The Best of Elizabeth Bear

The Bone War

Bijou the Artificer had seen many bones in her time, but never one larger or even close to the size of the monstrous object lying on the floor before her, supported by a plaster cradle. The thing was behemothic, easily longer than she was tall. It had an antediluvian appearance, stained an orange color as if from immersion in a peat bog. Fine dark brown cracks hairlined the surface, reminding Bijou of an egg cooked in spiced tea.

She stepped forward, supporting herself with her filigreed cane, and peered at the bone. Her familiar creature Ambrosias curled in the hood of her robe so he could rear over her shoulder and disconcert folks. He rattled as she bent down: a jeweled, silver-chased giant centipede constructed from a ferret skull mounted on the spine of a horse with the ribs of cats for legs—the whole geared and wired for movement and animated by Bijou’s signature magic.

She said, “May I touch it, Doctor?”

The answer came in Amjada Munquidh’s no-nonsense tones. “That is why the Trustees have charged me with the honor of bringing you here, Wizard Bijou.”

Bijou pushed herself upright and looked across the skid the thing rested upon—and, on two sides, protruded well beyond. The woman facing her had thick black hair, cropped short as a foreign man’s, and a clear olive complexion. Rectangular black-rimmed spectacles flashed on an upturned, sun-freckled nose that might have fooled somebody less observant into using adjectives such as cute, but her shoulders strained the rolled-up sleeves of her men’s khaki shirt and her trouser cuffs were stuffed into rock-marred hiking boots.

Bijou felt a touch of unease. Academic politics being what they were, she knew there had to be a catch somewhere.

“You brought me here to touch your humerus, Doctor Munquidh?” Bijou asked roguishly.

“It’s probably a tibia.” But Dr. Munquidh winked.

Bijou swapped her cane to her right hand and reached out with her left. The bone had a peculiar agate luster as she leaned close. When she laid her hand on it, she realized why. The wizard’s intuition tingled up her fingertips and told her that the enormous appendage laid out before her partook of the nature of both bone and stone.

Ambrosias glided over her shoulder, rib-legs prickling, the semiprecious stones in his ferret-skull glinting in the museum lights. He poured down her arm quick as water and arced his limber skeletal body to examine the relic.

“Are there giants made of rock?” Bijou joked, then shook her head. “A fossil? Is this a dragon bone?”

“It is a type of… what we call a ‘dinosaur,’ actually. An ancient beast that lived long before men. Or dragons, for that matter. The discoverer of this particular bone dubbed it the ‘Tidal Titan’ because the stones from which it was recovered appeared to have been laid down in a mangrove swamp.”

“A swamp? Here?”

“The world was once a very different place,” Dr. Munquidh said. She rubbed a hand across her thick dark hair. “Even in historic memory, there was a time when this city sat surrounded by rich farmland. Before the desert sands rolled in.”

“So your Tidal Titan predates even the elder races, then,” Bijou said. She stroked it, polished jasper that still held the echoes of a mind that had run, craved, played, feared in primeval forests. She looked up and stared Dr. Munquidh right in the spectacles. “You want to know if I can mount and animate the damned thing, don’t you?”

“I am transparent,” Munquidh said.

Bijou’s pulse quickened. She contemplated the challenge of quickening a skeleton so antique that it had leached in stone. But she was cautious, too. There were reasons she chose not to associate herself with the Museum, or the University.

She said, “How much more of it is there?”

Munquidh smiled, slow and gloating. “Come and see.”

She led Bijou out of the exhibit hall. Bijou took her time following, her age an excuse to crane her neck and take in the Museum’s architecture. The vaulted white marble dome lofted overhead would have graced any temple; the statues of Virtues ranged in niches between each of its supporting arches celebrated the purpose of the place: Truth, Modesty, Knowledge, Curiosity, Probity, Note-Taking, Citation…

Dr. Munquidh led Bijou to a back room and opened the door with a flourish. Within—

Ah, within.

Bijou stepped forward reverently. Sunlight through high windows outlined the curves of stone that was almost bone. The room was full of shelves, and the shelves were lined with the pieces of a mighty skeleton. There were ribs and tarsals, clavicles and patellae. A mighty scapula leaned against a bare section of wall. Vertebrae were stacked in order of size, the smallest no bigger than Bijou’s fist, the largest like sections through the trunks of ancient trees. But the centerpiece, the miracle at the heart of it all, lay in puzzle pieces scattered on the scarred, gouged, age-blackened surface of the massive wooden table in the middle of the workroom’s delightful paleontological clutter.

Bijou the Wizard had worked with bones for sixty years, here in this city of Messaline, a city so vast that they called her the Empire of Markets—when they weren’t referring to her as the City of Jackals, that was. Bijou knew a skull when she saw one. And this, when reassembled, would be a skull twice the size of the mighty head of an elephant. She could already imagine its delicate… well, delicate was a relative term, she supposed, given the size of the thing… nasal arches, the breadth of its spoonlike muzzle.

Bijou’s heart leapt up and thumped as uncomfortably against her ribs as if she were a young lover contemplating the face of her beloved after some prolonged absence. Say, she thought self-mockingly, so great a span as an afternoon.

Even her reflexive inner sarcasm could not quiet the thrill that ran through her. Her hesitations evaporated like desert dew. Ambrosias rattled her excitement.

“This will take years.”

“The Trustees are prepared to pay you for them.”

“I’ll need tools,” she said. She eyed the reddish-brown and orange color of the bones critically. “Steel. And brass and gold. Precious or semiprecious stones. Jacinths, I think. Garnets, spinels. Rubies if you have them to waste.”

“We have a basement full of minerals,” Dr. Munquidh replied. “For this, we can put them to work for you.”

She smiled. “And I’ll need my assistants.”

Dr. Munquidh brought her coffee—thick and sugary—and left her alone in the workroom with a pile of papers and sketches indicating how the natural philosophers thought the great beast might have been put together in life. Ambrosias, bored, curled himself twice around Bijou’s waist like a skeletal belt and went quiescent.

Bijou looked through them, amused. In a way, it was like being invited to peruse the working notes of a number of different Wizards. It transpired that each natural philosopher had his or her own ideas of how the “dinosaur” should be put together—not to mention his or her own school of thought regarding its diet, mode of locomotion, and probably social behavior, too.

The consensus of the majority, however, appeared to support or at least reinforce Amjada Munquidh’s hypotheses, as set forth in her extremely authoritative papers on the topic.

Having read them all, Bijou allowed herself a grimace and a bemused sigh. She pushed them away, finished her neglected and now-cold coffee with a gulp and a second grimace, and twisted the long woolly ropes of her hair into a knot behind her before addressing herself happily to the fossilized skull. She was completely engaged in playing jigsaw-puzzles when Dr. Munquidh returned.

Ambrosias, disturbed by her precipitate entry, slunk up Bijou’s spine to rattle on her shoulder once more.

Dr. Munquidh was beaming, and her smile redoubled when she saw what Bijou was doing. “We’ve been arguing about the arch of that nasal crest,” she said. “I see you’ve gone with the higher option.”

Bijou set the pieces down. She’d been experimenting, but she felt it would be cruel to tell Dr. Munquidh she hadn’t yet quite made up her mind. “You look happy.”

“The hall is yours!” Munquidh cried expansively. “Bring in whatever you need. I’ve arranged with the Trustees for you to have access to the materials you requested. And there’s the matter of your fee, funds for which have not yet been granted, but all the paperwork is in order and the Exchequer appears inclined to cooperate.”

Bijou arranged her face in a genial expression. The skills of a Wizard did not necessarily come cheap. And she had her own way of ensuring that there would be no problems with the funding. No long-term ones, anyway. On the other hand—she stroked a fossilized fragment of skull—when she was done with the “dinosaur,” the Museum would be able to charge whatever it wanted for people to come see it.

Bijou’s journeyman, a big, blond, bearded fellow who had chosen the Wizard name of Brazen, brought Hawti and the rest of Bijou’s gear in through the loading dock. Until now, Hawti had ranked as Bijou’s grandest creation. It was the complete skeleton of an elephant, geared and wired and jeweled on every available surface, with enormous belled bangles jingling merrily around each bony ankle. The trunk contained no bones, and so Bijou had given Hawti a trunk constructed from the limber spine of a constrictor.

The massive construct came in through the loading doors laden with two anvils, an indeterminate number of hammers, a jeweler’s lathe, and a variety of other implements too numerous to name. Brazen disappeared again—engaged in setting up Bijou’s traveling forge in the courtyard—and with Hawti’s tireless, gaily belled assistance (and the more obsequious but less congenial aid of several Museum laborers), Bijou rapidly got down to business.

She had all the bones and the table carried carefully from the workroom so she could begin laying out her design in real space and see how the actual bones differed from the sketches. Students of the Museum’s natural philosophers arrived to begin freeing the bones from their protective cases of plaster-dipped rag. Bijou herself oversaw the meticulous work of discerning rock from bone as they cleaned the fossils—though in fairness to the students and their teachers, they were remarkably skilled for people without the advantage of a Wizard’s intuition.

And so did Bijou pass a generally happy and absorbing three weeks, engaged in fiddling with bones, picking through the Museum’s assortment of surplus minerals, and tapping out paper-thin sheets of metal foil with her smallest hammer. She began, in fact, to have a tickling sensation that this thing might prove a masterpiece. So absorbed was she that she paid very little attention to the various natural philosophers who came through to tour her work and peer over her drawings, except to have a series of joyful academic arguments with them about the details of bone articulation and whether, in fact, the tibia and ulna in question came from the same individual.

This carefree approach, blissful while it lasted, proved, alas, to be a mistake.

Bijou had, by choice, worked alone—and lived nearly alone, except for the occasional apprentice—for decades. While she did not mind people, exactly, she did not in any way care for their politics, and she tended to ignore the existence of such things. Because of this, her first inkling of trouble arrived in the estimable personage of one of Dr. Munquidh’s colleagues, Dr. Azar.

Zandrya Azar had been among the natural philosophers stopping by to peer at the arranged bones and watch the evolution of Bijou’s map. She had paused frequently to examine Hawti and Ambrosias as the bone-and-jewel Artifices—not automatons, but self-willed creatures in their own right—assisted Bijou in her work (Brazen was mostly outside on the forge, hammering away at the rough blanks for the armature).

Now, Dr. Azar returned. She stared at Hawti once more, flicked the hem of her long, paneled, coffee-colored skirt against her button boots, and snorted. Her hair was long and lush: an unusual shade of auburn, glistening with red highlights like the coat of a dark bay horse. She was as narrow and sharp-edged as Dr. Munquidh was muscular and broad.

“Can I help you?” Bijou asked.

Dr. Azar cleared her throat and said, half-diffidently and half-not, “I hope you’re not going to take the sort of licenses with my Tidal Titan that you did with this elephant here.”

Bijou smiled. Was it Dr. Azar’s dinosaur? Bijou realized she didn’t know who had unearthed the thing. “My contract is to create something as close to life as possible.”

Natural philosophers often forgot to be cowed by Wizards once a technical discussion was in full swing. Dr. Azar was no exception.

“The drawings you are using show a lumbering beast. For all their size, the Tidal Giants were nimble, elegant creatures!” Dr. Azar insisted. She pointed to an enormous, fragmented humerus. Bijou had been meticulously cleaning each chip and working a setting for it in metal. Students drew the chip from every elevation, and when they were done she seated them in her armature. She used techniques similar to those of the arts that produced what the Eastern nations called “sparkling treasure,” a framework of gold wires supporting kiln-fired enamel.

Where the bone fragments were missing, she either smoothed the gap closed with her malleable golden wires, or she carved a replacement from agate, jasper, carnelian, red jade. On occasion, some costlier gem that she had ground, faceted, and polished to fit glittered and refracted among the yellows and reds. With practised skill and cleverness, she concealed the brass armatures and gears that would allow the thing to stand and move so that when it was assembled they would be barely noticeable.

The result was a mosaic in three dimensions that gave the appearance of golden light shining off water that had flooded the cracks in baked ochre mud. It was understated, lovely, and reminiscent of the most delicate cloisonné, though Bijou doubted any mundane artisan would work on such a scale. Every scrap of her expertise and her Wizardry would be needed to hold this thing together—and let it move.

“These bones are more than strong enough to bear the weight of the animal in a charge. Or to allow it to rear up, using its tail as a tripod! These beasts could run, Wizard!”

“Be that as it may,” Bijou said patiently, “there are some structural limitations on the bones in their current state.”

Dr. Azar gave her a sardonic eyebrow. “Based on what you’re charging us, I expect you can find some means of meeting the technical challenge. The science must be respected!”

Bijou had every intention of creating the most soundly engineered Tidal Titan the state of her art would allow. Her professional pride and her affection for her own constructs would permit her no less. But if she built the damned thing and it could dance, it wouldn’t be because she’d been intimidated into it. She said, “I will see what I can do.”

Dr. Azar muttered something about Wizards and their sense of self-worth. It carried quite clearly: the exhibit hall under the grand dome was acoustically excellent and could practically serve as a whispering vault.

Then Azar settled herself and said more loudly, “I shall bring you new drawings.”

Bijou sighed inwardly and contemplated the insufficiency of her retainer.

The next hint of trouble came after moonrise. Ambrosias curled snoozing inside Hawti’s enormous rib cage, his marcasites and pearls gleaming softly. Hawti curiously sorted fossils with its trunk, inspecting each with care. Bijou was otherwise alone in the exhibit hall. The trouble was heralded by the unhappy stomp of Dr. Munquidh’s desert boots across the exhibit hall’s marble floor. Her aggressive tromping carried her to the area Bijou had caused to be roped off with red silk cord. There was a brief rattle as she unhooked the thick cord and another rattle as she refastened it.

Bijou was perched on a stool under the harsh, painful brilliance of a magical lamp. She was bent over her worktable, a fragment of bone tiny and razor-tipped as a shard of pottery pinched in her smallest tweezers. She did not look up until it was seated against the tiny drop of glue that would attach it to its setting and hold it fast until the setting could be burnished into place.

Amjada Munquidh was in a high dudgeon, her olive skin dark with ill-repressed emotion. She squared her shoulders as if steeling herself for an unpleasant confrontation and said, “What’s this I hear about Zandrya Azar poking her pointy nose into your work?”

Bijou counted to ten in three and a half different languages—the last was really more of a dialect or patois—and said, “She stopped by earlier.”

“And what are these?”

Munquidh, of course, knew perfectly well what they were. Lying on a folding table in the disarray where Bijou had left them after thumbing through them, they were Dr. Azar’s sketches.

“She dropped off some drawings,” Bijou said, not feeling warmed by the schoolmarmish tone the much younger Dr. Munquidh was taking.

Munquidh snapped, “Well, what was wrong with my drawings?”

Bijou picked up her burnishing tool. She steadied the bone chip with one brown fingertip and began the gentle, painstaking process of coaxing the rim of the gold to enfold it. “I don’t recall having said there was anything wrong with your drawings, my dear Dr. Munquidh.”

Bijou would have half-liked to close her eyes—and perhaps slap herself on the forehead once or twice—but that wouldn’t be a good idea while she was burnishing. She would not allow these two to drive her to the point where she damaged the specimen, no matter how much of their academic rivalry they were planning to take out on her. She should definitely have asked for more money.

“Then what was she doing here?”

Bijou found a fifth language to count in, and when that didn’t help, she tried it backward. Burnish, burnish—remembering to keep her touch steady and light.

Neither counting nor burnishing helped, because when she opened her mouth what came out was, “Rather the same thing all of my academic visitors appear to be doing. Interfering. Interspersed with snitting.”

“Oh!”

Bijou waited. Munquidh eyed her, lips working in fury. Bijou, feeling the shard of fossil was seated to perfection, reached for the next. This one was larger, and it took a little work with the tools to prepare the setting to receive it.

As she was dotting the glue on with the brush, Bijou said, “Your Trustees hired me for my expertise, Doctor. It would be convenient—helpful, even—if you and your colleagues would trust me to use that expertise for everyone’s benefit.”

Munquidh seethed visibly enough that Bijou flinched inwardly in anticipation of her next words. But whether the good doctor couldn’t think of anything scathing enough to match her mood, or whether she was too polite to give voice to what she did think of, the result was that Munquidh simply expelled the breath she’d been holding in a loud and focused HUFF, then tromped punitively away.

It would have been nice to think that would be the end of the interference. But alas, unfocused thoughts do not reality shape, even for a Wizard. So Bijou was forced to continue her work around the interruptions, opinions, sheaves of artwork, well-reasoned papers, and general monotony of a deeply held and felt academic disagreement.

“Forced,” Brazen commented, when she aired exactly that sentiment to him one night aften they had returned to her house for dinner and a little privacy.

She scooped up lemony, salty tagine with her fingers and a flat bit of bread, chewed, and swallowed. “Well, ‘forced’ might be a strong word. We could always give the money back.”

“It’s not the money,” he said. He had a tendency to gaudy coats and elaborately colored robes and tunics that she expected to blossom into full-blown eccentricity once he was a master Wizard with an establishment of his own.

She glanced at him sideways. “It’s not?”

“You want to build a dinosaur.”

When she laughed, couscous nearly came up her nose. She choked and washed her throat clear with several gulps of wine, followed by a long swallow of water. When she had regained herself, she wiped her mouth on her napkin, folded it neatly, laid it beside the plate, and regarded him with a look of injured innocence.

“Well,” she said. “Who wouldn’t?”

And despite the politics, bun-fights, insurrections, and interruptions—building the dinosaur was a true delight and a test of every aspect of her skills: magicker, machinist, clockmaker, jeweler, engineer. The fussiest and most time-consuming part was assembling the fragmented, petrified bones into replicas of their own original structures that would nevertheless bear the weight of the entire edifice. Once that was accomplished, though, the work of actually erecting the thing went considerably faster—especially given Hawti’s assistance as an extremely dexterous and amenable crane and Ambrosias’s ability to swarm lightly up vertical surfaces and suspended scaffolding, serving Bijou as a pair of remote-operated hands.

It was a weird, glittering construction project. Hawti’s skeleton was not intended to be a naturalist’s specimen, and the tusks were chased in gold and enamel, the enormous skull filigreed with gold and emeralds. Mismatched knobby jewels filled its eye sockets, and every gem-paved step shimmered silvery chimes. The anatomy of the Tidal Titan looked almost reserved by comparison in its shades of ochre, wine, and gold.

It was… enormous. They built scaffolding around it, rope hoists, ramps for Hawti because even it could not reach high enough to lift the massive bones into place.

“Its neck should be loftier!” Dr. Azar argued.

Bijou glanced up at the height of the dome overhead.

“It should give more of an impression of power and dignity!” Dr. Munquidh cried, while Bijou contemplated the strength of the subflooring.

“The poor thing’s going to have a dull un-death in here,” Bijou said to Brazen, waving to the exhibit hall.

“Plenty of children will come to see it,” Brazen answered complacently and handed her another cup of coffee. “What are you going to name it?”

That brought Bijou up short.

Name it. Of course it needed a name. She could not animate it without a name. It could not be instructed if it didn’t have a name.

For a moment, she thought of asking the Trustees, or the natural philosophers, what she should name the thing. Then she considered doing something much more sensible, such as putting her head in a vise.

She sipped the coffee, black and bittersweet and heady. She sighed a deep and windy sigh, indicative of bleak despair—or, at least, of exasperation grown quite chronic. “What do you suppose Munquidh and Azar will fight the least over?”

“I’ll get you some more coffee.”

Bijou had saved the best for last. She’d endured endless hours of the reconstruction—eyes burning, back aching, fingers pricked by wire or blistered by solder—promising herself the pleasure of fitting together, of discovering the skull. Now, with two years of work gone by; half the students graduated and replaced by new students who had to be taught all the same things all over again; and the massive skeleton assembled, geared, wired, armatured, and holding together quite lightly, admirably, as if in life… Now she was ready.

And of course, Dr. Azar and Dr. Munquidh were there with her to help. They argued about the size of the braincase, the exact design of the hinge of the jaw, the flexibility of the attachment to the neck. They argued about position and number of teeth, whether the bony nostrils placed high on the thing’s forehead would potentially have supported a trunk, and how the eyes that Bijou faceted from jacinths larger than her heart and just as crimson should be placed inside the orbits of the eyes, before those orbits were even reconstructed. And then they argued about the reconstruction of those orbits.

Bijou at last resorted to the stratagem of telling each one, in confidence, that she was taking her advice—but asking them not to tell the other to prevent sabotage—just so she could make some progress.

At last the skull was built. Bijou, Brazen, the two completed Artifices, the students, and Drs. Azar and Munquidh gathered around to admire it before Hawti, with the assistance of a rope hoist, was to lift it into place. Hawti would need the help: the Titan’s head was tiny by comparison with its body, but it was still almost half as large as the elephant.

The comparison between the elephant’s dazzling, jeweled skull and that of the Titan was striking. Bijou had exercised great restraint in modeling the Titan’s skull. Its lines showed clean and unadorned, except for the thin bands of gold chasing the spaces between the bone bits, and the places where gemstones understudied lacunae in the preservation. The jeweled eyes kindled with a deep fire.

“All right,” Bijou said. “Let’s make it live.”

The Trustees were summoned and arrived in some haste with a considerable entourage. They had been warned to make themselves available, and no one who could find an excuse to be in the room would miss this ceremony. There would, of course, be a ribbon-cutting and such foofaraw for the public later, but everyone at the Museum knew this was the moment they had been paying for. The galleries encircling the high dome filled to groaning, and Bijou was a little afraid for their integrity.

She gave the word. And then she stood and watched with folded hands, afraid to breathe, as Hawti lifted the great, glorious skull—like a red cloisonné Rukh’s egg—and fitted it into place on the graceful sweep of the seemingly endless neck. (Bijou had been startled to discover that the neck was composed of nineteen vertebrae, far more than the standard seven allotted to almost all modern animals.) Brazen slid in the enormous brass pin that served to hinge the skull to the spine, and Hawti stabilized the Artifice while he hammered the end flat to seal it in place.

Most of the scaffolding had been cleared. But they had left a ramp to the head—which she had mounted neither high nor low, but somewhere in between. Bijou handed Ambrosias off to Brazen and marched right up it.

She knew people expected to see some ritual so she invented some. She swept her robes wide, letting sweeping black velvet sleeves (she had dressed for the occasion) flare around her. She intoned a scrap of remembered verse in her own native language, a funeral chant that sounded portentous.

She laid her hand on the thing’s flattened nose and reached up on tiptoe to blow her breath into its nostrils. Then she said aloud, in a tone that would carry quite clearly through the acoustically perfect space under the dome, “Amjada-Zandrya. That is your name.”

A shiver ran the entire inconceivable length of the Titan. A settling, of sorts, as if it found itself, or found its balance. Then the head lifted slightly and it regarded her, turning like a horse would to center her reflection in one gigantic vermillion jewel.

She stepped back, despite herself cowed.

Then, slowly, majestically, Amjada-Zandrya picked up its feet and began, delicately, to dance. The motion was unmistakable to anyone who had seen a horse perform the half-pass, an elegant diagonal trot, in dressage. There was only room for a half-dozen steps. The Titan, reaching the limit of its movement, curved its enormous head the other way and repeated the passage—airily, in rhythm, and without crushing a single student or laborer or shaking more than a modicum of dust from between the blocks of the dome overhead.

The Trustees and the others in the galleries were at first silent. As the Titan encroached, a few shrieked or pressed back. When it reversed direction, there was a scattering of applause that built quickly to a tumult.

Bijou smiled to herself, clicked her tongue, dropped her arms to her sides, and walked back down the ramp thinking about a hot bath and a two-week sleep.

She was met at the bottom of the ramp by a furious pair of natural philosophers.

She had learned over the course of the previous seasons that Amjada Munquidh was the more explosive of the two. Bijou was therefore not surprised when the black-haired doctor stomped up to her and leaned down to get in her face before shouting, “A Titan can’t dance.”

Bijou smiled, watching the lovely thing shuffle gently, in perfect rhythm, across the floor. “I’d say that’s a matter of some scientific dispute, wouldn’t you?”

Munquidh stared at Bijou in abject, horrified fury. The galleries were still applauding. Munquidh closed her eyes, visibly restrained herself from violence, and turned on her heel. She vanished into the celebrating students, leaving no few bobbing and aswirl with the violence of her wake.

Azar stepped forward next. Her temper was under better control but her voice was still acid when she said, “Why did you put her name before mine?”

“Alphabetical order,” Bijou replied. “It’s considered the equitable solution in the sciences, isn’t it?”

“It is customary to alphabetize by last name!” Dr. Azar stated icily. Then she, in her turn, clicked off in her polished button boots, her spine hung as straight as a ship’s mast.

Bijou watched her go, then shrugged and turned back to her Titan. Amjada-Zandrya had ceased dancing for the moment. Now its long neck lifted its piecework skull gently to the galleries, where it was allowing bystanders to pet its nose with apparent delight.

“Well,” Brazen said beside her. “It works.”

Bijou accepted the mug of strong tea Brazen handed her, along with a commentarial little wink. When she had sipped and sighed, he asked, “What made you decide to give it that ability?”

She grinned but didn’t look at him. Her eyes were for her happy monster. “Oh, I just asked myself what the Titan would have liked, if it could say.”