jamieproctor.ca

Well, it’s the busiest time of the year again! March was a little disappointing, but historically that’s meant a big April so let’s all hope for the best on this liveblog!

American kestrel

Direct sighting of a couple in a tree down by the edge of Oreweald Park. Quiet and wary but well-fed. Good for them!

American robin

So many of them out and about I lost count just on the way down to the lakefront; the flooding’s been lousy for worms but good for them.

Black-capped chickadee

Only saw twelve but heard a lot more, especially in the thickets by cooling tower three. If these are returning nesters rather than naïve newcomers, we could be looking at a significant shift in the local toxicology! Still, best not count our chickadees before they’ve hatched!

Blue Jay

Found a loose feather on the old trail by the exclusion fence, caught on the barbed wire. Hope they’re doing okay – we need more corvids! Not sure why they’re still so standoffish, if they’re smart enough to be wary, they should be smart enough to read the papers. It’s safer than it’s been in years!

Canada goose

Sixteen nesting on the old breakwater down by the outflow. Poor things.

Common raven

Old Toby still perched above the head manager’s office, clean as clockwork. Asked him my name and he said ‘Doom.’ Never change, Old Toby!

Great RE:gret

Performed my annual check-in on our nesting pair and can report that they are still resetting every sixteen minutes forty-nine seconds seventy-eight milliseconds on the dot, pushing back any hypothesized ‘half-life’ for the site 53-D chronodegeneration another century. A warm round of applause for Jackie and Dion – spending fifty years fetching sticks for a nest that will never be completed is a powerful metaphor for parenthood!

Herring gall

Saw four down by the old park boat launch, but there are definitely more around somewhere, because the ooze patches on the concrete have six distinct shades! We could be looking at a case of fresh mitosis here, and the new galls are hiding somewhere out of sight until they decide on how many limbs they want.

Mallard

Three off the overgrown beach, enjoying all the high water from the late melt. More to come, hopefully – the duckling survival rate has really gone up since the gnarlpike went extinct three summers back (RIP Lousie McKenny, Dougie Jimson, Stewart Brinkles, and ‘Wedge’ O’Connor).

Megadee

‘Granny Greycap’ is back! After going MIA for almost a decade, the great lady of North-Oreweald has returned to her sentinel post atop the easternmost pylon – and lest anyone doubt her identity, she still bears control rod #59 clutched in the remains of her left talon! All hail the return of the Sceptre’d Queen – but please, disable your flashes when recording her (newcomers: look up the ‘daylight bombings of ’98’).

Militant nuthatch

As I peered cautiously over the ragged and rust-corroded lip of what had once been the central radar dome and beheld the gnarled and twisted form of that infamous spruce, my heart crawled up my throat by inches: the palisade had been breached, but from WITHIN – no squirrel’s work this. They had survived, and now they have made their opening play. The war will resume. Beware!

Mourning dove

Found three torn open in a little circle with their hearts missing – yikes! Pretty sure it’s not golden gorefinches (contents of the stomachs weren’t eaten, no sign of egg-shrapnel in chest cavities from the ejection of larval hatchlings) or bakerbirds (no evidence of ‘oven’ construction), but drawing a blank otherwise and gladly seeking input. Maybe a third case of dove psychomorphism?

Northern cardinal

No sign of the couple I saw in March up in the New Grove. The whole tree’s missing so it’s possible either the ground’s gotten unstable there or the quadrasloth is coming out of hibernation. Going to have to apply for permission to view the seismograph again to solve this one!

Prophetic loon

Heard a splash but no direct sighting. The scrawling on the beach looks like the Second Magus’s footwriting though – she’s a southpaw. If anyone wants to take a crack at decoding it, better you than me is all I’ll say! I don’t believe in that sort of thing (no offense).

Red-everything’d hawk

At least one has moved in judging by the state of the band stand’s rooftop and the pines on the hill. I know they’re not big fans of humans, but still, nobody put anything outside they don’t want dyed – no sense ‘painting the town red’!

Red-winged blackbird

Filling the trees by the old boardwalk and whistling their hearts out, bless them.

Sandputter

One’s already set up the green and the rough by the sandbox at the worker’s daycare, but only nine holes are planted so far, and just three (!) have actual fissile material in them. Quick construction and poor planning suggest a young male. You’ll get there buddy!

Tubist swan

No sighting but the filings in my teeth buzzed at just that right ultra-low frequency, you know? That and the sonically-liquified golden doodle I found are evidence enough for me! Best steer clear of the southern edge of the Point if you’re walking a dog or not in rigorous physical condition and wearing at least twenty+ kilos of extra flesh!

Venus flycatcher

Checked inside the old ‘hot labs’ and yep, ‘big snappy’ is still growing strong as ever! Their roots are well-nourished, their newest clutch of eggs (at least twelve!) is glossy, and the sap drooling out of their beaks to attract prey smells as sweet as maple syrup! They tried to bite my index finger off when I checked their reflexes, bless them.

Xenoraptor colossus aka ‘Barbara’s Dreadnought’

Almost fell into the nest while skirting around the exposed foundations of the central mess hall and by the curvature of the eggshell, violet edging of the featherings, and dismembered cow skeletons I am certain beyond a doubt it is BACK! No sign of the parents but it looks like there’s at least two hatchlings and they’re what you’ve really got to watf ghiuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuydsoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Four months and three days before his thirteenth birthday, Thimas was appointed the Maker of Fish for the long long Lanky River and all its tributaries and streams and rills.

He was of unprecedented age, questionable tutelage, and unknown enthusiasm, but there were none more qualified, principally because four months and four days before his thirteenth birthday the previous Maker of Fish had gotten drunk, stayed out late, and fallen headfirst into the Lanky, where a crawfish-catcher had found most of him the next morning.

So Thimas was woken up early by his aunt and uncle, dressed in ceremonial robes intended for someone who’d suffered at least two more growth spurts, handshaken by the mayor and the priestess and the hermit, and feasted on all the available forage of the season before he was taken to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish and – with many blessings, and much cheering, and great and generous hope – thrown inside.

The door clicked.

It was just a little after noon and he was all alone inside a house inhabited by the same old man for fifty years running, surrounded by half labeled jars and jugs and barrels of things to make fish with, half-shucked-free of ceremonial robes, and overfed on (by word of his guts) half-ripened roozberries. And it sounded like he’d just been locked inside.

First, Thimas permitted himself some small swearing. Second, he found an empty barrel and liberated a sleeve from his discarded robes. Third, he began inventory.

Jars of ink, for squid to fill their ink sacs with.

Iron files, for sharks to sharpen their teeth upon.

Dog tongues, for cods to speak cod latin with.

Wiring, for electric eels to run electric current through.

And more, and more, and more, and more, stacked in the crates on the shelves dangling from the ceiling in jars wrapped up in paper and stashed under the bed lashed together with twine and leaned against the walls and sealed in the big metal safe that said DO NOT EVER OPEN UNLESS YOU HAVE TO that the old Maker of Fish had pinched Thimas’s ear until it was throbbing red for asking about.

It took a lot to make fish.

Thimas rattled at the big metal safe’s handle for a bit. It was locked, and when he gave up the rattling continued.

“It’s locked,” he called out.
“Oh, sorry,” said the visitor in the insincere and hesitant voice of one who’d said those words too often and too lightly. “I’ll come back later.”
“No, I mean it’s locked on your side.”

“Oh sorry oh no oh dear,” click click, and in stooped Windy, six and a half foot of Windy, fisherman Windy, always first to the weirs and last to come home with a bag half full, with a bear’s face and a bear’s hair and the fishing ability of a limbless chicken.

He tried, Windy. He really did. But sometimes, the old Maker of Fish had muttered, trying meant trying something else.

“I’m very sorry, but I heard you are the Maker of Fish now, if that’s okay,” said Windy, shoulders visibly cringing inwards at the audacity of this statement.

“Yes,” said Thimas, who was hoping he’d tucked the (not quite empty anymore) barrel far enough into the corner that nothing would be said of it.

“Oh well, if it’s no trouble, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be too rude if I asked – no pressure – if it’d be alright if you could maybe consider possibly, if you feel like it, and not just for politeness’s sake, potentially… making some fish for me? I’m sorry it’s stupid I’ll go away sorry for bothering you never mind don’t worry about i-”

“What kind of fish?” asked Thimas, and caught by surprise mid-apology Windy said “trout” and became mortified.

“Trout,” said Thimas to himself. And he hunted through the creaking bookcase by the door where the handiest fish were kept close to hand, and in a truly huge tub that was unlabeled because its contents were so omnipresent and obvious he pulled out four handfuls

(the old Maker of Fish had used two, but his hands had been bigger)

of many-hued little painted clay-fired pellets, which he jammed into the pockets of his (slightly depleted) ceremonial robes and slung over his shoulder like a backpack because he already had perfectly good shorts on and thought it would be silly for the Lanky’s Maker of Fish to fall over and drown twice in two days.

Nobody paid any attention as Thimas walked down to the weirs. Everybody very definitely paid no attention. Nobody looked with their eyes one little bit.

Four handfuls, one after another at the edge of the pier. A deep breath before the first, a terrible urge to scratch your nose shoved away, and WHOOSH, high into the air, a spray, a swirl, an arc of glittering colours in the sun.

A rainbow plunged into the water, and it churned and lashed with the onset of many curious fins and Thimas could breath again, which he did. Wheezily.

“The trout are provisioned,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Windy, which was almost like thanks.

So Thimas went back to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish and found some chalk and a slate, which he used to make a diagram, which said:

TROUT I

with plenty of space for more.

***

Three months and nine days before Thimas’s thirteenth birthday, he sat up in bed and looked at the slate, which he had placed on the wall, and it read:

TROUT IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
SALMON IIIIIII

There was still plenty of space for more. Honestly, it seemed roomier ever time he looked at it. He wished he could stop looking at it.

The Lanky’s waters ran clear and wild. The fishermen’s baskets were heaped high. Everyone was pleased. Everyone said he was doing a wonderful job.

Rap rap rap, came the door.

“Come in,” said Thimas, who was starting to suspect why the old Maker of Fish had grown a beard large enough to hide his face and everything it could possibly indicate.

He was already up and walking to the trout tub before the door opened.

“Hello, Maker of Fish, it’s my wedding tomorrow and-”

“Trout,” agreed Thimas.

“What? No, I-”

“Salmon,” concluded Thimas.

“I’m sorry, but no, Maker of Fish” – and this was so outlandish that Thimas found himself paying attention to his visitor for the first time in days: it was Ottough, a friend of his oldest sister’s, spindly and embarrassed to be speaking to him in a very different way than he’d ever seen before – “it’s my wife. She has a very specific favorite, you see, and I VERY much want her to be happy, and-”

“What?” asked Thimas. No, that sounded too unenthusiastic. “What?!” No, that sounded too angry. “What? What? What? WHAT?”
“Shark, if it would be acceptable, Maker of Fish,” said Ottough.

Thimas hugged him. But only briefly. There were so many shelves to dig through.

“What kind of shark?” he asked. Hammerhead, mako, bonnethead, lemon, scoophead, blacktip reef, shovelbill, sleeper…

“Oh. Err. I didn’t ask? Maybe I could-”

“No,” said Thimas. No. No stopping to ask questions. No opening a chance to wait, and second-guess, and return to the trout tub. “We can do a bit of everything. Here, hold this bag open.”

And into the wide-mouth triple-stitched remains of ceremonial robes went iron files to sharpen teeth, and sandpaper to burnish and smoothen tough shagreen, and toothpaste to shine an eternally-regrowing maw, and all the essentials of every kind of shark from great white (white polish for their white bellies) to dwarf lanternshark (matches for their lanterns) to blue (books of sad poems). All of it went into the water, a thick slosh that less churned than seethed, and already as Thimas watched the ripples spread up and down stream he saw the fins begin to circle.

“There,” he said. “Good luck.”
And he went home and added line after line after line to his slate until his hand cramped from the tiny letters he was forced to use, and he was filled with great and endless joy until his brain turned off.

***

Thimas woke and the sun was already setting. He had slept the sleep of the deeply, profoundly peaceful, slumped drooling over his slate, and this stayed with him for five perfect, deep, slow breaths until he realized that not only had no one woken him yet, but the village was quiet outside his window. No songs. No laughter. No arguments. Even the chickens were keeping it to a bare chuckle.

Thimas got out of bed. Thimas put on a new shirt. And Thimas, for the first time in almost a month, left the dwelling of the Maker of Fish of his own accord.

Everyone was easy to find. They were down at the weir. Watching.

Once again, nobody was looking at Thimas. But they didn’t have to try that hard this time. The Lanky was a sea of fins, the water seethed with long, hungry bodies, muscled jaws, and a million-million teeth of a thousand kinds.

“It would seem,” said a very calm and polite and considered voice from somewhere in the crowd, “that we are somewhat overblessed with fish.” It might have been his aunt.

Thimas nodded. Not too quickly, he hoped.

“This will not be a problem,” said an even calmer and more polite and over-considered voice from within the crowd. “Because we are blessed to have the assistance of the Maker of Fish. If fish caused this, fish can fix this.”
“Yes,” said the first voice.

“Yes,” said the second voice right back. It could have been his uncle.

“Yes,” said someone else.

“Yes,” said everyone else, not all at once, not all the same way, not all as polite and calm and considered and one or two really close to being muttered.

So Thimas walked home until he was out of sight, then he ran home, and he hunted from top to bottom until he found the chest buried in the dolphin bin that was filled with black-and-white beachballs and blood, which he combined, lugged down to the weir, and poured into the Lanky.

Then he added a little more, just to be sure.

And a little extra, just in case. It was just ONE kind of fish he was using, after all, so they’d be very outnumbered. Best to give them plenty to work with.

The water roared and surged. The many dorsal fins that darted up and down the Lanky wobbled in a hundred hundred different salutes, flags of undersea nations.

The crowd watched. And when the water began to settle, they went home, in dribs and drabs.

Thimas didn’t. He waited, and watched, and waited, and worried, and waited, and worked his way bit by bit into the fretful and unpleasantly stretched dreams of the deeply, profoundly guilty.

***

He woke up in the dark before dawn to something wet and flapping slapping him in the face, which he yelled about, which got it in his mouth, which cut his tongue – sharp rough skin. Denticles.

Thimas spat out his mouthful of shark meat and rolled out of bed, which was the weir, and out from under his covers, which was the severed and disemboweled corpse of a four-meter great white shark, and landed on the floor, which was the face of a watching orca.

“Hleef,” he explained.

It grinned at him. It was probably a grin. The teeth were showing, and it seemed to be happy. Then there was a flip and a twist and a nudge and Thimas was upside down and backwards and on the weir’s edge again, nose to nose with the carcass he had been gifted.

The black eyes were unreadable. The angle of the slackened mouth was reproachful.

The river looked full, and at least half red, and the flags that marched within its borders were tall-ships now, great towering black fins that bobbed cheerily as their owners flipped their prey onto the backs, tore their fins off, pummeled their organs into jelly, chattered enthusiastically among themselves and played catch and keep-away with the bodies once they had eaten their fill.

Thimas threw up. This did not Make any Fish, but it DID attract a curious snapping turtle from beneath a rock, which was immediately whisked away and swallowed by a titanic black-and-white set of jaws.

This was not an improvement. There was still an overblessing of fish. He still had to fix this.

If fish had caused this, fish could fix this. Yes. Yes. Yes.

So Thimas went home, opened every container he could – which was all of them, save for the big metal safe – and when he found the one that was full of gigantic steak knives and a big bottle of whale oil he took it down to the weir – using the ceremonial robe-sack as a sling – and tipped in with its entirety.

The dorsal fins circled, curious.

Then there was a cacophony – almost like gunshots. CLICK CLICK CLICK and splash, splash, splash, the beating of flukes on the water. The river churned and reeled.

The waterline slid upwards. Little wavelets slid over Thimas’s toes.

Then it surged, and splashed, and an orca came free of the waves, clutched in a mouthful of serrated triangles at the far end of a twenty-meter lawn dart.

The water closed up.

Thimas was on the shore. He had no memory of getting there.

Farther downstream, there was another splash. And another.

And a crash, as a shark larger than most of the buildings in the village misaimed a lunge and landed in the middle of cousin Burct’s unoccupied chip stand. It squirmed back towards the water, slowed by the six terrified whales clinging to its flanks and removing pieces of meat bigger than Thimas with every bite. One of the last rowboats in the village that hadn’t become a plaything got between two of the combatants, briefly.

There was a grinding noise as an entire pod escaped over the top of the weir, taking half of it with them. The remainder scraped the pursuing megalodon’s belly clean of remoras.

Thimas went back to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish. He wasn’t looking at anything, but he was listening, and it was very hard to think with all that noise. Even after he shut and barred the door it was very hard to think with the memory of all that noise. Even after he shouted and threw the ceremonial robe-sack-sling to the ground and stamped as hard as he could it was hard to think through the memory of all that noise, until he stamped a little too hard and fell over with his foot in his hands and a squeal in his throat and a drab, pointy little metal key skittering loose over the floorboards, torn free at last from some hidden pocket.

Thimas looked at the key, which was much better than listening or thinking. Then he held the key.

Then he dragged out the big metal safe that said DO NOT EVER OPEN UNLESS YOU HAVE TO and put the key in and opened it.

There was a garbage bag in there, double-knotted and surprisingly light. On the basis of speed and desperation, Thimas did not open it.

Instead, he walked down to the shores where the weir had been – now thinly populated by early risers, who were hollering and encouraging others to come stand there and help holler over the ongoing mutual-massacre – and poured out a seemingly endless flood of…meat scraps? They reeked of the pub, of too-high prices and high-capsaicin hot sauce that was all heat and no flavour. They plunged into the water and the grease and the peppery spice cut through the smell of blood that Thimas hadn’t realized was drowning him nose-first until it was broken.

He held the garbage bag in his shaking hands, and something was jabbing his palm – splintery, not like the key. He unfurled it, uncreased it, took one million years to pull it loose.

A stripped-clean chicken wing.

The water broke without boiling, the banks overflowed, and into the sky they rose, one chasing another. The orca breached, fins spread wide, body corkscrewing frantically for height, and behind it the shark, tail beating side to side with enough force to generate power for all of main street, jaws just a little open, eyes twitching and ready to roll back at the first chance to strike, both of them up, and up, and up, and away into the sky, their little fluffy white wings beating with the fury of an ascending grouse from beneath the hunter’s foot.

Everyone stopped hollering at that.

They started again right quick though, when the second-through-five-hundredth followed.

“He never liked eating fish much,” said Thimas as his aunt and uncle picked him up, torn between every emotion at once, watching the flock whirl away over the treeline and into the sun. A straggling carp – survivor of endless warfare – fluttered by them, loop-de-looping for the sheer thrill of it as it headed inland. “Never said why. I thought it was ritual bullshit.”

***

There are fewer fish these days in the great Lanky. But the fishing villages don’t complain, and they take only what they need, and they wish for nothing more than what’s already there. Only what’s already there.

Focus on what’s in front of you, they say. Don’t get carried away with wishing for what could be. You hear the folk from the Runny? Overland? Six leagues away? They believe in flying fish these days.

Honestly.

MEGA MARVIN LIFE FULL WALKTHROUGH

A guide by xxxSparrowAxexxx

COPYRIGHT 2003 DO NOT REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION!

****TABLE OF CONTENTS****

• Introduction

1.0 Hospital

2.0 Playground

3.0 Middle School

4.0 Retail

5.0 Night School

6.0 Mega Marvin

7.0 Management

8.0 The Snap

9.0 Drifting

10.0 Patience

11.0 Reckoning

• INTRODUCTION

Mega Marvin Life is my favourite game in the series and has been unfairly overlooked for years.  In this guide I will show you how to beat it fairly and have a good time.

1. HOSPITAL

After the introduction cutscene with God you have to escape the baby ward.  Easy to do: this is just the game introducing you to keycards and locked doors.  Take the janitor’s keycard and get through the halls to the elevator, bounce down the shaft, and find your way to the parking lot – just follow the signs.  There’s a time limit until your parents’ car leaves but it’ll basically never matter unless you get way too into exploring the level, and there’s nothing much to see.  The janitors are too slow to catch you and the nurses just ignore you.  Hop into your parent’s car and the level’s over.

1.1 SECRETS: there’s only one secret in this level, and it’s only useful if you’re trying to speedrun the game: if you crawl into the crib with the golden spoon on it push the other baby out of it and wait five minutes Marvin becomes Wealthy Marvin and you go to the credits.  Boring.

2.0 PLAYGROUND

This is the first proper level, and it’s a real open-ended sandbox. You have thirty minutes to do whatever you want, and it’s the tutorial to another big mechanic which is the Boredom meter. Do whatever you can to keep it up – throw pebbles at squirrels, build sand castles, bonk the other kids on the heads, whatever. Don’t overdo the last one though because every kid you take out makes the boss harder.

2.1 BOSS – AUNT MANDY: Aunt Mandy shows up at the end of the timer and again she’s basically a tutorial. Dodge the bottles she throws and use the Ignore function when she starts talking.  If you’ve ko’d at least three other kids she gets REALLY hard and basically never shuts up so watch out!  Kick the bottles back at her until she falls over and you win the level.

2.2 SECRETS: The bird in the skybox is an actual model, not just background art, and if you hit it with a pebble (I was aiming at a squirrel) it’ll poop on Marvin’s head and your controls are scrambled for the rest of the level because he won’t stop crying. 

3.0 MIDDLE SCHOOL

This is the last ‘tutorial’ level of the game, and it’s where the gloves come off. You need to keep your Boredom low AND not get the teachers to notice what you’re up to, AND collect enough points. If the teachers spot you, expect a tough chase – and all the desks and other kids make getting away difficult, AND they’re one-hit ko’s. 

3.1 BOSS: SCIENCE FAIR: Like the school itself this is a test of your multi-tasking. You need to keep the other kids from messing up your project AND show it off to the parents AND keep the judge distracted by messing up the other kid’s projects. All of these are easy – the other kids back off if you give ‘em one good thwack, the parents will nod and walk away if you pretty much do anything at all, and the other projects will fall apart if you give them one quick shove in the right place – but they’re all constantly right up in your face about it. You really can’t afford to sit still at all. 

3.2 SECRETS: You can beat the boss super fast if you let your project get knocked over and then just hold down the Scream command. You don’t get as many points, but it’s faster – especially if you knock your project over yourself. 

4.0 RETAIL

Probably the first really hard level. You can’t move at all, but the enemies just don’t stop coming at you. You need to perfectly avoid every single one of them, which is totally impossible but the good news is you don’t have to do it forever, just until your Bucks score gets high enough – it ticks up a little bit every minute.  Once you screw up and too many customers hit you, the boss fight starts.

4.1 BOSS: BOSS: You want to finish this as quick as possible because every time he hits you you lose Bucks.  If you grab his hair and yank it comes off and he can’t move for a minute, that helps a lot. 

4.2 SECRETS: If you attack the first customer he has a credit card in his wallet that maxxes out your Bucks but the boss gets a duplicate in a security guard outfit so the fight’s real hard.

5.0 NIGHT SCHOOL

This is like Middle School on steroids – your Bucks score is back from Retail and if it hits 0 before you finish the level you lose and your save file gets deleted, which sucks. 

5.1 BOSS: FRIDAY NIGHT: Dodge the cans, glasses, and bottles or lose your Bucks. REALLY avoid the whiskey, that’s a one-hit KO. 

5.2 SECRETS: If you hit the bartender the level ends without you losing any Bucks, but you start the next level at half health.

6.0 MEGA MARVIN

Here is where the game lost 50% of its playerbase and I think it’s weird because having the chance to customize your character from scratch is cool, even if it’s a little weird that it happens halfway through the game.  You can make Marvin look like anything so go as crazy as you want. Then you play through a sort of mashup highlight reel of levels from Mega Marvin, Mega Marvin 2: Marvin’s Domain, Mega Marvin Planet, and Mega Marvin Planet 2: Marvin’s Inferno.  The trick is you have to play through them backwards and upside down and the music is replaced with screaming which I think a lot of people were unable to appreciate.

6.1 SECRETS: If you try to name Marvin anything that isn’t Marvin your save file deletes itself.  I think a lot of people weren’t smart enough to know why that happened and really missed out on the rest of the game for no good reason. 

7.0 MANAGEMENT

Just like Night School was Middle School but harder, this is the Science Fair but way way tougher. Now you need to guard your Marvin projects from other managers, beat up your employees whenever they try to work on it, suck up to the CEO whenever he’s near, AND on top of that your relatives keep phoning you and draining your Bucks.  If you don’t answer the phone they show up in person and you have to dodge them while doing everything else, so unless you’re REALLY attached to your bucks don’t even bother.

7.1 BOSS: CFO: This one’s either really hard or really easy depending on how hard you think outside the boss.  If you try and counter his arguments you WILL eventually lose, if you try and beat him up he gets infinite Security and you lose. But you can move around while you talk and if you look in the bottom drawer of your desk you will find a gun. If you fire it at the boss you lose, but if you hold it while you make your arguments you win no matter which ones you pick. I like to pick the ones about Estonia because they’re interesting but if you’re in a hurry you can just yell “my COCK” over and over and it ends the fight really quickly. 

7.2 SECRETS: If you fire the gun at yourself instead the game goes to credits and tells you you won just like if you beat it normally. 

8.0 THE SNAP

This is sort of a breather level?  You don’t actually do anything – stuff happens around you.  None of the noises people make are words, they just sound like them. You can try and move, but it doesn’t change anything. Sometimes Marvin walks around the screen and yells at you.  It lasts anywhere between seven seconds and six hours; I checked like five times.

9.0 DRIFTING

This is a race: you have to make it to the far side of the bay with the money before the cops catch up to you.  It’s really hard until you figure out you can switch cars partway through by pointing your gun at them and screaming.

9.1 BOSS: META-MARVIN: This fight is hard the first time because you don’t expect him to jump out of the briefcase after you shoot him the first time. The whole fight’s like that: you need to have quick reflexes because it’s totally random where he’ll jump out of next and he’s super fast.  Under the car, out of the surf, up from behind a beached seal, beneath rocks, inside a discarded beer can, parachuting out of the sun…Marvin can be anywhere. If you run out of ammo you lose so you can’t just spray and pray either. Make every shot count.

9.2 SECRETS: If you make it to the checkpoint in the convertible you started in Meta-Marvin just spawns in the passenger’s seat every time and stares at you, covered in blood and holding a wedding ring up so you can see it.

10.0 PATIENCE

This is the last new mechanic in the game: your Sentence goes down a little bit every minute and goes back up if you hit any buttons. Just put the controller on the table and go to bed and you’re usually out of prison by the next morning.

10.1: BOSS: ??: Not sure if there is one, I never saw it just the clear screen.

11.0 RECKONING

So you have to get Marvin all the way from the top of the last will & testament to the bottom and it’s pretty hard if you try to take it one line at a time but pretty easy if you just blindly jump from paragraph to paragraph. You CAN jump on the ink smears, but the blood smears are INSTANT DEATH so don’t confuse them; some of the really dried rusty ones can be mistaken for each other.

11.1 BOSS: MEGA MARVIN LIFE: Jump over the logo when it appears at the end of the document and it’ll explode and then the credits start.

11.2 SECRETS: If you have more Bucks left at the end the last will & testament gets longer. If you finish the game with zero Bucks it just says ‘fuck you’ so if you want an easy level try and get rid of them in Management by letting your relatives phone you a lot or something.

Thank you for reading my guide I hope you enjoyed Mega Marvin Life as much as I do. It’s my favorite game and I hope I can make one as good as it someday.

The old apple tree was dead.

It was older than Ann, older than her mother, older than her grandmother, and it had almost died more times that she could count – ice storms, droughts, infestations, a fat raccoon on a thin branch – and now it was dead, truly dead and gone, and she had no time to think about it because Beatrice’s birthday was coming up and Arthur’s mother was sick and she had so many times and places she had to feel the right feeling that spending her time thinking of a dead old apple tree was unthinkable and she felt a little sick just imagining it.

Besides, the lawn was overrun with cogblins. She’d already spent all morning oiling them out, spraying down the screaming hordes with the thin mist that coated their eggs and robbed the friction from their gears that let them walk and fight and breath, leaving paralyzed hordes silent in their thousand homes and thousand knee-high skyscrapers, hapless as the ants and the cats and the birds swooped in. 

Ann polished the oiler until it gleamed and watched longer than an adult should have. It was acceptable for a child to be fascinated by mass death; in an adult it was some sort of bigger, stronger cousin of gauche that was unmentionable by the polite.

Her phone rang.  It was her sister, Clarice.  It was the first time she’d called in six years, since the thing with grandpa’s fish.  Ann answered it too fast for hesitation, a reflex operating without practice or instruction.

“Hey.”
“Hello.”

The world sat between them, its gravity drawing their conversation into faltering orbit.

“How have you been?” asked Ann, which wasn’t ‘I’m sorry.’
“I’m doing okay,” said Clarice, which wasn’t ‘I forgive you.’

“How’s Patrick?”
“Third grade.”
“They grow up so fast.  How’s Stacy?”
“The Cellar People got her.”
“Oh,” said Ann.

“I need to voyage into the Land Behind The Furnace for four days and four nights with a human-wax candle. Do you have one?”
“I could manage the house for you,” Ann didn’t say.

“I could watch Patrick for you,” Ann didn’t say.

“I’m sorry,” Ann didn’t say.

“Yeah, it’s in Arthur’s old school stuff,” Ann said.  “I can dig it out in a couple minutes and bring it over.”
“Thanks.  Just drop it in the mailbox.  I’m out late tonight and Patrick has karate after school.”

Ann didn’t say a lot of things.  She said “that’s okay” and “goodbye.”

Then she got in the car, drove twenty minutes to her sister’s house, did the no-odds double-evens skip-the-red-stones dance up the walk that kept the Cellar People from noticing you, left the candle in the mailbox, and told herself that she was a good person and a good sister.

Traffic was miserable on the way back.  Bumper to bumper and shot through with anger.  A cyberhinoceros screamed in agony at his career, his marriage, and his lost childhood and turned left on a right turn signal, totalling a semi and its cargo of twelve fresh-minted million-dollar uniceratosaurus juveniles.  Ann saw the uncreased and flattened brow on the mechanized lifter’s readout as he sat against the rubble of the traffic light and waited to be arrested and sent to the debt-mountain, just as she saw the glassy eyes of the crushed theropods waiting for virginal jockies that would go mountless, just as she saw the frozen cheeks and unsmiling mouth of the traffic copstable operating on an off-the-shelf job-app plugged into his official hat, and they were all different pieces of the same expression and she couldn’t recognize it because she was in it.

She stopped at the ice-walled superiormarket on the way home to get her mind off it.  Bought a Death Conger from the fish counter for a song two whistles and a secret. Took it home still-cursing, still-fighting inside its box of regrets, just like grandmother used to when she was little, twenty years retired from the Electricitsea but still living on it every night, gnarled hands twisting cables in the air, hoarse voice shouting to wake the neighbourhood with the call to man the lines and tend the insulation. 

Ann and Clarice had been fond of the eels but feared their grandmother, and that had gone both ways.  She flinched when she saw them, not just from the perpetual tic that had been shocked into her left hemisphere from a Humboldt Volctopus.  They were too small, not slimy enough, not trying to kill her, and that all hurt in places she didn’t like to explain or consider. 

The kitchen was quiet when she got home.  Beatrice took her time coming back, meeting with her friends in the places teenagers met with their friends. Park benches, parking lots, convenience stores, toadthrone circles, vantablack webrings, and the Last Bleacher where Cindy MacDougal’s skeleton still did her final cheerleading routine every Wednesday evening and the bats refused to roost.  Some of them Ann knew too well, others she knew too little, and she worried that she was mixing them up.

The eel was straightforward. She loved that fish, loved the way it snapped at her and fiercely offered her wishes three, loved the way its curses bounced off her grandmother’s shining silvered cleaver, loved the secrets that it whispered loose in the steam as its skull defleshed in the pressure cooker, loved it as fiercely and uncomplicatedly as she’d loved anything, loved it so she didn’t have to hear the thump and clunk of Arthur coming home or smell the traces of the outside world on his skin and sweat and clothing, loved it so much that she missed the soft scuttle of the ventipede as it swung down from the kitchen ceiling and wrapped itself six times around her throat, fangs bared to strike.

Ann snapped, but inside, where it mattered. She swung the cleaver wildly with her right hand, but it was with her left that she killed it, acrylics tearing through armour and fat and into deeper, more private flesh, turning insides out and popping open soft organs like party balloons, grinding with the heel and stabbing with the nails and ripping and gnashing with the thumb until she wore the whole of the beast on her arm like a puppet from a children’s show.

It screamed at her. She hissed in its face and bit its head off, swallowed its adrenaline and cortisol and dopamine like candy and spat out the mandibles, then sat down in a corner of the kitchen and did nothing but rock gently, so gently, without tears or thoughts or blinking, just a spreading numbness from toe to finger to scalp.

Then she scrubbed the ventipede innards away with her bare hands, vomited into the sink to purge the criotoxins, washed her hands with the red, white and infrared soaps, then exited the secret passage from her lair and walked down the hall to the dining room where her husband sat, waiting.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I wanted dinner to be special.”

“Let’s get divorced,” he told her.

Ann nodded.  Yes, that made sense. 

What a day.

What a typical goddamned day.

The alarm went off and the clipboard was already scratching.

“7 AM, Brian.” Tsk tsk tsk, half cluck and half near-articulated word, scratch scratch scratch, pen on paper. “You fucked up. You could’ve gone to bed earlier. You could’ve woken up earlier. You could’ve gotten some cleaning done. You could’ve gone for a run before work to stay healthy. You’re too old to pretend you’ll stay in shape no matter how you treat yourself”
“Yes,” agree Brian, whose eyes were open and who was sitting up but remained wholly unready to find the alarm.

“You didn’t go to bed until 2 AM because you’re a dumb little kid. Just scrolling away, just reading crap that wouldn’t improve you. You didn’t want tomorrow to start, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s a fuckup squared then because making a mistake you know to avoid is worse than making it because you don’t know better. Now get your ass out of bed and let’s go.”

So Brian got out of bed too slowly and made breakfast.

“Cereal? Well well well, looks like someone doesn’t want to put any effort in AND wants to run out of energy before lunch. Eat a piece of fruit at least.”
“I’m not that hungry,” said Brian, chewing each mouthful too many times each.

“That’s because you had an unhealthy snack late last night.” Scratch scratch. “Good going, at this rate we’ll be in double digits before we leave home.”

Brian rinsed the bowl without soap.

Scratch scratch.

***

“Well, you fucked up. Didn’t do that last room carefully enough at ALL.”
Brian took his time with the next set of windows and got all the corners with the broom and the mop. He wiped down the lights and the lightswitches to spotlessness. He desmeared the sink until his reflection was in the taps, wide-eyed and bulging.

“Good job, you just took twice as long as you needed to. If they were paying you for a sixteen-hour shift you’d be right on target.”

Brian sped up. He scrubbed and flushed and sprayed and mopped and wheezed.

“Good job, you just forgot to check the lights. Are you being paid to clean or go home early? And you forgot to take down the slippery surface sign. You should return your paycheck.”

Brian returned to pick up the sign, grabbed it, backed out of the way of oncoming traffic, smiled and nodded and said ‘sorry.’
“You mumbled that. He doesn’t understand what you said and your expression was disconcerting. Good going, his day’s a little worse now.” Scratch scratch scratch. “Hey, stop making that face or the next person to come by will get freaked out.”

Brian stopped making that face. He wiped down tables and vacuumed under desks and emptied trash bins.

“You still don’t know what to do when the fan makes that noise? Jesus, what are you even doing in this job.”

He left a note for the technician.

“Wow, you made it someone else’s problem. Good going. Might as well have lunch now, you’ll need it early since you had cereal for breakfast. Remember?”

Lunch was a sandwich and an apple.

“Jesus, this won’t be nearly enough. You’ll be lucky to fall asleep on the trip home instead of mid-shift.”

Lunch was a sandwich and an apple and a bag of chips from a vending machine.

“Wasting money? Good job. And learn how to make something more impressive than slapping some slices of prepackaged gunk between bread. And you’re five minutes late. Oh, were you looking at your phone again? Right, because you can’t wait for another three hours to read trivia you don’t need coming from idiots you shouldn’t listen to.”

***

Brian was home. His boots were off.

“You fucked up and forgot to buy milk. Guess that means either you try harder with breakfast tomorrow or you don’t get it, isn’t that helpful. What’s dinner? Oh, precooked glop frozen and reheated in the microwave – you can’t muster the patience to use the oven even if you don’t have to cut things?”

“Yep,” said Brian. “Shower time.”
“You should clean the shower. You should’ve cleaned the shower a week ago.”
“Yep.”
The scratching continued throughout the shower, throughout the meal.

“Forgot to get more hot sauce.”
“Yep.”
“Now what? Going to catch up with your friends – you should have more of those – or your family – so they don’t have to do it for you – or maybe read a book? Sign up for a course? Learn something? Talk to anyone?”
“No.”
“Gonna sit on the internet until you’re forced to go to bed again?”
Brian shut his eyes and sighed.

“Ignoring your problems. That’s helpful.”

***

It was 2 AM. Brian turned off his phone and waited for the list.

“Eighty-four-and-a-half. Up from yesterday, but only a little. You even half-ass halfassing.” Tap went the pen, dropped onto the clipboard with weary disgust. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m still here. You’re wasting my time. You’re wasting your time. Eighty-six-and-a-half. Now, you know the drill.”
Brian looked at the list. Clean, legible, precise. Everything his handwriting wasn’t (item thirty-seven).

He pointed at item fifty-three.

“Oh, when you said ‘thanks’ too loudly at the checkout, ruining the clerk’s day. Classic Brian move. Right.” The brisk sharp rip of a sheet of paper being tugged clear from a pad. “I’ll put it in the eternal loop with the others – make the prompt looking at the supermarket, talking to other people, and just sitting in the dark at 3 AM with your eyes shut. Remember: you can’t trust yourself, which means you can’t trust either of us. Now go to sleep already. Tomorrow’s another day and another chance.”

Bailey was halfway dressed for work when the call came, and halfway frustrated with that before she saw the number.

It was from the shop. That didn’t happen, not unsecured. So she answered the impossible call with an awkward compromise between appropriate formality and appropriate security, which consisted of saying “yes?” but in a very deferential way.

“You’re off shift,” said the shop. Terse, but not aggressive.  Urgent.  “Come on down and bring a change of clothes or two; this could get messy.”

“Alright.”
“Talk to you in an hour.”
Click.

Bailey got fully undressed for work, halfway dressed for casual, completely mentally undone at the seams, and all the way down to the shop – (behind two false fronts and never you mind the details) – before she dared consider what was going on, which was at the same moment she was bowing politely before Chandelier. 

“Esteemed,” she said.

“Not a lot of time,” Chandelier told Bailey, ignoring both of their manners with similar ease.  Her grey hair looked greyer, her big tired brown eyes looked heavier, her rumpled suit was verging on crumpled – crumpling farther, as she bent over and began to dig through the bottom drawers of her desk.  “The ‘keep is going to be out of town for the weekend. We need someone to housesit. You’re up. Know it’s in here someplace…”

“What, esteemed?” asked Bailey, in a terrible compromise between saying what was on her mind and maintaining operational professionalism.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get a detailed list and we’re fitting you with a nictitating meninx,” said Chandelier, effortlessly introducing several new things for Bailey to worry about. She gave a small grunt in small triumph and swayed back to desk height, a little grey cardboard box in her palm.  “Here it is. Take this and get it to Candlemaker, the third door on the right down the pink hall. She’ll set you up.”
“Esteemed,” said Bailey, hands shaking, brain shocked, mouth unwisely let off the leash. “Why me?  I’m not even third watt.”
Chandelier actually looked at Bailey for the first time since she’d entered the shop, and it was terrible. Sympathy, weary jealousy, irritation, a little contempt that stuck out like the red spot on Jupiter.

“Because the rest of us will be going with the shopkeep and doing a lot worse than housesitting this weekend,” she said, each word heat-sterilized before it entered the world. “So take your new meninx and your self down to Candlemaker and be happy for the time off. Now.”

“Yes, esteemed,” said Bailey. And fled to somewhere safer, to the office of Candlemaker with his wild shock of hair and his inappropriately big smile and his complicated and overwrought razorblades, who laughed in her face at her delivery and shook his head at her meek request for more information.

“The list’ll set you up,” he said, picking up and putting down things somewhere between scalpels and dental floss.  “Honestly? The less you know outside of it the better. The meninx will do its job, no fear, but if it has to face pressure from you AND the environment?  It might strain, a little. And if you strain it a little, it might stretch. And if it might stretch it might snap. And then you’re in trouble. So stop asking questions and do as you’re told, alright?”
“Yes, esteemed,” said Bailey.

“God, you sound like you’re up against a firing squad. Hey, look at my chin.”
Bailey looked at Candlemaker’s chin and fell asleep. When she woke up her head hurt, her leg was asleep, and she was sitting in a wooden lounge chair on a nice deck attached to a polite little two-story house that would’ve been middle-class twenty years ago and now was the height of unfeasible luxury.

The world was wrong.

She blinked.

No, that wasn’t it. The world was fine, but…

She remembered when she was six years old and she’d finally gotten a magic eye picture to work. How it had felt when her eyes had unfocused just right, her brow had furrowed just so, her brain had slid loose just enough, and then the sailboat popped out of nowhere, floating off the page.

Right now she felt like the whole world was a magic eye picture, she couldn’t stop seeing it, and her head was already as creased as Chendelier’s suit.

There was a list in her hand. Big, bold handwriting, easy to soak up even in her state.

A little bird sang its heart out in a tree altogether too close to her ears.

Autostereograms, that was what those pictures were called.

Well.

Thank God it’s Friday indeed.

***

Besides the little knot tied between Bailey’s eyes and her brain, the house was nice. Clean. Furnished. It was a little over-populated with knickknacks in the way that reminded her of her great-grandmother’s place when she was a small child: half the accumulation of a long life, half the relics of a style of decoration long-since passed-by. The fridge was almost overflowing. There was a tank of goldfish in the living room, and a birdfeeder in the backyard. There was a small almost-grove of tall, sober trees that didn’t seem to be able to decide if they had needles or leaves.

There was a big and not necessarily overwhelming sofa, which Bailey sat on as she read the list.

It was divided into a DO section, which was long, and DON’T section, which was short.

DO

-Water the plants. Half-a-can of water per day per plant, two in the living room, one on the shelf in the kitchen.

-Fill the birdfeeder with a cup of the black birdseed and a pinch of the purple birdseed every day.

-Shovel the front and back steps with the big blue shovel resting on the front porch.

-Feed the goldfish in the living room. One spoonful of feed per goldfish per day.

-Make polite conversation with the spider above the stair in the morning. The weather is best.

-Sleep in each bed once.

-Keep the thermostat at 17 degrees.

-Check the pump in the basement before going to bed.

-Pick up the phone and put it down again twice a day.

-Eat the food on the bottom shelf of the fridge.

DON’T

-Use the little yellow-handled shovel.

-Sleep in any bed more than once.

-Be rude to the spider.

-Eat food from anywhere other than the bottom shelf of the fridge.

-Feed anything the red birdseed.

At the very bottom of the list Candlemaker had written ‘Have Fun!!!!’ 

Bailey stared at this and wondered if it was technically attached to the DON’T section by placement, then decided she had better things to do and started from the top.

It didn’t take too long. The plants were odd and unrecognizable; the spider didn’t talk back; the goldfish were pleasantly rounded and healthy. The birds were not quite chickadees, but even though Bailey and her birdwatching app couldn’t identify their song it was quite pleasant. The phoneline sounded quite normal when she gave into curiosity and listened before putting it back down. The first container she found in the bottom of the fridge was humble takeout poutine of average quality (i.e., bad and therefore excellent), and the grey salt-studded slush on the steps peeled away easily under the big clumsy blade of the blue shovel. The only odd thing was the thermostat: someone had set it to 19 degrees.

Bailey fixed that and spent the afternoon reading, which had been neither DO or DON’T. She tried the books from the overstuffed study first, but abandoned that plan quickly – each of them were filled with lorum ipsum that made her eyes water on contact – and retreated to her phone.

The pump in the basement was innocuous and unmoving.

The one disconcerting thing was the master bed. Bailey sank into it like a pebble dropped over the Mariana Trench and woke at 4 AM Saturday after indiscernible, troubling dreams to find herself deeper still.  She decided an early morning was a safer bet than switching beds.

Breakfast came in the same takeout container as the poutine: an immaculate beef wellington. She microwaved it and felt a sense of inevitable, righteous doom overtake her until the first bite.

The thermometer was at 15 degrees. She fixed that.  The steps were covered in (still salty, oddly) slush again. She shoveled that.

“I’m not sure where it came from,” she told the spider honestly, “there’s no snow anywhere else. Not on the branches, not on the roof, nothing. I guess I’d better not think about it.”
The spider did not reply, no more than the goldfish did, and the birds still sang. Long trills and clicks, like Morse code set to music.

Dinner was what appeared to be plain scraped-from-a-can beans in molasses, and this Bailey felt far less guilty about microwaving. It tasted like university desperation and retail overtime, and raising her spoon felt like work. She read a paragraph for every bite, and the meal ran so late into the evening that at first she almost mistook her visitor for a flicker of the shadows in the old half-buzzing lights, or even one of the little twitches in her field of view she’d almost gotten used to by now.

A roach. Not too big, but unpleasant to even look at.

“Guh!” said Bailey articulately, and – thanks to her quick reflexes – this became the insect’s epitaph. It thrashed and died and one leg twitched and clawed at the air and her and the universe and oh.

Oh, that was a sensation.

Despite what migraines might advertise, Bailey knew that the human brain was famously devoid of pain receptors.

So, what she was feeling right then, that tearing, scraping, rending….thing?  Inside her skull.  That was very specifically not pain.  It was completely not like pain.  Pain and bright pink and strawberry-scent and velvet-soft and salty-taste were all much closer cousins to each other than this was.

But Bailey still felt very strongly that the correct response to it was to scream. Not a lot, or for long, but definitely to scream. Short and sharp and shattering like glass, with a hand slapped over her right eye.

Her right eye.  Very specifically her right eye. Quicker than thought, like a hand snatched from a burning stovetop.

She looked at the dead cockroach with her left eye. A dead, mashed cockroach.  No twitch left in the legs. Gross.

She looked at the dead cockroach with her closed right eye. She thought about opening it. She thought about what she would see.

She thought about how the pressure in her head had let up. About how the furrow in her brow was gone.

So instead of opening her right eye Bailey made an eyepatch out of one of her socks and some duct tape and she threw the cockroach out in the garbage, and then she went downstairs to check the pump in the basement.

It was innocuous and unmoving but it was also at the far end of the basement from where it had started.

Bailey’s right eye itched.

She ran up the stairs to bed in such a hurry that she nearly forgot herself and took the master bedroom again, but when she set foot in the room she looked at its deep, soft folds and felt its dusty breath and saw it wriggle – just a little – and remembered herself so fast she backed out without even turning around.

The guestroom bed, by contrast, was firm.  Immobile. Hard as a rock.

Baily didn’t fall asleep on it. But she did SOMETHING, because the dreams started before she’d even finished getting comfortable.

The birds sat in the window and watched her. The plants moved downstairs and talked in damp, dark voices. The books merged and split and recombined like microbes, filled the downstairs, the upstairs, to the ceiling, past the roof. The shovels marched into the mass and carved it away and slipped back downstairs to report to the pump and the pump couldn’t stop messing with the thermostat.

And all the while the birds watched her.

***

As she hadn’t slept, Bailey didn’t wake up.  But she did start moving around again.

Her phone said it was Sunday. She hoped it was right. She also hoped she was reading it right; part of her field of view was…odd… right now. Swollen, like a bruise. Despite the eyepatch, despite a firmly-clamped-shut right eyelid, she could see things on the right side of her nose. Somehow.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and her thoughts in one gulp and went downstairs to water the plants. She didn’t enjoy it. They kept making contact, brushing her wrists, and no matter how often she pushed their hands away they wouldn’t listen. No ears.

The goldfish were better. Their little hands only moved to cup the bones from the water and drink them down, their mouths murmured in gratitude and blessings. They reminded her of her grandfather after gramma died, all prayers and no thoughts.

The birds weren’t watching her. The birds were making eye contact. The birds were making eye contact with her right side. She was making it right back.

Her eyepatch was still on.  Her eyes were both shut.

Bailey screamed a little and ran back inside and slammed the door and shook herself for a few minutes, then went to talk to the spider.

“I’m really sorry, esteemed,” she mumbled. “But this is going very badly.”
The nictitating meninx was torn, the spider explained. She was seeing things that were there.

“That’s not good.”
The spider agreed. It suggested a solution, if she could go to the kitchen and find the sharpest knife. It would help.

Bailey did that.

The spider told her to point the knife at her right eyeball.

Bailey didn’t do that.

She really should, explained the spider.

“Maybe later,” said Baily.

She went to check the thermostat. It was at eleventeen. She spun the dial, spun the dial, spun the dial, then saw seventeen at last and twisted it home true only to realize she was looking at it with her left eye shut and her right eye wide and the sock eyepatch had burned its way into dust.

She looked behind her and caught the pump in the middle of moving from one end of the basement to the other. 

It hissed.

Bailey went back upstairs, picked up the knife again, and did as the spider instructed.

Leave it with me as payment, it told her.

“Take my eye. Please,” said Bailey. And giggled, but in relief. Her left eye was twitching again in that offset rhythm, her brain’s brow was furrowed and aching once more. How did that even work? Surely autostereograms need stereo vision, that was just common sense.

Hee hee who cared.  Not her!  Not Bailey! She was seeing single now, and one thing at a time was enough for her. She had mapo tofu for brunch from the fridge (and boy was she glad she hadn’t looked in it earlier), she checked the phone, she went down to the basement and gave the (now-relocated) pump a quick look and a middle finger, and she went out to the porch and boldly reached out and picked up the little yellow-handled shovel.

Oh wow, she thought.  Missed by six inches.  Depth perception DOES matter.

***

Bailey woke back up with a face against hers and a set of fingers in her right eyesocket.

“This is alright,” said the face. It was a very ordinary face, so ordinary that it was extraordinary that it remained ordinary. A face that ordinary should be memorable.

She agreed with it. Compared to what had happened after she touched the little yellow-handled shovel, this was perfect. 

“You have done nothing wrong.”

Arguable.

“The pest should not have been there. Killing it was good. Your suffering was a narrow escape. The spider gave good advice.”  The face clucked its tongue. “You should not have touched the little yellow-handled shovel. That wasn’t wrong and that wasn’t right. It was entropy, it was statistical decay. I came home early. Statistical decay.”

Oh alright then.

“You are going home now.”  The face moved away. The fingers went deeper. “And you will return with two eyes. You orphaned this one, and it will help you.”

***

Bailey saw everything.

She saw the look of disgust and shock and hidden envy travelling from Chandelier’s brain to her glands to her face and back.

She saw the experiments Candlemaker ran on the tatters of the nictitating meninx she’d carried home in her coat pocket, staining the fabric with cerebrospinal fluid.

She saw that she wasn’t a third watt anymore, whether or not anyone had said it aloud or not.

She saw that the pest had not been a cockroach.

She saw forwards and backwards and side to side and up and down and all around and beyond.

And she saw that standing there with her hand on the door to the shop wasn’t going to stop any of those things from happening.

So Bailey sighed deep, blinked with the eye that could still blink – the one that fit inside her eyesocket – and turned the doorknob, and stepped into a life that popped loose and floated above the page.

It was twenty seconds past nine o’clock when the customer arrived for his bar fight.

Unforgivable if he were a regular, but he was a tourist, and one with that combination of embarrassment and eagerness in his apologies that was all clumsily earnest. There was traffic, he’d lost reception on his navigation app, he’d hit five red lights in a row and he hadn’t checked the weather last night so the messy half-snowfall had caught him off-guard Doug forgave people like that, deserved or not.

“There’s no harm done,” he said, which was a lie but only on a very small scale. A little sloppiness and corrosion to the sense of timing and precision he’d be trying to maintain today, this year, this decade, this life. Life was full of those, one more or less was as harmful as any other. That was how they got you. “Now please, take your seat.”

Tourist, embarrassed, cursed by traffic or more, the customer was only so ignorant or slow on the uptake. He followed Doug’s cue perfectly and took the quiet-type seat at the bar, just near the far end, spaced double from its neighbours. A good position for an amateur, which meant he was one of the sorts with self-awareness. “The seat is comfortable?”
The customer shimmied quickly, rocked it sharply forwards once, twice. “Yep. All set and secured.”
“Then we shall begin.”

So speaking, Doug reached below the bar – a carefully pre-pitted and ancient slab of cheap wood – and withdraw a spray bottle. His arm moved in a broad, sure sweep, spritzing everything across the countertop with a thin shimmer of stale beer and sour sweat. The customer twitched, but only slightly, trusting in Doug’s aim to avoid his eyes as he donned the present from Doug’s other hand: a battered baseball cap, tattered from front to back. You couldn’t help but slouch under a hat like that, and so he did, back naturally relaxing into a shallow slump in the tireless fist of gravity. He took the third gift offered almost by reflex: the tall, smeared glass mug, brimming with half-drained yellow dregs and the last foam of the pour.

Doug slipped beneath the hidden cut-out of the bar, hinges in perfect oiled silence, and interrupted this moment by stepping beside the Fella and slapping one palm down on the counter.

“You lookin’ at me?” he demanded.

The Fella looked up. Slow on the uptake, but that was expected, and that it was accidental made it better to any except the most refined witnesses. “Huh?”

“I SAID, you lookin’ at me?”

The Fella shook his head. “Don’t want any trouble, bub.”

“Then why you lookin’ at me like that?”
“Like what?”

“Like you got a PROBLEM. You the kinda fella that’s got a problem with me?”

“No.” Short and surely, only a hint of eagerness expressed in the speed it came out at. Acceptable, could also be read as nerves.

“Then why. You. Lookin’. At. Me.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You callin’ me a liar?”
“I’m not calling you anything. Got wax in your ears?”
The Bub grabbed the mug. “Say WHAT there bigmouth?”
“Got glass in your ears?”
“Wh-” and just like magic, up came the Fella’s hand, right on cue, clenched and on target to the thickest part of the Bub’s chin, where impacted dead-on the target pad.

The squib in his mouth gushed red. The tonguebite was flawless; visible without gushing messily over them both. The Fella was slowing down though, almost too lost in admiration, and so the Bub slurred out (hand retreating to his mouth): “guh.”

The Fella took the cue, took the mug, and smashed it over the Bub’s face. He swore, spun, tripped over his own feet, and did a grasp-down kneecracker against the Fella’s chair.

The chair came up. The chair came down over his back. He went limp.

Good timing. Some slightly uncontrolled splinter spray from the chair’s legs, but that was the reason the Fella took the quiet-type seat: if you mishandled your setpiece, there wasn’t much else around you to suffer the consequences.

He held his breath. He released it.

“The moment is over,” said Doug.

The customer exhaled too, shakily. “God damn,” he said, blowing out his cheeks with the force of his sigh. He took off the cap and handed it back double-gripped to Doug, hands shaking just a little. “God DAMN. How do you do it? I know how, I’ve seen the interviews, but seeing it in action…”
“Practice,” said Doug, same as he’d said in every interview. And then, offhandedly, same as he’d said every time in-person: “and a metronome helps. Keep one in as much of your life as you can until you ignore it, then start paying attention. Timing is everything, and if you get that under control, the rest follows.”
“And maybe the red lights too,” the customer said – but a little sheepishly already, balking at the gulf that separated them. He paid in awe and left with a smile.

Doug stopped smiling when the man left, and wasn’t pleased with himself for it. Faking a good mood was for retail employees; his job was his art and his art was a pleasure, and expressing that pleasure was expected only insofar as he was doing this because he enjoyed it.

That had taken a while to figure out, when dad was going over the charts with him. Patiently, slowly, explaining every barstool, every step, every angle of approach, every usable tool and its substitutes.

“This is insane,” Doug had told him. “Half of these don’t do anything. Half of them are functional equivalents. All of them have two names each, and there’s six naming schemes that don’t agree with each other. Why make it so hard?”

“Dougie,” his father said – a little irritably, because dad had saved his patience for his craft – “Squabbling being hard is the whole reason I do it.”

It had taken him years to reason that out intellectually. But he’d had the time to think about it because he’d accepted it on a lower level a long time earlier, in the way his limbic system sang and his nerves fizzed.

(At the time. Familiarity didn’t breed contempt, it didn’t, it couldn’t, not this kind. But he was old now, and it was more humming and twitching)

Jenny had never gotten it. Maybe she would’ve, if she hadn’t been a little more like dad than Doug was, a little less willing to speak sharp.

***

The second person to walk into the Squabble studio was not a customer. They were a peer, and this was their sixth year visiting.

“Sorry for the weather,” they told Doug. “I know it’s not ideal for the plan.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, and he meant it. “I’ve done this knee-deep in plow backwash before. Hard on the knees, but what isn’t? The human body isn’t built very well.”
“You got that right,” said the peer, rubbing their back. And so they talked about aging as they walked outside, as they visited the shed and selected the bike (a fine middle-of-the-lane priced device, worn but adequately-if-erratically cared-for, the sort of thing he’d nod at and call good inside his own head as well as outside it), as they went out to the curb installation out back and swept back just enough slush to chain the bike to the post with a lock the peer had brought themselves.

“Buddy, I think,” they opined.

“Asshole,” he replied.

A brow raised, but only a little, and followed by a firm nod before they turned on their heel and marched back to the rear entrance. They were good enough to know just how good he was.

He didn’t make the count before he approached the bicycle in numbers. Nothing he counted in the studio happened in numbers anymore, or even biorhythms – heartbeats, breathes, the clench and unclench of muscle groups of any size. He just knew when to scuttle up to the bike, knew how long to fiddle at the padlock, knew when to pick it up and start smacking it against the post, knew the words a half-breath before they arrived.

“Hey asshole!”
He jerked his head upright, schooled the surprise on and off his features. “Who, me?”
They stamped over – the slush fountaining a bit with every angry step, no sign of slippage (good traction they’d worn for this weather). “See any other sticky-fingered shitheads out here with their hands. On. My. Bike?!”
“Buddy, I wasn’t touching your bike,” said the Asshole. “I was just looking at the lock.”
“Why the fuck you looking at my lock?”
“Some shithead’s broken it! Take a peek, see if I’m lying!”

Good mix of fury and bewilderment and curiosity, near-marred by a half-step short – a lunge would be tricky from this distance, ankle-deep in the drift.

But tricky wasn’t, so the Asshole not only cleared the drift but made it look natural – his legs felt longer, and acted the part, and the lock in his hand slapped into Buddy’s middrift with a sharp flat THWAK, distributed as evenly as anything while sounding like a cannonball being fired into a beef warehouse.

“Gwurk!” choked Buddy, doubled over, nose almost brushing their boots, and as the Asshole reared back and raised a doubled-fisted blow Buddy reached out, grasped the Asshole’s just-barely-shaky leg, and yanked.

“SHIT!” he shrieked on the way down, and as he fell he flailed, and as he flailed his grip shook loose, and so the lock and chain swung wildly, popping him one right in the eye and smeared a fat black bruise from the dye he’d palmed onto the mechanism’s base. He choked, flopped, rolled around clutching at his face, curled up around two boots to the midsection from the rallying, half-stooped form of Buddy, and then, one hand swinging wildly, he pulled in the bike by the spokes with his foot and ran it straight into Buddy’s backside.
Over went Buddy, a full two-twist somersault (a little showy, but why not shoot for your best?), and over went Asshole’s leg, and down the curb and the road he went, peddling hellbent until the moment was right and he was around the corner.

He held his breath. He released it.

“The moment is over,” said Doug. “And good work on the somersault.”

“Thanks,” said the peer, who’d come over to check the tires. “Sorry,” he said, “but my assplate shifted a bit when I dropped the first time and I want to be sure… yep. Nothing’s dented.” He patted the bike affectionately. “Apologies. Metal shrank in the cold.”
“If it takes a few knocks too many I can always shift the whole panoply down by one and get a new Brand New,” Doug said with a wave of his hand. “Not like I’m in the poorhouse just yet.”
“Yes, but the guilt.”
“You’ve told me twenty times you can’t feel that because you have no conscience.”
“Yes, but my husband does, and he’ll nag me ‘till past death’s door until I’ve bought you two bikes a bike shed and a snowblower.”
Doug laughed, and found himself startled by his own startlement at its genuineness. He accepted thanks, and he made promises, and he said goodbyes, and he still felt he was one step off. Just one piece of himself not quite there.

It had been like that, when Jenny left. If dad hadn’t skipped breakfast. If she’d not had a sleepless double-shift from the other mechanic running sick. If Doug had been a little firmer on asking them to back off.

Just one little thing off and nothing went right. And once it went wrong, it stayed wrong.

***

The third person to walk into the studio was a long-booker, someone with the patience to wait a full year for his schedule to settle and sift and solidify and another six months for their appointment to arrive.

She was also his niece.

For the first time in forty-three years, Doug wasn’t sure what expression he was making. “Ally,” he said instead. Like an idiot.

“Uncle Dougie,” she said. Like a smartass.

“You’ve gotten older.”
“Not as much as you have. You still doing this? Because I’m here for Look At My Fender, in case you’ve forgotten that.”

His brain snapped off his current course of action and onto one where it still knew what was going on. “Right. We can move it indoors, switch the fender to the shoe –”

“The hell we will. You going to let the weather tell you what to do?”
Nobody had spoken to Doug like that inside his studio in twenty years.

None of his family had spoken to Doug inside his studio in twenty years.

They went outside.

“I’ll bring my car around,” said Ally. And the problem with letting himself operate in professional mode was that it short-circuited the part of his brain that said things like “fucking hell are you insane?” so by the time he’d sorted his mouth from his ass she’d already turned on the – less-than-a-year-old, reasonably-nice, perfectly-undented sedan to the back of the building and parked it on the curb right next to where he’d shoveled the snow for the bicycle five milliseconds ago.

“Waiting,” she said, voice flat and humourless as dad’s pancakes. Doug shook himself off and let his gut pick his own car – went for the Clunker. Pulled on the coke-bottle-thick spectacles and the greasy wig, stopped to check and – oh god, she was already reaching to put the blinkers on.

He could stop and ask her questions she seemed to already have answers to. Or he could keep his timing.

So he fired up the engine, edged forwards, and – by reflex and feel – slammed bumper-first into the fender.

Which shrieked in a tone of metal that was NOT setpiece and went from one pole of his spine to another. Had she really-?

“What the FUCK!” screamed Ally, already outside his window. “Are you BLIND, you dense motherfucker?”
Those weren’t the words he’d expected. Not from whoever drove that car.

Dense Motherfucker peered out the window, goggling with entirely too-close-to-real bewilderment, and saw…

Downer. She was going full Downer. She must’ve had the outfit in the car and done a quickchange, because it was straight from halfway through the fall of the ‘90s, white shirt and tie, sweaty jacket, desperate and strung out and bug-eyed so you could almost see the cubicles reflected in the glaze in the back of her eyes.

“Say something, asshole!”

He smacked his lips and ran his tongue excessively and mumbled a string of syllables that would’ve made a kindergarten teacher disappointed.

“Speak WORDS!”

“Ididn’tseeanything,” he slurred out.

She yanked his door open.

Wait. That wasn’t Downer at all. That was Crazy.

A hand fisted his jacket, the other crunched into his nose. Red spurted extravagantly – she must’ve held at least two squibs and she’d squeezed them like a four-year-old with their first ketchup packet. It was warpaint as she screamed in his face about driving back home and coming back with her shotgun (crazy) and blowing his whole dense motherfucker (downer) family to hell and back (crazy).

And the outfit didn’t fit any of it, but it didn’t fit RIGHT. If she’d worn a good businesssuit or gone High Karen maybe it would’ve been laughable, it would’ve been parodic, but coming from her marooned-out-of-time Dilbert-on-my-wall Clinton-and-Bush burnout it was right, it was correct, and god above she’d braced her back and stabled her stance, legs wide.

That wasn’t Dense Motherfucker’s cue. It was from Fuckin’ Moron’s part.

It wasn’t called for, but it was correct. He took the groinshot – one knee, then the other. She hit a high C then took it higher still, pitched forwards, her skull dusted his gut and they went down in a mutual tangle, legs flailing, heads bouncing once at the very center of the asphalt pitch. His heel jerked. Her mouth gasped once. Stillness.

He’d held his breath. He released it.

“I’m retiring,” he said.

“What?” said Ally. She scrambled up on one elbow, genuinely appalled and concerned. “I go to all this time and effort to show up and make you take me seriously, and the second I do-”

“-you show me what I’m missing,” Doug finished. “Everything I can do I can do perfectly, the timing’s precise. Just now you showed me something I hadn’t done before, and I nearly screwed it up sixteen ways in sixteen seconds. I AM taking you seriously, and what that means is admitting I can’t show you anything you don’t already know.”

“I’m sorry I made you bust my fender for real,” said Ally miserably, retreating to less troubling ground. “It’s just, mom was sure you wouldn’t talk, and then when I was almost ready the first time grandpa was gone, and then I had that SHITTER of a year, and I wanted to be sure you’d get it, you’d really get it, and…”
“…and I got it,” said Doug. He patted her arm once, firmly. “But not the studio. You’re getting that.”

And everything was just where it had to be.

I had to check a couple times to make sure I was seeing right – this was the shoddiest dock in town, which meant it was a good, fine place for me to get day-drunk while looking at the water and imagining I was going to do real work – but no, I was right.

Eleven, maybe twelve years old. Kiddy lisps and mumbles all gone, voice still too high-pitched and squeaky, but talking in deadly grown-up earnest all the same.

“I want a ride,” she repeated, stone-faced. And that just made Angel laugh harder, hands on both knees now, dockmaster’s coat flapping from the wind of her joy.

“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “Oh I bet! Caught some minnows and now you want to go whale-hunting, huh? Get a vouch from someone that isn’t your mommy.”

“I’ll do it,” said the spirits, using my mouth. Damn, I’d had more than I thought. My impulse control wasn’t usually this bad.

“A vouch from someone that isn’t your mommy or halfway alcohol by volume,” said Angel.

“You’ve let me take Charlie-Jetty out when I can’t even talk, Angel,” I argued. “Go on, let the kid be. Worst that’ll happen is she can’t find anything.”
“Worst that’ll happen is she gets them both fed to a damn shark.”

I fumbled around in my jacket until I found the hooks in my pocket – had to fight them out, they’d gotten snarled in the weave – then flung them in the dockmaster’s direction. She took them up with a quickness and a grin that let me know she might have planned on this.

“G’wan then, shorty,” she said cheerfully. “Go catch your whales.”

“Thank you,” said the kid. Teeth not gritted, face still stony. This wasn’t the first time she’d been treated like this. How many docks do you visit before you go to the shoddiest one in town?

Maybe none, if the others aren’t dumb enough to rent out fins to prepubescent. And you’d be out of luck there too if a sentimental and contrary drunk wasn’t on hand to play scapegoat if the kid doesn’t come back.

Those were the cheerful thoughts that filled me as I watched the kid scud away into the early-morning mists atop the low-slung and scaleless back of Charlie-Jetty, short legs dangling from the croc’s flanks so her toes just touched the water’s surface.

“If she doesn’t come back,” Angel said, clicking my (her) hooks against each other thoughtfully, “I sure hope Charlie does.” A cheap ride, but a consistent one, and sensible. “There’ll be some sad old abalone hunters without him – he practically does their runs for them.”

“She’ll come back,” I said. An uninformed opinion, but a stubborn one, and hopeful. “She’ll come back.”

Then I dealt with my anxieties as best I knew how, which meant I wasn’t awake that evening when Charlie-Jetty came back to dock, rider included. But I knew he must have when I slept clear through ‘till morning, groggy and stiff.

Angel’s laugh always woke me up early. Too loud, too sharp, too pleased.

***

The kid was back soon after that, before I’d had time to think about breakfast. Walked right up to me, hand out, fistful of hooks.

“For yesterday,” she said. There was an uncomfortable amount of direct eye contact happening, and I realized I was feeling an old reflex to salute.

“Thanks,” I said. And took the hooks, and thought about other things I maybe should’ve said or asked while she walked to Angel’s post, rang the bell, argued her case.

Like “what were you doing?”

And “should you be doing it alone?”

And “why are you thanking me for letting you do it?”
Then Angel started laughing again and oh I didn’t want to hear that, not without breakfast. So I went down to the rocks and the little shack and bought a bottle of it, came back to sit by Charlie-Jetty’s berth and lie to myself that I’d be taking him out for baitfish in an hour, a few hours, the afternoon, tomorrow.

Angel came to keep me company and took the bottle from my hand, asking for neither. “You have an eye for talent, So’west!” she said cheerfully. Then she took a pull, then she made a face. “No goddamned taste though. Christ, you could clean the birdshit from the boards with this – if you didn’t mind turning the dock into a firetrap.”

“What’d she want?” I asked. I wasn’t going to ask for the bottle back. I wasn’t.

“Seems your old boy here didn’t hold her appeal.” Angel bucked her chin at Charlie-Jetty, sleeping like a (smooth) log in the way that sea-crocodiles do. “She wanted something bigger. A lot bigger. And well, I would’ve said no, but you gave me a bit of a turnaround yesterday, So’west. I’m a bigger woman now, with a generous, open heart.”
My hands shook a little faster. “Give me the bottle.”
“Huh?”

“Give me the bottle please.”

“Oh of course, no worries.”

I was trying to count the leads tied to the piers and swallow at the same time when she said “I reckon Bruce-Boy will do her fine,” gaze high and tight on the horizon, watching the sun climb out of its sullen grey bed.

I immediately failed at everything I was doing. It hurt worse than the last time, not least because while my throat burned and my heart wrenched my ears were full of Angel’s friendly, good-natured laughter.

***

I stayed up that time. Drank half my breakfast and put the other half in my pocket and took up a place at the lookout post, tucked in the corner where I could get a good view past the breakwater and pretend the young-and-bored postie wasn’t looking at me every five minutes and sharing the same opinion I’d developed of what he was seeing.

Young. He had to be twice the kid’s age.

And she was out there with the meanest near-reptile I’d ever met. Bruce-Boy had nearly six metres of neck and a mouthful of knives and if he was displeased with you he had a nasty habit of letting you know right away and everything from lack of food to early work to the sun in the sky to being ridden at all displeased him, displeased him greatly and thoroughly.

I had a few marks on my arms from Bruce-Boy’s displeasure, and if I’d been slower or had a bit more breakfast at the time I had no doubt I’d be missing fingers. That kid could lose a hand or worse.

The bottle was still in my pocket.

“Hey you want a drink?” I asked the postie.

“Not on watch.” And isn’t it nice to know you’re bringing out the best in people, Southwest? The barely-shaved watchman of the shoddiest dock in town can learn a bad idea when you show it to him.
“Good,” I said. Like that had been my plan. A good influence on all young people I am. This young man will go on to have a bright career thanks to my intervention, and that kid will probably go on to be a layer of gut flora in Bruce-Boy’s duodenum.

Moved by the spirits, I pulled the bottle out and dropped it over the side. It didn’t splash, and the first thought I had (the first EMOTION I had was blind regret and rage) was oh no, I hope I don’t get any of the fins drunk.

Then I thought of Charlie-Jetty drunk and swimming upside down at abalones and laughed. Messy, snorting, snot-dribbling, undignified, giggly and near-hysterical. The postie not-looked at me like I was the worst thing he’d ever seen.

It’d been a long time since I’d heard a laugh from someone that wasn’t Angel. It felt good.

Felt better when – just as the sky was turning red – in came Bruce-Boy, smooth as butter and worryingly traceless – all the froth and motion and force coming from a body only a little bigger than Charlie-Jetty’s, all the eye drawn to a neck twice that long with a malevolent little skull on it, leering at you from just above the waterline.

He looked happy. As far as that goes. And the kid, all things toothed and scaly be praised, looked unharmed. Tired, but unharmed. Well, unharmed by teeth – she had a sunburn fit to murder God and her posture looked more stiff than straight for once, but she had all her limbs and all those limbs looked unbandaged and unbleeding.

I was down from the lookout post before I had time to realize it, halfway through tying a hitch into Bruce-Boy’s lead before I remembered I’d forgotten how. Cinched it, tugged it, shrugged it off, offered a hand.

The kid ignored it – jumped up with a wince and a slap of the palms on the wood, shaky-armed – but nodded to me anyways. As was proper, if she’d been three times her age.

“Good day?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. And all she had to back that claim up was a foul-smelling fish-pack half her own size, but she said it without a pause or a stall or a thought, so I didn’t doubt her for a second.

“I’m Southwest,” I said.

“Cleat,” she said.

Then she left.

I looked at Bruce-Boy. He gave me the serene look of a cruel and temperamental beast with a full stomach.

“What’s she finding out there, eh?” I asked him.

He turned his back on me with more dignity than the postie had.

***

I skipped breakfast. My stomach rebelled and rejoiced all at once.

The air at the dock helped both. Dead fish and salt spray and the thick cool coating of a foggy day, inside and out. I could almost imagine I was a fish myself.

Angel was in a bad mood. She stared at the fog as if it had jimmied her brother then skipped town, the smoke of her pipe aggressively encroaching on its space.

“Unless you’re hunting harbour eels, no go,” she told me shortly. “Wait ‘till it burns off. Maybe a little noon traffic.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Might take Charlie-Jetty for a spin. Get my fins back on.”
“Didn’t know you had the means for a pleasure spin, So’west.” The bite was there, but the cheer was forced.

That mixed mood of my stomach spread to my tongue, and this time I couldn’t blame it on the spirits. “Well, Cleat paid me back. Reckon I’ll be set for a little.”

Muscle crawled on her jawbone like a lizard on a rock. The pipe twitched and I heard a little crunch.

“I’m going out,” said Cleat.

We both jumped. She wasn’t that quiet for a kid, but damn the fog ate noise.

“I’m going out,” she repeated. “And I need a big one.”

“Nothing doing,” snapped Angel. “Not in this fog.”
“I’m going out,” said Cleat. No change in tone; not impatient, not annoyed. All business. “The biggest one you can send.”
“Go hunt frogspawn in the crick.”
“I’m going out,” said Cleat. She held up both hands, opened them.

It’d been a while since I’d seen that many hooks. Some of them were doubles. I thought one might have been a triple.

“The biggest one you can send,” said Cleat.

Angel’s face moved through a few expressions, which was pretty funny if you didn’t see that her eyes didn’t change once. “Fine,” she said, as flat as Cleat had. “Let’s roll out Jenny-Regina.”

I choked on the fog and my own tongue. But Cleat didn’t say anything, just nodded, and I couldn’t put the words together right, not as they walked out to the security pier, not as they raised the gate and pulled the anchors loose, not as Angel held out the ammonite-shell chime that would hang from Cleat’s waist and remind Jenny-Regina that the tiny thing on her back existed, and the foul-smelling sack of nudibranchs that would dangle from Cleat’s neck and remind Jenny-Regina that the tiny thing on her back was not edible.

I couldn’t say a single word as Cleat leapt down – still a little stiff from yesterday if I wasn’t fooling myself – and seated herself on the saddle and smacked the goad against keeled scales and she was off.

Off atop Jenny-Regina. Fifteen metres of Meuse-lizard, finned and tailed and massively jawed. Indifferent to anything that didn’t threaten it, unthreatened by anything.

I couldn’t relate, especially when I found my tongue again after the two of them had passed beyond the breakwater, and all I could manage was “what the fuck, Angel?”
“Her hooks, her funeral,” said Angel. She sucked on one cheek and bit down. “Going to get early lunch. Go suck a bottle or kiss a harbour eel, I don’t care.”

A flip of the hand, a hook bounced off my forehead, and I was alone.

Then I was at the little shack by the rocks. Then I had a bottle.

But my stomach felt worse whenever it came out of my pocket, so I left it there and went back to the dock and tried not to think about why or what I was trying to do.

The fog was still so damned thick. Which is why I almost walked into Angel, and why she didn’t hear me do that (biting my tongue when I stumbled helped).

She was at the end of the dock, untethering something.

Then she was in the water. Barely a splash, head still level with the dock, and then moving off.

I ran to the end and caught the end of the tail.

Thomas-Clock. The old timeeater himself. The other end of the security dock. Short tail, long paddles, short body, long jaws. A mouth to rival Jenny-Regina’s.

I thought about what was going on, which was worryingly easy, and then about what I should do about it, which was a lot harder.

The good news was that while I was wasting my time thinking my body – uninfluenced by the spirits and feeling enthusiastic about that – ran down to Charlie-Jetty’s dock, stuffed fish in his mouth so quickly he almost bit me in surprise, and cast him off.

The water was up to my thighs. I hadn’t taken out fins in… god. A year? More.

But you couldn’t forget.

***

Following Tommy-Clock was easy. Charlie-Jetty’s nose was good and he knew his distant dockmate’s smell well. All I had to do was keep him pointed in the direction he was most uncomfortable.

Damn, I owed him more than a few fistfuls of bait.

We went out past the breakwater, swaddled hard in dead fog, and for a while we went straight out. Downcoast and out, towards where the shoals would be if the season were better. But a big fish-pack-full of plain food didn’t bring in a fistful of hooks and then some, and I wasn’t surprised when we took a sharp turn.

Near back to shore. Nearer. Nearer. A long way from town now, closer to the headland. Ragged and rocky. Charlie-Jetty slipped through with ease but steering Bruce-Boy would’ve been tricky and Jenny-Regina would be like pushing a cork back into a bottle.

The rocks were getting closer. One bad wave I couldn’t see coming and I’d be a bag of broken bones held together with meat glue. At least I’d give my fins his snack, assuming he didn’t end up worse…

… then a wave came – no, not a wave, a current – and slid us closer, and under, and THROUGH – oh, oh, there’s your secret.

Cleat had found a sea cave. Barely above the water, barely below it. I crouched low over Charlie-Jetty’s back and breathed between the cold wet slaps of the current against my face, and when the light came again – fogbound though it was – I blinked it away until things made sense.

The roof had collapsed long ago; I was inside a gigantic bowl, tall-walled, invisible inside the cliffs of the headland.

I was also next to a gigantic carcass, which explained why I vomited.

God, the smell – overwarm, overrotting.

Cleat HAD been whale-hunting. Or the sea had done it for her. The carcass alternated between dark barnacle-studded hide and pale half-rotted bloodless flesh, riddled with reeking decay. It was a wonder I wasn’t up to my armpits in sharks.

A splash. Violent. The water ahead of me moved against the current – then back again. A gigantic scaled flipper broke the surface and smacked it, sending up a sheet of water that could’ve soaked a house roof to floorboards.

Jenny-Regina.

No wonder she’d wanted a big set of fins. And from the lunge and the ripple and the sudden stone-still hesitance of Charlie-Jetty to proceed, Tommy-Clock was here too. But the riders were either off or dead; they wouldn’t let them dive in a fight, not both at once – too risky being a loose fleck of meat between two apex predators, even with the nudibranchs and the chimes, so-

“Back off!”

There they were. And that was the first time I heard Cleat’s voice raised. No wonder she kept herself monotone: level enough and you could forget her age, but when she yelled it came out shrill and made you think of refusing to go to bed or complaining about dessert.

Angel laughed because of that. Genuine in a way her face hadn’t been all morning.

“Why? It’s a free salvage. Else what? You threatening me, kid? That’s a crime, you know.”
“I’m not stupid!” and oh that was the wrong thing to say in that voice, it just made Angel laugh harder and that’d make Cleat angrier, and she’d feast on that like a warm dinner.

I took that sick heat of worry inside me and let it distract me from my gooseflesh as I slid off Charlie-Jetty. He was used to the abalone hunters; he wasn’t fussed.

“Sure, kid. Sure. You just thought you’d take advantage of my generosity because I run a poor dock at a good price and you’d use that to sneak twenty kilos of ambergris a day past me without so much as a thank-you, good-bye, or by-your-leave. You’re not stupid, kid. You’re an asshole. And a toll-dodger.”

“I paid double fare today!” Like fairness or facts would help. It wasn’t fair this was happening; and the fact was I was swimming like a drunk false-lizard, trying to paddle with my shoulders instead of my arms, splashing too much.

“And what was that compared to your take? Going to bring home two bags today? On my fins? Do you know how to do percentages yet?”

Do you know if that yank at your left foot is the current, the shearing force of a ten-metre-plus reptile shooting by, or a three-metre skull snipping your foot off at the knee?

“There is no cargo toll!”
“Not if you announce the cargo,” happy as a clam. Never as happy as when someone else is miserable. Always happy to see me. Had she ever paid me for that? “Without doing that it’s smuggling. Smuggling and threatening a dockmaster…” Sharp, clear, slow tisks. “And we’re on the water. So the justice is summary. But you’re young and I’m generous – tell you what, kid: give me back the dock’s property and you can swim home. You’re good at what you do, I’m sure ol’ Jenny’ll treat you like a fellow queen, chime or no. Deal?”

I had my hands on the corpse now. Spongy where it shouldn’t be and thick in ways it hadn’t been when alive. A bruise in the shape of a body, half septic.

Cleat wasn’t talking. Sensible. Saving her lungs. Mine ached with strain as I hauled myself clear of the water, face nearly buried in semisolid flesh. I clawed upwards through the consistency of sticky pudding.

“Deal,” agreed Angel with herself. A slight stir, metal and leather slapping on a palm. “Put the knife down or I take your doggypaddlers off before I throw you in.”

I’d love to say I planned to grab her leg right then. The truth is, I was blinded by some of the foulest-smelling glue I’d ever imagined, I was groping blind, and when my right hand gripped Angel’s ankle my first thought was it was a rib.

Then she yelled “What the FUCK,” kicked, slid and fell over – cling-cling went the chime at her belt, cling-cling! – catching herself with a hand that sank down to her elbow in melting blubber.

The arm with the axe wavered in midair, ready to come down but not sure of what her target was.

“So’west?” she half-said. I think she might have just mouthed it. My eyes weren’t any better, and her face was a lot closer to the corpse than it had been a second ago. Her mouth was twisted in a half-retch and I wasn’t sure if it was the whale or me.

Then I lost my footing, scrabbled at thin air, slid loose belly, chest, and arms, and down we went.

Cling-cling, cling-cling!

Splash!

Splash!

I went under first, Angel on top of me, between me and air. Feet and arms windmilling.

Hatchet just missing me, free hand shoving at the water. Cling-cling!

I ignored both of them, grabbed the bag at her waist, and tore as hard as I could. It slid free and I followed it, grabbing before it could sink out of sight into the dark, then turning for the surface.

Sharp pain in my shoulder. Cling, cling, cling-cling. I’ll give Angel this much: she kept that axe sharp. Even underwater it stung. I rolled around, leaving a little red trail between me and the light, between me and the blacked-out silhouette of Angel, hand groping for me, other arm rearing back for a second strike.

I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, it was still dark.

Cling-

I blinked again. Still dark.

Then the mass that had blotted out the surface moved on, propelled by a fluked tail taller than I was, and I could see all the way up to the surface and the sun.

I swam to it. Sore-shouldered, leaking a thin line of red.

Not the only red in the water now.

Cleat was watching when I broke surface.

“Hand up?” I gasped.

“By the tail,” she said, pointing with her chin. “It’s too steep here.”

“I noticed.”

She did her best, eleven-ish as she was, but getting me out took time. When I finally laid on my back, bloated whaleflesh beneath me, a just-clearing sun above me, I felt like I would never be dry again.

“Are you okay?” asked Cleat.

“Maybe,” I said. My shoulder hurt – and something was jabbing my side. I shook out my jacket and watched, neck craned, as broken glass slid its way onto the shark-bitten meat below. “I lost my bottle,” I observed.

“I’ll buy you a new one.”

“No thanks,” I said. I leaned back and thought about how we’d get two of the meanest sets of fins in the docks home without eating each other, how long it’d take before poor Charlie-Jetty found the courage to walk himself home. Last time he’d had to do that was when a shark took his abalone diver. “You’ve given me quite enough.”

There weren’t any giants in the earth in those days. Too small, too low, too cramped, too narrow.

They’d moved into the sky instead. The ceiling was higher, the floor was airier, there were less bothersome little things underfoot.

But there was also less to eat, and what there was to eat was scarcer than would be appreciated, and the nutrition it supplied was smaller than convenient, and nothing could go to waste. And because of all of this and because giants have big appetites even for their size, certain professions were taken up.

Beantender Buckletin was a respected giant, and in a way that had nothing to do with his size (a moderate fifteen metres) or his wisdom (adequate to find his way out of an empty room within three tries) or his strength (he could hold a thunderhead overhead without his arms shaking for at least a few moments). No, it was the reason his mother had been a respected giant, and her father before her, and his father before him, and so on and on. They had been beantenders too and they had been revered for it as he was even now – a giant’s plate without a beanstalk of stratus upon it was empty and sad indeed, and a giant’s bowels would blame them for it most petulantly. All nodded to him when they met him, all knew his name, many thanked him when they parted.

But he bet they didn’t have to deal with things like this.

“Burrowed right up through the turf and stole a whole pod for itself, the little thief!” he complained to his wife, who was inspecting the hole in the cumulus with a critical eye guiding a steady hand holding a fog patch. “Where the little pest came from I don’t know, but we need to put a stop to it – are you sure that’ll hold?”
“For now,” she told him absently. Her name was Broomplate, and she was in work mode. No promises. “If there’s more they could dig in around the edges. Never seen this kind of damage before. Got any idea what it is?”

Buckletin held the cup-and-plate he’d captured the intruder in up to the light, fashioned of rainbow-hued glass burned in the kilns of the heavens. It bared its teeth and hooted at him.

“Not the faintest clue in the big broad blue and beyond,” he admitted. “Looks like a horrible tiny little giant if you ask me, but its belly is too small and its mouth is all narrow and puckered. Gross. Gross gross gross.” He shuddered. “Give me eelnadoes any day. At least those are big enough you can punch them.”

“Mmmm.” All attention on the hammer now, cold grey stone capped with ice, mountainous.

“I suppose I’ll fling it off the margins. Eugh, but what if it clings to the glass. It has thumbs, tiny little thumbs – augh, what a beast!”

WUMP, tons and tons of force slapped into fog slapped over puffy white cloud, ice particles and mist everywhere. Broomplate blew away the residue and freed up her attention span for a second, and with that second she said thusly the words of doom:
“Take it to the bakery.”

“Pardon?”
“It stole calories and vitamins. Let it become calories and vitamins. Nothing must go to waste.” She lined up the hammer again.

“Oh. Oh! Yes, how convenient. How poetic. I love you, you know. And your poetry.”
“Mmmmmmm.”
He scrutinized the offending creature with a newfound (wary) enthusiasm. “Mushy, but with a crunchy core… yes, that could do. That could do! The cup will be back before the evening is out!”
“Mm-hm.”
“Farewell!”
WUMP

So Beantender Buckletin took his cup and plate down to the bakery and left them there, and the first he heard of the rest of the day’s events was the screaming and crackling flames.

***

“I’m telling you, I’ve been off my feet since before the day started! Why, first that starwhaler comes in a week late with no notice before midnight, then as I’m trying to get that under control then grey-upon-his-skull Kettlemuck comes rushing down my door with a racket about how this sackful of barometernacles are perfectly fresh but need grinding down NOW before they spoil, and by the time I’ve made halfway progress on THAT everyone else has dropped off their own materials and I’m behind again, just like I was last week when we had all that overflow from the eelnadoes and I’d shut down early since the starwhaler wasn’t back yet.” Grinder Spoonfrond stopped for breath, then recalled his manners. “You DO remember that, right? I’m not boring you?”
“Guh,” said his audience, a perfectly innocent giant of advanced age and respectable clothing who arrived at precisely six o’clock in the morning every other weekday and whose name Spoonfrond would definitely get around to learning someday. Twenty minutes ago the golden doorchime at the bakery’s entrance had rung proud; twenty minutes in which the last twenty years of another’s life had been funneled into her skull via her ears. She was beginning to hyperventilate.

“Anyways, your loaf,” Spoonfrond said, and from the great burning oven he plucked bare-handed a brick of meteor-heated snow-iced ground cloudbone bread. “Was in a cirric dogfish this time yesterday, now it’s on your plate. Come again!”
“Bwuh.”

“Yes, I said come again – the gold-upon-the-door chimed, then chimed again – “WHAT NOW oh sorry beantender didn’t see you there, was talking about something else to someone else. Anyway! What have you got there?”

Buckletin held up a cup and a plate and a creature and a blissfully unaware smile. “Garden pest!” he said proudly. “It stole a bean, let it fulfill a bean’s function! Can’t let something go to waste.”
Spoonfrond inspected his prospective ingredient closely. He flicked the cup, watched its flesh ripple and its body cringe from the shockwaves.

“Well, there’re bones in there,” he said dubiously. “And I suppose they’ll do even if the flesh is no good. Come back tomorrow and I’ll see if I can fit it in.”

“Tomorrow?” said Buckletin with the genuine alarm of the blissful encountering a fact. “Oh no no, are you sure you can’t just take it now? I promised my wife the cup would be back this very evening! Please, my friend, my good grinder, can’t you just squeeze it in? Last thing before your meal, quick as a blink – see how small it is? It won’t take more than two twists of your pestle!”

In the face of such marshalled, earnest inconsiderateness from a publicly revered person Spoonfrond caved, but had the self-respect to do so gracelessly. “Okay fine, sure, I guess, well, maybe this one time, it’ll be tough, I’ll fit it in somehow,” he said in one long beleaguered sigh.

“Thank you!” said Buckletin, filled with cheer and an utter absence of awareness, and he departed in good spirits, leaving all of his troubles in his wake to fume and spill over the great granite slab of the grinder’s counter of the bakery.

Spoonfrond glared in distaste at the little trapped beast. It was, he realized with a pinch of amusement and a pound of revulsion, mirroring his expression in a most uncanny way.

“Vile beast,” he muttered, and put it to the back of the queue and out of his mind.

He took up the great pestle, hewn from a sapling that had held up a rainbow’s end. He took up the broad mortar, hollowed from a skywhale’s brain-pan.

There was grinding to do.

So grinder Spoonfrond ground.

He ground the fat-defleshed bones of the skywhale that had come in last night, thicker than his forelimbs and fighting the pestle every turn of the way, sparking with lightning that seared the scant hair of his forearms, and he put them into broad cakes that stank most heavenly with ozone, each a feast for a family with leftovers.

He ground the last bones of the day’s catch of cirric dogfish – lean and crumbly when dried, elastic and springy fresh, barely bones at all if you asked him, but oh what a fine toothsome loaf they made.

He ground the musty attic-smelling still-dripping bones of a nimbostratic gulper, and he shaped them into dumplings to be boiled in rainbroth at home until they were no longer bitter and would instead of spittle drip with toothsome, oilsome, delightsome grease.

He ground the many and thin and MANY bones of a sunfish that had swum too close to the sky, and he patted the charred lean loves that emerged fondly – they always baked so evenly.

He ground a little too vigorously, and cursed as he knocked over the scale and had to retrieve it from the floor. Clatter clatter clunk clang smash clang clunk.

He ground the fine-toothed bones of the lean skylurks that whispered unwholesome things under the gables of the giants’ homes and crept into their shoes at night to nest, and put them into simple muffins for midday snacks.

He ground a long, long, long sheaf of dried auroarfish borealis vertebrae, pale and perfect in the night, and from them made an anniversary cake of eighty beautiful interlocking donuts like chain-links, that could wrap around the happy couple twice over with room to spare, seasoning each in a different colour.

He ground until he was light in the head and then realized he was suffering from smoke inhalation, and that the air was hazy, and that it wasn’t coming from the oven, and that his door was open a crack and he hadn’t heard it happen because his golden doorchime was missing.

Then he fell over.

Spoonfrond’s last blurry thought before he passed out was that his head hurt from more than the impact. Someone had left broken glass all over his floor, and the cupboard he kept the matches in – dried pine saplings dipped in their own tar – was swinging wide open.

When he woke up again it was all over and it was too late to do anything but complain about it. Which he did, to every being in the hospital.

***

Kettlemuck was picking his teeth with a knife down at the wharf – as sky-fishers did, or so he’d assumed they did when he was a child, which had been whole YEARS ago by now – when he smelled the smoke. That got his attention. Then he saw the running fire brigade with their emergency glacier-buckets, which raised his eyebrows.

Then he heard a doorchime. That just confused him until he saw it scuttling along the ground at ankle-height, clutched in the grips of what smelled like a very tiny and very dirty giant.

“Ho!” he called. “Halt!”

The thing didn’t halt, which meant it was probably alright by the code of the sky-fishers to do what Kettlemuck did next and fling his knife at it. A meter-long blade of good wholesome sunset steel spun happily through the last of the day’s blue and embedded itself precisely in front of the scuttling vermin, which ducked and wove and hurried its way under the lofty cloud-pillared wall of the nearest garden.

Kettlemuck looked down the street. The bakery was aflame. The doorchime looked familiar. And if the bakery was aflame…

“Little shit! My order wasn’t ready yet!” he shouted at the unthinking vermin and the world in general, and took the wall at a leap, harpoon unsheathed and at the ready, bad-weather kilt of haze and smog swirling about his legs, teeth gritted until thunder cracked, every inch the portrait of the sky-fisher at the ready, defending kin and feeding kith with every expedition into the trackless reaches between the big broad blue and the black beyond.

He landed on the far side up to his ass in beans, tripped over a stalk, and almost landed on top of the escaping vermin, which shrieked in a barely-audible voice whose pitch cleaned his ears like a finger round a cup’s rim. Kettlemuck’s mind recoiled, Kettlemuck’s body lunged, and Kettlemuck’s harpoon split the difference and plunged a jagged furrow through the clouds below, dropping him down to his armpit – and then, abruptly, dizzingly, up to his armpit. He dangled below the garden, tangled in bean roots, gripping to the edge of the world by one finger.

Something touched the one finger.

Kettlemack looked up and saw a good meter-long blade of wholesome sunset steel and a little vermin clutching a golden doorchime in its free hand.

“Cursed be ye and yours from all that lies above,” he said. But he was a little surprised still and the knife was very sharp, so instead what came out was more like this.

“Ah! Uhh-nuh! ACK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH”

and so on.

***

Jack cut down the wispy cloud of a beanstalk afterwards to be safe against pursuit, then moved on out – to a bigger city, a bigger place where you could sell a magical golden thing that made music on its own.

But slow month by slow year, eventually, gradually, a second beanstalk sprouted from the crater where Kettlemuck had landed. A scrap he’d kept in his belt for emergencies, for an empty plate in times of need, fueled by his good strong bones and learning, root by root, stalk by stem, of all that lay around it.

And oh, and oh, what lay around it was such excess, such luxury, such shallow-rooted fleetingness! It knew how to compete with that. A thing that lives in the sky knows that nothing must go to waste.

It grew long meters while remaining a humble surfacebound sprout, wispy and ethereal. Downwards. Outwards. Reaching, gnawing at the deep earth’s feed of minerals and organic detritus, drinking down its cold hidden waters steeped straight from the bedrock. Storing its treasures in roots and tubers and nodules. Bracing its feet before stretching its arms.

There were no giants in the earth in those days.

But that left room for just one.

In a manner of speaking, Nezzy’s brother had been killed by the dragon.

It had been the dragon that had come to their lands years before, unprovoked and unsent for and unwanted. It had been the dragon that had hollowed the old bailey into its den and feasted upon the headmen within. It had been the dragon that had taken as satisfaction a head of cattle a moon – and two sheep besides –in payment. And it had been the dragon who at last fell to the blade and hooves and bravery of an adventurer-prince, bestial and ravening hunger laid low by skill and grace.

So if the dragon had been a little fiercer, a little faster, a little hungrier, a little less clumsy and a little more wise, Nezzy’s older brother wouldn’t be on the gibbet in the Square right now, where the crows were debating over the division of his eyes.

***

It had been a long time since their lands had known the hand of a king. Things had been relearned slowly. Allowances had been given. He was a just ruler.

Do not cut or fell the trees in the woods without express permission of the king, through his headmen.

Do not hunt the game in the woods above a given size, and do not seek permission otherwise from the king or from his headmen.

Do not fail to pay a tithe of the harvest or its equivalent value to the king through the headmen, annually.

Do not refuse a request of the king or his headmen for your time or your labour.

Do not gather an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods.

Nezzy’s family had broken one or another of those rules in the first few years, but whose hadn’t?

Then mother passed, quick and quiet in the winter, and father drank until he got in fights enough to follow her, and Nezzy and her brother had gotten a bit behind, a little distracted, and that earned them a few big warnings and then her brother had gathered an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods, and when a headman had suggested that some of them looked fresh-cut he had expressed his disagreement less than delicately.

So now he was on the gibbet, and his tithe had been taken, and Nezzy was owner of an elderly donkey and two worn cows and a half-broken shack and a headful of thoughts she shouldn’t dwell on and couldn’t stop.

Going somewhere was more important than deciding where to go. So she went, and her body did the thinking while her head did the wandering.

***

Dragons weren’t common, and thank the skies and the stones that it was so, people said. They lived in the trackless and traceless places, on moors and in thickets, where hills were stony and soil grew thin and no farm or herd could tend for a single season. No one looked for them, no one wished for them, some were just afflicted by them, and who could dare ask why?
But if you talked to the folk who worked in the woods – the deep treecutters, the charcoal-makers, the rangers and the trailblazers and the huntsmen, they would mention things. Not speak of them, you mind – not dwell on them, not introduce them, consider them, measure them, offer advice on them. Just little things in passing.

“Big one out past quarter-moon lake.”

And everyone present hadn’t nodded, hadn’t grunted agreement, had just kept on talking and if anyone had asked why none of them had ventured out by quarter-moon lake in almost a year, maybe they’d get the same answer and maybe they’d just get a shrug.

Best not to talk about what you didn’t want to think about.

Well, Nezzy was past thinking now. And past quarter-moon lake by a league, where the remnants of the trails were uneven and strange.

No fresh blazes. No woodsign. No trace of tent or graze.

But the path itself was clear. The trees hadn’t grown in. The shrubbery hadn’t swallowed it whole.

Something walked here.

Nezzy’s body, which was still doing her thinking for her, kept checking the wind and scanning her sightlines and – most importantly – never once loosened her grip on Irribelle’s lead. If something was wrong the donkey would know before she did, half-blind or no, and she wanted to have firsthand advice on which way to run first.

***

The cave smelt like death.

The cows refused to budge before Nezzy even caught wind of it. Irribelle dug in her hooves at the sight of it. And her stomach tried to keep her out when she stepped into it.

Dangerous to have the light at your back.

Dangerous to stand between any living thing and its only path away from you.

Dangerous to go alone into the woods where anyone with sense was staying clear, keeping out.

Dangerous to be the last member of a family whose second-last member had called the king in his bailey all sorts of things in public that you shouldn’t think even in private.

Dangerous to have half a fallen-down shack and two cows and a donkey to your name with winter coming on sooner than later.

While her mind collected all of those facts and stood there looking at them like an idiot, Nezzy’s body struck a light and walked in.

Still a breeze at her heels from the outside. Safe.

Still a dancing spark in her grip. Safe.

Still no movement on the walls beyond the twist and turn of the shadows. Sa

it growled.

Nezzy’s body stopped moving. Her mind accelerated.

The growl wasn’t stopping.

She stepped back. It sunk.

She stepped forward. It rose.

She stood where she was and raised her light and it pitched into a snarl into a short sharp squeal and a cluster of tree-gluttons bounced free of their nest and seethed past her feet to more hidden corners, bright teeth bared and angry eyes glistening, beautiful fur on sleek-shouldered frames and sharp sharp claws.

The nest, she recognized on inspection, was a bear’s carcass, half-mummified and half-skeletonized. It had probably died in hibernation, starved in its bed with nowhere to find food.

That could explain a little of the smell, and the rest was set by the leavings around the nest. All very regular. Very normal.

The noise she heard was not normal at all and also somewhat quieted by distance, so it took Nezzy a moment to place it: a donkey, frightened, cut short.

***

She’d seen the dragon six times. Four as a child, twice as an adult; five living, one dead and dangling from the tree of the Square, before they cut it down and raised up the gibbet. It had been huge and huge and huge and huge and stayed that way until it was dead and she could see it was taller than a horse, but not by much, and longer than a horse, but mostly in tail, and fiercer-toothed than any bear, but not impossibly, and so on. Its size had grown up with her in a way its body hadn’t.

This dragon’s belly was taller than a horse. This dragon’s tail was longer than a house. This dragon’s skull was larger than a bear. This dragon’s mouth contained all of Irribelle’s body, bar one stray hoof.

It crunched. The hoof fell and landed, maybe it made a noise or maybe it didn’t because Nezzy couldn’t hear a thing that wasn’t her own heartbeat.

Maybe the cave wasn’t helping. Her heartbeat was resonating up from her bones into her ears out and into the stone and back in her ears and to fix this she needed to get out of the cave. Yes, that was reasonable.

She stepped out of the cave into the daylight and the dragon looked at her. Tilted its skull, let those two seemingly-tiny eyes settle on her. Forward-facing like an eagle. Feet like an eagle too, three-toed and three-clawed. No arms.

Nezzy had seen the dragon six times. But she’d lived with it for years and years, and she remembered the rules her parents had taught her.

Do not make eye contact. If you do, do not hold it. Release it and move on.

Do not shed blood near it, nor show weakness or illness.

Do not stray from the adults. Do not let go of the children, and do not bring them near where it may be.

Do not ever run, and do not ever ever run away.

Do not contest its meals.

Do not venture out when it is hungry.

So Nezzy looked at the dragon’s tail, side-on as she walked – without flinching, without haste, without wobbling or whimpering – and saw by its bobbing and turning the dragon’s casual observation of her and a lack of alert focus.

And she thought to herself: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that I’m not an important meal.

And: poor Irribelle, but at least it would have been quick.

And: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that she won’t fill it up forever.

The cows were gone from where she’d left them, the tether worn apart in the sort of long-term sustained-effort that came from terror rather than panic, and it took her until near sundown to find them again, trembling in a thicket. She soothed them and patted them and brushed their sides and patted their noses and felt very badly about what she was going to do tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after.

She’d grown up with them. She’d make it quick.

***

Nezzy took Mop first. Poor trusting Mop, her brother’s favorite, who went with her because what else could she do, and she led Mop back towards home and tied her close to a tree and killed her as quick and quiet as she could, which was hard because Mop was no deer and she hadn’t had occasion to practice on deer since the king came.

“Sorry,” she said afterwards, and in reply she thought she heard that half-quenched bray again. Sorry Irribelle. Sorry Mop.

Better than to starve, right? Would brother have said that? Before or after he went on the gibbet?

Her knife grew dull and her arms grew sore, but the work gave her legs a rest until it was done and it was time to move, joint by joint, cut by cut, bone and muscle and sinew, all that weight that Mop had taken every moment of her life heaved up and hauled through the too-clear-paths by a single aching human body, limbs hauling limbs.

She alternated heavy and light. A big chunk. A tantalizing giblet. A whole leg. The liver.

Work and rest, work and rest. The trip back to Mop grew longer, the distance to the cave shorter.

“Hurry up,” Nezzy told herself as she flagged. The sun was high, the evening was going to come. This wasn’t something she wanted to do at night, although she’d bet her shoes that no bear wolf or otherwise was left in these forests for as far as they could run.

She threw the last, bloodied chunk – Mop’s tongue – into the air in the direction of the cave – as far as she could – and left, a stumbling, red-smeared walking corpse. If quarter-moon lake wasn’t as far away as all she’d walked today combined she’d have taken herself all the way there to clean herself; she made do with a cold stream and a mossy stone for a scrub, then shambled all the way to where Brush waited.

She hadn’t broken her tether this time. Either she trusted Nezzy more or she was too frightened to move without Mop. Nezzy wasn’t sure which made her feel worse, and slept guiltily against the cow’s flank with Irribelle’s death-cry in her ears again, distant and wavering.

***

She moved at dawn, stiff and sure, and before she’d even reached Mop’s butchering ground she knew she’d done it. The distant stink from downwind. The quiet of the larger birds. The little itch at her eyes that said: Look Wider, Look Carefully.

The dragon lay at rest under the tree, tucked neatly on its coiled legs like a hen, long tail behind it. Its eyes were open or maybe not, shaded under the thick ridge of its brows.

Mop was no longer in evidence.

Were its sides fuller? Did its stomach look distended? At rest it was hard to say what was which, and it wasn’t as if her parents had ever let her anywhere near the dragon when it was full, scarce less when it was feeding, never at all when it was hungry.

But she measured Mop by the bloody tether wrapped around the tree’s trunk, and she measured the dragon from that, and she put that together with Irribelle.

It can make room, she told herself. But a day or two first. A day or two. There’s water nearby, the weather is nice. It won’t move.

A day or two. She could brush Brush. Comb her until she shone.

The dragon’s head had raised up. When had that happened? It was smelling the air. She should’ve heard that, she’d forgotten how quiet the old dragon could be, had already lost in disbelief her memories that this dragon had crept up on Irribelle and killed her by surprise. Big didn’t have to mean loud. Not all big things were kings.

She walked back into the woods, kept downwind the whole way. And for two, three, four days she tended to Brush until her lean sides gleamed like new, in the noon sun and under the full moon, and with every other sweep she told her ‘thank you,’ because that sounded less cruel and self-serving than ‘sorry.’

***

Brush she doled out over a wider distance. Four days of observation showed her a dragon willing to slumber in place after a good meal, and she took that time to prepare a long and bloody trail, one that took them past the very rim of quarter-moon lake.

She didn’t see it move, at night or in the day. But on the morning of the fifth day it lay happily in the morning sun where Brush’s carcass had been.

Nezzy breathed out slow.

“Thank you.”

Nezzy breathed in slow, then almost choked because she knew better than to make a single noise around this thing and because she knew better she hadn’t done that, she swore she hadn’t unless her mind was fighting her body one and for all right next to a no-longer-sleeping dragon. Its head was up. Its snout tested at the air lazily.

She was downwind. Safe.

“Thank you,” said her own voice.

Nezzy broke her own rules and ran. She was not punished.

***

She stayed away five full days that time. Told herself she was waiting for the right game to come by. Told herself she was waiting for the dragon’s belly to empty again, get it just hungry enough. Told herself several things that were completely true while being obvious lies.

So she sat in a blind she’d made by a stream she’d favoured some years ago – when food had been tight and doing something the king didn’t know about seemed safe – where the tracks seemed fresh enough, and for three days she let the selfsame stag drink and walk away, telling herself she was just holding on for something a bit bigger, or getting up the perfect shot.

The stag left again and she walked back to her den, scraped under a fallen tree. A bear would likely appreciate this spot come winter, and by the smell of it, already had.

“Thank you.”

Nezzy jumped, full on leapt straight upwards like a squirrel on a branch with her heart between her teeth, and before she landed she knew that wasn’t her imagination, she wasn’t tired enough to be mistaken, and that it was her voice.

Nobody near, not in sight, not on the trail.

She wanted to run. She couldn’t see where to run. She didn’t run.

“Hurry up.”
She ran. She ran like she hadn’t since she was four and racing her brother. She ran like she hadn’t since the miller had called to her and said the leech was with her mother. She ran like she hadn’t known better.

When she was done she cowered in her scrape of dirt and dead wood and maybe she slept and maybe she didn’t and she rose with the dawn and stopped the stag’s life before it saw another sunset.

The knife was dull as a spoon by then. She kept her mind on that, and off other things.

***

“Dragon!”

Thump thump thump, the noisy sound of human feet on human floors of human dwellings, the loudest thing she’d ever heard. She hadn’t been in the woods that long, had she?
“Dragon!”

A distant whisper, a cautious mutter behind closed doors and latched shutters.

“Dragon!”

She was loud. She was so damned loud, louder than any of them, loudest thing she’d heard. Was that enough? She hadn’t been in the woods that long, surely.

“Dra-“

The bailey’s door opened under her hands, which clawed at nothing for a moment before fisting in a shirt. A headman blinked at her, groggy in the daylight, annoyed by her presumption. He hit her – irritated, businesslike – and she let her head snap to the side and pass the force in one side and out the other, gasped like she had no air in her lungs (she didn’t) and like she was shocked (she wasn’t).

“What?” he asked. Thump thump thump, other feet on the move. She HAD been loud enough then; they’d heard her words, not just some idiot making a ruckus.

“Dragon!” she said, loud but talking-loud now, shaken but reasonable, eager to speak up. “In the fields! It took my cow!” She clawed at his arms, blood slipping wetly from her to him. “Get the king! Send for the king! Help! Help! Help! Dragon!”

She took another punch then, but she’d expected that, made sure to smear the headman extra good on her way down the ground – which earned her a kick and she’d expected that too but damnit, his boots were too new and too good.

“Dragon?” the next headman asked. She could hear it behind the shutters in the houses too, between the tiny whispers. Could hear it passing from headman to headman down the hall into the bailey. Dragon? Dragon? Dragon?

“Who knows,” said the first headman, whose clothes were so fine he must be the bailey’s steward, and she might have smeared a bit too much blood on him because he sounded more upset with her than he did about the hue and cry. “But – hst! Hear that?”

Bless the paranoia of the shepherds. Bless the keen noses of their dogs. Bless whatever quick-footed paranoid had made it to the warning bell in the Square first.

Ding! Ding! Ding! The dragon was hungry! The dragon was to be fed! Let it come to the sound! Let it come to the square!

Nezzy could have left then. Their eyes were off her. Their thoughts. Their hands.

But she was too busy hoping, too busy thinking, and for once she let her brain creep into those thoughts too: did it work? Will it come? Will the bell frighten it? What if?

What if what if what if what if what if

“Bring her.”

Firm. Decisive. Sure. Mannerless.

She’d never actually heard the king speak before. But with that voice – not its pitch, or its timbre, but its attitude – she didn’t need to see the steed or the steel armour or the fine blade, did she?

***

Down the way from the bailey they marched in company, two score good headmen and all the rest besides, and the king at their front, armed and armoured. To the Square, to the gibbet, to the bell.

Nezzy got to march near the front, besides the steward. Well, half march, half drag. If she did too much of the former he shoved her until it became the latter.

The Square was empty, the bell-ringer fled. Even the echoes had gone cold before they arrived. Headmen spread like lumpy jam across the way, hammered on doors and pried at shutters.

“Open up!”
“Did you see anything?”
“Who ran the bell?”

“Hurry up.”
It was not very loud, it was in Nezzy’s ear. It was in her own voice.

“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up,” she said aloud. The steward looked sharp at her from the end of her cuffs.
“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up!” she called. He swore at her and yanked her tight, was shouting something in her face.

“Hurry up.”
“Hurry UP!” she yelled, shoved him hard in the stomach, smearing what sticky blood was left on her palms on his oiled mail. He grabbed her face and put a hand on his belt and someone made a short sharp cry.

Like Irribelle, she thought.

The steward turned to look. Everyone did. Nezzy shouldn’t have, but she’d shouldn’t have a lot of things.

The dragon stood between the company and the bailey, nosing with interest the remains of a headman. His body was heaped, if it was in pieces it couldn’t have been more than two.

Then it stood up and looked at them. All the way up.

It had forearms, Nezzy realized. They were simply very very small compared to the rest of it.

Its mouth opened the tiniest fraction. Something wet and sharp was inside. “Hurry up,” said Nezzy’s voice, right in her ear. Right in everyone’s ear, the way the company jolted.

“Thank you,” said Nezzy.

“Thank you,” said the dragon. And then – a quick jerk of its head – a short, sharp terrible sound, the half-choked bray of a donkey cut-short, and like that was a rallying horn the company raised their arms and cried and it moved.

Nezzy broke her rule again. Nezzy ran. Nezzy ran away, and Nezzy ran for the end of the company, where the king was cursing and wrestling with the head of his horse – the same he’d killed that older dragon atop? Surely not – and grabbed at his stirrups and hauled herself up, still coated in the leftover drying paste of stag’s blood, and started a fight with a man coated in tempered steel and brandishing a sword meant to be used from horseback.

It went poorly for Nezzy, although the sword wasn’t much help against someone practically inside the same suit of armour as its wielder. She swore and spat and clawed at the metal mask and twisted and thrashed like an eel as the horse jerked and shook under her, took two solid blows that – at the very least – removed some of her teeth, and did everything she could to keep all her weight, all her pressure on that one arm that was groping at his waist, where his dagger was.

The horse bucked, but even if she wasn’t strapped in the king was, and she took the weightlessness and let it put her right full on top of him, capturing his arm until he gave up and let loose the reins and struck at her left-handed and even as she lost a few more teeth she fell and grabbed and stole the dagger loose as she fell, swung wildly against firm hide and heard a terrible equine shriek, felt hooves slam near her head, then something else.

The world moved. A claw bigger than her forearm moved past her, one of three on one of two gigantic feet.

She’d broken a second rule. She’d contested the dragon’s prey. But it had broken another, and another, because not only was it bleeding but it turned to flee.

The king shouted something, and if he’d still had use of his sword he’d probably have brandished it. But instead all he could do was wave his arm –

Do not contest its prey. Do not make eye contact.

– which was what the dragon took him by, and when it tore him loose from the horse and let him fly he was limp both in flight and after his landing, so that Nezzy wasn’t quite sure at which moment he’d been killed.

She laid there on the ground, bleeding slightly, surrounded by many who were bleeding thoroughly, and when she was done she stood herself up – steadily, not slowly or quickly – and looked at the dragon’s tail, which indicated the dragon was bent over (face deep in the king’s horse, which was larger than any of the many, many, many headmen lying about, and less metallic) and facing in her direction.

Nezzy brushed her sides once, deliberately, and walked forwards – edge-on to her audience – and towards the door of the nearest house.

She knocked.

“Thank you,” said her voice.

“This is the new steward of the bailey,” she said. “Please let me in. There are some old rules you ought to know about, and some new ones you can forget.”

Part II: Fit For A King
The world was warm and dark and soft and vast, so vast that the little loud angry part of it is Nezzy’s ear stuck out all the worst, like a tiny pebble in a big boot.

She bent all the power of her will to ignoring it.

Success. All was wasn’t once more and forever.

Then water broke everything.

Nezzy shouted something unspeakable and jerked upright, hair turned traitor and congealed into a sopping mop that kept the cold hateful liquid close to her tender scalp. A scalp that was presently clutched in a big none-too-tender hand.

“You up for real this time?”
Nezzy said something unspeakable again.

“Good. Nod off again and I’ll stick a funnel in your ear and piss in it. Can’t make you dumber.”

“Cousin,” said Nezzy.

“Cousin. Family. Yes, if you’ve got nothing else, you’ve got family. And we’re all the family we have now, aren’t we?”
Yes. No more ailing mother, no more grieving father, and aunt and uncle had gone years before in the fire. And no more brother. Just Nezzy and Cousin Hacca. Cousin Hacca and her gentle manner. Cousin Hacca and her slender blacksmith’s arms.

“Go and die,” suggested Nezzy.

“Maybe I will. Maybe you’ve helped with that. Maybe it’s time for you to fix what you broke. Had a good night’s sleep after a hard night’s drink and fight and ruining everyone’s lives so I guess you’re ready now as any. I brought a sausage.”

“Gimme.”
Hacca gave her the sausage. It was cold and lint-ridden from her pocket and over-greasy and off to start with and she’d never needed anything so badly as long as she didn’t think about her brother and the last month.

“C’mere and take a look,” said Hacca. She’d stood next to the window.

Reluctantly, in defiance of the awful, hateful, penetrating light, Nezzy approached and looked outside.

They were in the bailey on the second floor. That explained the good bed she’d been slumped over and the fine desk she’d knock over and the sturdy chair she’d kicked until a leg came loose. That also explained her sore foot.

The dragon sleeping outside the bailey’s gate explained the rest.

“Like what you see?” asked Hacca.

“Should I?”

Hand on the scalp again, yanking on her braid like they were six. “Yes you’d BETTER you wart on a mule’s taint, because YOU did that! You! You brought it here! You’d better have some idea of what you were doing, and you’d better have some idea of what you were going to do next, and that’d better not have dribbled out your behind with the rest of your brains while you sucked down half the steward’s best firkin! Now REMEMBER.”

Hacca released her hair. Nezzy’s chin nearly hit the windowledge before she caught herself, and in that sharp drop and intake of breath she remembered another breath, another angry voice.

***

The folks of the Square had been tense. Having a king slaughtered on your doorstep with all his headmen did not soothe the nerves. But she’d gone from house to house, slipping through the alleyways and the shadows of the eaves while the not-too-distant crunch and gulp of the dragon’s dining slid alongside her.

“I am the new steward of the bailey,” she said to each door. And she told them the old rules they should know, about eye contact, and showing blood or weakness, and watching the young and elderly, and not entering the woods when it was hungry, which made them shrink. And she told them that the new rules – of tithe and tribute and duties and forbiddances – were all gone, which made them stare. And then she told them goodday and went to the next house.

It was the eleventh house – farther from the battle – where someone spoke back.

“Why’d you do it?”
“I didn’t do anything,” she’d lied.

“Why’d you do it? You left to die in the woods and then you came back and that thing came right behind you! I saw it when the bells rang! You led it to the bailey and put blood in the streets and a dragon back in our midst, just when we’d gotten rid of the old one, and for what? Because your brother was too stupid to shut up when the king-”

She wasn’t sure who he was – he? Yes, probably? – but she’d hit him very hard. Yes.

Someone else had taken exception and she’d hit them too.

***

After the fight was over Nezzy had gone home (which was the bailey now, since she was the steward) and gotten drunk, which was amusingly backwards now that she was awake enough to think about it.

That explained some of her bruises. The missing teeth were the king’s responsibility. She’d taken the trade happily; less than a minute later the dragon had killed him like a cat would a rat: irresistible yet restrained force delivered in eager glee

“I remember,” she said.
“Really?”
“Not opening the firkin,” she admitted. “But everything else.”
“Glad to hear spending the night stuck in here waiting for you to wait up wasn’t a total loss. You remember how to get rid of it?”
Nezzy squinted down again. The dragon was still sleeping, hadn’t budged. She knew how quickly and quietly it could change that. “No?”

Movement stop-and-started behind her, paused from slamming her chin into the stonework.

“Softie.”
“It’s the kids,” Hacca said frankly, unfondly. “You learn to reel it in or you learn to accept being your mother. In the name of all and everything, I’m not doing that.”
There was a significant syllable in that sentence. “Kids?”
“Yeah. Get rid of that thing you dragged in and you’ll live long enough to be an aunt again. Deal?”
Nezzy’s eyes hadn’t left the dragon, but her attention had. Was its snout turned to that side before? Too quick and too quiet.

“Deal,” she said. Because just like last time, it was this or nothing. And nothing never was what it promised.

***

Get rid of it.

Well, how could that be harder than bringing it there had been? Days and days and days freezing in the woods, dismembering three animals into breadcrumb trails with nothing but a sharp knife and total disregard for safety and sanity because that had been less important than daring a dragonslaying king to do it again against an animal half the age and ten times the size of the one he’d put down.

Now the king was dead and Nezzy was still alive and, she was startled to realize, she now cared about staying that way. Not in the bitter, nailed-down panic of someone who had a goal to accomplish come flame or scream but in the abstract, messy, vague way she vaguely remembered feeling all her life until she’d watched her brother spin and dangle in the Square.

What an inconvenient thing to feel again, when leaving the bailey meant walking right by the body of a slumbering animal whose mouth could fit three of her inside it without difficulty or a need for chewing.

No, there were better things to focus on. Like the bailey door. Well oiled, well tended – the king had been a prudent man, had cared for the things that stood between him and the rest of the land. Like his doors, and his rules, and his armour. And much good that had done him.

Nezzy appreciated the door, but didn’t rely on it. Slipped loose, sideways. Heel-toe, heel-toe, careful as if she were stalking a deer. Glanced at the dragon, saw it still sitting senseless.

Good. Good. She was out.

Now she could plan. With the air around her she could think again.

Get rid of it.

Not for a few days at least, not after the meal it’d had. At least. The king’s horse had not been small, and. Hmm. Neither had been the king and his headmen. Two score and more of headmen, all loyal to the end or loyal to too-near-to-flee.

She’d better check the battlefield. If she wanted the dragon to hunger again, to be lured again, to be spirited away into the woods, she’d need it without a banquet.

So she walked the road to the Square – longer now than it had been before, desperate and angry and frightened and tethered – and surveyed the wreckage.

Untouched. On the one hand, not a shock: from what she remembered of the houses she’d visited last night, nobody had been in a hurry to step outdoors. One day, one sleepless night, one morning. There’d be a little bit longer before anyone decided they needed laundry or chores or drag away and bury the corpses of men they feared-at-best more than they needed to avoid the dragon.

On the other hand, untouched. Within sight of the bailey, where the dragon slept. The horse was an unpleasant stain on the cobbles, taken hooves, saddle and all. But every one of those two score and more remained where they fell – to pieces, in pieces, whole but made small, whole but bent oddly, torn loose and leaking.

None of them touched. Morsels spread out far and wide and unplucked by the dragon.

Still sampled though. There were crows, enjoying a feast far grander than that ever provided by the gibbet. Anyone face-up was eyeless.

Nezzy thought of her brother and felt her teeth bare giddily. And as if drawn by a magnet, she took her feet to the king.

Yes, left where he fell. No crows for him, covered head to toe in armour. Untouched, if you didn’t count the interesting smells already brewing from within him. Death, in its majestic equality and dignity, did not see fit to withhold the royal bowels from the cobbles.

She was laughing. Quietly, but with real joy behind it. So she made herself busy and her over-blunted knife and began to cut loose the king’s armour, piece by piece, and when his body was free she dragged it to the center of the square, to the stump of the tree, to the gibbet, and she looked up at the rope and her arms already ached twice over.

“Deal?” said Hacca.

“Deal,” said Nezzy.
“Deal?” said Hacca. “Deal?”

Nezzy’s gut let her tired, hungover brain know that Hacca would never leave the bailey as long as the dragon was still sleeping in front of it.

“Deal,” said someone who wasn’t Nezzy, in her voice.

She went over the old rules from the old dragon again, very quickly and very calmly.

Do not make eye contact. Do not hold it.

Do not shed blood near it, do not show injury.

Do not let the children in its sight.

Do not run.

Do not contest its meals.

Do not venture out when it is hungry.

She wasn’t doing any of those things, mayb-

The king’s corpse hung like a side of beef in her hands.

Do not contest its meals.

-well. She hadn’t done most of those things.

Nothing to do but lay down the body – carefully, with a gentleness she didn’t feel, no sudden movements from either of them – and step back and stretch your arms, casually, overhead. Warming up in the still-rising sunlight. Glance around casually.

The dragon was standing behind her, head at a slight tilt, something like a dog or a bird and a lot more like a fifty-foot pile of scales and death on two legs. She could smell the horsemeat and blood on its quiet breaths, even closemouthed.

Nezzy didn’t step back. She turned and walked away at an angle, behind the gibbet. Not turning her back, not backing away, not cowering. Calm and collected. Untroubled and unbothered. She nearly filled her pants four ways over.

The dragon stepped forward. Not for her, not for Nezzy. It stepped forward and pressed its nose to the king, inhaled one long, steady huff.

Then it took him in its mouth, raised its head, and with a twist of its neck – thicker than Nezzy stood tall – it flung him through the air.

He was unarmoured. The noise was thicker and wetter this time.

“Hurry up,” the dragon said in Nezzy’s voice, head tilting again.

She leaned against the gibbet and watched.

Sixteen times. Sixteen times it smelled at him, pawed at him with its great three-toed foot, plucked him from the dirt with its teeth like a bitch with her pups, sent him to flying. On the thirteenth time it stopped to investigate his innards, licked him cautiously.

It took an hour, one of the best of Nezzy’’s life. And at the end it sighed – a real true bone-rustler of a sigh, all the way out, a little bit back in – and turned on its heel and walked back up the way,

Back to the bailey.

And there, at the door, it once again curled its long, thick-muscled legs under it, hunkered down like a broody chicken, and shut its eyes.

Well then.

Nezzy watched as the crows came for the splatter of the king and began to think.

So. Not such a banquet after all. Too sour? Too sweet? Too salty? Too small? Just too full for now?

A horse was maybe enough. A horse was clearly preferred. A cow had sufficed, a donkey had been accepted, a deer would do. Beg some livestock to be sacrificed now for future benefit, lure the dragon into the woods, farther and farther. Lure it all the way out to past quarter-moon lake, back where she found it, and – and…

…and hope that it stayed there, where it had clearly been hungry enough to eagerly follow her scraps?

Hope that it didn’t stay here, where it had stood and fought – against small enemies, yes, but so many of them? It could’ve left. It hadn’t. It had fought and killed for this ground, and now it was comfortably sleeping there – had chosen to comfortably sleep there again.

Did she have to pull it out into the deep woods and find something to fight it? Hope that it liked its new home better? Hope she could find a place to park the biggest dragon she’d ever heard of that had enough food to sustain it and wasn’t so favoured by the other woodsfolk that she’d be ‘accidentally’ shot by hunters in midwinter and have her body hidden in a charcoal pile?

Too much hope needed over only so much at hand.

Nezzy walked back to the battlefield, back to where the king had laid. Picked up his helmet in her hand, stared into its idiot polished surface. Flecked with crow guano on the outside.

She turned it. A hint of dried bloody spit marred the inside.

Fine steel still, though. Fine steel. Their king had taken their wealth and spent it on what mattered most to him.

Well, he had given it back, in its way. Useless but for trade, though – you couldn’t hunt a deer with a sword, but you could buy cattle for-

Ah, now that was a thought, and-

Oh.

Oh.

Nezzy trotted back to the bailey; forcing all her muscles to slow into a double-step as she approached the dragon. It squinted one eye open at her and grumbled in a sleepy way as she slipped through the door.

“I’ve got it,” she told it.

***

“I’ve got this.”

“You’re out of your mind,” said Hacca, but quietly and without intensity. Her body was too rigid to muster rage, standing with a single-however-thick wooden door between her and a sleeping dragon.

“Come on. It’s safe. I’ve been three times now. I’m there right now. Am I eaten yet?”
“You’re going to kill me and run.”
“No.”
“You’d rather murder me than be an aunt again.”
“No.”
“Hurry up,” said Nezzy’s voice.

“What?”

Nezzy held up one hand and looked at the dragon. It shut its eye again and gurgled quietly.

The scent of horsemeat in her nose again. Sharply half-digested.

“I said hurry up,” said Nezzy. She could explain that later. “I’ve got something for you to look at.”

Hacca was paler than fresh snow, but she listened. And she listened when Nezzy hissed not to run, and she watched their backs up until Nezzy found the king’s fallen sword and she had something to look at that was, to her, so much more interesting than the dragon.

“Never seen it up close before.”
“And?”

“It’s quality,” said Hacca. “The headmen carried worse.”
“Yes, but they carried two score and more of them.”
“Mmm.”
“And the steward’s chain. And their rings. And the king’s armour.”

Hacca was still glaring, but in the way that meant she was concentrating. Adding up all that metal. All that craftsmanship.

“That’s a lot of cattle,” said Hacca.

“Enough cattle?”
“Enough for what? You want to eat one a week?”

Nezzy scowled. “Not me,” she said. “And if that’s what we’ve got, it won’t be enough. Not if it’s going to stay.”

Hacca dropped the sword, the sort of gesture that happened because every tendon in her arms spasmed without her say-so.

“It’s going to what?” she hissed, a yell forced by (still-sleeping) circumstance to exit between her front teeth.

“Stay,” said Nezzy. “It doesn’t think we’re tasty. It’s in no rush to hunt us as long as it’s full and we’re respectful. If you could stomach our last king you can stomach this one, at least it’ll only kill you for what you DO to it, not what you SAY about it.”

“And in return we feed it a cow a week until we’ve out of cows and deer and elders and have to start stuffing children down its gullet?” said Hacca.

“No,” said Nezzy. “We feed it a cow a week until we’re running low on cattle. Then we beg the aid of an adventurer-prince. ‘Slay the dragon! Take the land as king!’ Just like the last time. Except now our dragon is a lot bigger.”

Hacca stared at her.

“An adventurer-prince has a sword,” said Nezzy. “And headmen with swords. And a horse.” She shrugged. “More cattle. And cousin, I don’t think our neighbours will ask too many questions about where our trade-goods come from so long as they keep coming and we keep asking for their cattle.”

Hacca wasn’t blinking.  Her mouth was open just a little.  Her breathing sounded funny, not too fast, not too snow, not too hard.  Just a little funny.

“Deal?” asked Nezzy.
“All and everything above and below,” said Hacca, almost awestruck. “My idiot baby ranger cousin stands in front of me and talks of harvesting humans for their gear like conies for their pelts, to fund a murderous beast whose only function is to kill anyone that comes to challenge it.” She clasped her hands atop Nezzy’s shoulders.

“You really ARE the new steward of the bailey.”

Then Nezzy’s cousin’s forehead came at her like a bowshot.

Nezzy lay there on her back, head ringing from cobble-shaped bruise on one side and broken nose on the other.

“Deal,” said Hacca’s voice, flat and dead above her.

“Deal?” asked Hacca’s voice, distant at the bailey.

“Sure,” said Nezzy. The blood was trickling into her smile, into the gaps the king’s mailed fist had left. “Sure.”