In Arcadia (Touchstone Book 5)

by Andrea K Höst

  "What are their names? Are you being both of them?"

  "No, this is mine," Laura replied, picking up the female model and reviewing her progress. The face had come out well—very reminiscent of Lalla Ward—and the hands were expressively posed. "Her name's Angharad. The other is my friend's character, Ruvord."

  "Do you always make figures from the games you play?"

  "Often. It's like taking a picture to remember them by. Though I left my previous ones in storage with your Great-Aunt Bet when I came here, since I didn't have room for them in my bag."

  "Great-Aunt," Lira repeated. "Does that mean 'Big Aunt'?"

  Laura smiled, and explained while rolling out and shaping some clay for the clothing detail.

  Lira listened attentively, then made a face. "This is a stupid language," she said—demonstrating a tolerable command of it. Daily breakfast lessons had had an impact.

  "It's known for its contradictions. But I like all the shades and complications. Words that mean three things, names that have history."

  "Does your name mean something?"

  "Laura comes from 'laurel', which is a kind of tree that symbolised honour and victory."

  "Do you have a secret name too, like She does?"

  "A secret name?" Laura repeated, surprised. 'She' was Cass, whenever Ys or Lira were angry with her. "What's Cass' secret name?"

  "Eloise."

  "Oh, her middle name?"

  Tarens didn't go in for middle names, and Nurans and Old Muinans ran their 'House' and personal name together—so Lira's full name was Liranadestar because she had belonged to House Destar, just as Sen was Sentarestal of House Restal. Ys and Rye had been only Ys and Rye until Cass and Kaoren had adopted them, and there were worlds of rank and privilege issues tied up in this naming system. It was not only out of Australian habit that Cass called Sen and Lira by shortened names.

  "My middle name is Rose," Laura said. "Which is a type of flower that grows on both Earth and Muina, though Earth has a few thousand more varieties."

  "Your name is Tree Flower and you like plants." Lira smiled for the first time. "That is very silly."

  Laura stroked the girl's thick hair. "I'll have to name one of my characters Tree Flower one day. It's nicely literal. Now, would you like to work on something as well? I'll be meeting my friend in my game in an hour or so, but there's time enough for me to show you how to use this type of clay."

  "Can I try the game?" Lira asked, eyeing the Ruvord figure speculatively. "What is it called?"

  "Red Exchange," Laura said, sending a link while admiring the girl's unerring instinct for the nuances of 'friend'. "I don't see why not. Do you need me to help you make an account?"

  Lira might have been born in a pre-industrial culture, but she'd clocked up a couple of years of heavy interface use, so this offer earned only a scornful negative, then some absent nodding as Laura told her which island to start on, and where to meet later. Laura watched her curl up on the workroom divan. There would be no long download delay—most of the games Laura had played on Muina had taken only a few minutes before they were playable.

  After a pause to adjust the room's temperature a notch higher, Laura sent a message to Gidds.

  Laura: Would there be any issues with Lira joining us for today's game?

  Gidds: None occurs to me. She will know Allidi and Haelin a very little from Kaoren and Cassandra's wedding.

  Laura: I'll see you soon, then.

  Gidds had actually been the celebrant for Cass and Kaoren's wedding—something Laura hadn't managed to notice on multiple viewings of the event's recording, so busy had she been staring at Cass. After meeting Gidds she'd gone back to look for him, and forgiven herself for not noticing the few side-on glimpses. But she should have remembered that voice.

  Before returning focus to her models, Laura sat for a while watching her granddaughter. The girl's usual haughty mask relaxed into a small frown, and then an absorbed expression that Laura suspected meant she'd reached character creation. When she let her guard down she looked younger than her thirteen years.

  Lira had spent a very long time alone and afraid. She hardly ever let her guard down.

  Since Laura had no solution to public speculation about the lifespan of a girl brought back from the not-quite-dead, she returned to working on Angharad's starting outfit, but only made a little progress before it was time to pack away for the day. After tidying up, she touched Lira's shoulder, murmured that she would be logging in, and then climbed the loops of the spiral stair up to her roofline window seat.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A girl called Rose was dancing with a tiny flying sea serpent in the fountain on Porphery Mountain. The sea serpent was blue and silver, with trailing scalloped fins. The girl strongly resembled a slightly-older Ys: an interesting choice given how very different the two girls were. Deciding the name was a compliment, Laura waved until the girl splashed over, the serpent disappearing from view.

  "Look, Unna Laura." Rose-Lira held out her hand to display an Ouroboros brand in the centre of her palm. "Its name is Nimenny. I'm splashing because Nimenny likes it."

  "That was quick!" Lira had obviously had no trouble with her first teszen. "Mine was very grumpy, and doesn't seem to like anything at all."

  "You sound very funny, Unna Laura. Isn't it strange how our voices come out all different from how we've said them?" Lira was looking about. "I don't see your friend. Isn't he coming?"

  "I'm a little early," Laura said, hiding a smile at the unabashed curiosity. "I'm glad you're here. He's bringing his daughters for me to meet, and now I won't feel quite so outnumbered."

  "How many daughters?"

  "Two. You've met them before: they came to your Mum and Dad's wedding. Allidi and Haelin."

  Rose-Lira's head came up, her eyes round. "Is your friend Tsur Selkie?"

  "That's right."

  Lira's amazed delight turned to suspicion. "His daughters are Kalrani."

  "They are," Laura agreed readily. "I'm a little nervous to meet them, really."

  "Why?"

  "They're both Sight Sight talents. And…let's just say I want to make a good first impression."

  Laura's strategy worked: Lira was diverted back to the fascinating discovery that Unna Laura had a special friend.

  "Why do you need to meet them in this game? They live in Pandora."

  "They're visiting Meziath at the moment. Gidds travels a lot, and the game lets me spend a little more time with him. Besides, I like games."

  Laura spotted Ruvord-Gidds then, and raised a hand in greeting. With him were a pair of girls who stood almost equal to him in height—like Lira they'd chosen the upper age limit allowed for minors playing the game—but not closely resembling his Ruvord. Named 'Dakal' and 'Zenneth', they were long-limbed, elegant and graceful, and gazed at her with cool interest.

  Laura had not been able to avoid fretting over meeting Gidds' daughters, not least because their Sight Sight meant any nerves, minor irritations, and false enthusiasms would not necessarily be private. She had decided the most she could do was be forthright and friendly, and hope for the best.

  Because it mattered whether they liked her. It would matter to Gidds. It mattered to Laura.

  Wondering how much of this was clear to the girls through the filter of the game, she smiled at them and said hello. "You'll have to tell me which is Allidi and which Haelin, I'm afraid."

  "I'm Allidi," said 'Zenneth'.

  'Dakal' said: "Haelin," and then looked from Gidds to Laura: "Should we use our proper names or the game names when talking to each other?"

  "The game names when other people are around, I guess," Laura said. "Though I gather so many people pretend to be Cass and her family any slips of the tongue are likely to be dismissed."

  "I met one who was being me," Lira said. "She didn't sound like me at all, but a few people seemed to believe her." From the face Lira made, it had not been a complimentary impersonation.

  "Li—Rose has
already contracted with her first teszen," Laura told the others. "If you've collected a mission for us, Ruvord, we're all ready to set out."

  Gidds nodded. "We'll be taking the airship to Mris."

  "I know where the docking platform is," Haelin said, shedding cool reserve to bounce a little.

  "Then lead the way," Gidds told her, hanging back as she obeyed so that he could walk with Laura.

  "Hello," she said quietly.

  He brushed the back of her hand with his fingers. Such a small thing to leave Laura glowing with outright pleasure, simply because he wanted to greet her with that touch even though it would give him vertigo.

  "What are you doing in Meziath?" Lira asked, trailing the sisters with a certain amount of reluctance.

  "Looking," Haelin replied.

  "We're touring all the towns on the teleport network," Allidi added, carefully polite. "In one of them, perhaps, we'll keep a house to go to during longer holidays."

  "Oh, a summer house," Lira said. "Cassandra talks about getting one of those every winter, though she hasn't yet."

  "What would it be called when it's winter where the house is?" Allidi asked.

  Lira shrugged, and three pairs of eyes immediately turned to Laura. Sight Sight need to know in triplicate. Mildly amused, Laura explained the difference between a house you visited to get away from the heat of summer, and a holiday house—that presumably would be located where it was summer during Arcadia's winter.

  "So Cassandra is using the word wrong?" Allidi asked.

  "I suspect deliberately changing the meaning," Laura said. "Do you like Meziath?"

  "Yes," said Allidi.

  "No," Haelin said, glanced at her father, and continued: "It's not terrible, but I don't like being at the bottom of the trees."

  "Everything feels a little loomed-over there, doesn't it?" Laura said.

  "Like standing with grown-ups," Haelin said absently, then pointed. "Look, the airship's already at the dock. Let's run!"

  They ran, an effortless thing in the game, although their avatars still took on plummy hues and panted. Laura laughed as they flung themselves aboard the gondola just as the mooring ropes were cast loose, and cheered Lira, who was last to make the leap.

  "Well done," she said, hugging the girl. "Even in the game it's still scary jumping a gap like that."

  "I would have fallen a long way," Lira said, gazing interestedly over the railing of the gondola. "What is Mris?"

  "An island a little closer to the main point of damage," Gidds told her and—since Lira obviously hadn't spent any time on the game's backstory—explained how a strange object had fallen from the sky and struck the island of Ramara, and a burning miasma had rapidly spread, fracturing the land so that most of the island had vanished beneath in-rushing water. Mris was starting to see small spots of this corruption.

  There were other passengers, most of whom directed only disinterested glances their way, but one pair listened to Gidds' explanation as attentively as Lira. Laura smiled at the way he shifted so that they would be able to hear him more easily.

  The trip between islands was barely long enough for Gidds to set out the basics, and then they were spilling out of the gondola onto a mooring platform above a walled town, clattering down wooden stairs, and heading straight out into orchards.

  Laura, as ever, thoroughly enjoyed the chance for a scenic walk and this was particularly lovely: long rows of trees, the sweet-sharp scent of fruit ripening in sunshine, and strange drooping...were they insects or birds? White gossamer puffs of down that could well be dandelion seeds, except that they would whir off whenever anyone strayed too close. She was glad to see Allidi and Haelin drop some of their formality and join Lira in trying to get close enough to see one properly. Gidds caught at Laura's fingers again, and she smiled at him, knowing he was pleased.

  "Do you think they have a teszen, Unna—Angharad?" Lira asked, trotting back. "But we're not hunting new teszen at the moment, right?"

  "I expect if we met one we could ask it to lend us its power," Laura said. "But no, we're here to find damage to the island and try to repair it. Look for..." She paused, and then pointed in the direction that the downy puffs had fled. "I think what we're looking for might well be over there."

  The puffs had gathered in great numbers around a collection of grey dimples that interrupted the neat grass stripes separating the rows of trees. The puffs perched in branches, or spiralled in small clouds above each dimple, and although the air smelled sulphurous, it wasn't until Laura was standing nearly on the rim of the nearest that she understood that they must be attracted by the rising heat.

  "It's called 'grey scar'," Allidi told Lira, pointing to watermelon-sized pocks spreading from the edge of the dimples. "We should be able to close the little ones on our own, but we'll have to work together to get the bigger holes to go away."

  "Nimenny knows what to do," Lira said confidently, and proved it by holding her hands out toward the nearest pock mark and conjuring a swirl of water. In moments the grey-black patch had been erased, smoothed out to the healthy brown of rich, fertile earth.

  Laura, who now had two novels' worth of backstory to draw upon, concentrated on the paw print branded onto her wrist, and asked the kirr-tut teszen to lend its strength. All the teszen were aligned to a series of elemental wheels—a combination of the typical water strong against fire and weak against ice configuration, but intersecting with 'sharp' and 'fast' and 'silk' and other complexities. A kirr-tut was aligned to bone/fast, and when Laura asked for aid it flickered into existence and seemed to fill in a pockmark by scratching surrounding dirt into it.

  The larger dimples of the grey scar were not so easily dealt with, since they required carefully timed elemental combinations, and reacted to attempts to close them with little jolts of force and gusts of rotten-egg miasma that had to be shielded against, blown away or dodged.

  It was a tricky form of combat, and far harder to master than clicking through skill buttons, but it was not too long before the last of the dimples closed over, and only healthy earth remained.

  "We did it!" Lira cheered, then sat down. "I feel tired even though I'm really just lying down."

  "That took a lot of concentration," Laura agreed. "I think we scared all the puff balls away, too."

  "What is this?" Haelin asked, using the toe of her boot to expose a dully-glinting object buried in the soil.

  "Melted glass, perhaps?" Laura suggested. "I know you're supposed to get crafting materials as a reward for repairing damage."

  Haelin nudged to expose it further, then picked up an elaborately whorled blue-green object that resembled a blown-glass decanter.

  "Musical instrument?" Lira suggested. "Like a horn to blow through?"

  "Dzo, there's something…" Allidi began.

  'Dzo'—short for 'dzozen'—was an equivalent of 'dad', and she turned to Gidds, who responded with a nod, and his brief smile.

  "Too hasty," he told Haelin. "It is a trap, not a reward. I can feel it waiting to trigger."

  "Don't try to put it down," Allidi added. "I think that's what sets it off."

  "Not crafting material?" Haelin shot Laura a reproachful glance.

  "I wasn't warned of traps at the Hall of the Weaver," Gidds said, ignoring a sudden jut to Haelin's lower lip. "Is there any mention in the books you've been reading, Laura?"

  "Nothing. I think I'll ask Julian—he's been playing a lot more than I have."

  Laura: Hey kiddo. In Red Exchange, what do you do with weird bits of glass left behind when you clear grey scar?

  Julian: Gems, Mum. Get them made into necklaces and they'll boost your teszen's strength.

  Laura: Not gems. Something like a vase or a glass horn.

  Julian: ! Is it kind of bruise-coloured? Send me a screenie.

  Laura obediently emailed him an image of 'Dakal' and her whorl of glass.

  Julian: Star Claw! OMFG, Mum, where are you? Give me your map coordinates.

  Laura: So demandi
ng. So unexplainy.

  It was surely Laura's imagination that brought her Julian's exasperated cry all the way from his bedroom. She read the detailed response that followed, and then told Haelin: "You've thrown Julian into a welter of excitement. This is apparently a rare item that will trigger a major event. Still, unfortunately, a trap. He says to not give it to anyone else, or leave the immediate area. Both will trigger it."

  "What kind of event?" Haelin asked, brightening.

  "The corruption will try to make a serious incursion on Mris. In the form of..." She paused, then read: "...tentacles of ultimate doom. When it appears, players will come frantically running from all the islands, because if it's not beaten back, Mris will start to break apart. Being first on site gives the greatest chance of gaining some very nice rewards. Julian's guild—ah, band—is asking very nicely for us to tell them where we are, and for you try to hold off triggering the event until most of them are here."

  Haelin was a 'psychic psychic', and had spent several years training to fight semi-real monsters, but she was still a youngster who plainly found the idea of sending a wave of players running most gratifying.

  "If they can help me not get killed that would be good, too," she said.

  "All right," Laura said, and relayed the map coordinates. "Julian says it will only be a few minutes—few joden—before the first of them reach us, but it will be at least a quarter-kasse before there will be enough of the band here to start. The best thing to do is to stay very still."

  "So we just stand around?" Haelin asked, more in token protest than annoyance.

  "We were ready for a break anyway," Gidds told her. "Go to the bathroom if you need to—we will probably be very busy in a few minutes."

  "Dzo." A whole world's dignity and reproach in a single syllable.

  Lira, who had been idly poking the fresh dirt where the Star Claw had been uncovered, said: "Does Julian have a secret name as well, Unna Laura?"

  "Alexander." Anticipating Sight Sight this time, Laura went on to explain middle names once again.

  "May I ask you a question about your family name, Tsa Devlin?" Allidi asked, in her calm, direct way. "I'm not certain if it is an impolite question in Earth culture."