ART THERAPY

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

My best friend Rusty and I used to hide out in an abandoned refrigeration unit in the middle of the junky vacant lot next door to our compartment building. We were in the lot when the fridge was dumped. We turned it sideways, then used our own locks to secure it outside and in, and covered it with so much noxious junk nobody else ever went near it, though there were lots of people in the vicinity who were looking for hideouts.

The fridge must have been used in an industrial kitchen; it had room enough for the carcasses of several butchered animals, and its perpetual internal light source still worked most of the time, even with the door shut. Aside from a few holes we punched through the superinsulation so we could breathe, it was soundproof. So what if it smelled like really old blood? It was bigger than both our sleeping niches put together.

It was inside that old fridge we swore our undying loyalty to each other and pledged to support whoever rose to power first, as long as the other was second in command. We swore with blood oaths.

Rusty knew all my secrets. If I had been following Ruthless Master protocols, I would have had him killed early in my career.

Now that I have achieved ultimate enough power to run things the way I like them, I am known as Darkblood, Incarnation of Exquisite Evil. Only Rusty ever calls me Spiff, and only when no one else can hear us.

In my current power hierarchy, Rusty is known as my trusted lieutenant, Shrike the Impaler, Purveyor of Irresistible Torture.

Rusty and I have been indispensable to each other in a series of country-and world-conquering power plays. We have ruled six countries and two planets, and would have settled into comfortable despotism several countries ago if only heroes weren’t so thick on the ground.

I really thought Ruritraya was going to be our retirement community. It had plenty of mineral wealth to exploit, a sturdy population of underlings and peasants with decent work ethics, a nice coast-line, constant small-scale wars with neighboring countries to keep any native thinkers distracted, and exquisite cuisine.

We kept watch for the various standard hero approaches, but no one had challenged us in a year.

Things were going too well.

I was lulled. Despite my determination never to relax my vigilance in all directions, I was lulled.

Betrayal came from a direction I never expected.

Rusty led the intervention on me. When I get out of Rehab, I’m going to spend some quality time with his head. I don’t care what happens to the rest of his body.

The rest of my top staff participated, though some of them wore masks. Masks could not hide their visages from my awful wrath. I know the name of everyone who conspired to humiliate me. At night, when I am strapped to the bed, I use the point of a loose screw to inscribe their names, one by one, into the patina. My bed stinks of fresh paint because the minions here are efficient and desire that everything remain pristine, so they paint over my list every day. I don’t care that my list disappears. I am really scribing the names in my memory while I try to erase the things my inferiors said to me.

The things they said to me!

“We caught you being nice to a random dog.”

“Your personal assistant used sarcasm on you, and you didn’t have him flogged.”

“You smiled in public, and it wasn’t the smile that sends small children screaming into the night.”

“You’re letting the intervention proceed without ordering us all killed immediately,” said Rusty. “Boss, you’re losing your edge. Trust me. You need help.”

Refocusing Personality Rehabilitation takes place in a satellite orbiting an unnamed planet that is not on most star or node charts. I knew about Rehab because of jokes people told at supervillain reunions. I laughed, same as everybody else, about those weak-willed idiots who came here.

I never even noticed Rusty putting a jump node to Rehab in our palace, another indication that the intervention was probably timely; I was slipping.

Most of the patients here have no living family. Family is what drove us to be evil dictators and ruthless overlords in the first place. We would have been better off without them in the beginning of our lives, and most of us rectified that situation by the time we hit our teens.

Nevertheless, there is a portion of our treatment called Family Therapy, a.k.a. “Group,” where those nearest to us participate in group sessions. This is when I see Rusty every week.

My roommate Bob, the Purveyor of Ultimate Misery, has four trusted lieutenants who come to Group, and a wife. She is not one of those trophy wives you marry just to ruin her life, foil the aims of her Hero, whoever that might be, and because you get off on humiliating her. Bob’s wife is dumpy, and she knits. Her major vice seems to be a love of large, inappropriately flashy jewelry. She wears a new and clashing assortment every week, which demonstrates that Bob has been overly generous in the past.

This is what’s good about Bob’s wife, Rose: she never says anything in group. Her sole virtue, as far as I can see. And yet, Bob envies me Rusty. That’s what he told me at breakfast, just before we headed in to another of those nightmare extended torture sessions called Group. “I wish someone cared about me the way Rusty cares about you,” Bob said.

I don’t think Bob has much of a future in this business, revealing a weakness like that to someone he doesn’t know well.

Or maybe he knows me too well. Because of all the things Rusty says during Group.

There are so many people I’m going to have to kill when I get out of here. For a while I’m going to have to risk looking like a Hero. I know their respective worlds will be happier places with these Multifarious Crushers of the Many Flavors of Joy removed, but I have to kill them anyway.

If I were orchestrating Rehab, it would have a whole different outcome. Anyone sent to this place would immediately be rendered into fertilizer and sprinkled somewhere they could make people sick. Obviously we are all failures in our chosen fields, both because we are vulnerable to something as lame as an intervention, and because someone felt they could subject us to such a thing in the first place. Failures deserve no mercy.

I’m not sure how I would spin the whole thing to the media, which I would absolutely control. Probably I would use one of the lesser euphemisms. I like “aneurysm.” I enjoy words with y in the middle.

I have big plans for someone in denial about his own shortcomings.

Just now I’m in art therapy, supposedly drawing pictures of large-scale destruction to reinvigorate my imagination with possible future triumphs. I never drew anything before, but I find I enjoy art therapy, even though I demonstrate no real skill. Mostly I like it because I’m using it to mask a couple of other activities.

The art therapy dictator is staring at me, but I don’t think she can read this particular code, which I’m writing in red, part of a large picture of a village in flames.

My mind has been fragmented while I stay here; I can’t concentrate with my usual focus and finesse. I suspect some sort of drugs in our water or food, though what the aim is, I don’t know. Somehow it helps me think to use art therapy this way. I’m the only one who will ever know what I write here, and I will burn this picture as soon as I finish it.

The art dictator just came by and castigated me for not creating a picture with more scope. Why did I decide to destroy a mere village instead of a major city, or even a planet? Such thinking demonstrates how reduced my ambitions and abilities are. I’m behaving in a self-limiting fashion, she said.

I told her the scene I’m painting is not just any village. It is the village where I was humiliated as a small child, and I set it on fire when I left town. I am using it to build up my anger at my past so I can reinvigorate my tyrannical tendencies.

She believes this fabrication, which demonstrates how incompetent she is. If she had read my file, she would know that Rusty and I grew up in the megalopolis called Tourist Trap on the planet Sanitation.

She allowed as to how painting the destruction of a village where I was tortured might be a legitimate use of my art therapy time, and moved on to harass Alan, Supreme Leader of the Dark Legions of Destruction. He was painting giant flowers. I, too, considered his project an exercise in lameness, until he told Supervisor Susie he was imagining flesh-eating flowers with concealed teeth, his favorite tactic for use in subduing inferiors: lull them with a false and pleasing surface, and when they least expected it, leap out with teeth and chew them in half.

This place is full of useless, time-wasting activities, like meditations in the blood chapel to attract a new and more ruthless personal god. I think gods mix everything up and get in the way when you least need their help. Sometimes they switch sides in the middle of the battle. Once I had a personal relationship with Krrgoth the Blood Reaver, and the Hero I was opposing, who professed to honor life in all its forms, even the lowliest, grubbiest churls, sacrificed six beautiful virgins (where he found them in that particular kingdom I don’t know; lord knows I had scoured the hills for them before he got there, and used up all the ones I could find) to Krrgoth in one big bloodletting gorefest, and the damned god helped the Hero overthrow me.

That Hero went on to be a worse tyrant than I ever was. The peasants used to whisper my name (Darkblood, not Spiff) longingly years after I had left. Some even hung tapestries of me in their living rooms—tapestries that could be reversed to show the image of a popular clown figure if any government troops dropped by for inspection.

Rusty told me about the aftermath of my overthrow. He survived the coup in the palace and hung around looking enough like a halfwit that the Hero recruited him as an informer. This is one of our tactics in the event of revolutions. Whoever isn’t in power does their best to undermine the other’s successor, as long as it is no risk to life and limb. This Hero needed no help in driving the populace to accomplish his downfall. One of my more satisfying aftermaths, I must say, and much of its success due to the machinations of Rusty.

Rusty! My rage at him resulted in me smearing several plumes of flame. I can’t think straight enough to encode for a few minutes. How could he speak of Ellen in Group this morning?

After art therapy I am scheduled to visit the cryptic chapel. They’re going to have a prognosticator there who will select an appropriate god to get me out of my slump.

I hate fortune-tellers. Too many of them have given me false tales, accused me of having a kind heart. They sang a different tune when I applied red-hot irons to various portions of their anatomies.

I ended up having to torture them all. Except that one woman, Blind Mariah, who saw all too clearly. She accurately predicted the entrance of a particular Hero, and told me how to foil him. For that, I let her go. I thought about sending an assassin after her, but in the end decided against it. A good seer is hard to find, and I might need her again.

She left me with several uncomfortable utterances. I remember a portion of her prophecy that made no sense at the time, but now that I think of it, it probably predicted my sojourn in this place. “Down the darkest well,” she said, “one can see daylight stars.”

I wish I had my crystal pear. I acquired it on a short stop on Lymaztla, where they specialize in hidden dangers. At home, I affected the quirk of always having the pear in my left hand, and sometimes tossing it. I found it soothing, in truth, though it started as a calculated affectation. At the pear’s heart is a toxic vapor for which I have taken the antidote. I could shatter it on the edge of the table here during a meal and kill half the evil dictators in Rehab, and most of the Rehab staff. A lovely prospect.

Group this morning was more distressing than usual. Rusty has totally betrayed me, I fear, a slow and fiendish betrayal I would have thought beyond him: each secret he tells in Group makes me that much more vulnerable to an assortment of other evil people, including the staff at this institution. This morning he revealed that I had cried when the Hero killed my consort Ellen, several kingdoms ago.

This sounds like a more egregious weakness than it was. Everyone who knew Ellen, my Peerless Enchantress of the Darker and More Secret Passions, cried after her death. Possibly all of them had been intimate with her before she hooked up with me. That would explain their copious tears; she was the best lover I ever knew. Even the damned Hero who killed her cried (she had seduced him, at my behest; things were going well before he figured out she was still loyal to me and was telling me everything he revealed to her during their intimate moments).

He was one of those self-hating heroes who believe chastity is a gift to his prudish god, and to violate his vow of singularity was a mortal sin; he punished Ellen because he could not punish himself enough. I did it for him after he killed her. Once the bones are carefully broken, there is not much a Hero can do to evade repeated blows from a meat tenderizing hammer, spread out over several hours, applied with a precision that does not allow him to die with any speed.

At the time, Rusty told me anybody would cry at a loss like mine. Or ours, I suppose. Ellen was generous with her favors. In Group, fifteen years later, when he told everyone about it, it sounded much more pathetic than it had been.

He is weakening me an increment at a time. At first I did not understand. I thought he had my welfare at heart; it’s the only reason I agreed to give up my defenses and come here. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I thought this place would strengthen my skills—that’s what Rusty told me—but I see now it isn’t so. This place is a prison. I am certain now that all the news Rusty relays to me about Ruritraya in my absence is false. He has told them I am dead, and stepped forward to steal my country. Perhaps he presented himself to them in the guise of a Hero. We know how they operate. He could easily act the part.

“Here’s another piece of paper, Darkblood,” said the art dictator. “You should start over. You’ve messed up your current picture.” She pointed to the flames I smeared when rage overcame me.

“I’m not creating something for a gallery, Susie,” I snarled. “Smears are part of any great campaign.”

“You should know better than to continue a project with obvious flaws,” she said.

“Those are not flaws. It’s art,” I said, but I took the extra piece of paper.

The art dictator. This is the zenith, the acme she has reached with her tyrannical disposition. She’s a failed despot, except in this tiny, unimportant sphere. I know there’s a lesson here, but I’m not in the mood to learn it.

The only thing that keeps Susie alive is that stun-shield she wears. I am fortunate I saw Ziggy attack her before I decided to try. He lay twitching on the floor for the rest of the session. I was dismayed but unsurprised to discover all the staff wear these shields.

Yesterday afternoon I had my regular reinfliction of childhood damage session. When I first entered Rehab, the staff had the psych computer run a deep hypnotic regression on me, for diagnostic and forensic purposes, they said. The computer knows everything that’s ever happened to me, so it, along with every staff member and probably all the outside aides, will have to die when I put my escape plans in motion.

At first I thought the reinfliction sessions were the most effective part of the treatment. Reliving my father’s denigration, beatings, and coldness, my mother’s inappropriate desires, my two brothers’ deaths at our parents’ hands—yes, I remembered again why I became a supervillain. I was ready to leave Rehab after my first session. I had a wide array of ideas on how to lock down Ruritraya.

But they didn’t let me leave after that first session. Instead I have to endure all their other programs: art therapy, family group, twelve step group, inflating your esteem group, seminars on improved tactics for basic activities such as blackmail, stealing, politicking, manipulation, nefarious weapons updates, and conscience crushing. There is also physical therapy to beef up our bodies so we can be more imposing. PT and art therapy are the only places where they release the restraints on our arms and legs; otherwise I’m sure we’d all kill each other. If I’m going to escape, it’s got to be during PT or art therapy.

I have a reinfliction session weekly, and I’m becoming numbed and tired of the whole thing. Sure, my experience was difficult at the time, and I’ve used those memories to justify all sorts of behavior since, but anything, even one’s personal tragedy, can lose its power if one sees it endlessly repeated.

I’m so over it now that I spend the session contemplating ways I could reprogram the reinfliction computer to make it more amusing. First, I need to download its information about everyone else’s reinfliction sessions so I can blackmail them into being a cadre of useful helpers in my escape. After that, I contemplate what I’ll have the computer to do to the staff here, each program tailored to the appropriate person. My scenario for Susie the art dictator changes daily.

She just returned to the table. “You’re being too meticulous and cerebral,” she told me. “Forget those tiny brush strokes. I gave you a giant piece of paper for a reason, Dark. You’re supposed to think large. Open up. Envision world war.” She tried to snatch this drawing out from under my fingers. I unleashed a fraction of my inner berserker, though I made no attempt to actually touch her. I rose to my feet, planted my hands flat on my paper, let my rage kindle into fire, and growled at her. Softly. Knowing that flames danced in my eyes—a surgical enhancement I arranged for three dictatorships ago, one I’ve never regretted.

She paled and backed away, stammering, “That’s—that’s all right. It’s your project.” She glanced around to make sure my guard was aware of my threat posture. His stun gun was aimed in my direction. I was glad this was only a fraction of my berserker. If I let the whole out, I would be stunned and twitching on the floor by now.

One more growl with less grit in it, and I settled back in my chair, loaded my skinny brush with red paint. Back to what I increasingly realize is more of a mental ramble than therapy, but oh well, it’s for an audience of one.

Rusty has probably discovered my stash of cocoa-coffee candy by now. I wonder if he’s sleeping in my all-comforts bed, whether he knows where the massage button is. Maybe he just rings the bell to call Layla up for a skin-to-skin session. She probably likes him better than she ever did me; it’s hard to tell whether the women appreciate me for myself or for my power. Most of the time I don’t care, but something about Rehab breaks through my indifference and makes me wonder. I’m going to need another form of Rehab when I escape this one. I want to go to a planet where it’s legal to hunt humans, and have some of them dress up as the people I most resent so I can shoot them with zero consequences.

Today is not the day I’ll put my escape plan into action. Alan the Supreme Leader is the only other patient (or client, as they call us) in the room with me; they only let two of us into art therapy at once, since this is a restraint-free activity, and few creatures are more dangerous than frustrated supervillains. I’ve created a small coalition of the unwilling in Rehab, but Alan isn’t a member. I only recruited people who know the secret hand language of the Tillia Undersea People (now extinct), which narrowed my pool of potential partners to one woman and an animal. I need to act when Bituba, Scourge of the Unworthy, is in art therapy with me. Staff cycles these things randomly, though, and she and I haven’t been paired in more than a week.

What meaningful work can I do in today’s session, below the radar of Commander Susie?

This morning I asked Rusty, right before Group and his betrayal about Ellen, how anybody got out of Rehab. “The staff get together and discuss each case,” he said. “If they’ve seen real progress, they can decide to release you. What’s the matter with you, Spiff? Why is it taking you so long to return to your real self? Aren’t you getting the help you need? What can I do to help?”

“Maybe I just need more downtime,” I told him.

What if he goes even farther back in our history? What if he talks about what happened in the fridge when his older brother discovered how we used it? The computer in reinfliction must know about that incident, though it hasn’t used it in the matrix of memories it assaults me with each week. It’s a key to both Rusty’s and my subsequent characters, how we dealt with that two days of terror and entrapment, the heat and fear when Big Bro plugged our airholes. I was the one who scraped a finger raw getting two of the airholes open again, and Rusty was the one who collapsed into whimpers about twelve hours into our ordeal when the perpetual light failed. I acted, and he panicked.

That’s the way I remember it, anyway.

I’ve drawn enough flames on this picture for now. A thought struck me I don’t want to think about. I’m going to ask the guard to burn the picture, and tell Officer Susie I’m ready to quit.

Superirritant Susie is suspicious about Bituba’s last gesture to me. As well she should be.

Today I’m painting a cityscape under a pall of reddish smog. My skills aren’t up to this project, but Susie tells us skill level is irrelevant; all that matters is flow. She’s angry at me again because I took one of the brushes and cut most of the hair off it so I can paint with narrower lines. What’s therapeutic about sloppiness?

It’s not as easy to work code into blocky city buildings. Flames gave me flow, if that’s what it was. I feel more driven to be precise in this format.

Precisely, Bituba has just signaled that she’s ready when I am.

I’m not ready yet.

Yesterday the prognosticator at the blood chapel gave me a new god, Arisia the Mediator. What kind of a terrible name is that for a god? Would anyone feel threatened when you invoke a god like that? No one I’d care to intimidate.

The prognosticator asked me if I wanted to dedicate myself to this new god and said it would help me in the future if I did so. I don’t say yes to everything here in Rehab; I think ready acquiescence would indicate I can never rise to my full level of evil again. I wanted to refuse this ridiculous charge, but with my plans so close to fruition, I didn’t want to give anybody an excuse to overmonitor my actions, so I said, “What the hell,” and let them open a vein to spill my blood into a dish at Arisia’s statue’s feet. She is one of those gods with lots of arms and only two legs. Could be fun in the sack.

I read from the script the prognosticator handed me. “I, Darkblood, hereby dedicate myself to the worship of Arisia and invite the god to feast on my essence, binding her to my will in accordance with our covenant. Arisia, be thou my shield and sword, my victory song, my blood transfusion in times of want. In return I give you my own blood promise; I will sacrifice in your name.”

I give lip service to a lot of gods, but since Krrgoth burned me so badly, I don’t give a lot of credence to any of them. I didn’t know what Arisia was promising me, and I didn’t care. All I cared about was getting through another useless time-wasting activity in Rehab.

I was surprised by a strange feeling after I finished my oath to the goddess, a kind of shudder all through me as though I had planted myself and was growing roots.

Last night I had a series of dreams. I dreamed each kingdom and planet Rusty and I had conquered, watching us from some distant point as we arrived, insinuated, manipulated, blackmailed, bought our way into power and moved up, up, and on, rising on stairs built of those we had destroyed and betrayed. In my dreams I smiled at the evidence of our finesse, how neatly we out-thought our opponents, how deliciously we set plans into motion, watching as each consequence followed each action.

I remembered the Heroes, too, the many who had failed against us (and the punishments we meted out to them) and the few who had succeeded.

From a distance I studied Ruritraya, my retirement country. I saw that I had not trodden down the populace enough. Systems Rusty and I had developed and refined across the years, plans I could script in my sleep—I hadn’t initiated half of them. We had an ideal structure of power, and the one I built on Ruritraya was missing several pillars and could unbalance at any moment. The only wonder was that no Heroes had yet arisen to challenge us.

Rusty was right. My heart wasn’t in the job. I had let him down.

“This is what you have bought with your blood,” whispered the goddess’s voice through the edge of my dream. “Now you must decide which way to go.”

Arisia has to be the least fun goddess I’ve ever dedicated myself to. Another flaw in this stupid Rehab system. Why don’t they choose from the dark pantheon? What’s with these gray, nuanced gods?

I have my list of people who must die so I can continue to enjoy my evil, debauched, and luxurious lifestyle. I’ve devised an appropriate death for each of them. I have my plans and backup plans for escape. I know exactly who to promote to support me when I get back to my palace in Ruritraya, and who to incarcerate, and which dogs to kick. I have a map of my immediate future. Why is the goddess messing with my head?

“You’re focusing too much on the details,” Bossy Susie just said. “What about the big picture? There’s no balance.”

I snarled at her and let my eyes scare her again, but I didn’t stand up this time and intimidate her physically. I wanted until she turned to Bituba, and then I actually looked at my picture.

Odd how text and art can war. When I let my eyes unfocus so I can see the image I’ve been drawing instead of the words I’ve been writing, I see that Susie is right. I sketched some outlines to engage most of the paper, dusted in rancid smog here and there, and then hunkered down and wrote the outlines of a few buildings over in the corner, leaving the wider space without definition. Just now I’m coding in a fountain in the city’s central square. I like the ease of writing water.

Bituba just glanced at the chronometer and then at me. We only have ten minutes left in this session, and after that, who knows when we’ll be together again? I wish I’d never had all those stupid dreams.

I’m going to signal her now.

Everything fell into place, just as I planned it. Bituba and I overpowered our guards, tied up Susie with her own stretchy body stocking, stuffed her mouth with wadded up sketches, and made our way to Rehab’s Node Central, overpowering guards and security measures as we went. We collected our third conspirator, the station ferret, part of companion animal therapy (they apparently didn’t realize that he had been genetically enhanced for intelligence and opposable thumbs; he was instrumental in spying out a blueprint of the station and getting us the guard schedules, also in telling us where the necessary supplies were) and jumped many nodes in rapid succession. Bituba had stashed emergency identity-making supplies on one of the worlds where she’d been overthrown. She had a secret node to a deep dungeon there; she’d guessed that the Hero who succeeded her would never use it. So we kitted up, changed all our identifying marks, and jumped some more.

Bituba wanted to go back to the country she’d been ruling before her mother-in-law did the intervention on her. She was ready to chop off enough heads that she could regain her old power. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, myself. Once a populace has seen you taken down, they often won’t stand for your rising again.

I have lost some of my fire. All those murders I know I need to do? Can’t work up the energy for them. Just now I’m sitting on the balcony of a luxury resort in some winter mountains on an innocuous tourist world, with this piece of paper and a set of colored pens in front of me. The ferret’s a warm coil of furry weasel on my lap. He has a certain musky smell I don’t care for, but I owe him a lot, so I’ll learn to like it. Bituba and I had a custody battle for him; we decided to share, so we have to keep each other apprised of where we are. This is the kind of weak spot I would never have countenanced in my previous incarnation. Anyone who learns about this could bring about both our downfalls.

The picture I’m drawing, even though I no longer need to code my words because I can burn this document myself, is of a forest. Trees lend themselves to code. This is a coniferous needle-bearing forest, so I have the luxury of writing words in sweeps of branching green. For the bark I am reserving the names of all the people I would kill if I were my old self. The list is long enough to make for tall trees.

I plunged into the galactic newstream last night and sought out information about the current state of Ruritraya. Shrike the Impaler is running the country as a regent for Darkblood. A series of political cartoons lampooning some of Rusty’s more ridiculous mannerisms made me nostalgic. One caricature captured his nose by exaggeration in a way that was somehow more true than a photograph.

Just now my pen moved on the page and drew a picture of Rusty the way he looked when he was ten T.S. There were no words in this picture, and it doesn’t fit into my forest; his head floats in a space where I haven’t penned needlesprays. Now I am writing around his face, as if I could enfold it in foliage, make him part of my forest of confusion and revenge.

The ferret churrs and drops from my lap. He has spotted a vole on the edge of the balcony and wants to pursue it.

I am here in this distant place, where the maid service is invisible, the food is good, and the bed is comfortable, with enough money from Bituba’s stash to support me for a lifetime, a new face, eyes, fingertips, and footprints, and blurs on a few of my genes where they won’t interfere with life support. Only the ferret connects me to anyone else. Only my drawing connects me to who I was in Rehab. Yesterday, though, the waiter who brought my room service tray saw a sketch I’d done, my recollection of Bituba before she changed her skin color and the shape of her nose. He asked if he could have it.

I couldn’t see what appeal a picture like that would have for a creature shaped like a squared lump, with a few stumpy limbs, a featureless nodule for a head, and a bowtie. I was flattered, though. Then I thought twice. Perhaps he was the kind of creature who leaked things to whatever passes for media here, and he recognized Bituba. Can’t let any of that out. Plus, I’d coded on her face, and I can’t believe I’m the only one left who remembers Pitcairn pothooks. I drew a portrait of the waiter instead and gave it to him. He seemed just as pleased, if I interpret the flushes of color across his flesh correctly.

Here where it’s safe to wonder, I think about Ruritraya, and wonder if a Hero will knock Rusty off his regent’s throne before I go back there.

Maybe I’ll draw him a postcard. First I have to finish my forest.

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