazel eyes and a scar that cut up from the edge of his jaw to the corner of his mouth, tugging it slightly up into a permanent wry smile. He was older than I’d expected, probably close to my own age than what was typical for someone in his career.
He smiled back at me and something tightened in my chest.
I was suddenly, irrationally convinced that this was my secret suitor.
I managed to keep my feelings off my face and returned my attention to Akan’s story although, admittedly, I didn’t do a very good job of keeping it there. Instead I found myself watching the man across the table through the curtain of my lashes, trying to understand where that feeling was coming from.
I have never given much weight to the idea of extra-sensory perception. I’ve been in the presence of magic. I know humans don’t have telekinesis or the ability to tell the future, but I do believe in human intuition.
It’s still not magic. Rather, humans have an innate ability to instinctively recognize patterns and make complex associations based on very little.
My instinct was telling me that I knew the man across the table. I just had to observe until my conscious mind made the same connection my subconscious already jumped to.
Little by little, the pieces came together.
I might not have known him, but his body language said he knew me. He kept glancing back in my direction, trying to be subtle about it and mostly failing.
I was good at watching without being seen to do it so to him it appeared as though I were still listening to Lady Akan. Hopefully she thought so too, but it was telling that she hadn’t said anything in the past several minutes that required an actual response from me.
He shrugged his shoulders in response to something one of his companions said and I suddenly realized what it was my subconscious had latched onto.
Hunters don’t go in for uniforms. They dress with comfort and utility in mind. The one exception is a hunter’s mantle; a sort of long half-cape draped from one shoulder and trimmed with a fur collar. Traditionally, the fur is supposed to come from a hunter’s most ambitious solo kill.
In practice, though, many of the most dangerous and crafty monsters are ugly and stink long past death so most hunters will pick from the best of their most attractive kills.
The mantle of the man watching me had a collar of pale gold fur with a subtle pattern of bronze rosettes fixed with a bone pin carved in the shape of a tree cat.