I’d already had about six coffees, the most I could drink in one day before experiencing heart palpitations, but I didn’t stop her. For some reason, Grizzie balanced out the interference of glamouring by making coffee.
And that’s how I waited out the rest of my workday, till, at five o’clock, we shut up shop and went back to my house. I ate dinner, changed out of my work uniform, then took the shortcut through the woods to Anyan’s cabin for my nightly training.
Normally when I walked up, Nell would be waiting for me on the porch, rocking in her little chair. But this time no one was around. After beefing up my shields, just to be on the safe side, I followed the sound of sandpaper around the cabin toward Anyan’s workshop.
The big man was sitting just where I’d found him the day I’d come to apologize, again sanding smooth the curves of that same statue. In the darkness, the workshop glowed warm and cozy while the soft rasping of sandpaper stroked against wood lulled my tired brain. I closed my eyes, leaning against the lintel of the workshop door, as the gentle susurrating sounds along with the smell of freshly cut wood and lemon wax washed over me.
“You’re going to fall asleep standing there,” Anyan rumbled, causing me to jerk upright and blink hazily in the suddenly overbright room. As my eyes adjusted to their opened state, I saw that Anyan had put his statue down and was leaning back on his bale of hay, long legs stretched out before him.
I had a brief, intensely detailed fantasy of springing up and hovering, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, only to land straddling the barghest. After a second I registered how ridiculous that was, and I had a secondary, equally vivid fantasy of my short-assed legs hopping awkwardly across the floor toward Anyan while he stared with a mixture of confusion and horror.
Shaking my head to clear it of my daymare, I ruefully smiled at nothing in particular just as Nell yelled for me from the yard.
“Training time!” I sang, awkwardly and too loudly, before plastering on a grin and pivoting on my heel to flee to the front side of the cabin.
What the hell is wrong with me? I wondered. Could I be any more of a spaz?
Luckily, my self-recriminations were short-lived. Mostly because the second I turned the corner I was diving to the ground as Nell tried to take my face off with a mage ball.
Motherfucking gnomes, I thought as I struggled to maintain shields, scramble to my feet, and create a mage ball all at the same time. Nell loved what she called surprises. And by “surprise,” Nell meant trying to maim you when you least expected it. She was like Cato from the fucking Pink Panther, only more destructive.
So, for the next hour and a half she chased me around the pasture, then the woods, and finally to my cove, lobbing mage balls at me the whole time while she flew through the air like a hovercraft, laughing maniacally. I did manage to squeeze off a shot or two, but my aim was pants and I inevitably missed her entirely.
We called a truce when we got to the cove, and Nell watched my back as I splashed in the shallows. After I’d dried off and put my clothes back on, we went back to the cabin so she could “assess my progress.” Which, in Code Nell, meant going into great detail about how much I suck.
The night had turned chilly, and damp, by the time we made it back to Anyan’s. This meant that, since he was around and his cabin open, I got my dressing-down inside the cabin instead of shivering on the front stairs as usual.
When we walked inside, Anyan was sitting at the enormous butcher-block island that dominated the center of his kitchen, reading over the reports he’d gotten that day. But when I dragged my straggly wet-haired self inside, he frowned.
“Nell, she looks like death warmed over.”
The gnome shrugged. “She has to train.”
“I know, but… look at her.”
“Hello, I’m here,” I reminded both of them. “Can we not discuss how shitty I look?”
“Sorry, Jane,” Anyan said. “But you do look like crap.”
I shot him my best gimlet eye.
“Can I make you some tea?” he added apologetically.
“Do you have chamomile?”
“Yup.”
“Sure, that’d be nice. Thanks.”
The gnome accepted Anyan’s offer of tea as well, and we walked toward the cabin’s seating area. Nell levitated her little rocking chair inside, next to the warm fire blazing in Anyan’s fireplace. She settled down in it comfortably as I took the place nearest the fire on Anyan’s giant, overstuffed sofa.
His sofa isn’t lumpy, my exhausted body whined petulantly as I curled up contentedly against the armrest.
Yes, well, I reminded myself, Anyan isn’t supporting two people on government disability and a job at a bookstore. So quit yer whining.
And speaking of Anyan… I watched, a little too appreciatively, as the barghest moved about his kitchen. I tried to keep my attention on Nell, but I was failing miserably. Part of the problem was that I’d heard everything I did wrong with mage balls a thousand times already. And hearing what I did wrong obviously wasn’t connecting, for me, with what I needed to do in order to improve.
I watched as Anyan’s big hands deftly unwrapped two comparatively minuscule tea packets, one of which he dropped into a normal mug and one of which he dropped into a wee, gnome-sized mug. Then, from a stack of dishes on his draining board, he pulled out an enormous mug, a barghest-sized mug, and placed it next to the other two.
Mama mug, daddy mug, and baby mug, my tired brain chortled, and I felt myself smiling.
“Jane, are you paying any attention to what I’m saying?”
I turned to the gnome, unable even to appear contrite. I tried to look sorry, I really did. But all I could do was blink stupidly.
“I’m sorry, Nell,” I said as Anyan brought over the three steaming mugs. He placed Nell’s on the floor by her feet, and mine he set on the side table next to me. Then he joined me on the sofa.
“… you keep throwing the mage ball. But you want to send the mage ball,” Nell was saying for the fiftieth time. But I was too busy sniffing the air.
Following my nose, I sat up and leaned toward Anyan. Floating in his enormous mug of tea were about six little seedpods, bobbing about and emitting their heavenly aroma.
“Cardamom,” I said happily. “That’s why you always smell of cardamom.”
The barghest blinked at me, and I realized that my nostril quest had sent me traipsing into his personal couch space. So I backed off, sheepishly settling down into my own little corner.
“… once you stop thinking of physical distance as a space to be crossed, you’ll shoot more accurately and forcefully…”
“I smell like cardamom?” the big man rumbled his basso profundo underneath Nell’s lecture.
“Yes. And lemon wax,” I added, blushing when his wide mouth quirked in a small smile.
“… and if you two would stop whispering to each other like hundred-year-olds, we might actually get Jane to a point where she can defend herself!” Nell yelled from her chair, causing us both to startle.
“Sorry, Nell,” we mumbled as the gnome took an annoyed sip from her mug, grumbling under her breath the entire time. We sat in shamed silence, till the barghest spoke.
“Nell, may I?”
“Since you’ll just pass notes or something otherwise, why don’t you go ahead and take this one?”
Anyan had more self-control than I did, and he looked very contrite as he nodded to Nell. But when he turned to me, his eyes were sparkling with amusement.
“Okay, Jane, here’s the deal. You throw like a girl.”
Before I could even begin to think, I was spouting off. “First of all, I am a girl, shit for brains. And second of all, girls throw hard nowadays. Haven’t you seen a girls’ softball team? That is gender equality in kinetic energy, so don’t tell me I throw like a girl.”
Anyan sighed. “But you do throw like a girl.”
“Anyan!”
“The whole point is, you don’t have to be throwing at all. All you have to imagine is your mage ball going from point A to point B and then make it go that way. Stop physically throwing it. Because you really do throw like a girl.”
I glowered at him, even as I felt that little tingle that I get when I finally understand something.
“The fact that you’re an unreconstructed male chauvinist aside, you’re telling me that when Nell says, ‘Send, don’t throw,’ what she means is that I should… zing the mage ball with my mind? Instead of trying to manually lob it with what is, admittedly, very little force or accuracy?”
“Yup.”
“Huh,” I grunted. “That’s sort of how I swim… and that should make mage balls a hell of a lot easier.”
Nell was looking between the two of us like she wasn’t sure whom to kill first.
“Really? Is that all it took?”
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, that Anyan understood how my brain worked. But even as I thought it, I was so struck by that idea that I clammed up and my mind went all numb.
I noisily sucked down some of my tea.