Margo Lai woke to the unpleasant news that she was engaged to fight a wizard’s duel for Miss Philippa Sastrowardoyo’s hand.
Sometime between the hours of eight o’clock and noon, when Margo and all other right-thinking individuals had been asleep, the letter of challenge made its way through the humid streets of Oum and onto the pile of correspondence next to Margo’s breakfast plate, assaulting her with its accusatory gilt script before she could even finish her morning jook. It took a moment for her brain to remember how to read English, too, instead of just Chinese, but once she got the language bit sorted she almost ripped the paper in her dawning horror.
There were three problems with the letter. The first was that she didn’t recognize the name of the man she was supposed to be fighting, and didn’t remember anything about the challenge. The second was that she was not and had never been romantically involved with Miss Sastrowardoyo. The third, and perhaps the most important, was that she was not a wizard.
Margo barely even remembered to sling her sword over her hip as she rushed out of the house, tugging her coat on over her nightgown and clutching the letter in one shaking hand. It was a fine day, and too cursedly bright. The attempt to move into a light jog sent Margo’s insides reeling, and so her long walk to Miss Sastrowardoyo’s house was conducted in a sullen, seething trudge.
She took the spare key from the little hollow in the persimmon tree, stomped right up to Miss Sastrowardoyo’s boudoir, and slammed the door open, brandishing the letter.
“Pippa! Pips! What in the seven depths of hell is this supposed to be?”
There was no response, then a faint groan came from a lump on the settee. Upon closer inspection, Margo realized that the lump was in fact the lady herself, hidden under a tangled mound of blankets.
“Oh, please not so loud, Madge,” said the lump in a thin, reedy voice. There was a damp towel over her eyes, her hand pressed to her forehead in the very picture of elegant distress. Margo ruthlessly snatched the towel away and brandished the letter again with renewed force.
Groaning in protest, the lump opened her eyes. The beauty of Miss Philippa Sastrowardoyo, known to most as Pippa and only to Margo as Pips, was in Margo’s opinion marred only slightly by the grease and grime from the previous night, which had still not been washed from Pippa’s deep brown skin. Even her squinting against the daylight only drew attention to the long sweep of eyelashes against her soot-dark eyes, the endearing little furrow between her brows.
“I’m very angry at you,” Margo said, as much to remind herself as anything else. “I went along with all of your wretched schemes all throughout primary school... And secondary school, and I’ll admit I have been very cooperative so far throughout university, but now you’ve finally gone too far! I’m done with it, Pips! I’m at the very crust-end of my patience! What in the devil’s toes have you gotten me into this time?”
“I think you got yourself into this one, actually,” said Pippa.
Margo felt the blaze of her righteous anger crumble into a very sheepish ash. “Did I?”
“Oh, yes. You shook your sword at this, er... Mr. Frakes, told him you’d face him in any kind of duel he liked, and then when you tried to slap his face with a glove, you sort of...”
Pippa couldn’t speak. She was making little snorting sounds, a hh-hh-hh she barely attempted to muffle, and though she tried to keep her face serene, she couldn’t hide the way the corners of her lips kept twitching upwards.
“It’s not funny,” Margo protested.
“You tripped and f-fell face-first into the duck pond!”
It was too late. Pippa collapsed into giggles, and wherever Pippa went, it was hard for Margo not to follow. She was beginning to see the humor in it, as much as she didn’t want to, the story as Pippa would inevitably tell it unspooling itself in her mind. Pippa would brandish a knife in place of Margo’s sword, relive Margo’s fall into the pond complete with the splash of her tripping into three feet of water and the startled quacks of the ducks.
“Maybe it is a little bit funny,” Margo conceded, “but it won’t be once that Frakes fellow burns me to a crisp with a single snap of his fingers. I could die, Pips. Who’ll grease the doorsteps of your enemies with you then?”
“Don’t be dramatic, Madge,” said Pippa, brushing her (perfect, luscious, admittedly slightly matted from sleep) hair back from her forehead. “Have you forgotten that your best friend’s father is a legal genius? Papa’s gotten his clients out of worse than a duel. He’ll help us, and this’ll all be nothing more than a funny story we’ll tell over tea next Tuesday.”
The elder Sastrowardoyo’s laughter was neither as charming nor as infectious as his daughter’s. Margo stood stone-faced in his study as he struggled to his feet, still wheezing with laughter, to give her a hearty slap on the back.
Usually, it was quite nice that Mr. Sastrowardoyo treated Margo very much like one of the family. He was forever telling her stories about the wild world of taxation law and ruffling her hair, and there was always an extra plate set for her at dinnertime, should she choose to drop in. Margo had the run of the house as she pleased, could rifle through the pantry and let herself in through the side door in the dead of night. Today, however, Margo heartily wished that he’d show a little more consideration towards society’s rules of polite communication for those not technically kin.
“Oh, I could help you, Madge, I absolutely could. It would be very easy for me.”
He paused theatrically, his beard waggling on his chin. Pippa refused to take the bait, glaring up at her father with more dignity than could usually be summoned by someone whose breath still smelt like stale wine and last night’s sausage rolls. Margo was not so strong.
“But?”
“But I will not, because I would very much like to see you attempt to fight a wizard. Did you know that Mr. Frakes is one of the most accomplished magicians of our decade?”
Mr. Sastrowardoyo’s dramatic, courtroom-trained manner was not dimmed one bit by his disapproving audience of two. He had the precise, inventive diction of someone who had learned all his English from books, and the waver of his accent only grew stronger with emotion. He stabbed the air with a finger, raised his voice to its signature boom.
“When a sailor cut the queue for lemon ices in front of him, he spelled his name in cursed boils upon their forehead. When the Sage of Seven Forests became a wolf to snap him up in her jaws, he made himself into a mosquito and stung her till she cried forfeit! He’s the reason Josiah Lim spent three months as a stoat, and in his last duel, he—”
“Papa! You’re making Margo sick!”
“I’m all right,” Margo managed, though it felt a little like the room was spinning around her. Chastened, Mr. Sastrowardoyo patted her on the shoulder with considerably less force than before, and Pippa helped her into the velvet-upholstered armchair her father kept for only the most important guests.
“Don’t fret. Legally, he can’t inflict any permanent damage,” said Mr. Sastrowardoyo.
“My parents are both cultivators. They can fly, and I can barely even hop sideways! Mr. Frakes is going to humiliate my whole family, and, worse, I’m going to be a laughingstock! I think that’s rather permanent enough!”
Margo put her head in her hands, hunched over in absolute misery and despair. Pippa braced protectively over her and began to rub her back a little, which only further cemented Margo’s determination to never cheer up.
“If it’s that bad, I’m surprised the two of you haven’t used the easiest way out yet. Since you’re dueling for Pippa’s hand, all it would take is for her to claim a prior attachment and render the challenge moot. And since she already—”
“No!”
Pippa’s cry of protest was loud enough that Margo was certain it could be heard on the street, but by the time she looked up Pippa had already regained her usual unruffled poise, as prim and dainty as a rose.
“I don’t have any current romantic attachments, thank you,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Papa...” Pippa tugged an unresisting Margo away. They ensconced themselves back in her bedroom, where Pippa had attached a rug to the window with clothespins to block out the light.
“Are you sure you don’t have anyone?” asked Margo tentatively, fixing her eyes on the wall so she wouldn’t have to see Pippa’s expression, whatever it was. “Not even a flirtation, or a one-sided yearning, or a tiny little pash? I know you said as much, but your father was there, and you’ve always been damned secretive about your paramours...”
“There’s no one,” Pippa said, her mouth pressed into a thin line. She drew a blanket back over herself, and the slight cotton barrier felt as impregnable as the old city’s siege walls.
After a long afternoon spent lying around feeling sorry for themselves and snacking on the cassava cakes that Pippa had secreted about her room for exactly this sort of eventuality, the two of them determined that they would go to the University Abstruse and plead their case with Mr. Frakes themselves.
Ordinarily, one had to answer three riddles, navigate a maze of mirrors, and whisper their deepest secret into the trunk of an elephant to access the university, but Pippa and Margo entered through the back way with the launderers instead. They did have to do an arcane ritual for Mr. Frakes’s room number, but Margo had begged the instructions and a stick of camphor off her second brother years ago for a prank.
“Do you think we did it right?” Pippa asked, tilting one of the glowing glyphs upside down to get a better look. “Only it doesn’t seem—”
A plume of smoke erupted from the center of the room, little fizzing sparks dancing in spirals through the air. A cloak of the darkest shadow blotted out the fading light of sunset, and guttural, demonic laughter emanated from the floor. When it all cleared, Margo saw a blond man lounging on a floating cushion. His sumptuous wizard’s robes, the exact shade and texture of a waterfall, were long enough to brush the floor.
“Hullo,” he said. “I suppose you’re here about the duel.”
“Yes! I wanted to explain that it was all a massive misunderstanding, and there’s no need for a duel at all. Very funny, really. You see, the thing is... the reason why... It’s...”
They’d planned a script for Margo to say in advance, but faced with a man who was even now spinning little balls of lightning in between his hands, all their prepared words rushed out of Margo’s mind like sand through a sieve. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Mr. Frakes had already cursed her into a state of magical panic, but unfortunately the sensation was familiar enough for her to realize that the blank nothing in her mind was entirely her own.
“You don’t want to marry Pippa,” Margo said, the words emerging fully formed onto her tongue with little to no input from the conscious centers of her mind. “And that’s because... It’s because she’s disgusting.”
“Madge!”
“I find that quite hard to believe,” said Mr. Frakes, giving Pippa what Margo supposed was his version of a charming smile. Margo glanced over at Pippa, who had cleaned up for their visit and was looking quite neat and fresh in her teal-green day gown. This was going to be a more difficult argument than she’d thought.
Margo had forgotten that when other people looked at Pippa, all they saw was a pretty, graceful young lady with a charming smile and elegantly turned-out ankles. They hadn’t seen, like Margo had, Pippa creeping to the kitchens in the middle of the night to pour jam down her throat straight from the jar. If they knew her as Margo did, they’d know that Pippa was not a thing to be won. She could only be followed, and listened to, and sometimes, very occasionally, coaxed.
“She leaves all her clothes on the ground,” Margo blurted. “They’re everywhere. And if she can’t tell if something’s from the dirty or clean pile, she’ll just wear it again anyway.”
“I do not!” Pippa yelped, completely undermining Margo’s argument. Margo gave her a significant look, which Pippa somehow failed to psychically understand, then gave up and dragged her off to the side for a whispered conference.
“I’m trying to keep him from wanting to duel me, if you haven’t noticed!”
Pippa crossed her eyes at her. Margo frowned back. Then, as unstoppable and ominous as an oncoming train, a smile of pure mischief crossed Pippa’s face. Margo had seen that look before, usually immediately preceding ideas that had gotten them both banned from establishments of ill repute all across the city. She reached out, but it was too late. Pippa, the very picture of demure elegance, had already glided back to Mr. Frakes.
“My friend has neglected to mention the most important reason you ought to cancel the duel, which is that it would be beneath you. You see, Margo doesn’t have any magic at all, and what’s more, she’s very stupid.”
“Am not!”
“She may look strong, but all that muscular development has hindered the growth of her brain. Did you know she once asked me if an oligarchy was a type of cheese?”
Pippa glanced at Margo with that little sally, her smug smirk calling to mind a very specific and lurid fantasy of Margo tackling her bodily onto the carpet, and wiping that taunting smile off her face by, er. Wrestling, Margo supposed. At that point the fantasy dissolved into hazy images that Margo did not like to dwell on in public.
“Yes, well, you drink your coffee by pouring it into the sugar bowl until it becomes a sort of brownish sludge, which is a far more compelling reason—”
“What’s more, Margo is a coward, as evidenced by her debilitating fear of ballerinas—”
“The way they move is legitimately disconcerting! And what about your—you pranked me last month by putting crushed chilies in my open mouth as I slept, and I ought to warn Mr. Frakes that that’s what he could be waking up to every morning!”
“Well, you deserved that one, especially after—”
Abruptly, Pippa fell silent, her hands flying to her throat in alarm. When Margo tried to ask her what was wrong, she found herself unable to speak, either. As one, they turned towards Mr. Frakes lying indolently upon his cushion, his lips crackling with the telltale sparks of a curse.
“One by one, please,” he drawled, letting one of his little lightning bolts strike the ceiling. Even though it came nowhere near her, Margo couldn’t help but flinch. He pointed at Pippa first.
“While I may have indulged in certain youthful japes, I must assure you that I am quite respectable, and what’s more, Margo—”
Mr. Frakes silenced her with a gesture. Apparently, it was Margo’s turn to speak.
“I’m not a coward,” Margo said. “And as a matter of fact, my family’s cultivation is stronger than any sort of Western mystical mumbling, so I’ll thank you not to underestimate—”
“Well, then,” said Mr. Frakes, the hem of his robe beginning to evaporate into mist. “If Miss Sastrowardoyo is a lady and Miss Lai is a worthy opponent, then I don’t see either of your objections. Besides, I like to duel.”
With alarm, Margo realized that his legs had started to fade as well, and the cushion was quick to follow. Before either of them could protest, his chest disappeared, then his head, then finally his stupid floppy hair.
“I hate wizards,” Pippa said, and Margo could only heartily concur.
The university had rearranged itself around them so that they had to take the long way back out. Margo and Pippa walked through hallways that had them floating up to the ceilings if they stepped on the wrong floor tile and past a bubbling moat of greenish, sour-smelling slime. Pippa was unusually quiet throughout the walk. The only sound she made was the whisper of her dress against the floor.
“You don’t really see me that way, right?” she asked suddenly. “Disgusting, I mean. I know all those things you said were true, but—”
“Uh,” said Margo. In front of her, right there on the path, was a jeweled ring. Something in the facet of the gem mesmerized her, a promise of love and glory insinuating itself into her mind. Margo kicked it into the moat.
“A little bit, maybe? I do think the way you take your coffee is utterly nauseating, but”—and here she hastened to stave off Pippa’s offense, or worse, her hurt—“I like that part of you. It might be my favorite. Don’t get me wrong, I’m dead impressed by how good you are with words and clothes and things, but I wouldn’t like you half as much as I do if you were Pippa the Perfect all the time.”
The next corridor had eschewed a floor entirely in favor of a path made of massive, floating stones. Pippa skipped merrily onto the first and offered a gallant hand to Margo to help her over. Even after they were safely on the path, she didn’t let go.
“I like who I am with you,” she said, squeezing Margo’s hand. “It’s nice acting perfect, sometimes, or at least it’s nice knowing that I can be convincing enough, but I’d much rather have fun.”
“That’s why we’re best friends, isn’t it?” said Margo. She squeezed back. Pippa’s hand was only very slightly larger than hers, close enough in size that they could press them fingertip to fingertip, palm to palm. “Though if you tell me that your favorite thing about me is that I’m so stupid, I’m going to salt your tea.”
The next morning, Pippa arrived at Margo’s house with a little basket of mangosteens for her parents and a plan.
“We’re going to have to fight Mr. Frakes on his own level,” she said, bouncing with unrestrained energy. “Magic runs in your family. Your father has one of the best scroll collections outside of Suzhou. I don’t know why we hadn’t thought of this before.”
“Possibly because I’ve never been able to understand my father’s magic. It’s all so...” Margo waved her hand in the air in a sort of whooshy way. Her father had tried several times to impart the family knowledge to her, but the lessons were always so philosophical, and Margo never understood the convoluted metaphors.
“Oh, we’re not going to make you the magician,” said Pippa. She paused, striking a subtle yet dramatic pose on Margo’s doorjamb. Just like her father sometimes, with his same love of playing to an audience.
“Get on with it!”
“I’ve been reading through the Duelists’ Code, and found quite the loophole,” said Pippa. “You might not be able to use magic at all, but I can, and the arena will let me. All we need is to convince your father to teach me magic.”
It fell upon Margo to carry out the delicate task of asking her father for the favor without letting slip any of the other aspects of the situation and landing herself in a heap of trouble, but it all seemed to go well.
“Of course I will,” he said, his ink-stained hands ponderously stroking his scholar’s beard. “These spells are secret only to our household, but Pippa, my dear, I have always eagerly awaited the day my daughter invited you to join our family.”
The blood in Margo’s veins turned to ice. She went still, like a rabbit feeling the gaze of the fox. She couldn’t look at Pippa. No, she had to. No, she couldn’t!
“Don’t say that,” she managed, barely remembering to switch into Chinese so the conversation couldn’t embarrass her any further. “I haven’t. We aren’t!”
“A man of integrity must always speak the truth,” said her father, which was honestly so typical.
“I’m going to go train,” Margo said, in English this time, and avoided Pippa’s gaze the entire way out. She didn’t want to know if Pippa was embarrassed, or disgusted, or worse, half-laughing at her with the glint in her eyes that usually seemed so inviting. What she did want was to go hit things with her sword.
She’d never minded Pippa laughing at her. They wouldn’t have met otherwise. In primary school, the children usually grouped together based on heritage, Chinese and Malay and Anglo and Igbo. Margo had always been too shy to speak to anyone she didn’t already know from her neighborhood. Then one day she was fumbling through a presentation she was entirely unprepared for, and Pippa had laughed.
At any other time, with any other two people, that would have been a humiliating incident of schoolyard bullying, but Margo had been grateful to hear something other than the sound of her own floundering voice. She saw Pippa mortified with her hands over her mouth, and wanted to make her laugh again. Her next sentence had been something about how the Tang Dynasty was named so for their groundbreaking invention of soup. By the time Teacher Liu finally forced Margo to sit back down, Pippa was clutching her stomach with laughter and Margo knew that they would be the best of friends.
It wasn’t like she didn’t sometimes wonder what it would be like to kiss Pippa, or occasionally imagine living together in some far-off, nebulous version of the future. She would make jokes about the way Pippa cooked breakfast and would fall asleep in a bed where Pippa’s side was always heaped up with extra blankets. They’d argue about the laundry, and Margo would trade dish duty for organizing their closet as she pleased.
But if Pippa wanted that, she would’ve said, wouldn’t she? She had never shied away from saying exactly what she wanted, not to Margo. There would’ve been a sign, some admiring look or casual brush of her hand. Margo spent enough of her time looking at Pippa that she ought to have noticed.
She didn’t like thinking about it. Margo picked up a wooden sword and headed into the garden where the training posts were, but her mother was already there.
“There you are. Come! We never finished our lesson.”
Another lesson where her mother talked at her with allusions to classical Chinese literature. It sounded only slightly better than thinking about Pippa, but Margo walked over and got into stance anyway. Her mother looked her over with a proud nod, as if already assuming Margo’s success despite the many previous lessons’ worth of evidence to the contrary.
“Feel the energy moving through your body, the way it’s connected to the energy around you. Chi means breath, and the breath in your body wants to be air. Let it, like so.”
Her mother leaped into the air, as if pulled upwards by invisible wire, and landed gracefully upon the rooftop. Margo tried the same, and landed gracefully in the flowerbed about a foot away.
“No, Margo! Think about the clouds, the way they drift in the air...”
There with the metaphors again, and Margo was feeling incredibly sorry for herself. She hoped Pippa was having more luck with her father. She hoped Pippa....
Pippa was watching her from the study window. If there had ever been a moment for a sign, that was it.
Margo pretended she hadn’t noticed Pippa at all. She unbuttoned her outer shirt, casually, and flexed her shoulders. She had good shoulders, didn’t she? She certainly spent enough time training them that she felt rather impressive, sometimes. She stretched, though she couldn’t quite get the right angle to see Pippa’s reaction without giving herself away, and took off running.
Halfway across the garden was almost enough. Margo leaped—be air, be air—and curled herself into a single weightless flip before crashing back down. Had Pippa seen? Was she looking, even now?
“Margo! Are you showing off?”
The laughter in Pippa’s voice made Margo’s ears turn red. She checked to see if her parents were watching and made a covert rude gesture in Pippa’s general direction. What a fool she was, to have expected admiration or perhaps uncontrollable lust. All she could do was amuse Pippa, and she ought not ever hope for more.
“Aren’t you supposed to be learning my ancient family spells?” she snapped.
“Already have,” said Pippa, holding up a calligraphic talisman that looked much neater than Margo’s usual wobbly, blotchy attempts. Margo was not feeling especially charitable, so she only grunted in reply. Pippa leaned out the window, hands resting on the sill, as pretty as a painting that had decided to come out of its frame.
“Margo? I didn’t mean it that way,” she said, looking rather contrite. “It was quite astounding, you know. All that raw physical skill and everything. I was very impressed.”
“No, you weren’t,” said Margo. “You just want me to compliment you on your talisman. Which, all right, you have beautiful handwriting and it looks like the work of a natural talent.”
“I didn’t want to say it myself, but...” Pippa said, and turned her nose up in the air like a conceited cat. Margo laughed, and took her arm so she could haul her over the windowsill and onto the garden path.
“Come on, oh wise and powerful sage,” she said. “I’ll walk you home.”
Margo didn’t remember what they talked about on the way back. It was one of those glorious conversations where she was barely aware of what she said at all, where the words arrived into her mouth without her stopping to think. They took the long way to Pippa’s house, stopping to buy aiyu jelly and roti prata and eat their spoils under the banyan at the center of Pippa’s neighborhood.
“You seriously only learned a talisman that causes rainfall?” she asked. “We’re in the tropics! It rains every other week!”
“I didn’t know how to ask your father to learn something more dangerous,” Pippa protested. “I couldn’t very well tell him you were going to a duel tomorrow, could I? Though I do think the consequences wouldn’t be as bad as you think. They only took your sword for a week after we got caught putting soap-suds in the school fountain.”
“Yes, but I’m still feeling their guilt trip! Every time anyone says ‘sacrifice’ I’m right back in the dean’s office, listening to their lecture.”
“You suffer so much,” said Pippa. “Here, have some roti.”
Pippa yanked it away from Margo’s hand, because of course she did, but it was still in range. Margo leaned over, stealing the roti with her teeth faster than Pippa could react, but then their faces were very close, enough for Margo to smell the hibiscus oil in her hair. Pippa let her hand fall, eyes very wide. Margo chewed.
“Why did I challenge Mr. Frakes to a duel, anyway?” she asked, mouth still half-full. “You seem to remember the night far better than I.”
“He was flirting very badly,” Pippa said. “Nothing too horrible, just that he’d quite like to take me shopping sometime. Something about my being too girlish to wear the clothing of an old maid. I was about to pretend that I didn’t feel terribly insulted, when you went over with your hair all askew, shaking your sword. It was... It was quite gallant, actually.”
They were still very close. Margo could see each individual eyelash, the pores that Pippa obsessed over in the mirror and Margo usually didn’t notice. Her eyes were dark, almost fathomless, a brown only a single shade removed from black. Pippa leaned in, or Margo leaned in, or both. She couldn’t tell, she didn’t remember, because they were kissing and Pippa was so soft and so, so close.
For a second Margo was worried that she would not rise to the occasion. She had forgotten everything except pure instinct, and she had no way to tell if her lips were moving too slowly, or whether Pippa liked that Margo had put her hands around her waist or wanted her to move them. She was also worried that she might have gotten roti stuck to her teeth, because what if Pippa put her tongue in her mouth and then came back out again with a bit of unchewed dough?
Then Pippa tugged at the end of Margo’s braid, just once and very lightly, and Margo knew that this was still her Pippa, and anything she did would make her smile. She breathed in the heady scent of hibiscus and then she was aware of barely anything at all.
Eventually, one of them had to have pulled away, because Margo was staring at Pippa unmoving in her arms. Her mind was blank again. The smell of hibiscus lingered. Was this where she was supposed to prostrate herself and confess her love like in a wuxia novel? Were they supposed to pretend they were only sharing a casual moment’s touch, like in those artistic French books that Pippa liked to read? Pippa’s lips were right there and Margo knew exactly how they felt. She had to speak. Anything was better than that expectant silence.
“What?” said Margo, which was exactly the worst thing to say. Pippa pulled away (no!) and wiped her mouth off with her sleeve (why!) and then she was Perfect Pippa again, but a worse version, because her smooth, unruffled mask was based on the Pippa that Margo knew.
“Just for luck,” she said, “since you’re so worried about Mr. Frakes turning you into a baboon tomorrow. Who knows if anyone’ll kiss you then!” She laughed, a sort of tinkling, musical gurgle. It sounded extremely fake. Then she sprang up from the bench, curtsied for reasons that Margo knew not, and ran away. She didn’t even take the rest of the jelly.
Margo leaned against the banyan, her mind spinning. Why had Pippa kissed her? What did it mean? What did she want from her? Where had Pippa learned how to kiss so urgently and so sweetly, and why hadn’t Margo been involved?
She still had to fight a duel tomorrow. Margo picked up the aiyu jelly that Pippa had abandoned so heartlessly and began the long walk home.
She arrived at the dueling ground the next day unslept and unnerved but looking very, very sharp. She’d had to ask her older brother for help, but her bangs fell in careless, tousled waves, her braid pinned up into a crown around her head. She wore a cultivator’s loose robes in the blue and silver of her family sect, her Western-style boots spit-polished to perfection.
Mr. Frakes was already waiting in the arena, his robes shining with every shade of the sunset. If she looked at them for long enough, she could see them changing as the sun stitched on his back traveled from his collar down to his ankles. It was the clothing of a man who didn’t expect to break a sweat.
The umpire called them to inspect weaponry. Mr. Frakes presented him with his staff, made of a moonbeam with studded, inset circles of silver starlight. Margo handed him hers.
“That’s not a wizard’s staff! That’s a sword you’ve stuck a crystal on!”
Mr. Frakes’s voice was not so indolent anymore. It was fascinating how his accent changed with alarm, rougher and deeper vowels suggesting that, at one point, he might have actually held a job. He looked like he was only then realizing that the duel would be quite different from any he’d fought before.
“I think you’ll find, Honored Judge, that Margo’s weapon meets all the stated requirements in the Duelists’ Code.”
A high, sweet voice made the objection from the front row. Margo didn’t have to turn around to see that it was Pippa, but she did. It was the first time she had seen Pippa look like such a frump outside the home. Her hair frizzed, and she had buttoned her dress slightly wrong so one extra buttonhole flopped awkwardly above her collar. She looked beautiful. Her eyes met Margo’s like they were sharing something significant, though Margo didn’t know precisely what.
The umpire called paces, and Margo spent five of the ten steps away from Mr. Frakes thinking about that look and the other five about her imminent humiliation. At the sound of the whistle, Mr. Frakes turned and immediately flung a bolt of lightning, which Margo dodged by diving onto the ground and rolling away.
He had spells aplenty, glowing glyphs and purple bolts of pure magic that he threw out faster than Margo could even inhale, but that didn’t matter as long as he couldn’t hit her. He called vines up from the floor to tangle around her ankles and she cut them in a single swing. The floor itself rumbled and split beneath her, but Margo jumped and skidded back onto solid ground.
She had to close the distance, and she was. He was throwing everything he could at her, but she was relentless, each dodge and duck bringing her a step closer. If she could only move forward, until she was a sword’s length away....
Mr. Frakes launched an armory’s worth of magical knives at waistheight, packed so close that there was nowhere for Margo to sidestep, and Margo dived underneath them and rolled, somersaulting like she and Pippa had learned together in primary school. She had perhaps a few more paces to go. She sprang up into a crouch, tensing the muscles in her calves.
Mr. Frakes smiled, and only after she had begun to leap did the floor in front of Margo burst into a wall of flame. She managed to throw herself sideways at the last second, landing awkwardly on her hip, but there were flames behind her and to the right, and they were only getting closer.
This was it. She had fought, but she had lost. Margo squeezed her eyes shut and raised her hand to forfeit, feeling a tear run down her... forehead?
She opened her eyes again. Rain was falling indoors, the storm clouds gathering in the arena’s eaves, a gentle pattering rhythm against the stone floor. Her painstakingly arranged curls flopped into her eyes, and through them Margo saw Pippa standing with the talisman gleaming in her hand.
“Now, see here,” said Mr. Frakes, frustration creeping into his voice. “I was just about to defeat Miss Lai! No outside interference!”
“The Duelists’ Code states, in exact language, that none may cast spells upon the arena except for the parties involved,” said Pippa primly. “As the person whose hand is being fought over, I am quite definitely a party involved.”
The umpire consulted his rules, while Mr. Frakes muttered exasperated imprecations against interfering females and Margo lay exhausted on the floor. She watched as the umpire conferred with a colleague, then his book again.
“I’ll allow it,” he said. Pippa looked panicked for a second, then the mask descended and she was perfect again, as indolent and commanding as Mr. Frakes himself.
“No,” she said.
“What? But you just argued—”
“I actually prepared a rather longer argument, and I’d like the chance to give it, if only to establish legal precedent,” she said, very convincingly grave. She snuck a glance at Margo, though, and when their eyes met and Margo saw that familiar mischievous gleam, Margo knew. Pippa was giving her time to catch her breath.
The whole crowd, and Mr. Frakes, watched, mesmerized, as Pippa held forth upon the nature of dueling, marriage, womanhood, and magic itself. Margo eased herself upright, and slunk along the side of the arena, behind the massive stone pillars that Mr. Frakes had been so kind to raise for her. The only one who noticed her move was Mr. Sastrowardoyo, in his promised front-row seat, but he had just enough mercy in him to beam with silent glee and wave her along.
From experience, Margo knew that Pippa could speak extemporaneously for hours on end, but the umpire had none of Margo’s patience. He cut her off after a minute, and Mr. Frakes sighed in relief, then gasped in alarm.
“Wait, where did she—”
Margo leapt at him, sword extended. Faced with eighty centimeters of cold steel inches from his face, Mr. Frakes defaulted to instinct and turned himself into a jaguar, then a komodo dragon, then a great white bear. Unfortunately for him, Margo’s mother had taken her into the wilderness for training several times, and all those animals were susceptible to being stabbed.
“Forfeit! I forfeit!” cried the great white bear that was Mr. Frakes, Margo’s swordpoint at the vulnerable underside of his belly. He reverted to his human form and raked his hair back with his hand, dropping his staff to the floor. “Damn it all to Bristol, you win! You can have Miss Philippa’s hand!”
Margo felt the entire arena audience focus its attention on her, Pippa not excluded. She blushed, again. Lowered her sword. She could still hear Pippa asking her if she was showing off. She could still feel her kiss.
“Right, er,” she said. “I’m giving it back to you, Pippa. I suppose.”
Pippa was very silent and still for a second, then she mimed catching something and grinned, to the general laughter of the arena. Mr. Frakes picked his staff up again and leaned against it, looking harried.
“Hang on a second, so you didn’t even want her hand in the first place? I don’t— but why— If you’re not getting anything, I still have to give you a forfeit,” he said. “It’s only fair, and that was the most exciting duel I’ve had in a year.”
“You have to fund the celebration party,” Margo said, feeling abruptly like she had fought a thousand duels instead of just one. “And tell me how you do your hair.”
Mr. Frakes had thrown possibly the most extravagant party Margo had ever been to, but she couldn’t bring herself to enjoy it. Not the dancing candy figurines on the table, or the life-size ski jump that launched partiers into a bed of soft, fluffy clouds. Even the wizards in the crowd trying to best each other at casting marvelous illusions couldn’t put a smile on her face.
Pippa was enjoying herself immensely, dancing with the ten illusionary simulacrums of herself Mr. Frakes had summoned from thin air, but Margo needed nothing more than some quiet and fresh air. She left Pippa’s house through the side entrance, carefully avoiding Mr. Sastrowardoyo recounting the story of her duel to some legal colleagues in the foyer, and walked towards the banyan.
She was going over the events of the past few days in her mind, and trying to think about what she could’ve changed to make everything go right instead. She had frozen up, like she always did, even after Pippa had given her chance upon chance. When her mind went blank she worked on instinct, and every single one of her instincts was wrong. She wanted to be someone else, someone who knew things like how people felt and what to say to them.
She didn’t want to be Margo Lai anymore. Even all the— all the breath in her body wanted to be air.
She felt like she was floating already before she even leapt, and then the sky dipped down to meet her until she landed among the branches of the banyan. The city seemed so small from up there, or, well, at least the neighborhood did. She could see the lights of Pippa’s house shining through the dark, multi-colored fireworks exploding from a window. She even thought she could see Pippa herself, or maybe just a corner of her scarlet gown.
The moon was large in the sky, and Margo felt that if she only leapt again she could perhaps brush her hand against its surface. Years and years of trying to learn magic, months of the same lesson from her mother, and she had finally mastered flight the... what? Thousandth time? She’d lost count.
There had been nothing special about the leap she’d made, no epiphany or perfect metaphor. All she’d had to do was try one thousand times, and then try again.
She squinted at Pippa’s house and saw that it really was her, walking down the cobbled path with her practical shoes clicking against the ground. Margo shouted and waved, rustling the roots, until Pippa looked up.
“How did you get up there?”
“I finally learned how to jump,” Margo said. “Like my mother’s been trying to teach me. I could take you up here, if you like.”
“I think I’ll wait till you get some more practice in, thank you,” said Pippa, face taking on an exaggeratedexpression of concern. Margo could make a joke back, fall into their practiced rhythm, and Pippa would let her. They would never have to talk about the kiss again, if she didn’t want to. If there was bad news, Margo would never have to know.
“Pippa, I...”
She didn’t know what to say. Her heart was pounding, blood roaring in her ears. Margo tried again.
“I think... I loo... After, everything I mean, the roti...”
She was fumbling again, trying out words and then discarding them just as quickly. Margo could hear nothing but the sound of her own voice, not even the party only two streets away. Then Pippa laughed, a small, quiet, fond sound, and Margo laughed, too.
“You can have my hand, you know,” Margo said, rediscovering the ability to form sentences with each word. “In marriage, and whatnot.”
“Yes!” Pippa said before Margo could even finish saying “whatnot.” “I—It’s been eons, you know? That’s how long I’ve wanted you to say... Well, not that, precisely, but something. Anything. And you can’t say I was the one who kept us waiting so long, because I did try. I kissed you! First!”
“But you couldn’t tell me what it meant,” said Margo, grinning. “So I think I should really get the credit.”
“You—Come down here so I can argue with you properly!”
“Not a chance,” said Margo. She rustled the roots of the banyan a little more so that they brushed against Pippa, making her shriek with laughter and shake her fist up at her.
“Come down here so I can kiss you again,” Pippa said, and Margo did.
It was a perfect night. Moonlight making Pippa’s brown skin gleam, faint music from the party, and a distant shout when someone knocked over a vase. The scent of gardenias, because Pippa had changed her shampoo. For a while, it felt as though they were the only two people in the world, and yet also part of the world, their hearts beatingin the same rhythm as all the lovers who had ever loved before.
Then, nestled in Margo’s arms, Pippa asked:
“We’re not going to get married just yet, though, right?”
“Spirits, no,” said Margo, with feeling. “I think—I feel much too young. Don’t you feel too young?”
“By decades,” Pippa said. “Though for a while there I thought about pretending that I wanted to get married next week, just to really give you a scare.”
“You’re horrible,” said Margo, and Pippa giggled and tugged her braid, then kissed her again. Being perfectly in love was all right, but she liked Pippa laughing at her even more.