Leaving the temple, Lirenna made her way to the enchantment building. It was the building in which most of the valley's junior female wizards had their rooms, rooms that would in all probability be their homes for only a few years before they moved back out into the big, wide world to continue their careers. Most of the wizards who made the valley their permanent home were old and retiring from active life, returning to take up a teaching post in their declining years, and many of these moved into one of the castles and mansions that stood upon the steep and craggy slopes of the mountains ringing the valley where they could be assured peace and quiet, away from the noise and bustle of hundreds of busy, hardworking apprentices. For temporary residents, though, a small cluster of rooms could usually be found in one or another of the University buildings, and the wizard would squeeze him or herself into these.

     Entering the building, Lirenna stopped a pretty girl she passed in the corridor to ask where she could find Tassley Kimber. The girl said she’d just seen her going to her rooms with a young man and probably wouldn’t want to be disturbed. Lirenna smiled sweetly and asked for directions anyway, saying she’d go later, when hopefully she would be free. The girl was happy to comply, and Lirenna then turned to leave the building. As soon as the girl had gone, though, she turned again and headed in the direction she’d given.

     It took nearly twenty minutes for Lirenna to find Tassley's rooms in the maze of rooms, staircases and corridors that was the enchantment building, and she could only speculate as to the building's original purpose. She followed a narrow twisting corridor around several bends and turns and squeezed up a flight of stairs so narrow that even her willowy figure was brushing the bare stone walls on either side. She followed another corridor whose stone floor was so old that centuries of use had left a low rut along the centre and passed a classroom in which a hapless male 'volunteer' was having enchantments cast upon him by one after another of the giggling female students under the stern, watchful gaze of a crusty old wizardess. Lirenna felt a powerful surge of nostalgia as she peeped in through the window, but forced it firmly down. She was here on serious business.

     Finally, she climbed a steep spiral staircase that wound its way up one of the towers that stood at the four corners of the building. From here she had a wonderful view of the whole valley, and under other circumstances she would have paused a few minutes to gaze out in wonder. Instead, she crept up to the door that stood at the very top of the stairs and pressed her sensitive shayen ear to it, listening carefully.

     Her sharp shayen hearing picked up the sounds of two people breathing, soft and regular. The sound of people in a light sleep. Lirenna grinned in satisfaction and looked furtively back down the staircase. Someone was moving way down near the bottom, but there was no activity higher up, so she quietly turned the doorhandle, pushed the door slowly open and slipped inside.

     Tassley's apartment consisted of three rooms occupying the conical peak of the tower, and the door opened into a small but cosy looking living, reception room whose dominating item of furniture was a large, padded sofa, worn a lot more at one end than the other and with two squashed down depressions in the cushions. Tassley's lab robe was draped casually across the back of a chair, and the room was filled with the faint scent of perfume. There were very few personal items in the room, very little to give any idea of Tassley's lifestyle and interests, but then that sofa just about said it all really. There was no need for any more clues as to Tassley's favourite hobby.

     Lirenna hardly glanced at the reception room as she passed through it, though, and completely ignored the small toilet, moving around the circular wall that contained the central stairwell to the bedroom/washroom. The room was only just big enough for the single bed and the small washbasin, which carried a permanent magical charge that filled it with hot, soapy water whenever a word of command was spoken. A number of toilet items stood on a small shelf above the bowl and below a mirror, all the usual things that young women use to make themselves more attractive and desirable, but amongst them was a cutthroat razor. The large kind used by men, not the smaller kind that women sometimes used to shave their legs.

     Lirenna drew in her breath in a hiss of anger at the sight of it, and Tassley, lying on the bed beside a sleeping man, moaned in her sleep and rolled over onto her back. Lirenna froze, afraid she'd woken her up, but the human girl settled down again and her breathing resumed its slow, regular rhythm. Lirenna relaxed but remained wary. Tassley was obviously a light sleeper. She'd have to take steps to make sure she didn't wake up too soon.

     She reached into a pouch, drew out a pinch of fine sand and spoke a sequence of magic words as she sprinkled it over the sleeping couple. Every grain of sand sparkled and evaporated as it was consumed by the spell, and Lirenna held her breath anxiously as she waited to see if it was working. After a moment the breathing of the two people in the bed grew slower and deeper, telling the demi shae that they had entered a deeper layer of sleep, and Lirenna smiled in triumph. Good. If she wanted, she could pull Tassley's hair out by the roots now, one great clump at a time, and the human girl would just sleep on until the spell wore off.

     She pulled the bedsheets down to the human girl's waist and hissed in jealousy at the girl's beauty, even though it was nothing in comparison to her own. No man would spare any other woman so much as a glance so long as Lirenna was in the room and she knew it, but Tassley's beauty was nevertheless great; great enough for Lirenna to see her as a threat. The aureolae around her nipples were large and pale, almost the same colour as the surrounding skin, and they were perched high on top of breasts that were plump and firm; breasts that seemed to be crying out for a man's hand to grab and squeeze them. Thomas's hand, perhaps.

     Lirenna ground her teeth in anger. The nipples themselves were hard and erect, and the milky white skin around them had the mottled, pink pattern of distended blood vessels. A sure sign of sexual excitement. Lirenna looked closely at her eyes and saw them moving rapidly under the closed lids. Her mouth opened and she uttered a low moan. The demi shae clenched her fists in fury. She was having an erotic dream! About Thomas? The bitch! The whore! I'll teach her! I will!

     She thrust her hand into a pouch, pulled out the bottle of potion she'd brought from the chapel and looked at the label with a smile of savage satisfaction. Hair restorer, she read. To be applied externally only to those areas where hair is desired. Effects are permanent and can only be reversed by a high ranking cleric of Caroli. Wash hands immediately after application. Lirenna nodded to herself. Yes, this should do the job nicely. Let's see how many men you can lure into your bed with hairy nipples!

     She removed the stopper, put her fingers over the opening and upended the bottle so that a small quantity of the potion wetted the tips of her first two fingers. She lay the bottle down on the small bedside table, bent over and reached her hand out towards the sleeping girl's breasts.

     She paused, though, with her wetted fingers only half an inch above the sleeping girl's left nipple as she suddenly imagined the girl's reaction when she woke up and saw what had happened to her. She imagined a shriek of horror loud enough to wake the whole building. Her bedmate leaping up expecting to see a murderer in the room. She imagined the girl staring at herself in the small mirror, fingering the long, coarse hair that had sprouted during her sleep with feverish, trembling fingers. Lirenna smiled with satisfaction was she prepared to apply the potion.

     But then she paused, feeling sudden shame and guilt at being the cause of such distress. But hadn't that been what she wanted to create, to punish her for throwing herself at her husband? Perhaps, but she suddenly found herself strangely reluctant to go through with it. She remembered how she felt whenever she found herself in the company of pureblooded shae folk. Remembered how much she hated everything about her body that betrayed her partly human heritage. Everything that reminded her that she was different from them. Less perfect, less graceful. Bigger. Clumsier. Uglier. She slowly drew back her hand. She couldn't do that to the human girl, not without greater provocation.

     "I'll let you off this time," she said therefore, looking down into the sleeping girl's face, "but you so much as look at my husband again and I'll be back, and next time I really will do it!"

     She washed her hands in the basin to get the potion off her fingers, picked up and restoppered the bottle and slipped quietly out of the apartment. She was surprised to find that she felt much better now. Happy and satisfied. The mere fact that she could have had her revenge on Tassley if she'd really wanted to, and that she could go through with it for real any time she wanted, was enough to defuse her anger, and she found that she could now put the human girl out of her mind and get on with better things.

     She hummed a tune to herself as she left the dormitory, therefore, and made her way back to the dwelling tree, intending to prepare a really special dinner for her husband that evening.

☆☆☆

     Thomas and Lirenna met each other on the road back to the shaewoods and walked side by side back to the dwelling tree, the demi shae explaining her brief excursion by inventing a colourful story about wanting to keep a promise to another junior wizard. She said nothing of her visit to Tassley Kimber's rooms, but still felt a warm glow of satisfaction from the success of her foray. The bottle of hair restoring potion, sitting in a pouch of her buckskin jacket, bounced against her hips as she walked, reminding her that she could still have her terrible revenge any time she wanted.

     Thomas noticed the strange smile on her lips and demanded to know what else she'd been up to, but she maintained a maddening, enigmatic silence all the way back to the tree. He got his revenge by giving her an equally enigmatic smile as if he’d also been up to something and refusing to explain it, but that only worked until she read his mind to find out the truth.

     After supper, they returned to their spot in the garden, wrapped up against the gathering chill, and sat with their backs against the same tree, their arms around each other. Looking up at the sky through a gap in the overhead canopy as it slowly darkened and the stars came out. The sky was clear and dark that night, with the red sun below the horizon and only one small comet visible low in the east, and the stars shone with a clarity they'd rarely seen before. Sereena was visible as well, shining a brilliant gold as the elliptical orbits of the two planets brought them within ten million miles of each other, and Thomas was sure that if he'd had even a small telescope he'd have been able to see the wide, golden rings that graced the next planet out from the yellow sun.

     "What a nice day this has been," he murmured lazily. "I think that, on the whole, all things considered, this has been one of the nicest days of my whole life."

     "It's been a perfect day," agreed Lirenna, snuggling closer to him. "Perfect. So perfect that I don't want it to ever end. No day to come can possibly be as perfect as this one has been."

     "Of course it can!" replied Thomas, giving her an emphatic squeeze. "There'll be lots and lots of perfect days in the future. You wait and see."

     "Promise?" she asked, turning her head to look at him.

     "Promise," replied Thomas, and he sealed the promise with a long, slow kiss.