First up, daffodil bulbs poking their heads up out of the dirt. Then our seed boxes, and seed trays full of potential (and water). Plus two pictures of pansies.

Since I started this post the world has entered May, to my dismay and hurry. I lost two weeks to a throat infection and two more weekends before that to a heavenly vacation in England, which was great but not really helping me keep busy. Our sunflower and tomato babies are outgrowing their space, and if I’m lucky they’ll put up with being inside until Memorial Day weekend, the traditional time to plant in this part of the world. It’s been dry here, with sparse rain and a constant stream of conversation about hoses and drip hoses and while we’re at it, how about adding a water feature back by the dogwood bush? It’s a lovely season with everything leafing, and I’ve been spending the day wrestling with the push mower. Mom’s been making candied violets with egg whites, a paintbrush, and multicolored sugars. There is also a rhubarb cake on the conference table, thus proving why we garden in the first place. I have quince flowers on my desk, that deep red that is hard to capture with words, because it has overtones and undertones and a sense of solidity that defies my attempt to explain it.

The hills were red with twilight, and in the woods beyond town the crimson-etched oak leaves vibrated with an eerie descanting song. Three voices were raised, songs with words beyond our ken rising to the heavens and falling into glens already shadowed by night.

tempers on em each one and all,

The traveler was lost and not from these parts, and heard the song but was not so clever as to take it for the beautiful markings on the poisonous butterfly. He knocked upon the door of the cottage, under the fading light beneath the eaves. The door opened and he was invited inside, polite as you please, as the song fell silent. The women were beautiful, though he could not place their age, and their gazes were brown and level and wise and filled with an emotion he could not name.

so ware your mouth drinking with them watch your cup drinking with them take your grace with them

They sat him down by the fire, and busied themselves with cauldron and kettle. Their murmurs were once more in a language he knew not, but their hospitality was unescapable.

“Thank you,” he said, and, “It’s very nice to meet you,” he said, but they did not reply in tongues he understood, and, “What sort of stupid people can’t understand plain English,” he said, and the three women smiled at him and pushed him back down into his chair. They were not strong, those pressing hands, but they pushed him down despite that, and into the woven chair he fell. They offered him a goblet, red and steaming, drawn from the cauldron over the fire and the hot water from the kettle.

Three witches; all both cruel and kind, drinking cups filled with tea, rosemary…and darrrk..red wiiine…-

The sun set. The song began again.

“What’s up?” Janine asked her friend Lyssa, who was currently in the form of a very lazy green snake with yellow eyes and a flash of red tongue. Lyssa was curled up on the school yard bench, making herself ornamental around the wrought-iron arm.

Tongue-flick.

“Another schism,” her friend replied, in a perfectly clear and understandable human voice. Janine never did get that part of the whole thing.

“What, seriously?”

Janine plopped her bookbag down between them and sat on the back of the wooden bench, perching precariously. Lyssa was unconcerned by her tone, unblinking. Not that Lyssa ever blinked, except in that weird milky way.

“Seriously,” Lyssa entoned. “They decided it after morning prayer. We are now the Honorable Reform-New Charter Lycanthrope School of the North, and the south building is the Venerated Reform-Traditionalist Lycanthrope School of the South.”

“You’re joking.”

Lyssa stared at her, unamused by disbelief.

“We just split off from the Orthodox Lycanthrope Tradition last month,” Janine wailed, glaring at the south building across the green as if she expected it to try to eat her. “Which teachers did we keep?”

“Professor Alastair. Professor Rizon. Professor Shasha. Plus their assistants and most of the ground staff. Um… you’ll be pissed.” Lyssa glanced away, sinuously.

“Why am I going to be more pissed than I already am about this?”

“Professor Mokni is the head of the School of the South.”

“But he’s my advisor – why would – aren’t I in the School of the South, then?”

“I don’t think you want to be in the School of the South,” Lyssa hissed. “They’re talking about mandatory robe wearing. Didn’t you enjoy wearing jeans this month?”

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean – which school are you going to?”

“North. Obviousssly.”

“It isn’t that obvious to me,” Janine retorted.

“Young ladies,” a masculine voice said from behind her. Janine quailed, turning. It was Professor Mokni, looking beautiful and sleek in full formal robes and spectacles, black hair held back by a ribbon. Janine supressed a purr.

“Yes, professor?” She asked, Lyssa falling silent.

“Gossip is inappropriate. Your class schedules will be released to you as usual on Sunday after prayer.”

He softened the admonition with a smile.

“Go hunt. It clarifies thought and strengthens the body.”

Janine nodded, form flowing into that of a great spotted cat. Her tail twitched, catching the scent of him, and catching the scent of him catching the scent of her. They were a rare pair in that they were technically the same species. He was a black panther, and she a simple panther, and he made her want to – she turned, bounding away, and Lyssa slithered after her, leaving the religious questions to their elders.

The rustle of chairs.

“Thank you for coming, Lord Tillwood.”

“I had to admit to some curiosity, your ladyship. It is seldom I receive a proposal from someone I am currently making war upon.”

“I did consider other methods of communication, but I’ve never been known as a woman whose talent lies in coming to the point.”

“Your ladyship confuses me. If your proposal was not to the point, what is?”

“I wished to speak with you upon a subject.”

“What subject, if not marriage?”

“I did not say the subject was not marriage.”

“Now your ladyship has as much as said the subject is marriage.”

“I did not say that either, Lord Tillwood.”

“Are we to argue in circles, then, your ladyship?”

“If it pleases you, Marquis of Tillwood.”

“I came here to assuage a curiousity, your ladyship, and out of courtesy. Pray be courteous.”

“Have I offended you, your lordship?”

“No, no, not offended. I simply ask that you speak plainly.”

Silence, broken by the swish of a fan and a finger tapping against a leather glove.

“Tea, your lordship?”

“Certainly.”

Small, bustling noises. Tea pouring. The silver clink of a spoon.

“Milk, sugar?”

“I will take both, please.”

“Very good,” came her murmur.

The sound of a cup moving against a saucer as it is passed from hand to hand.

“Very well, lady, if you will not speak plainly, pray speak at all. Say on, and I will attempt patience.”

“Do you ever succeed at patience?”

“Not often, no, though sometimes on the hunt.”

“What do you hunt?”

“I prefer men, but deer will do. Wolves provide a challenge, and the wild boar is terrifying.”

“Something terrifies you? I’m surprised.”

“I am a man.”

“Yes, as I am a woman. I take a woman’s approach to solving problems.”

“What do you mean by that, your ladyship?”

“You see, Lord Tillwood, I’ve poisoned the tea.”

There’s a swirl of color in the center of the room. It’s blue at its core but beaded in black and purple and silver, surrounding a woman who surrounds herself in a veil of swaying arms and clever, inviting hands. She is wearing a midrift-baring silky sapphire top and a skirt of the same shade, covered in a net of dark beads and flashing coins that sound like bells with each stamp of her foot.

She has a backup singer in the background, and a man in a vest playing some sort of drum. It’s hard to pay attention to them, when her movements snap with a precision that seems almost painful, and then sway with a langoir that almost puts you to sleep. The music slows, and her hands slow with it. The arc of her black hair turns downward, flowing around her shoulders, and the rhythm of her hips is a gentle shh, shh. Her skirt, you notice, is embroidered with a pattern of feathers in black thread, just visible under the black net of beads and silver coins that make that sound that is getting under your skin and weaving itself with your heartbeat. You find your breath slowing in sympathy. Her figure is round and has no hard edges, except her nose, which writers might call ‘striking’ and you would call flat and oddly appealing, though that might be the way it looks with the blackness of her eyelashes and the curve of her neck, the line of her shoulder, the way the light flares golden across her skin as she circles and you can see the spread of her upper back above her shirt.

The drum begins to beat louder, slowly. Drum. Drum. Drum. She finishes the dance with a swaying walk, and as her hips echo from side to side, the beads on her skirt go flying.

Zita was a student at a boarding school known as Addergoole. She was in her fourth year, a few months from graduating, and was endlessly surprised and impressed with the school’s ability to throw fresh challenges in her face, where they proceeded to try to claw her eyeballs out and turn her tongue into a new and delicious form of popsicle.

Today, Zita was wearing one of her favorite outfits, a short white skirt and white blouse with a matching white ribbon choker and tiny white hat that took nursing past the practical and into the risque. It made her bosses at the school nursing station make old fashioned sounds, but Zita knew for a fact that both of the women in charge of her supervised last year of earning her nursing certification in her spare time would be busy with patients and then busy eating and sleeping and having some semblance of time off to recharge. It was a hectic time.

Right at the moment, the challenge facing Zita was her English homework. Despite batting considerable eyelashes at the English professor, she still had an essay due Tuesday. Or was it Wednesday? She was pretty sure she had it written down in a day planner that she realized, running a hand over her face, she had left at home. Zita sighed, and plowed on with her notes.

A sound in the doorway made her look up. Zita blinked. Leofric, Leo, her best friend and the center of her life, was standing in the doorway covered in blood. That was not, in itself, unusual. Leo liked to fight, and blood was easily replacable. Leo’s shirt was missing a sleeve. Also not particularly unusual.

Zita stood up.

Leo’s arm was missing from inside the sleeve. Zita’s teeth clenched.

“Leo, you lost your arm. How could you forget that?”

Aspen preferred nighttime in the city. It was his preference to go unseen and unnoticed, which was far easier in a crowd than in a small town. He was from a small town, originally, with a petty lord and small town problems - village officials who stole small amounts from their town’s coffers, rather than wandering off after larger prey. Their motivation, he supposed, was an aversion to risk, and was not an aversion he shared. Aspen preferred risk.

He did not share as much risk by night as a woman might have, wending her way home through the torchlit streets. He had been mistaken for a girl one dark night on an unpleasantly memorable occasion, though his own particular talents had lent themselves to escape and a quiet certainty he was never taking that road home again. He’d been younger then. Today, perhaps, he would be more proactive.

Aspen eyed his fellow travelers, with their mix of local and foreign looks, their packages and their donkeys. One, a woman, met his eyes with a direct glower and her hand on her purse. Well, she wasn’t wrong, for all he wasn’t working yet tonight. Nothing was gained by engaging her, so he turned his head, a trick that worked on street vendors as well as those with the instincts to spot a thief. She passed him, rust-colored skirts held out of the mud with one hand, hair covered with a pale blue scarf. For a moment he wanted to say something, just one word, to bring himself closer to this sea of strangers. What would he say? His pace picked up, the soft soles of his shoes shhhing against the cobbles. Hello. Good evening. Lovely stars tonight, aren’t they? Nice big moon.

The moon was indeed bright and the stars were particularly clear, with no clouds to obscure either. Bad weather for his work.

Eyes on the sky, Aspen was startled by a jostle, as a young – yes, female pickpocket, if he wasn’t mistaken – ran into him artfully. Her hands ghosted over his clothing almost imperceptibly, and came away empty. She apologized, and Aspen summoned up a smile from somewhere. He was, he thought, in an odd mood tonight.

“Quite alright,” he said, his own voice sounding alien to his ears. His mood, he decided, was fae, or perhaps silly. He was not so alone as all that. Not really.

The young pickpocket shrugged, and he stepped around her to move on. He glanced backward, to catch her foot, the last of her, disappearing into an even darker alley. No torches to illuminate the way there. She’d be lucky to avoid a bigger fish. Had he begun to look so prosperous he was prey as well as predator?

He shook his head, and aimed himself for the next dark alley. From there, it was a matter of minutes to climb the crumbling brick wall, covered in equally crumbling dauls of tan clay, and reach the tiled roof. He’d take the high road the rest of the way. He was sick to death of not dealing with people.

There is a certain practice known among the stars by many names. It goes something like this: you make contact with a less advanced civilization, and start gifting them with technology. You give them medical equipment and food based on their nutritional requirements. You give them defenses they couldn’t have built themselves, strung out along their solar system like a cattle fence made of pinpoints of metal. You encourage them to be at peace with each other, and strive to do better than their ancestors. The race commonly known as the Tydrin were well known for this. When you knew this race a little better, you arranged to collect shiploads of these newly healthy and well fed people, to assist with their new population pressures. You take those ships to newly discovered worlds of the correct atmospheric content to suit both your races (a race with a very similar physiology is the keystone of this method) and you leave them there. If they build a civilization, you may use it to found your own colony and as a source of workers. If they die, you have learned something important about the native biota.

Most often, the colonists die.

The Tydrin’s previous farmed race was over-managed a few generations back, population stripped of the young and hardy, by a rather expansionist Tydrin faction that hadn’t studied their agriculture. The current Tydrin ruling government is a far more mellow moderate coalition, prone to thinking themselves the most reasonable people in the room. They even allow humanity a certain choice in their sacrifices for the greater good. The Tydrin take those who are seldom missed – from the foster care system, from the streets, from countries with surplus populations they would prefer to discriminate against anyway. Runaways. Outcasts. Rebels. Dissedents. Prisoners.

That the Tydrin have offered to take people away is an open secret. They even get some volunteers, eager to see the stars. Some governments volunteer people they find inconvinient. The Tydrin have offices in most major cities and in every country, where they oversee the distribution and maintainance of their farming androids and medical facilities. They’re very easy to find, though very hard to kill.

No one really knows where the Tydrin take people. The Tydrin prefer it that way.

This is the story of a yet unnamed planet, in a sector of the arm of the galaxy near Earth. The Tydrin just opened it for pre-colonization, having recently liberated from the dedicated terraforming of an aquatic race of their acquaintance. The Tydrin and this race do not get along, despite a lack of overlapping habitat needs. Something about a star exploding some centuries ago.

Next time: meet the cast.
Chapter One

Past

Waking up in a metal coffin, shaking and twisting its way through the atmosphere. Arguments, loud and buzzing in the ears. Trying to get a word in edgewise, until the shaking turned into a horrible spiralling descent that plastered you to the walls and slammed someone into you hard enough to make your mouth taste like sucking on pennies.

Present

“I don’t think that’s edible,” the mud-smeared girl said.

Noah looked blearily at her. The root in his hand, dug out of the swamp, was an unobjectionable brown color, and seemed a better bet than the sharp-edged spiky grass things he’d cut his other hand on. The cut was helpfully covered in the ever-present mud, keeping out one set of alien bugs by putting another set of alien bugs in close proximity to his precious blood, but he wasn’t thinking about that. At least it had stopped bleeding.

“Why wouldn’t it be edible?” Noah asked the girl.

She spread muddy hands.

“Why would it be edible?” She echoed back at him. “I’m not sure there’s a first rule of wilderness survival, or, like, whatever, but if there were I’m pretty sure it’d be don’t stick stuff in your mouth without testing it first.”

“Testing?” Noah asked blankly.

“You know, seeing if it causes your skin to break out in big red blotches? Testing.”

“Oh.”

She frowned.

“Hey, are you tracking?”

She waved a hand in front of his eyes. Noah reared back, headache worsening. He batted at her hand and missed.

“Yes. What?”

“Did… you… hit… your head?” She finished, doing him the favor of not leaving embarrassingly long pauses between every single word she was saying. Noah considered this question. His memory of the crash was paltry. Mediocre, even, mediocre was a good word.

“I guess. There more of you guys?” He asked her.

“There’s some more girls arguing over down that way,” she gestured with a broad arm motion. “They were giving me a headache, so I decided to scout around for survivors.”

“Why aren’t we dead?”

The girl shrugged. Her hair was brown, he noticed, but a sunny brown. There were pale streaks under the green-brown mud.

“I was asleep most of the time, after-” she folded her arms. “One of the other girls said she thought the ship hit turbulence coming down, and that’s why half the bodies around are dead. Lots of broken bones. You hurt?”

Noah started to take an absent bite of his fist-sized root. The girl snatched it from his hand.

“Weren’t you listening to me?”

Noah blinked at her.

“Damn it. Okay, c’mon, let’s find you someplace dry to sit down.”

She approached him like a wild animal. Eyeing his root, now in her hands, Noah let himself be taken in hand and led through the knee-deep water towards a cluster of tall plant things resembling trees.

“We’re just going to the trees,” she commented.

“They look like trees. We don’t know that they are trees. Why?”

“There’s some higher ground there, built up around their roots. More solid.”

“Huh.”

The trek was miserable, the air thick and viscous with fog. Noah noticed, variously, that the razor reeds were just as painful to walk through as they were to grab hold of, that he didn’t know the girl’s name, and that she was taller than him. He couldn’t muster the energy to do anything about any of these things, however, so he followed his new savior-captor-busybody up out of the water atop muck to a patch of muck atop water. One of the trunks had fallen into the swamp, and she sat him down on that, and sat next to him.

“I wish I had a knife,” she said, staring out over the foggy hillocks of grey-green spikes.

It at least looked like wilderness from home. Not that Noah was much for wilderness. He ignored this obvious plea, and sat.

She shook herself, and moved away down the slope to the nearest stand of razor reeds. Noah rather liked the name. She made them rustle, moving them, and trotted back up the slope. She was briefly delayed by getting a sneaker sunk in a sinkhole, and tugged her foot loose with a huffy breath.

There was a streak of red on her forearm. Noah swore.

“What happened? Are you okay?” He asked, voice high.

“Oh, yeah, I just cut myself. You know – well, obviously you don’t-“ She sat down next to him on the rotting log thing, before continuing. “For the scratch test. You put a bit of something you might be allergic to on a scratch, and if it gets red or weird or itchy or hurts, then you’re probably allergic or it’s poisonous.”

“You didn’t have to cut yourself! I have a cut on my hand right here,” he waved his mud-covered hand, ignoring that she couldn’t possibly see the cut under all that mud. “Do you have any idea how many bacteria there are we aren’t immune to in normal Earth environments, not to mention wherever we are? Chr- f- don’t do that,” he finished weakly.
Her lips pursed for a long half-minute.

“You’re a germophobe,” she said, testing it out.

“No, my dad’s a doctor.” He scowled, rubbing at his temples. “I mean, I guess.”

“You guess your dad’s a doctor?”

“I guess he’s my dad. Look, what’s this about a scratch test?”

“You don’t have a concussion.”

“No, I’m just distracted being pissed about being stuck on an alien planet, and what’s your name?”

“Michelle Lopez.”

“I’m Noah.”

“Just – don’t do that. Don’t act like I’m not here.” There was an edge, an intensity, to her voice that he couldn’t place.

“Sorry.” He met her eyes. They were green, bright against her darker skin. “Show me that scratch test thing, please.”
Ceremoniously, Michelle chipped a raw spot on his root, until it started gleaming pale sap-stuff. She rubbed it against the thin red line condensing on her arm, smearing the blood around.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Going to go back to looking for more people?” He asked.

“Nah. I might keel over and die from alien toxins,” she said, looking at him sideways.

“You’re a true humanitarian.”

She snorted.

“I am. Nice to meet you, Noah.”

“You, too. How long do we wait?”

“I dunno. Half an hour, an hour? I’ve never done one before, I’ve just heard of them.”

“We’re all gonna die,” Noah observed mildly.

“I don’t know. I’m used to living rough, your dad was a doctor- we might have a better chance than the clutch I was talking to. They weren’t-“

“Think it’s a test? Like, character building?”

“I have enough character to last two lifetimes.”

“Cool. Can I have some?”

That startled a laugh from her, a mellow, deep sound. He smiled, watching her carefully. She sobered, studying the cut on her arm.

“Michelle?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s going to get cold after dark, isn’t it.”

Her gaze shifted and she stared off into the greyness, still brightly lit by whatever color of distant star they were orbiting.

“Yeah.”

As in most cases, with human endeavor, it pays to be mindful of the details. I prefer glass for my instruments, so my teapot is clear glass decorated by a few golden stripes along the outside. My cups are small and round, in the Middle Eastern style, also made of glass. The whole set sits on a golden tray. Gold for life, for the sun, but also for softness and bending. Around my tea set in glass bowls sit my ingredients. Rosehips for the possibility of love. Dried petals of the hibiscus flower for dreams. Lemon peel (organic, there was a sale), for purification. Blackberry leaves, hawthorne, orange, mint. I wasn’t going to be using the mint today, but I took some out of its tin and put it in its bowl all the same, next to my favorite Assam. There had been a time or two when I had been happy to have mint close to hand, when dark things came calling.

I use a circular table made of maple wood that I got from my grandfather. The only fire I use is to heat the boiling water. Today my main ingredients are rose, hibiscus, lemon, blackberry. A few pinches of other things, well crumbled, go into the pot as well, and then I meditate as the water warms. Purification. An opening of hearts. Golden light sloshes within me in time with my heartbeat, like the tide on fast forward, out to my fingertips and back to my heart. I feel the pulsing steadiness of my center, as I let my intent encompass the room, feeling its boundaries. The doors through which my will does not pass, because I do not care for it to be so, the round window in one wall looking out over my garden.

My kettle, made of true iron, begins to steam. I hope the Senator likes his gift.

Traditionally, the first accepted sign of spring here is when the red-breasted robins arrive from their winter away. I’ve seen a few so far this spring, and skunks out hopefully seeking mates, a quest to which we leave them with all good will and the hope that they will do so far away from our backyards. I associate spring with the pale robin’s egg blue of the shells pushed out of the nest once the baby birds are done hatching. The association between Easter and eggs (and chickens) is a strong one, especially in the Norwegian tradition of my family. Here’s a tutorial about Norwegian egg painting, which also show up during family Christmas-time. Our creativity as a family has tended towards food coloring plaids, not the delicate designs some artists can muster.

What else symbolizes spring? New sweets, hidden carefully around the home, symbolize the thawing of rivers and the availability of new treasures and trade. Apple or cherry branches, brought inside to sit in water, bloom early when ‘forced.’ The promises of fruit and abundance and above all, to me, color. Winter is a pale, monochrome time, and reminds me of living on an army base (an experience I enjoyed but which brought home to me the importance of color in our lives, as I started to climb the off-white concrete walls). Yellow aconite, red and blue plaid eggs, pale blue robin’s eggs and red robin’s breasts. Green algae and pink apple blossoms. That, to me, is spring.