Chapter Fifteen: Disciplinary Problems

+++++Anise+++++

Anise had no idea what to think. She'd awoken that morning with Franyi snuggled up behind her and, even though her friend's arm was draped across her collarbone rather than that lovely spot on her belly and, even though she had a bit of morning breath, everything was warm and wonderful. And, even though they didn't say a word about it as they prepared that morning, there was a palpable frisson between the two of them… there was no denying that something had happened. Anise didn't dare put what she felt into words, though she hoped that Franyi would. But her friend only looked at her with those amber eyes, as if trying to read volumes into Anise's every little word and gesture.

Then she'd returned from linguistics that afternoon to find their room smelling of herbs and meadow flowers with Franyi bustling about their cramped work desk, snipping something green and aromatic with her little herbal scissors and tying a neat lavender bow around the bundle. She handed it to Anise, a slight blush on her cheeks… her hair was coal-dark, her eyes were amber, her skin was golden caramel, and their room smelled like a springtime meadow. Anise's mind soared to silly fantasies of Franyi giving her a little bouquet of flowers and declaring her undying love… but that's not what happened.

"I… I made you an herbal packet." She couldn't quite meet Anise's puzzled eyes. "I knew you didn't have time, and I was making mine anyway…"

"Thanks," Anise said, and she smelled them like they were a bouquet of flowers, which was a mistake. Some herbs did not smell pleasant. She sneezed. She sneezed again…

"Oh!" Franyi shoved a handkerchief into Anise's free hand. "Not into the packet… it'll only make it worse!"

The handkerchief smelled faintly of Franyi's bath oils, and Anise decided to keep it 'in case she had another sneeze or two'. What on Medias was happening?

Anise couldn't decide whether something had changed with Franyi or whether it was just her imagination yearning for things to be different… it was probably her imagination. Franyi was just the best and nicest person in the whole world, and if she knew what Anise thought about her, what Anise wanted to do to her, she'd be repulsed, disgusted. These weren't normal thoughts!

Anise was so worked up over it that she found herself lost in her own world between classes. She sat under the shade of a gumrose tree, turning Franyi's packet of herbs over and over in her hands. She was tempted to smell it again, but she'd probably just sneeze more. Within the week, most of the leaves would fall from the tree and, soon thereafter, there would be no real shade on the green until springtime… that was a bit sad. But the mid-morning light was wonderful that day, dappled through the plum-purple leaves. Anise didn't even notice the matron shuffling across the green to nab her.

"Sorceress Binar requests your presence immediately," the matron said. It didn't sound much like a request.

She followed after the woman, her gray skirt billowing in the autumn breeze, her stern expression fixed straight ahead like the prow of a ship. Most of the school's dozen or so matrons were graduates of St. Albathea's Boarding School, the charity wing of St. Quillia's, which took promising girls of humble means and, apparently, turned some significant fraction of them into stern and humorless members of the upper servantry. Anise wondered what the woman would think of Anise's scandalous secret.

The magistress was already in a poor mood when Anise arrived, papers scattered across the ornate, glossy wood of her desk and muttering over the poor state of a random tome she'd just recieved… Anise couldn't help but peek at the title: Observations of the Wild Scriben - something from the early days of Yuya-Sasetù's colonization, then. Sorceress Binar's already-cross expression darkened as Anise darkened her doorway.

"Miss Derrigin… why does it feel like I've seen too much of you of late?"

"I'm sorry, magistress," Anise said.

Binar glanced to the matron. "Leave us, Ludvmil."

"Yes, magistress."

The sorceress sat but didn't indicate that Anise should do so - hopefully, that meant this would be a short meeting. Binar flipped through a pile of papers, pulling out a cream-white letter bearing Anise's uncle's unmistakable seal - a magpie holding a sacramental dagger in its talons. She held the letter disdainfully between her fingers, as if it were a used diaper, her eyes glancing up to Anise after a moment.

"You were in the Chartham Canals yesterday…"

"Did my uncle say that?" Anise asked.

"You won't even bother to deny it, then?"

Anise's heart thudded away in her chest. This was even worse than she'd feared - her uncle had taken an entirely different track to ruin her reputation and derail her education. He still had his trump card firmly in his breast pocket but, even without it, he might get Anise expelled from St. Quillia's. However…

Anise shrugged - what did she really have to lose at this point? She was coasting on borrowed time. "Why would I deny it? My uncle asked… demanded that I go there as a favor for him. He pointed out that I'd wronged him with my potion-making and threatened to ruin me if I didn't obey this request… so I did. I apologize, Sorceress Binar… I'd hoped to keep St. Quillia's reputation intact. I dressed as a Nun of the Mendicant Mountain Order, and I swear that not a soul in Chartham recognized me. But it seems that my uncle is insistent upon ruining my reputation…"

"Such that it is," Binar sighed. "Your uncle is family to you and a sorcerer of the 7th elevation, and it is right that you should obey him… but I am a sorceress of the 7th elevation and your magistress, so you will obey when I order you not to join in his dishonorable schemes, regardless of whatever reputational or financial threat he holds over you."

"Yes, magistress."

"After this outrageous public debacle he perpetuated yesterday over Chartham Bridge, he's a laughingstock and nobody will take his wild-eyed accusations seriously. But neither will his stature offer you protection any more, Miss Derrigin. You are on very thin ice and the last of your insurance is worth less than the old brushpin you level your table with. One more misstep and I will send you packing… and my letter to your parents explaining why they’ll not be receiving a refund shall be very thorough. Do I make myself clear?"

"Very clear, magistress," Anise said. "Thank you."

+++++Anise+++++

To Anise's credit, she held together admirably. She didn't start tearing up until well outside of the administrative building and didn't cry in earnest until she was back in her room. She even managed a believable smile as she passed Eloise on the green… though, when her friend stopped to ask her some random question about alchemical electrolytics, Anise broke into a run straight back to St. Bastia's Hall. She collapsed in a heap on her bed and indulged herself in great, choking sobs as she pondered her life's inexorable, inevitable ruin…

"Ani…" came the soft voice behind her. "Anise, what's wrong?"

Franyi had been napping on her bed and Anise's unhinged sobbing had awoken her.

It would be very generous to consider anything in Anise's sniffling reply coherent, though the basic gist might have gotten across - that Anise felt like her life was crumbling around her and had good reasons to feel that way. Franyi sat at the side of the bed for a moment and rubbed Anise's shoulder, which felt good. Then she slid onto the mattress behind Anise, her body warm at her back, and ran her fingers through Anise's hair, which somehow felt even better.

"What are you going to do?" Franyi asked eventually. Her voice was a soothing hum at the nape of Anise's neck.

Anise rested there for a moment, feeling Franyi's warmth, enjoying smooth fingers stroking through her dark hair, and wondered. In her almost-seventeen years, she'd never had any doubt as to her standing in the world. The daughter of a competent magistress and an esteemed physician, the niece of a respected sorcerer. She was always going to graduate from St. Quillia's, marry some man in the gentry, and continue the family line. Only, none of those things seemed likely to happen anymore.

She turned around to face Franyi, only to find herself far closer to her friend than she'd expected - face-to-face, their noses practically touching, Franyi's questing amber eyes, so full of intelligence and inquisitiveness, looking into hers. Anise searched within herself for something to say and found her well of words utterly empty. Her lips parted, as if to speak, but all that came out was a gentle breath. Franyi lifted Anise's hair out of the way with a nimble finger and, when she was done, her hand somehow found its way to Anise's cheek, stroking the little glistening rivulet where tears had streamed freely mere moments before. But Anise couldn't possibly cry now.

She wasn't sure whether she'd leaned forward or if it had been Franyi's doing, but suddenly they were kissing. They were kissing! Anise's eyes lifted open, just for a moment - and since Franyi's were closed and she hadn't shouted and stumbled out of Anise's bed, there was only one possible conclusion: somehow, however improbably, Anise's beautiful, brilliant friend was okay with it.

She was so happy she let out a little moan, which made Franyi giggle, which made Anise moan again because she wanted to hear that giggle more. Her heart wanted to leap out of her chest. It thudded away: yes, yes, yes, yes, its beats cried out. Anise's hand found its way to Franyi's hips, and they pressed against one another as they kissed, and Franyi smell of bath oils, crushed herbs, and her own unique, indelible odor, all of it filling Anise's nostrils. This was right. This was so right. Nothing that fulfilled Anise's soul this way, that filled her with such glorious warmth, that sent every sense to tingling… nothing that felt like this could possibly be wrong. It just wasn't possible.

Eventually Franyi pulled away and Anise made a little whine - her lips suddenly felt naked without Franyi's mouth, warm and soft, upon them.

"You're… you're not mad?" Franyi said.

Anise shook her head. "I'm happy."

Franyi shook her head. "I'm happy."

Anise figured there was room enough in the world for them both to be happy, and that was a pretty wonderful thing.

+++++Anise+++++

Franyi had once read a book on the urmal, who had a culture very different from those races from the West. In their society, usually, it was a woman and a man who bonded for life - most of their tribes didn't quite have marriage, but they had something like it. Usually, it was a woman and a man, but not always - and, amazingly, when two women bonded (or two men), the tribe did not turn them out. They celebrated exactly the same as with any other bonded couple.

"No wonder they got conquered," Anise said, and she frowned at her own statement, because she knew it was wrong. The urmal hadn't been conquered because they were morally corrupt, but because they were technologically backward and because the colonizing corporations were merciless. "I mean… it sounds like they were too pure for their own good…"

"Maybe," Franyi said.

Franyi had once read another book - she liked to read about different peoples and cultures - that told legend of a tribe of warrior-women among the kao-alta. The women would love freely among one another, pairing with men in the surrounding savage tribes only to procreate but otherwise keeping their attentions exclusively upon one another. Anise suspected there was a bit of salacious narration or wish-fulfillment in the tale, but it certainly got her to thinking: maybe the people of St. Arbalest had got things completely wrong. The more she thought on it the more certain she was and the angrier she became.

"I thought I was a pervert! I… I thought of killing myself, you know," she said. She glared at the copy of the Old Sylvan Bible that her grandmother had gifted her upon her admission to St. Quillia's.

The bookshelf rattled and rocked, but Franyi managed to save the books by nudging the offending volume with a broomstick. As if by its own accord, the bible tumbled to the floor, flopped around a few times, and then caught on fire. Franyi extinguished it with a towel and brought Anise into a hug - just a chaste one, like they used to share all the time. But it still felt different because Anise knew her friend felt just like she did.

"You have to be careful with your magical energy now that you're 4th elevation," Franyi said. "You can really damage things if you let it go unchecked…"

"I know," Anise sighed. "It's just… I grew up going to my father's temple - lots of important people go there - and they always taught that this…" she gestured between Franyi and herself… "was wrong. They taught that so much was wrong. But what if they're what's wrong? I mean… they told us wives must obey their husbands and parishioners have to obey their priests. They also taught us that the other races, the urmal, the dorthek, the byoun… they said those races were beneath us. But they aren't, are they? All of it is just a lie so they can keep enjoying their spots at the top of the city…"

"Maybe," Franyi said. "That's one book I haven't read much of… I never had much interest and my parents never encouraged me to develop one. My father has two copies of the Old Sylvan back at home. The first is the original family bible that he got from my great-grandfather. It's got the family tree going back seven generations. The other copy is a recent printing that he cut up, annotated, and inked out - all of the contradictory passages, outright falsehoods, and appeals to arbitrary divine law he blotted right out… and, in the end, he arrived at about twenty pages of prosaic truisms and two or three pages of solid moral advice."

"Anything about 'a woman shall not lie with a woman'?"

Franyi shook her head. "I don't think that made the cut."

"Good."

+++++Anise+++++

The days that followed were probably the happiest of Anise's life. At night, she and Franyi used their magical telekinesis to quietly move their beds until they were right next to one another, and then they would sleep together. That's all they did, really: sleep and kiss and caress, with an occasional foray into what might be considered groping, though that sounded far too crass for what it felt like. Anise knew that there were much more sexually-intense things that they could do with one another, but those things could wait. She felt her love for Franyi blossoming within her soul, and the feeling was so intense and so pure that Anise felt no need to sully that love with anything carnal.

She excelled in her studies, too. Whatever focus she'd lost in her latest bouts with trouble returned with a vengeance, and Anise found herself blasting through the curriculum of classes she'd found nigh impossible at the beginning of the term. She'd be up to advanced classes soon, after which there would be nothing for her to learn at St. Quillia's, unless Binar was able to get her enrolled in the several St. Arbalest's classes intended for future magisters of great promise.

"I think you'll be past me, soon," Franyi said - it was unclear whether she was more worried or proud at the prospect.

In either case, the observation was wrong, because Franyi had been dipping from the same endless pool of focus. If Anise was coming to master intermediate subjects, Franyi was getting to the point where it was awkward for her to even be in those classes. When their herbalism teacher, Magistress Calcelon, couldn't get her reflux reaction to work, Franyi troubleshot it in front of the whole class and got a liver decoction so pure you could have sold it at Parliament Exchange.

"Yes, thank you, Miss Jashopo…" Calcelon said, with a hint of embarrassment. "Let that be a lesson to the rest of you, too - even the best herbalist or alchemist must be mindful of her equipment setup, else she renders a subtle reaction apparatus next to useless."

Yes, Franyi was brilliant. Everybody said so. But correcting a 5th elevation Mage just wasn't supposed to happen. And now people were saying that Anise was brilliant, which definitely wasn't supposed to happen. Whenever her professors asked a particularly difficult question and Franyi wasn't around, all eyes turned to her. Anise will know, they seemed to say. And, however maddeningly, insanely improbable… she usually did!

"Integration by parts fails here because it results in reversion to the original integral, but we can rewrite the equation into a more complex one that will be solvable by parts if we use the double-integral," Anise said.

"Very good, Miss Derrigin. Would you care to solve for the class, then?" Mrs. Guayanek said.

And Anise did, and everybody else scribbled furiously into their notebooks, as if the solution wasn't perfectly obvious. Anise didn't feel any different, but maybe some great root clot had been dislodged from her soul and she was thinking and feeling freely for the first time. Maybe all those years of indoctrination - indoctrination that, thank the… thank the whomever… had never quite taken hold - had been holding her back like a butterfly stuck in her chrysalis. Now she was flying free and Franyi was flying with her…

"The magistress needs to speak with you," the matron said.

"What?" Anise said. "Again?"

"Come along, girl."

The matron pulled her right out of Intermediate Calculus, right in front of everybody, and marched her down to the administrative building with its stately white marble and coils of tasteful ivy. She wondered what could possibly be the matter this time. She'd done nothing but excel since her last run-in with school discipline… well, excel and then kiss and cuddle a lot, but that was always in the privacy of their room. Unless, of course, somebody had been spying on them? But whom? Could the school really be keeping such close tabs on them?

When she arrived at Sorceress Binar's office, some familiar faces were already there.

"Hello, Miss Derrigin," the kao-alta constabulary captain said.

"We know about the 3Z potion," the scriben bureaucrat added. With a bit of boastful flourish, he waved the little glass jar containing the smaller monogrammed potion phial in front of Anise's face. "We need you to confirm that this was the formula you used…"

"Well?" Sorceress Binar said. "What of it, Anise?"

They still had the phial. They had the formula. They'd confirmed a few of the ingredients that Anise and Franyi had used. And, now that some of Mr. Gladion's men and some of her uncle's hired thugs had been arrested after some sort of epic street dust-up in the Port District, they had testimony affirming that, not only had Anise not sold a potion to Mr. Gladion (as she'd originally claimed), but there were two infernics on the loose. Two infernics formerly under her uncle's control. They knew everything, and they promised Anise that she'd be in no legal trouble - they'd assume that she hadn't known what the potion was, that Ezra had tricked and/or seduced her into making it and, given her good breeding, there was no reason to suspect Anise Derrigin of criminality. She just needed to confirm the actual turn of events so they could pursue the case.

"That's… that's exactly what happened," Anise said. She wrung her hands in front of her, her gaze glued to the floor.

"I knew it!" the scriben bureaucrat slapped his palm against Sorceress Binar's desk, earning him an angry glare from the magistress. "Captain, I trust you can track down the fugitives?"

"There's not an alleyway in this city an escaped infernic can hide in," the captain said. He frowned at Anise over his sunglasses. "Thank you, Miss Derrigin… and do stay out of trouble from here on out. I'm a lenient man, but I have a good memory, and your family name will not earn you leniency again."

Anise nodded and just stood there as they left, her breath caught up at the top of her chest, her palms sweaty and pocked with red little crescents where her fingernails had dug into the flesh. The two men left, the door clicking shut behind her, and Anise just stood there, not daring to look up and feeling every second of Sorceress Binar's cold gaze.

"Look at me, girl," Binar said.

With some reluctance, Anise met the merciless gaze of those crystal-blue eyes. "Yes, magistress," she said, her voice sounding so small she wondered if Binar had even heard it from across her desk. She had.

"Yes sorceress," Binar said. "I am no longer the magistress of your school - you are no longer a St. Quillia's girl. I expect you to have vacated the etudium grounds by this time tomorrow, for you are no longer welcome here. You are one of the most talented young women I've ever had during my tenure here, but that will not overcome such a deep-seated character defect as lying to your magistress right to her face over matters of grave import. Perhaps another school will take you… one that does not expect such lofty moral standing among its students. A letter will be sent to your parents tomorrow morning. Get out of my sight, Anise Derrigin… now!"

With a wave of the sorceress's hand, the door to her office flew open with a crack, surprising several students passing in the hallway. Anise backed out slowly, hoping to preserve some shred of her dignity, her gaze once again returned to the floor. Then she fled, racing back to St. Bastia's Hall, perhaps for the last time. Franyi was already there, concern written all over her face. She'd been right there when they'd pulled Anise out of calculus. She knew that whatever had transpired couldn't be good.

She held Anise close, waiting for her to stop crying, and then planted little kisses all over her face, drying Anise tears with a handkerchief that smelled of her cinnamon-and-flowers bath oils. She held Anise's hands, her thumbs tracing little lines along the backs of them, and waited until Anise was composed enough to meet her beautiful eyes. With a start, Anise realized that Franyi had been crying, too, and in her own fit of self-pity, she'd completely ignored her.

"I'm a terrible person," Anise muttered. "You're too good for me…"

"Let me decide who I'm good enough for," Franyi said. "It's like you said - the whole system is broken, and you've been punished because you're a good person trying to get by. And if ignoring that is what it means to be a good St. Quillia's girl, then I want no part of it." Anise could hear the bitter bile in her words, could feel the bits of spittle as Franyi's expressive lips drew up into a scowl.

"Franyi… you can't…" Anise said.

"I can. It's my decision and nobody else's. Anise… you and I are going to Sidoade Island."

Anise felt so conflicted - it sounded like Franyi was throwing her future away. She would be a respected magistress in no time, able to pave her way in the world, beholden to nobody. And she was about to ruin that, and Anise felt like the architect of the destruction of Franyi's future. And yet Anise's heart overflowed with joy: Franyi loved her and was coming with her! Surely, that had to count for something.

"Let's get packed, then," Anise said.