MISTAKES WERE MADE
A Pygmalion Fail, Book Two
by Casey Matthews
Text © 2016 Casey Matthews
To Barash and Volon, who are flying still; and to Tarol Hunt and his contagious love of dungeons.
ARTISTIC LICENSE
I stood at the exact center of the narrow dock and realized there was a deadly amount of sky beneath my feet. Wind buffeted me and I hurried for the entrance to the tower. My head only stopped swimming when I was through an archway and standing in the palace proper.
“Why are there no freaking railings on those docks?” I asked, heart thundering in my ears.
Tammagan shrugged. “The palace was like this when we discovered it.”
Right. No railings because I’d designed it that way when painting Queen Eliandra on the edge of a palace precipice. Railings would have taken away from the majesty of the illustration. “Someone couldn’t come out here and throw some on?” I asked.
“The Council sought to prevent changes that would drastically alter the palace’s aesthetic,” Tammagan said.
“The same Council who put you in a metal bikini top?” I asked.
Tammagan scowled, though not at me. “The very one.”
Chapter One: Girl Troubles
Let me explain my luck with women. When I was eight years old, the neighborhood bully—Mandy Craig—knocked me down for “practice kicks” whenever she could catch me. She was training to be a ninja turtle, and it was my bad luck I’d naively agreed to train with her.
In high school, a few classmates told me I was cute or tried to hook me up with friends, but I stayed true to my Japanese internet girlfriend, who turned out to be a middle-aged parolee from Tucson. In her defense, she was a gifted World of Warcraft healer; in my defense, her Japanese was freakishly good. After uncovering her deceit at the tender age of sixteen, I nearly ran away to Tucson. My best friend Dak talked me down. He refers to it as the “Isaac almost does a dungeon for real” fiasco. A year or so after we broke up, I caught word she was shot in the arm by a SWAT team while threatening to blow up her mom with a propane tank.
And that, by the way, is why Blizzard warns that game experience may change during online play.
The thing about bad relationships—or ones that only seemed good because you were catfished by someone with neck tattoos—is they make you paranoid. I avoided romance for a few years. I kept my eye out for a soulmate, sure, but I stopped taking chances and never dated for fun.
Today, though, my sense of mortality was adjusted by the wizard dictator who wanted to enslave me. “Taking chances” was pretty much every day now. So damn it all, it was time to carpe some diem. I wanted a girlfriend. After all, it only took one slip-up from me or my ninja bodyguard, and I’d be swallowed by another one of Lord Dracon’s witches—this time, perhaps, digested.
In a few hours I would disembark, and I was playing cards in the sky ship’s galley with Kyra. I had to convince the stunningly attractive warrior I was boyfriend material before the boat docked. If I’m even allowed to date her. The Akarri prohibited marriage, though I’d gathered she could date. I didn’t even know my own availability, though, since my entire future on Rune would soon be decided by a queen I’d never met (but had in fact painted into existence—not that I’d be telling the Queen that).
Kyra was a long shot. There was “out of my league,” and then there was my fantasy of hitting it off with Felicia Day at Comicon, and then there was this.
It’s best to describe Kyra by way of small-town church scandals. When I was young, our congregation was nearly destroyed when the pastor divorced his wife and ran off with a congregant named Chloe. Everyone was livid except my Uncle Scott, who approaches life with the mentality of an engineer looking at equations for the eventual heat death of the universe. After hearing Dak’s particularly invective-filled tirade against pastoral hypocrisy, Uncle Scott squared us both in his gaze. “It’s a rotten thing,” he said. “But Chloe’s a nine; and her personality’s a ten.”
I was floored by his cynicism. But looking over my cards at Kyra now, I understood his meaning. Kyra was an eleven. Enough to make me reconsider my life’s direction and want her somewhere near its center.
She had the sort of black eyes that made my heart feel like the wrong size for my chest. Her smile lit me through until I couldn’t help radiating it back at her. She’d relentlessly championed my cause to her superiors when Ronin—my bodyguard—wanted to keep me locked in my room. She’d defended me from witches only five days ago. While the most novice Akarri warrior aboard our sky ship, that was like saying she was the least experienced Navy SEAL in her squad. She’d trained to murder monsters since she was thirteen and “graduated” by slaying a bog demon.
And oh yeah, she was playing Magic: The Gathering with me.
Correction: she was beating me at it.
“You play well for a foreigner,” Kyra said. Even as she complimented me, she tapped a final attack from her tramplers, destroying me for the fifth hand in a row. Her green deck came out of the gate hard and fast. I had initially been thrilled to discover poker was regarded as a kid’s game in Rune; the gentleman’s game played by kings, soldiers, and tavern-goers was Magic.
I’d hoped to impress Kyra. I failed to realize that if all the Akarri played Magic with their meager pay, they all got incredibly good at it. I’d built an elf deck from Kyra’s spare cards, but without Dak’s tournament-quality skills I was laid waste. “You must say that to all the young men you destroy,” I said.
“Mostly young women,” Kyra pointed out. The Akarri were an all-female guard corps who protected the Queen when they weren’t slaying monsters.
My stomach fluttered when I realized I had an opening. “If you’d like to beat me on a more regular basis, we could keep in touch once we land in Amyss.” I made eye contact. It was like holding a live wire. “Or we could grab dinner some night.”
She smiled and shyly covered her mouth with one hand. It should have been encouraging, but wrecked me instead. My most paranoid inner voice hissed, She’s giggling at you. I silenced it. I was smarter than that—she wasn’t laughing. She just felt complimented.
“A bold proposal, Magister Grawflefox.” That was my pseudonym. If it sounds like it was made up by a ten-year-old, that’s because it was. That’s probably why I liked it.
“Is bold… good?” My heart was in my throat. I tried to swallow it down.
She lowered her hand and shuffled her deck. “You’re a pleasure to play cards with, but I’m afraid I must decline your offer.”
I frowned.
“I’m nobility,” Kyra said cautiously.
I wanted to ask, So? But I was American and Kyra hailed from a culturally alien, magitech world I’d designed and been transported to. That’ll teach you to create rigid caste systems, you dolt. “So the ‘foreigner without a pedigree’ thing does me no favors?” I asked.
“It makes you interesting,” Kyra said, eyes full of good cheer. But then she made the nicest I-know-I’m-hurting-you-and-I’m-sorry face I’d ever seen. “But there’s tradition on my shoulders. Much is expected of me. My parents already despise my decision to serve with the Akarri. One day I will leave the service and rejoin my family, but were I to marry outside my position it would aggrieve them further still.”
There was also an undercurrent of her not being that into me. She’d gone against family wishes on the Akarri thing, so must have truly wanted that. But some skinny guy she’d only just met? The risk/reward wasn’t there.
I exhaled. God, it stung. It felt like something perfect slipping between my fingers. But I was also glad I’d asked, becaus
e now I wouldn’t spend my whole life wondering. Not the world’s sweetest pill, but I’d had worse. So I shuffled my deck. “How about one more hand instead?”
***
Kyra let me keep the elf deck and I stowed it in one of my new lime-green Army vest’s extra-dimensional pockets. I’d drawn the vest into existence to store my accumulating stuff. I’d created the magic pockets by illustrating the storage space for each pocket and linking them by a thin line, like a blueprint.
Drawing and summoning things from my sketchpad was the “magic” that made Lord Dracon chase me. True, I’d also stolen a witch’s wand that turned anagrams into reality, but I’d broken that two days ago. I’d tried transforming tasteless oatmeal into doughnuts; ended up with a bowl of sentient oatmeal, which attacked and forced its way down my throat. I nearly choked to death, then spent a day in absolute misery as living oatmeal bashed its way through my small intestine. If that’s not creepy enough, by the next morning I think I digested it to death because it stopped struggling.
That was when I decided no more witch magic.
Maybe I should have spent my five days of downtime drawing a weapon or artifact strong enough to defend me from angry breakfast. After all, that was the world I lived in now. But I didn’t want the full extent of my power on display for Ronin or the crew, lest they squeal to Queen Eliandra. The cautious part of me—the part that could only poop when the bathroom door was locked—didn’t want to show my whole hand. I’d be happy to demonstrate once I was convinced the Queen had my best interests at heart.
My Army vest had eight pockets, each able to hold about one storage locker’s worth of stuff. Two pockets were accessed by broad diagonal slashes wide enough to fit my sketchpad and folded-up magitech “computer.” Not all my summonings were okay for storage: I feared turtles might not like extra-dimensional space too much, so I carried Leo under one arm.
Kyra told me we’d fly into Amyss by evening, so at the appointed time I headed for the weather deck in anticipation of seeing the skyline I’d once painted. I was curious. Everything in Rune was both larger and subtly different from how I’d envisioned it.
On my way down the corridor to the staircase, Elsie rushed up from the lower decks where Akarri slept. The pixie-faced brunette slipped past me toward the galley, nose pointed at the floor. This was so uncharacteristic of the effusive woman that I frowned her way. “You okay?”
She paused and turned partway without quite facing me. “Yeah, just… got duties.” Her voice was pinched. “See you on deck later.” And she fled.
What the hell? Elsie was the closest thing to a friend I had on Rune; never in the week I’d known her had she willingly traded an opportunity to chat for work.
Spinning toward the stairs, I nearly ran into Captain Tammagan, who ascended the same steps Elsie had, from a respectable distance. Her expression was as standard-issue as the pressed uniform cloak she wore over her armor. Without thinking, I asked, “Hey, is Elsie all right?”
“How should I know?” Tammagan snapped. She strode up the stairs for the weather deck, ahead of me. “I’m her superior officer. Do you think we braid one another’s hair?”
That was brusque even by Tammagan’s standards. I wasn’t her favorite person, but we’d been on better footing the last few days.
The pieces came together then. Guess Elsie told Tammagan about having a crush on her. And it apparently didn’t go well.
My spirit sank. I’d been rooting for Elsie. I suddenly wished I didn’t have to visit the Queen, since I’d have much rather commiserated with Elsie over our mutual bad luck with the ladies—and Elsie needed it more than I did. Kyra had been a shot in the dark on my part, but Elsie had clearly pined over her captain for some time.
I met Kyra as she put away mop and bucket after swabbing the weather deck. Her eyes widened in pleasant surprise and for an instant my heart sang—until I realized she was fixed on Leo. “Oh, he is a most handsome reptile,” she said, reaching tentatively. “May I touch him?”
“Sure. Go ahead, he loves it.”
“My! Heavy, aren’t you?” She bounced Leo in her hands. “When last we met, sir, you were saving my life from a witch.”
When one of the witches had shrunk Kyra into a shrew and tried to smash her, it was Leo who’d protected her in his shell. Granted, I had kicked him her way and later un-shrewed her, but Leo had done the hard work. He was milking the hell out of it, too, rubbing his beak on Kyra’s nose until she laughed. I felt a flash of anger toward him. I sucked it up and said over and over in my head: I’m not jealous of a turtle. I am not jealous of a turtle.
Kyra and I watched our approach together. The sun bled into the horizon behind us, leaving a long pink line that lit the city’s towers in gold. The sight hit my gut like a fast-pitch softball. Amyss was not just big—it was impossible. Its central district towered like Manhattan, sky ships trafficking between building tops. The bay made the entire city vaguely C-shaped and had the neat roundness of an impact crater. About half the bay was iced over on a warm day—enchanted ice kept solid year-round by rune stones. The buildings on the sheet were also made from ice and it was thickly populated.
Akarri behind us hoisted a royal flag to the top of our mast and we angled for the Palace of Ten Thousand Chambers. It was the size of two Central Parks, built from stack upon stack of walls and towers. It rose into the air like a layer cake the size of a mountain. Flying toward it made me realize what I had taken to be crenels were individual buildings at the lip of a wall the size of the Hoover Dam. Closer and closer it loomed, details sharpening, the unthinkable vastness of the structure giving me the same ominous feeling I had when an Imperial Star Destroyer passed overhead in A New Hope.
The palace was a city within a city, jutting as deep underground as it did into the sky. My setting notes stated that no living being—not even elves—had ever visited every one of its chambers. Whole sections were abandoned and virtually unexplored, particularly in the vast underground chambers where only skilled adventurers could traverse the obstacles.
The palace swelled in size until it was the only thing I could see. We approached a spire with airship docks and our boat shuddered on finding its berth. Akarri tossed lines to uniformed palace workers, who secured us and dropped a plank.
“This is it,” I said.
Kyra offered me Leo, and I considered. “Could you keep him safe for me?”
“You fear for your life?” she asked.
“I don’t know where I’m going next. And I think he likes you.”
“I like him. And you’re not so bad either.” She leaned in, pecking me on the cheek.
My ears flamed. “He likes lettuce and his species is okay to put in water.”
“I will keep my eye on him until you’re settled somewhere,” Kyra said.
“Good. He’s a troublemaker.” I rapped Leo’s shell and winked at him.
Ronin appeared beside me and unceremoniously seized my arm, dragging me to the plank. Captain Tammagan joined him, so that I was fitted between the two. “You could just tell me to follow you,” I said, squirming from Ronin’s iron grip.
“Haven’t you heard?” Tammagan asked. “Ronin has a daily limit of three hundred words.”
“Wow,” I said to the dark-clad man in the demon mask. “You’re so gloomy that Tammagan’s making fun of you for being antisocial.”
He settled his chilly stare on me until my mouth clicked shut. Together, we walked down the gangplank. I could see between the two-inch-thick boards and realized that if they gave way, gravity would make me its plaything for a half-mile before it introduced me to pavement. My stomach performed trapeze acts all the way to the dock, which was only three yards wide.
I stood at the exact center of the narrow dock and realized there was a deadly amount of sky beneath my feet. Wind buffeted me and I hurried for the entrance to the tower. My head only stopped swimming when I was through an archway and standing in the palace proper.
“Why are there no fr
eaking railings on those docks?” I asked, heart thundering in my ears.
Tammagan shrugged. “The palace was like this when we discovered it.”
Right. No railings because I’d designed it that way when painting Queen Eliandra on the edge of a palace precipice. Railings would have taken away from the majesty of the illustration. “Someone couldn’t come out here and throw some on?” I asked.
“The Council sought to prevent changes that would drastically alter the palace’s aesthetic,” Tammagan said.
“The same Council who put you in a metal bikini top?” I asked.
Tammagan scowled, though not at me. “The very one.”
Great—there was a political body actively trying to preserve all my worst mistakes. Someone had latched onto the smallest thing I’d thrown on paper and used it to screw over the Akarri and, now, some dock workers too. I was starting to really sympathize with God. I’ll bet he spent the entire Middle Ages slamming his forehead into a desk. “Has anyone suggested that maybe railings aren’t blasphemy and the Akarri could save the traditional armor for—I dunno—ceremonial occasions?” Like spring break?
“If I had it my way, I would design the uniforms for Council,” Tammagan muttered.
“Something to show off my ass?” boomed a loud voice. Standing over us was a soldier in shining black armor with gold filigree, a purple cape swooshed off one shoulder. He had one of those young, chiseled, CW Network faces with a stubbled jaw and friendly eyes. He belonged on a poster in a fourteen-year-old girl’s locker.
“General Marcel,” Tammagan said, saluting. The distaste in her expression diminished the gesture. “You could pull off the chaps.”
“Of course I could. I look good in everything.” He returned her salute with the casual congeniality of someone who didn’t particularly care if he was despised. “But do you really want all those Council prunes in thongs?”
“Better them than us,” Tammagan groused.
Mistakes Were Made (A Pygmalion Fail Book 2) Page 1
