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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 95, Thinking Outside the Box
🕑 Added 2022-04-13 15:58:05 +0000 UTC~~~~
Alfric had said that being a dungeoneer involved a lot of travel, and Isra supposed that this would simply be her life now, going from place to place. Dondrian had been fascinating, a place with thousands of owls whose eyes were easy to see through, teeming with people, perpetually warm with the winds of the vast ocean coming in at every hour of the day. There had been many new rules to learn, rules about which side of the street to walk on, rules about certain people not to talk to, things like that. She hoped that some of that knowledge would transfer, but the good thing about a city, in Isra’s opinion, was that it was okay to be from somewhere else. People would give you leeway if you messed up. And if they didn’t give you leeway, the odds were good that you were never going to see them again.
Plenarch was a different city, the sea lending a different flavor to it, the winds carrying different smells, and the way it was spread out over islands in a lagoon with a bridge to the mainland gave it a character of its own. There was a faint smell of fish that seemed to perpetually hang in the air, even when they were in the middle of one of the islands, and there was a smell of smoke that was occasionally so heavy that it could almost be tasted. There were a large number of cats in the city, perhaps because of the fish, or perhaps for pest control. Isra’s understanding of Dondrian’s owls was that part of why they were used was to deprive insects and rodents of food, something they were largely successful at. In Plenarch, they seemed to use cats to kill anything they didn’t want around.
It was a strange, lovely city. The one problem with Plenarch was that Verity wasn’t there.
The house that Alfric led them to was an odd one, shaped like a cube that had been sunken into the ground. The front door was a square as well, one set into a different square on the front. The squares were already clearly going to be a running theme, and Isra wasn’t sure whether she liked them. They waited for some time after Alfric had knocked.
“She knows we’re coming,” Alfric said. Isra took this for an apology or explanation. The sentence was of those sideways things that she had been practicing, a way of saying one thing while meaning another.
“The house is an entad,” said Mizuki. She was squinting at it. “It’s the biggest entad I’ve ever seen.”
“Is it?” asked Alfric, looking at the house. “It seemed unusual.”
“I would love a magic house,” said Mizuki. “How do you get a thing like this out of a dungeon?”
“Typically you don’t,” said Alfric. “But if you’re a seasoned dungeoneer with some very nice storage entads, you could take it that way, either shrink it down or warp it into a holding place, or something like that. Then again, we don’t know what the house does, so maybe it grew to this size.”
The door finally swung open, and they found themselves looking at someone whose face wasn’t human. He had deep jowls, like a bulldog, and was covered in fine brown fur, with large, rheumy eyes that quickly scanned them. He was dressed in fairly normal clothes despite his appearance, a close-fitting shirt with long sleeves, and loose pants that accommodated legs that bent backward. His hands had long fingers covered in black scales, only three fingers to a hand, one of them bent inward like a thumb.
“Welcome,” he said, his Inter perfect, his voice low and rich. “Please don’t be alarmed by my appearance. Are you Alfric Overguard?”
“I am,” said Alfric, keeping his surprise, distrust, disgust, or whatever else he was feeling from his face. “Is my aunt Penny in? I believe we were expected.”
“She’s out at the moment, due to an emergency,” said the creature. “My name is Willam, one of her permanent guests. She asked me to show you to your quarters, if that’s alright with you. If you’d rather not interact with me, I would suggest waiting three hours, at which point she’ll be back, and I apologize for the inconvenience.”
“A tour from you will be fine, Willam,” said Alfric. “I’m familiar with my aunt’s work.”
“Excellent,” replied Willam. It was now clear that his odd face had been tightly controlled before, and he gave them a wide, expressive smile, showing rounded teeth like pebbles on a beach.
They followed Willam into the house, through the large square door. The inside was composed almost entirely of squares of various kinds, composed of squares, which were used to make up most of the furniture. It gave everything a very blocky appearance, and Isra found herself unsettled as they moved through the foyer and into the large dining room.
“What’s with all the squares?” asked Mizuki.
“The house, as you might have guessed, is entadic in nature,” said Willam. “It can create any object composed of perfect cubes, with the strengths of the entad being related to how large and perfectly composed the cubes are. Each room is a perfect cube, or composed of two or three of them, each doorway is a square set within a sub-divided face of a cube, and so on. You’ll notice that the ceilings are quite high in many of the rooms in order to accommodate this.”
The dining room was massive, almost as tall as the church in Pucklechurch, with the ceiling forty feet above them. It was a cavernous space that made Isra feel small. A chandelier was hung from the center, and it descended down on a thin wire to perch just above the table, like a spider hanging above its prey. Isra couldn’t imagine dining there, but she supposed that they would. The table was just as square as everything else. The motif of squares was broken up in places by furs, statues, and greenery, but it was an unsettling and unwelcoming house. Isra wondered if the others felt the same.
“This is wild,” said Mizuki, who kept looking around. “I love it. Wait — is that statue also made of cubes?”
Toward one end of the dining room there was a statue of a woman, a nude. As they moved closer to it, following in Mizuki’s wake, Isra could see that it was true. The woman, laying on her side, was composed of cubes, each of them slotted into a grid shape that extended in three dimensions. Up close it was difficult to make out that it was a woman, but the illusion was convincing from far away. She was laying on her side, hand on one hip, looking off into the distance from beneath a large bushy hairstyle with a defined part.
“That’s my aunt,” said Alfric, frowning at the statue. “Penelope Overguard. Not a true aunt, she’s a second aunt once removed, I think. In the guild though.”
“How do we feel about tasteful nude sculptures of ourselves in the house?” asked Mizuki. She reached out and touched the curve formed by the series of cubes. “Can I touch this?” she belatedly asked Willam.
“Everything in here is made from the entad,” said Willam. “It cleans itself.”
“Neat,” asid Mizuki. She looked over at him, eyes taking in his features, then looked back at the statue. “Does she … is she married? Partnered I mean?”
“No,” said Willam. “She was pacted, if you’re familiar with the practice, but the children are now grown, and they felt no need to continue as a family except at special occasions — holidays, mostly.”
“And there are others of you in the house?” asked Mizuki. “Other, ah, dungeon … monsters?” She had paused as though searching for the correct words, but she had obviously failed.
“A creature taken from a dungeon is referred to as a bastle,” said Willam. “Lady Overguard prefers the term bastlefolk for those under her care, though a bastle is generally a pet or commercial animal, and there’s some disagreement.”
“Well what do you prefer?” asked Mizuki.
“Bastlefolk is fine,” said Willam. “And to answer the question, there are three others who live in this house. None of them are like me though. I was pulled from a dungeon alone, and am now a species of one.”
Mizuki frowned. “How does that — you know what, sorry for the questions, I’ll mind my own business.”
“We’re accustomed to the questions,” said Willam. “I personally don’t mind them. I’m not as true a believer as Lady Overguard is, but I do believe in doing my part.”
“Okay, so how does that work?” asked Mizuki. “Someone pulled you from a dungeon and then … brought you here?”
“Thirty years ago, yes,” said Willam. “A small, poorly-funded group found me in a crib after having killed the dungeon-mad creatures who I share a nominal species with. They had heard of Lady Overguard’s initiative and brought me to her for the generous reward she was then offering for bastlefolk. After a quick check, a cleric of Qymmos — Mansin, who is still part of the initiative — declared that I was a model case. I resided at the Tender Hearts Home in Dondrian for my first ten years, and now live here, with Lady Overguard.”
“How many of you are there?” asked Mizuki. “Bastlefolk?”
Willam hesitated. “It depends to some extent on how we’re counted. Of those at my own level, there are four here and seven in Dondrian, with perhaps another dozen outside those two cities. There are another fifty or so whose behavioral, social, or intellectual disability severely limits them, and I believe at the moment there are several hundred whose disposition is as-yet unknown.”
“Wow,” said Mizuki. “That’s —”
“A complicated issue,” said Alfric. “One that you can discuss at length with my aunt, if you feel like you need to.”
“I was going to say grim,” said Mizuki. “Hundreds of dungeon babies and there are like two dozen people to show for it?”
“Thousands, in fact,” said Willam. “And yes, I don’t believe there’s anyone who wouldn’t agree that it’s quite grim. Lady Overguard speaks on the grimness of the endeavor quite often.”
“If we could see our rooms now, that would be wonderful,” said Alfric.
Isra watched this all. Mizuki didn’t like to be corralled, but was also legitimately interested. Hannah was standing back, making no contribution to the conversation, which seemed to be because she felt that it wasn’t her place, or possibly because she didn’t think her thoughts were appropriate. Isra’s own feelings on these bastlefolk felt uncomplicated. She was glad that these people had been rescued from the dungeons, and sad that the dungeons occasionally made such things. She felt a kinship with them, perhaps inappropriately, and wanted to ask Willam what it was like to be a creature that was perpetually out of place. She held her tongue.
They were led to their rooms without much further discussion, through the House of Cubes. There were plentiful guest rooms, it seemed, and the one Isra was placed in seemed overly large, a cube twenty feet to a side, with a four-poster bed whose frame was also shaped like a cube. It was all so elaborate, and gave a feeling of wealth far beyond what Isra had seen in Dondrian. Verity had joked that Isra was getting a very skewed view of the world, having seen some of the most expensive and unique houses in Inter and little else, and this house was doing nothing to help with that.
Isra had a sack which had been placed inside the trunk, and she spread out her meager belongings on the bed. She had a change of clothes for the next day, but she’d grown dissatisfied with her wardrobe, particularly in comparison with Verity. The particular style of dress that Isra was accustomed to was popular in Tarbin — or what her father had always said was popular in Tarbin. It was proper, in some ill-defined way, to keep her arms covered even in the height of summer, to wrap a scarf around her head and tuck her hair back. Her father had never really explained why this was how they dressed in Tarbin, but among the books they kept were a few that proclaimed the virtues of modesty and made it seem as though showing skin and flowing hair was an invitation for … they never really said what, but she had taken it to be mating behaviors.
There was still a part of her that felt naked without the headscarf, but there was a different part that felt like giving it up would take her a step farther from her father. To give up both the clothes and the house felt like walking too far from where she’d come from. She could get used to going around with more of her skin showing, inviting attention and attraction — she had done it enough since joining the party — but it was attached to a sense of loss. Isra wanted to be like Verity, able to smoothly glide through conversations, graceful and poised, always knowing the proper thing to say, but she was starting to become convinced that it would mean a loss of self. And perhaps if Isra were to become more like Verity, wearing the same clothes, styling herself in the same ways, Verity would like her less. Verity wanted a wild wolf in the woods, that had become clear, and Isra yearned for the warm embrace of civilization.
Isra had wanted to go shopping for clothes with Verity, but that wasn’t going to happen on this trip. Isra did want clothes though, and this would give her a chance to buy something without Verity seeing it ahead of time.
They were getting ready to head into the city for their various purposes when Penelope Overguard returned. She swept into the house like a storm, loudly and with the wind of her exclamations, with two teenagers, a boy and a girl, trailing behind her. Like her, they were dark-skinned, and both looked rather sullen in contrast to her boisterousness. The so-called Lady Overguard greeted them with a wide smile.
“Alfric!” she called. She wrapped him in a hug. “I’m just so happy to have you out this way, when I heard you landed in Pucklechurch I had hoped that we might have a small reunion. I keep telling the family that we haven’t had a reunion in far too long, but of course there are concerns about too many together in the same place.” She released him and waved a hand.
“Aunt Penny, these are the other members of my party,” said Alfric, gesturing to the group. “Our bard, Verity, had to stay back in Pucklechurch, but —”
“Oh, I was so hoping we might get a small performance,” said Penelope. “A sneak preview of the coming concert series? I do have tickets.”
“You do?” asked Alfric.
“It’s the talk of the town in Dondrian,” she replied. “And of course news trickles down to those of us who can make the trip.” It wasn’t clear whether she meant people with special entads, people with enough wealth, or both. “But do continue the introductions.”
Isra watched. Penelope Overguard was close to how she’d been depicted in the cubic statue, though older, and with a few more pounds. She had wide hips and a bright smile, and though she must have been at least sixty, she didn’t look it. She had a hat with such a wide brim that it was almost comical and a dress that moved along with her in a sinuous way. Isra decided that she liked this woman. When it came Isra’s turn to be introduced, she only nodded, but she tried to make it clear that this wasn’t merely a perfunctory nod.
“I do know your buyer,” said Penelope. “I sold to her a few times, back when I was in the business. That was nearly thirty years ago, though it took much longer than that for us to clear our warehouse. We had a setup that allowed us to take absolutely whatever we wanted, and we did, with some abandon.” She turned to the two teenagers she’d come in with, frowning slightly. “Kali, Pek, would you like to be introduced as you are, or could I convince you to show yourselves around friends?”
“I’ll stay as I am,” said the girl, who Isra assumed was Kali, an assumption that was born out less than a second later. “Kali Overguard, bastlefolk. I’m wearing an entad to keep me normal.”
Penelope frowned again. “That’s not the language that I would prefer you use.”
Kali shrugged. “I’m going to my room. I’ll be down for dinner.” She turned to the party. “It’s been nice meeting you.” It was very clear that this was a perfunctory and grudging display of manners. She slipped away, off to some other portion of the large cubic house.
The boy, Pek, removed a ring from his finger and transformed.
He was taller, in this new form, though mostly in the neck. His pale face was studded with rounded rocks, each of them sitting within a cavity that seemed made for them, limned with opaque wetness. The features of his face were otherwise normal, though perhaps his eyes were a bit small and his nose a bit big, mouth wide and teeth off-colored. His arms forked, with two forearms on each: these fitted neatly into his flared sleeves, which Isra had thought were a matter of style.
If Isra had seen something like him in a dungeon, she wouldn’t have thought twice about killing him. It was a sobering thought.
“We met Willam,” said Mizuki. “Is there a reason he doesn’t get a disguise?” It was the first thing anyone had said after the silence that followed Pek revealing himself.
“Willam has one,” said Pek. “Whether to wear one or not is — complicated. I wear mine when I’m out. Kali — she’s my sister — hardly ever takes hers off.”
“I collect such things, disguising entads,” said Penelope. “If you find something suitable, I’ll offer a premium price for it. But of course we would rather fix the problem from the other end, naturally.”
“The other end?” asked Alfric.
“We would rather the bastlefolk fit in with society and have no need to disguise themselves as human,” said Penelope. “If people would accept them as they are, they would have no need to blend in. In Dondrian, they are known within their neighborhoods, and we’ve made good progress in Plenarch as well. There are, however, some differences in thought.”
“I need to spend some time with my books,” said Pek with a deep bow. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”
Once he was gone, Penelope turned to them. “And how are we enjoying Plenarch so far?”
“We only just got here,” said Alfric.
“Well, you’ll have dinner with us here, won’t you?” asked Penelope. “It’s entad-served, whatever you’d like.”
“Sounds great,” said Mizuki.
“We were going to take in the city, if that’s alright with you,” said Alfric.
“Of course!” clapped Penelope. “And perhaps over dinner we can discuss the finer points of the bastlefolk.”
“If we had encountered any likely babies, we’d have brought them to you,” said Alfric. Isra saw Mizuki raise an eyebrow, but she said nothing. When they’d talked about thinking dungeon creatures, Alfric had mentioned babies only as an aside.
“Yes, of course,” said Penelope. “But there are other things to consider beyond simply that.” She waved a hand. “We can have the discussion over dinner. It’s been so nice to see you, I feel like the last time we spoke in person was — four years ago?”
“Seven,” said Alfric.
“And you were just a boy then,” said Penelope. “Now a man grown, and your parents are so proud of you.”
“Thanks,” nodded Alfric. “It’s kind of you to say.”
“Well, I’ll talk your ear off later,” said Penelope.
They warped out together, then went their separate ways, leaving Isra alone in the city. She had a fair number of rings in her pouch, and was on a quest to find some clothes that would look more like what she routinely saw around Pucklechurch, or that matched some of the dresses that Verity wore.
She took her headscarf off when she wandered into the store, and pretended to be another person, an airy dilettante who went into such stores every day of her life, and couldn’t possibly have cared less about the dresses, which she was an expert in. This was a technique that Verity had suggested: sometimes, when she was particularly anxious or needed to present a face, she would simply pretend to be someone else.
It was nice to smile, and nice to not have a care in the world. The woman who ran the shop seemed happy to have someone to talk to, and Isra kept her supplied with a steady stream of questions about the various cuts of the dresses, the materials, and the fabrics. Most of the dresses would need alteration of one kind or another, but Isra was convinced to try one of them on, and it was close enough that she could walk out of the store wearing it, though it would need the attention of a seamstress. It was so much more convenient to have everything custom fitted by an entad, but the shop didn’t have anything like that. Alfric’s mother had spoiled them, it seemed.
The dress was a purple panel dress with fluttering bits of fabric at the shoulders, and the only bad thing about it was that she would need other things to go with it. Her shoes looked too large and clunky with the dress, and of course something would have to be done with her hair as well, or she would have to get a hat to hide it. Still, she looked like a different person, which was what she had been going for.
It was a bit surprising how much you could learn by listening to experts, and how eager most people were to share something about their area of expertise. Plenarch seemed like a friendly city, more than Dondrian, and in a different way from Pucklechurch or Liberfell. The people of Plenarch felt eager to talk, and without so much a veneer of professionalism.
In some stores she said she was a dungeoneer, in others a druid, and while she never lied, she chose different things to emphasize about herself. She told a cobbler about Verity, saying the word ‘girlfriend’ for the first time. To a perfumier, she described spending nearly a week in a dungeon stripping out everything, getting sweaty and grimy, wanting to smell nice for a change.
She spent far too much money, especially at the salon, where they put polish onto her toenails and fingernails, and spent some time doing things to her hair that she didn’t fully understand. Part of the reason that she was willing to part with so much money was that she wanted the experience, not like it had been when Alfric’s mother had done all these things, but the experience that Verity had undergone before performances, getting prim and proper with all that entailed.
She didn’t haggle for much. Haggling was something that she didn’t particularly enjoy, though everyone told her that she was good at it. Most of what she did when haggling was treating the other person like an enemy, and she didn’t want to be enemies, not to people who were only trying to make some money. There were other ways to haggle with people, she knew, a way of trying to sell things by pretending that you were a friend to the merchant, or that you were giving a good deal, but she had virtually no experience with that except having been on the receiving end of it.
At the end of it, she didn’t look like herself. She was more womanly, more mature, as though she’d aged five years in an afternoon, and while she wasn’t sure that she had attained anything approaching style, she had gotten a look that worked. If the way she dressed was an invitation, an enticement, then it wasn’t enough of one that it caused anyone to stop and talk with her, or even look at her more often than normal. She liked fitting in though, looking like a woman with somewhere to be, perhaps the kind of woman who lived in a giant cubic house.
She ended up nearly late to dinner, even though the dinner was served much later in the afternoon than she was used to. The table was set, and people were being seated, which left Isra just barely enough time to drop her bags in her room.
“Wow,” said Hannah. Isra sat down beside her. “What have you been doin’ all day?”
Isra held up a hand and grinned. “Do you like them?”
Hannah took Isra’s hand and looked at the nails. “Quite the transformation.”
“But do you like them?” asked Isra, her smile momentarily fading. She wasn’t sure what she would do if the answer was ‘no’.
“You look very fetching,” said Hannah. “Mesmerisin’. I wouldn’t have expected it of you, that’s all.” She looked at the nails again, which were a deep red. “You look amazin’.” Hannah gave a closer look at Isra’s face. “All this makeup though, it’s — well, what will you do tomorrow?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” said Isra. “Wash it off, put more on. I want Verity to see.”
“You had help with this though?” asked Hannah. “The blending is very clean, the lines are nice.”
“I had help,” said Isra. “It didn’t seem hard.”
“I think this is good for you,” said Hannah. “But you’re jumpin’ in the deep end, and the expert, to the extent we have one, is three hours flight away.”
“She’s under pressure,” said Isra. “I don’t want —”
They were interrupted by a knife clinking against a glass. All of the glasses were cubes and all the plates were square, though they seemed to have been made to match the house rather than created by some entad. The lip of the plates was a concession to practicality. Their uniformity suggested that they weren’t magical, and Isra wondered where the food would come from.
“Greetings all!” said Penelope with a clap of her hands. “We are honored to have guests here tonight to share in our largesse, to dine with us, to learn with us, to experience each other. I believe all introductions have been made, so I won’t waste much time before handing it over to Hannah. I always enjoy it when a cleric joins us.”
If Hannah found this request to be a surprise, she didn’t react in the slightest, instead rising just as Penelope sat.
“The Garam Ashar does not refer to humans,” said Hannah. “In the translations, sometimes those particular words are used, but in the proper godly language, delivered unto us by the gods themselves, the words are agnostic. We thinking beings are far more alike than we are apart, and even where we’re different, we reflect each other. I am glad the bastlefolk have been able to find a home, and I pray for the blessings of Garos upon it. May our meal suit this beautiful home, with the certainty of the gods.”
“Nicely done,” said Isra with a conspiratorial voice as Hannah sat down.
“Thanks,” said Hannah. She seemed surprised that Isra would have commented, and she was right to be surprised, because normally Isra stayed quiet. “I had it prepared, just in case. I think it needed a readin’ from the Garam Ashar, but I couldn’t think of one offhand. The theological question is an interestin’ one.”
There were several entads for food, which were passed around the table as though they were communal serving dishes. A ring the size of a bracelet extruded proteins, a brush left pasta in its wake, and roasted vegetables fell out of a shaker and expanded to full size once they were on the plate. There was much discussion about how to actually use these things, but there wasn’t the same bounty of possibility as at Alfric’s family home, and no little ‘game’ of having to figure anything out. Kali, who sat on Isra’s right, explained in brief how the entads worked.
Isra’s eyes went to Kali’s plate a few times. The bastlefolk girl didn’t seem to be eating anything like normal food, and she’d had the entads put some very hard, shiny things on her plate. They looked suspiciously like small rocks, and Kali picked them up with her fingers, one by one, and slipped them into her mouth, where they were swallowed without any obvious chewing.
“I eat rocks,” said Kali, after the third time Isra looked. She had a flat voice, without any obvious emotion to it.
Isra was silent for a moment as she tried to figure out what kind of response that warranted. She could ask what kind of rocks, but this was a bastlefolk, and she seemed to just want to be left alone, at least so far as their differences went. Surely these kinds of dinners weren’t uncommon, and the questions that came when someone else saw her eating rocks would be mostly the same.
“Sorry, no one said when we were introduced, what do you do?” asked Isra.
Kali blinked at her. “Do?” she asked.
“Your job, your vocation,” said Isra. “I’m a druid, and a dungeoneer.”
“Oh,” said Kali. She blinked. “I don’t really do anything.”
Isra frowned. She didn’t know how to handle that response. “I collect things.”
“What things?” asked Kali, with a frown of her own.
“Rocks, sticks, bits of bone, wood, mosses, little plants, feathers, objects of that nature,” said Isra.
“Why?” asked Kali. She used her delicate fingers to place another rock into her mouth, and it made a visible bump in her throat as she swallowed down.
“I just like them,” said Isra. “Some rocks are interesting, worn in particular ways, or with banding, or holes in them, or holes that have been filled in by some other sort of rock. There are rocks with good colors, or interesting shapes, or made of materials that you don’t often see. And then, when I’m feeling off, I can go look at my rocks and marvel at them.”
That seemed to give Kali pause. “I don’t know what that would be, for me.”
Isra returned to her meal, thinking the conversation was done. For the puck of meat she’d wanted poultry, and it seemed to be layered turkey, chicken, and squab, interleaved with very thin layers of herbs. It was good, though unconventional, and she cut it apart, eating it with the incredibly thin pasta she’d brushed onto her plate.
“You looked different when we came in,” said Kali.
“I went shopping,” said Isra. She showed off her nails. “And had a manicure.” Kali was still giving a questioning look. “I wanted to look pretty.” Verity had always said that Isra was pretty, just as she was. “Pretty in a normal way.”
“A normal way?” asked Kali.
“I was raised in the woods,” said Isra. “My father followed Tarbin customs. I didn’t learn that I was a druid until some months ago. I always felt apart from everyone, different, and that’s because I was different, I just didn’t know it.” She thought about what she had to say and tried to turn it into a funny anecdote. “Did you know, until about two months ago, I thought that everyone could look through the eyes of a bird and it was just that it was taboo to talk about? People would talk about the weather, and I thought that they were pretending not to be able to control it.”
Kali had, over the course of their conversation, seemed to come to life, her face taking on some animation, her movements less economical. “That’s insane.”
“It is,” nodded Isra. “I felt like the stupidest person in the world. But my father had died and I’d been on my own, so I had plenty of time to build up wrong ideas about the world.”
“But your parents must have known you were a druid?” asked Kali.
“I never knew my mother,” said Isra. “If my father knew, he never said. And then I was on my own. As I said, I had a lot of time to build up wrong ideas. But now I know, and I think I’ve figured out how to fit in.” She looked down at her nails again. “Right?”
“I want to be normal,” said Kali. She had a distant look.
“Aren’t you?” asked Isra.
Kali paused for a moment before answering. “A few days ago I had a bad breakup. He — he said the same thing, that I was normal, but it wasn’t true. I wasn’t normal enough for him.”
“We could go drown him,” said Isra. She smiled, but Kali looked aghast. “Sorry, that was a joke.” It had been funny and strangely reassuring when Mizuki had said it, and Isra wasn’t sure where she’d gone wrong in the delivery.
“I loved him,” said Kali. “Still do, really. But he left me, because I wasn’t … enough.”
“I’m sorry,” said Isra. She had no words to help, and felt useless. Kali seemed on the verge of crying, though it was difficult to tell, and Isra had almost no experience.
“It’s fine,” said Kali. “It’s our lot in life. Pulled from the dungeons before we could say whether we wanted to be. Always outsiders. Curiosities or a set piece for a debate.” She got up from her seat, though dinner was only half over, and rushed away from the table.
“I handled that wrong,” said Isra, partly to Hannah, partly to the empty air.
“No,” said Hannah. “It’s a tough position. But, maybe, from what I overheard, it might just be that she’s a teenage girl, full of normal feelings that press down on her like they’re tryin’ to turn her grapes into wine. Hard to say. I wouldn’t take her to be too indicative of how it is to be a bastlefolk, is all I’m sayin’. I’ve been around this house more than you and spoke with a few of the others.”
“Okay,” said Isra. “If you say so. Should I … go after her?”
“Sit and eat,” said Hannah. “If someone wants some space, better to give it to them.”
Isra sat and ate, and her thoughts turned, not just on the notion of the bastlefolk and how normal Kali seemed, but on the idea of being normal, of being young and in love.
She missed Verity, fiercely, though they’d seen each other just that morning. She hoped that desperate longing for one another would never go away.
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Author’s note: the term ‘puck’ is anachronistic, but used here because it’s a useful term and hopefully doesn’t cause confusion for the reader. It’s also one of those words that somewhat surprises me, since I would have thought that it would be much older.
