That night I laid awake thinking about Mizzy. Sweet, gentle, lovable Mizzy. For the last few years, whenever I thought about such things, I often thought about Mizzy and Tommil together. I never deluded myself enough to think it was a real possibility, but it always seemed like the idea had some good symmetry. I mentioned it to Mama once and she made a sour face.
"Do not be a match maker Tandy, you are ill-suited for it."
Now that I see Tommil and Adiz together, I see what Mama was talking about. Tommil grew up with Mama, and later to a much lessor degree me, as the template of what a Kinderling woman should be. But Tommil is also gentle like Father. Adiz is the perfect mix of strong, beautiful, industrious woman, and soft, supportive affection that Tommil needs.
I may be ill-suited as a match maker, but I think I can recognize it when I see a good one.
All that aside, what should I do about Mizzy? What could I do?
*"your ---- is in trouble?"* The ---- didn't translate. It tasted something like sister-wife-mother-daughter all at once.
Tasted? This bonding with a familiar thing was getting weirder and weirder.
"I'm afraid for my friend Smoke, and I don't know what to do about it" I whispered to the furball curled under my chin.
*"i go check on her tomorrow"*
The next morning's breakfast was lively with chatter. It seems that even though the Outcropping garrison is the safest place most of us have been in days, and has the most comfortable beds. None of us slept well.
The one notable absence, at least to me, was Smoke. I remembered what she said about going to check on Mizzy, but I didn't know how, she had never even met Mizzy, and it was such a long way back to the village and the Gorfs and and... Then I felt Smoke's amused touch in my mind *"you worry too much dear one"* and somehow I knew she would be okay.
After allowing everyone to eat breakfast, and engage in some general chatter Mama took over. As usual, there was no argument. There was no question. Mama just spoke up and was in charge. That's Mama for you.
"We need to see about getting as many of the others still living in the mines out of there and up here to safety." Mama said. "I spoke with Bez and Tilly, and they both say the Garrison is large enough, and can sustain that many. We'll need to re-open parts of the Garrison that have been closed for quite a while, but that shouldn't be a problem."
"We also need to find out what's going on in the village." Added Father. "Yes, we could bring our people up here, but ultimately hiding up here isn't a permanent solution."
"What we need to do is stick an arrow or two in that fat Baot, kill the tyrants, and take the village back! By force if necessary!" Zenna interjected.
"Yes. Short term, we also need to find out what is going on in the village. Thank you Tadius." Mama said. "Freeing the village and punishing the guilty are, of course, also good goals. However, due to our numbers, that will have to be a long term goal at best."
"And I have to go rescue Mizzy." I blurted out. I couldn't help myself.
"Tandy, it's too dangerous to go in and rescue one person." Father said. I knew that's how he would feel about it. To him, Mizzy was just another annoying Kinderling girl. Mama knew better. Mama was there on that night when I stumbled through the door, too drunk on honey wine to quit babbling. She alone knew about the deal I had made with Mizzy.
"Mama, you know as well as I do that Mizzy is doing her best to gather ever scrap of information she can. Because that's what the perfect Kinderling wife would do. She always said, the perfect Kinderling wife knows everything that is going on so she can tell her husband what he needs to know." I got some weird looks from around the table at the "perfect Kinderling wife" part, but nobody asked and I was grateful to not have to try to explain it. Mizzy's ideas are not what you would call normal among Kinderlings.
"You know, rescuing a single Kinderling would probably be easier than crawling around and trying to gather intelligence." Uncle Zon said, coming to my defense. "If, of course, that one person is ready to be rescued."
"She is Uncle Zon." I said, "She's waiting for me to come get her, I just know it."
Then Tommil had to go and break-up the seriousness of the conversation.
"Is there something we don't know about Tandy and Mizzy?" His tone said everything he was thinking. All eyes around the table were either staring at me, shocked about what my own brother's words implied, or staring at him, shocked that he would imply such a thing. Don't get me wrong, such relations do happen among the Kinderling, it isn't taboo or anything, but it is rare enough that people don't usually expect it.
Adiz broke the silence by slugging Tommil in the shoulder.
"OW! What was that for?" He asked.
"Being a big giant doofus." She told him.
Apparently "Being a big giant doofus" meant something between them, because Tommil nodded.
"Sorry Tandy. Adiz is right, I was being a big giant doofus. Forgive me."
Ding! One point for Tandy... Those two ARE perfect for each other.
"So, we split up into two teams." Mama said. "Team Exodus can start making plans for how to get the people from the mines. Who?"
"I got that one Bonnie." Uncle Zon volunteered. "I think I have a friend who can help in that regard, if I can find him."
"I'll take team Princess Rescue then." Mama said. "I'll need Tandy. The rest of you are in the pool. As we make plans and need personnel, we pull from the pool. Anyone not pulled from the pool are on cleanup duty! Tadius, you spearhead that effort. Zon?"
"Looks like we're Solid!" Replied Uncle Zon. "Zenna, Fendt, Toff! I'll need a detailed report on the situation at the mines."
"Dismissed!" Sounded Mama. Wow... that all was decided fast.
This soldier-side of Mama wasn't one I had ever seen before. It was hard to reconcile with the picture I had in my head of Mama the healer, and at the same time it made perfect sense. It didn't make matters any easier to grasp that Uncle Zon, as a Capitan of the militia, and Father the one surviving member of the village council, both should have far out ranked Mama, yet they deferred to her completely. For that matter, so did Bez and Tilly now that I think of it. They were both retired, but I was getting the strong impression that they both outranked Uncle Zon somehow, yet even they seemed to accept that Mama was the boss.
Mama and I didn't take long to sketch in our basic plan. We didn't know enough about what was going on in the village to get too specific. From Zenna we knew that Daggi hadn't moved out of his hole in the old Oak stump. The tree itself was gone having been hit by lightning and mostly burnt down long before I was born leaving a soggy old rotten stump. Mizzy had to be hating it there. Cold, wet, damp. Rotting wood all around. Kinderlings love trees, and we make our homes in them. One of the most common gifts that Kinderlings have is the ability to gently guide trees to grow in the way we want them to. Something like one in every three Kinderlings can do this. I can't, Mama can't, but both Father can, and Tommil is particularly good at it. Over the years our home, an enormous willow tree, has thrived and grown under the gentle guidance of the family.
We were going to have to make it up as we went along. The basic plan was to find a hiding place just outside the village and watch for an opening. Daggi's stump was near the edge of the village, so we hoped it wouldn't be too hard to sneak in, grab Mizzy, and get out without being detected.
After a meeting with Uncle Zon, Father, Bez, and Tilly, which I was disappointed to not been invited to, Mama came to talk to me that evening.
"Tandy. Zon, Toff, and I are going to go look for that friend Zon was talking about, and do a preliminary scout of the village." Mama said. "I want you to rest here, build up your strength, and ready whatever devices you might need for the rescue." Mama looked at my bag of tricks. "Is there anything in there that might help?"
I had gone over what was in my bag. Many of the ideas were sound, but looking at them now, the implementation of those ideas was childish at best. If I had faced off against the bullies that day, it was a toss-up as to who would have come out on top, but someone definitely would have gotten hurt. Sure, if I was lucky, those bullies wouldn't have had a chance, but one can't count on luck. Without it I would have been in serious trouble. Not to mention that some of the devices were potentially a lot more deadly than I remember.
"I'll get to work on it. I should be able to come up with something." I said. I'm sure Mama saw through what little bravado I was able to muster.
A little later, Father was the next helpful family member to come see if I was okay.
"Hey kiddo, how are you making out?"
I had broken down an arrow chucker device and was thinking of using the motivator, the part that accelerated the arrows, to toss a grappling hook with a line attached. I showed Father the original idea, and then what I had planned to modify it into.
"Tandy, if that thing works like you said, I would put it back together the way it was. You might need it."
"But I can't figure out a way to keep the arrows from killing someone Father." I said. "I never should have built this thing, what was I thinking? Sure the bullies were mean, but I could have killed them!" I hadn't thought about what I was going to do that day for a long time, and more mature me was shocked at what younger, angry me had in store.
"Kiddo, you know I wouldn't normally condone this, but Daggi has your friend, and he's forcing her to live with him as his wife. If he catches you when you go to rescue her, he will kill you. Your mother and I had a fight about this and I lost. This is crazy, I didn't want to let you go, but your mother says it has to be done, so as soon as she gets back from scouting, you need to be ready. If by then you don't think you can kill someone if you need to to rescue your friend or save your own life, I'm going to revisit that fight. I'll probably lose again, but I'm not sending my little girl, defenseless, into that mess."
Father was serious. For once, serious enough that I actually thought he had a chance to win that fight, but I didn't want him to have to try. I would do this, I had to do this. For Mizzy, for my village, and for myself. I started looking at my pile of devices from a different perspective.
Later yet, another helpful family member showed up. This time with a girlfriend on his arm.
"We brought you a couple things that we hope might help." With that, Tommil set a couple pieces of wood next to me. They were shaped like my ill-fated go-stick, but this time, instead of just being hacked from a chunk of wood, they appeared to be grown into that shape. That was pretty incredible, even for Tommil. Sure some Kinderlings could convince a tree to grow in a certain way. That's how we formed rooms and doorways and window openings for our Kinderling houses. In order for it to happen in a way that wouldn't harm the tree, there was no way to make it precise. It was more like a strong suggestion. To convince a tree to grow a specifically formed piece and give it up? That was powerful.
"This is incredible, how did you do this?" I asked Tommil.
"I provided the power to convince the tree to grow, and Adiz did the shaping." He answered.
"I would never have been able to do it without Tommil, I have never been able to convince a tree to grow any faster than it wants to. With him providing the growth, and me the control to make the shape, it works."
It was almost unheard of for Kinderlings to be able to team up to do something like that. A lot of people would say impossible, but I'm not most people. I know the word impossible is for quitters. Really really difficult? yea, that exists. So difficult that nobody bothers? Yep that too, but impossible is a lie.
"Thank you Tommil. I'm going to start sketching and see if I can figure out what went wrong with the last one right now!" I was excited, a little touched, and motivated by Tommil and Adiz' gift. And, of course, terrified that I would screw it up again.
I spent much the next day poring over the go-stick design. Air? Lightness? Quickness? Those worked before. Bridge them together with a trefoil bridge? A quatrefoil? That's dumb, how would a quatrefoil bridge balance with three runes?
"Tandy? What you got there?" Tilly asked. "Sorry to bother you, but you looked like you were stuck. Sometimes when I'm stuck, I like to get a fresh perspective. Of course, usually I only have Bez to ask, and he's all knees and elbows when it comes to runic magic, so he usually isn't much help, but talking it out sometimes works."
So I told her the whole story of the go-stick. How my first experiments with Air and Lightness, connected by a standard duplex bridge was interesting, but wouldn't go anywhere. Then about how I worked up to the go-stick that I used to fly through the forest. That one used Air, Lightness, and Quickness, with a Trefoil bridge, but it didn't last long. She laughed with me about the looks on the Gorfs faces as their dinner, me, shot off through the forest, right out of reach.
To show her how it all worked, I found a short piece of tree branch and carved the runes and bridges into it. ZIP, POW! It flew across the room, narrowly missing Fendt, and smashed itself against the far wall before it fell to dust.
"Oh my, that is powerful." Tilly said. "Have you ever heard of using chains, or nets of chains, instead of bridges?" Upon seeing my blank expression, "Ooh! Come to my lab, this is going to be fun!"
"I'll get my things!" I cried happily.
Fendt just scowled at us and shook his head.
I have never had a like minded soul to play with runes with. None of my family shared my way of looking at runes and seeing the connections. Mama came closest, and she can make some amazing devices, but she uses runes that just don't sing for me. When I show her my devices, she sees the runes, but often can't tell what I was trying to do. Even when they worked, and more often than not they didn't, she wasn't able to understand why. My parent's old friend, Mr. Rupert, didn't really grasp it either. He would show me new runes and tell me what to do with them. I rarely understood the connection between the rune and what he said to do. Sure, using a Lightness rune to remove a stone from a field sounded reasonable enough, I just couldn't make it work like Mr. Rupert. Eventually, I would play with the new runes enough to figure out to make them do something, but it was almost never, what Mr. Rupert said they would do. The whole thing made me feel like I was defective somehow.
It was different with Tilly. She didn't always understand what I was trying to do, but she cheered me on with giddy delight anyway. Then she told me something nobody had ever said to me before. "Tandy, everyone is different. The runes don't work for you the same as they work for me, and they won't work for me the same as they work for you. The difference isn't right or wrong, the difference is the people. It's normal. I use Lightness to help me move stone blocks onto the fortifications when I build. I could no more use it to fly than you could use Fire and Lightning runes to quarry stone."
I really wanted to see that! If only for the light show!
Tilly also showed me new ways to bridge runes together. Ways that were stronger and more stable than the duplex and trefoil bridges that I learned in school. Those, she said, were fine for learning theory, and for light work, but as soon as there was any stress on the runic matrix they fell apart.
She had never seen a quatrefoil. Admittedly, I had mostly made that one up by extrapolating what the trefoil might look like in four dimensions, so maybe that's why. Now that I understood that bridges were unable to take stress, I was able to create a couple small devices with it to prove it worked. The secret was only using it for things that didn't stress the runic matrix. Unfortunately, that made them a lot less useful to me.
I did make a couple floating lamps that might be useful. I made both trefoil and quatrefoil versions. The trefoil version just floated there and you could tie a string to it and pull it along with you wherever you went. The quatrefoil version was designed to be thrown, and used a new rune that Tilly taught me. The Inertia rune. Interestingly, she uses that rune on fortifications so that they don't move when hit by something big. She said the basic rule of the Inertia rune was "Things in motion tend to stay in motion, things at rest tend to stay at rest." What I did with it was make a Light that when thrown, it kept going in the direction you threw it. Eventually, the charge would run out and it would collapse into dust, but they went pretty far before that happened.
I didn't know what I would use the Inertia Light for, but it was neat, so I packed it.
Then I started playing with the new ways to create runic matrices that Tilly showed me. Chains and Nets. Bridges tended to fall apart when subjected to stress. Mama never needed anything stronger, because her devices didn't create that stress. The pain-relief needle didn't fly itself across the room, it just used... I don't know what... to disrupt... something or other that did pain stuff... from letting you know your arm, or whatever, hurt. Most of Mama's devices worked like that. Very passive, but powerful.
Nobody has ever described ME as passive. Force of nature? Yea. Destructive lunatic? You bet. Passive? No.
By the time Mama and Uncle Zon returned from the scouting trip, I had a bag of goodies that I not only knew would work, I knew why they worked. I even knew why and how my no-see-me's worked, and had improved them to make them a whole lot more reliable. Still not a magic invisibility cloak, but much more reliable, and they also helped with sound and scent. It was Tilly that added the sound and scent part, but it was close enough to my own way of thinking that I was not only able to understand how it worked, I was able to duplicate it. The two of us made a dozen of them. Mama and I would each have one, and Uncle Zon's Exidous team would have ten of the devices to help with his part of the mission.
In addition to those devices, my arrow chucker was a beast. I was able to beat Fendt hands down in an "archery" contest with it, and I had a few different options for arrows to shoot out of it. Regular arrows worked, and I had an arrow with a barbed tip and a line that would be awesome for arrow fishing. I had a grappling hook with a heavier line that I could shoot up somewhere and use to climb, IF the grappling hook caught on something. I also had a couple special arrows. One turned to dust moments after it hit, and the other exploded rather extravagantly when it hit. I had a few of each.
The chucker itself, I only had one. I had salvaged the parts from my old one, that would definitely not have worked for long, to make the new one, but they were too complex to make more of in the short time we had. With my permission, Tilly was planning on scaling the idea up to make it chuck full size spears or bigger. I have no idea what she was planning on killing with that monster, but hey, I don't always have a reason for the things I build either.
Most importantly, I also had two go-sticks. Good ones. I could fly them around, speed up, slow down. Turn. Land gracefully! Not crash!
