Leyna tried her best to stay focused to what Gryth was saying, but it had been a long day, and her exhausted brain had stopped properly tracking his words nearly as soon as she’s stepped through the dressing room door.
But the panic in Gale’s voice grabbed her full attention, and Gryth’s response echoed in the empty recesses of her mind: “You can’t go home.”
The anxious knot in Leyna’s chest tightened. It had been bad enough living hundreds of miles away from her family and only seeing them once or twice a year, but being trapped in another world with no idea if she would ever see them again was far worse. She could only imagine what terrible things they would assume had happened to her if she never returned.
Leyna glanced sideways at the other two to see if they were having similar thoughts, only to see Gale’s eyes gloss over and her face go white as ash.
She looks like she’s about to faint, Leyna thought moments before Gale wobbled on her feet and tipped forward.
Gale was almost too far out of Leyna’s reach, and Leyna lost her own balance in her rush to catch her. Thankfully the decade and a half of fall training let Leyna get them both to the ground safely.
“Blast it,” Gryth swore and ripped a towel off the shelf as he knelt down beside them.
Leyna eased Gale to the floor and Gryth placed the folded towel under her head.
“Is she alright?” Marianne asked, joining them on the floor.
“I think she just fainted,” Leyna said. She and Gryth tried to get Gale into a more comfortable position, but Gale let out an unhappy groan in response.
“Sorry,” Gryth said, immediately pulling his hands back. He got to his feet and stepped away toward the sink.
“He ought to feel bad,” Marianne muttered. “That was such a heartless thing for him to say.”
Leyna didn’t see anything wrong with being honest about their situation, but this wasn’t the time to argue.
Gale’s eyes blinked open. “What happened?” she asked.
“You fainted,” Leyna explained.
“For a moment I thought I was trapped in another world,” Gale said.
“Unfortunately, that is true,” Marianne said.
Leyna glanced around the room. It was strangely familiar, like a place from a half-forgotten memory. She couldn’t help but wonder how many unexplained disappearances were the result of people falling into another world.
Gryth returned a moment later with a cup in hand, blue glazed earthenware without a handle.
“Try to drink something,” he said, holding it out to Gale. “Once you feel ready to move, we can have tea somewhere more comfortable.”
Gale sat up unsteadily and took the cup, but she didn’t drink and stared at the water like it was death sentence.
“Eating or drinking the food of this land will have no effect on your ability to return to your home land,” Gryth said, kneeling on the floor with a resigned sigh. “Expiring of dehydration will, however, make your quest more difficult.”
Gale took a tentative sip. “Cold,” she said.
“Yes, the spring water here is quite cold,” Gryth agreed.
When Gale finished and handed the cup back, Gryth waved his hand and the cup vanished in a small flash of light.
All three of them flinched away from him in surprise.
“What kind of impossible magic was that?” Marianne snapped.
“My apologies. Storage jewellery is common here,” Gryth said, turning his hand to show the ring on the middle finger of his left hand. “I always forget how startling it is the first time.” With no further explanation, he gracefully unfolded and stood. “Come, let us have tea and some food.”
Marianne helped Leyna get Gale to her feet.
Gale was still a little wobbly, but she was able to walk on her own. The three of them followed Gryth back into the entranceway, through the door directly opposite the outside door, and into what was obviously the main room of this building.
Whitewashed walls were soot-stained around a massive stone fireplace that took up nearly a third of the back wall. A large faded rug covering the stone floor in front of the fireplace, and the low wooden table on top of it, went a long way toward making the otherwise austere room cosy.
Five wooden beds lined the wall to the left, three of them neatly made. A fourth stood empty between the others and a disheveled fifth bed with several articles of clothing abandoned at the foot of it.
Leyna and Marianne helped Gale settle onto one of the floor cushions by the table and then sat down on either side of her.
A small earthenware tea set with four cups waited on a matching tray in the centre of the table.
Glancing from the tea set to the beds and back, Leyna asked, “Are there others here?”
“No,” Gryth answered, taking a seat on the opposite side of the table. The fire at his back gave him an unsettling glow. He picked up a kettle off a hook on the side of the fireplace and filled the teapot with the steaming water.
Four cups.
Four beds.
They were expected.
The cold rush of terror was dizzying, but Leyna managed to avoid following Gale’s example and faint.
“What do you mean, we can’t go home?” Gale asked.
“Yeah, someone cast that summoning spell,” Marianne broke in. “That some person can send up back.”
“Unfortunately, that is not true,” Gryth said, hanging the kettle back on its hook. “The only way for you to return to your land is to complete the task you were brought here to perform.”
“And what task is that?” Gale asked, her voice trembling as much as Leyna’s exhausted body was starting to.
“To rebalance the magics that hold our land together,” Gryth said and picked up the teapot.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Marianne demanded, voice raising in volume with every word. “And, more importantly, how can I be expected to balance some place’s magic when I’m not even a mage?”
Not looking up, Gryth answered, “I will give you magic.”
“Why can’t someone from this world do it?” Leyna asked.
“Our people are too closely entwined with the magic that supports this land.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question,” Marianne said.
“I have told you all that I can.” Gryth poured tea into the first cup. “My task is to give you magic, a little training, and supplies. That is all.”
His task.
He’d said he was just as unwilling a participant as they were. Did that mean he was stuck in this place until he’d done what he was supposed to do?
No wonder he felt so out of place. His perfectly manicured hands would look more at home holding a teacup of the most delicate translucent porcelain than the solid earthenware pot in his hands
“How are you going to give us magic?” Gale asked.
Looking slightly ill, Gryth set down the tea pot and took a slow breath. “There is a spell,” he said. “But you needn’t worry about that now. I will not cast it until tomorrow morning.”
Still not meeting their eyes, he set the first cup of tea in front of Gale.
Leyna got the second cup, and she considered the steaming brown liquid. Part of her still hoped she’d wake up from this dream, and even if Gryth was right that eating the food wouldn’t actually trap them more than they already were, drinking the hot tea would prove this was real and destroy any notion that this was simply a very convincing nightmare.
Gryth turned back to the fire. After first setting a flat frying pan on a trivet beside the flames, he opened a covered bowl that had been waiting at the edge of the hearth.
The warm scent of yeast filled the air as he pulled a piece of dough out of the bowl, flattening and stretching it in his hands before dropping it onto the surface of the pan, where is sizzled and puffed up into a nice looking flatbread. For someone with hands that looked like they had never seen a minute of housework, Gryth proved quite deft at both flipping and removing the breads when they were finished.
Once he had a dozen of the flatbreads, Gryth set the basket of them beside the tea tray and turned his attention to the lidded cauldron hanging opposite the kettle. He ladled soup into more earthenware, and placed a steaming bowl of it in front of each of them.
The soup smelled amazing, rich and herby. Taking offered wooden spoon, Leyna plunged it into the bowl and brought up a spoonful of finely chopped vegetables and what seemed to be some sort of shredded poultry.
Without a word, Gryth settled himself back down and picked up a flatbread, folded it in half, and dipped it into his bowl before having a bite.
“Why us?” Leyna asked. “I’m a historian. Not some sort of adventurer.”
Gryth shook his head. “I don’t know how that particular summoning spell works. I only know it chooses the people most suited for the task.”
“How are we best suited for the task? We’re an author, a historian, and a—” Marianne glanced over at Gale.
“Game developer,” Gale offered.
Marianne nodded as if she expected that answer. “How are we the most suited to— Wait! Is this going to be a travelling quest?”
“Yes. You will need to travel to complete it,” Gryth didn’t look up and just put another spoonful of soup in his mouth.
“Are these supplies going to include clothes, or are you expecting us to walk who knows how many miles in what we arrived in?” Marianne asked, her knuckles going white as she tightened her grip on her spoon
That was a good question. Leyna didn’t want to go questing her wellies. They were fine for traipsing through the mud at a festival, but not for walking miles and miles.
“Of course you will receive boots, clothing, and everything else you might need to make your task easier to complete,” Gryth said.
Gale was starting to look grey around the edges again, so Leyna decided to change the subject. It wasn’t as if Gryth was offering them anymore information.
“You’re an author?” she asked, turning to Marianne. “Anything I’d know?”
“The Master Mage’s Bodyguard series,” Marianne answered, scooping up another spoonful of soup. “The draft of book three is due next month. Pretty sure I won’t be turning it in on time.”
“Wait!” Gale snapped her head up to look at Marianne. “You’re Marianne Wylough?
Marianne nodded, spoon still in her mouth.
“Protection Duty is one of my absolute favourite books!” Gale declared, sitting up straighter as more colour came back into her face. “It inspired one of the story branches of the game I’m working on.”
“Glad you liked it,” Marianne said with a sigh. “I royally messed up book three, so I hope I get the chance to rewrite it before someone decides to just send it to print as it is.”
“I know what you mean, but if I don’t make it back, the game I’ve been working on for years will just disappear,” Gale pulled her knees to her chest, tears glistening in her eyes.
“Such doom and gloom,” Leyna said. “Who says we won’t make it back home?”
She wasn’t sure she believed it herself, but it wasn’t worth dwelling on something she couldn’t control. Instead, she chose to focus on the things she could control, like her sweaty body and dirty clothes. After spending so much of the last week sleeping in a field, actually being clean sounded wonderful.
Shoving the last few mouthful of food in her mouth, Leyna pushed away from the table and announced, “I’m going to have a bath.”
Leyna stood in front of the shelves, staring at the bottles she believed were the ones Gryth had said were soaps. They were labelled with a looping handwritten scrawl of characters she didn’t recognise, and she couldn’t work out what the difference was between them.
She’d have to ask Gryth how to read the writing, but that could wait for tomorrow.
First, a bath and then sleep.
Gale shuffled in behind her, stopping at the sink without a word.
“Do you remember which soap was which?” Leyna asked.
“I wasn’t exactly paying attention.” Gale pulled her hoodie off and shoved it under the water tap.
Leyna reached for a bottle, only to feel her hand go through some sort of membrane. Yanking her hand back automatically, she laughed at herself. Of course such a well stocked room had storage spells to keep things fresh.
Trying to ignore the slimy feeling, she reached back through the spell membrane and grabbed one of the bottles.
The solution inside smelled of lavender and sage. It felt enough like liquid soap between her fingers that she figured it would do well enough to clean the dirt and sweat off her body.
A soft shuddering sob from Gale pulled her away from the soaps.
Gale was scrubbing at the coffee stains on the cuffs of her hoodie, tears running down her face. It wasn’t a new hoodie. The image of three giant robots on the front was faded and starting to peel at the edges. Still, Gale scrubbed with a desperate vigour that was more likely to make things worse than better.
“Hey.” Leyna caught her arm. “Scrubbing will just rub it in more. Let’s see if Gryth has some vinegar and we can try soaking it. They must have some sort of vinegar here. Fermenting stuff is basically universal, right?”
With a deep trembling breath, Gale asked, “Do you think that will work?”
Leyna’s answer was cut off by Marianne’s scream echoing through the building.
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