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That Friday night, he got a half-day off school; the twins had promised to deliver all the homework on his doorstep, as though he really cared about that, but hopefully he could look bewilderedly at Rhye until she ponied up and 'did' half of it in the name of helping him -- went home immediately and fell asleep, flopped down in his bed and stone with a distressing creak of the bedsprings. (It was amazing he didn't break the bed.) That night, he somehow found himself lying in the backseat of his mother's car with his iPod stuck in his ears: it didn't drown out Lindy and the radio, informing the night and the world at large that every little thing some random chick did was magic with Sting -- not nervous, not really nervous.

Later he rethought it: he'd been a perfect fool not to be nervous.

"Are you excited?" said his mum. "I would be so excited. I'm excited. I am so sad I can't stick around, I want to be the worst stage mother and like, unholistically make sure my baby is okay -- "

" -- don't think they'll kill me, mum -- "

" -- remember, think deeply about any propaganda they tell you about humans," she said. "I know that you are heritage to an oppressed people, but remember that the first step towards healing and coming-together are to examine privileges on a day-to-day basis -- "

"Mum, when do I even meet normal humans," he said languidly, grey eyes closed, stretching his legs -- jeans, t-shirt, he hadn't thought to dress up any. The slight spurs of his knees were poking a little through the jeans, his big clawed feet balanced up on the armrest of the other door. "I go to the Liberty Center, practically everyone you meet has three eyes and a tail."

"I'm just saying."

"I'm not planning on mass genocide or whatever."

"Just keep an open mind. Keep in mind that traditional gargoyles are very touchy and very prideful, they have rigorous codes of honour blah blah probably you'll find their code of fealty is very medieval, very liege-lord and clannish -- very warrior hunt'n'gather stuff, and from what Duff told me it didn't sound like these guys were hugely liberal."

"So you are basically sending me into the dark ages? Merci."

"I love you!" said Lindy. "Remember that: I will always love you." And: "I can't believe I only get to pick you up tomorrow. This is the first night my baby's been away from me."

Casca wanted to say: only because I am a social deflation who's never had a sleepover, but it sounded a bit resentful. Outside the blur of the car windows, the last remnants of the countryside disappeared behind them and they were out in the wild; out in the cold and out in territory where the tar macadam of the road started to turn into dirt road, and then it turned into nothing, no castle in sight. His mother stopped the car (out in the middle of nowhere?) and he was uncongenially forced to leave his iPod on the seat; a little bewildered, even, until his mother started wrestling herself out of her coat, and said: "This is the furthest we can go. Have to fly from here!"

Yeah: this was going to be utterly messed up.

The signal was the old man bringing his fingers up to his lips, and giving a piercing whistle. They'd never been alone. Immediately, a burly monster burst out of the trees overhead -- a sort of dull, olive-green, and Casca got the impression of a lot of complicated bone and knobbles on his forehead, and he was about double his size -- and picked up Duff, lifting up on an updraft into the air. Four others immediately shot out from their silent waiting-points at the cliffside, circling above them as some kind of honour guard (or at least police watch) as his mother shot into the air -- he had to clamber up the cliff feeling like a total retard before he could get lift, dropping back vertically so that he could join his mother in the climb.

The Lindorm clan was not overly large: less than twenty. But as he made his way up -- flanked by two fully-grown gargoyles on each side, silent and stony-faced -- and saw them in their equally silent serried ranks at the castle wall, waiting to meet him, there could've been a hundred for all that it made his heart drop down into his hypothetical boots.

The faux-pas as he alighted down next to his mother and the other gargoyles on the uneven, crumbling tower piazza was obvious. Casca brushed himself down and gave a cautious look to the gargoyles around him, as Duff was set down beside him and his mother: they were all to a man wearing crude linen loincloths or shifts, belted with wide leather belts, some of them with boiled leather armour: shoulder-guards or arm-guards, most of it austere and without decoration, though some of the women wore thong pendants and both sexes wore earrings. It looked like something out of a movie. There were about five gargoyles who looked in various states of child to late teenager, and they stared at his jeans-and-t-shirt get-up as though bewildered or embarrassed for him. They all stood with military posture and bearing -- some of the adults had hunting spears, even, and all of the men had swords at their belts.

Didn't need to guess which one was the clan chieftain either: he was tall and a dark, smoky grey colour, and built like a van had had a relationship with a rock and he was a result. He wore some carefully preserved chain mail, not like he needed it; he held his long tail out behind him and it had spikes every single inch. His horns were less horns and more like an antler display of spikes, with heavy brow ridges and two small spurs at his chin.

Casca decided he really would have preferred a night in with Kash and Rhye.

"Do you present them in good faith?" said Ragnar to Duff. He had a slight accent, crisp and angular, a bit baroque; Casca couldn't really place where, and usually he was fantastic with accents.

"I do," said the old human man complacently.

"Then they may plead their case," said Ragnar.

There was a slightly awkward pause before it became apparent that his mother was meant to say something. If he was something to stare at, they were staring at his mum a little more; she did look appallingly Old Testament, light and a bit ethereal, otherworldly. She stepped forward and, thank God, didn't actually wave or something, and in fact said quite respectably: "I'm his guardian."

One enormous grey claw was crooked pretty imperiously at Lindy; she went forward, past the silent rank and file of Lindorm gargoyles, and into the personal space of the clan leader. They spoke quietly together for a few minutes, and Casca couldn't catch any of it: his mother was gesturing back to him at times, and Ragnar was giving her a respectful berth (so were his two elites) as her son tried not to stare at the others. He met the eye of one of the boys he thought might've been his age, or a little younger: they had a brief staring contest. The boy gargoyle was hostile. Casca was peaceable. Eventually the boy turned his head away first, which probably meant that he had won a major battle or that now he had to duel him, or something.

"Child," Ragnar said eventually, and it took a moment for Casca to realise the guy was talking to him, "come forward."

(Cascati went forward, pretty sure that if he didn't, the guy would pick his teeth with his ribs.)

"Plea has been made for the stripling to be around his own kind," said the clan leader boomingly to the rest of Lindorm, and they murmured, apparently in quiet approval. "He will be under clan protection. He will be as child to you; brother to you; and in bondage to you." (That did not sound right, thought Casca.) "This is pledged. Do you agree that he will be as child to us, brother to us, and in bondage to us, however long he dwells in our keep?"

This was to Lindy, as apparently Casca's opinion on the matter wasn't worth anything. "Yes," she said firmly, and Ragnar spat in his hand. What happened after that was pretty gross; Lindy also spat in her hand, and as Casca thought about herpes, HIV+, influenza and general cooties, they slapped them together with a slightly sickening mulch. No vote went around with the others; obviously they'd all been consulted before.

"It is done, then," said the enormous gargoyle, and he rumbled forward to Casca, who felt utterly dwarfed. He reached out one enormous meaty clawed hand to him, and not knowing at all what to do, he reached out his own back as though they were meant to shake hands: but Ragnar closed his claws around Casca's wrist and Casca attempted to close his own around Ragnar's. It didn't work. The guy nearly had tree trunks for arms. They shook that way: it felt pretty stupid. "Boy, you are under Clan Lindorm's protection."

No cheering or anything. Gargoyles were apparently pretty grim. But every single one of them bent down on one knee as though it was their own display of yes; this just made Casca feel ten times more awkward than before, and he surrepticiously tried to rub at his wrist as Ragnar finally let go of it. The lines broke up and milled around, but the gargoyles held back still; he realised belatedly that this was because of his mother, who came and (holding one hand out, the cooties hand) hugged him tightly.

"Okay, this is my exit, stage right," said his mum, and he realised with a fierce ache that he was going to be terribly homesick for her, wanted her around desperately. "I'll be back for you tomorrow night, darling. I love you. I love you with all my heart and soul."

"I love you, mum," he murmured, trying to sound like this kind of thing happened every day. "Don't worry about me. Go home and make tacos or something."

"Are you kidding? I'm going to go home and jump on your bed," said Lindy, but it didn't sound as though her heart was in it. She kissed his forehead, and then she was lead away as the honour guard escorted her off the property -- a rustle of wings, looking like a little bird caught in-between some big flying dinosaurs, and Casca was left alone. Duff had creaked his way forward, obviously to speak to Ragnar, and some of the tension melted away --

-- okay, well not all of it.

"He blind, Chief?" Duff was saying. "Kid's got grey eyes; that ain't normal gargoyle stuff."

"He can see adequately," said Ragnar curtly, "as much as I have ascertained: his sight may just be weak. The angelicus was saying he ages ten times as fast as a normal gargoyle, though this will cease when he comes into his manhood. His egg was polluted with magic, no doubt, though he seems healthy and free of taint -- "

That would have been an interesting conversation to listen in on, only he was molested immediately by a group of gargoyle kids. It was apparent that kids were the same wherever you went, only at least he got to be the center of attention in this case. Then again, he didn't really want to be the center of attention.

"What," said a plump, pretty gargoyle girl, with curly dark hair and mandarin-coloured skin, "are you wearing?"

"Uh," hazarded Casca, "clothes?"

This made them all pack up. Unfortunately they sounded like they were laughing at him. "You reek like humans reek," said another boy disdainfully: Captain Staring Contest. "Ugh. He stinks."

"He stinks?"

"He stinks!"

He looked around, trying to judge a friendly face. There weren't many. They all looked lean and hungry and somehow primitive, some with their earrings like their parents, some already with nascent scars. Hunters. Nobody who had ever enjoyed Starbucks. One of the older boys was a thin, rangy-looking gargoyle, with the same olivey skin as the first one he'd seen beat his way out of the tree, and he was bald except for a long ash-blonde braid at the nape of his neck. His eyebrow ridges were frilly and ornate, and he didn't look immediately like he wanted to snigger. "I'm Casca," he offered.

Another faux pas: another girl said, "We don't use names here -- not really," a little more quietly, as though this was not a rule that was enforced all the time.

Casca was lost. "How do you call each other?"

"Brother," offered the green-skinned teen, not unkindly.

"Sister," said the first girl.

"Stinkbomb," said Staring Boy.

Feeling incredibly ill at ease, he started to pull his t-shirt over his head; this just made the girls titter maniacally, laughing even harder than they had been, and he felt more than a few flickers of annoyance. This was just compounded when what looked to be the youngest among them -- an androgynous little slip of a gargoyle, in just the briefest loincloth and belt, with cherry-red wings stretching from ankle to wrist rather than on his back -- immediately yanked the t-shirt from Casca's grip. "Mine," it shrieked, and the other younger gargoyles immediately fell on it in kind of an affray: they were all immediately punching, yelling, screaming and fighting in a display of violence that would have gotten them all detentions and Quiet Time Outs and counselling at the Liberty Center. There were glowing eyes and claws everywhere.

-- well, when in Rome --

Casca immediately jumped into the squirming pile of bodies, trying to claw his way to the tiny gargoyle -- it escaped like a cork popping out of a bottle, and he made a desperate lunge to grab at its ankle. This tripped it over, to more screeching: the adults finally tired of the display, and the teenagers were pulling the fight apart.

He found himself grabbed by the scruff and held by one of the guards he'd seen next to Ragnar, feeling defiant and miserable already, humiliated and hurt. His mouth was open, fangs gritted: the gargoyle in front of him was big and homely and knew nothing at all about diet Coke or the Internet.

"You in your first fight already, stripling?"

Casca found himself speechless, infantilised and still shocked that anyone would grab him. This was apparently a good idea, because after some brief eyeballing he was put down and the male barked a laugh and said, "Well, might be some hope for you, blostma," with the implication that he was obviously too used to soft livin'.

"Child," said Ragnar, "come."

It was going to be hell.

Snow, Kash thought gleefully, was the best thing EVER. It was white and fluffy and she could make things out of it! Like the fort she was in the middle of building so she could launch snowball attacks on innocent passer-bys.

Of course, the only passerby she would get would be family or Lindy, and she didn't want to fail school because she snowball'd her teacher. Yeah... that sucked, she realized abruptly. But maybe there would be someone else sooner or later! Or, barring that, there was always her sister.

In reality, if she'd snowballed Lindy, she probably would have gotten shrieks of laughter and her teacher chasing her around to try to dump snow on her head -- but thankfully, her next-door-neighbour and Cascati's mother did not appear. It was winter: the afternoon dimmed into evening much quicker than it did in summer, with five o'clock already seeing the lengthening shadows.

No wonder, then, when a yawning Cascati emerged from his house, cup of coffee in clawed hand, wings cloaked around his shoulders -- the most perfect target that ever there was.

Her eyes lit up and she scooped up the biggest ball of snow she could, packing it tightly before throwing it straight at him. She had a good arm, so it flew true, aimed straight for his head.

Snow splattered into Casca's face, dead center. He stumbled a little -- the pavement was skiddery, cracked over with some ice -- before wiping it off with an extremely sour expression, giving Kashmira two fingers in what was obviously a rude salute. "Darling," he said plaintively, "honey-child, why do you have to go and do that? I'm going to go shortsheet your bed, you little shrub."

Nonetheless, he sauntered over. "Very nice fort," he said, "Cool. Great. You are a little monster."

Two more snow balls came flying out from the direction that the house sat. Rhye had made a late start on things, and as a result, she saw what Kash was up too. The two snow balls were really meant for her sister, until Casca appeared.

She decided he needed another snow ball to the face. His cup of coffee was probably getting chilled much faster, at this point.

Kash was dying, enjoying the pelting poor Casca was getting. "You totally deserved that for taking so long to get home!" she told him shamelessly.

Casca immediately put up his wings as a shield, laughing a little despite himself, and hastily drinking his coffee; a large chunk of snow had fallen into it, and he made a face. "Who'd want to come home to you two, ma petit soeurs?" he retorted, "if this is the kind of welcome I get -- no way. And your poor friend, me, I was stuck in a crazy place all weekend and missed out on this snow, and I had to wear no clothes and eat warmed-up deer -- c'mon. Give me a little love."

"Nope, it's still your fault!" Rhye replied, running over to them. She was a little disappointed that the other snow ball missed her sister, but one out of two wasn't bad! "Where'd you go? Why'd you have to eat something nasty like deer? .... You killed Bambi's mom, didn't you?" she asked him accusingly.

"You ran around NAKED?" Kash asked, completely ignoring the bambi comment. "That's like, the image I LEAST wanted to picture in my head. Ewwwww."

"Thank you, thank you," said Casca, "and no, I wore clothes, they just wear these weird little rags -- it's utterly caveman hour. And, yes, Rhye, love, I'm sorry. I killed Bambi's mom. Or at least I watched them kill Bambi's mom. And then we ate Bambi's mom after warming her for five seconds."

It was depressingly so. He made a face, remembering the taste, and sipped his coffee as though to banish it. "Mum sent me on a field trip," he said, "to a gargoyle clan."

"You mean, you met more gargoyles?" Rhye asked, to surprised to even commented to what he had said about 'eating Bambi's mom' and all that. Then she wrinkled her nose. "It doesn't sound like you had fun, though."

"Were any of them cute?" Kash asked, pulling herself up to sit on the wall of her fort. She liked cold, it seemed. It was more comfortable than hot with the fur she had. "Wouldn't a gargoyle boyfriend be cool? I mean, other than Casca?"

He reached over and ruffled her short mop of silvery hair before she could complain about it, rather heavily patting her head in the manner of nice puppy, good puppy. "I don't think they'd go for you, you little freak," he said comfortably, "they're all GARGOYLES GARGOYLES GARGOYLES, grr, arg, let us chase down our meat and eat it traditionally and talk about how appalling humans are."

Another sip of his coffee. "It was... interesting," he said repressively, not quite knowing how to say everything he really wanted to say about the experience. "I don't know why Mum thinks I need to get culture. They don't have any. They're savages."

"Well, at least there's someone like you," Rhye said, picking up an handful of snow and starting to pack it into a ball. She liked the snow too. "Kash and I are the only ones that look like us. At least we don't have to go off with others like us, hunting our own food or wear a scrap of cloth and be nearly naked!"

Kash growled at him. "I'm not a dog, so stop petting me like one," she muttered, shoving at his hand. "And at least you know what you are. We still get weird looks whenever we go out into public."

With one last swipe at her fluffy ear, Casca removed his hand. "That's because you look like deranged plushie toys," he said, and turned his head to Rhye -- "excepting you, darling; you know that I think you are the cutest little fluffy dragon thing, don't you? You and all your pretty long hair."

He winked, to show he was teasing as well, and finished off the rest of his coffee. "Well, at least you don't have to go off to have cultural experiences with your species or whatever," he said, "it was so boring and I didn't have my iPod."

Rhye gave him a smile for his teasing, yet flirty words. So she liked being talked to like that! Not that she would ever, ever admit it to Kash. Kash would tease her horribly. So to off set that, she stuck her tongue out at Casca, though her tail swished in the snow.

"I bet you didn't even have a game boy. Hey, if you have to go again, why not being that sorta thing? Show them that there are interesting things in the -modern- world!" she suggested happily. "Maybe they wont squish things."

Kash pouted, not wanting to admit that she didn't want him to go at all. It was boring without Casca around, no matter how annoying he might be. She kicked her feet a bit, looking around for something to change the subject to.

"Wanna have a snowball fight?" she asked suddenly.

The last of the coffee was drained, and Casca ambled over to set it on the windowsill of his kitchen -- when he turned around, there was already a snowball in his hand, and it whizzed through the air. Unfortunately, it missed Kashmira utterly and hit Rhye in the arm, to which the gargoyle boy burst out laughing: there was a "Sorry, honey! Sorry!" but he was snickering.

The snowball fight was on!

"Hey!" Rhye yelled, then threw the ball she had been making at him. It clipped a shoulder-wing, and splattered on the wall behind him. She ducked behind Kash's fort to get more snow, giggling at she did.

Kash first threw one at Casca, then pelted her sister at point blank range. "My fort! Get your own!" she said, laughing.

Casca immediately ducked behind the snow-covered shrubbery next to his house; he was obviously shaping snowballs as fast as he could, and his own were much larger and lumpier than theirs. They didn't fly so hard. But when they did, there was a lot of them.

"I can hide behind it too!" Rhye replied, pelting her sister with a snowball as well, then chucking out more at Casca. She stayed in the dangerous zone of behind the fort.

She would have argued that point if there hadn't been a massive amount of snowballs coming into the fort at the moment.

Needless to say when they went in every single one of them was thoroughly soaked.

Whenever his mother asked him at the end of a long Saturday, well, how was it!, he found he had only a boring repetoire of things to say: it was fine. Cool. It was okay. Eh. All of these things drove her crazy, he knew that, but what could he say to her? She would freak out otherwise.

We went hunting. They still call me a stripling, and they used to go crazy thinking I'd never hunted -- kept on asking the same stupid questions over and over and over. "You never hunted?" said one of the brothers disbelievingly, way back then. "You never even had the urge to hunt, blostma?" No, he'd never had the urge to hunt, he'd never run down anything, he used to buy goddamn Happy Meals at McDonald's and keep the toy with his mum.

There was a reason they called him blostma: flower. He was the local sissy.

There was nothing worse than being the local anything -- the local outsider was crappy enough, the local outsider namby-pamby sissy even worse -- he threw himself into it with reckless abandon but it was the kind of reckless abandon where they could tell he had no real interest in doing it, he hid wads of Extra Sugarfree on his person and chewed them in the downtime. That at least had started something different. The kids, they were a different story to the adults, even if at times he got treated with the same amount of contempt -- some of them had names, for instance, their parents softening or them just picking names out of midair to secretly call each other. The little tangerine girl: Thora. Another one of the gargoyle girls, older, with long rough green braids: Magna. One of the older boys with the whorls of scars was Erek, another one Ruadh, all names that wouldn't sound out of place on an Enya CD. And the first weekend where he had passed the gum around and they'd all eaten it in furtive silence, he'd known that finally he had something to bargain with -- the outside world.

There was suspicion there, too. One of the older teen gargoyles had put their hand out for a stick without bothering to ask what was for, and not made a face at the taste like some of the kids. Too many questions. No answers.

And then the crappy school morning that he'd exploded out of his stone sleep and exploded out of his t-shirt and pyjama pants too, with the raucous and gleeful laughter of his mother not helping any (though at least he got a free shopping trip) -- the only thing he could think of on going back to that first weekend was: dread.

Being a cabbage child sucked: everything slipped through your fingers the moment he got it, being normal, hell, being a normal gargoyle. It was enough to make you want to put your hair up in a fauxhawk and go emo.