by Jean Johnson
“Yes. And if you don’t mind, I have to be ready to pull her out.” Sighing, glad of his matchmaking efforts, despite the rough way he was “thanked” for them, Morganen pushed back onto his feet, still grinning. “I’m also getting a little tired of being knocked around by you, but I’ll forgive you this time. Again. Since you love her so much.”
Kelly stumbled as she came through, emerging in the middle of the confrontation, between the two lines the Middle Ages Society members and bigoted townsfolk had made. So did the two groups, falling back on both sides with exclamations of shock as she literally came out of nowhere between the two groups. Dizzy once more from running so much right after giving blood, Kelly oriented herself. She spotted her friend Hope, the one she had been looking for…but now was not the time for a reunion, however brief a time she would be here. Whirling to face the other way, she lifted her ruined pajamas high in the air.
“Murderers!” she shouted, catching everyone’s attention with that word. She glared at the townsfolk who had harassed her, summoning up her feelings about what had happened, feelings she had set aside in the challenge of dealing with a new world and its new, strange rules. “It wasn’t enough for you, was it, to spread all those lies about me, driving away my customers with your baseless, superstitious, petty fears!
“Do you see these?” Kelly demanded, waving the bundled clothes in her hand. She shook out the top, displaying the seared mark that had burned her ribs, then tossed it down. “Do you see this?” she added, shaking out the pajama bottoms, which were much more thoroughly scorched from roughly the top of the knee down. “I was in my bed, you murderers! Fast asleep, until the roof collapsed in flames on top of me!”
Tossing down the second garment, she glared at them, hands on her hips.
“That’s right—arson and murder, because you’re so gods-be-damned stupid enough to believe in superstition, of all things! This is the twenty-first century, well into the Age of Reason, you dumbheads, not the twelfth century!”
She stomped her aquamarine-clad foot, pajamas tossed on the ground and hands planted on her hips. This particular tirade had been inside of her all along, locked down and set aside because there had been no reason to let it out. But with even more vigor than Pandora, she was yanking open the lid here and now, and hers was a box of trouble she was going to aim right at the unmentionables facing off against her medieval society friends.
“Paganism is a religion, you prejudiced bastards, and it’s perfectly legal to be practiced. Guaranteed by the Constitution, you gun-toting morons! The same gods-be-damned Constitution that gives you the right to carry those guns—and what were you going to do with them, today?” she demanded, striding toward one of the three cradling a rifle in the front line. “Were you going to try to kill someone else, today? Huh? Murder is the only thing against the law that I have seen happening here. And you asinines not only attempted it on me, you came here today to try it again!”
She turned and paced down the line, as the man she had faced down had the grace to look ashamed, awkwardly shifting his rifle out of the way. Kelly wasn’t done.
“These people are historians! You’ve got people re-creating the Battle of the Bulge, and Gettysburg, and World War II—these people re-create battles like Agincourt, and the days of William the Conqueror, and the War of the Roses!
“Do you accuse a man in a re-created, gray Confederate uniform of owning slaves in this day and age?—Do you?” she demanded, far more imperiously than she had acted as a queen. Turning as she strode back, she pointed at some of the people she knew. “He’s a computer programmer! She’s a waitress! That one’s a doctor! A doctor! He’s a podiatrist, a specialist in foot injuries, for God’s sake! There aren’t any witches here—witches don’t exist in this world!”
“Then how did he get here, and you, too, and how did you survive that fire, if not by witchcraft?” one of the other gun-carrying men demanded as the others gasped and stepped back again. He held his rifle in one hand and pointed with the other. She looked where his finger jabbed.
Saber stood there, between the two lines of people. Glaring at the row of townfolk and doing his best to ignore the oddities of his wife’s world. He had appeared in his sleeveless aquamarine overtunic, the muscles of his arms bulged rather impressively where they were folded across his chest. Saber knew he looked impressive, because some of the men facing his wife and her friends flinched when he twitched those muscles. It was good, because he wanted these barbarians to know he was here to protect his wife.
His words were slow, hard-chosen against the sluggish aether around him, but he managed to make the Ultra-Tongue spell work well enough to be understood. “She is not a ‘witch’…but I am. Someone among you tried to kill my wife,” he added on a growl. “I think that someone is here.” Unfolding his arms, he spread them, voice rising with each hard-changed word. “Coshak medakh valsa cro-deh, inswat meerdah tekla var-deh! Pensih comri Verita-meh, Veritagis, sumol des-reh!!”
The very air crackled with the force of the energy he was shoving through it. His hand slashed out, and the people in front of him reflexively ducked—but they couldn’t avoid it. Not when his brother was feeding him power from their own world to supplement his own. Sometimes it paid to be one of the Eight Brothers of Prophecy.
Three people started to glow, luminescent yellow. Two of the rifle-wielders and one more who had come with them. “There!” Saber shouted, pointing at the trio. “There are your fire-makers, your arsonists—your would-be murderers!”
One man had dropped his gun, he was so busy whirling around and around, brushing and scrubbing and slapping at the glow that radiated from his clothes and skin. The other two simply took off, so fast that one left his baseball cap behind, and the other discarded his rifle as surely as the first of them had. The others who had accompanied them in the mindless fervor of an impending riot quickly scattered as well. The first one to glow stopped trying to get rid of the light, ignored his van, and fled on foot. Hollering about the demons of hell, or something like that, as he ran off.
Saber bent over, bracing his hands on his knees as he breathed hard from the effort of casting magic in this world; it was a truly bizarre realm, in more ways than just the visible ones. Kelly hurried over to his side, pleasing him with the concern in her aquamarine eyes. “Saber! Are you all right?”
He nodded, waited a moment, then straightened again and wiped at his face. “It is not easy to cast even a simple truth-finding spell, in this world of yours.”
“Well, I’ll be glad to get back to ours,” she agreed under her breath, glancing back at the other half. Most of the society members were still in shock from their very odd display. Some had backed off, and a few had even started running for the far side of the fairgrounds, just as the mob of prejudiced townsfolk had. Only one ran to them. Her friend Hope.
“Kelly! You’re alive! You’re all right!”
“Hope!” Kelly caught her dark-haired friend and they embraced hard. “I’ve been wanting to get ahold of you—”
Hope pulled back and thumped her in the arm, her brown eyes glistening with emotion. “Where have you been all this time? I couldn’t even find you!”
Some of the others were coming forward now, exclaiming over the odd show. Kelly quickly drew Saber to her side and cobbled together an explanation she hoped would pass. “Everyone, this is Dr. Nightfall; he’s a scientist working for the government. He’s been helping me put together evidence against the arsonists who almost claimed my life, because of their highly misinformed prejudice against the society. We didn’t get enough to take them to court, but we’re pretty sure those three men did it—that whole light show was just a trick of pre-dusting them with a photoluminescent powder while they were mixed into the crowd. Exposure to enough oxygen over time makes it glow strongly like that.”
“But, how did the two of you appear here, out of thin air?” the doctor she had pointed out, demanded.
“That’s sort of classified,” Kelly
improvised with a quick grimace. “Even Dr. Nightfall doesn’t know how it works. I suggest the rest of you take the news of this little would-be riot to the papers—but leave our names out of it, please. We’re not supposed to be using this stuff for personal reasons,” she added cagily, lying for a very good cause. “I don’t want to get the government pissed off at us. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some things to discuss with my friend, here.”
Catching Hope’s arm, she hustled her and Saber off among the tents at the edge of the field, seeking out her friend’s jewelry-selling stall. Pulling them into the back of the tent erected behind the stall, she embraced Hope once again. Hope returned the hug with equal fervor.
“I know you’re lying,” Kelly’s friend whispered in her ear, as Saber eyed the cot and its zippered sleeping bag, the flashlight-lantern on a folding table, and the other odds and ends of Earth civilization that weren’t quite like anything he had ever seen before. “But I don’t mind.” She pulled back enough to eye Saber with her weighing gaze, then whispered once more in Kelly’s ear, grinning lasciviously. “Just tell me there’s more of them where he comes from!”
Kelly laughed and hugged her friend. Hope had her own oddities, but she was a good woman, and Kelly had missed her. “Eight of them, actually, and seven still bachelors—but you wouldn’t believe where you’d have to go to find them.” She shook her head. “Hope, I can’t stay, here. I belong with—oh! Where are my manners?” She smacked her forehead and gestured at him. “Saber, this is Hope O’Niell. Hope, this is Saber of Nightfall, my husband—yes, that’s his real name, and yes, I really married him.
“Hope, here, was my first and best friend when I moved here from my old home three years ago,” Kelly added, hugging the somewhat younger woman around the shoulders.
Saber and Hope exchanged polite nods.
“I really do have to be going. And I don’t think I’ll be coming back very often. I like you, and I like most of the people in the Middle Ages Society, but I don’t like living in this town, and I don’t belong anymore where I used to live, back up near Seattle. So I’m staying with Saber and his brothers…do you understand what I’m saying?” Kelly asked her friend.
The other woman narrowed her eyes slightly. “You’re trying to say we’ll probably never see each other again.”
“Sort of,” Kelly agreed reluctantly. “Probably; it’s pretty tough to come back here for a visit, from where I’m living now.”
Hope shook her head. “We’ll see each other again.” When her strawberry-haired friend opened her mouth, she shook her head again, holding up her hand. “No, we will. Trust me.” She eyed Saber once more, then smiled slyly. “If he’s a witch, then so am I.”
“Hope, he really is a mage,” Kelly returned firmly, trying to convince her friend though she knew it was fruitless.
Her friend grinned. “I know—get it?”
Saber frowned at her, this woman his wife was making her good-byes to. “You…are a Seer?”
“Not all the time, and only in occasional, irritating flashes of insight, but yes, I am. Oh, don’t look so surprised!” she ordered Kelly, who was staring at her in uncertainty. “I told you when we met that I knew we’d be great friends, didn’t I?”
“Well, yeah…but anybody could have guessed that,” Kelly pointed out, recovering from her shock. She shook her head after a moment, then shrugged philosophically.
It didn’t surprise her, somehow, that her friend professed to have psychic powers. Then again, Kelly had just grown used to a whole world of magic, so it shouldn’t surprise her that her birth-universe held a little “magic” of its own, in its own way. Morganen had implied as much, shortly after her arrival. Now, however, this world felt like the stranger one of the two to Kelly.
Reluctantly, she sighed. “We really do have to go. Morganen’s waiting for us. Elsewhere.”
“So that’s why I couldn’t find you, then. All this time, you’ve been…elsewhere.” Hope eyed the man in the tent with them, then pulled her friend aside. “Do me a favor?”
“What’s that?” Kelly asked, curious.
“Give me a couple of months to settle my affairs, then invite me over. Elsewhere,” she added pointedly with another glance at Kelly’s handsome husband. When Kelly started to speak, her friend cut her off. “I don’t belong in this world either, Kel. If those guys with the guns knew I could sometimes sense things, my house would be next. And they’d make abso-damned-lutely sure I was in it, too, because I actually have ‘witch’ powers.”
Kelly bit her lower lip. She couldn’t speak for the others…but she knew a few things. One of them was that, while the eight men now in her life were good companions, and her husband was all she could hope a husband to be…she wanted female companionship in her life. “Okay. But only on one condition. Take a midwife course or something; buy books on childbirth, and books on other stuff. Lots of different subjects. Where we are, they don’t exactly have any hospitals or libraries nearby, and I don’t trust any of the brothers to ‘know nothin’ about birthin’ no babies!’, if you know what I mean. Mages or otherwise.”
“Deal! How do I contact you?” Hope asked, clasping Kelly’s hand.
“I’ll have Morganen watch you once in a while. Don’t worry, I’ve seen his scrying mirror, and it does blank out the improper bits—it’s a long story,” Kelly added as Hope arched a brow in confusion. “I could also have him scry your kitchen, so all you’d have to do is put a note on your refrigerator saying ‘Kelly, I’m ready to go’ in big letters, and we’ll contact you. Or whatever else you need to say to us. If we need to get in touch with you, we’ll do the same. I know there are a few things I’d like to have on the other side, if you don’t mind doing a little shopping for me?”
Hope grinned and hugged her enthusiastically. “You won’t regret this! Give me a list of anything you want me to bring over, and I’ll bring it. Though if you ask for a lot, it may take me a year to get it all together.”
Kelly laughed and hugged her back. “Given the fact that everything I owned burned down in the fire, that’s one heck of a shopping list, all right. We’ll send you some things to sell to pay for it all, I promise. Gold or gems or something.”
“We must go now,” Saber reminded his wife. “Morganen said the way would not stay open for very long.”
Kelly nodded and released her friend. She stepped back and caught Saber’s hand. “I promise, we’ll see each other again, on the other side…” She broke off and grinned as it hit her, what the “other side” was made of. “On the other side of the looking-glass. Literally!”
Saber pulled his wife against him, holding her close. They would go back together, for he wasn’t about to leave his wife behind. He eyed the woman in front of them. She stood about an inch shorter than his wife, with more curves—though his wife, with the benefit of plenty of regular meals, was developing some really nice ones—naturally tanned skin, and longer, dark brown hair. Clad in clothes that were almost properly styled, a two-layered skirt hiked up slightly on one side and a ribbon-trimmed blouse that slipped off one shoulder at the neckline, she was attractive in her own way.
Of course, she wasn’t as beautiful as his Kelly, but for other men…a thought made his mouth curve up in humor. “I did hear what you said to my wife, and I think it would be a good thing for you to come and join us. There are seven more verses to fulfill after all, in our Song of Destiny. You just might be one of them.”
“And I think it’s about time to leave here, before we spend all day trying to explain that,” Kelly asserted. “Morganen!” she called out, looking up at Saber with a smile. “Take us home!”
The world swayed and rippled around them. Out of the tent and back into a workroom a whole universe away. As soon as her balance steadied, Kelly turned around, looking at the mirror. Hope stepped into the view, first a blot of darkness, then her gypsy-clad body. She peered around the tent, waved her arms through the air…then smiled and shook her head. Straining, Kelly could
just make out her words.
“What an adventure she must be having, in the other world!”
“I’ll close the link in a few moments.”
Kelly looked over at the youngest of the brothers. He looked tired, but his gaze was on the woman in the view. Since she couldn’t read Morganen’s expression, which was normally quite amiable and open, Kelly censored most of the thought that flashed through her mind. Most of it; she let only a roundabout trickle come out. “I, um, invited her to come across and live with us, when she gets all her affairs in order. Which will probably be in less than a year—Saber said it was okay, in case you were wondering.”
Morganen grinned at her. “So quick to pin the blame elsewhere, Sister? How many times do I have to tell all of you? I like women! Go on, get out of here. Saber, have you told Rydan, yet?”
“No—I got distracted,” Saber admitted with a glance at his wife. He tightened his grip on her hand. “We will do that now. Thank you, Brother.”
“Just don’t ever hit me again.” His smile fading, Morganen watched them leave, then glanced toward the mirror again. He had left the link active, in case anything else might be needed to deal with the foreigners, but it didn’t look like it was needed.
The woman in the view was frowning softly, touching her fingers to the air—to the exact plane where the Gate intersected her world. There was no way for her to come across, not from her almost magicless side, but she evidently still felt its location. That startled Morganen.
As he watched, she caressed her tanned fingers through that plane with a little smile. She had a gamine face, warm with a generous mouth and laughing brown eyes, lighter in hue compared to the dark lashes fringing them. If she could find the intersection zone in that realm of so very little magic…if she was sensitive to things, like a Seer…she was powerful. As Morganen studied her, she spread her hand flat just in front of the mirror’s point of view, perhaps in a good-bye gesture, perhaps for one last touch of something truly magical in her life.