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“No, my lady sorceress, he seemed satisfied and said he looked forward to having his new non-burning lights this evening. Is that what you’re making? How wonderful that will be! No one else has a master as eccentric and powerful as you are. The others were so jealous that I had to sit still outside the tent and not move until you were done.” She looked around puzzled. “But where are the lights? Oh! They’re invisible until dark? How especially wonderful!”
Okay, we needed to work on communication with the initiative thing. One step at a time.
Right now I needed to eat something. I let Dragonfly brush out my hair while I ate fruit, cheese, nuts and some kind of cold meat from the breakfast tray, not arguing while she fussed that she could have put my hair up for me so that I didn’t knot it like that.
“Something out of my face, but not tight,” I told her. “I have to finish tweaking the new lights.”
She came up with a modified soft ponytail that suited us both, and got me dressed to her satisfaction. Then I sent her off to wash the blankets and clothes, along with chamber-pot emptying, which at least made her happy, even if I still fretted about it. I also suggested that she needed to relax after her guard duty this morning.
I felt good, free, the last dregs of sex and fear clearing from my mind.
But what to do with the dying flower? If I had a book, I’d press it. I decided to dry the flower, hanging it upside down over my workbench with a thread pulled from one of the ubiquitous pillows. I didn’t know why I felt the need to preserve it. Something to do with my soft chewy center. After all, it was still a flower from a gorgeous man—and the last gift I could accept from him.
Now to my commissioned project. How to make non-burning lights?
I paced around the tent, ruminating about all the fairy tales I’d read. “Fairy lights” were a common theme, blamed on phosphorescent gases by scientists. Various wizards and so forth had little balls of light they carried on their palms or sent winging around in the air. But that seemed impractical as a long-term solution. It would be better to find some physical object and alter it to emit light.
On my umpteenth circuit around the tent, kicking away yet another pillow that tumbled off a pile and into my path, I considered taking a walk outside. The possibility, however, of running into any number of several someones I didn’t want to talk to seemed high. It wasn’t that I was hiding out, so much.
What kind of object could I use to make light around the camp?
I didn’t want to mess with the existing candles and torches because I already associated them so strongly with fire. And besides, Falcon might believe I’d ducked the assignment, and I couldn’t afford that. I needed something innocuous, something readily available. I kicked another pillow aside, which hit one of Dragonfly’s towers so a rainbow of pillows tumbled down in whispers of silk, catching the light.
I laughed.
Glowing pillows. Every tent had too many. The fae loved them. They’d be bright and colorful. You could increase light by adding more, play with the effect by using different colors. Perfect!
But how exactly?
I grabbed a knife from Dragonfly’s little buffet table and slit a rectangular lime-green pillow down one seam. There had to be thousands of hand-sewn pillows in this camp alone—who was making them? I pictured a pixie sweatshop, downtrodden gnomes and Dragonfly-girls hunched over pillows, working to earn bizarre body modifications.
The stuffing in the pillow seemed to be some sort of silk floss. Possibly a plant material?
What I wanted was for the pillow fill to glow, like a phosphorescent organism. Ideally it would be light-sensitive in the same way—glow brightening in dusk, perhaps recharging in the light. Except what about when you were ready to go to sleep and you had all the damn pillows radiating away around you?
Though I wasn’t exactly sure how phosphorescent organisms emitted light, I remembered a talk at the Neuroscience Convention that discussed how nerve impulses changed the polarity of the membrane around the light-bearing cells. So, I could maybe transform these fibers to do that, so that some kind of action changed their polarity. But then they’d need to be living tissue, which would require nutrition. And excretion.
Feeding and changing the pillows—I don’t think so.
I needed something like the clapper—clap on, clap off—but how to make something sound-sensitive?
Okay, I was overthinking.Just experiment with one pillow. Give up trying to control it all and just let the magic find a way.I thought about what I wanted, the fill to glow as a fiber-optic might, pulling warm light from the sun, lining up to glow when the pillow was clapped, depolarizing to dark with a second clap.
Finally I drew on the sexual charge Rogue had so thoughtfully provided. The little orgasm had barely taken the edge off. How convenient that my poor love life all those years gave me so much practice at sublimating. At least doing magic gave me something productive to do with all that energy. I fed it into the idea I’d constructed. Connected them.
The pillow looked just the same, lime silk sagging around the wound I’d made in it, gray-white silky guts spilling out. I pulled the fabric taut and smacked the pillow. Soft green light shone in the bright sunlight, a purer white from the spilling material.
Eureka!
I strode over to the tent flaps, stepping outside for the first time that day. The camp whirled in the same merry activity, birdsong and music intertwining. I clutched my glowing pillow triumphantly.
“Dragonfly!” I called. “Come see the light I made.”Darling—come see!I sent him a picture of glowing pillows piled on the floor and heard his lazy response. He sounded unimpressed.
“I’ll fetch her, Lady Sorceress.” A little guy, one of the hip-high gnomey-looking ones in a ripe blueberry color, sat perched on a tree stump at the corner of my tent.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your page, Lady Sorceress.”
