Pinion was happy to be back home, though he’d been gone for long enough that everything felt a bit off-kilter. Lambria felt like a behemoth astride a mountain, and he found himself caught off guard by it, which was a faintly ridiculous feeling. Greater Plenarch was hilly, but the hills didn’t reach such heights.
Argya Ham sat him down in her office for a friendly meeting, but she was clearly skeptical of how much he’d actually done during the whole adventure. “You were gone a long time,” she said. “I had thought that it would be a matter of a week or two for you to make your investigation and then return.”
She was a gray-haired woman with a narrow face and eyes that had always seemed to blink too infrequently, as though she was afraid of missing something. She’d ascended to her position of professorship thanks to a tremendous natural aptitude for books, but it was often remarked that her real talent was with people. As a mentor, she was widely sought after.
“You understand why it went long, don’t you?” asked Pinion.
“I do,” said Argya. She had all his letters arranged out before her. “I understand that you believed something interesting was happening in the dungeons, and that you wanted to investigate it, but,” her finger went down to one of the later letters, “At a certain point, the party simply stopped doing dungeons, for reasons that you never adequately explained, and you … stayed with them.” Her fingers moved the letters over, one by one. There were far fewer from the point on, even though they covered a much longer stretch of time.
She let the unspoken question linger in the air.
“There are certain things which are … sensitive,” said Pinion. “Things that I can’t talk about.”
Argya sighed. She had an office filled with books, but they had grudgingly made way for a window to her left. She looked out of it for a moment. “A girl?”
“Oh,” said Pinion. “No. I mean, yes, but that’s not … not why, exactly.”
“Come now,” said Argya, turning back to him. “There were three months during which the party you were shadowing and occasionally a part of was doing no dungeons. You were still doing work during that time, combing through reports and speaking with them and whatever else, but you could easily have come back here. In fact, I recall asking you to return when you had wrapped things up — two months ago.”
“Sorry,” said Pinion. “It’s just … I was hoping that they would start doing dungeons again. But it’s complicated, and as I’ve said, I can’t explain in full.”
“Can you gesture vaguely in the direction of the reason you can’t explain?” asked Argya.
“Not really, no,” said Pinion. “It’s … complicated.”
Argya pursed her lips. “You understand that’s difficult for me to accept?”
“Am I in trouble?” asked Pinion.
“Not as such, no,” said Argya. “You weren’t asking for money to continue the research, so this wasn’t all that different from you taking a sabbatical, at least from my perspective. I don’t know that I would count these months you’ve spent in your favor at review, nor do I think it appropriate to count them against you.”
Pinion held his tongue. He wanted to tell her about everything that had happened with the dungeons, but if the cat got out of the bag among the academics, it was only a matter of time until it spread elsewhere.
Pinion spent two weeks going through his notes, which he’d gone through a dozen times before. He didn’t particularly want to publish these, either, given that they might lead in the direction of Verity’s technique, but so far as he knew, the technique wasn’t learnable. Argya was annoyed with him, since in her view he was a promising researcher who’d been sidetracked on personal things and wasted her time in the process, but he had no idea how to disabuse her of that notion while still maintaining the secrecy.
She was also right that it had been personal for him. If it hadn’t been, he might have returned to Lambria earlier, perhaps as soon as the party had been prohibited from doing dungeons. Plenarch was a place with friends. It was also a place with romantic complications.
He went into the Lambrian Church of Garos, a tall building with two symmetrical wings. He had been only once before, during a holy day, but it was now nearly deserted. Midweek was when the temples saw the least use, and Lambria wasn’t quite a large enough city for there to be a midweek temple day, as there was in some places. He moved cautiously, unsure of himself, peeking around corners until a cleric spotted him.
“Would you like to talk?” she asked. She was wearing the chasuble, and had a pendant around her neck. She was older than him by at least a decade, which was more or less what he had been hoping for, but he was still hesitant, because he didn’t know how to explain it.
“Yes, I suppose,” said Pinion. “I’m just … confused, I think.”
They had a seat in a small but cozy room, and she poured him a cup of tea and offered a lump of sugar in it, then waited for him to speak. The seat was plush and warm, and there was a nice scent hanging in the air from a small candle that was burning down on one of the shelves.
“Confused?” she prompted.
“I have a friend who’s only interested in women,” said Pinion.
Her face changed somewhat, eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. “Ah,” she said. “I see. And she’s been clear on the matter?”
“She has,” said Pinion. “The thing is, I thought we were friends, just friends, which was all nice and fine, I enjoyed being friends with her, but, ah …”
“It changed?” asked the cleric. She’d introduced herself as Elle, which was also the name of Pinion’s mother, and made him feel awkward.
“Yes,” nodded Pinion. He was having trouble getting to the next part.
“We do see this sometimes,” said Elle. “You need to understand that it’s unlikely she’ll reciprocate those feelings, and given that, it’s best you let go of them. I can recommend a cleric of Kesbin for you to speak with, or we can talk about it further, but reciprocity is the foundation of any good relationship, and it cannot be forced, only hoped for.” She sat up a bit straighter. “It’s true that sometimes attraction isn’t so clear cut as ‘only women’, but if she’s been forthright about it with you, I think you should take that as a sign that perhaps she understands your attraction and is trying to let you down gently.”
“Oh,” said Pinion. “Er, no, it’s more complicated than that.”
Elle raised an eyebrow. He was worried that she would launch into a prepared speech, but she let him wallow in silence as he found his words.
“She had retrieved, from a dungeon, an entad that would turn me into a girl,” said Pinion.
Elle blinked at him. “I … see,” she said.
“She got flirty,” said Pinion. “I enjoyed it. I wasn’t sure whether it was just the mood, or the company, but it planted a seed, and while it had seemed really clear cut before that there was never any possibility, it was a lot less clear after that night.”
Elle held up a hand. “Sorry, that night?”
“The first night I had the dress on,” said Pinion. “It was me, her, and her ex-girlfriend, who is also my friend, in the room that they share.”
“Ah,” said Elle. “I see. Complicated.”
“Yes,” said Pinion. “Can I — how much am I supposed to share? I usually speak with clerics of Qymmos, but given the circumstances, I thought you’d, I don’t know, have some insight.”
“Take me through what you think is relevant,” said Elle. “You’ve been weighing it all in your mind, I take it.”
“I wore the dress every now and then,” said Pinion. “She got very flirty. And then I’d take the dress off — sorry, not take it off, not like that, I mean I would go to my own room and change into normal clothes — and then it felt like it was still lingering there, the … something. It was fun, I guess, dressing up, and they gave me all these lessons on how to be a proper lady, most of which ended in giggling fits, but … I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?” asked Elle.
“Well, wait, sorry, there’s more,” said Pinion. “She was having this concert — she’s a musician — and I put on the dress, and had her ex-girlfriend help me with the makeup and everything, and it was mostly that I thought she’d get a kick out of it, but …” Elle waited. “We kissed.”
“Ah,” said Elle. “And who initiated the kiss?”
“She did,” said Pinion. “She kissed me like it was the third or fourth time we had kissed. She treated it as though it was something we always did. And it was nice, but I felt flustered and awkward, and then I left. We … never really talked about it again, and a few days later, I moved hundreds of miles back home — which is here.”
“Is there a chance you go back?” asked Elle.
“I don’t know,” said Pinion. He had been thinking about that. There was certainly cause to, if the Settlers were going to be doing dungeons again.
“Let’s take a Qymmic approach and delve deeper,” said Elle. “We can try to put names to your feelings, even if they're just temporary ones, and if those names are wrong, we can change them. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Pinion. He was thankful that he’d mentioned Qymmos. He did have some training as a cleric, though the Qymmic approach hadn’t really helped him much. “It’s weird, to have someone’s attraction to you flip back and forth.”
“I can imagine,” said Elle. “Would a metaphor help? If you thought of it not as switching between man and woman, but between man and drooling ogre? A woman might understand that you’re the same person inside either way, but her feelings toward the ogre would be different.”
“And in this metaphor, my option is to … stop being an ogre?” asked Pinion.
“Personally, I don’t think changing who you are is ever going to be the best thing for a relationship,” said Elle.
“I don’t know that it was a relationship that either of us were after,” said Pinion. “Just … a fling.”
“Ah, well that’s different,” said Elle. “But the thought made you uncomfortable?”
“Maybe,” said Pinion. “I think as an experience … many people wonder what it would be like to be the opposite gender.” Elle shrugged. Perhaps she had never thought about it. He wanted to ask her about that, to probe, but that wasn’t really why he was there. “I think my confusion is more over … me.”
“A matter of identity?” asked Elle.
“Something like that,” said Pinion. “The night of the concert was the first time I’d gone out in public, and I enjoyed it. And I was thinking ‘I could be like this’. But I couldn’t, really.”
“Why not?” asked Elle.
“The entad is a dress,” said Pinion. “I’d just be stuck wearing the same dress the whole time, and during laundry day I would just become Pinion again.”
“So it’s a question of practicality?” asked Elle. “If you had an entad that you could wear as a ring, would the answer be different?”
Pinion thought about that. “I wouldn’t want to live as a woman,” he said. “Not full time. And to do it only part of the time, two or three days a week, would just be,” he shook his head. “Confusing, I guess.”
“For you?” asked Elle.
“No,” said Pinion. “For other people.”
Elle paused for a moment, then pursed her lips. “I’m going to do something that clerics aren’t really supposed to do when people come to them seeking advice.”
“Okay?” asked Pinion.
Elle rolled her eyes in a very dramatic fashion. She grinned at him, showing a pretty smile. “Confusing for other people is something that people understandably think about,” said Elle. “They think about the social implications, the conversations that they would need to have, and maybe they would rather not have those conversations. But not doing something because of social pressure, because it would be difficult to explain to other people … I get so many young men and women in here who put off necessary discussions because they think it will be awkward.”
“I suppose that is a bit silly,” said Pinion.
“I don’t think silly is the word I would use,” said Elle. “I think it’s understandable. I think especially if you feel some confusion rather than a firmness of resolve, it’s important to move at your own pace. But if that’s the primary thing that’s stopping you, then it’s important you understand that this is mostly an issue of anxiety and fear. Sometimes our fears are founded, and it’s important to understand when they’re not. You could view it instead as a cost to be borne.”
“The cost of explaining to people?” asked Pinion.
“Or the cost of worrying,” said Elle. “I imagine that most likely, in most cases, you won’t have to explain anything at all. When you went to the concert, did anyone notice or comment on your appearance?”
“Just the people in my party,” said Pinion. “And they don’t feel any particular way about it, I don’t think.” He frowned.
“You worry that they do?” asked Elle.
Pinion shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It just seems like a lot of fuss to go through for something that isn’t ever going to be a permanent fixture of my life.”
“It’s possible to worry too much about permanence,” said Elle. “People worry about the future, about having a permanent identity. There are people who go into the seminary, and realize that it’s not for them, but they stay because they’ve committed to it, even though they’re not happy.”
“I did that,” said Pinion, feeling a little sheepish. “I was in a Qymmic seminary.”
“Ah,” said Elle. She looked abashed. “Then I’m not sure if that makes for a bad analogy or a good one.”
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“Good, I think,” said Pinion. “That was also difficult, but this … imagining the conversation with my parents, if I ever had to have one, seems like it might go easier than that.”
“Is this helping?” asked Elle.
“I think so, yes,” said Pinion. “It’s putting some of the pieces into place. I just don’t know if … if it's me.”
“People can be many things,” said Elle. “They can change. You can try doing whatever you’d like, and if it doesn’t work out, that’s no big loss, it’s an opportunity for growth, change, and understanding.”
Pinion nodded. “I shouldn’t be thinking about years from now, I should be thinking about now?” he asked.
“I can’t say for certain,” said Elle. “I won’t lie, your situation isn’t one that I’ve ever encountered or even heard of before. Most of clerical work is listening to the same dozen problems repeated with some variation to them, which generally makes it easier to give advice. But if I think about the things that I’ve seen most often, then yes, doing what you’d like and not worrying too much about whether it’s forever or confusing for other people is probably what I would advise.”
Pinion nodded. “Thank you. Sorry for taking up your time. I’ve got a lot to think about.”
Elle seemed disappointed to have him go, perhaps because it was unique. “I have good availability, if you’d like to speak again.”
Over the following days, Pinion tried to have what was known as a Qymmic reorientation, a change in the way he saw things. Sometimes, certain things you ‘knew’ turned out to be wrong, and it was a virtue to align yourself with the truth. He didn’t have much luck with it, but it was worth the effort. He sent a letter off to Verity, which probably explained too much of his thoughts and feelings and would probably serve to kill whatever fleeting attraction she’d had to the female version of him. He felt better having sent it though, and tried to put his mental energy into his work.
Not long after Pinion’s visit to the cleric, Argya Ham called him into her office. She had a newspaper laid out in front of her.
“Were you interested in going back to Plenarch?” she asked.
“I … suppose,” said Pinion.
“Have you read today’s paper?” she asked.
“No,” said Pinion. He looked at the paper, which was facing the wrong way for him to read the headlines.
“Well,” she said. “The short version is that half a week ago, a law was passed clarifying what would happen if a fully sentient person were to be pulled from a dungeon. Very shortly after that, a dungeon party in Plenarch pulled out thirty-seven in one go.”
Pinion tensed. “Were they okay?”
Argya looked down at the paper and frowned. “The party was fine, yes.”
“The people, I meant,” said Pinion.
“They’re fine too, yes, just a bit confused, and with some language issues that are being dealt with using entads,” said Argya. “At any rate, we can pay for a return trip to Plenarch for you to interview them and help to understand what happened. I haven’t sent him a letter, but the party leader is a ‘Grig Tinsmith’.”
“Oh, Grig,” said Pinion. “Yeah, I know Grig.”
Argya paused. “You … know him? Personally?”
“He’s a friend,” said Pinion. He swallowed, thinking that he might have made a misstep.
“And a friend of your bard?” asked Argya.
Pinion nodded.
“Which means that this isn’t a coincidence, and might have something to do with why the party you were with stopped doing dungeons,” said Argya.
“Yes,” said Pinion with a sigh. “Sorry for keeping it from you, but while they were figuring out the laws, I was told not to discuss it. And … there’s some worry that if we publish, it will lead to a flourishing of … this.” He gestured at the paper.
“Has there been a suggestion that we not publish?” asked Argya. “That we keep this to ourselves?”
“Not a suggestion that I think anyone takes too seriously,” said Pinion. “It’s too vital to keep secret, too important, and if Grig can do it, then there are probably hundreds of other bards who can do it too.” He paused for a moment. “No offense meant to him, he’s a fine bard.”
Argya leaned back. “There was a precursor,” she said.
“Yes,” said Pinion. “She’s a friend too. I can hand over my extended notes, but she wished for her identity to be kept secret, and I’ve taken out identifying information.”
“You’ve had time with this,” said Argya. “This is what you were doing with those three months.”
“Er,” said Pinion. “I wasn’t entirely idle, no. There are opinions and theories and what evidence I could gather. But you’re right that if there are new people, I would do well to go speak with them, to see whether I can confirm or disconfirm what’s in the — it’s not a book, per se, but it’s structured like one, and I think it doesn’t have that far to go.”
“You could be elected a fellow for this,” said Argya Ham. She shook her head and a smile spread across her face. “I apologize for doubting you.”
“I did spend more time there than necessary,” said Pinion. “And a lot of it was for personal reasons.”
“Do you want to go back?” asked Argya Ham.
“I don’t know,” said Pinion. He thought about the letter, and wished that he hadn’t sent it.
“Then we need to get this published,” said Argya. “Let’s get to work.”
~~~~
Pinion hadn’t realized how much work the publication of a book was. He had, in Argya’s words, very ‘clean’ writing, but she still had hundreds of suggestions, and had marked up her copy of his draft extensively, as well as given some suggestions for ‘extra’ chapters. She’d written an introduction, and suggested that he write one too, which seemed like a bit much to him, given that he usually skipped those.
It took two months, all told, which Argya said was very fast for a book of this density, and then it was off to be published in relatively small quantities, because the audience was intended to be academics rather than those who would actually be using the technique.
Pinion got a letter back from Verity.
It was long, even longer than his, and more scattered than he had expected it to be, especially given her skill at composing songs. He read it enough times to notice the places where the penmanship changed, where a nib had been replaced or ink had been swapped. He could imagine, but not conclusively prove, that it had been written over a number of sittings, added to over and over again. It repeated itself, in places.
She had started with an apology, then explained her own feelings. It was weird, she agreed, though the reasons she thought it was weird were much different from the reasons he felt it was weird. She used the ogre metaphor, because he had used the ogre metaphor.
Imagine that you’re good friends with an ogre. He’s a good listener, he’s funny, he has a certain sort of charm — I say a certain sort because when I think charm I think sleaze, like Xy, and while I sometimes like a bit of smoothness like that, your charm is different. The ogre then takes a drink of a potion and turns into a beautiful woman, and you already have this connection with her, so it feels natural for it to progress to something else.
It somehow makes me feel shallow, for not feeling the same way about the ogre when it’s in ogre form. I don’t think that’s actually a proper thing for me to feel, but it’s there, an emotion that lurks, that shame or guilt.
I worry that you’re not coming back because of this, and that makes me sad, but I would understand it. I grew up with enormous amounts of pressure to be someone that I wasn’t, to engage in all these acts of performance for the sake of my mother, not just the literal musical performances but everything, attending balls and clubs, speaking with people in the proper tone and about the proper subjects … I don’t like thinking that I was putting any of that same pressure on you.
Sorry for comparing you to an ogre. You are the least ogre-like man I know, but I worry that any metaphor I tried would be unintentionally insulting.
It went on like that, and Pinion reread it, puzzling over different parts of it.
It felt nice to kiss you. I hope that it felt nice to you too. When Isra and I were circling each other for what felt like forever, Hannah had said that what we needed to do was talk to each other. We didn’t really do that, and at the start it worked out wonderfully. It was nice to just speak with our lips, to do everything by touch and feel. I guess I had thought that was how it should work between us, but the already absurd length of this letter is a sign that I was wrong.
I’m interested in having a relationship with you, if you’re a girl. I don’t need this to be some serious thing. You could be my on-again off-again girlfriend, if you wanted to be. The only worry is that it would be weird for both of us, but I like that it would be weird. Not weird — unusual, different, something that possibly no one has ever done before. I think the unusualness doesn’t appeal to you like it appeals to me, but I’m trying to be forthright and honest. For what it’s worth, even if this weren’t a brave new frontier, I would still want you to be my sometimes girlfriend. And even if that’s not what you want, I do still want to be friends, whatever form you take.
Pinion had worked closely with a wortier to get the book in order for its small publication, but once everything was in order, with all his corrections and Argya’s suggestions taken into account, a different wortier specializing in publication took over.
“There are two basic options,” said the wortier, whose shop was filled with books. “The expensive option is to go with specially made books. We would take the paper, cut it, bind it, then transfer the words over, and each and every book would be more or less the same, with the quality being a matter of cost.” She moved over to a stack of books that was sitting on her counter. “The other option is to use dungeon books. We bleed the words out, then put your words in. Now, the quality of the books can be a good bit higher with better materials, but they don’t always look like each other, and we have to do something about extra pages or missing pages or what have you, which can sometimes make it obvious that it was adapted, and too many changes take time, which takes money.”
“It’s the college’s money,” said Pinion. “But I think … we could go with the dungeon books. Most of these will be sent out free to other researchers.” He didn’t want to spend more money just because it wasn’t his money. “And there’s something appropriate about these books having come from dungeons, since it’s a book about dungeons.”
“For a run of three hundred, I have a special batch of books I got from a seller down south,” said the wortier. “These were all pulled from a single dungeon, and match each other pretty well, sort of a best of both worlds situation.” She quoted a price, and Pinion was happy that he wasn’t the one paying it.
There was more haggling to be done on what would be included in the book, because wortiers could add in all sorts of things to make it easier to read, like a table of contents that would take you to whatever you pressed on, or an index that would automatically fill itself in, but Pinion eschewed that. It wasn’t a particularly long book, in spite of him having worked on it for so long, and he hoped that it would make a good impression with the power of the words alone.
Once the books had been filled with words at the college’s expense, they were sent off to all corners of Inter. He had exchanged letters with Alfric about this, and Alfric seemed to be of the opinion that the spread of the technique was inevitable, and that it was better if it was done with as much information as possible so that bad outcomes could be avoided.
Three hundred was a fairly large number, but they kept getting more requests, and the pallet of books that had been parked in a corner of Argya Ham’s office quickly dwindled.
“You should be proud of having written such a thing at your age,” said Argya Ham. “The best thing for your career would be a follow-up to it, given that the evidence you collected is already out of date.”
“I would need to return to Plenarch,” said Pinion.
“Yes,” said Argya with a nod. “That’s what I’m suggesting.”
“When you sent me to them the first time, it was partly so I could get some experience of the world, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” said Argya. “If I’d known how much merit there was to what they were seeing, I would have gone myself.” She pursed her lips. “I understand, of course, if the personal issues get in the way.”
“No,” said Pinion. “I’m hoping they won’t. I’m hoping that it’s … nice.”
“Good, then let’s strike while the iron is hot,” said Argya. “I’ll arrange transport by leycraft.”
~~~~
The ley lines threaded through the world, carrying magical energy to and fro, similar to rivers but following their own logic. They tended to stay stable, with a few notable exceptions, and were used by cartiers to move from place to place at high speeds, but what they were more well known for was the leycraft that plied the spectral streams and connected the great cities of the world.
The leycraft station in Lambria was relatively small, with only a dozen bays, all of them aligned along the central shaft which pointed down the hill. The ley lines were invisible to the naked eye, but they could be felt sometimes, when you were close, usually as just a bit of frisson in the air. The hairs on the back of Pinion’s neck were standing up as he waited for the appointed time. He had come early, mostly out of nervousness. This was his fourth time using a leycraft, which some people would consider to be a lot, but he still didn’t feel particularly comfortable with it.
He had packed light, with only a small suitcase with his clothes for the next two days. Leycraft were rather large, but they held very little, and a variety of entads would spectacularly fail when slipping into the ley line. There were signs all around informing Pinion of this, not that he needed to be reminded. It remained to be seen whether laundoncraft would also fail inside a leycraft, but when he’d left it had seemed like a fairly dangerous thing to test. Pinion found himself compulsively checking that he hadn’t somehow accidentally worn an entad that would cause problems.
Pinion’s pilot was a short man — they were roughly the same height — who wore a leather outfit and tight-fitting gloves. After a brief inspection of Pinion and his suitcase, the pilot took him over to the craft, which was on wheels in its bay.
“First time?” asked the pilot.
“No,” said Pinion.
“Nervous though?” asked the pilot.
“Yes,” said Pinion. “It’s not the most sedate form of travel.”
“No, no it is not,” laughed the pilot. “Once we get going, it’ll be hard to talk, anything you wanted to ask before we leave?”
“Not really,” said Pinion.
“It’s an hour, not all that long, all things considered,” said the pilot. “We’ll slide in at Plenarch, I’ll drop you off, and then you’ll be on solid ground again.”
“Right,” said Pinion.
“Try not to throw up,” the pilot nodded. “Helps to keep your eyes closed, though then you can’t see the turns coming. It’s a bit better when you’re the one steering the thing.”
“That … doesn’t really help me,” said Pinion. “I’ll be fine, it’s more the feeling of speed than anything else.”
They climbed up into the craft, with the pilot in the front and Pinion in the back. All the leycraft were built more or less the same, with a sleek body like a fish, including iridescent scales that let it move within the leylines. There were tiny fins on it, controlled by ropes, and a glass canopy with each of the panels kept in place by a grid of metal. When it was first built, it had probably been a work of supreme craftsmanship, but like all leycraft, it was in a constant state of being repaired. The glass had probably been replaced dozens of times, and the scales were marked with the cruft that built up during transit through the leylines, almost like bluish-black soot.
Once the canopy was closed, a team of men pulled the leycraft into position, straining against ropes to wheel it into place. They were in the leyline, and Pinion could already smell a spiced ginger smell that would be there for the entire trip.
With a yank of a lever, the leycraft transitioned into the ley line, becoming a part of it and moving them down through Lambria in a flash. The sensation of speed was overwhelming, so many things flashing by them, but the pilot’s hands were steady, steering them through the ley line with practiced ease.
Pinion didn’t throw up, though it was close a few times. He knew that people who used leycraft extensively got used to it, but he couldn’t imagine subjecting himself to it enough for that to happen. If he’d been acclimated, perhaps he could have read a book or otherwise gotten some work done, but he mostly kept his eyes closed, especially when another leycraft passed by them going the other direction, which caused the pilot to yelp.
The leycraft were insubstantial when moving down the ley line, and the craft would pass through buildings and trees, which added to the sheer sense of speed. Pinion couldn’t imagine how the pilot was managing to keep them within the ley line, but he didn’t suppose that the craft would be allowed if it were very dangerous.
From time to time, they passed forks in the road, and one of them required a hard turn, the fins of the craft pushing them hard, to the left, but aside from that bit of excitement, there really wasn’t that much to the trip. They saw another craft only that one time.
When the hour was up, the leycraft was ‘caught’ in the Plenarch station, which was quite a bit larger than the one in Lambria. Very quickly, the leycraft was attached to ropes and then pulled out of the way, making room for the others, and the pilot opened the canopy and hopped down before Pinion was fully ready.
“See, you did fine, didn’t you?” asked the pilot.
“Now I feel sick,” said Pinion.
“Well, outside the craft, please,” said the pilot with a frown.
Pinion felt better once he was out, but he was going right back to the Settlers, which wasn’t entirely where he wanted to be.
He was surprised to find Verity waiting for him once he came out of the station. She had on a long dress with flowers embroidered near the bottom, and was sitting on a bench, drumming her fingers on the wood. She didn’t notice him at first.
“Pinion!” she said when she spotted him.
“How’d you know I was coming?” he asked.
“Alfric,” said Verity with a wave of her hand. “He was resetting anyway, and thought it might be nice for someone to meet you.”
“I got your letter,” said Pinion.
“Ah,” said Verity. “Was I the wrong person to come greet you?”
“No,” said Pinion. His hand was clutching his minimal luggage. “I just, ah … would agree to be your sometimes girlfriend, I guess, if that’s still what you wanted. Something impermanent.”
“Impermanent,” nodded Verity. “Fleeting?”
“Maybe not fleeting,” said Pinion. He shrugged. “Just … not set in stone.”
Verity beamed at him. “I can do not set in stone. I just don’t want it to be … something that doesn’t work for you.”
Pinion nodded. “I think it’ll be fine.” He hesitated. “I’m not sure how much I’ll wear the dress. I might get it altered to something I like better, aesthetically.”
Verity coughed politely. “Well, yes, but … you know, if you do sometimes want to be my girlfriend, then we have been doing dungeons, and, er, I think I’m probably understating it to say that you now have some other options.”
Pinion watched her. “It’s been on your mind?”
“It’s been on my mind,” she nodded.
They walked to the house together, and along the way, he slipped her hand into hers. She gave his hand a squeeze, and they carried on like that. Pinion felt a bit of nervousness about the whole thing, a feeling of uncertainty and possibility.
Mostly, he felt a sense of excitement.