Sometime around the following midday, my dorm started staying put when I looked around it. Felt like someone had played a hilarious prank on me while I slept, mainly involving floating me backwards over Wrevondale’s knobbliest waterfall. I peeled myself out of my bed, sent my clothes down the laundry hatch, showered, scrubbed clean what I could but by this point most of the mess was on the other side of my skin, and by the time I got out, the clothes had fallen back into my wardrobe again. I dressed and the room behaved itself. Very kind of it to do so. I squinted at nothing and counted the days out in my head. This week, another week, and then the final week of the semester. And I’d already missed a day and a half of this one.

  Through the week I played a game I found myself calling ‘The Prince and the Pauper’. A fun little game with beautifully simple rules. Whenever I saw The Prince, I had to turn the other way or duck into a side room or blend into a misunderstanding of students – I think that’s the group noun – and every time I saw The Prince and he didn’t see me, I got a point. Sounds easy enough, but like all the best games, there was a catch: if The Prince saw me, I lost every single one of my points and had to start again from zero.

  With a careful management of schedules and a commitment to shoving myself into the study hall instead of going to any class we shared, sticking a book under my nose and not letting myself leave till class would be over, not only did I get a considerable amount of revision and work done by the end of the week, but also and more importantly, I racked up fourteen whole points. Go me!

  And sure he wasn’t technically a prince, but by this point, why should I fucking care?

  I saw Robin and did my best to help with his work, to ease his day, and when it was only him at the counter I stood in the corner and watched him a little, knowing how he was handling things so much better than me, knowing I wanted more than anything not to drag him down to my level. I saw Omen and mentally went through my plan of getting him out on a commandeered horse and cart once he could cope with it, but before they tossed him in that insidious carriage and sent him upstream – and I wished I could have actually told him the plan, but I knew I couldn’t give him the chance to disagree. He could change his mind later. My way, he’d always have the choice. The other way, he’d be stuck there till he left in a cold wooden box.

  I saw Grove and I saw Holly, and as much as I appreciated them and what they did and how they tried to keep the dorm as cosy and comfortable as it was, I couldn’t help noticing the little… bits. The patch on the rug that still wasn’t the same colour from back when we’d changed it. The floorboard that creaked like a disapproving cat. The way the curtains weren’t perfectly straight, or the desk with its slight tilt, or the rattles of the door whenever the air pressure shifted, especially at night. All through the night sometimes. And once I heard it, I couldn’t stop hearing it. But the cottage had been perfect, and Miss Belladonna, strange as she was, had made it so. I understood her completely. I daydreamed of it, needed more of it, and every time the door rattled, I bit a little deeper into the inside of my cheek.

  I did not see Kaspar. Instead I studied and tallied my points. Strange how it was easier to learn outside of the classes – during them, my mind felt like a river blocked up by the mass of all the uncomfortable emotions, intruding and stagnating up there. Away, the river flowed free. I could do what I wanted. I wanted to avoid Kaspar, to stick with Robin, to liberate Omen, and to do any of that, first I wanted to pass this damned exam.

  If I wanted all that, what was I fearing so much?

  Hesserday finished. The weekend started tomorrow. One more week to go and I was feeling… not too bad about it all. So much so I’d even started staying later, way later in the study hall. When my focus wouldn’t stick any longer, I shut my book and jammed it under my arm and skittered out of the hall and up to the dorms and –

  “Ah! It’s you!” Fuck. “Just the guy I wanted to see!” I sighed silently, seethingly. Points tumbling back to zero. Could I pretend I hadn’t heard him? Doubt it – just my luck that out of the several hundred students, he had to be the only one wandering the corridor in the ten seconds I was using it. I gritted my teeth and turned to him. “Well, uh, guy…?” he followed with an outstretched arm, gesturing vaguely at me. “It’s a you, for sure. A Forester. A sharp-faced Forester… But a guy?”

  “What do you want?” I asked flatly.

  “I fixed it!” he cheered a little too loudly. “Fixed it all. All done now.” He leaned on the wall, jabbed a thumb at himself. “I can do many things,” he declared. “Aaall on my own. No one else needs to help me.”

  “Fixed what?”

  “The important thing!” he effused like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “The thing I needed to fix. The, uh…” His face lit up with a bright idea. “I can show you! Come see!”

  He teetered off towards his room and I… Well, I couldn’t leave him, could I? Grove and Holly would tell me to. Good for them! But the sheer innocent joy in Kaspar’s face and voice, and the way he seemed actually happy to see me after a couple weeks apart…

  I closed his door behind me in an oddly pungent room, and hoped his upcoming apology would be worth my visit. “Fixed it all up!” he said, his hand on a strange little box set up on his desk, a thick tube emerging from it, flaring out wide at the end like some great and perfect flower cast in rubber and metal. Some circular lever on the side. What kind of apology was this? “Well, I didn’t, but I worked really hard to find the person who did. None of you people know anything about this stuff, none of you,” he explained very markedly. “Our modern technology hasn’t reached your little valley yet. But then I was really smart and I had an idea. A clockmocker! Clock… mocker. Someone who makes clocks. Makeclocker. Whatever you call it in your weird messy language. Anyway. She took it off me and turned it over and told me to come back at the end of the day, and I had to pay upfront, and it was a lot,” he said, leaning in like he was telling me an awful secret. “Like, lots of lots. But she did it! And now it’s all fixed! Let me tell you, Gan, I’m ever so grateful it’s fixed, as I do so love to dance.”

  “You do?” News to me. And the way he was swaying a little despite leaning on the desk, looked like he was hearing some whispered rhythm already.

  “Very much so. But the phonograph broke on the ship over. Unspeakable tragedy…” He shook his head mournfully. “One of the shipmen was so terribly clumsy – I ought to have scolded him. Arms like a jellyfish. Meant that I’ve been missing the dancing and had to find my succour in the vintners instead. Had to visit three of them before I found one with adequate stock!” He thrust a hand at me, two fingers held up. It was starting to make sense now. “And the absinthe you have here tastes like wallpaper paste, but what can you do?”

  He’d slapped a hand on something. A bottle of something violent green, beside the fanciest stemmed glass I’d ever seen. An open packet of sugar between them. Looked like an alchemical experiment. “Care to imbibe with me? It’s been so long since I’ve seen you around, and I’ve missed you so dearly.”

  “I don’t think I should.” My heels itched to turn and leave. “I should probably –”

  “Dance, of course, dance, yes,” he said. “My mistake. You’ll dance with me instead, now my wonderful music is repaired?”

  I wish I could’ve told him no. But the lamb-like hope in his face and the wavering in his tone made me feel like if I left, I’d crush him. He looked at me like… Well, while we’d been apart, I’d gone to Grove and Holly, and I’d gone to Robin and Omen. Who did Kaspar have? Is that what he meant by how he’d told the moons about me? Here, Kaspar only had me, and he looked at me like he needed me.

  *

  In Dreadfall we danced to the pounding of the war drums. The lilting, elegant tune emerging from the phonograph once Kaspar wedged a little cylinder into it – then turned it round and wedged it in the right way – was nothing like that at all. It floated in the air like a resplendent silvery moth and Kaspar knew its every move, his surprisingly warm hands taking mine and leading me, nudging my boots and putting my feet in the right places. To dance to this, you had to do what he called steps. Yeah, well we had steps to our music too. It was called a forward march.

  When his machine went quiet, he hurried over to start it up again, and after a few rounds of his music my boots still weren’t where he wanted them and I’d tripped over his rug at least twice. The more we danced, the more I stumbled, and the more he tugged my arms to where he told me I was meant to be. Thankfully this time, he didn’t check on his machine, propping himself instead on his bedpost, and I found a trunk to perch on. “He was never such a dancer as I,” he said, looking at me in a way that felt like he was gazing at the wall behind me instead, and then his sights drifted entirely. “One of seldom things I held over him. Dancing, dozing, and… something else.. My head is made of blancmange right now. Did you know,” he started urgently, and then drew a breath and wheezed a heavy sigh. Scrunched his mouth up. Sighed again. “I could have done it, you know.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  I chewed on my lip, thinking of increasingly convoluted ways to politely evacuate myself from the room. Realised I was being stared at. “Done what, sorry?”

  “Did him in. Offed him. Cut him down in his prime. Sent him over the great waterfall. Waved goodnight as I hammered the lid shut. However you want to phrase it.”

  I sat up straight, much tenser. “I’m not sure that, uh…”

  “No, no, I could have done. Stop doubting me – hush, you! I had solid plans. Poisoning his food and blaming a jealous baron. Or both of our food once I’d built up an immunity to it.” He recited it like a rote-learned list. “Perhaps tipping off a horde of brigands and giving them all the details they needed to ambush a convoy as we travelled through the badlands, to ransack and kidnap Almos and extort him for ransom, letting them take all the gold and jewels and ending with him dying on our doorstep anyway. Everyone benefits,” he explained simply. “Eh. Almost everyone. That’s good enough.”

  On the trunk, I hummed uneasily. “I don’t wanna say this but I think I should –”

  “Oh, skies above,” he exclaimed, suddenly distraught, “am I a terrible person?”

  His hands were on his face and he’d sunk low against the bedpost, and I gritted my teeth. “You’re not terrible,” I said. “You never actually did anything, did you? So I guess even if you were thinking about it, in… a considerable amount of detail, you didn’t do anything bad, really.”

  “Mhm,” he grumbled. “Never had the guts. Wasn’t fucking strong enough to do it.” His voice had gone low, rough, grating. “Always stuck being second best forever. Couldn’t fix it one way nor the other. Too weak to be the important one.”

  “Maybe… you were too strong? You’ve told me how you craved the importance and the glory, and how hard you worked alongside him for none of the rewards he got.” I wished I was anywhere else than here, consoling an inebriated prince, but ah well. “If you had a plan to get all of that, then I think resisting it for so long because, well, it’s a really bad thing to do – I think that shows strength, not weakness.”

  “If I were indeed strong, I wouldn’t have kept wanting all I couldn’t have,” he said. Then turned sharply to me. “We could have it, you know? Run away to a town we’ve never heard of, high on the sunny coastal plains of my lands. I’d pay the royal scribes to charter a handover of the township to me. Nothing huge, just enough for us.” His expression had melted into one of a genuinely contented bliss, eyes closed like he was narrating an ongoing dream. “You could be my consort… or vizier… A court-appointed messenger boy who I spend objectively too long thanking for each delivery behind closed doors.” He laughed easily, winked grandly, and it sent sparks through my stomach. This was the Kaspar I’d missed. “We wouldn’t have everything, but we’d have plenty enough. Each other. Me as myself, and you as yourself. Nothing else. No war, no hurt, and no one to get in the way for the rest of our lives.” By this point his ass was on the floor, and he raised his arms comfortably behind his head. “Ah, that was the other one. Despite it all, I was still better at dancing, dozing, and dreaming. A courtier told me that. He was a fair count older than I, but so good… At the time I thought it an insult, that I hadn’t the aptitude to succeed at all the things I aspired to be. Years later, I think I see it as a compliment. A fortune-telling, perhaps… And this dream for us, isn’t it so wonderful?”

  If it would ever happen. If it would ever be anything like he described, like he imagined, and if I knew Kaspar, I couldn’t be certain it would. “Wonderful, yeah,” I said.

  “And we’d finally have our perfect life together,” he said. I wished he hadn’t because it struck something deep and raw in me, and I really didn’t wanna stay here any longer. Realised I needed to go talk to Omen. “I have missed you so terribly,” Kaspar declared again, squeezing his whole heart into the words, “and I think the drink is making it clearer. The, uh… Wait.” He sat sharply upright. “Wait, wait. I’ve got it. The absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.” His face lit gleefully. “I’m the new Gan! Except with way shorter nails, and other differences, and…”

  “They’re claws, not nails. Not the same.”

  “Even so, very long. Scratchy. Scratchy…” He drew a hand through the air like a cat scratching down a tree. “The makeclocker could fix that for you, those long nails. She’s good at fixing things, I’ve found.”

  “I don’t need to be altered by you, Kaspar. I’m good as I am.”

  He nodded. “Of course, yes. That’s okay. Great, even. I like stuff long,” he said with an ostentatious wink.

  “Okay, that’s plenty,” I said and picked myself up from the trunk. With stiff muscles I tried to lift him to his feet, but either he wasn’t coordinating or he just didn’t want to. “C’mon, it’s time to get in bed and sleep it off –”

  Kaspar rose all at once and peered at his hand in mine. “Oh. We could dance like this.”

  “Let’s just –”

  But we were moving already, him leading again, barely standing yet still stepping with purpose and rhythm, guiding me whirling around his room to whatever unheard melody he’d swayed to earlier, humming with all the melody of a neighbour doing loud housework. About halfway round, after tripping over again and nearly sending us both to the floorboards, I managed to get him sat on his bed. “I may stand to be corrected,” he said as I tried to lever his legs up and onto the sheets, “but I’d issue that you’re the only person with whom I’ve ever danced freely.” One leg up. Reaching for the other. “Not as a training lesson, nor an exercise of formality. Merely dancing, like people should. Being free, being free…” The second leg was proving a challenge. “You’re a useless dancer, you know,” he said. Jabbed a finger into my chest. “Totally inept. No training whatsoever. Potentially untrainable. You move like a bear with its foot stuck in a trap. Not foot… Whatever bears have instead. Do bears have feet?” I wasn’t gonna engage with him. Just doing what I needed to get this evening done with. But then his finger drooped. “But maybe that’s… because of me. I think I may also be a useless teacher. I can’t remember a single time I’ve ever taught anyone anything. Gan, Gan,” he urged, “have I ever taught you anything?”

  What a loaded question. “A few things, I think.” Finally got his other leg onto the bed.

  “But never where it matters,” he said, pulling at my arm until I fell on the sheets beside him. “All the stuff we’ve done… Always me doing it for you. Not the other way round. Don’t you know how?”

  I bristled with indignation. “Of course I know how!”

  “Then whyyy’ve you never done it?” His deep eyes focused on me, hovering a little but heavy with intensity. “I haven’t seen you in so long, and when I was telling the moons about you, it was about the care and compassion you always gave to me. And I gave back in my own way, and I did give, but you never gave in that way…” His hand came up, took my elbow again but far softer this time. A caress instead of a pull. “I paid for your stuff, and I paid for your semester fees, because you couldn’t. And I’m sorry for making you feel bad about that. It wasn’t fair, and… wrong of me. I did it to show care, not to be some callous bargaining chip.” He hiccuped, and swiped a hand over his mouth. “But if it’s stuff we can both do, I think it’s fair if we share it, right?” The tenderness in his voice stirred things within me, many things, and I didn’t know which ones I wanted right now. “If I’ve given care to you in this bed, would you give it back to me?”

  *

  “She’s at the party down in the city,” Grove said as I stared dumbly at Holly’s empty alcove. “Whatever it’s called for the two weeks before Frostfest.” My mind couldn’t stop circling, but at least I had something to focus on. “I slept early since I wasn’t expecting either of you back,” they added, hand on the open bedcurtain.

  “Yeah, well…” I said. How could a body feel both so light and so heavy at the same time? “I’m cold. Would you like your Ooh on?”

  “I’m fine either way.”

  I tapped it and dropped to the rug like a sack of potatoes, cross-legged before the glowing cube, and the feeling didn’t change much once I was warm enough to peel my potato-sack cloak off. Still didn’t want to wear Kaspar’s lavish replacement but at least I felt even with him now. “You grow up on a diet of potatoes and greens, and when you finally escape your hometown, you dream it’s gonna bring all the best the world has to offer. Turns out it’s potatoes all the way down,” I said. A shot of pain pierced my stomach and I groaned. “Man, and now I want to go home. Ugh...”

  “But why? When you talk so compellingly about how bad it is there?”

  “If we only wanted things that were good for us, everything would be so much easier,” I grumbled. “I know it was bad. I can still miss it.” The Ooh was hot now, and it felt like a waking dream the way it warmed me, the replica firelight oozing within, drawing me into it. “Potatoes all the way down. Oh hey, I should get some and roast them on your Ooh one day, just for the three of us. You and Holly have always been so nice to me. I want to pay you back.”

  “You’re our firstie. Firsties only have to bring the joyful enthusiasm to the room and that’s plenty enough.”

  “I’m trying,” I said flatly. “But it might happen. I’m not spending time or effort on Kaspar anymore. He tried to teach me to dance today and I think I finally saw it. He dreamed up this whole perfect life and wanted me in it. But not me – someone else that he wanted me to be, dressed up in fancy clothes and with high-society skills and proper pronunciation. It hurts to have to say no to something you might enjoy, but you two were right about that too. And I see that now.”

  “Of course we were right,” said Grove. They shuffled up the bed and pulled the curtain a little further to see me properly. “You can’t really see a problem with the same perspectives that created it, and you can’t really get out of a problem with the same emotions that got you into it. That’s what my grandma says.”

  “Your grandma says a lot.”

  The curtain swished back closed. “It got her where she is. She developed a street corner stall into a bespoke service business with clients across the continent. I haven’t yet found anything incorrect from her.”

  “Maybe she should live my life for me instead… The dramatic ups and downs were harmful and I see that now, so I’m only being a casual friend to him. I’ll thank Holly for showing me other perspectives and emotions when I see her next, and thank you for your help too, Grove. The exam is less than a week away and I need stability more than ever. I need a quiet and consistent good, not a big and brash maybe-good, maybe-bad. You helped me see that.”

  “Any time, Morrigan,” they said, accompanied by the rustle of someone settling back into their bedcovers after being briefly disturbed. “Make sure to tap the Ooh off when you’re done. The glyphs begin to deteriorate after a few hundredtimes if not given a chance to cycle their phlogiston charge.”

  “I will,” I said, letting my hands linger near the warming surface. “Oh, and sorry for waking you.”

  “It's alright, I sleep light,” came the reply. “Supposedly it’s genetic, since my family sleepwalk a lot. My grandma says it’s when the spirits have tasks for you that your waking mind would not be able to comprehend.”

  I rubbed my hands over the Ooh and let Grove rest, and my thoughts wandered to a world where the spirits could help me sleepwalk through this final week of the semester and I didn’t have to comprehend quite so damned much as I had done of late. Yeah, that’d be nice. Really nice.