The next few days, it was hard to tell what was going on with Aylwyn. Maybe I was just being paranoid, afterall. If she was different, it was subtle. Nothing I could really say for sure, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything if I hadn’t been watching, which made me wonder even more if it wasn’t all in my head.

For example, morning exercises the next morning. It started as it always did, with a series of slow stretches and poses intended to strengthen certain muscle groups. But then she decided to try something new. “You have some weapons training from your time at Stark Academy, yes?”

I nodded. “Fencing and archery, as well as unarmed combat.”

“And yet, when you have faced others in combat, it rarely goes well for you.”

Ouch! Did she have to rub it in like that? “Well, I didn’t spend very much time training at the academy. Just brief stops in between all my wandering.”

“True,” Aylwyn said. “And yet… I think there may be more to it. Your strength is not the strength of a warrior, brute force and swiftness of motion. No, I have been watching you, and your greatest strength is deception. Misdirection and swiftness of thought. But do you know how to fight with deception?”

Umm… that was a weird question. She always tended to show disapproval of me being sneaky. So of course I did what I always do when I’m uncomfortable: make wisecracks. I suddenly put on my best shocked face, pointed off behind her, and gasped. “What’s that over there?”

A hint of a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “And then when I turn to look, you strike at the back of my head. Yes. But there is more than that to be aware of.

“Tell me, my love, what is the first philosophy of combat?”

I knew that much at least. It was a Paladin thing that she’d mentioned a few times. “If it comes to a fight, you’ve already failed once. Ensure that you don’t fail a second time by being beaten in the fight.”

She nodded. “We always wish to avoid combat when possible. If someone is acting aggressive towards you, you wish to add water to the situation rather than flame. And yet, you do not wish to be a fool and simply hope that there will be no fighting, and end up unprepared.

“Let us say I think you wish to fight me.” She stepped up to me and got into a fighting stance, hands up in front of her, fists clenched, guarding her torso and face. “What does this posture tell you about me?”

“You’re getting ready to punch me,” I said.

“Yes. This is a posture of flame, not water. I look very aggressive like this. But, if I stand this way…” She opened her fists, holding her hands with her palms towards me.

“That’s a guarding stance,” I said. “You look like you’re trying to back away. You don’t want trouble.”

“Exactly,” Aylwyn said. “And yet…” With no warning, one of her hands suddenly shot forward and upward, right at my face. I flinched, and just as abruptly it stopped moving, with the skin of her palm just barely touching the tip of my nose. “My hands were still in the exact same place as the fists were, ready to attack if my opponent will not allow me to disengage. I deceived you into thinking I was unready.”

I took a step back, trying to replay in my mind what had just happened. “…wow. That’s a very interesting move!”

She smiled. “It is simple, but it will serve you well if you should need it. Now you do it. Practice the guard stance and the palm thrust. Strike for my shoulder, not my face, as you do not have the control yet to stop as precisely as I did.” Aylwyn flashed me a challenging grin. “In fact, don’t stop. Try to make me fall.”

Well, that was unlikely. She’s taller, stronger and heavier than me, and a trained warrior to boot. Making someone fall involves getting them off-balance, which I’ll freely admit is beyond my physical capabilities.

…but wasn’t that just what she’d been saying? Hmm… what if I tried it with guile and intelligence instead of brute force? She is taller than me. If I imagine her body as a single straight line from head to feet, if I could put a fulcrum behind her feet, pushing on a point up high would give me a lot of leverage!

Of course, a person’s body is not a rigid straight lever. It’s full of complicated factors like joints and muscles, their will and their sense of balance, stuff that makes that model ridiculously simplistic… unless you can catch them off guard and strike quickly enough that they’re falling before they have time to react.

Yeah. Sure. Catch Aylwyn off guard. And for my next trick, I’ll invent the vaccine, the internal combustion engine, and the transistor, all at once! She had always had a truly uncanny ability to see through tricks and deception.

But then again, didn’t Asimov say that the closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself, when it can be used, is the best lie of all? If I couldn’t trick her with a lie, could I trick her with the truth, by making her think I was lying?

First, of course, was to simply play along. I held up my hands defensively. “I don’t want trouble,” I said.

Aylwyn nodded, then suddenly I struck, as hard as I could, shoving her shoulder back. I was half expecting it to be like the old cliche about hitting someone who’s like a brick wall, but no. She was still a person, with all the mixed hardness and softness that a person’s body brings to the table, and hers yielded to my strike, but just a little. She didn’t even have to take a step back or anything; she just shifted her weight back a bit to maintain her balance, then gave me an approving smile. “Very good. Again.”

So I did it again. And again and again, practicing the strike five or six times before I tried anything further, but finally, I looked off into the distance, to where Hoan had pitched his tent. “Looks like Hoan’s getting up,” I said.

Aylwyn scoffed at my transparent attempt at deception. “Look over there?” she asked. “Really?

So she hadn’t fallen for it.  Then again, I hadn’t intended for her to, so in a very meta sense, it meant my deception was working!

Kind of.  Hey, at this point, I was willing to take whatever small victories I could get.

I kept on striking at her shoulders, varying it up now, alternating between left-hand and right-hand attacks, trying to hit at random, though after a bit she began to dodge and weave slightly, evading most of my attacks as soon as I began to move.

Right.  Humans suck at randomness.  It was something I’d read online once.  Manual attempts to be “random” try too hard, and we end up yielding results that are way too smooth and evenly distributed, whereas with real randomness, it’s not uncommon to get strings of the same number several times in a row, just by random chance.  Computers, on the other hand, start with a seed, an initial number that they perform complicated calculations on to give results that aren’t predictable as long as you don’t know what the seed is.

So I thought of the first number I could call to mind: my birthdate.  A basically random sequence of digits, each one either odd or even.  For each digit, if it was odd I would switch hands, if it was even I would repeat the same hand.  Simple enough to remember, super-quick to calculate in my head, and completely impossible for Aylwyn to predict.  And sure enough, she got a lot worse at dodging the right way when I started using the new system.  But even when I connected, not once could I ever force her back, even a single step.

I went on to my home address and my phone number, then my Social Security number before taking half a step back.  “OK, Hoan’s really getting up now.  We should get ready to go.”

She shook her head.  “This is not the deception you should be practicing, my love.”

Very well then.  More numbers.  My college apartment address.  867-5309.  The first several digits of Pi.  I briefly considered using the Fibonacci sequence, but that always went odd, odd, even, odd, odd, even, over and over again forever.  Too predictable.

And then I saw Hoan emerge from his tent.  Finally!

“Good morning, Hoan!” I called out.

Aylwyn sighed and gave me a Look, but then Hoan responded.  “And to you also!”  Aylwyn’s eyes widened slightly and she turned to look over her shoulder, her body tensing slightly.  And that was all I needed.  I took a quick step forward and around the side of her, stuck a foot behind her back leg, and pushed hard on her shoulder with both hands.

She cried out with surprise, stumbling backwards, arms flailing.  Finally her wings flapped open, beating briefly at the air behind her, giving her the forward impetus she needed to steady herself.  She turned to look at me, an expression of shock and surprise on her face, mingled with respect.  “Well done,” she said, just the slightest bit grudgingly.

“Is everything well?” Hoan asked as he approached us.

Aylwyn turned and smiled at him.  “Yes.  We weren’t fighting; simply training.”

Our guide nodded.  “Always good,” he remarked.  “But we should continue onward soon.”

Aylwyn and I agreed, and before long we were breaking camp and getting ready to continue on our trip.  I should have been happy.  I should have been exultant, really.  I’d actually managed to catch Aylwyn off-guard.  But the paranoid part of me just couldn’t help but wonder, though, wasn’t that just a little too easy?  Wasn’t she a bit out of character there, trying to encourage me to fight with deception, and then falling for my trick instead of seeing through it?  And did she seriously think I–a trained bard–didn’t know how to pull punches?

Maybe I was just overthinking things, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Aylwyn, though she looked and sounded the same as she always had, wasn’t quite acting the same.  Had the mirror talisman done something to her mind?  Or was I just being dumb and paranoid for no good reason?

Hoan had said the best thing to do with the amulet was to do nothing at all.  But he didn’t know that I had the power to nullify magic.  So the thought kept running through my mind as we set out:  Should I try and get Aylwyn to give it to me, so I could use the Twist on it?  Or would that somehow be playing into Melina-Karilil’s hands in some way too?