“We’ll help you as best we can. You’re unusual, as far as druids go, but you’re still a druid, and we have certain ways of looking at the world.” Dom stood up once again. “It was good to meet you, baby druid, even if you’re not so much a baby as we usually get.”
“It was good to meet you too,” said Isra, though she was feeling like a stone had been dropped into her stomach.
When she’d been told that she was a druid, it had felt as if everything was going to slot into place, as if this would explain everything. It had, in a way, but only in one way, and now, looking at Dom, seeing a fairly normal person and being told that she was unusual by the standards of druids and wasn’t expected to fit in with them… well, the stone-in-the-stomach feeling wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting worse.
Chapter 32 — A Tree from a Stone
Knowing that Lola was around in Liberfell put a bit of fear into Alfric.
Being the only chrononaut made things simple. It was only him, and it was always the first time the day had been done. With a second chrononaut, he was put in the position of everyone else, which he had never found himself enjoying. Was this the first time through? Was it going to be wiped away like chalk washed from a slate, living on only in the mind of someone else? Or was he going to be blindsided by something that had happened in an undone day? He trusted the people in his family to tell him if they had some kind of interaction with him, since they did that on a regular basis, but with Lola, there was the opposite of trust. She was almost solely responsible for everything bad that had happened to him. She was every bad thing they said about chrononauts.
They were still, in some technical sense, pacted. Alfric had gone to his parents and explained things, then gone to her parents and explained things, and this was taken to be a temporary spat between the two of them, as much as he’d said that he wanted nothing to do with her. He was never going to marry her or have children with her. To have children, his children, be raised by her seemed unconscionable.
In quiet moments, when he was feeling the pain of her departure, he wished that she would somehow die. He didn’t wish violence on her and of course had no intention of taking offensive action against her, but if she could just… not exist anymore. He felt guilty for these thoughts, but that didn’t stop them from coming.
Chrononauts interacted with each other on a system of priority, and Lola had come into her power first, by quite a few years, despite them being the same age. This meant that she got to live the day “first” in some technical sense, but it also meant that he could respond to whatever it was she ended up doing. Overall, he wasn’t certain which position he would prefer to be in, because there were advantages of either. That was the way it was though, and Alfric knew there was no choice but to live out the day and not think too much about what might be happening with the flow of time.
“The hotel lobby has pastries,” said Hannah. “That’s a good enough breakfast for me, if it suits the two of you.”
“I don’t think I’ll have breakfast,” said Alfric.
“Me neither,” said Verity. She had gotten up late, as predicted, but not as late as she normally did. “My stomach still isn’t quite used to it, even with almost a week of having Mizuki cook for me.”
“Well, I can eat as we walk then,” said Hannah. “We’ve things to sell today and a trip to the local League office.”
“We need to get the wardrobe back to Pucklechurch,” said Alfric. A thought occurred to him. “Better to get it back sooner than later.”
“You’re still worried about it getting stolen, are you?” asked Hannah.
“I’m worried that Lola knows about it,” said Alfric. “And if she knows about it, then yes, there’s a possibility that she’ll steal it from us.”
“I don’t really understand why she hates you so much,” said Verity.
“I don’t either,” said Alfric. “We were pacted, and we were friends beyond that, but… I don’t know why she’s intent on interfering. If she is. I don’t know why she’s here.” Certainly if the previous day was viewed from the perspective of ‘everything that happened was what Lola wanted to have happened’ it didn’t seem all that bad. She had stirred the pot, but not to within the limits of her ability. She hadn’t planted rumors and apparently hadn’t even told Mizuki that they were chrononauts.
“I mean no offense,” said Hannah. “But how do you know she was responsible for it all? Your other failures.” She said it very gently.
“I was wondering that myself,” said Verity. She was less gentle.
Alfric felt a sourness in his gut. “It’s a fair question,” he said. “She admitted to taking the party and doing it to manipulate me. I think she must have tried other methods before doing something so extreme, and it obviously took some planning on her part. Relationships between chrononauts are complicated, though, because you end up knowing someone through undone days, and most of what passed between the two of us probably happened in days I never experienced.” He could feel himself hesitating when it came to the core question. “She did take the party though, and that was first for leverage, which failed, and then for spite. As for everything else, the rumors seem like they have her as the obvious source, unless people suddenly decided to make things up about me at the same time she left with the group. Actual sabotage… I don’t know. For too much of it, she was on the other side of Inter. Not that she couldn’t have used travel entads, and her family has good ones, but… I don’t know. It seems implausible to do it and not get caught by anyone.” It was entirely possible that some of the failures were his own, beyond the problems that Lola had created.
“The rumors might have started because you had a group collapse on you,” said Hannah. “Just playin’ the imp, since I don’t know, of course. There were rumors about her, after that, weren’t there?”
“I suppose,” said Alfric. “Uglier than the normal rumors about her.”
“Four men and a woman,” said Hannah, clucking her tongue. “I can practically taste the rumors.”
“I’ve never really understood that,” said Verity. “They get that women and men can sleep with each other in any combination, don’t they?”
“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “And let me tell you, at the seminary, where symmetrical sexuality was more of a given, people would jump on any two women spendin’ time together as cause for gossip. Alfric, do you think she would?”
“Would what?” asked Alfric.
“Have a relationship with any of them,” said Hannah. “Just out of curiosity.”
“This is the ectad shop I was told about,” said Alfric. He was still lugging around the book, which had the stone in it, which in turn had the two tall trees they’d managed to get into it. He was going to be happy when he could go without carrying around fifty pounds of book. His legs needed a rest. “And no, I don’t think she would, but when she left, she made it clear that I didn’t know her as well as I had thought.”
The ectad shop was on the edge of town, as ectad places often were, since they needed somewhere to house their equipment. Wilch, over in Tarchwood, hadn’t had the full setup, but this place seemed to have it all. There were big vats for distilling down materials, grinders for reducing stone to dust, and furnaces for melting metals. Ectad materials came in a variety of different forms, which then had to be refined in various ways, all of which had to be done differently depending on what the end result would be, especially because they usually started ‘expressing’ partway through the process. A half-completed waterstone would start leaking water, which would create all kinds of problems if the ectad engineer wasn’t prepared for it.