Water

  Water

  by Hannah Blume (as Alicorn)

  This story has a sequel, Mana.

  * * *

  I: Niomah

  Niomah

  She was pulling triple duty. The busgirl and the food runner were both out with what everybody was politely calling headaches and which Niomah preferred to think of as the condensed ball of emotion elicited by they’re the owner’s pets and if they steal half the booze and then call in sick with hangovers nothing will happen to them, will it. So she took orders and cleared napkins and glasses and baskets of half-eaten fried taro and she ferried to recipients uneaten baskets of fries and fresh drinks. She skipped her first break of the shift and flipped smoking banana fritters instead, when she ducked into the kitchen and found the cook necking with the dish-washer, because if the bananas burned someone was getting clobbered and it’d probably be Niomah. The other waitress would escape the misaimed cruelty; she wasn’t the owner’s pet, she was just paler and prettier and had options besides working at the Emerald Drop.

  Niomah took her second break, at one in the morning, fruit be damned, not because she expected to be able to get away with sitting down but because she could no longer physically stand. If she’d had forethought she might have brought silverware to wrap in napkins, or a tub of new dishes to peel the labels off of, so she wouldn’t be caught quite idling, but it didn’t occur to her until she had her ass in a booth and getting up seemed about as doable as climbing the Crystal Mountain. Backwards.

  She people-watched. A couple hours earlier the place had gone from restaurant to bar. If she’d ever taken theoretical magic she might know how the furniture and the lighting shifted of their own accord, but she wasn’t even caught up on state-mandated general education. The last time someone had tried to test Niomah on the geography and language of her adopted country her father had “corrected” the bureaucrat about her birthday, so she’d gotten another four months of nonexistent spare time to study before they had to move out of town or go sublegal. More sublegal than the fake birthday already made them.

  Vocabulary she might have picked up just from being around native Gathru constantly, but they talked so fast, and on top of each other, like the spoken words were a badly-observed courtesy and they were in fact telepaths. Some of them might be. Maybe the boy in the corner was actually talking to someone, not just staring into space like he didn’t know where he was because he actually didn’t.

  Maybe he was actually lost.

  With five minutes of rest Niomah was able to contemplate standing up and finding out - if she was sweet to him she might get a tip out of it, that would be something, the other waitress wasn’t paying enough attention to steal it out of her apron. But she didn’t stand. She was entitled to half an hour - a full one, if she called it both of her day’s breaks back-to-back and pretended she was Mainlander-pale and Mainlander-rich and Mainlander-accented and entitled to the words on her contract.

  She decided to pretend. But she caught Lost Boy’s eye and tilted her head. If he wanted directions to the bathroom or the exit or the other restaurant down the block she could do that. She wasn’t that bad with weird Gath vowels and syntax, and she could draw him a map on the bit of paper towel left from somebody’s fries that she’d missed in clearing this table.

  The boy blinked at her and came over to her booth.

  * * *

  Sanuar

  That poor waitress looked exhausted. Sanuar’s allowance felt like a rock in his pocket. She looked Arnysh. Didn’t they have a thing about being offered money? He probably couldn’t just offer her fifty balances because he thought she could use them. Could he? Wouldn’t she think he’d mistaken her for a prostitute? Or was that the Behadze? (Was she Arnysh…?) But she was a waitress, uniform and all. Did fifty balances exceed plausible tipping range? He was so bad at this.

  But he was still walking towards her.

  “Hi,” he said lamely.

  “Hi,” she replied. “You look lost.” Arnysh accent, he’d been right the first time.

  “Not really,” said Sanuar. “My friends,” he used the word for lack of a better one-syllable summary for people I don’t like who I hang out with in the absence of a better option because our parents know each other, “are strung out on mana spots in your back alley, but it’s cold out so I stepped in. I don’t think I ought to go home, I should probably check on them in an hour or so. Just -” He shrugged.

  “Oh,” said the waitress. He liked the accent. “Tell me if it looks like they are dying when you look, there is a regular, he at the bar, has magic and can save them.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Sanuar. “You work here?” Idiot. Of course she works here, she’s probably been working here for twenty-four hours solid, she’s wearing an apron -

  But she smiled, darkly, looking at the ceiling. “I take a break here. I will get up and work here again, soon, if my feet are still on my legs.”

  Sanuar laughed. He tried to read her nametag, but it was too dark.

  “Niomah,” she said, catching him looking. “Something to yell when you want drinks.”

  “Sanuar. Sorry for loitering and not ordering anything. I don’t really -” He gestured vaguely.

  “I might care, if owner, he ever paid me the -” She snapped her fingers.

  “Commissions?” suggested Sanuar.

  “Is that the word - but he does not, so I would rather if you order nothing, and I sit.”

  Sanuar grinned. “I can oblige. You’re just sitting? Talking to lost boys?”

  “Watching people. Deciding who is prettiest,” said Niomah.

  “And who’s prettiest?” Sanuar regretted the question - what did he think she was going to say, it’s you, Sanuar? - but she didn’t take offense at this one either.

  “Girl, she at the table with the bubble liqueur. Face belongs in museum,” said Niomah emphatically.

  “Are you sure that’s a girl?” asked Sanuar.

  Niomah squinted, then shrugged. “Face belongs in museum,” she repeated. “Makeup, illusions, sit up in bed so beautiful every sunrise, I don’t know, they have gods’ luck at whatever, look.”

  “They’re pretty,” agreed Sanuar, “you’re very good at deciding who’s prettiest.”

  Niomah’s smile flashed her teeth white in the dimness of the bar.

  * * *

  Ens

  Ens shook whenever somebody looked at him. Any minute now one of the falsies would fall out of his shirt or it would turn out he’d missed a spot shaving or he’d have to go to the bathroom and his walk, voice, conspicuous choker necklace, would give him away. And then -

  Well, nothing, probably, he’d slink out of the bar and change into the regular clothes in his purse and go home. But he wanted -

  Well, that was the question, wasn’t it. This had seemed like a marvelous idea the other day. Ens had imagined putting on girlhood like another garment. And… he felt like a boy in a dress. Which was an interesting change from feeling like a girl in a suit, but not right either. Damn it all, it wasn’t like he had any other evenings free to try this, either, not for weeks, and what if after weeks he slipped out again and whatever fractured part of his mind had given him this idea in the first place decided to go on vacation again the minute he put on his sister’s pearls?

  There were a girl and a boy staring at him. Yes, this was clearly why he’d swiped jewelry, and lied about the prices of unrelated purchases long enough to save untracked money for a dress. Being tittered at in bars.

  He swigged his bubble liqueur. It was okay. Heavier on the sugar than the kind served at home. Not nearly strong enough to take the edge off what Mother called “adolescent mood”, but the last thing he needed was to stumble around attracting attention when he had to sneak back into the house past the night patroller without waking the butler or the housekeeper or the sister to whom he had to return the choker. So weak sugary (girly) drinks it was.

  They were still looking at him, sneaking glances out of the corners of their eyes.

  Well, if the next time his sister was out all night and he had a chance to take her jewelry he wanted to do this again - just in case - it might be useful to talk to some people he’d never see again and get feedback on just how ludicrously unfeminine he looked. Assuming they weren’t telepaths they could only be going on his appearance, right, not the mess in his head?

  He knocked back his liqueur and put the glass in a tub of dirty dishes on the next table, got up, tried to sidle towards smoky-eyed waitress and that boy who looked unfair amounts of tall even sitting down.

  “Something you want to say to me?” he asked, pitching his voice as alto as he could, feminine without try-hard falsetto giving the game away.

  The boy blushed, hard; if the girl did too it was impossible to see under the Arnysh brown in the bad light, and she didn’t look embarrassed, anyway. “We are saying,” she told him brazenly, “that you are prettiest in the whole bar.”

  Ens blushed.

  “And are not sure,” the girl went on - her nametag said Niomah - “if you are pretty girl or pretty boy. So, my father, he should be how angry at me for ungodly thoughts?”

  “Ah,” said Ens. He sat down, across from the two of them, suddenly dizzy. “…You know, I don’t really know, myself.”

  “Very angry father,” chuckled Niomah. “Very pretty something.”

  “You’re wearing girls’ clothes,” the boy pointed out.

  “Sometimes I want to,” shrugged Ens. “…If I’m very lucky that’ll coincide with when I can, one day.”

  Niomah tutted
sympathetically. “You should be just so pretty in anything, I think.”

  The boy was looking between Niomah and Ens like he’d been unexpectedly teleported there from somewhere that made a lot more sense. “Uh,” said Ens, trying to draw attention away from himself and his weird internal conflicts, “what’s your name - and ‘Niomah’, am I pronouncing it right?”

  “First try,” congratulated Niomah.

  “Sanuar,” said the boy. “You?”

  “Ens.” Common enough name. Unisex, even. If he didn’t give out his last he probably wouldn’t be identified by random bar people. “Good to meet you.”

  * * *

  Niomah

  Niomah sat with the one and a half boys, the tall lost one and the pretty one with the museum face, until she noticed the other waitress giving her dirty looks. Then she hauled herself to her feet and slid around Sanuar out of the booth, and got back to work. She reminded Sanuar to check on his drugged friends, and he reported that they were all alive and seemed lucid enough to get home on their own. Ens asked her for another liqueur and she brought it and Sanuar paid for it, to Ens’s adorable dismay. And then Sanuar pressed the rest of his pocketful of bills into Niomah’s hand.

  “Tab?” she asked.

  “Tip,” Sanuar blurted. “You look - tired.”

  Niomah grinned at him and ran her hand over his hair and pocketed the money. “Thank you.”

  “Oh thank goodness - I thought it’d offend you or -” He watched her hand when she let it fall back to her side.

  “Much too poor to be offended. And now I could buy you a drink.” She probably shouldn’t, she should probably just smile and flirt and not actually let the bills out of her possession on anything nonessential, but they were a windfall to begin with, and the bartender would actually give her the employee discount she was entitled to.

  Sanuar giggled. “I - I don’t really -”

  “Grape juice,” she said, patting his hair again. “Say yes?”

  He nodded, all shy.

  “Niomah,” said Ens before she could go put the order in.

  “Mm?”

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “Eh, I get water.” Clean water. She hydrated as much as she could and filled up a jug before she went home every day to have something clean to cook rice in and for her family to drink. Her brother who worked at a bakery did the same thing.

  “Can I buy you a drink, whatever you want?” Ens asked. “It’ll be full circle. …Triangle.”

  “You can buy me a coffee.” She could use one, at this hour, with the long walk home still ahead of her.

  “They have coffee here?” asked Sanuar.

  “No,” Niomah winked. “We close in an hour. Coffee cart down the block, open all night.”

  “All right,” grinned Ens.

  Niomah got Sanuar his grape juice. She cleared the stragglers’ tables. She flirted with the one and a half boys. When one of Sanuar’s friends wobbled in to ask where Sanuar was, was he okay, did he take his share of mana spots after all and wander into traffic, she said he was fine. She issued the kitchen closure announcement, and the last-call announcement, and petted Sanuar’s hair again before he left, and Ens loitered waiting for her while she filled up on water and linked elbows with her in such a gentlemanly way and took her to the coffee cart and bought her a coffee.

  “Come by again,” she suggested, batting her eyes over her shoulder. Ens belonged in a museum. “I work every day.”

  “Maybe I will,” Ens murmured.

  “Oh, maybe, trying to keep me doing guesswork,” laughed Niomah, and she went home, a coffee in her hand to drink half of and keep her on her feet until she got to her bed and forty-three balances in her pocket to get a new pair of work shoes and a few days’ worth of rice for her family. The other half of the coffee she’d thin out with milk to get her out of bed in the morning. And maybe they’d come back and smile at her like she was the sort of person one really smiled at instead of leering or ignoring or bossing like she was voice-activated furniture.

  When she got home all her brothers and sisters and her sister-in-law and her parents and her uncle and her grandfather were asleep. She put the bottom half of the coffee away for the morning, hid Sanuar’s money in her shoe lest her lazy sister-in-law or badly behaved little brother find it and steal it before she could buy needful things, and waited in the dark in silence until her oldest sister woke up to go to work and yielded Niomah her place in the big bed. Niomah fell asleep as soon as her head touched the mattress.

  * * *

  Ens

  Ens put the pearls back in his sister’s jewelry box and tucked the dress in the back of the closet and wiped off the makeup (thank all the gods that Mother considered doing makeup for the stage players an acceptably “culturing” school-break activity to fill his time, he didn’t have to hide the box, just pretend he brought it home leftover from a production and make sure half of it was wrong for his skin tone).

  He went to bed.

  He woke up after insufficient sleep and put on his normal clothes. They were okay, this occasion, though who knew how long that would last. He shaved and combed his hair. He ate breakfast, and had his dulcimer lesson, and his Ancient Gath after that, and lunch out and a matinee concert with his sister because her fiancé was busy at the Hall of Justice all day and couldn’t escort her. By the time the sun set, Ens wanted the pearls back again, but she couldn’t get them because her sister was home and would miss them, because she was expected at her mother’s party, because, because.

  Ens wished she could treat her brain like a spoiled child asking for dessert after having turned up their nose at a perfectly good slice of cake the previous night, but then again she didn’t really know what to do with spoiled children either.

  So she kept on the starchy handsome boy clothes and re-combed her hair. And when Mother said “You look tired,” Ens said, “I know how to fix that with a little foundation just under the eyes, nobody’ll notice and I’ll look presentable at the party,” and her mother nodded and she scampered upstairs and did that, just that, no eyeliner, no lipstain, no boxed glamer for her cheekbones, but it made her feel better. And made her look less tired. Mother said as much when she came back down.

  The party was ostensibly to celebrate Ens’s sister’s fiancé‘s promotion to District Justicar, but like all of Mother’s parties it was really about collecting a lot of old money and old power in one place and introducing bits of it to other bits of it. Occasionally small amounts of newer money and newer power snuck in, and Ens could tell from long years of exasperated practice evaluating outfits and carriage that this was such an occasion. There was the manager of the shipping concern, there was the cousin of that fellow who’d married the duke’s daughter in a surprise upset. There was an actress, only moderately famous, who had got an invite through Ens herself, because she always sat good and still for her paint and asked how Ens was doing, and if the nice lady wanted to rub shoulders then - Ens being the child of the principal local landowner ought to do some good for somebody, ever. There was the Fourteenth Archmage in full formal uniform robes, recently promoted on sheer skill with no connections to speak of, and his family -

  At the shoulder of the Fourteenth Archmage was Sanuar.

  Oh, no, not here, Ens had gone all the way to that little bar because she didn’t expect anyone to recognize her and trace her back to her daytime life, her family, her - self, in the suit, combed and neat instead of pretty and pearly.

  But it was too late to pretend to be abruptly sick.

  Sanuar looked at her, where she was wobbling up on the balcony. Sanuar smiled. Gods, he was tall, standing up.

  Desperately, Ens held a finger to her lips. Don’t let on, please.

  Sanuar’s smile dropped. He nodded, very subtly, broke eye contact, let his - father? uncle? grandfather? - the Archmage introduce him to Ens’s parents.

  Ens trotted down the stairs like she was supposed to, appearing at her mother’s elbow just in time for the introductions to swing around to, “And this is our son Ens. Ens, this is Archmage Vayar -” Other relatives of the Archmage were introduced, and finally - “his son, Sanuar Vayar.”