Lancaster. A golden monument to itself.
The center of the Witches’ campus was a single great tower modeled after a white nautilus shell, one that had been sliced in half and stretched to absurd heights, its curves and angles gilded to show off its impossible beauty. The tower glittered, white and gold, with windows which caught the sun no matter where it hung in the sky. At night, mirrors embedded within the tower’s clean, curving lines caught starlight and reflected it back into the galaxy, a shining beacon which had better things to do with fancy radiation than to keep it.
Around the tower stretched kilometer after kilometer of wide green lawns, perfectly manicured, each blade of grass groomed to a precise length, width, and height. Pathways were used sparingly, and were mostly for decoration. Streets were an abomination and shunned altogether, save for a wide stretch of white cobblestones at the base of the tower for visitors arriving via Lancaster’s private hopper. The lawns were dotted with formal gardens and entertainment pavilions, a private library, living quarters for young Witches-in-training, an old museum which described the history of the Deep, and a quaint little gift shop which also served as a commissary for those guests staying in Lancaster’s overnight suites.
Past the paraphernalia of Lancaster Tower lay the tidy houses of those Witches who chose to live on Lancaster’s campus. Not many did, not when the commute to work was a single jump through the Deep. The purposefully small residential bungalows of Lancaster couldn’t compete with the option to buy a mansion (or two, or three, or more) on cosmopolitan planets at the center of the galaxy. Tricks of the landscaping made it so no Witch saw another’s house, not unless they wanted to. This philosophy had governed the design of the nearby Witches’ village, as most of the older Witches did want to see each other, and not just as distant company on the margins. No, for them, proximity was paramount. All the better to socialize and talk and complain, my dears. About how the city on the other side of Lancaster’s high walls encroached ever closer, about the young Witches and their many flaws, about how things used to be…better. Had it been different? Yes, of course, but the heart of the problem was that life used to be better in ways that couldn’t be summed up by tallying differences alone.
These old Witches—these immortal creatures with their unlined faces and their ancient eyes—had set up a small village for themselves, filled with shops and restaurants and countless other small diversions. It was the perfect illusion of a country town. It was how they thought country towns should be, with buildings crafted from rough-cut stone, and windows made from old-fashioned glass. Rooftops had graceful arches leading up to high peaks. Paint was allowed to flake in a controlled, well-mannered fashion. It was best to not speak of the ivy.
It was a lovely place if you appreciated stagecraft.
And the Deep had set down Matindi’s house in the dead center of the village square.
“I take it we’re not being subtle?” Tembi said, as Matindi strode into the square, clucking for her chickens.
“Oh, you do know the meaning of the word,” Matindi said. “Find some nicer clothes, dear. It’s time to put on a show.”
A set of dress robes appeared in the air beside Tembi, neatly folded in a careful pile. Tembi recognized them as her own; she didn’t have as many colorful badges as most of the older Witches, but the few she had earned were unmistakable. As far as she knew, she was the only Witch to have received an honorary knighthood on Camelot for services rendered to the Throne.
“Yes,” Tembi said, and the white and gold robes replaced her bomb disposal uniform, her badges neatly running down the midnight blue stripe which covered her left shoulder. She shifted in place; her underwear was still comfortable. That wasn’t always the case, as the Deep seemed to think that fancy clothes should be accompanied by equally fancy undergarments, and didn’t understand that such undergarments weren’t technically meant to be worn under much of anything, and then not worn for very long at all.
She gave her outfit one last tug to make sure it draped in all the proper places, checked to make sure that the Deep had swapped out her filthy headscarf with a clean white one, and followed Matindi into the village square.
Witches began to appear, packing the picturesque miniature town, each of them calling for Matindi in false outrage. Matindi ignored them all, walking straight towards the pathway which opened onto Lancaster’s green-and-gold fields. Tembi followed, dodging and weaving as people teleported into the square around her. The Deep would never stick one Witch through another, oh no! Never that! But it certainly enjoyed dropping a Witch a few centimeters in front of another to check their reflexes. It was rather like a dance, moving between the newcomers, twisting beneath arms, spinning away before they had a chance to realize one of the two Witches in front of them was somebody they had come to see. Tembi took a moment to check if Matindi needed help… No. Her mentor was wearing a predatory smile, a speck of pale leafy green grinning within a sea of polished jewels, each step taking her further into the grass.
Then it was the two of them, alone, walking across the wide rolling fields towards Lancaster Tower.
No. It was the three of them: Matindi on one side, Tembi on the other, and a set of footprints between them. Except whatever was making these footprints wasn’t human, as the tracks bent low into the grass showed paws, or claws, or perhaps the light brushings of feathers or a million different wiggly legs.
Tembi thought the Deep was laughing.
The journey to Lancaster Tower should have taken hours. The Tower was a dozen kilometers distant, and Tembi knew they were on foot! But each step they took was a jump of a different kind. Step, and the village was behind them. Step, and they had cleared the fields. Step, and the dormitories were in front of them, and with another step, those had fallen far away…
Step, and they were at the foot of the Tower.
Step, and they were inside.
Step, and they were at an old wooden door with Matindi’s name painted in small black print, with bare winter branches etched into the door itself. As Matindi reached for the handle, flecks of green appeared within the wood, and fresh spring leaves unspooled themselves from the carvings.
Matindi paused. “Thank you, dear.” One of the smaller carved branches waved merrily at her, and she kissed her fingertips and pressed them against the branch. The door opened, and Matindi ushered Tembi inside.
The office was larger than it should have been, a trick of the Deep’s to ensure that Lancaster never ran out of premium space for its administrators. Matindi’s taste in decorating ran towards heavy slabs of natural materials, dotted with fragile works of art. Humanity, she always said, might do its best to leave its mark but never appreciated how it could be erased with the shiver of an earthquake. Her office was paneled in wood and slices of live green moss cut into cunning shapes, with a large stone desk at its center. It also had a thick layer of five years’ worth of dust, as well as the broken glass left over from the fight Matindi had with Lancaster’s Earth Assembly representative on the day she had abandoned her duties and gone into retirement.
They stared at the pile of glass.
“I had almost forgotten,” Matindi said quietly.
It had been a fight for the ages. Five years ago, Tembi had watched from her usual seat on the couch as Matindi faced off against a woman nearly half again as tall as her, a woman in white robes, her white hair braided with the colors of rainbows. Domino, the other queen of Lancaster. An unsmiling queen unless it suited her, and oh! how she had smiled as Matindi lost her temper and hurled a crystal ewer at her, swearing that she would leave and never return!
Domino had gestured, a small crook of her finger, and the Deep had obeyed her and turned the ewer into shards. That might have been the end of it, except that the shards had continued through the air and hit Domino.
Oh, small and precious gods.
If Domino had not also been a child of Adhama and shared Tembi’s rock-hard skin, her face would have been sliced to ribbons. As it was, only a single small cut appeared on Domino’s left cheek, marring the paint of the rainbow prisms which the Deep used as her Witch’s mark.
The significance of what had happened froze the three of them, shattered their anger like the ewer itself. In Lancaster’s political hierarchy, Domino outranked Matindi. The only casualty should have been the old glass jug. The Deep had not followed the order imposed by that hierarchy, and had instead decided to obey both Matindi and Domino.
That was how Witches died.
Matindi had pointed Domino out of her office, shoved a young Tembi into the hall, and sealed the door behind the three of them, instructing the Deep to keep it shut. The green leaves within the wood had curled into withered husks, and had then blown away.
Now, staring at the mess, Matindi seemed lost in thought. “I shouldn’t have let her get to me,” she sighed, as she knelt to clean up the glass. “She was trying to drive me out. I knew it, and I still allowed her to do it.”
“Here,” Tembi said, as she nudged Matindi out of the way and started to scoop up the pieces into her bare hands. “My people were made for this. Literally.”
“But Domino was hurt—”
“Yes, she was,” Tembi agreed, as she intentionally jabbed a large shard straight at her own face. Matindi gasped, but Tembi ran her thumb along the unblemished skin of her cheek, and then lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “She was hurt.”
Matindi paused, as if she had never considered that the Deep had truly been responsible for bloodshed. “Right,” she finally said, and fell upon the rest of her office, wiping up five years’ worth of dust with a hungry suckcloth. As Matindi moved in quick, efficient swipes, Tembi noticed the dust missed by the cloth was sweeping itself into small piles.
“Stop,” she thought at the Deep. “You don’t have to clean up after us.”
A small cloud of dust fluttered in a remarkable approximation of a shrug, and then settled back into its thin patina across the sideboard.
A sound like a small crack of thunder made them both jump as a man in an old-fashioned business suit stepped out of the Deep. His skin was brown, with one side of his face painted with the same branches bending under the weight of spring leaves as Matindi’s own Witch’s mark.
He stared at Matindi, and then at Tembi, and shook his head.
“Hello, Matthew,” Matindi said, not bothering to look up from her dusting.
“Oh, love,” Matthew sighed. “Could you please call ahead next time?”
“Ruins the surprise.” Matindi stretched, her elbows bending in a way that made Tembi’s stomach lurch. “Can you summon the others? This is business, and I’d rather not drop this on you alone.”
“Might as well,” Matthew said tiredly. “It’s going to land on me anyhow.”
Tembi’s heart went out to him. He was Lancaster’s head administrator and was very good at his job. She had never held that against him, as he and Matindi loved each other with the kind of slow-burning passion that could survive across millennia.
“Hey there, sweet girl,” he said, sparing a smile for Tembi. “How’d you manage to talk her out of retirement?”
“The Deep took me to watch a moon blow up.”
Matthew reached behind him, groping aimlessly for a chair. One shuffled its way across the thick woolen carpet and bumped against his legs until he sat. “I need to hear this story,” he said, fingers pressed against his temples.
She told him, omitting the minor detail of her fight with Kalais, as Matthew tended to get angry on her behalf. He listened carefully, asking questions here and there, and then… “Matindi, love, why have you come back now?”
“Because it’s time for Lancaster to get involved in the war,” Matindi said, smiling brightly. “It’s not enough that we move refugees or disarm weapons. If the Deep is taking Tembi to see new types of bombs at work, I choose to interpret that as evidence that the Witches should stop pretending to be a neutral party.”
Tembi shot a quick look at Matthew. He had his eyes shut, his head now pressed into his hands. “Matindi,” he said quietly.
“If the Deep has decided to bring children into the fight—” Matindi paused, and added, “—no offense, Tembi dear, but I am twenty-five hundred years old—” Tembi nodded. “—it has decided that the older Witches have abdicated their responsibilities. I cannot stand by and let our youngest generation carry the weight of our failures.”
The room fell quiet. Tembi fixed her attention on the ceiling. Matthew let out a dramatic sigh. It seemed this was not the response Matindi had expected. She crossed her arms, glaring. “What aren’t you saying?”
“Tembi, could you give us a moment?” Matthew asked.
“You’ve already started, haven’t you?” Matindi shook her head. “Your own little rebellion, just the two of you.”
“Matindi, love—”
“Not just the two of you?!” Matindi threw up her hands. “And you never thought to tell me?”
Tembi and Matthew exchanged a glance. “You’ve said you don’t want to be involved in politics anymore,” Tembi ventured. “You’ve said that a lot.”
“As recently as two days ago,” Matthew added. “Over dinner, you told me that politics ruins your digestion, and you didn’t want to hear a word about Domino, Lancaster, or the war.”
“Well.” Matindi said sharply, as if fury and resignation were in conflict. “Well, then.”
“You used the phrase ‘don’t mention that bitch’s name where I can hear it,’ at least twice.”
“I know what I said,” Matindi replied, arms crossed.
“Do you want specifics?” Matthew said. “There’s a small group meeting planned for later tonight.”
“It’s been postponed. Moto’s still on assignment,” Tembi said. “I think.”
Moto was also a child of Adhama. He and Tembi had grown up on the same continent, in the same city. Despite the short distance between their two childhood neighborhoods, Tembi had gone halfway across the galaxy before she met him. He was several years older than she was, and worked as Domino’s personal assistant. He was intelligent and kind and gorgeous! and he had been a friend to Tembi when she had needed one the most. He hadn’t checked in for a few days, but that was normal for him. His job was…complicated.
“So Moto’s involved in this conspiracy, too.” Matindi moved to sit upon her old stone desk. “Kalais?”
Tembi snorted, and Matthew shook his head. “Not Kalais,” he said. “He’s too enthusiastic about doing whatever he can to help the Sabenta. But there are others…” He looked at Tembi, waiting.
“I’ll leave,” she assured him, and started towards the door.
“Large gods, don’t tell me you’ve organized cells!” shouted Matindi.
As Tembi let herself out, Matthew began to rattle off a list of names. The moment she stepped over the threshold, the sound of his voice vanished: the Deep might not understand politics but it certainly understood secrets. When Tembi and Matthew had first begun planning their quiet internal rebellion, they had met on asteroids, or in small diners on the corner of nowhere. As time went on, the Deep grasped their desire for privacy, and now it spun their conversations away from outside observers.
She padded down the corridor, thinking. She was never sure how many Witches were involved in this…this…whatever it was. Matindi was wrong. It wasn’t a rebellion, and it wasn’t a conspiracy. If she had to give it a label, it was a…a reckoning of conscience in which a small number of Witches had come to believe that the prevailing philosophy of Lancaster was both outdated and amoral.
As members of a neutral trade organization, Witches could go anywhere, at any time. Their mobility kept the galaxy’s principal supply chains humming along, as regular as orbit. It also meant that Witches turned a blind eye to war. In theory, this was…appropriate. It was appropriate for Lancaster to stay out of all forms of conflict. It was stated policy that the Deep would not be used for any purposes related to war, not for moving weapons or soldiers, or contraband across blockades. In theory, this helped keep war to a minimum, as what kind of fool wanted to strap themselves into pokey ships with FTL drives? Might as well be cavemen.
(In Tembi’s opinion, if you wanted to go to war through hyperspace and brave the dangers of skipping across reality without reliable galax-caching processes, then you were truly committed to your cause.)
Except this war was different. Everyone at Lancaster knew how the Blackwing War had begun, even if the timeline of tiny slights that had snowballed into war had become incomprehensible for anyone but politicians and the inevitable pundits. It had begun the way wars always do, with petty grievances coming together in the form of murder. As Tembi had heard it, the catalyst was when a small local federation of terraformed planets with bioformed populations tried to negotiate for a better trade deal. The people who had money wished to keep it. Then, there came several generations of villains and heroes and would-be profiteers, and after that came war.
It had happened a thousand times before. It would happen a thousand times again. Except this time, the edges of the war had blurred. Local conflict became regional, with neighboring solar systems taking sides. Like a virus, this particular war kept spreading! infecting humans across the galaxy with various versions of a righteous cause. For many—for most—that cause was to define what it meant to be human.
Modified humans didn’t fit into Earth’s definition of “human.” Earth first. Earth pure. No genes altered to improve survival on other planets (and let’s all ignore how this allowed Earth purists to upgrade their babies for health and beauty and athleticism and intellect because “Earth pure” could be better phrased as “Earth perfect,” and thus there was no need to ban all genetic tinkering completely because who wanted to raise an ugly baby?) That didn’t mean that all modded humans were in danger. There were too many of them to eradicate completely, not without the galaxy falling apart. The Sagittarius Armed Forces simply wanted modded humans to relearn their place in the natural order. If Tembi kept her ears covered and Kalais didn’t blink too hard at the wrong time? They could pass in Earth-normal society when necessary, and then go back to cavort like the freaks they were on their home planets. Modded humans like Tembi and Kalais weren’t at risk, not unless they chose to fight back.
But people like Matindi…
The Blackwings had places to put people like Matindi.
Matindi’s final fight with Domino had begun months before the day the ewer was shattered, when Matindi insisted that Lancaster must acknowledge how the Deep was done being a passive onlooker! A hundred small signs suggested that the Deep wanted to intervene on the side of the Sabenta, the loose confederation of modified humans who stood against the formal military of the Sagittarius Armed Forces. The Blackwings were purging entire civilizations, she said, and the Deep kept giving them signs that this shouldn’t be allowed.
Domino had said no, no, never, and no. Not when Lancaster’s independence kept the galaxy moving. They would help dispose of bombs and other threats in locations of shipping and commerce, and move Sabenta refugees out of the path of the thresher’s blade, but that was all! Anything more would yank Lancaster straight into trouble, and the good they did for the galaxy as a whole would be lost within the crash of bloody war.
Matindi had said that the galaxy as a whole was about to be lost to the war, and they had the power to stop it. Why stand idly by when Lancaster could push for peace instead?
No, said Domino, and that is final.
It hadn’t been final, not at all, but their relationship had gone downhill from there, and it had been pretty far down the slope to begin with, and on fire besides.
Later, after Matindi had gone into retirement, Tembi and Matthew had long conversations about morality, ethics, and philosophy in out-of-the-way diners. Others had joined in, small salons popping up in unlikely locations throughout the galaxy. Now, their rebellion that wasn’t a rebellion was trucking along, with Witches trying to unknot the messy tangle of policy, protocol, and emotion that was Lancaster. They felt the Deep needed to be protected, and that its abilities should be used in the service of promoting peace instead of commerce. If this was to happen, they would need to change the belief that Lancaster’s status as an independent entity was paramount to all else. It wouldn’t be easy. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t imposs—
“—on your mind?”
Tembi jumped straight up, her bare feet smacking down on the marble floor as she landed. Beside her was a stunningly lovely woman with long black hair and plain blue robes, her head tilted to show the blue waves painted on her face.
“Bayle!” Tembi shook herself. “Sorry. Lost in thought.”
“Oh, what now?” Bayle sighed.
“I don’t know where to start.” Tembi glanced around. The cavernous hallway was empty: most Witches didn’t bother walking. Her best friend was an exception. Bayle taught some of Lancaster’s introductory classes for junior Witches, and she wandered the halls during her breaks. “Where were you headed?”
“Home. I’m done teaching for the day.” Bayle stretched, standing as tall as she could on her toes. She dropped her arms so they slapped against her sides. “What’s happened?”
“Everything,” Tembi said. “Let’s go somewhere to talk.”
Bayle nodded and jumped them, a quick trip which took them straight to the roof of the spiral nautilus. A short jump, yes, but Tembi couldn’t help but wince. The Deep never felt the same to her when another Witch led the way. She had grown up with Matindi, so Matindi’s jumps never set her teeth on edge, but Bayle’s felt like she was plunging them both into cool, clear water. Which was more than fair, she supposed, as Bayle claimed that Tembi’s jumps were like flying through a polite sandstorm.
The trip was worth it, though. The view was amazing.
The planet of Found was perfect. Simply perfect in every possible way. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Witches had gone to the newly formed Earth Assembly and told them that they wanted to build their headquarters on Earth. And why not? Hadn’t the Deep changed everything? Made galactic expansion a reality? Didn’t the Witches who made it all possible deserve a prime location on Earth?
The Earth Assembly had laughed. No, they told the Witches. No. Earth is already bursting at the seams. If you are truly the masters of the galaxy, go and find a planet of your own.
So that was exactly what the Witches did.
They asked the Deep to find them a habitable planet. Not just any planet, no. Their planet needed to be the best and the brightest, where every single day felt like late spring, where the inclement weather of Earth almost never occurred, where the local flora never stopped blooming and any fauna were cute, small, friendly, non-toxic, and begged for belly rubs.
Oh! And beaches along the shorelines. Waterfalls, too, if that wasn’t asking too much.
The Witches waited. Within the space of a day, the Deep said, ::FOUND::
Lancaster built the nautilus first, the living quarters for the Witches next. Then, around the periphery, a high wall to keep the rest of humanity’s immigrants to Found away from Lancaster’s golden grounds. Over the centuries, the campus sprung up within the walls, with Lancaster’s own buildings bridged by thick lawns, dotted with wide lakes, and surrounded by a thick forest of evergreens. Last, beyond the walls and stretching for kilometers in all directions, was the city of Hub, prosperous from its proximity to the heart of the galaxy’s transportation infrastructure.
“Look,” Bayle said, pointing. Down in the center of the village square, Matindi’s house was flickering in and out of existence as the other Witches argued. Then, the little house snapped into place as solidly as if it had been built there.
Tembi snorted. “Don’t mess with Matindi.”
“What happens if the old Witches all come together and ask the Deep as a group?”
“I don’t know,” Tembi said, as she sat. As soon as her butt hit the roof, her entire body reminded her that she was exhausted, and she gratefully flopped backwards to bask in the sun. “Do you think that’ll ever happen?”
“No,” Bayle said, as she tucked her long blue robes around her legs and sat beside Tembi. She stretched out her bare feet, twisting them in a swimming motion. Bayle’s ankles were thicker than Earth-normal, and there was webbing between her fingers and toes. She kept her hands hidden and wore a pair of custom-made boots when she wanted to pass, but both she and Tembi agreed that footwear of any ilk was wholly the creation of greater demons and they avoided it whenever possible. “What’s happened? The Deep keeps sending me an image of a broken egg.”
“Oh, gods, how did I forget about the moon?” Tembi groaned. She checked the timer on the sleeve of her uniform: all of her jaunting about the galaxy had taken place in the space of three hours. Give or take an hour for time travel, she reminded herself.
Bayle poked her with a remarkably sturdy toe.
Tembi sighed and started from the beginning with the bomb, followed by the meeting with Kalais at the broken moon. At the right point in the story, Bayle hissed like a roach in an airlock: “He didn’t.”
“He did.”
“I’ll kill him,” Bayle vowed, and then nodded towards the distant village square where the dotting of Witches kept trying to convince the Deep to remove the cottage. “What about Matindi?”
“I told her about the moon, and she decided she was coming out of retirement again,” Tembi replied. “Were you here the last time she did this?”
“You mean when she showed up with you? How old do you think I am?” Bayle nudged Tembi towards the edge of the roof with her bare foot as Tembi laughed.
Bayle might be older, but Tembi had been at Lancaster longer. The last time Matindi had come out of retirement, she had arrived at Lancaster with Tembi in tow. Tembi had been eleven, her face painted by the Deep with golden silhouettes of birds in flight. Their arrival had thrown Lancaster into chaos, as Lancaster had believed the Deep always chose adults to become new Witches. To think that this…this child!…had caught the attention of the Deep? Well! Obviously a mistake had been made somewhere along the way, and obviously Matindi was to blame. Or so went the gossip.
“Matthew’s telling her now, about the…” Tembi let herself trail off as she gestured vaguely, hinting at insurrection, polarization, and everything else.
“Really?” Bayle draped her feet over Tembi’s, and laid beside her on the roof. “Is that why you were walking around like you were in a stupor?”
“I’m just tired.” Her eyes were shut tight, and the sun on her face felt good, a light pressure that bypassed her skin and soothed her like a warm blanket. It was still early in the day here on Found. There was a nap waiting for her, and maybe an oversized lunch—
The unmistakable sound and sensation of displaced air caused her to flinch. She was in no mood to have a conversation with anyone other than Bayle, and if one of those old Witches in the village thought she’d interfere with Matindi on their behalf, they had another thing coming. She was about to jump herself to her own bed when Bayle kicked her in the shin.
Tembi opened her eyes to see a rainbow.
“Scheisse!” she swore, unable to stop herself.
“No argument,” replied Kalais. The sun was behind him, turning him into a streak of light dotted in color. He was dressed in the white and gold of Lancaster’s formal robes, a multicolored array of badges and honorariums running in a vertical line from his left shoulder to the hem of the skirt. He sounded resigned and more than a little sorry as he added, “I’ve come to fetch you.”
“No,” Tembi replied. “I already reported to Matindi and Matthew. They’ll brief the others.” She glanced over the edge of the roof to where a tiny speck of green in white robes had appeared. The buildings nearest to the town square vanished, water and worse spraying up from broken utility lines until Lancaster’s maintenance scripts shut them down. “I think it’s going well.”
Kalais shook his head at the chaos below. “They need you on Earth,” he said. “Domino’s requested your presence.”
“Then let’s go,” Bayle said, as she stood and dusted herself off.
“Bayle, you’re not invited—”
“Would you rather I make myself useful by heading into town and whoring myself out on a corner?” she snapped at him, blue eyes flashing.
Kalais looked away, beaten.
As Bayle moved, her robes changed from a casual sky blue to a cascading riot of the many colors of seafoam, pale blues and greens shading down to a deep ultramarine, the skirts dividing over themselves to fall in multiple layers, becoming formal robes which would have been at home on a princess. No Deep magic at work here, no, merely the usual blend of technology and absurd amounts of money which allowed Bayle to move from classroom to stateroom without pause. She looked at her bare feet and sighed; the Deep took over and a pair of black leather boots appeared.
For a brief blissful moment, Tembi wondered if she could simply let Bayle go in her stead. Bayle was a diplomat’s daughter and had grown up speaking the language of power. Her home planet of Atlantis had quite recently proved to hold large quantities of a rare unpronounceable mineral essential to communication through the channels, which had elevated its status from a backwater nowhere to one of the wealthiest planets in the galaxy. Bayle had, nearly overnight, gone from fairly comfortable landed gentry to ultra-rich landed gentry, and people treated her accordingly. Tembi’s early childhood had been spent picking pockets and rolling marks, and no matter how much time she spent at Lancaster, she knew she’d always have an accent. But she would never ask Bayle to fight her battles for her.
Bayle kicked Tembi again. As Tembi rose to her feet, she asked the Deep for help. Her dress robes smoothed themselves out, and the stains she had collected from rolling about on the roof disappeared.
Bayle pointed at Tembi’s bare feet.
“No,” Tembi told her. “They want me, they get me.”
Bayle and Kalais glanced at each other, a quick communication which drove a dagger of pure fury into Tembi’s stomach. She held out her hands, and a bright blue scarf appeared. She pulled off the white one and tied the new one up and over her hair in a practiced move designed to show off her ears, as she silently asked the Deep to swap out her tiny gold earrings for three sets of bright blue opals.
“Right, then,” Kalais said, and opened their way through the Deep.
Tembi caught one last glimpse of the town square, its buildings newly returned but in disarray—Small gods, is that store upside-down?—and then they were away.