Well, all good things must come to an end. I have the closest thing to a doctorate that L’Université Polygnostique d’Elysailles will give to a woman, and my family is no longer willing to subsidize my garret apartments and philosophical experiments until the good gentlemen of the university realize that giving young ladies a diploma and a few letters after our names isn’t going to do something dreadful to our wombs. It is time to return, at least for now, to Mother Kyrillia. I have missed the place – the West is so compacted compared to my homeland, the weather just doesn’t have the bite it ought to, and Elysaillesians wouldn’t know decent tea if they drowned in it – but I don’t look forward to being stranded with my father and brothers waving their egos about and my mother trying to set me up with someone before I get old and become even more unmarriageable than I currently am.

I wonder what she’ll think of my current “situation.” I did warn her about it in my first letter after The Experiment, but I know the woman’s capacity for wishful thinking from long experience, and she’s probably hoping that the lightning burns and other, more interesting side effects of injecting otherworldly beast ichor into one’s veins will fade like some exotic but curable rash. I could tell her to cheer up, at least they aren’t syphilitic lesions, but she’d probably take the fact that I knew what syphilitic lesions were as a sign of the folly of higher education for girls. She can be a frightful prude like that. My father would either think it was funny or yell at me for arguing with my elders. (Never mind that “There are several disfiguring conditions, which are progressive, eventually more unsightly than my current appearance, and ultimately fatal” is a simple fact which can be verified in any medical dictionary.) Maybe I should use leprosy for my example instead of syphilis, but then I might get accused of impiety. (Yes, leprosy does show up in Holy Writ. So do goats. Should I never refer to them in casual hypothetical terms?) My family are, I suppose, not bad people in their way (not that I’m in a position to judge anyone’s personal character, at least not by conventional standards), but they are not what one would call disciples of reason.

I’m on the train east from Elysailles Station, now. We’re going through wine country. I suppose vineyards could be interesting up close, if one likes that sort of thing, but from a distance they all look rather green and lumpy at this time of year. They would provide a decent amount of hiding places for bandits who didn’t mind scrunching up, but the people you’d be in the best position to ambush would be vineyard workers, and I don’t think that even after the Revolution made all men equal vine tenders got paid very much. Of course, nowadays the monarchy’s been restored and people are un-equal again, so unless you’re a bandit who has his heart set on pruning tools, robbing vineyard workers would be a waste of your time. Of course, you could always steal the grapes, but taking them off the vines would be no more work and pose a lower chance of getting caught. But then again, people who worry about the risk versus payoff potential of various forms of crime tend not to go into banditry. They enter government service instead.

I have read how much poverty there was in the Languedouil countryside before the Revolution – and even now, after they lost so much on ill-advised foreign military adventures. (If their Emperor was such a genius, why didn’t he realize that the only force ever to successfully invade Kyrillia more than a month after the autumnal equinox was General Frost’s?) But in my opinion, any country where people can afford to make vodka out of fruit just needs to learn to manage its money better. Maybe building palaces that don’t cost a fortune to heat would be a good start.

I splurged on a new hat for the trip – my old one really hasn’t been the same since the silverfish colony took up residence in the fake chrysanthemums – and a nice thick veil to go with it, but I’m still attracting attention from a few of the passengers. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m taller than most of the men in my compartment and carrying a hatbox labeled “Caution: Live Snakes.” (It’s actually just full of delicate lab equipment – I only used it to transport live reptiles once, as a favor to a friend – but the label seems to encourage people to handle the box carefully and not mess with it too much, so I haven’t bothered to remove it.) I have my seat to myself, which is a mercy, although there still isn’t enough room to really stretch my legs properly. Mother would say that this shouldn’t be an issue, as ladies do not have muscles below their diaphragms, or at least don’t publicly admit to the existence of such. I’ve read about many interesting prodigies of nature in my studies, but body parts that appear and disappear with the social requirements of the situation are a new one to me.

Elysailles is a cosmopolitan city, but for all its famed attractions, not everyone who goes there seems to want to stay. My compartment has several foreigners besides myself. There's a black Askian Amazon woman, looking very sharp in blue taffeta with matching scabbard for her scimitar, who, as much as I can judge when she’s sitting down, must be almost as tall as I am. There’s a whole family of little Sidonians chatting away in their own language – they look well-dressed, and have a lot of flat boxes, so I would guess they were jewelers. I’m seated behind a short, stern-looking gentleman who would look the epitome of sober respectability if it wasn't for his braided waist-length beard. His seatmate is a rather slight, dusky gentleman in smoked spectacles watching the countryside with a rapt expression. I wonder if he’s some foreign scholar sent by his government to gather useful information for the establishment of his country's own wine industry. One of our own emperors did something like that about a hundred years ago, although he was more interested in military and civilian infrastructure than beverages. Most of Kyrillia isn't grape country, anyway, and even the part that is, isn’t much like eastern Languedouil. We have a rather less temperate climate.

"Isn’t this lovely, Mademoiselle?" the small dark man asks, presumably referring to the countryside. His accent is comprehensible – no thicker than mine is when I’m not watching my vowels – but impossible to trace. "So fertile! So green! Farms in every direction!" I have nothing against green, fertile land, but the thick clusters of farms actually bother me a bit. Civilized living required breathing room. If people had to live too close to each other, they eventually went a little stir-crazy and started looking for more efficient ways of chopping each other’s heads off.