Three Chicks from Othe - J_C_D (2024)

Tiny rocks plinked off a wooden window in the dead of night. The rectangular plank angled outward from a bottom hinge, held in place by a rope on the outside with a fine mesh curtain tacked over the frame inside. The netting kept the moorland’s many bloodsuckers at bay – all except for one, the sleeping figure mused, as she stirred awake at the noise.

“Nina! Nina!” A human girl whisper-shouted up at the window. She was hood-cloaked and fourteen, her bare light-brown legs wet and muddy to the knees, and she held a floating fireball no brighter than a candle in her hand. “Ninevah! Wake up!” She threw another rock.

“What, Marigold?” Another girl’s voice came from the darkness behind the window, irritably.

“There’s a dead devil in the water!”

Silence replied. Less than a minute later, just as Marigold picked up another pebble, a gangly brown half-orc girl rounded the corner of the brick-walled house, wearing a tunic thrown over a nightgown and hiking boots hastily tied. Her dark brown hair lay disheveled around her shoulders.

“I can’t wake my parents up with yelling,” Ninevah whispered, her tusks still small enough to fit under her top lip. “Say that again?”

“Out in the water,” Marigold pointed, her flame flickering in the dark night of a new moon, “I was out poaching willowshade and—”

“Mari!” Ninevah hissed. “They cane you for that!”

“Only if you’re caught,” Marigold flipped her hand, “but that’s not important. I swear there’s a devil out there.”

“A devil,” Ninevah doubted.

“Yeah, tail and wings and everything!” The shorter girl swept her hands out to illustrate, casting new shadows from her flame. “Totally devil. Just flopped over and dead. Wanna see before something eats it?”

“Kinda?” Ninevah glanced back at her house. “But what if—”

“Great!” Marigold snatched her best friend by the wrist and pulled her away to adventure.

The town of Othe was a crescent of five bridge-connected swaths of dry land above the waterline of the Othemoor. Ninevah lived in the Rudwashes on the westernmost patch, the borders of which declined into bogs before reaching the start of the navigable water mid-crescent. Marigold led the way south, out beyond the town’s western point. Dark as it was under the stars, they quickly left sight of the last house.

When the land started to soften, Marigold rolled her wrist and the flame glowed lantern-strong. It reflected off the wet planks of a bog-bridge and danced off the water where the wooden path submerged. The girls forged ahead slower to keep Ninevah’s boots from splashing and squelching too loudly.

“Why’d you even bring those?” Marigold chided, her bare feet silent.

“Snakes,” Ninevah answered.

“It’s fine, they’re still nesting where it’s drier. They don’t like wet beds.”

“What, you asked them?”

“Like it’s even hard?” Marigold glanced back. “You’d know it too if you weren’t an indoor kid.”

“Shut up, at least there’s soap indoors.”

“Uh-huh. Know what’s not? This.”

Marigold flexed her fingers and expanded her flame. A body became visible in the shallow water. It lay on its side, nude and half-submerged, tail limp, one devilish wing draped over it and the other crumpled underneath it. Its long black hair lay lank and plastered to its violet skin, its gender illegible with its back facing the girls. A point of a horn rose over its head.

The girls crept closer. The figure’s ribs rose and fell, shallowly.

“You said it was dead,” Ninevah whispered.

“I didn’t get this close before,” Marigold whispered back.

“You woke me up for it and you didn’t even check?”

“It looked dead, I thought I had time!”

“What if it wakes up?”

“Even better,” Marigold’s grin was audible.

Ninevah delved her well-read brain for anything on devils, trying to at least start with an identification. “Maybe it’s an imp.”

“Do they get that big?”

“I dunno. You think it’s a succubus?”

The girls held very still and contemplated that possibility. Marigold’s magical flame reddened. She noticed and quickly moved it off her hand to her shoulder, where it glowed back to orange.

“I think,” said Marigold, slowly, “if she was, this isn’t the way to seduce anyone. She’d be, like, washing her hair or squishing her boobs up or something.”

Ninevah bit her lip. “Is she even a she?”

It was impossible to tell from where they stood. The girls glanced at each other, silently came to an agreement, and closed the distance.

The winged figure stirred as they approached. It rolled face-down. Bubbles disturbed the water around its head, but it lay still. The bubbles ceased.

The girls darted forward, mud sucking at their feet, all sense of danger gone in the face of a rescue. Ninevah made it there first, grabbed the figure by the shoulders and turned it face-up.

The face they saw was of a girl their age, her horns a single long crescent growing from just above her eyebrows. At the center of the horns, a strange design like a foreign letter was glowing no brighter than a firefly. She convulsed, vomiting bog water as she gasped for breath on pure instinct.

Marigold touched the winged girl on the shoulder. A flash of radiant orange fire spilled from the gaps between her fingers and rippled over her wet purple skin, drying and healing in one go.

“She’s a tiefling!” said Marigold. “Never saw one with wings before.”

“I didn’t know they could get wings,” said Ninevah. The tiefling weakly sputtered and coughed, the odd rune on her horns casting its weak light.

Marigold stripped her cloak off her short striped pajamas underneath, her helpful fireball staying in place and burning nothing. She had the Youth Sports build of a permanent outdoor kid. “Yeah, there’s lots of variants. Wings, hooves, black eyes, fangs,” she sighed, “some races get all the luck. Move her over there.”

The two girls wrapped the third in her own wings and then in the dry cloak. The stranger remained limp and unresponsive throughout, her eyes half-lidded and staring at nothing.

Ninevah frowned. “Didn’t you heal her?”

Marigold ran an anxious hand through her wavy-curly brown hair. “Look, I only started last year! We gotta take her to somebody.”

“Well we can’t take her to my house—”

“Why would we even do that?”

“I don’t know,” Ninevah threw her hands up, “you always try to bring some weird injured—”

“Look, the alligator was one time—”

“And the displacer beast?”

“It was an injured baby the circus just threw out!”

“And the boar?”

“Does she look like a boar to you?!”

“Who’s out there?” A man’s voice called from the dark.

Marigold squeaked and snuffed her flame.

“It’s us, Mister Tallgrass!” Ninevah called back.

“Narc,” Marigold muttered.

Ninevah flicked a finger off Marigold’s forehead. “Shut up and turn the lights back on!”

A blinding white ball burst into being above their heads, the light of high noon suddenly catching them completely exposed. The girls grunted and slammed their eyes shut.

“As you like,” said the approaching voice. It paused only a second before turning stern and rushing closer. “Who’s this?”

Ninevah blinked through the radiance of localized daylight. Mister Tallgrass was already bent over the stranger, one hand flat on her forehead and another on her neck, his swept-back light-brown hair tumbling over his short pointed ears.

“We found her in the water,” said Ninevah.

“I gave her what I could,” said Marigold, still grinding her wrists into her eyes.

“Good girl,” said the half-elf, lifting the half-drowned stranger. “Come with me.”

Even as centuries of tradition made a place for modernity, the shamans who founded Othe remained in strength, supplementing local Zhelezo with druidic guardians to maintain daily life with alacrity and wisdom. Wisdom held that the night of a new moon meant mischievous teenagers. Bernardiam Tallgrass, druidic guardian at large, was of the opinion that the Zhelezo would rather arrest the young than look after them. On nights like this, he roamed alone to protect the next generation with one hand, gently chide them with another, and heal with both.

Ninevah and Marigold went with him to his in-home clinic, a clean room smelling of mint and charcoal with four narrow empty straw-stuffed beds on one side. Covered lamps flared all around as he offhandedly pointed at each one in turn. Tallgrass handled his patient as gently as a bird’s egg, touching and testing her limp limbs while Marigold bustled to his every order.

“Scissors and gauze for starters, always.”

“Yes sir.” A drawer rolled.

“And cotton and a number-three ointment.”

“Right.” A cabinet door swung.

“Why?” Tallgrass prompted. “You already gave her a shot of healing.”

“’Cause… um. The patient’s body might be too weak to absorb it all.”

“And?”

“Manual natural healing is slow but the most consistent,” Marigold droned.

“Good. Now. Splint, hickory, size five.”

“On it.”

“Why?” He prompted again.

“The bones don’t know what direction they’re in,” she answered, crouched at another cabinet. “Healing crooked is worse than a break.” She froze. “sh*t.”

“It’s fine, you didn’t juice her enough for bone to start setting. Add a size-three to that, her ulna’s fractured.”

“Yes sir.”

Ninevah watched, amazed; she had never seen her delinquent friend work harder or with more focus. Those who worked for Mister Tallgrass knew their business. They had to, to keep working for him.

“Miss Kesh,” Tallgrass called to Ninevah, “weren’t you studying under the Marquis’s cousin?”

“Still am,” she said. “But I left my spellbook at home.”

“No sweat. Boil some water for us? I’d have a nurse here to do it but my last one just graduated to the temple.”

Ninevah hustled to the stove and conjured flames under it. Cantrips, at least, didn’t need a spellbook. “Which temple?”

“Wildmother’s. My old master runs it. Oh, and put some dried mold in the kettle, it’s in the cabinet to your left.”

“Sure.”

Both girls followed every instruction given as the night wore on.

“She’s been through a lot,” Tallgrass informed them when the work was done. The unconscious patient was dressed in a standard white infirmary gown, her gargoyle-like wings inward, her leg and arm splinted and wrapped. “Exhausted, malnourished, broken leg, fractured arm, dislocated shoulder, multiple stress sprains in her back and in multiple wing joints. I’ll have to hit her with more magic once she’s gotten some sleep in, but at least all her bones are aligned now.”

Ninevah’s eyes wandered over the patient. The mystery girl’s nails were ragged from neglect. “Did somebody… throw her out?”

“Logical guess,” sighed Tallgrass, “but if so it was nobody local. Pearl at the grocer’s is too young for a daughter your age. Principality has only been at the Zhelezo station for three years and he isn’t into women. No, this girl from Wildmother-knows where was starved at least a few days before she flew here, and flew a long way – probably a few more days – until she crashed hard, at least once. It’s a serious case of exhaustion, girls. I doubt if she can even hear us right now. Still… she owes her life to both of you.”

The winged tiefling hadn’t so much as twitched since coming out of the water. Ninevah and Marigold watched her closely. Her mouth was chapped, her cheeks sunken, her eyes baggy, her unmoving irises a dark shade of red in ordinary humanoid white. Her ears were pointed and stuck out a little. On closer inspection, the rune in the center of her horns – bestriding the thin skinless seam where both horns fused into one – looked a little like a fist in profile.

“That’s…” Ninevah squinted. “That rune, that’s a syllable.”

“What language?” Marigold asked.

“It’s not really a language in itself,” Ninevah tilted her head, “it’s like… magic math made of sounds. A syllable of basic arcanistry.”

“Okay then, indoor kid, which one is it?”

“Argh.”

“Forgot it?”

“No, that’s what it is. Argh. It’s one of those runes that kind of escaped into language as a noise-word, like hmph or ah. It means… well, depending on the language context, whatever you usually feel when you say argh.”

Marigold leaned in with a magnifying glass she produced from somewhere when Ninevah wasn’t looking. “Cool. What’s it mean in Orcish?”

Ninevah withdrew, her brown cheeks darkening. “It… um…”

“It doesn’t have to be the Orcish context,” said Tallgrass, reading her embarrassment and bailing her out. “People say argh for all sorts of reasons. What would it be in Common?”

Marigold looked up. “Smashed-your-finger-in-a-drawer?”

Ninevah flicked Marigold on the forehead.

“Ow! Hey, is ow a rune?”

Ninevah ignored her. “The thing is, every language sort of elevates any word derived from runes, giving it a connotation of academic use. So given the Common language’s roots, average speakers might call it plain old ‘worry.’ But, if you consider the higher-minded context, an accurate translation would be more like… ‘consternation.’”

Tallgrass nodded. “So somebody, probably whoever she escaped from, magically branded her with their feelings about her.”

“I don’t think it’s a brand,” said Marigold. “The edges fit right in, flush with the top layer of horn. It’s not like it was etched or even tattooed, it’s like a jeweler set and polished it. I think it grew there.”

“How?” Ninevah asked.

“And why that one?” Tallgrass asked.

Marigold made the universal I-don’t-know noise, wondering vaguely whether that was a rune as well. Even as she did, the rune faded, leaving no sign it was ever there. The tiefling’s shallow breathing continued, unaffected. Tallgrass touched her neck.

“Regular pulse, little slow though. Consternated or not, she’ll need a monitor.”

“You’re looking at it,” said Marigold, thumbing to herself. Ninevah nodded an agreement.

The girls and the druid looked over their patient, feeling a little consternation themselves. An abused child implied an abuser. It cared too little to protect her. Would it care enough to pursue her?

#

She was a body, just barely. She had started from a place of utterly determined focus and beat her wings until focus itself engulfed and sublimated her conscious thought, eating it for fuel as miles became leagues.

There were… men, and then mountains, and then trees. Rain was in there, somewhere, but because it came from outside it could be ignored. Pain was in there, somewhere, but because it came from inside it was just another fuel source, burning up until she couldn’t feel it, or anything else.

She glided. She flew. Away. Away. Hitting rocks, hitting trees. Her spirit outwilled her flesh until her flesh failed, and fell. And fell. And landed, not softly.

And now the world was soft. And her eyelids lifted, and the sky was still and brownish. And the air smelled of sharpness and of fire, and of the bones of fire. And something wet-sounding was happening to one side of her. And on the other side came tiny sounds like chipping stone.

A brown figure put a wet cloth on her head, speaking, but not to her. “Don’t clip ‘em too close.”

She moved her eyes. A lighter-skinned figure seemed to be clutching her hand. “First of all, I didn’t. Second, I’ve been clipping unconscious nails a lot longer than you. Third, shut up he left me in charge.”

“Who?” The tiefling rasped.

Her caretakers jumped. “Oh sh*t!” The hand-holder put something away. “Water, try giving her some water again!”

“Again?” The tiefling whispered, the most volume she could offer.

Focusing was difficult, but her dry eyes fixed on a grinning girlish brown-eyed face framed in wavy brown hair above an orange sun dress. “We found you in the bog three nights ago – well I did, Nina tagged along.”

“Ninevah,” a taller and darker person loomed, resolving into a young woman with a put-upon half-smile under yellow eyes and a brown-black ponytail. She wore a button-up shirt in light yet muted green. “Ninevah Kesh. She’s Marigold Sucrose. Here, drink this.” She held out a wooden cup.

“Will you ever stop using government names – and don’t just hold the thing out, she’s weak as a scarecrow, you gotta prop – here, I’ll get some pillows.” Marigold ducked away. “I’m Mari. She’s Nina. Who’re you?”

The tiefling sat up, all the formerly fiery aches of her muscles gone and forgotten. The one called Ninevah held her up from behind and touched the rim of the cup to her lips. Shaky, fresh-clipped fingers on weak arms supported the cup and tipped it back. It was glorious liquid life. She gulped raggedly and got most of it on… something that clung. She stared at her unfamiliar clothes, a white gown faintly grayed and yellowed with use.

“Oh, that’s just what Mister Tallgrass had lying around for patients,” said the back-supporter. “When you’re feeling up to moving we have some other clothes, mostly my stuff since you’re about my size. How’s your leg feel?”

The patient glanced down. Sheets were folded at the foot of the bed. Someone had cut and filed her toenails with care and painted them yellow and orange, a sharp contrast to her skin. She lifted her knee a little.

“Feels… there?”

“Great! Mister Tallgrass made us keep the splint on ‘til this morning, just in case.”

“The paint…”

Marigold-or-maybe-Mari returned with her arms full of downy pillows and stuffed one under where Ninevah-or-maybe-Nina held her up. “That’s my work. You like it?”

“Yeah. Nice colors.” She smiled aside at her pillow provider. “It’s… cute.”

Marigold averted her flustered gaze and shoved another pillow.

The tiefling reclined upright in comfort she hadn’t felt in— weeks? How long? Months? And where? Questions. The shorter girl had asked her name. Her name? It was right there, wasn’t it? She touched between her horns. Her rune, the thing they kept touching—

Holding her still, until magic did it for them—

Her breathing quickened and her eyes darted, but no, she wasn’t there. That was far away, and—

The sick-looking man, his skin thin and yellowed like paper, grinning sideways over her—

Her hand involuntarily clenched over where her rune had been and she gasped like she’d been drowning.

“That rune went away not long after we found you.” Marigold squashed a final pillow in. “How’d you get it?”

“Here, shh, it’s okay, you don’t have to answer,” Ninevah raised a larger mug of water with better bedside manner than the trainee healer. The tiefling gently covered her offering hands with her own, drinking slowly and deeply. The water anchored her. It felt like years since she had so much at once.

“Well we can’t help unless you do answer,” said Marigold.

“Some things are private!” Ninevah shouted at a higher pitch than she wanted, her cheeks dark. “Don’t you have confidentiality?!”

“Healers keep things secret from other people!” Marigold gestured sharply at the door. “They can’t help a patient they don’t know about!”

The tiefling blinked at her.

Healers. The quiet men in the white room with the white ceiling she couldn’t look away from. Sometimes they showed her the needles—

The tiefling screwed her eyes shut and breathed. She was all right. There wasn’t here. She got away. She was fine. She defensively hugged herself; the water she had spilled down her front clung tighter and colder.

“I don’t know how,” she said. “It shows up when I use my magic. Here, look.” She looked at her medical gown. Without a word or gesture it brightened and bleached and dried off, every subtle stain of age lifted to off-the-loom fresh. The fist-like rune glowed between her horns. She reached up with a trembling hand and tapped it. “It’s my name.”

“Consternation?”

The tiefling widened her eyes directly at the half-orc. “How’d you know?”

“I know some languages.” Ninevah couldn’t hide a trace of smugness, nor could Marigold conceal a frown. Neither of them were the slightest bit surprised at the show of magic cleanliness. “Were you named after it or did it come later?”

“The first one. It was there when I was born.” Consternation huffed a single chuckle. “I know it’s weird, but it’s mine. I’ve been called a lot worse than Consternation.”

“That’s still a terrible name,” said Marigold. “You’re Connie now.”

“Hey,” Ninevah scowled, “she can be Consternation if she wants to be!”

Consternation managed to twitch a cautious smirk. “Can I be someone else? It’s a crappy job.”

The other girls smiled excitedly.

“You know what makes any job better?” Marigold started.

“Friends to help work it,” Ninevah finished.

Tallgrass returned some time later to find the three girls talking and laughing like lifelong schoolmates. Ninevah held court in a chair she had dragged to the bedside while Marigold sat on the edge of the bed.

“So I opened the door and there she was, naked and muddy and mud up to her nose,” Ninevah gestured like shouldering a sack, “with a whole-ass gator over her shoulder—”

“It was a juvenile, not even three—”

“And she goes ‘Nina! Nina! I need your bathtub!’”

“And she—” Marigold cracked up— “she said, ‘But my mom’s using it!’”

“And Marigold goes—she grabs my arm and goes ‘Then let’s find an empty one!’ And we—” Ninevah collapsed face-first into the bed, laughing herself incoherent.

“We—we knocked on like six different doors and then Nina says to try the—the Marquis—!” Marigold bent double, gasping her laughs, unable to go on.

Consternation pressed her knuckles to her mouth, her shoulders vibrating from laughs bouncing around lungs too empty to fuel them, a picture of youthful health.

Tallgrass politely cleared his throat.

Marigold gasped herself back to speech. “Oh! Hey boss! She’s okay and she likes art and rice and her name’s Connie!”

Ninevah rose, her brown face red and wet and smiling ear to ear. “No it isn’t, it’s Consternation!”

“It’s, it’s being discussed,” Consternation fanned herself, calming down.

“Well, Beingdiscussed—” Tallgrass started, just to make the trio collapse into giggles— “your body’s already been healed as well as can be. I was just waiting for your spirit to be well enough to move it. From the sound of things, I’d say it’s good enough now. Have you tried standing yet?”

Consternation shifted. Her new friends bolted to her arms to help her up.

She stood without swaying. She shrugged her wings and stretched them wide, thin leathery sheets of violet hanging from enormous fingers. She draped them around her friends and pulled them closer, a blanketing hug that the girls quickly put their arms into. The membranes were warmer than they expected.

“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice creaking out of her tight throat and her spade-tipped tail wrapping another hug at their knees. “Thank you.” The girls stayed huddled for a moment, breathing each other’s breath.

Tallgrass smiled at them with a healer’s relief. “May I ask how old you are, Miss?”

“I’m not sure,” she said from her enclosure.

“Well you don’t look much older than them, which means you’ll need someone to take custody—”

Ninevah and Marigold burst free, “Me me me!”

“Some adult, girls, who has a place to stay—”

“Hers!” Ninevah and Marigold pointed at each other. “No way!” They replied.

Consternation raised her hand. “Can I get a vote?”

“Please,” said Tallgrass.

“Breakfast first? Lots of it please? I’ll clean or whatever to pay for it.”

“It’s closer to dinner now,” he said. “It’s a matter of health, though, so it’s on me.” He produced a gently clinking pouch from one of his many pockets and idly dug around in it. “Now if only I could think of a reliable guide for you—”

“Me me me!”

#

The sun began lowering over the moorland. A wind from the sea two hundred miles south pushed clouds into the backdrop of the Cyrios Mountains. A small flock of ducks passed in front of them.

Consternation ate like a firestorm, consuming all and sundry with a zealousness that would’ve been terrifying if it wasn’t so impressive. The town of eight thousand had by then heard rumor of the mysterious newcomer, but none besides the girls and Tallgrass had yet laid eyes on her. Her very presence was a show, her wings a topic of fascination. On top of that, watching the skinny teenager annihilate big steaming plates of fried rice and boiled crayfish and roasted duck was rapidly becoming a public event, there at the biggest outdoor restaurant in town.

“You’re supposed to take the shells off,” Ninevah noted.

“Mmh?” A crayfish claw dangled from Consternation’s mouth. She wore an old yellow dress of Ninevah’s. A waiter carried away a stack of spent plates.

“Nevermind.”

“Here’s some more rice,” Marigold pushed her own half-finished plate forward, fascinated at the prospect of watching someone explode.

They had gotten some conversation in before the food had arrived. Consternation had willingly shared a few points about herself, details that now rippled through the ad-hoc community forum that openly eavesdropped even as it chattered to itself.

She was born in a small house in a big wetland near a town called Berleben. Her parents were both tieflings, though neither had wings. One day both parents suddenly fell ill and died of a disease she didn’t understand. A polite stranger said that she herself might have it too, and with her permission, peacefully took her away to find out. Her next memory was being in a white room, where she was kept paralyzed while other men did magic she didn’t understand and occasionally stuck her with needles. Then, after an unknowable interval of too many days, the white room was broken by yet more strangers – she remembered an ogre with huge eyes, and a man dressed like an owlbear – and, free to move at last, she fled before learning more about them. She flew away, away and away, over trees and mountains until she passed out in flight and woke up in the clinic’s bed.

She had described all of this clearly yet dispassionately, as if it were bad weather in another country, and then destroyed the incoming food like a dragon. Her friends let her work.

The crowd roamed itself like a tidepool, now clustering around tables of paying customers to develop ideas, now flowing to other tables to compare and debate. The word tiefling bobbed in and out of hearing, tolerant and rude and suspicious and kind by turns. The word adventurers rode high on the surface. The word Empire slithered underneath.

The girls had sharp ears. Literally, in Consternation and Ninevah’s cases.

“Adventurers?” Consternation asked.

“You know,” Marigold rolled her hand, “rich weirdos roaming around fighting stuff. They pay tons above market rate for the herbs we grow here, especially if they wander in from the Empire.”

“Oh. So is this not part of the Empire?”

Ninevah sputtered on a forkful of red rice and stared at her like a fascinating new specimen of sapient life. “I sure freaking hope not. Where did you think you were?”

Consternation shrugged. “Somewhere nicer than Berleben.”

“Well we are that.” Ninevah’s comment set some of the eavesdroppers into the laughter of social and civic pride, though few of them could have found their own town on a map.

“This is Othe in the Clovis Concord,” said Marigold. “The Dwendies are just across the mountains from here, but they don’t care about us, they all have rich-ass vacation homes in Nicodranas.” She leaned in with a conspirator’s whisper and a gruesome special interest. “Dwendies also have a lot of spooks. Spies, killers, all into weird magic and bad science done on whatever little peasants they can grab – like, say, an innocent orphan tiefling. They’d disintegrate a body just to weigh out the soul, everybody knows it. They’re called voltsuckers.”

“Volstrucker,” said Ninevah.

“That’s what I said.”

Consternation gulped down some water, her stomach finally admitting defeat. “I’m not disintegrated though.”

“And there’s no proof at all that they even exist,” Ninevah shook her head. “All my teachers told me so, but Marigold still loves that conspiracy junk.”

“Come on,” Marigold rolled her neck, “Connie’s totally their thing. Physical and magical oddity.”

Consternation shifted a wing. “Am I really that odd?”

“Hells yeah, in the best way,” Marigold nodded vigorously. She planed her chin in her hand and gazed out at the clouds like a princess in a tower. “Wish I had wings. I’d fly away to Nicodranas or Port Damali and never come back. I can’t get ‘em yet, though, that’s way more advanced.”

“Huh?”

“She’s a druid,” Ninevah explained. “They can learn to turn into animals.”

“Oh. Are you a druid too?”

“No, I’m studying to be a wizard.”

“Her parents are rich,” Marigold stage-whispered.

“They’re really not. They just know people.”

“Right. Rich people.”

“There are a lot of people richer than them, you know!”

Consternation stretched her back and pushed her plate away. “Do you think they’d have me? The doctor was right, I do need someplace to stay.”

“For how long?” Marigold asked, with eyes like a cat watching a fish.

Consternation watched the clouds. Some in the distance bunched up gray and rained on a mountain she must have flown over.

“Forever, I guess. My parents had no other family but me, and now they’re gone. Everyone who made them work so hard I barely saw them is somewhere in the middle of another country where the biggest town they’ve ever seen is half the size of this one. They’ll all be happy to lose a freak. Nobody will be coming to claim me.”

She looked back down. Ninevah had drawn her lips tight with a determined scrunch to her chin while Marigold’s gaze turned to that of a bear watching a cub.

“I think it’s safe to say that we claim you,” said Ninevah.

“We’re not gonna let you sleep in the bog again,” said Marigold. “Ever.”

Consternation smiled, swallowing past a hot knot in her throat.

“Then… your folks or hers?”

Her friends glanced at each other, doubtfully.

#

“Come back alone or never again!”

The door slammed, echoing over the swamp. Insects creaked and frogs peeped.

Marigold stood stiffly, toes clenched on the wooden planks of the porch, fists trembling at her sides.

“f*cking bitch.”

The door swung out from a pale and stocky woman, her long wavy hair spilling over a red dress and necklaces heavy with stained-glass sunburst medallions. “What did you call me?!”

“I said you’re a f*cking bitch!” Marigold stomped. “I saved her life and you can’t even—”

“You saved a devil-child!” Missus Sucrose thrust a finger at Consternation, safely distant on the wood-plank walkway up to the wood-walled house, guarded by Ninevah. “The Dawnfather didn’t smite the Lord of the Hells just for His children, us, to show them mercy!” She briefly moved her condemning finger to the half-orc. “It’s bad enough that the minions of the Ruiner pollute the blood of Man without devils, winged devils, foul cambiae, crawling the town in the holy daylight! Get that monster gone!”

“Shut up!” Marigold stomped again, slamming her fists on a table of empty air. “You don’t know anything about them!”

“I know much more than you, chica! I’ve heard what wicked filth they do at night!”

“From who, your idiot temple friends?!” Anger raged in her voice, but a single impassioned bubble of sorrow allowed itself to rise, “You never talk to real people like you never talk to me—”

Missus Sucrose reached into the dark behind the door. “You never listen!”

The bubble popped for good. “Because you can’t imagine a world where anyone doesn’t need your god-ranting!”

The furious woman threw a handful of something grainy on her doorstep. “I am striving and praying every hour of every day for the children of the Dawnfather! We must secure the existence of our people and a future for human children! And you want to bring that filth into this house?!” She stabbed a finger downward. “Fall on your knees here and now and beg forgiveness of Pelor Himself, or I will put the fear of Him in you!”

Marigold spat where her mother pointed. “f*ck him and f*ck you.”

Missus Sucrose reached into the dark again. Marigold was ready. The mother threw another handful of sparkling crumbs straight at her daughter’s face, but her eyes were already closed to blunt it. The door slammed again, and locked with a heavy clank.

Frogs croaked. Somewhere an early nightingale started singing.

Marigold turned and walked back to her friends in the waning light of evening.

“What was…” Consternation started.

“An anti-demon custom,” said Ninevah.

“Salt,” said Marigold, dusting it off.

“I’m so sorry,” Consternation began, “I shouldn’t have—”

“Look, I’m barely here anyway and I’m already apprenticed. I don’t need this house and I don’t need her. I’ve just been fishing for a reason to say that to her face.” Marigold sniffed sharply, scraped her forearm across her nose and brushed more salt from her hair.

Consternation fixed her eyes on Marigold’s hair. It fluffed out, instantly saltless and cleaner than it had been in weeks. The rune glowed between her horns.

Marigold blinked, patted her hair, smiled, and sniffed hard again.

“Right. Nina’s folks are next. Let’s go try for a f*ckin’ sleepover.”

#

Eridu Kesh, reclining in his high-backed chair and white linen nightclothes embroidered with boars as dark brown as his skin, spun his spoon in his teacup. Shuruppak Kesh, perfectly poised in a matching seat and an imported red velvet robe, rested her olive-green hands on her knee. The two half-orcs looked at each other, each reading their spouse’s intent, a debate communicated in flickers of eyes and angled twitches of lip over tusk. It went on for a quarter of a minute.

At last, they turned their heads forward.

“No,” said Ninevah’s parents.

Ninevah stood before their seats and the fireplace, gesturing back at her friends on the leather couch, “But neither of them has anywhere else to go! Don’t we have the guest room?”

Eridu and Shuruppak held another moment of spousely pseudo-telepathy.

“We can’t just take in a – an unhoused teenager, let alone two,” said Eridu.

“Oh come on, don’t be like Missus Sucrose! One can take the guest room and the other can squeeze into mine – or just take the couch!”

“Onetwothree dibs on couch,” said Marigold, raising her hand and bouncing a little on the cushions.

“Stop that,” Shuruppak snapped. Marigold held still. Consternation remained still, awkwardly holding her knees in poor imitation of the lady of the house. “We won’t have the space for long, dear,” Shuruppak continued. “I’m going to have another child.”

Ninevah’s jaw dropped. Her friends watched owlishly.

“That’s… that’s great, Mom, really… but you might be aware that having one takes a few months.”

“During which time we’ll need to thoroughly prepare the house,” Eridu gestured around with his spoon. “We can’t have the renovating and redecorating muddled by working around a tenant.” He sipped his tea. “Or disinfecting after one.”

Shuruppak looked hard at her husband, who plunged his gaze into his cup.

“Disinfecting?” Ninevah clenched her jaw. “With salt, maybe?”

Shuruppak turned her glare on her daughter. “Do not imply prejudice where none exists, dear. It is simply a fact that unborn children are highly susceptible to… arcane influence. And potentially strange diseases, I hear. It’s a matter of health,” she glanced purposefully at Marigold, “quite apart from more mundane germs.”

Marigold twiddled a fingertip in her ear. Consternation stared at the floor.

Ninevah shook her head. “I can’t believe you. Both of you! All I’m asking is that my friends don’t have to sleep without a roof! Just for a little while!”

“I remind you that Marigold has a quite responsible master, dear. Surely it would be no trouble for her to take young… Connie there and work for room and board.”

Marigold threw an arm across the back of the couch and crossed her dirty feet at the ankles. “The clinic needs its beds kept clean and open all night, ma’am.”

Shuruppak gave a short disdainful sniff. “I imagine there’s ample space on the floor.”

Ninevah bared her stubby tusks. “You know, Mom, you’re right. Plenty for all three of us. I’ll go pack so I can sleep with the filth you hate so much.” She turned and stormed away.

“Ninevah!” Eridu shouted. “Don’t talk like that to your mother!”

Ninevah stomped upstairs. “If they’re not sleeping here then I’m not!”

Consternation sat very still, wincing at the sound of a slammed door.

Marigold patted her on the shoulder. “Happens every time, not your fault.” She crossed her legs on the couch.

“Get your feet down,” Shuruppak glared, “that’s Damalian leather.”

“Oh, ever so sorry m’lady.” Marigold pivoted in place, putting her feet on the armrest and her head on Consternation’s lap. “We’ll just wait here for her. Got some more tea, Eri?”

Eridu glowered over his cup. “Not for the likes of you.”

Marigold grinned upward. “That’s why they call it classism, Connie. It’s classier than racism.”

Consternation smiled down at her sideways face—

The jaundiced man’s sideways grin, looming—

And shut her eyes.

#

Tallgrass’s house was single-story yet wide, taken up mostly by his clinic. Tallgrass himself was tending to a bearded man’s bloodied arm in one bed as a second man with a bandaged and splinted leg lay in another when the girls returned. Tallgrass dispatched Marigold to mix herbs to pay for her absence as he stepped out to talk to the others.

“Gator bite and a fall off a roof,” he thumbed behind him. “Thank the Wildmother you came to us in a lull, but now it’s back to business. Guess you got turned out, huh?”

Ninevah carried a satchel on her back, laden with necessities and extra. “Yeah. Can we stay here, tonight at least?”

“People don’t stay at a clinic except out of need, Miss Kesh.”

“It’s a need. My mom’s pregnant and being stupid about it, so the guest room’s a no-go. I’m here for, y’know, solidarity with my friends, but I think Marigold’s mom was serious about kicking her out this time.”

“Figures,” he sighed.

“Mister Tallgrass I am so sorry,” Consternation bit her lip and bowed ninety degrees, “I didn’t mean to cause so much trouble to everyone. I didn’t even mean to come here, I’m sorry for being weird, I just wanted…” she bit harder.

“Hey. No.” Tallgrass planted both hands on her shoulders, stood her upright, crouched to even their height and looked straight at her, his dark brown eyes deep as the earth itself. “You have nothing to apologize for. You escaped from a bad place and can make Othe a good one, if you can ignore the foolishness of some of your new neighbors. They aren’t all of us. Most of us know a gift when we see one. But you know that already, don’t you?”

Consternation nodded, sniffling. Her tail twitched.

“You came to us out of nowhere and immediately found some pretty amazing friends, didn’t you?”

She nodded again, smiling. Her tail swayed.

He glanced behind her. “And they’ll help take care of you ‘til you’re settled, won’t they?”

“Yes sir,” said Ninevah.

“Well there you go then.” He patted the tiefling’s shoulders once and released her, standing back up. “Did you settle on what you’d like to be called?”

“Consternation’s fine.”

“You got it. I’ve heard a bit from the rumor mill, Consternation, but if you’re going to sleep over, I’ll need a long sit-down talk after these gentlemen are healed up. Full story, okay?”

“Okay. But, um. If you let me stay longer I’ll do whatever you need me to. I can read and write and work some magic and I know every herb in the dictionary. I’ll pick up whatever doctoring you can teach.”

Tallgrass’s expression shifted. Consternation would later describe it as looking at a peaceful field until the light changed and the wind turned, revealing an ear and an eye of the cougar staring at you.

“I don’t have time to teach medical basics,” he said.

She met his eyes and held her ground. “And I don’t have time to forget what I know.”

Ninevah watched their rapid exchange like a tennis match.

“Name three things the average body has about two hundred of,” Tallgrass started.

“Bones, joints, and… muscles used in a step.”

“How much blood can a body lose before it dies?”

“Less than half, more than a third.”

“What causes infection?”

“The tiniest creatures alive.”

“How do you kill them without medicine?”

“Soap and heat, ideally with water.” Consternation flicked her eyes away in quick thought. “Alcohol too, if that doesn’t count as a medicine.”

Tallgrass leaned closer, tracking her face for hesitation and finding none.

“What makes a poison?”

“The dose.”

“What causes cancer?”

“Living.”

“What cures any ailment?”

“Prevention.”

“What’s a doctor’s greatest enemy?”

“Time.”

Ninevah wanted to applaud. The predator in Tallgrass’s face vanished, leaving only the breezy field of open kindness.

“Not bad,” said the healer. “Who taught you?”

“Me,” Consternation lifted her chin, rightfully proud. “I read everything I could find, sometimes pretty fast because I found it on somebody else’s shelf. And I would always look for medical books because no healer would…” her pride and chin shrank back, “help my parents.”

Tallgrass looked at her with a flash of claws in his eyes, but she knew implicitly that they weren’t for her.

“You did say you were short a nurse, sir,” Ninevah helpfully pointed out.

Tallgrass smirked. “I did. Seems like every other healer in the temples either mustered up through me or got poached from me. They had their own homes, of course, but given the circ*mstances…” he scratched behind his head, “it might be that I can swing a live-in apprentice. Or two, if Mari’s really on the outs.”

“It seemed pretty final,” said Consternation.

“It’s seemed final before.”

“Missus Sucrose threw salt at her this time,” said Ninevah.

Tallgrass whistled under his breath. “Well then.”

He turned half around to look back into the clinic. The bearded man with the bite injury was laughing as Marigold made big jaw-chomping motions with her arms and mimed wrestling something. Tallgrass tucked some hair behind his pointed ear.

“You know she’s tried to talk me into being her legal guardian before? If you’ve got an apprentice who’s an orphan or abandoned, guardianship’s just a matter of paperwork and an interview. ‘All you’d have to do is feed me,’ she said once. I kind of assumed she’d kill her mom to make it happen, so this is really the best case scenario.” He looked to Consternation. “And… no promises, but… if I take guardianship of one apprentice but not the other, she’d never let me hear the end of it.”

Consternation rushed up and hugged him, arms and wings and tail each clenching tight. Tallgrass looked surprised for a second before reaching around her wings to return the hug.

“It’ll be okay,” said the druid. “Life comes at us fast as rain. I think you fell here for a reason. If giving you a roof and an education helps you find out what that reason is, then I’m doing a little more good in this world.”

Consternation sobbed against him.

He looked over at Ninevah. “You can head home if you want, I’ve got it from here.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, jostling her bag. “I’ve got lessons in the morning.”

“Prepared for anything, aren’t you, Miss Kesh?”

Ninevah looked at Consternation, her new best friend clinging to the healer like the kinder world she fell into would blow away at any moment. Her winged shoulders shook with quiet sobs.

“Almost,” said Ninevah.

#

Days became weeks. Ninevah had gone home from her tutor to a house that kindly ignored her dramatic departure as just another paragraph in the story of silly yet harmless juvenile rebellion. Marigold had stolen back into her room while her mother was at the Dawnfather temple, took everything she owned – which fit in a single small bag – and dumped all the salt on her mother’s bed. Consternation had moved into Tallgrass’s office, sleeping quite comfortably with spare sheets on the floor behind his desk while Marigold slept in front of it.

Everyone in Othe soon knew of Consternation. Common wisdom settled on her story: the girl with the wings at Tallgrass’s clinic was freed from an evil cult by Imperial adventurers. She ate like… well… a devil, but she was level-headed, hard-working, and had already made a well-to-do friend and taken the edge off a known delinquent. Mau the fishers’ guildmaster would hear no ill word spoken about Consternation after she saved his fool son from a nasty infected harpoon wound. The town’s adult tiefling population of exactly two had taken to her like long-lost family, Pearl giving her discounts on the sly and Principality always asking whether anyone was bothering her. No one was, thankfully. The likes of Missus Sucrose knew to keep their mouths shut in public, especially around the Zhelezo.

Weeks became months. Interviews were made, paperwork was processed, and what had been Tallgrass’s office was reworked into a legitimate bedroom for both of his new apprentice-charges. Consternation painted the walls in abstract blues and grays and yellow-greens, capturing the living spirit of the wetlands she had left and the wetlands she had come to, while Marigold added sparks of orange and perfectly accurate silhouettes of fifteen kinds of bird. Ninevah slept over every chance she got – the remodeling at home being too noisy – and the girls chattered late into the night. Missus Sucrose, who had willingly and on paper given up every legal right to her daughter, was nevertheless often heard to complain about how her daughter had abandoned her. The sympathy and attention it earned her from her temple friends made her outwardly happier than she’d been in years.

Spring became Summer. Consternation didn’t know her own exact birthdate – her parents had counted by seasons, not days – so Ninevah and Marigold happily gave her the birthday they both already shared. On the First of Sydenstar, all three girls would turn fifteen. While Othe was steeped in Ki’Nau culture more than most cities, the Kesh family carried different customs from their ancestry in Port Damali. This meant that nothing would do for their precious daughter but to throw a quinceañera. Ninevah, however, laid down an ultimatum: since both of her best-friends-forever shared her birthday, her parents would host a triple quinceañera or none at all. To their credit, the Keshes surrendered. Consternation had never even heard the word “quinceañera” before, but her dearest friends quickly educated her in its finer points, and before long she was as hyped as either of them.

Hundreds of people turned out for the party at the rented-out dance hall. The triple birthday girls were their own traditional court of friends, though every other young lady of Othe was invited anyway to share in the event and dream of having a birthday as grand. Eridu relished the social clout of his strategic generosity. Shuruppak was present as well, yet was often noticed keeping her distance and over-salting her food. The party’s traditions had required a father figure for Consternation and Marigold, so Mister Tallgrass gladly stepped up: he paid for their dresses, gave them their customary end-of-childhood dolls, and at the end, formally danced them into social young-adulthood.

Missus Sucrose declined the invitation. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the party she had disappeared, leaving word with her gosspiest temple friends that she was visiting family in Nicodranas. If any such family actually existed there, it was news to Marigold.

#

When Consternation had first fallen out of the sky, Tallgrass had requested his druid circle to find out more about her. A week after the party, he finally heard what he had guessed. It seemed that the Darrington Brigade, a notable adventuring party out of the Dwendalian city of Deastok, had caused an embarrassing incident when a vineyard mansion they were contracted to investigate under allegations of criminal wine-adulteration turned out to be hiding dark magical studies in the basem*nt. A winged devil was said to have been witnessed escaping toward the south, destination unknown.

Tallgrass let Consternation know over dinner. She ate with him and her inseparable friends in his snug kitchen at a table too small for four.

“If you like,” he said, “I can try to get in touch with the ones who saved you.”

“No thanks,” she said, halfway through an alligator steak. “That’s there, this is here.”

“They’re rich though,” Marigold noted, a rice grain stuck to her chin. “Their leader is, anyway. He might donate to a poor little tiefling’s education if you ask him.”

“I’m fine, Mari,” Consternation rolled her eyes, “I don’t need to grift.”

“Couldn’t hurt – ow!”

Ninevah flicked her on the temple. “You need to stop milking adventurers, Marigold.”

“I’ll stop when they stop paying!” Marigold pointed her fork. “Before we met you, Connie, there was some group from Damali who were going to a volcano or something and wanted fireproofing. They were paying platinum for muroosa balm, all they could get. I talked them up and showed them where one of my stashes was? They gave me a ruby the size of a baby tooth.” Marigold’s eyes glittered before a shadow passed over them. “Mom found it, of course, said I stole it. She gave it to the f*cking temple.”

“Language,” said Tallgrass, not looking up from his rice. “And wipe your chin.”

Marigold thumbed the rice off. “She gave it to the stupid temple to impress her stupid friends.”

“Better.”

Consternation shook her head. “I could swear I still see her peek around a corner at me sometimes.”

“Ugh, that bitch.”

“Language,” said Tallgrass.

“That hen.”

“Better.”

“There’s a real market for catering to adventurers, though,” said Ninevah. “My teacher’s always going on about how expensive spell components are, and that’s just for daily use. Adventurers need all kinds, all the time, even stuff more valuable than diamonds.”

“Maybe we could open a magic shop,” said Consternation. “Not that healing isn’t, uh, a great and fulfilling career,” she nodded deferentially to her guardian, “but making a living with it depends on donations and always has entanglements with temples.”

“That’s fair,” said Tallgrass. “If you’re an independent healer, then anywhere you go you’ll be cutting in on temple profits. Some down south might even cut you back. Running a magic shop could still give you good opportunities for healing, and if nothing else, it’d be more efficient than Mari’s hustling.”

Marigold’s eyes practically flashed. “Can you imagine how much we could make? In a big city on the Roadway? We’d have to beat away adventurers with a broom. Gouge ‘em if they look like they can take it and it’s just good business. Ow!” She rubbed her ear as Ninevah flicked it. “Okay, we’ll have coupons. And discounts for orcish wizards.”

Ninevah nodded approvingly. “So long as spells need spell components, we’d never want for customers. You’re lucky you’re a sorcerer, Consternation, you’re walking around in all you need.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the tiefling smiled, looking left and right between her friends. They smiled back, understanding.

“Come to think of it,” said Tallgrass after an appropriate pause, “our muroosa stock’s getting low. You girls want to do a harvest run before bed?”

“Sure, Boss,” Consternation sat up straight. “But, wait, I made a big batch last week.”

Marigold snorted. “Damalian merchants bought a bunch, and then Mau’s big idiot fell asleep in the sun again.”

“Lasa’s not an idiot,” said Ninevah. “He’s great with geometry, he studies with me and helps me out all the time.”

“Does he?” Consternation raised an innocent eyebrow. Marigold pursed her lips and matched it.

Ninevah caught her inflection and blushed fiercely. “Sink the insinuation, Consternation! He’s just a classmate!”

Marigold put her chin in her hands and grinned like an alligator at her. “Your just-a-classmate got burned deep red as a sunset and needed a whole jar of balm massaged in.”

Ninevah’s expression was a frozen mask of horror. “What? You mean you got to—”

“Nah,” she thumbed at Tallgrass, “Boss wouldn’t let me. Those shoulders do it for you, though, huh Nina?”

“Sh-shut up, Marigold!” Ninevah stood so fast she bumped the table. “I don’t have to put up with your disingenuous assertions! Consternation! Let’s go!”

“You even know where?” Consternation asked.

“Of course I do!” Ninevah turned and left.

“She really doesn’t,” Consternation nodded goodbye to Tallgrass and sped after her friend. Marigold followed, leaving the dirty plates behind.

“Pick ‘em from the bottom, girls,” Tallgrass called after them. “And take the bags!” He stood up. “And don’t let Mari go barefoot, Connie!”

“Yes, Boss!” Consternation called back.

Much later, she wished she had chosen something more important to be her last words to him.

#

The setting sun painted the Cyrios Mountains red and gold. A trio of herons glowed in the sky.

Muroosa balm, Othe’s favorite sunburn remedy and magical fire-resistance ointment, was made from the bush of the same name, a magical cousin of torch aloe. Consternation had been a quick study in where it grew, but always went with caution, as the best sources close to the the town were off near Missus Sucrose’s house. Marigold hadn’t ventured that way in months. She hung back in the marching order behind Ninevah, following her treaded prints with the straw-rope sandals Consternation forced her into. Consternation herself walked in laceless pull-on boots, her wings folded around her like a cape. They walked a long winding hump of drier yet still soft land above the swamp, a folded leather drawstring bag at each belt.

“Lasa’s really not that dumb by the way,” said Ninevah, unprompted. “He’s just absent-minded.”

“Uh-huh,” said Consternation, leading the way.

“Sweet, though. He gave me a pencil once.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Most boys are a lot worse, you know.”

“I really don’t.”

“They get interested in you no matter what,” Ninevah went on, teaching on a subject she had only begun learning. “They don’t care if you can speak Zemnian or write all the basic runes without looking them up first. They’re just boars sniffing around for truffles. Um. Mostly. Some can be good.”

“Uh-huh.”

Ninevah finally caught her friend’s disinterest. “Oh. Um. Not… that girls aren’t good too.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Some girls are great!”

Consternation kept quiet. Ninevah kept going.

“Some girls are… amazing, in fact. Some are… just so strong. Some are even… pretty. Really pretty.”

Insects creaked. The girls walked. Consternation was glad she couldn’t see them.

“Girls are the best,” Marigold offered, quietly. “Some more than others, if they’re… special. Not that I ever dated one. Or kissed one. Or… that.”

“Me neither,” said Ninevah. “I mean. You know. That. Alone, maybe.”

“Alone lots of times, sure.”

“But not with somebody else.”

“Right. Not… yet, anyway.”

The silence of nature that followed her words weighted the conversation, compressing and transmuting it in the girls’ minds from the surface rubble of casual commentary to foundational awareness of one another. The openness, the intimacy of it fascinated them, even if they talked around what they meant. They were, after all, fifteen. The interest in love and sex was there. They simply hadn’t found, in all their evenings of conversation, the right opportunity to talk seriously about who or what attracted them before, and what they had or hadn’t done. Now amidst the delicate conversational arrangement of new interpersonal strata, Consternation became acutely aware of a space which, then and there, could only be filled by her. She tilted up her chin and addressed the tree line to make it easier.

“I think some girls are pretty too. Even beautiful. I haven’t… done anything either, though. With anybody.”

The girls hesitated together, slowing their pace, treading an untrod path into the realm of being known and dreading to make a mortifying misstep.

“It might… be nice.” Ninevah ventured. “To touch and kiss and hold and… go from there. With somebody.”

“Yeah,” said Marigold, swallowing. “Somebody special.”

“It would be really nice,” Consternation agreed, walking while assiduously facing forward. “I’m not sure if I ever will, though. Nobody’s interested. Nobody really looks at me, they look at me. And not in, y’know, positive ways. The tail’s probably okay but the wings are just too freakshow.”

“No, they’re great! I love ‘em on you!” Marigold suddenly sounded closer.

“They’re no different than any other physical quirk,” Ninevah insisted, closer still. “Lots more appealing than tusks. Your tail’s like, like a stroke of paint from a divine brush and your wings are a, a royal mantle.”

“Yeah!” Marigold exclaimed, creatively.

Consternation drooped her head. “And the horns?”

“Awesome!”

“Like a crescent moon come to earth.”

Consternation looked at her hand. “And the purple?”

“Amazing!”

“Like a watercolor of night.”

She stopped walking and turned around. “And the weird eyes?”

“Like—like rubies!” Marigold tried.

“The fire of sunset and the warmth of home,” said Ninevah.

Marigold shoved the would-be poet, only half playfully. “Dude quit one-upping me!”

“I’m just complimenting her!”

“Well stop being so great at it!” Marigold grinned crookedly, her cheeks too hot to keep it straight. “Stop being so godsdamned smart and tall and beautiful!”

Ninevah sputtered in mock offense, her eloquence briefly burning away in her own blushing. “Maybe when—when you stop being so—so strong and cute and p-passionate!”

“You’re both describing things that won’t ever happen,” said Consternation, shyly.

The other two wheeled on her, all smiles.

“Shut your perfect mouth!”

“Just because you’re p-prettier and kinder and more resilient than either of us doesn’t mean you can just adore us like that!”

“Why you little treasures!” Consternation put her fists on her hips, taking her turn to grin and blush and play along. “I can’t believe the incredible friendship and happiness and love I’ve felt ever since I met you! Where do you two get off sacrificing so much for some random stranger you could’ve let die in the swamp! How dare you be the most important people in the world to me!”

“Because you’re worth it, you raven-haired goddess!” Ninevah shouted.

“Don’t you know we love you?!” Marigold shouted louder.

“Well I love both of you more!” Consternation shouted loudest, magically thunderingly loud, spreading her wings and slapping her hand over her heart, the rune between her horns glowing like a meteor. “I love you more than anyone! And there’s enough of me to be a girlfriend for both of you!”

Silence reigned. The nearby animals had hidden from the noise.

“If… um… if you’d like that,” Consternation finished, deflating from invincible confidence to anxious vulnerability.

The young ladies stared at each other, flushed and silent.

Marigold suddenly snorted a laugh, with the same effect of a loose rock on a mountainside. The three of them started laughing, building from nervous yet reassured giggling of whole-body relief to loud deep-gut full-chest whooping of previously inconceivable delight. They tangled themselves in a three-way hug and didn’t stop laughing, not even while awkwardly and giddily trading kisses on cheeks and lips and every fraction of face, melting the force and volume of mere glee into fiercest tear-streaming joy.

The sun lowered, dipping the swamp into blue-violet shade. The girls had fallen into a triangular arrangement, heads inward and faces up, each holding each other’s hands while they caught their breath and continuing to hold them long after. Their clothes were rumpled and it was impossible to tell whose tears were drying on whose cheeks.

“Hells, what time is it,” Marigold muttered at the first stars peeking into view.

“Late,” said Ninevah. “Why were we out here again?”

“Balm because of your beau,” said Consternation.

“He’s not my beau.”

“Good,” Consternation and Marigold echoed one another, causing another bout of giggles like an aftershock, leveling them into companionable quiet. Frogs started to peep off in the water.

“So how does this work? Do we have sex now?” Marigold asked, not in demand but cautious curiosity.

“Not out here,” Ninevah groaned, putting a hand to her eyes. “Not where there’s dirt and bugs.”

“Coward.”

Consternation rose first. “Come on, chicks, let’s get the job done.”

Marigold snorted. “It’s chicas. Chee-kaas. Your accent’s too Dwendy.”

“I don’t have an accent.”

“It’s… charmingly flat,” said Ninevah.

“Like you?” Marigold prodded her on the cheek.

Ninevah playfully swatted the prodding hand and scooted closer. “Shut up.”

“Make me.”

They kissed side by side, long and sweet. Consternation gave them a moment before she lightly kicked at Marigold’s leg.

“All right already!” Marigold grumbled. “Help me up.”

Consternation held down her hand. Marigold grabbed it and launched herself up into a kiss, quick and passionate and on tiptoe. “There,” said Marigold, “all evened out. S’go.”

Consternation and Ninevah exchanged a glance and a smile, but only that, content to share the warmth of their little firecracker.

The trio held hands, Consternation in the middle. They progressed at their leisure, each mind feeling and enjoying the soft edges of silence offered by the others. Steeped in the gentle uncertainty of where the newly opened door of their lives would lead, each held the wish that the evening and the moorland would go on forever.

Ultimately, inevitably, they came to the thicket of flowering muroosa bushes at the border of drier land where ash and sweetgum trees started to spread. The world had changed, but work remained. Marigold floated a fireball in the air, Ninevah floated four steady yellow lights, and under the glow everyone opened their bags and stuffed them with long fat spiky-edged leaves torn from the bottom of each plant.

“Seriously though Connie how is this gonna work?” Marigold chuckled after a minute’s work. “I’m good with sharing, but Nina doesn’t have our job or our bedroom so it’s not fair to her. Do we need a girlfriend calendar?”

“I can make one,” Ninevah volunteered.

“Of course you can,” Consternation and Marigold instantly replied, and snickered at their timing.

Consternation went on, leaf-picking, “Well we’re around each other basically all the time after work already. Maybe we can just wing it.”

“Heh-heh, wing it,” said Marigold.

Consternation threw out her wings, their edges snapping like bedsheets under the magical lights.

“That’s so cool,” Marigold whispered. “You’re so cool.”

Consternation smiled and gathered breath to reply.

A woman’s voice shattered the night.

“There! The wings! It’s over there!”

The girls froze. Marigold had heard that voice every bad day of her life.

Missus Sucrose marched from the darkening marsh like a triumphant general, her holy accessories swaying and clinking with her stride. Behind her walked a taller human man with dirty-blonde hair and a face paler than hers, dressed in a dark brown hooded poncho over dark green, making his shape difficult to pick out in the low light. The malice in her face and the neutrality in his made a terrifying sight.

“I have you now, foul bellowing cambion!” She gloated, stopping short and looking back at her companion. “Here is your runaway devil! Remember, don’t harm the short one, but do with the others what you like!”

“Danke schoen,” he said, stepping closer to her.

The man’s gloved hand came up around her neck and slit her throat.

As she fell forward, the girls saw that the man’s bare arm was marked with magical runes.

Arms, sleeves, hands with needles in them –

A sleeve rolled back, a pattern of runes on the skin –

Consternation shut out the memory with the force of panic. Her eyes darted. Ninevah had dropped her bag to cover her mouth. Marigold had become a statue. The floating flame and lights each went out.

The rune-marked arm put away its knife and stepped around the dying woman. He was alone. One of him was all he needed, especially against three children.

Without a word he pointed his other arm. Runes glowed on it.

The runic shapes flashed through Consternation’s mind, striking instinct and what second-hand magic tutoring of Ninevah’s she absorbed, all without conscious thought. She darted in front of her friends and held her leaf-stuffed bag as a shield.

The man fired two bolts of flame from his hand. They punched into the bag and burst. The muroosa leaves burned away, blunting the flames into a mere wash of hot air across Consternation’s violet skin.

The rune between her horns flared.

“Fall,” she commanded.

The man’s knees buckled, much to his surprise, and dropped him to the earth in the blood of his victim.

Consternation dropped the smoking bag and spun to her friends. “Run!”

No magic could have made them obey faster.

The trio sprinted for their lives.

“It’s one of them!” Marigold cried out between gasps. “The Dwendy spooks!”

Ninevah huffed, not used to exertion. “Should—should we scatter?!”

“I’m not leaving you,” said Consternation, slowing to match her pace.

Ninevah looked at her and smiled.

Two bolts of fire slammed into Ninevah’s back. She went down without so much as a yelp. Marigold screamed enough for both of them and fell to aid her.

True to her word, Consternation stayed put, guarding them both with her wings wide.

The Volstrucker sniffed, his arms glowing blue-white with whole paragraphs of runes.

“Rarely have I been compelled,” he said, his Zemnian accent as thick as his menace. “A blow well made, runechild, at such age. You could become much, serving us.”

“Not a killer,” she replied, trembling despite her will. The man’s runes were… fake, her instincts told her. Tattooed in. Yet among them she saw the rune of her name, and suddenly wondered how many other people like her there had been – how many rune-marked children – how many parents swiftly removed under suspicious circ*mstances – how many white rooms the Empire had where escapes like hers were never made.

“Gut,” said the Volstrucker, raising his arm. “We don’t need you for that.”

He aimed at Consternation, but Marigold was faster. Done with her life-saving healing, she turned and sprang out on all fours, releasing an inhuman snarl that became a chitter as she shrank into the shape of a black and orange weasel. Two firebolts burst into the ground around her, the speed and coloration of her new shape making her into a vengeful blur in the dark. She leapt onto his leg and sprang up before he could kick, clinging to his belt under his cloak and savaging his groin with weasel teeth. The assassin swore and writhed.

Consternation ducked down to Ninevah; her pulse was faint yet present, her back a burned bloody mess. She pulled Ninevah’s arm and hauled her onto her back; it made flight impossible, but any distance dragged was better than none.

She heard a squeak that morphed into a yelp. She turned to look.

For years afterward she would remember the sight: the man pressing one boot on Marigold’s chest, pointing his arm at her face under the light of the full moon, only to be interrupted as a giant eagle divebombed him. His shout of surprise and pain mixed with a vengeful avian shriek.

Consternation had no time to ponder the miracle, not when Marigold was lying there. She put one girlfriend down and rushed to the other.

“Mari! Marigold!”

“M’fine,” Marigold slurred, dazed, “Boss has it.”

The eagle thrashed and clawed. The Volstrucker blew it off of him with a two-handed blast of lightning. It rolled away, becoming Mister Tallgrass. He landed on all fours.

“Run, girls!” He roared, running forward and wild-shaping himself mid-stride into a charging water buffalo.

Consternation and Marigold retreated to Ninevah and picked her up, an arm over each shoulder, the horrible sounds of splashing wood-snapping thrashing mixed with human fury and bovine bellowing carrying on behind them. They shuffled and dragged her upright as lightning struck again, flashing stark shadows over the path ahead.

Ninevah groaned. “What…”

“I love you shut up keep going,” Marigold hissed in her ear.

“I love you I love you it’ll be okay,” Consternation panted, terror seizing her in the shaky wake of adrenaline.

They staggered onward. A bull’s roar morphed into a man’s pained cry. The trio stopped, turned, and looked.

The Volstrucker was bleeding freely from his slashed arms and gored ribs. Down the aim of his extended arm, Tallgrass rolled out of some kind of smoking puddle and the smoke followed him, burning without flame. He clawed the ground and the ground reshaped, sinking and snapping shut around his foe’s legs. Tallgrass stood up, ducking and weaving around another pair of firebolts, closing the distance and clamping his hand on the arcane assassin’s throat.

The Volstrucker grinned. His runes glowed despite his injuries. A bead of orange light formed in his hand. He pointed the bead at the girls.

Tallgrass put himself in front of it.

Consternation wrapped her wings around her girlfriends and held them close. There was a roaring blast of sound like the sky falling, like the end of the world. Flame and force washed her skin, hot yet harmless.

Silence fell like ash. The trio breathed each other’s breath. The wings lowered.

A charred body bent limply backwards, held upright by the dirt mound. A second body smoked on the baked earth. The ground was scorched black in an immense circle that ran right up to Consternation’s feet.

Her legs failed. Her friends fell with her, clinging like castaways at sea.

They didn’t let go, even as the others arrived.

Othe had more than one druid, of course. Fellow members of Tallgrass’s circle came, too late, too late. The newcomers asked questions the girls didn’t answer, said things the girls didn’t hear, did things the girls didn’t see. Time passed yet didn’t. The trio didn’t let go of each other.

After a numb interval, an older woman came up to the inseparable victims and waved her hands with a pleasant-sounding incantation. They quietly fell asleep and knew no more.

#

Consternation awoke in a medical clinic, recognizable by the smell. The ceiling was of a paler wood than Tallgrass’s, however, and the bed was a different texture. She felt to her sides. She was alone.

Her memory played back flashes of terror and death.

She bolted upright and screamed.

An older human woman was at her side at once. She said something Consternation didn’t understand, and all of her wracking internal turmoil spilled into a placid dish of calm.

“It’s all right,” the woman said. Her round face was age-lined yet red-cheeked and she had a reef’s worth of coral wound into her silver-streaked brown hair. “You’re safe. So are your friends.”

Consternation felt all right with that. Just all right. She tried to feel appropriately relieved, but even her relief was mild. She hadn’t yet learned how to magically calm emotions, but she knew the spell when she felt it.

“Thank you,” she said. “Please keep the spell up. Who are you and where am I?”

“My name’s ’I’iwi,” said the healer. Her name sounded like birdsong, ee-eev-ee. She gestured with a sagging arm tattooed with oddly sparkling red birds from her shoulder to her wrist. “You’re in the infirmary of the Mother’s Grove, Miss Consternation.”

Consternation looked around. She was still in her rumpled clothes, half-covered by a sheet with her pull-on boots at the side of the bed. The room was round and had many linen-made beds around the rim, each curtained off from each other, in which she saw a couple of nurses attending patients. At the center, a huge woven grass garland studded with dozens of kinds of flowers hung from a ring in the ceiling. It was hooked there by the top of the shepherd’s crook stuck through the garland, which divided it vertically. The crook’s bottom tip stopped a little above a small bubbling fountain set in the white tile floor, swinging gently like a bumped pendulum.

“Oh,” she said. “The Wildmother temple. That makes sense.”

‘I’iwi patiently watched her, waiting for her to process.

Sorrow gnawed her heart, toothless under the spell. “I’m not in Mister Tallgrass’s clinic because he’s dead, isn’t he.”

‘I’iwi bowed her head. Her brown eyes gazed over a gulf of decades. “I brought him into the world, you know. One of my very first jobs, that, when I was just a little older than you. And then I helped bury him, right where he fell. He’s with the Wildmother now.”

Consternation wept, calmly and cleanly. “I see. And Missus Sucrose?”

‘I’iwi patted her patient’s knee. “Delivered to her beloved temple. As a keeper of life in the name of the Prime Deities, I must believe that all find their way back to their god. It is my sincerest hope that the Dawnfather has a very specific place set aside for her.”

“That was very civil of you.”

“I’ve had practice.” ‘I’iwi’s smile lines deepened.

Raw red grief crept into Consternation’s mind. “Please cast your spell again, ma’am, I don’t want it to leave yet.”

‘I’iwi muttered once more and waved her hand. The edges of the world softened. “Done.”

“Thank you. You said my girlfriends were safe?”

The healer raised her eyebrows, but only for a moment. “I did. Some senior druids took the young Miss Sucrose out of town to help her grieve, as is their way. She knows them all, don’t worry. As for Miss Kesh, her parents took her home.”

Consternation bunched the top sheet under her fists. “Am I free to go?”

“Yes, you’re free and welcome. Although…”

Consternation was already pulling her boots on. “Yes?”

“What do you know about the man with the tattoos?”

The glow of his arm as he aimed death at the girl under his boot…

Consternation squeezed her eyes shut. “Before I came to Othe, I think I escaped from him or his bosses.”

The runes glowed on his arm, “We don’t need you for that…”

Consternation coolly shut the memory out. “And I think… there are others like him.”

‘I’iwi gripped her on the shoulder, firmly yet not unkindly. “Then if you want some wisdom, young lady, you need to think hard about what that means. Not just for your sake. It’s a cruel thing to lose loved ones before their time.”

“Yes, ma’am, it is.” Consternation’s hands twitched. “One more casting for the road?”

#

She was just about able to control her own emotions by the time the third shot wore off. The weight of the changed world filled her stomach like anvils. How dare the sun be shining? Why hadn’t the air turned to molten lead? Because there was still some light in the world, she knew, as she made her way into the red brick neighborhood.

She reached the Kesh family’s home, intending nothing less than to see Ninevah even should the door be bricked over. It wasn’t. She raised her knuckles to knock. Her fist trembled.

The lights of her world had nearly gone out, one while smiling at her and the other under a killer’s boot. And who had brought the killer?

She loosened her fist. She reached for the knocker. She lowered her hand.

Well? Who had brought him? Missus Sucrose, sure, but why was he even there to be brought? He’d come for his runaway. And he’d nearly killed more to get her.

Ninevah was too kind to hold it against her. Surely she was. The beautiful young wizard-in-training would never blame her for getting hurt, never blame her for Tallgrass’s death. She’d never blame her, and Consternation would stay with her, and they would live their lives with their passionate little delinquent druid… and a dozen more Volstruckers with a hundred more runes on their arms would come looking for the dead one, and then—

The thudding of flame into her back, the thudding of the ground against her face—

Consternation clutched at her heart, thunked her head on the door and started a sobbing fit.

The door opened a crack.

She bolted upright and swiped her wrist over her eyes. “Nuh— Ninevah?!”

The crack widened. Shuruppak stood glaring. “What do you want.”

“I have to see Ninevah!” She didn’t scream it, couldn’t, but the words tore out of her sore throat with the same emotional force.

Shuruppak stood with most of the door between her and the tiefling. “My daughter is in her room, safe and resting, no thanks to you. She doesn’t want you here anymore. Don’t darken our door again.”

Consternation wept in panic. “But please! Please please I have to see her!”

The crack narrowed to a knife-slit. “Haven’t you done enough?”

The door shut and clicked. Consternation chewed her cheeks. Her tears fell to her boots.

It was easier this way, she decided. If she saw Ninevah’s face she’d never have the courage to do what must be done. But even so, for the sake of her own heart, someone had to know how sorry she was for needing to leave.

Marigold. Marigold would listen, or maybe kill her. Consternation barely cared which.

The tiefling turned, snapped out her wings and took to the air, flapping hard. She glided once she got the altitude for it and turned toward the swamp. Tallgrass’s druid circle was helping Marigold grieve, the temple healer had said. And now Marigold had a whole house to herself in which to do it. Surely she would be there.

Consternation passed over house and hillock, fen and field, water and marsh, and came to the spot where her girlfriend was once banished for befriending a tiefling.

The house was burned to black scraps of wood and gray ash as dead as her hope.

Consternation landed and walked to what had been the porch. She touched the burned wood. Of course Marigold would grieve this way. Of course she would.

She wondered whether her girlfriend burned it alone or whether Tallgrass’s circle merely watched. If Tallgrass was one of them then they were kind people, she decided. They might even have made it a bonding exercise. There was no trace of Marigold there, not even a splat of departing spit. They could have taken her anywhere by now. Keeping her safe.

Safe from her.

Consternation sat down, hugged her knees, and wrapped her wings and tail around herself. She sat a while, hoping that at any moment she’d feel a comforting hand on her back. None came.

She remembered her own parents, reliable providers who were always busy in town until they grew weak and succumbed to their wasting ailment. The memory of their faces was pleasant yet vague with the distance of time. For Consternation, until that very moment, the past had always lacked the vital immediacy of the present. There wasn’t here. Now she wished she had put greater importance in storing the present, in working to know her parents while she had them. Maybe then the memories would be clear enough to comfort instead of vague enough to taunt.

Outside Berleben she had… people. People she barely knew until they were lost, and lost again in the forgetting. In Othe she had a man no less busy yet no less happy to support her than her flesh-and-blood parents, a man who made a home for her in his house and literally played the part of father on her birthday, but who she always called Boss. She should have called him Dad at least once. She should have. She thought she had more time. Now all she had was memory. “There” absolutely had to be “here.” If it wasn’t, where else would it be? Where else would he be, if not forever present in her mind?

Her throat was on fire. Who in the world knew what time they had? Life came as fast as rain, as he once said – and left just as quickly, drying like tears.

“And then I helped bury him, right where he fell…”

Consternation swallowed. She looked up.

She returned to the site of her grief. There was only one grave, a conspicuous long mound dense with growing wildflowers. She couldn’t tell what had become of the other man, which she decided was just as well, if all druids grieved like Marigold.

She sat by the middle of the mound, uncertain of which unmarked end was which.

“Hey,” she said. That was all she could say. Her face screwed together from her chin to her horns and she buried it in her hands, crying and crying, breaking the dam of her heart.

She was still alone once she’d gotten it all out.

“I’m sorry,” she sniffled. “But you know that already, don’t you.”

The grave lay companionably quiet.

“I’ll be all right. Probably.”

The flowers on the grave nodded in a faint breeze. Wind rustled the distant trees without intruding on her grief, giving shape to the silence like a candle shapes the dark.

Consternation sniffled again. Her ruby-red hearth-warm eyes stared into her future. She stood up.

“Can I tell you something?”

The grave listened.

“I love them so much. I want to be with them. And I will. I will. So, y’know, this isn’t really leaving, this is… scouting. I’ll just go for… a while… and find a good place somewhere, some great big city. Somewhere so far away the Empire bastards can’t follow me.”

A quick small rustling sound became large running footsteps.

“The f*ck you will!”

Marigold tackled her to the ground.

“Mari?!”

“Don’t you dare!” Marigold’s clenching hug bound her arms and wings together. “Don’t you even dare think about leaving!”

“But I have to protect you!” Consternation squirmed.

Marigold squeezed like a python. “You’ve got it backwards, you beautiful dumbass! I’ll protect you! I’ll burn the whole f*cking world down if one of those Zemnian sausage-eaters touches you!”

Consternation rolled over, pinning her human friend and trying to slip her wings free. “Let me go, Mari! You can’t come with me!”

Marigold clung with her legs as well. “Damn right I can’t ‘cause you’re not leaving!”

“I can—I can command you to let go if I wanted!”

“If you wanna leave us behind so bad then do it! Do it, I dare you!”

Consternation hesitated. Marigold unhooked a leg for leverage and wrenched her body, slamming the tiefling to her back hard enough to knock her breath out. The human then seized her wrists and pinned them to her half-folded wings with all her strength. Consternation barely had time to be impressed.

“Come on, coward!” Marigold screamed in her face. “sh*t or get off the pot!”

Tears splashed on Consternation’s cheeks, but they weren’t hers. Marigold’s eyes were wells into lightless anguish rimmed with ferocity no animal could match.

The thought of removing those eyes from her life, even for an indeterminate “a while,” turned Consternation’s spine to jelly.

“Tell me I’m being stupid,” she squeaked.

“You’re being f*cking stupid,” Marigold squeezed her wrists for effect.

“Tell me I don’t have to go.”

“You don’t. You don’t have to go.”

“Tell me what you’d do if I did.” Consternation’s rune flared. “Tell.”

Marigold’s eyes glazed over. “I’d cry more over you than I did over my own father.” She blinked and shook her head, stunned into silence.

They lay like that, butterfly and pins, staring at each other and breathing hard from emotional exhaustion.

They began to lean in.

“Marigold! Consternation!”

Both girls froze.

Ninevah staggered toward them, huffing and puffing. “What—are you—doing?!”

Consternation sat up. Marigold let her. “But— I went to your house and your mom said—”

“She locked me in my room! I saw you fly off!” Ninevah accusingly waved a book in her hand at the pair. “I busted the netting out and let’s just say I’m glad I learned Feather Fall. I thought you were running away!”

“She was!” Marigold defensively reapplied her constriction, but the position made it merely a hug. “I heard her tell Dad some bullsh*t about protecting us by leaving!”

Dad. Consternation went limp at the name. Thankfully the tussle hadn’t touched any of the grave flowers.

“I thought so,” said Ninevah, catching her breath. “Consternation, you focus better than either of us on whatever task is at hand, and you said before that we sacrificed ‘so much’ for you. Your self-sacrificial course of action was obvious. Once I put it together I tried to go to the temple, but Mom caught me and locked me up.”

“Am I really that easy to read?”

Marigold let her go but still sat on her shins to keep her pinned. “We own your whole book, Connie.”

Ninevah shook her head like a teacher grading papers. “Sacrifice. Really. As if this was transactional!” She sat on the ground, careful not to disturb the grave. “If we gave up anything, it was stuff we could do without. If it was a trade at all, we spent a few coins of our lives for more time with you. And we’re not about to let you steal yourself away from us.”

Consternation felt her tears rise again. It amazed her that she had any left in her. “I don’t want you to get hurt again because of me.”

“Then stay.” Ninevah crawled the remaining distance to her girlfriends and sat beside them. Marigold repositioned to sit on her legs as well. “Stay, and we’ll finish training up together. Then nobody will hurt us. Not parents, not magical assassins, nobody.”

Consternation looked once more at the grave of her guardian. “But how…”

Marigold gently pinched her violet cheek. “His clinic’s still there, dummy. His old master’s at the Wildmother temple. I pounded the door down and talked her into taking it, then I went to see you, but she said you’d just left. We’ll work under her ‘til we’re old enough. Healing’s a good portable skill, y’know, and adventurers pay through the nose for—ow!”

Ninevah flicked her on the nose. “What she means to say is that we’ll be better positioned to make a living and leverage that into whatever we want once our education’s finished. Much more realistic than running away and hoping for the best, isn’t it?”

“Flying,” said Consternation. “I was flying away.” She bent her wings into an enveloping hug around the lights of her life. “Flying away to fly back someday and fly you both away.”

“That’s so romantic,” Marigold grinned. “And stupid. But romantic.”

“Mostly stupid, though, huh?” Consternation moved her long hair off her shoulder.

“Passionate,” said Marigold. “We’re old enough for it to be passion.”

“And young enough for it to be self-destructive,” said Ninevah, professional downer.

Consternation kissed her on the forehead. “Then you’d better keep us grounded.”

Ninevah held Consternation’s cheeks. “You know, in Orcish, the argh rune translates to ‘heartache.’”

“Does it?” She smiled.

“The pain of longing. Of desire. Of wanting your face in my hands, my heart on your wings…”

Marigold brusquely squirmed off of them. “Hey, c’mon Miss Poetry, Dad’s grave is right there.”

Ninevah recoiled, “Oh crap—”

Consternation fell over, “Sorry Dad—”

“Dude don’t you call him Dad too, I’m not dating my sister.”

“Sorry Boss?”

“Better.”

The girls disentangled and brushed themselves off. Consternation folded her hands and bowed to the mound. Marigold and Ninevah joined her.

Cicadas sang. Birds called. The breeze rippled the flowers. Consternation wondered what words could have added anything more to it.

“Thank you,” she said, to the man who saved her life. “Thank you,” she said, to the friends who were her life.

She looked into the endless blue sky, away and away, and saw a future that would wait for her to meet it, stronger in skill and richer in love.

“Let’s go.”

#

Seagulls chased one another in the high columns of scented air above Port Damali. From sky to sea, port to pinnacle, the tiered-hill city of eighty thousand souls bustled in the summer sun.

A green-skinned half-orc man in traveling leathers with a sword strapped to his back made his way up the winding Prism Path in the eastern edge of the city. There the districts narrowed so much and the land was so steeply terraced that a strong arm on the uppermost tier might throw a stone across three major roads. The traveler passed from the trailing tail of the opulent tourist district under street-wide strings of cotton streamers and glass beads into the city’s market district, where the music of commerce and entertainment buskers lured all and sundry.

The polished multicolored sea-stones of his path took him north until it meandered west. At the bend stood a large limestone-walled building with big arched bay windows on both floors, its walls covered in – he squinted – murals of marsh grasses as high as the lower doors and flocks of bird silhouettes flying from a painted moorland horizon to the red-tiled roofing.

A sign on the balcony above the main doors read:

“THREE CHICKS FROM OTHE”

ARTFUL ARCANISTRY ATELIER

(formerly LUCIDIAN DREAM ARCANISTRY)

His pale green chin jutted out in thought. He glanced at the hilt of the falchion on his back, stepped up, and opened the doors.

Wind chimes sang like madness of Spring. Rich air and lofty light filled the shop. Its interior walls were a perfect continuous mural of a marshland, vibrant with clear water and scores of flowers beneath welcoming shade of a full-sized willow at the far rear of the space. Large pots, narrow ponds, and wall-mounted hanging planters held actual plants to help sell the imagery. The long front desk, flanked with cabinets of potions and scrolls, was a barrier directing the eye to adjoining rooms left and right. Behind the desk spread what the visitor could only describe as an art studio. Paintings and wood-burn etchings in various degrees of completion stood on easels or propped against the muraled wall. Long shelves on one wall barely contained their busts and carvings and art-supply boxes. Along the other wall, behind a saloon-door flap connected to the front desk, the visitor recognized a tattoo chair and a wide-open cabinet filled with all the tools to turn skin into living canvas.

A purple tiefling in a same-color cape and breezy white tunic was at work in the studio. In the abundant light she was using her bare fingers to burn a landscape into a polished plank of wood, a sepia-tone view of rolling heathers and distant mountains under a cloud-strung sky. Her left arm was tattooed with cloud designs while her right arm was an inked riot of tropical birds. She looked up at the chiming of the traveler’s arrival.

“Hello hello!” She shook out her hand, shedding sparks of electricity. “Just a moment!”

Another woman rushed in from an adjoining room by the scroll cabinet: a brown half-orc in a yellow waistcoat. “I’ve got it, hon! Hello sir and welcome to the Three Chicks, Port Damali’s best and biggest shop for all your magical needs!”

“Is that a customer?!” A third woman’s voice called from the room past the potion cabinets.

“We’ve got it, Mari!” The tiefling called.

“Discount the willowshade, it’s not moving!” The voice, whom the traveler assumed was the third chick, yelled back.

“Uh, look y’all, I ain’t here to buy,” the visitor grinned defensively, his dialect drawling and confident. “I’m lookin’ for somebody, and this seems like the kind of place she’d shop.”

The tiefling strode up to the desk. Her cape unfastened itself and folded back into a pair of wings, revealing an oddly sparkling tattoo of three seagulls flying across her collarbones. The visitor’s eyes couldn’t pick what to stare at.

“Well I’m Consternation,” she said, “and I make it a point to remember my customers. And if I don’t, my partner Ninevah here remembers for me.”

“Hello,” smiled Ninevah. She was a full head taller than the visitor, yet looked no older than him.

“Uh, right,” the half-orc man recovered, “good afternoon ma’am -- ma'ams -- my name's Fjord. Have either of you seen a blue tiefling girl, about yea high,” he leveled a hand below his chin, “big smile, probably snackin’ on donuts? I know she can do magic and likes art n’stuff.”

“Oh right,” said Consternation, “just yesterday at the grand re-opening. She didn’t give her name, but trust me, I know my tieflings. She said she loved my work, didn’t buy any though.”

“At least she left yours alone,” Ninevah scowled. “The girl asked for a Locate Creature scroll and while I was checking our backstock she drew a penis in my spellbook.”

“That’s her all right,” the visitor chuckled.

“I still think it’s possible she wasn’t the culprit,” Consternation looked askance toward the potion shelves.

“I am brewing! Don’t make me come out there!” Yelled the third voice.

“Did she, uh, say where she was headed?” Fjord asked.

“Looking for her dad among sailors,” said Consternation. “I felt kind of bad for her, a wandering little off-color tiefling alone in the world. You might say I sympathized. So, I gave her a bit of gold and pointed her to a supplier of ours going to Feolinn. If she made it to the ship in time, she left yesterday evening.”

“Feolinn, less’n a day ago,” Fjord repeated, nodding. “All right, thanks, you’ve been a big help.”

“Can I interest you in any scrolls before you go?” Ninevah leaned in, hands clasped businesslike. “I scribe them all myself, Cobalt Soul accredited.”

“Or potions?” Consternation gestured to the cabinet where a rainbow of liquids twinkled in little jars, some of them bubbling or sloshing of their own accord. “Our partner Marigold does all of them from authentic Othean recipes, and I handle genuine Ki’Nau magical tattoos and inks.”

“No thanks, I really oughta be going,” Fjord backed away, yet fished in a pocket and flicked Ninevah a silver piece. “For your trouble, though. Have yourselves a nice day, ma’am. Ma’ams.”

He turned and left, chiming the excessive chimes on his way out.

“Damn,” Consternation snapped her fingers, “he looked like an adventurer, too.”

A human woman in a leather safety apron walked out from the left-hand room, wiping her hands on a rag. Despite the apron, she was barefoot, and her long wavy hair was unbound. Half her neck was a tattoo of a bundle of yellow and orange flowers, while on the other half was a skull with the same flowers in its eye sockets.

“They’re always a gamble,” said Marigold. “Some days a huge windfall, some days a bunch of f*ckin’ looky-loos. If his girl comes back we can upsell them on some lesser restos, all the young lovers use ‘em.”

“We never did,” Consternation grinned.

“We weren’t sailors,” Marigold grinned back. “The only docks we needed were each other. Man were those ever the days.”

“You talk like we’re not still young and active,” Ninevah chided. “Thirty’s just a number and we’re not even there yet.”

“You’ve been thirty since you were nine,” said Marigold.

“And you’ll be eighteen the rest of your life.”

“Damn straight. Now get down here.” Marigold stepped on Ninevah’s boots, stood on tiptoe, craned her head up and pecked her a kiss right between the tusks. She hooked herself in place with her elbows around Ninevah’s neck. “Can’t wait for our birthday. Gonna ride you and Connie ‘til you both feel my age.”

“Since when were you one to wait?” Ninevah ran a hand up her partner’s back.

“Woman raises a good point,” Marigold lolled her head around to Consternation. “Want to take another lunch break? You know how fast I can eat.”

Consternation cleared her throat and folded her wings around her collar, obscuring the sparkling seagull tattoos and the deep blush creeping up her chest. “Focus, chicas. This place is ours now. Responsibility is how we convinced Mister Keef to sell it to us and responsibility is how we’ll keep it. Until closing time,” she winked. “Then all my limbs are all yours.”

“Right,” Ninevah dramatically balled a fist. “There’s still enough hours of daylight to finish a couple scrolls.”

“My pot’s simmering,” Marigold hopped off Ninevah’s boots, “plenty of time yet to get it all bottled for the arena. I’ll show those bastards at the guild how a real healer brews a potion.”

“Good,” Consternation curtly nodded. “And I’ll crank out some more promo art between customers. Now here, let’s bring it in.”

Her partners stepped up to the desk. The three of them leaned over it, reaching to each other’s shoulders and touching their heads together. They held the pose a moment, breathing each other’s breath.

“Love you,” said Consternation.

“Love you back,” said Ninevah.

“Love you more,” said Marigold.

They split away from one another and returned to their specialties.

Highly controlled lightning sparked from Consternation’s fingers, burning the wood with care. Beneath the shop title and above its address and hours, dreamy wisps of smoke drifted off iconic simplifications of the Three Chicks from Othe, and each cartooned face was a picture of happiness.