September 22, 2010
Crop Circle I.
“You’ve got to sort of push a little. Like this,” said a voice. A wide line appeared in the wheat field.
“Hm,” said a tinier voice. One small tongue poked out of the corner of a mouth, and several minutes passed in silence. Wheat waved a little, vaguely. It might have been the wind.
“No, no. Like this,” said the older man. “Here, stick your hand out and feel it. Good. Now you try.”
“Okay.” Three stalks of wheat obligingly bent.
“Hm. Not bad, but be careful or you’ll damage the stalks.”
“‘Kay.”
“Try bending a circle of ‘em.”
“‘Kay.” A small, grubby hand stuck out, and a six-inch circle appeared in the wheat field. It rather resembled the kind of circles drunken rats might make.
Nathan solemnly looked up at his father. Dag grinned back, and a second ring appeared around the boy’s rather wonky first circle. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you making fine patterns to bewilder farmers everywhere in no time.”
The Flowers.
It must be hard, Lia often thought, to go from being a sentient piece of landscape to a human-ish being. Talk about culture shock.
So when Dag cheerfully informed her that he’d finally found something similar between human culture and landwight culture, and presented her with the sickliest looking bouquet she’d ever seen (wild rose and foxglove and some dying daisies and random sprigs of pine), she ignored the thorns and gladly accepted it, dropping them into a glass on her windowsill as fast as was kind.
He kept giving her … “flowers” was too narrow a word, but the thought was there, even if they did end up having some interesting conversations on what constituted “safe” when it came to botanicals. (Dag was floored to discover that plants could be harmful to humans, and for weeks afterward gave her nothing but herbs and the occasional carrot.)
He passed it on, too. When Nathan was five, he dropped a handful of weedy buttercups on her lap, roots, dirt, and all, and solemnly informed her that that was what you were supposed to give a lady if you liked her, and she was a lady and he liked her very much. He was not quite as … prolific a giver as his father (who, after all, was still showering her with random garden trimmings every time he realized the last batch was wilting), but every so often she’d be sitting at her desk, and she’d catch a glimpse of the glass out of the corner of her eye, and notice a new flower or two tucked neatly into place. (Nathan’s gifts, she was happy to say, were all nonpoisonous and generally lacking in stickies, though he was more inclined towards random greenery than his father.)
And then Nathan went journeying and was lost, and Dag died before even getting the chance to see his daughter, and Lia quietly pruned the last bouquet of anything likely to rot and left the rest there to dry in the strong semitropical sun. And when little Teleika found the preserved flowers and asked, gingerly touching one wrinkled brown petal, what they were, Lia set her on her knee and told her. (Lia thought she’d rarely seen anything sadder in her life, outside of open battle. Teleika thought she’d never seen anything prettier.)
And then Nathan was found, dragged back from his own special hell by one of those suspiciously nondescript people who ended up in the Guard occasionally (though Lia never did quite figure out how someone that damn pale managed nevertheless to be overlooked), and he met his sister and re-met his mother and realized his father was nowhere to be seen, and he was back in body and even mostly in mind, but he wasn’t really back at all.
And then one day a couple years later, Teleika came running in at some ungodly hour of the morning, giddily yet gently waving a sunny yellow daisy around and beaming ear to ear, and as Lia grumped out of bed to help her daughter find her own flower-glass, she thought that it might take some time, and probably more visits from that guard (who twitched so nicely when startled), and probably also being dropped into some sort of work if he didn’t do it on his own, but Nathan would be rather all right, in the end.
When she got to her office, there was a tiny budding rose, perfect and just a touch more yellow than copper, nestled amid dried holly leaves.
Lia and Dag.
There was something just kinda …. wrong about a landwight in human form. The proportions were just slightly off – not anything you could put your finger on, exactly. They moved just a little oddly, like someone not quite used to having limbs. Expressions registered just a bit off beat: smiling a hair too late, frowning almost as an afterthought. And their coloring always seemed slightly different – always earth-toned, but sometimes shading into mossy green, say, or the peculiarly bright pink found in bands in some desert canyons.
It was somewhat disconcerting.
Fortunately for Dag, Lia found disconcertion hot.
The first time they’d had sex, Lia had found herself in the highly unusual position of continually misjudging his location in space and misreading his body language, like some kind of multiform illusion. She’d started giggling uncontrollably, and fortunately he’d not realized that was not a generally desired reaction during sex, and they’d had rather a fun time of it.
She’d learned with typical rapidity how to read him, and compensating for the optical illusion of his body had not taken much longer.
Then it happened again.
And again.
And he’d finally picked up a repertoire of wicked expressions all his own, and she’d realized he was altering his body deliberately – and subtly enough that she’d not noticed.
Lia contemplated this as she watched him gleefully making a muck out of some poor sap’s cornfield, and waited for him to get bored with circles. Catching her eye, Dag tromped over and extricated himself from the bedrock, his legs rubberbanding back to more typical manly proportions as he sat on the stoop next to her.
“What?” he asked, shooting her a wicked grin full of too-straight teeth.
She looked him over for a minute, confirming her initial impressions. Yes, he’ll do, Lia thought. “Do you want to get married?”
“What, now?” he asked, a slow, lazy grin curling across his face.
Lia shivered. “Sure, why not?”
Dag bounced to his feet. “I’ll go snag Kaezia, and you can go roust Jetta. She’d never forgive you, otherwise.”
Lia rose, dusting herself off. “Well, this’ll be fun.”
“And I’ll snag some alcohol too, while I’m at it.”
Lia grinned. “I knew I loved you for a reason.”
Dag stilled, face falling into blankness, then rapidly leaned forward and kissed her. “Same to you,” he said, and was off.
April 10, 2008
Her.
She isn’t the kind of woman I’m attracted to at all.
For one thing, she’s about a foot taller than me. I’m fairly tall, as my people go; it’s disconcerting to be the one looked down on. She’s also skinny as hell. She looks as if a stiff breeze would snap her in half. She’s all bones; all hard angles and sharp lines. There’s nothing soft about her.
Her skin is landwight-dark, and her hair is a rich blond, both of which would be fine on any other woman. Her eyes, though… They’re gold, which is always an uncanny color for eyes. Perhaps even that wouldn’t be so bad, except that she doesn’t blink, and she sees everything. I swear, assassins’ knives are duller than her gaze.
Then there’s that damnable grin. She’s always grinning – in a toothy, I’m-going-to-rake-you-over-hot-coals-and-laugh-about-it manner. Okay, she’s not always grinning, but when she isn’t, she’s wearing that insufferably smug I-still-know-more-than-you-do expression that makes me want to slap her, except if I did I wouldn’t live long.
More than anything else though, she’s creepy. She’s the stereotypical creep in the dark alley, made even more unnerving by her preference for broad daylight. She sees everything, and forgets none of it, which triggers a constant caught-with-the-hand-in-the-cookie-jar reaction in everyone around her. Her whole attitude is dismissive; the world is a dark joke to her – and yet you know just by looking at her that to mess with her is to risk life and limb.
No, I’m not attracted to her at all.
Not even if she is intelligent, with a wry sense of humor and scathing wit, an admirable inability to abide fools, and an odd magnetism that draws everyone to her like moths to a flame…
Oh, damn.
—
Mother Lia.
No one ever really thought the words Liamariye Thaziazhsta and maternal instinct in the same sentence, unless it was with faint bewilderment. If there was one woman who seemed to be the embodiment of everything but motherhood, it was the ruthless, distant, and haughtily irreverent General.
Of course, most people couldn’t imagine her married, either, and the atmosphere at her wedding was one of confusion in general, and pity for her husband. Dag, being Dag, found it all amusing. Lia, typically, ignored the whole thing, though she did find a malicious joy at flashing her wedding ring at people.
I don’t know why everyone was so surprised when news of Lia’s pregnancy spread. What, precisely, did they think she did with her husband? Lia, typically, took the whole thing with her typical equanimity, although it was during this time that her craving for spicy foods led her to create her infamous hot sauce.
Of course, she was far more likely to rip off people’s heads while pregnant, as the ambassador from the Shadowlands came close to finding out personally. It just gave me more of an excuse to keep Lia from doing any diplomatic work. Still, I think everyone was relieved when the baby was finally born.
The first thing I remember about Nathan was that he was so small, especially when cradled in the arms of his seven-foot-tall mother. The second thing I remember was the vicious glare Lia directed my way; it was clear that she was ready to rip the arms off anyone who breathed wrong in her son’s presence. I smirked; all those who thought Lia had no maternal instinct were about to be proven very wrong.
***
Two weeks after Nathan was born, I ran into a haggard Dag in the kitchens. He shot me a tired smile, sat down at a corner counter, and promptly dozed off … or so I thought.
“Every night.”
“What?” I asked, rubbing my sore head. I’d slammed it into the top of the cooler door when he’d spoken.
“Every night, sometime around early morning, Nathan wakes up. Which wakes Lia up. He won’t go back to sleep until she reads to him – so she reads to him. The Encyclopedia of Naval Strategies. Diplomatic Negotiations for Dummies. A Beginner’s Guide to Conquering the World.“
I stared at him. “Are you serious?”
Dag looked at me, his green-brown eyes unusually solemn. “Yes. I don’t know where she gets the books – from her colleagues in the Bard Schools, I suppose. I’ve never heard of most of them.” He rose with a sigh. “She’s starting on The Philosophy of War tonight. I’m off to catch some sleep – I have battle strategies leaking out of my ears.”
“Nathan’s opinion of all this is…?” I asked Dag as he headed for the door.
Dag heaved another sigh. “That’s the galling thing – he’s completely enthralled.”
***
Nathan was the kind of sweet child everyone fell in love with – and he was the kind of child intelligent enough to take advantage of that. By age two, he had the whole castle wrapped around his finger – and everyone knew it, and no one minded. He was also surprisingly good at getting into mischief.
No one was entirely surprised when Lia proved to have a strange intuition concerning her son. Wherever he hid himself, she would find him – easily, without even looking around. Whatever trouble he was involved in, she’d worm him out of – always with a lecture on how to better get away with things. On one memorable occasion, Lia stood on her chair in the middle of a diplomatic conference and dragged Nathan out of the overhead air shaft – all without interrupting her statement. A curious and slightly chagrined Nathan sat on her lap for the rest of the meeting.
People were a bit surprised when Nathan grew up and joined the Healers; he’d never shown much interest in that field. Then again, he has always been a quiet boy. But deep down – or not so deep down, really, but from his core to his surface – he’s always been a kind person. It takes kindness, more than anything else, to be a healer.
Lia stands next to me, watching him leave on his apprenticeship. I look up at her. “He’ll be fine, Lia.”
“Oh, he’ll complete his apprenticeship easily; I have no doubts about him.” Lia pauses, glances at me, then glances back at her departing son. “But my intuition is screaming at me nonetheless.”
I tap her arm. “Let’s go in.”
She gives me a mocking bow. “Yes, your Majesty.”
I whack her harder, unable to avoid noticing the worry that still laces her eyes…
