"Usually," Jahir said. "Not always."
The monitor sounded, a muted chime.
"To work," Jahir said, putting his mug aside.
Vasiht'h followed him into the room next door, where their client had curled herself into a furry ball, both arms wrapped around a pillow. She wore a stubborn expression, even in her sleep.
/Poor thing,/ Vasiht'h said, /She doesn't even give up her troubles in bed./ He held out a hand.
Working against social taboos centuries strong, Jahir slid his own fingers into the black, furred ones, and the already-strong mindline broadened into a deep, powerful channel, the link that made their special brand of therapy possible. They turned their attention as one and reached for the sleeper, falling through the layers of her consciousness and into the tangle that preoccupied her as she slumbered.
Their client was cleaning, it seemed. The corners of a wooden home. The walls. The ceilings, though how she reached them neither she nor her two observers understood. She spent a long time doing this, until an older man passed through, a stern but absent Hinichi elder.
The man asked her what she was doing. She was, of course, cleaning. There was poison somewhere, and she had to get rid of it all. The elder thought she should keep at it, then.
/Is she the poison?/ Jahir wondered.
/Or her unmet desires, which she's trying to keep away from her family,/ Vasiht'h said. /Do you want to affect?/
They watched a while longer as their client went from room to room, sweeping invisible dirt from walls, searching and becoming frustrated when her search turned up no poison.
/Let's,/ Jahir said. /I'll go first./
/Right./
Jahir took on the seeming of a younger Hinichi, suggesting with a breath, I'm family. He made and sat in a chair in one of the rooms, and when the client entered, he said, "What are you looking for?"
The woman, exasperated, thought it was obvious. She was looking for poison.
"There are many kinds of poisons," Jahir said. "What will this kind do?"
This kind would kill her!
/Her?/ Vasiht'h wondered.
Jahir asked, "Kill you? What about us, your family?"
He was ridiculous. Her family couldn't be hurt by poison. They didn't even realize it existed, so how could it hurt them? Now could she return to her search? It was very important.
"Go ahead," Jahir said. /Interesting. Your turn./
Vasiht'h chose to show himself as another family member, but he did not address her. She cleaned her way around him until she frowned and looked around. She didn't understand.
"What don't you understand?" Vasiht'h asked.
She knew the poison had to be in the house somewhere, but she'd searched it from top to bottom, in every nook and cranny. How had it escaped her? This was very important... if she didn't find it, she would die.
"Maybe there's no poison in the house," Vasiht'h said.
This was obviously ridiculous. Of course there was. She knew this with a personal certainty, no matter what her brothers and sisters said.
"We've told you again and again there's no poison," Vasiht'h said. "Why don't you believe us?"
She loved her brothers and sisters very much, but if there was no poison, why was she sick?
"Perhaps because you think you should be."
Nonsense, that was definitely nonsense. All she wanted was love and acceptance, and this poison was in the way. She would just have to go back to cleaning until she found it. Now would her brother kindly move out of the way?
/What do you think?/ Vasiht'h asked.
/I think what you're thinking,/ Jahir said. /She is becoming agitated. We should slip out before she finishes waking./
"So," said the woman ten minutes later. "What did you find out?"
"You tell us," Jahir said. "What did you feel on waking?"
"Irritated," the woman said, tail twitching. "I had this weird dream—did you plant it?"
"No," Jahir said. "We were just watching. What do you remember about the dream?"
She looked at her tail. "I remember being upset because something was killing me and no one was helping me to get rid of it."
/Interesting!/ Vasiht'h said.
"Do you remember what the thing was?" Jahir asked.
"I'm not sure. Some sort of gas," she said. "I kept looking for something, you know, liquid. Like a stain. But there was no stain. I was supposed to be looking for a gas, and I was getting weaker and weaker because I didn't realize I couldn't see what was killing me." She picked at her tail-tip. "I'd rather not dream that again."
"I don't blame you," Vasiht'h said.
"So what's wrong with me?" she asked. "Barron said you usually know within a single session."
/Which of us should deliver, given how she has described us?/
Vasiht'h's snort echoed down the mindline. /Better let me. She'll find it harder to be angry with me./
/No arguments there./
"Well, Sarja," Vasiht'h said. "You were older than many cross-race babies are when they're adopted. Five years is plenty of time to develop expectations of how your parents are going to show their love."
"So this is about me being Harat-Shariin after all," the woman said. "You think I haven't cried about my mother dying because she didn't pet me the way my Harat-Shariin mother did."
"That's what we think," Vasiht'h said.
She picked at her tail tip. There was already a bare spot on it. "I don't remember my birth-mother all that well."
"You don't have to remember her consciously to have developed a feeling about how parents are supposed to act," Vasiht'h said.
She stopped plucking her tail, stared at them, and said, "I think you're wrong." And then she left, back stiff and ears flat against her head. The door slid on their startled silence.
"Did I not state it gently enough?" Vasiht'h wondered, his words echoing up the mindline with a touch of limp remorse.
"We either hit the mark exactly right," Jahir started.
"—or?"
"Or we missed it entirely," Jahir said. "I have no idea which."
"Let's just hope she comes back," Vasiht'h said.
"What did you do to my sister?"
/This doesn't look good,/ Vasiht'h said.
"We evaluated her as you requested," Jahir said. "But her case is complex. We'd like her to return so we can continue working with her."
"She says you told her that Mother didn't love her!" the man exclaimed.
"We told her that we thought it likely that she didn't interpret your mother's behavior as loving because it didn't match the behavior displayed by her Harat-Shariin mother," Jahir said. "She was old enough to become accustomed to how Harat-Shar families operate... not how Hinichi families do."
The Hinichi wrinkled his nose. "We loved her far more than her Harat-Shariin family ever did."
"I don't doubt that," Jahir said. "This is working on a more subtle, subconscious level, alet."
"She doesn't want to come back," the Hinichi said. "I just came to pay for her session."
/Not good at all,/ Vasiht'h said.
/No,/ Jahir said. /But we can't exactly coerce her./ "We appreciate that," the Eldritch continued out loud. "Though we wish we could finish what we've begun. We can often diagnose a problem within a session, but we can't solve it."
"If all she's going to take away from this is that Mother didn't love her enough, it's not worth it," the man said. "She's upset enough as it is without thinking thoughts like that about the woman we just put to the ground."
"Of course," Jahir said as the man counted out a stack of coins. The Alliance rarely used literal money, but on occasion people did prefer to pay them in fin.
The Hinichi began to hand the stack over when he stopped. "Oh, I can't give this to you, can I?"
"You can pass it to my partner," Jahir said.
The man turned to the shorter Glaseah and handed him the money. "It must make things difficult for you, not to be able to touch anyone."
"It's the way we're raised," Jahir said. "It's hard to escape the conditioning we had as children."
"And that's Sarja's problem, is it?" the Hinichi said. He snorted. "Love is what Harat-Shar say love is."
"Exactly," Vasiht'h said.
The man laughed. "Right. So Eldritch love is never touching, and Harat-Shariin love is abandonment. I think I'll stay with what I learned as an adult." He bowed. "Thank you for your attempts, aletsen."
/Arii!/
/I heard it too. Do you suppose—/
/It makes a lot more sense, don't you think?/ Vasiht'h said, urgency compacting the words, black and spiked. /We got too tangled in what we thought the problem was to actually see the problem./
"Alet," Jahir called after the man's retreating back, standing. "A moment, if you would...?"
The Hinichi paused at their door. "Yes?"
"We'll refund you the fee in full if you give us just one more chance to talk with Sarja," Jahir said. "Just talk. No dreams. One more session... if she doesn't want to come back after what we have to say, that's fine. We won't charge her again."
He hesitated. "You think you can help? More than you did before?"
Jahir exchanged a look with Vasiht'h. The latter said, "We're sure of it."
"Mother loved me," Sarja said at their door, scowling.
"We know," Vasiht'h said.
Jahir continued, "It was your birth-mother who didn't love you."
The woman's eyes widened in shock... and then she let out a long wail.
As Vasiht'h helped her back to the couch, Jahir said, /No wonder the poison couldn't kill her real family. They knew she'd been abandoned, but they still love her. She's the only one who could die if she found it and looked at it./
/I wonder how long she's been trying to clean that house?/ Vasiht'h said.
/Probably all her life,/ Jahir said, drawing his chair closer and passing the client a handkerchief through Vasiht'h's hands. /Hopefully in a few weeks she'll put away her bucket and towels and be done with the whole business./
/Hopefully,/ Vasiht'h said. /Let's get to work./
APPENDICES
Containing a recipe, information about the species of the Alliance, a sidebar about Rexina Regina, author sketches, acknowledgments, a rundown on other Pelted stories, and the author's (actual, rather than fictional) biographical data.
(Very Basic) Scones
Heaven help me, but I would pick scones for this book when scones are both finicky and hard to test if you can't eat flour. Or have milk. But there really is nothing like a scone, so I flung myself into the kitchen with a bunch of recipes and hammered them together and came up with these. This recipe makes 6 largish scones (good if you have a modest family), and tastes mostly of butter (so make sure you buy really good butter). And I am happy to report they are not disappointing, which is the adjective one finds most often on the tip of one's tongue when eating wheatless baked goods. They're a little chewier than most scones, but they're still tasty.
If, unlike me, you can have both wheat and milk, removing the xantham gum and doing a one-to-one substitution should work. Just don't use skim!
Finally, be warned that I live at sea-level. If you live at high altitude, adjust accordingly.
Scones for Eating While Reading
1 cup gluten-free flour
3/4 tsp xanthan gum*
1/2 tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 cup frozen berries
2.5 tbsp unsalted butter, chilled
1/2 cup almond milk
Set oven to 400F and line a pan with parchment paper. Set aside.
Scone-making is a lot like pie-crust making, which means if you don't have a pastry cutter you will weep bitter tears. I highly recommend one. Also, keep your tools cold. Your bowl, your hands, your cutting board. I usually put a cold-pack under mine.
Combine the flour, gum, powder, salt, and sugar in one bowl, really well. (Double-check your gluten-free flour mix; some of them already contain xantham gum, at which point you can omit it.) Put the frozen berries in another smaller bowl and toss them with a couple teaspoons of this mix to coat them.
Now, praying to the higher powers, dice the butter into the large bowl (keeping it chilled), and then cut it into the flour until it gets chunky and the chunks are all flour-covered and about the size of peas. (If you've never done this, there is almost certainly a Youtube video somewhere that demonstrates cutting butter into flour.) If you don't have a pastry cutter, you can use a knife and fork but it will take you six times as long. I recommend buying your scones from a bakery and saving yourself the grief.
After you have the butter cut in, add the milk and mix it just enough to integrate (it should be an ugly dough, kind of lumpy). Fold in the frozen berries and then drop big dollops of the dough on your pan. Mine were about half the size of my palm, which gave me six. Sprinkle the tops with crystallized sugar, if you like extra sweetness.
Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the edges are slightly brown. I like to eat these after they've cooled a bit. And then I put more butter on them. Because butter.
The Species of the Alliance
The Alliance is mostly composed of the Pelted, a group of races that segregated and colonized worlds based (more or less) on their visual characteristics. Having been engineered from a mélange of uplifted animals, it’s not technically correct to refer to any of them as “cats” or “wolves,” since any one individual might have as many as six or seven genetic contributors: thus the monikers like “foxine” and “tigraine” rather than “vulpine” or “tiger.” However, even the Pelted think of themselves in groupings of general animal characteristics, so for the ease of imagining them, I’ve separated them that way.
The Pelted
The Quasi-Felids: The Karaka’An, Asanii, and Harat-Shar comprise the most cat-like of the Pelted, with the Karaka’An being the shortest and digitigrade, the Asanii being taller and plantigrade, and the Harat-Shar including either sort but being based on the great cats rather than the domesticated variants.
The Quasi-Canids: The Seersa, Tam-illee, and Hinichi are the most doggish of the Pelted, with the Seersa being short and digitigrade and foxish, the Tam-illee taller, plantigrade and also foxish, and the Hinichi being wolflike.
Others: Less easily categorized are the Aera, with long, hare-like ears, winged feet and foxish faces, the felid Malarai with their feathered wings, and the Phoenix, tall bipedal avians.
The Centauroids: Of the Pelted, two species are centauroid in configuration, the short Glaseah, furred and with lower bodies like lions but coloration like skunks and leathery wings on their lower backs, and the tall Ciracaana, who have foxish faces but long-legged cat-like bodies.
Aquatics: One Pelted race was engineered for aquatic environments: the Naysha, who look like mermaids would if mermaids had sleek, hairless, slightly rodent-like faces and the lower bodies of dolphins.
Other Species
Humanoids: Humanity fills this niche, along with their estranged cousins, the esper-race Eldritch.
True Aliens: Of the true aliens, six are known: the shapeshifting Chatcaava, whose natural form is draconic (though they are mammals); the gentle heavyworlder Faulfenza, who are furred and generally regarded to be attractive; the Akubi, large dinosaur-like fliers with three sexes; the aquatic Platies, who look like colorful flatworms and can communicate reliably only with the Naysha, and the enigmatic Flitzbe, who are quasi-vegetative and resemble softly furred volleyballs that change color depending on their mood. New to the Alliance (and not pictured in the line-up) is the last race, the "Octopi" of Either Side of the Strand.
For a more detailed look into the species of the Alliance, a Peltedverse Guidebook is available through me; you can get it by signing up for my mailing list (from my website), by jumping on my Patreon, or by emailing me directly (haikujaguar at gmail).
ABOUT REXINA REGINA
I would love to say that Young Me’s story of Th
addeus and Alana the Eldritch exists as a finished piece I could share with you, but at fifteen I was very good at starting stories and not very good at finishing them. Since the Peltedverse was in its infancy, I didn’t have a handle on anything in the setting, anyway, so it would have been astonishingly non-canonical in places. And their story in particular went through several versions, including a swiftly-abandoned attempt at a B&W comic (back in the era where there was no internet for me to post to—thank goodness).
But I think their story is important, which is what inspired me to include it (sort of) in Dreamhearth... because it represents my initial attempts to find “the” Eldritch story. I knew instinctively it had to be about an Eldritch and one of the alien species in the universe, but I couldn’t decide what that pairing looked like. Thaddeus and Alana (who had several different names in their various drafts) were my first attempt. Then there was a Tam-illee girl and an Eldritch girl who were Best Friends Forever—these two evolved, eventually, into Fasianyl and Sellelvi, the Eldritch and Harat-Shar that Reese learns about in Earthrise. The ultimate end of my journey was Reese and Hirianthial, of course... but I wouldn’t have gotten there without my initial flailing as a teenager.
It’s for this reason I feel affection for my first efforts. Even as an angst-obsessed teen, I could sense the bones of a good story, and I was tenacious enough to stick with it until I found the goods. You go, young self.
Some amusing trivia: first, Vasiht’h’s comments about the weirdly detailed medical stuff in HEALED BY HER IMMORTAL HEART are true of the originals. The comic’s first few pages took place in a doctor’s office where Thaddeus is getting lectured about his declining sperm count. (Seriously. I wrote this. As a fifteen-year-old.) While there’s not much left of the actual writing of these stories—this is my mournful look at this ancient Syquest cartridge I can no longer read—I did compose the excerpts in Dreamhearth by stealing lines from other stories written at the same time, which is where Vasiht’h gets his complaints about comparing someone to fruits and precious stones in the same paragraph. And the author’s pen name was actually the one I selected for myself as a teen: Regina Queen. I thought I’d just alliterate it a bit, for the sake of cute, and I chose another name I really liked as a teen. I was big into Latin-sounding names.
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