“I’m having second thoughts about this idea.”

Okay, they weren’t second thoughts, as such. They were something like fortieth or forty-fifth thoughts, at the very least. Whatever the case, Ulysses was having doubts.

Bill offered him a look, the sort of look of kindness that was so rare in the lives they led. But there was also a hint of irritation buried in it. After all, as much as the dread in Ulysses’ chest hurt, this was their chance.

“Come on,” Bill said, “the hard part’s over. We’re past the walls of the castle.”

“That’s what worries me.”

Watermilfoil was crowded. And open. Too open; no matter where you looked, there was another path to who-knows-where.

And the people were numerous. Too numerous. They could look at Ulysses, all of those eyes, and they could hurt him, all those hands. Each passing person looked, to him, to be an agent of his father, the Lord of the Order… and as mentioned before, people were numerous there.

Ulysses looked back, back to the walls, back to the comfort of the grey eggshell of the place he laid his head down. It would be easier to just wander back on in, beg for absolution and punishment from the Order, and forget this whole episode.

“I’m going back.”

This drew the gazes of the three people with him: Bailey, the girl who was unfairly pretty; Henry, the bastard who had no right to be so kind; and Bill. Bill, who might as well have been Ulysses’s own flesh and blood.

“Going back where, exactly?” Bill asked.

“Where do you think? The castle. It’s safer there. There’s less… options.”

“Uh. I don’t know about ‘safe’. That’s a bad idea.”

Ulysses huffed.

“Piss off. You don’t know what it’s like out here. Look at these streets, huh? It’s not like the castle. You could wander anywhere. In the castle, it’s easy to get lost, but you’re contained. Your choices all lead back on themselves. Not here.”

“And that’s… bad?” Bill asked.

Bad. Was it… bad? Was the terrible freedom of the winding streets, the possibility of just wandering off and never coming back the way you came… bad?

Yes. Of course it was. Choice was a poison that confused the mind and frustrated the path forward. Choice led to this ridiculous situation, in a dress and a hood out in the middle of the scorned city. This was ill fitting of a man of his bloodline.

Right?

“I don’t know, but I’m sick of worrying about it. I’m going back.”

Yeah.

“I’ll walk you back,” Bailey said, “you know the way to Alice’s, right, Henry?”

“I should hope so!”

Bailey laughed, and she and Henry shared a smile that made Ulysses angry. They had choice, the poison was coursing through their veins, and they were happy about it. How dare they?

“Come on, then,” Bailey said.

The walk back was somehow worse than the walk out. For all the dread that being out in public brought, the terror of going home again was tenfold. Sure, the people in the city could see him, but he was just another body in a sea of bodies. At the castle? There was a role to fill.

“Why did you go along with any of this?” Ulysses asked.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Well…

“If my father finds out about this you’re probably going to wake up chained to a basement wall, for one.”

Bailey shrugged.

“I mean, forget whether or not you’d even have a job, you’d probably never see the light of day again. Throwing me off my path… especially given that you’re just castle staff… you’d pay dearly.”

“Now,” Bailey said, “I seem to recall you asking me for this. I accept that this carries risk for me, but…”

“I--”

Fuck. She had a point.

“I make bad choices sometimes. What can I say?” he said.

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

“Now what does that mean?”

Once more, Bailey shrugged.

“You think I’m making a mistake, don’t you?”

“Why would my opinion matter to you?” Bailey asked, “You barely know me and I can hardly stomach you after you hurt Henry.”

Ulysses frowned. ‘Hardly stomach’ was about how well he liked himself, too.

“It matters because you’re good. Effortlessly.”

At that, Bailey laughed. When she was done doing that, she chuckled. Then, when she was through chuckling, she giggled, guffawed, and cackled. This was both confusing and upsetting to Ulysses, who found no humor in the situation.

“Effortlessly. Please,” she said, between laughs.

“What’s so funny?”

“You think I’m not constantly trying my ass off, and I can either feel flattered, insulted, or amused. I choose to be amused.”

Ulysses wrinkled his nose at that.

“Look. The castle’s not far, now. I trust that you can walk yourself the rest of the way, yeah?”

Indeed, the castle was looming larger and closer than before. The edges of the town frayed outwards towards the beastly building like leaves pointing up towards the sky. It would indeed be easy to just waltz over to the front gate and go back in, slip back into the life that was written out for him; get knighted, get married to a noblewoman of suitable breeding, succeed his father, have a son to succeed him, kill some dragons, die a hero’s death…

He could already see the obituary in the papers and the words on his tomb; ‘Lord Ulysses Gaius. Killer of dragons, father to a son, son of a hero.’ They’d sing his praises for each deviant/dragon he’d felled, each dreamer’s wings he’d clipped. They’d talk about how he grew out of his juvenile love for beautiful things, how he loved nothing more than the hard and the gray and the dead…

Ulysses felt sick to his stomach. Bailey was already walking away, back into the city, back to the world of countless possibilities, where the roads twisted and turned and grew organically.

“Wait!”

Bailey turned around and raised her eyebrow at him.

“I… I don’t want to go back. Not alone. And… I don’t want to become who I’m supposed to be.”

“Yeah?” Bailey asked.

“Yeah.”

She gestured for him to come with her; Ulysses complied.

It wasn’t Henry’s idea to leave Belladonna in the dragon’s den that was Alice’s apartment. In fact, Henry was pretty sure she (?) would regret being alone in there with Alice, what with her exacting gaze and pointed questions.

But regardless, Henry stood out in the courtyard of the apartment building, watching the stone floor. Little plants grew out of cracks in the stone, life issuing from the dead gray ground.

Just as he was starting to get antsy, Alice’s door opened, and Belladonna emerged with a huge smile on their/her face.

“Satisfied?” Henry asked.

“Yeah…”

“Good.”

Both just sort of stood there for a moment. The tepid air of the courtyard tugged at their clothing and bit at exposed skin; even without the wind chill, it was a nightmarishly cold November day. But somehow Alice’s room was still a less attractive option at the moment.

“Hey, Henry…”

“Hm?”

Belladonna searched the opposite courtyard wall, but no answers could be found there; there was naught but stone walls, apartment doors, and flyers inviting people to Alice’s dragonquell party.

“You’re like, a man, right?”

Wow. Just out and asking, huh?

“I mean, yes, I am,” Henry said.

“How did you know? When did you know?”

Ah. The million coin questions. Henry shrugged.

“Not easy to answer either of those, really. In hindsight, I always wanted to be a guy, but I sort of assumed that that was just my upbringing devaluing women. It’s like… a feeling, I guess? It wasn’t easy to sort out.”

The wind picked up a little, but Henry felt plenty warm at the thoughts that ran through him. There was a bitterness to some of them; there was a sweetness to them, too. In whatever newfound (rediscovered?) selfhood he had, there was a stirring sense of melancholia; laughing at a joke at a funeral, or crying at a beautiful wedding.

It sure beat feeling empty and lifeless, that was for sure.

“How’s it feel?” Bill asked.

“Well, before, when I was dreaming of it, thinking it would never happen? Cold. Not in a comfortable winter kind of cold, like the way a stone wall is cold. And I was used to that… but now that I know, now that I have a body I can stand? I feel warm. Like I’m wearing a cloak. Sure there’s still the cold, but I have something soft and comfortable with me. And with Bailey… it just gets warmer.”

And with Lillian, but that was a whole other bed full of worms. It occurred to him that he might have to lay in that bed at some point, but that wasn’t here or there.

“Huh.”

Bill frowned.

“I was thinking I wouldn’t understand at all,” Bill said, “but I do. Uh…”

“What part were you expecting not to get?”

“Well. I… for me, being a man is… not so good. It is, you know, what it is, but it’s not my favorite thing. But clearly we’re different. Like… you’re you, and for you being a guy is…”

Amazing, beautiful, cool, dandy, elegant, favorable, great, happy? Or perhaps interesting, joyous, or… a word that started with a k. Whatever, the point still stood.

“Wonderful? Warm?”

“That, yeah.”

Belladonna kicked at the floor.

“Well, you don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,” Henry said.

“I have to be a guy, though. That’s the exception.”

Henry caught his friend’s eye with a look that sat somewhere in the continuum of ‘stern’ and ‘comforting’. It was a wide river to ford, but he did his damndest. How else was Belladonna to know that there was a choice?

“No exceptions. Seriously.”

“So… I could not be…”

Emotion overcame Belladonna as a river overcame a dam, or a revolutionary fervor overcame despair and terror. Henry’s companion got very quiet and still for a time.

“I need to think. I’m going to take a walk.”

“Want me to come with?” Henry asked.

“No, actually, I’d rather hash this out myself, uh, you know. If that’s alright.”

Henry nodded.

“I’ll come back.”

The second Belladonna was out of earshot, Alice emerged from her den.

“Would it be in poor taste to make a bet? Because Belladonna there is like, inches away from a realization.”

“You’ve grown calloused and cynical to the raw emotions at play in a gender crisis, Alice,” Henry said, “and maybe you should think that over, hm?”

At that, Alice cocked an eyebrow at Henry.

“Anything else you want to bring up while you’re here, or is that it?”

“You ought to treat Bailey better.”

Alice huffed.

“Yeah, probably. Fuck.”

A long silence hung in the air, a chill over the conversation. Henry swished his big red cloak around and ran a hand through his hair. A dull gray sky met his gaze with swirls of frosty clouds and the omnipresent threat of solid precipitation.

“I’m a little surprised you’re helping Belladonna and Yulia, given their profession,” he said, after a time.

“If I can stomach you being one of those knights, I can stomach her -- them.”

Ouch. Okay, fair was fair. Henry had to manually unlock his jaw again before he could speak; that jab hit him right where it hurt.

“About that… I might leave the order soon. You won’t have to stomach me any longer.”

Alice said nothing but a flat, “Good,” and returned to doing nothing. It was as if she had her own personal set of overcast clouds hanging above her; whether they were related to Henry’s criticisms or some unknown other issues was beyond Henry’s reckoning.

“And I might try… I don’t know.”

“Try what?” Alice said.

Henry turned his head to get a glimpse of her expression.

“You won’t laugh?”

“I’m not Bailey. No promises.”

“Well, alright. If you laugh I’ll tell Bailey you’re being mean to me, though.”

At that, Alice frowned. Henry’s gambit clearly worked; he could see the gears and pulleys in her brain working at the image of a particularly ornery Bailey.

It felt good to know he had someone like Bailey on his side. Or, no, not someone like Bailey; just Bailey. No substitutes would do when it came to her.

He cleared his throat, “So, knights, right?”

“I’m familiar with the concept.”

“Well, what about an order of knights who would stand opposed to…”

Henry gestured at the world around them.

“All this. These conditions we’re living in.”

“You’d get crushed instantly,” she said, not hesitating even one bit.

“We’d start small. Stay hidden.”

Alice chuckled, but it was mirthless.

“Oh, my mistake. You’d get found, then crushed.”

“Ever the optimist, huh?” Henry asked.

In response, Alice jabbed a pointed finger his way.

“Look, bub. I grew up, more or less, on a commune -- a safe haven for dragons, outcasts, unionists, the whole shebang. The only saving grace that kept it going for so long was the remote location and the hard climb up the mountain… and even then, your,” she poked his shoulder, “order burned it to the ground and locked the whole mountain down. Resistances and communes and the like aren’t a matter of if they fail. It’s a matter of when and how many people survive.”

Henry shook his head.

“So, what? Don’t try anything? That’s bleak.”

“Didn’t say that. Just--”

“Hey, you two!” Bailey chirped, “Look who I brought.”

Oh thank goodness. Bailey was there with a reticent Yulia in tow.

“Oh, the other one. Good.” Alice rubbed her hands together.

“I can wait. It seems like you were in the middle of something,” Yulia said.

Henry smiled and shook his head.

“No,” he said, “we were done.”

“Yeah. Come on in, you, let’s talk.”

Yulia, with the reluctance of a soprano with the flu, followed Alice into the hall of gender and piles that was the witches’ apartment.

Without speaking, Bailey offered her hand to Henry. He took it, and arm in arm, they began to walk.

*****

“You think Yulia’s gonna be okay in there?” Henry asked, as he and Bailey went on their little promenade. They walked, arm in arm, their bodies forming a circuit of warmth that kept them both nice and toasty in the late November air.

All Bailey could do was shrug.

“They’ll be fine,” she said. “Or not! Alice will bite if she feels so compelled.”

“She didn’t bite me. I consider myself blessed.”

Bailey chuckled.

“You should. It’s her go-to form of attacking.”

“What, really?”

Bailey rolled up the sleeve of her dress, just below the shoulder. There was a dark mark made of little rectangular indents that once upon a time might have been angry and red. Apparently their semi-illusory forms kept old scars and the like, then?

“The story is, I was three, and she was ten, and I was hogging her stuffed dragon toy. I guess she thought that I’d drop it if she bit me on the arm.

For a moment, Bailey looked thoughtful.

“I didn’t, by the way.”

“She was ten?”

“Yeah,” Bailey shrugged, “before she sort of figured her shit out she was pretty unpleasant when she got upset.”

Henry looked at the ground to avoid saying something like ‘oh, she used to?’ or other things of that caliber. If it were any other person in the world, Bailey would move to defend Alice, but to Henry, she felt no such need. She merely shrugged.

“You know how it is, when someone’s got a case of the gends. People can do some pretty strange things to get out of the emotions that come from living in the gendered world as… you know. Someone who’s alien to it,” Bailey said.

“True.”

For a second, they let the sounds of the city fill the space; a stiff breeze blew at even stiffer trees, children crunched on the light snow on the ground, and mournful birds cursed the heavens for the early winter.

“Considering how we were at the start of this whole thing… I mean, it checks out,” Henry said.

“Yeah, right?”

They both could do nothing but laugh. Outlandish memories of denial occurred to them, blossoming into sprouts of laughter and embarrassment. There was enough there for a whole orchard’s worth of fruit, a veritable harvest of ‘Did I really say that and not think that meant something? Fuck!’

“...Can I ask a silly question?” he asked.

“By all means!”

“We’re trans, right? Both of us?”

The question struck them like an avalanche to a snow measurement marker.

“Yeah. When’d you figure It out?” Bailey asked.

“I don’t know. One day I started thinking of myself as a man and just…. Never stopped. Pretty recently, though.”

For a moment, Bailey looked at the ground. It felt silly to admit, but...

“Honestly? I don’t know either. There was no ‘ah ha!’ It wasn’t till your goober friends came and asked me about this stuff that I was like… oh. Huh. I am kind of experienced at this, to some degree. And… I know who I am.”

Damn. To know oneself was still such an alien thing to Henry. The idea of admittance, of letting himself see within and acknowledge it? Some parts of him, parts that sounded less like him and more his parents and his church and his boarding school teachers, raged at it. Their voices were naught for now, though. They could come back and try again later when he was feeling worse.

“It’s a wonderful feeling.” Henry leaned up against her as he spoke.

“Yeah, no kidding.”

Bailey leaned right back at him, in such a way that their shoulders were touching. Warmth freely transferred between them, and that was just how they wanted it.

“I hope,” Henry said, “you can see in you what I see.”

That was more than enough prompting for Bailey to look at Henry’s face. She batted eyelashes at him and really put some syrup into her voice as she asked, “And what’s that?”

“Your fire. Your beauty. Your… power.”

“Power?”

“Yes.”

She got a dangerous look in her eye. It was highly erotic, if Henry was honest with himself.

“My power…”

“The power to do anything you wanted,” Henry said.

At that, Bailey offered her hand to him. With a smile as gentle as a wildflower in autumn, Henry gladly took her hand. She looped her hand around his and squeezed… not too tight, but certainly tighter than gently. Henry squeezed right on back.

“Huh. You’re right. I wanted to do that, and I had the power to do so.”

“See?”

“Yeah, at this rate, I could be the sorceress with this kind of power. No one could stop me.”

It was said with the same tone that one might jokingly declare that the sun was going to turn blue, or that it would start raining vegetables tomorrow.

“You could. You’d be damn good at it,” Henry said.

“You think so?”

“I know so. And I know, if you were the Sorceress, I’d want to be your knight.”

A hand found a hand, though neither was sure who reached out for the other’s first. Bailey grasped Henry’s with a tight squeeze.

“I’d want that too,” she said.

He let himself be held for a minute, for skin to meet skin and for the cold world to become warm and full of possibilities. When he found the words to match his thoughts, he spoke up, with a careful measuring of his tone and pace.

“I… I’ve been thinking. I’ve missed you.”

Henry rubbed his thumb underneath Bailey’s palm; the creases and contours were a whole world of mountains and rivers and hills and plains, a whole cosmos of creation in one hand.

“What if… we went somewhere together, sometime? The two of us, I mean,” Henry said.

“Like, a date?”

“If you want.”

Bailey looked him straight in the eye. Not even the space between them, nor the time between their words, could act as a barrier between the pair.

“I’m not sure I’ve wanted anything more than this,” she said, “let’s fucking do it.”