We had breakfast, though there wasn’t much to say over it, really—I couldn’t talk about my adventure, and there’d been little of note for Serru during that time.

  As the sun grew higher, though, something fascinating happened.

  Somehow, someone had shaped and angled the roof to catch the light even of the very early sun and reflect it downwards. While some of the roof was colourless gss or clouded and darkened like smoky quartz, some of it was coloured—and a red patch of light fell neatly onto the spiralled floor pattern, squarely onto a section that was simirly vibrant red.

  “Does that change through the day?” I asked, looking up in an attempt to puzzle it out.

  “Yes. Between now and sunset, it will travel along the entire path on the floor, changing colour as it does, and just before st light it will be violet and rest there.” She gestured. “It’s increasingly intricate through the middle of the day, at times there are two or three dancing around each other, and when it moves between gss panels it reaches some lovely shades very briefly.”

  “That must have taken... I wouldn’t even know where to start on calcuting exactly how to do that, let alone being able to construct it that precisely.”

  “I imagine it was a colboration between one or more astronomers and artists and architects.”

  “All of that for a shelter that travellers can just stop and camp in? Overnight, possibly tired, and might not stay long enough to appreciate?”

  “Yes. Why not? They got an idea to create something beautiful and they did. Likely others contributed materials or camping supplies or bour. The Quincunx ring road is possibly the most travelled road outside the Midnds, and that means it can be enjoyed by gatherers like me, and merchants and wagoners who move goods all over, and performers who travel to find new audiences, and people visiting friends or family, and countless other reasons. Shelters will always have the same basic function but why shouldn’t they be beautiful and memorable as well?”

  “Wow.”

  We made sure the fire was thoroughly extinguished, refilled our water fsks, and checked that nothing had been left behind.

  “They’re more visible in this light,” Serru said, and pointed. Assuming the sun rose in the east, she was pointing southwest. “The Evercloud Mountains catch the sunlight from this angle.”

  I followed her line of sight, and saw in the distance a broad purple-blue mass with sloped sides, several points on top peeking out of a mass of cloud. The angled light of the rising sun made the cloud luminous and the emerging points were very dark.

  “Most geothermal activity is in the Highnds, but there’s enough in Evercloud that it’s always warm and extremely humid, and it rains frequently. It’s a shame it’s out of our way, it’s very beautiful there. It’s foggy, more dense some days than others but never clear, and your clothes get wet quickly, but it’s intensely green with animals and pnts that don’t exist anywhere else. The range spills into the Midnds and there are many settlements in the foothills around it, even a few small vilges inside. It would take us well out of our way, and add days to reaching the next Quincunx site.”

  “Too bad. It does sound like a fascinating pce to visit. All I’ve seen so far is Brightspring Wood and some open Grassnd and whatever this rocky area is...”

  “It’s generally just called the Ftnds.”

  “That’s an accurate description. And all that has been within a few days of walking. There’s obviously a lot to see. I kinda wish I was here on vacation instead of trying to figure out how to get home and worrying about my family.”

  She nodded. “There are many, many beautiful pces, some of them less obvious than others and some of them genuinely obscure unless you know the area. Unfortunately, most of those are not near the ring road. But if we come close to any, I’ll tell you.”

  “Sounds good. I’d love to see what I can.” I looked thoughtfully at the road. “I have an idea.”

  “Yes?”

  “I bet I could carry you as a centaur. If you want. Or is something like that going to have weird associations? I’m just thinking of it as a practical thing. I’m pretty sure I made really good time back here.”

  “I don’t believe there are any particur social connotations to a friend making an offer to a friend, although my personal familiarity with centaurs and their customs is fairly superficial. Many of them live farther out on the Grassnds and my friends don’t happen to include any of those who live closer to the Midnds. Cervids and lmids ck the size and strength to make an offer like that. I’d rather you didn’t tire yourself, though. I’m used to walking much of the day.”

  “I don’t think it’ll tire me.”

  “We can certainly try, and see how it works, then. If it reduces the time it takes us to reach our next destination, then for your sake, I can hardly argue.”

  “Right.” I took a deep breath, and brought up the dispy.

  When I turned the only dial I could see, the world lurched again.

  It was harder to feel unsteady when I had four legs I could spread to wait until everything stabilized.

  “I think I’m going to need a step in order to get on,” Serru said, and pointed to a rock. “That one, maybe?”

  I moved over beside it, and twisted so I could reach behind my human back to offer her a hand; Serru climbed agilely up onto the rock and from there up onto my horse back, settling herself and her brown-and-green satchel and my yellow-and-blue backpack all in comfortable harmony .

  “It’s, um, okay to reach around if you need to,” I said. “I don’t know what bancing is going to be like.”

  “Likely not so bad at a walk,” Serru said. “But I may need to take you up on that at any faster pace.”

  “Let’s just walk for a while, until we both get used to this.”

  I picked my way carefully back to the road, and started along it in the direction Serru said led to the next Quincunx site.

  There were two drawbacks to travel this way.

  One was easily solved by folding a bnket to form a yer of padding over my back to protect us from each other and friction and pressure.

  The other was that it was virtually impossible to do any gathering along the way.

  Serru insisted that she didn’t mind, but I’d seen enough of her normal behaviour to know that she collected whatever she came across and that led to the varied and sometimes uncommon or downright rare items she could sell in towns. Impatient though I was to go home, I didn’t want her to lose that.

  The compromise we reached was that she’d point out any areas where she expected there to be a substantial yield or that was likely to have valuable items, based on her familiarity with the terrain and the associations between those pnts and the local wildlife, mostly birds, and more visible vegetation. I found her knowledge of so many factors in finding them and her ability to tell me about each pnt and its uses highly impressive.

  At those times I’d switch back to being human and help her harvest as much as possible. Useful items, it turned out, included any fallen dry wood we could use for a fire, since apparently once we made it all the way up the slope and back to the normal grassnd, we’d soon reach a stretch where that would be in short supply. Wood fell from the trees in neat whole identical branches that could be easily divided into manageable lengths with a few blows from a hatchet and stored in bundles in a bag. No mess, no fuss.

  The rest of the time we’d spend alternating between the retively-fast steady walk I could do on four legs and a kind of bouncy jog that I thought was roughly simir to a horse’s trot.

  I couldn’t actually persuade my brain that there was anything about having a second form, and such an alien one, that should by rights have been causing some serious adjustment issues. I had an additional pair of limbs, all four legs had hooves instead of pntigrade feet, and a tail, and a massive amount of body that was at right angles to where I was used to a body being! Maybe the dreams had something to do with it: if I’d spent long enough dreaming about it, maybe my brain had just worked through all the potential trauma in that state and by the time I woke up, it just felt natural. I couldn’t think of any other expnation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t talk to Serru about it.

  There was also the fact that I wasn’t just a centaur, I was a female centaur.

  I had boobs, for heaven’s sake. They were of a modest size, considering my overall build, and it turned out that under my tunic I was wearing what I could only call a bra; it was a soft stretchy comfy thing that I hadn’t even noticed, and that didn’t really match with what I’d typically heard from female friends. It successfully kept them from uncomfortable bouncing, though—I knew women, especially rger-breasted ones, could do damage that way if they didn’t have enough support, so that was a relief. But they were there. And mine.

  I had long hair that reached all the way to my waist, and actually grew in a sharply-narrowing V down the back of my neck to my first thoracic vertebra, but it seemed inclined to naturally fall behind my shoulders, which was a relief. Serru combed and braided it for me while we were walking, and that helped even more with keeping it out of my way. As a bonus, her hands felt good, pying with my hair, but that didn’t strike me as having anything to do with being a centaur.

  Genital anatomy was, well... complicated. That was probably to be expected when you combined human and horse into one body with two torsos, although absolutely nothing about this followed biological rules as I understood them. Okay, I’d needed a travel bar with my breakfast because apparently centaurs ate moderately more, but that didn’t seem like enough. For that matter how was I breathing enough to sustain this much mass? I mean, just passing waste of any kind felt like it was happening a long way off, at the other end of my horse body. If there was any sexual anatomy down there too, which presumably there was, I couldn’t see any immediate relevance, since I had much more important things to think about and also, where to even begin?

  It led to some rather confusing feelings, and probably not the ones most men would have.

  I’d done a bit of experimenting, pushing the boundaries of gender roles, when I was in my te teens and trying to figure out who I was. That, in fact, had been right around the time that I’d realized that my sexual attraction to people had nothing to do with what kind of plumbing they had. For a while, I’d been deeply unsure about my retionship with my own hardware and all the social stuff associated with it. My sister had teased me, but my parents had simply told me they’d always love me and let me work it out my own way.

  I’d gotten as far as establishing that I didn’t have such sufficiently strong feelings that I needed to start looking at ways to transition or anything like that, but there is a whole lot of ground between there and being cisgender. The needle hadn’t settled yet when I started college to get my paramedic qualifications.

  It didn’t take me very long to shove all of those questions into a box, lock it, and put it in a back corner of my mind, to be explored in the future when circumstances changed.

  I did have reasons. EMS is, historically, masculine, and the culture within and around it still reflects that despite the women who excel at it. Maybe if I really wanted to just transition, it would have worked—at least as far as my coworkers. It can be a problem with patients, though. And being in that murky middle ground of gender, by any name, that’s less well-understood and less likely to be accepted by patients or coworkers.

  Teamwork with coworkers, especially being able to depend on your partner this shift, was essential, and I overheard the odd comment that strongly suggested that at least some would take exception. Even more importantly, being able to immediately get a patient’s trust and cooperation could make all the difference, and while some would probably not even notice, some certainly would. It was impractical, since jewellery was a bad idea—one coworker had an earring ripped out by a patient who wasn’t even aggressive, just panicking—and who had the energy for makeup when doing yet another night shift? Uniforms were what they were, that was the whole idea. When not working, most of my friends were the same people I worked with. It was better to just cut my hair short, wear my uniform at work and jeans the rest of the time, and stick with an entirely male presentation. It left an ache deep inside, an awareness of something missing, but in the aftermath of a physically aggressive patient or the effort to extract and save the victim of a DUI accident before they could bleed out or reassuring a terrified child in pain, it tended not to make the top ten list of things on my mind. Frankly, most of the time I just wanted to sleep. Or, sometimes, drink a lot.

  For the life of me, I had no idea what to make of the Quincunx giving me an alternate form as a female centaur.

  And with no idea how this world felt about gender, I was absolutely not bringing any of that up.

  I was used to going whole days at a time without ever thinking about it, and pushing it all away when I did. It seemed safest to keep doing that.

  I distracted myself by checking out my cool new spell-wheel, trying to get a decent sense of what was on it. Five mimicked potions: Cleansing, Quickheal, Anodyne, Panacea, and Antidote. The other three were Light, Start Fire, and Vitals. All of those seemed highly useful.

  The bars on the right were obviously important too. I finally concluded that the outermost one, which dropped a little each time I switched forms but gradually crept upwards again, was essentially showing me how much magic or power or mana or whatever I had avaible, and apparently switching had a small cost, maybe five percent or so.

  When I switched which spell I was looking at on the central wheel, the indicator on the inner vertical bar usually changed. In most cases it hovered around ten to twenty percent. A small red marker appeared each time on the outer bar that I thought was showing me what the total would be if I used that spell, which was handy.

  I did wonder whether ‘scable’ might mean I could spend more or less on a spell to get a different effect—a brighter or bigger light, or a more powerful Quickheal. It was all going to take time to figure out, presumably, since it didn’t come with a manual. On the other hand, it did seem to be a pretty straightforward and intuitive interface, so the fact that there were features I could only specute about didn’t mean it was a failure, just that it was a complicated subject.