TWO HUNDRED TWELVE: High Flyers

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The morning went perfectly. Alden and Stuart checked on the bokabv, and except for tracking down Quinyeth and giving her the jar of honey, they avoided interacting with people in exactly the manner Alden had suggested.

He’d enjoyed coming up with a different way to say he was under orders to have a relaxing day every time they ran into someone new:

“My brain is steeping, and too many words will disturb it.”

“Stu and trees are calming for me…only Stu and trees.”

“I promised Hn’tyon Rel-art’h I would obey the healer, so I’ll have to check with them both before I let you have a word with my companion. Shall I call him and tell him you insisted? I’ll call him now.”

The last had been directed at Declared Asay-tor, and after hearing it, he seemed much less eager to have Rel-art’h come give his opinion on Alden’s business than he had when they’d met in the library. The future knight had excused himself before Stuart’s face could give away the extent of Alden’s absurdity.

Now, the two of them were far downhill from the school, sitting on the edge of a suspended wood and vine bridge that was part of a network of walkways in the tree canopy. The aerial route went all the way from the Rapport School campus to the town of Root, and this bridge was halfway between. They’d been sitting here for over an hour, and not a single person had passed by.

A hodgepodge of topics had been covered so far.

The wreath of floating offerings Stuart had made for Emban-art’h’s bedroom door and why it was considered a spell instead of an enchanted object. How Kimberly Martinez had gotten her own car, and why that was a rite of passage for many American teenagers. What the pick-your-own produce place looked like on Anesidora. And Artonan marriage contracts—how there was a great deal of variety when it came to the terms people included in theirs, but very few circumstances in which ending your marriage was socially acceptable, even if it was magically and legally possible.

The conversation found its way there because Alden was telling Stuart about Porti-loth being invited to travel on the Sdyelis Branch. That led to mentioning that the healer had recommended he watch Kwoo-pak, which led to a discussion of the second episode, wherein Kwoo found out that his parents’ plans to marry one another had fallen through and they’d decided to stick with the less extreme relationship contract they already had instead.

Alden would never have guessed there were so few leaps between him saying, “Porti-loth told me I was too old for Klee-pak,” and Stuart saying, “One of the more senior students at LeafSong tried to form a study circle on marriage contracts. It was after Ro-den told her that her research for the past year was almost as important as mold he’d found growing on the bread he’d left in one of his pockets.”

“Why did that make her switch to marriage contracts?”

“She said if he didn’t like her research, she’d study a more worthwhile question. Like whether Grand Senator Lamet-seepa’s marriage was actually <<violable>> because of Ro-den’s dominion over him, or if it was because the senator and his spouse had hated each other for a long time. She theorized that <<hostility>> eroded a badly made contract that should never have been recognized to have marriage strength in the first place.”

Marriage strength had been a point in the Kwoo-pak episode.

The show wasn’t about the parents having a problem with one another, since they were happy living together. It was about Kwoo being so fixated on the prestige associated with a contract that was flawless and indelible enough to be considered a proper marriage that he’d forgotten to respect the commitment his parents had already made.

“How does that work?” Alden asked.

It was only after Stuart started explaining that he realized the question had been unclear. Alden wanted general information about how contracts could be eroded over time. Stuart took it as a request for specifics on what Ro-den had done.

Once those specifics had been introduced, Alden was too busy gaping at the train wreck to say he’d only wanted a peek at the locomotive’s engine room. Even Stuart’s brisk, factual explanation of events couldn’t take all of the drama out of the situation.

The Grand Senator was on the committee that had denied Ro-den the title he wanted and then argued with him over it. In the heat of one of those arguments, he had quipped that if Ro-den was actually powerful enough for the attention he demanded, then he wouldn’t have to demand it from better wizards.

Only a couple of days later, Ro-den had gotten himself invited to a dinner attended by important people. He’d shown up with the senator’s wife.

She was an ordinary class woman who was thought to be madly in love with her husband. Their marriage was heavy on alien romantic gestures, and Stuart assured Alden it was all very public and adorable in a way that thrilled the senator’s wizard supporters and charmed ordinary class members into living under his representation. She had been the star of an Artonan Cinderella story for decades.

Their contract didn’t allow her to have sex with other people at all. A total ban on that was noteworthy, and it was widely gossiped about, in part because she attended lots of parties. While not every adult party on the Triplanets included an orgy, they were a frequent enough occurrence that saying someone had hosted a good one wasn’t hugely different from mentioning how great the live music had been at an event on Earth.

Alden understood this after sitting through all of the sex ed classes in intake. But it was still enlightening to have Stuart spend an additional few sentences explaining that the dinner they were talking about wasn’t one where people were expected to do that kind of thing. Like he assumed Alden wouldn’t properly appreciate the deliberate nature of Ro-den’s revenge without the clarification.

At the end of a sedate dinner party, while a few dozen other wizards sat around imbibing potions like guests with manners, Worli Ro-den had helped the Grand Senator’s wife to have her way with him.

Just right there in the chair he’d eaten second meal in.

While she howled her approval, he bent so much authority to suppressing her marriage contract that nobody felt like it would be safe to interrupt them.

Alden didn’t know what to say into the silence that followed this story.

Artonan Cinderella is not into Senator Prince Charming.

Joe had called this situation “sleeping with one senator’s wife.” It sounded more like he’d given the senator a temporary divorce so that everyone on the Triplanets could find out how much his wife loathed him.

“People now have many questions for the Grand Senator,” Stuart said. “About what kind of contract his marriage really is and about how he has behaved toward his spouse. There’s a rumor that when he rushed into the house where the dinner was being hosted, she said, ‘If you were actually worthy of my attention, I wouldn’t be <<claiming>> a better wizard.’”

“And the senator didn’t die right there?”

“He lives still. And he was prevented from attacking Ro-den afterward, while Ro-den was <<mellowed>> by the activity. The other guests intervened. They had had time by then to reverse their potion effects and insist on more reasonable behavior…somewhat more reasonable behavior. Are you going to buy a car as a rite of passage, too?”

Alden blinked and shook as much of the shocking imagery from his thoughts as he could. “No. Anesidora has a lot of easier options, and cars are expensive. I love Esh-erdi’s Nine-edged Son, though. Does your family ever use something like that for travel?”

So they’d talked and talked, and now they were having an airplane flying contest. They were down to the last pieces of origami paper Alden had had in his bag. He watched a green one he’d just made dip a little too soon. It wouldn’t beat his previous record.

“Aw… ”

He was winning if they didn’t count the one Stuart had helped along with a spell. The green plane swooped down and landed on the ground a few steps away from a purple one.

Other than the Ro-den story, the most stressful thing that had happened since they’d left the school behind was Alden being startled by the gift Quinyeth had given him in return for the honey. She’d gone for an exchange of sweets, presenting him with something like a Pez dispenser. Only he hadn’t realized that was what it was at first. It looked like candy beads on a stick, so he’d thought it was a simple lollipop until he tried to taste it and it fired one of the beads at his approaching mouth.

At least Stuart had gotten a laugh out of it.

Healer Yenu would probably approve of paper planes.

Thinking of her took him back to the bits and pieces of the dream he remembered. The best thing about those fragmented recollections was how he could tell that having them softened some of the edges he’d been cutting himself on for months.

He now had a few images of himself dealing with his fears instead of being overwhelmed by them, and it made more of a difference than he would have expected.

“The painting I saw in the top library showed up in one of my dreams,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Which painting was it?” Stuart was carefully checking the evenness of the wings on his own plane before he launched it. “I should have asked when you first told me. But we always have so much to talk about, and some things I wonder are left behind.”

“Same,” Alden said. “I mean, I’ve noticed the same thing. It was a painting of a knight in a desert, or a place that might only have looked like a desert because the chaos had destroyed so much there. He was alone, and he was protecting one spot of life.”

“That one,” said Stuart, throwing his paper plane suddenly and with none of his usual care. “I hate that painting.”

Alden shut his mouth and looked over. “You do? I was about to say how much I appreciated it. It’s dark, and it’s sad. But with the knight there… ”

The desire to explain it correctly was almost like having the weight of the inward path pressing on him. “It’s not over yet. The situation is bad, but it’s not over yet. Someone’s still trying. Maybe that’s obvious, but it feels meaningful to me.”

Stuart was watching the spot where his plane had just crashed. “I am glad you like it. ‘Someone’s still trying’ is one of the meanings it’s meant to <<evoke>>. Jozz <<nitpicked>> the artist until she actually <<excused>> herself from the work once, but everyone agrees it’s an excellent painting. Including me. I don’t like it for personal reasons.”

“Jozz?”

“My older brother. From the last child group in our family. The painting is of him.”

“He’s alive!” Alden was even happier to hear that the knight had made it out of that place than he would have expected to be. “And…he’s your brother. The last big group born at the siblinghold? I thought the person in the painting might be a famous knight from a very long time ago. Or an older person, at least.”

Stuart’s siblings in that set should be around late university age. They were almost all still in school, from what Alden had gathered. Wizard university lasted forever, being a knight came with educational delays, and being a votary came with expectations of its own.

We’re definitely talking about adults here, but not wise, important figures that would have special artwork made of them. You’d think.

“Jozz is definitely not famous.” Stuart sounded amused. “The paintings in the library are always of younger knights. There should be only a small distance between the lives of the people in the images and those of the students viewing them.

“Having such a painting made of a significant moment is a pastime some knights enjoy while they recover from a binding, an affixation. The process fills long days and encourages a person to focus on their accomplishments. So the school frequently has new ones to choose from. Jozz was proud they wanted to display his.”

No legendary warriors on the wall, but instead, people you would probably see around the Rapport. Your classmates’ sisters and brothers. “That’s hyektch,” said Alden.

Stuart shook his head.

“You like how I use the word hyektch. Just admit it.”

Stuart seemed to be in a fine mood after the initial reaction.

Alden was about to ask what he hated about the piece of art. Cautiously—Stuart plus random family member plus big emotions had so far been an equation that resulted in unrelaxing stories being shared. But Stuart answered the question before he could phrase it.

“Jozz looks so lonely in the painting. His skill is Whisperer of Refuge. He didn’t choose it only to <<complement>> Sina’s skill, but it did complement hers. And he liked that. In the painting, he is waiting for the other members of his squad to reach him. Our cousins. I know he will be happy to see them when they do, and that they will all come home safely. Whenever I look at it, though, it feels as if he waits for her.” He glanced away from Alden’s gaze. “And she won’t ever come for him. Because of that…I don’t like it much.”

For a moment, Alden scrambled for something comforting or maybe even deep, to say. Then, he stopped scrambling.

“I understand. I wouldn’t like it much either if I were you.” He passed Stuart their last sheet of paper. “You get one more chance to win. That time you cheated with your wizard powers wasn’t real.”

“<<Valid,>>” Stuart said.

“It wasn’t real or valid.”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Stop making the bridge bounce while I’m folding.”

Alden swung his legs to make the bridge bounce harder.

A minute later, a dark yellow plane was airborne, and they both watched it avidly as it sailed under limbs, down and down…

“No!” said Alden. “It’s going too far!”

“It’s going a proper amount of far, I think,” Stuart disagreed. “When I win—”

He never finished the sentence. A knight in a peach-colored coat with matching ribbons woven through her purple hair teleported onto the forest floor, directly in the plane’s flight path. It crashed into her forehead within a second of her arrival, and she screeched a loud, “Yeeeeeee!,” while swatting with both hands like she feared she might have landed in a swarm of the flying attackers.

Alden and Stuart looked on in surprise as Emban-art’h pounced on the fallen plane, smashed it into the ground with a fist, then picked it up to examine it.

“I think she thought it was a bug,” Alden whispered.

Stuart’s small laugh attracted Emban’s attention, and she looked up at them. She had the crushed plane held up in one hand.

“What is this?” she called. “Stu?”

“The Contract definitely made that happen,” Alden said.

[What a thing to suggest, Alden.]