They rode on for hours, stopping at a small, shabby inn to water the horses and get a light lunch, and then for hours more, stopping at a larger and cleaner inn for supper and beds. Toamic had not ridden in a coach or carriage for six years, since his formal education had been interrupted when his father was no longer able to pay his tuition, and he had ridden home from school for the last time in a post coach. After six years of walking everywhere, he had forgotten how bumpy riding could be, and his butt was aching by the time they finally sought their beds after supper. Saina was going to pay for separate solo rooms for both of them, but he drew the line here, and paid for a share in a room on his own. He shared his bed with another traveler, a middle-aged merchant who snored dreadfully, and regretted it the next morning when they got on the road again.
During lunch on the second day, Saina asked, “Have you considered what your name will be?”
“I have been thinking about it a lot,” Toamic admitted. “I’m leaning toward Dirra or Sorana, but I haven’t decided.”
“Do you want to pick one for me to call you, and introduce you by when we get to my house? You can always change your mind later.”
After some dithering, he shyly asked Saina to call him Dirra. Or to call her Dirra? Could she consider herself a woman already, just from the desire to be one? Saina had told her that some of the girls and women she’d found had already been living as women, shaving twice a day if necessary, wearing women’s clothes with strategic padding, and going by women’s names, long before they had any hope of finding transformative magic within their means. Dirra wasn’t sure she could have done that. If Saina hadn’t come along with her offer, she probably would have gone on living as a man indefinitely, resigned to her fate.
After another long day of travel, they arrived in Three Towers a little before suppertime. Looking out the window, Dirra could see the titular three towers rising high above the rest of the rooftops, the relics of one of the ancient civilizations. Saina told her the lower ten stories were now used by imperial and city government offices, while the upper fifty stories were inhabited by a few wizards who could fly or teleport; no one would walk up that many flights of stairs routinely if they could help it, and the magic that used to bring people up and down with no muscular effort no longer worked.
Saina’s house was more modest than most of those in Toamic and Garic’s neighborhood, but still large, a three-story brownstone which Toamic estimated might have twelve or fourteen rooms. The driver helped Saina and Dirra dismount from the carriage, and they walked up to the front door while the driver and a groom were seeing to the horses.
Before they could quite reach the door, it swung open, revealing a thin, petite girl a few years younger than Toamic. She beamed at them.
“Saina! You’re home! And you’ve brought a guest?”
“A new sister,” Saina said, embracing the girl as they entered. “Caspena, this is Dirra, her grace the Duchess of Parramind. Dirra, this is Caspena, my ward and protegé.”
“Actually, not exactly,” Dirra said, seeing the awe on Caspena’s face. “As a man, I was the Duke of Parramind, but the daughter of a duke is not a duchess, but an Honorable. We can dispense with that if you don’t mind.”
“Very well. Do you wish to see the idol right away, or refresh yourself first?”
“I must do a necessary thing first, but I’d like to… get into something more comfortable soon after that.”
“All right. Caspena, can you show Dirra the way to the privy?”
A scant few minutes later, Dirra returned to the parlor to find Saina sitting and chatting with Caspena and two other girls of different ages, telling them about her trip and how she had met Dirra.
“Are you ready?” Saina asked, rising from the sofa where she was sitting beside Caspena and another woman closer to her age, perhaps around thirty. All of them were beautiful in their own ways.
“I don’t know,” Dirra confessed. “I think so.”
“I can’t wait to see how pretty you’ll be,” one of the girls said. “Hi, I’m Tiama.”
“I’m charmed to meet one so graceful,” Dirra said, blushing at the thought of being pretty.
“And I’m Norria,” said the other woman. “Let’s talk more after you get changed. I think we’ve got a lot in common.”
“Oh, yes, my Uncle Pondarr told me about you. And Saina has told me a little more.”
“The idol is this way,” Saina said, and led Dirra down a corridor to a closed door with a sign reading “No One Who Values His Masculinity Beyond This Point.” Saina took a key from the ring on her belt and unlocked it. It proved to be a closet with barely room for more than a small table containing the idol Saina had described, about eight inches tall, obscenely priapic and grotesquely ugly of face.
Confronted with it, Dirra found her heart beating fast. “Ah – it belatedly occurs to me that I should have waited to do the necessary thing until now…” It also occurred to her that if she was intended to pee on the statue, it should have been fixed in place over a privy or chamber pot, not on a table in a closet.
“No, that won’t be – heh – necessary. By trial and error, we’ve found that any gesture of disrespect will trigger the curse. Seljen figured out that the god of this idol was a god of masculinity, but not a good kind of masculinity – the kind that despises women and men weaker than oneself, the kind that can never rest easy while another man is stronger than oneself or has more wives. The kind that would regard turning into a woman as the worst punishment imaginable. Fuck him,” she added, and spat on the statue.
Everything in Dirra’s upbringing rebelled against swearing, or spitting in front of another person. But what she wanted more than anything was within reach. “F-fuck him,” she agreed, and spat.
Epilogue
The Honorable Dirra, daughter of the late Duke of Parramind, rose at the first bell and prepared breakfast for herself in her small flat in the Docklands. After eating, bathing and dressing, she set out to meet her first client of the day, the ambassador from the Tillabeth Isles.
Her most direct route would take her through her old neighborhood and past her old house, now occupied by her cousin Sorres. She debated taking a slightly longer route to avoid it, as she had done the last few times she had visited the embassy, but decided not to. Perhaps it would be good to see what Sorres had made of the place.
Last time she had passed by, the east wing had been covered in scaffolding and swarming with workmen, at last making the long-needed repairs that Dirra and her father had been unable to afford. But today, the place was quiet. The scaffolding was still there, but there were no workmen visible, no sounds of hammering or sawing. No smell of cooking or smoke from the chimney, either; no signs of habitation at all. The windows were shuttered, unusual in this summer heat. Had Sorres run out of money for the repairs, and moved back to his townhouse in Juniper Square? She wondered who she could ask. If it were worth finding out.
After she had returned from Three Towers with a womanly body, Dirra had found her mother obdurate in refusing to speak with her. She had refused to make Dirra a set of women’s clothes, or teach her to sew. During the weeks of court proceedings that followed, as Uncle Pondarr gallantly tried to save the house at least, if not the title, and failed, Dirra had taught herself to sew from a little book she picked up in a secondhand shop, and slowly, with many pricked and bleeding fingers staining her first efforts, had built herself a modest feminine wardrobe. When the case was declared against her, and Sorres ended up with the title, house, and fortunately the debts as well, her mother had silently left and gone to live with her oldest brother, the Earl of Suticarr. Uncle Pondarr had offered Dirra a place to live, as he had promised, but she had found that, freed from the burden of paying interest on the debt, she could afford a small but decent flat with her etiquette teaching income. It was a long walk from most of her clients’ houses, but she was long since used to walking, and it was neat and comfortable, and did not take long to clean top to bottom.
After pausing in thought for a minute or two in front of her ancestors’ house, Dirra hurried onward. She had lost a few of her previous clients after returning from Three Towers with a new name and body, though not as many as she feared, and after a few difficult weeks, had gained even more. Mothers who would have been reluctant to hire a young man to teach their daughters etiquette had no hesitation in hiring a woman, even if she had an unusual past, while hardly any objected to a woman teaching their sons.
A long walk later, she reached the embassy, rang the bell, and was admitted. She found Liapi alone in the parlor.
“The Honorable Dirra of the line of Parramind,” the manservant announced.
Liapi put down her book and stood up. “Good morning, teacher, O blossom of the line of Parramind,” she said. “The day is bright and excellent for learning.” Her eyes flashed merrily.
“Good morning, pupil, O pearl of the line of Tepha. I have but little wisdom to impart, but it is freely yours. – May I ask whether your mothers and father will be joining us soon?”
“Alas, Mama was summoned by the Emperor early this morning – he’s finally acting on the trade treaty that Mama has been asking for all these months – and Papa and Mom have gone with her. They asked me to give you their apologies.”
“None are needed,” Dirra said. Her heart pounded. She was alone with Liapi. Since returning as a woman, she had gradually begun to suspect that Liapi now returned her interest, but it was hard to be sure when they were always accompanied by her parents. She would have had difficulty believing Liapi could be attracted to her as she was now if she had not seen the obvious affection between Liapi’s mothers, or the even more obvious (not to say blatant) affection she had seen between Saina and Norria during the days she had spent at Saina’s house.
They sat down and began their lesson. It was a good thing that Dirra knew her material so thoroughly, or she would have forgotten half of it in the whirl of emotions she felt in Liapi’s presence. And what was worse (or infinitely better), as the lesson progressed, she was becoming more and more sure that Liapi returned her interest. Little smiles and glances, an unnecessary emphasis on a word here and a phrase of double meaning there (innocently passed off as imperfect fluency in the language) – it was impossibly to be sure that any one of them was intended as flirtation, but all together, they gave an unmistakable impression.
Unless Dirra were fooling herself, mistaking her wishes for reality.
At last the lesson was over, to Dirra’s great regret, and she began to take her leave.
“Must you go right away?”
“Alas, I have another client I must teach at the third bell. I can stay perhaps a few minutes longer.”
“Then stay and chat a little more.”
“And I will be here on Fifthday evening, to teach you and your parents more about suppertime customs, and then I will be staying for supper.”
“That will be a delight. I’ll be sure to ask Mama to seat you beside me.”
They were standing very close. Dirra longed to take Liapi’s hands in hers, or perhaps something more daring, but hesitated, and decided that if she did so, she would remain far too long and be late for her next client. She was about to say goodbye when Liapi made the decision for her: she felt Liapi’s dark hands clasping her own, and then Liapi was kissing her, and she was kissing her back.
A large part of the reason she had chosen to take a flat in the Docklands rather than move in with Uncle Pondarr had been to avoid the pressure to get married – more specifically, to find a husband – which she feared her well-meaning uncle would unwittingly place on her, simply through his eagerness to help her out. She had not been in a hurry to find a wife before her transformation, and was even less willing to find a husband. But the Tillabeth Islanders allowed two women to marry, or two men, or groups of three or more spouses of the same or mixed sexes. This was not a mere dalliance before Liapi inevitably got married to a man; it was a real possibility for her future.
As she kissed Liapi long and hard, she realized she was going to be late for her next client, but it was difficult to care.
This was lovely! Thank you so much for writing it, I loved the characters and Dirra's triumph in transitioning by saying f*ck.
This was sweet!
Short and sweet novel!
I'll be keeping tabs to read the mermay special
That was a cute little story. :)
Do you know what happened to the idol?
This is So Sweet omg. I love this.