Leah seeks out the rookery the next morning for some alone-time, to think through what she has learned and seen so far. She sits near the songbirds and listens for familiar tunes, but none are from where she lives.

Well, no surprise there, really. This place doesn’t really feel that temperate, and even if it were, who’s to say it’s not more European, or Asian, or South American? I don’t know every bird species in the world; I hardly know those from back home in the real world, other than the basics.

What day would it be now, back home in the real world? she wonders. Has this whole dream lasted one night, or have I slipped into a coma at some point and this is what my brain has created to pass the time? Considering the coma option, she decides she can understand why some people might not want to wake up from a coma; in spite of her fear and confusion, she wants to see how it ends.

She thinks of her parents, and then realises she shouldn’t, as whatever they’re doing right now all hinges on whether this is a dream, coma, death, hallucination, or something else.

A knock at the door makes her jump and turn around. Kimry enters with a plate of hot buns, a bowl of blueberry jam, and a mug of tea.

“I heard the falconer saying you were up here,” she explains, setting the dishes down on the old wooden bench. “Thought you’d like breakfast. Unless, of course, you’d rather eat somewhere cleaner.”

“This is fine,” Leah says, then falls silent. Kimry waits. “My memory still isn’t back.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She takes a bun and turns it over a few times, distracted. “Are any of these birds from Algi?”

Kimry’s mouth opens in a soft “oh!…” She sits down next to Leah and pulls her head down against her chest, stroking Leah’s hair. “I hadn’t realised the damage went so deep…you don’t remember home?”

No, I can remember home perfectly; it just feels far away. A trembling starts in her hands, and somehow the knowledge that its cause will be misinterpreted as missing Algi, and not her real home, feels almost worse than the loneliness itself. “Tell me about it,” Leah asks, desperate for a distraction.

Kimry sits up and points out a bright yellow bird with black feet and a black beak, and brown markings down its tail. “That’s a golden caper. We call it vedouure. It’s a common garden pest in Nent and Algi; a flock can ravage a berry patch in hours.” The bird hops happily from perch to perch in the cage, its song lost among all the others.

“Berry patches? Were you a farmer growing up, or a forager?”

Kimry chuckles a bit. “Lots of families forage, in Nent. The country is more forested than Algi is, in general, but I’m from up near the mountains.”

“How’d you end up all the way out here?”

Kimry doesn’t immediately answer, still looking at the birds. Leah senses she’s hit a nerve, and is about to apologise and retract her question when Kimry starts talking.

“A noble family from Probesc was sold a batch of peridots from our Bolyar’s mines, but the Bolyar had tried to cheat them; some of the gems were quartz, dyed green. The family found out, and demanded that the Bolyar send over a double shipment of replacement peridots, as well as some of his serfs. If not, the family would brand the mines tainted and no-one would buy from them again.” Kimry shrugs. “Peridots are Nent’s lifeblood; without the mine, the Bolyar would lose all his power and standing, so he accepted the terms. My family was one of the ones sent over as payment.”

“You’re here as a slave?”

“As an indentured servant; I have six more years for the debt to be paid.”

“How long have you been a servant?”

“Nine years. I was sixteen when my family arrived in Probesc. Over the years, our debts were traded and sold to other estates, and we were divided. Finally I wound up here, in the Valerid estate, about a year ago.” Kimry picks at the hem of her sleeve. “When you showed up, it was the first time I’d heard a northern accent since I was separated from my sister, three years ago.”

Leah puts an arm around Kimry shoulders, tearing off pieces from her bread roll and dipping it in the jam. “Is Algi the same? Such a…controlled, way of living? Serfdom?”

Kimry shakes her head. “Algi and Nent are loosely allied, but Algi is much more open to cultural contact with the other nations, where Nent…the Bolyars rule the market, and the clerics rule daily life, and everyone else just scrapes by. Both nations have little formal government as the south would define it, but there is leadership. Algi is more communal, less controlling, from what you’ve told me. More agricultural, certainly.”

“What about culture? I know Valerin has some of the same deities as Algi, but what else?”

“Nent has very strong musical traditions, mostly religious or work songs, and Algi is much the same.” Kimry smiles warmly. “You used to hum them for me, to remind me of home.”

“I’m sorry to have forgotten them.”

“No; now it’s just become my turn.” Kimry begins to hum a slow waltz, stroking the top of Leah’s hand as she does so. Leah listens, then leans her head against Kimry’s and closes her eyes.

Near the end of the song the doorknob rattles, and both women stand up abruptly. A servant enters to tend to the birds, but hesitates on seeing Leah there. Kimry curtsies to Leah, leaving the breakfast behind.

The servant boy looks at the rolls hungrily, and Leah tosses him one in exchange for information about the songbirds. “They’ll only be kept until the equinox,” the boy tells her, around a mouthful of rye bread. “Then they’ll be released from their cages to fly over the city, singing to announce that the wedding is formalised and Lady Jeno is the future Lady Valerid.”

Leah finishes her breakfast, asks the boy to take the tray down to the kitchen, then leaves for Wellen’s house. If I ask right, he’s the one person who might be able to give me an impartial, academic take on Seffon. If I ask right.

Instead, she finds him as ambiguous as the five; he understands that she does not know, but believes the answer “he is an enemy of Volst” to be sufficient. When she presses, he grows increasingly reticent.

“But he must have motives for why he is our enemy; he surely didn’t just decide it on a whim?” Leah says, stirring her tea impatiently.

 “He has been a thorn in our side for decades, though only recently such a bold one,” Wellen says with a shrug. “Certainly he thinks himself justified in his position, but could we understand his logic if we knew it?”

“So we don’t know it? No-one knows why he has decided to attack Valerin?”

“Those who need to know, do know.”

Leah raises her hands in frustration. “So shouldn’t I be one of the ones who needs to know?” She takes a deep breath. “Sorry, I’m just…trying my best to understand my role in things.”

Wellen nods understandingly. “I know that, but others might not. You must be careful, Leah; any curiosity about Seffon may be taken against you.”

Leah takes a sip of the tea, and tries one last time. “Of everyone I have re-met since returning from Seffon’s keep, you’re the one I trust the most – the one who seems most intelligent, the one who likely has the most answers.” Wellen tries to discourage this flattery with a scoff and an embarrassed head shake, but Leah continues. “You know the most about my memory loss, and I’ve trusted you more fully even than my teammates. I trust you to be confidential, and honest.” She pauses, and he seems to be at least open to listening. “So. How long Seffon has been a threat?”

Wellen seems easily willing to answer this. “Seffon has been present on the border for decades, but had never tried to cross into Valerin until a month ago. The very next day, your team was summoned; both to take care of the border, and to provide a reputable female guard for the Auzzo’s daughter, when the family arrived.”

“What happened a month ago to make Seffon suddenly invade?”

He shrugs unconcernedly. “That is a matter for military minds, not scientific minds. Speaking of, have none of your memories even slightly returned?”

Leah shakes her head. “I’ve been trying to prompt their return, asking the team about our past and such, but it’s never led to anything.”

“Hm. Then it is time to try stronger methods; perhaps since magic caused its loss, magic could cause its return.”

She listens, frowns, and watches carefully as Wellen fetches a bunch of ingredients from throughout the shop. “Is that…is that not what we’ve been trying so far?”

Wellen gives her an odd look, but does not comment. He takes out a number of tumbled semi-precious stones, and arranges them in a shape on the table.

Oh, okay, so this is a different sort of magic. It looks along the lines of sympathetic magic or other witchery from home. Well, interesting, at least I’m learning about their level of development.

As she thinks this, Wellen takes out a tiny skull from a rodent, pours a cloudy liquid into the brain case, and has Leah inhale sharply over the skull while holding her hands over the stones. She humours him by doing so, then gags at the smell – chlorine, alcohol, and something that she eventually identifies after a confused search through childhood memories as dandelion. Wellen holds her in place, so Leah assumes this is par for the course.

Then, she starts to shake and fade out of consciousness. She sees flashes of blue across her vision, sparks floating, and hears a quiet conversation coming from somewhere very deep below her. Fuck, is this supposed to happen? Why is this supposed to happen? What’s this doing?

Wellen pulls her gently away, and the sickness passes. Leah sags back in her seat, dizzy and terrified, still shaking a bit. He offers her a glass of clean water and she chokes on it, trying to get the smell out of her throat.

“What the hell just happened?”

“What’s hell?”

As her head clears, she watches Wellen clean the stones away and throw the skull into the fire, where it sends up green flames. Leah supposes this is some chemical reaction, but then the ghostly form of a rat rises onto the coals, runs around, then sits up to stare at Leah.

Oh. Cool. Now I’m hallucinating.

The rat disappears in a flash of blue, the same shade as that which swam across her vision earlier. She once again asks Wellen what he just did to her, and he explains in surprise that it was magic: “What else could it have been?”

“So, magic is…drugs?”

“No, the medicine I’ve been giving you up until now has been drugs. They didn’t work, so we’re trying something stronger.”

“Hallucinogens?”

“Whats?”

“Things that make you see things that aren’t there?”

Wellen seems curious. “What did you see that wasn’t there?” Leah recounts the blue, the sparks, the green flames, the rat. Wellen nods along, expectantly. “No, no, that was all there, I saw them too. That was exactly what the magic was supposed to do.”

“Okay…then, what exactly did it do?” Leah asks uncertainly.

“It will bring suppressed memories back to the surface. You should dream about them tonight, though how much will return I cannot say.”

She nods for a bit, still confused. “But it’s just rocks and bones. How does it work?”

“By magic.”

Leah gives him a sceptical glance.

Wellen sighs patiently, then dithers about looking for something. “Take this,” he instructs, putting a spherical glass bowl in her hand. “Now…” He takes a sprig of some herb or other, lights it over a candle, and traces the burning edge around the sides of the bowl. Dimly, an image begins to appear within, distorted but growing clearer. Leah peers at it, and sees a miniature view of the city of Valerin. The image zooms as she focuses on it, and she finds she can navigate the map to a limited degree.

“Is this a representation, or is it real-time?” she asks breathlessly.

“It’s real. If you were to focus on this house and walk out the door, you would be able to see yourself doing so – not enough to see details, you can’t use it to identify people at that scale.” Wellen dips the smouldering twig in a glass of water, and the image vanishes in an instant. He takes the bowl back from Leah’s motionless hand.

“Oh my god…” Her face is split in two by a smile. Magic is real. Magic is real here. Okay, game changer. She realises she can put her hand down. “Is this the kind of magic that Seffon performs?”

“Basically, yes, although his magic is less the curative or divinatory, and more so enchantments and conjurations.”

“So that’s why people fear him? He can make people do things they don’t want to do, and summon things?”

Wellen looks uncomfortable, putting the ingredients back in their places carefully. “Yes, in essence…although the public belief that enchantment can enslave a person is faulty, and most enchantments actually have a quite limited duration.” He sits back down at the table, brushing his hands free of ash. “That’s what many people believe happened to you. Of course, if that were the case you’d have recovered after your first night here, or possibly even sooner, and we wouldn’t be sitting here having this discussion.”

Leah is nonetheless uncomfortable. “Is there any way to know for sure what happened to me? What spell he tried?”

“I’m afraid not. Magic is rather taboo in Valerin, and everything I’ve learned has been either through private consultation with casters from abroad, or in books purchased from the collections of people who don’t realise their contents. No, finding someone who could identify a spell only by its effects, and could then counter the spell with a more powerful one, would be impossible in Valerin.”

Leah grimaces in frustration, then shakes it off. “This is fascinating, I didn’t realise when you said magic that you meant…magic.”

“You wouldn’t have seen any performed in the keep, so it doesn’t surprise me that it takes you by surprise.”

“Memory spells, divination, enchantments…I always figured magic as more of a ‘shooting lightning from your fingertips’ sort of thing.”

Wellen laughs. “No, lightning and magic don’t mix. I’ve never even seen it mentioned in any of the banned texts.”

Leah’s attention is suddenly fixed on him. “You have banned texts?”

Wellen takes a sip of his tea and looks away.

Leah grins and sits back. “I won’t tell anyone! You never told about me, so I won’t about you.”

This seems to reassure him somewhat. “I’ve…read, some of them. I don’t own any. Lord Valerid allows me to practice magic, and acknowledges the benefits thereof – healing, maintaining the fertility of the lands, that sort of thing. But that is all. Anything beyond that…people in Volst have been executed for less than what I do here.”

Leah’s face falls. She is tempted to ask why, but decides it might be a sensitive topic – and having already put her foot in her mouth once today with Kimry, she is not eager to do so again with the only helpful person in the whole city. She leaves Wellen’s home unsettled, and while riding Beeswax back decides to take a detour through the city.

Eventually she comes across what looks like a bazaar or a market, bustling with people and horses and even a few dogs, running wild underfoot. Remembering her journal entries, she dismounts and walks through the crowd leading Beeswax beside her, observing everything. People part for her and seem to recognise her, calling out her name and waving; unsettled, she nods back with a small smile to anyone who greets her, in case she knows them but can’t remember.

She suddenly stops in the middle of the bazaar, realizing that she has started to take it for granted that whatever this reality is, it is real. There is a warrior-Leah, with warrior-memories and warrior-friends and a warrior-future. I’ve been carefully preserving the illusion of being this warrior-Leah all this time, as though it matters what happens in the future of this reality. Shouldn’t I be focused on going home? Who cares about some pretender-lord; there was supposed to be a board game party in a few days from when I was last in my world. Crap, did I miss it? Did I even remember to RSVP?

Oh come on, board game night is the least of my concerns, if I really have been missing from my world…

Someone calls out to her, hawking their wares; gratefully, she allows her mind to be drawn back to her surroundings. She has been given a portion of the team’s funds, but she is still not confident about the monetary system, and certainly not about the worth of items. How embarrassing if I get overwhelmingly ripped-off in public because I didn’t know the proper price of an apple. Then again, if warrior-Leah is supposed to be dumb, maybe that’s a good thing. But no, then she wouldn’t have known that olives were expensive on a given day. She realises she is conspicuous, standing in a crowd with a horse, debating her existence. She moves on.

Most of the buying and purchasing at this end of the market seems to be local; meat, grain, perfumes, liquor, clothing. Shops have a variety of objects, and sales happen between people. As she passes through and reaches the riverside edge, she comes across the more industrial side of things; crates and barrels labelled with names and destinations, being loaded into shallow-draught ships along long docks, other goods being unloaded and put onto wagons to be carried to their destinations.

One of the ships, at the very end of one dock, in the deepest part of the river, looks different from the others. There are more sails, and the ship seems more solidly built, with a deeper draught, though it sits lightly in the water. An ocean-going vessel? I suppose the others are all for river-trade, or maybe along the coast. She approaches, curious, and Beeswax follows along easily behind her, horseshoes clacking against the wooden boards of the dock.

The ship is unloading crates of wine bottles, and casks of muddy green olives stored in brine. The crest on the ship’s side is vaguely familiar, and she realises she has seen it in Jeno’s rooms before – the white mountains, green slopes, and gold sky. Listening to the workers, they seem to have a similar accent to the Auzzos, though a much more colloquial vocabulary. Leah keeps to the other side of the dock, out of the way, and observes.

The sailors gossip loudly about a Devadiss ship they crossed on their way towards the mainland, and how they managed to slip past unmolested only by chance and the blessings of the wind god – local dockworkers join them in cursing Devad, their tone familiar and casual. She notices that the sailors are all well-armed.

One notices her watching them and whistles at her, pointing her out to his comrades. A nearby sailor on the dock, dark-haired and solidly built, in fine armour and armed with a long sword, turns and spots her. His eyes widen in recognition. She nods politely but does not smile, then heads back to the road, lest he try to talk to her and she betray her lack of knowledge.

She mounts up once outside of the market, and returns via the north bridge. The whole time she is within sight of the ship she keeps one eye on it, and swears that the man in armour watches her go.

*

Leah descends to the hall for supper, once again held in the dining hall, the table crowded with people. She finds a seat with the five and sits down, unenthusiastic.

“Is it just me, or is it odd that the Valerids never just have a meal on their own, with a few close friends?” she complains quietly to Iris, watching as the servants begin to bring in plates. “Every night has to be this great feast.”

Iris nods along, drinking from her mug of ale. “Most of this is for show, I figure; because of the Auzzos. That being said, the pageantry is all that’s impressive. The food is nothing special: pigeon instead of quail; carrots and turnips instead of fresh spring produce; fiddleheads instead of asparagus; local cheeses instead of Probesc imports.”

Meredith throws them a sharp glance, but Lord Valerid is talking with his wife and does not notice their conversation.

“Valerin is wealthy in nut trees and citrus trees, but those are ready to harvest in summer and fall,” Vivitha points out, a bit defensively. “The fare is plain, true, but it can be made to look fancy. Sauces, plating, you know.” She takes the plate that is offered to her with a smile to the servant. Leah decides she likes Vivitha’s eye for food.

“Why does Valerin have so little wealth?” Leah asks, taking her own plate – potatoes, fiddleheads, gravy, a small portion of meat, and a roll of crispy rye bread.

“That’s not the case at all,” Iris corrects her. “Valerin province is very well-off. Nuts and citrus are wanted everywhere, but they grow best here, so they get lots of business from that. Then, during the off-season, they receive support from the governing body of Volst.” She pauses to take a hearty bite of food, and Meredith takes over.

“Any stinginess now relates to the fact that they anticipate a great battle with Seffon, and must be prepared to spend a great deal to feed and arm their forces.”

Leah hums around a mouthful of food, then washes it down with the ale. “So where do we feature in all this?”

“Valerin cannot send an army into the Jun province before declaring war on Devad,” Vivitha says. “It would look like a usurpation attempt. A group like us, however, can infiltrate and escape without causing political scandal.”

“Is there animosity between Devad, Cheden, and Volst? And what’s Jun, exactly?”

“Oh Gods, right, you’ve forgotten everything.” She sets down her utensils and focuses on explaining. “Volst used to rule Jun province, but it was conquered by Devad about three hundred years ago, and mismanaged so thoroughly that its population plummeted and its government dissolved. The whole place is wild forests with occasional self-declared Lords, like Seffon.”

“What about Cheden?”

Vivitha looks a little haughty. “They’ve got everything they need on their island, but they want a foothold on the mainland. That’s what this marriage is about; they want allies on the mainland, and a way to get around Volst’s tax on river trade. Marrying into a Volsti or provincial family is an easy way to do that, and considering that the Volst core has an absolute ban on magic, I guess they thought we were a likelier bet.”

Leah raises an eyebrow at that phrasing. “So the various countries have different policies on magic?”

Vivitha shrugs and looks to the others.

Iris looks uncomfortable. “I grew up in Volst. People there treat it like a disease, but Volst tolerates it in Valerin province because it helps them defend against the pretender-lords who come out of Jun province, and in Welleslass because most traders from Bair use magic and bring in great wealth.”

Leah notices she says “lords” instead of “lord,” but conversation is picking up along all the tables and the five move on to other topics, and she doesn’t have an opportunity to pursue the issue.

At the end of the meal the Lady passes behind them, and whispers to Meredith, who nods. “Debriefing,” she says, getting up and wiping her hands on her napkin.

Iris stands next, smothering a sigh, and drops her napkin forcefully on the table. “They never fucking tell us anything new…” she grumbles, following the Lady and Meredith out to the private room.

“Thank god, I thought I was the only one who thought so,” Leah whispers to her, and Iris snickers.