They are led to a different room than the usual one, though nearby. Larger, Leah notices with relief. Inside there are a number of chairs around a bare wood table, and bookshelves lining the walls; Leah does not have the time to read any titles, distracted by the fact that both the Valerids and the Auzzos are in the room, waiting. Ah, that’s why it’s a new room. Not enough space in the private office. Barely enough space in here, as it is. Sparing a glance around, Leah realises this is probably also a private office, with a door that locks from the inside, portraits on the walls, and no other exits besides the main door.

Leah finds it a little cramped, not just in terms of bodies but in terms of personality: the Duke and the Lord seem to share the role of bringing solemnity to the room, in imposing uniforms and with sombre expressions; the Duchess and Lady sit, dignified, by their spouses, steering things back on track when they get side-lined; Meredith leads their side of things with casual yet stubborn confidence. Leah sits back and happily lets the big-wigs talk.

“We want you to make another push against Seffon,” the Lady says, once the basic reports have been taken care of. “In advance of the wedding, in two weeks.”

Finally! At least now I know when exactly the wedding will be relative to the current date, instead of all this ‘equinox’ stuff. Leah nods, keeping her face neutral.

“If I may,” Meredith says, “I would suggest we focus on reinforcing the border, to discourage any further invasive acts by Seffon’s forces. We don’t want him to feel he needs to advance any quicker, and a push might feel like a threat.”

The Duchess raises an eyebrow. “Do we not wish him to feel threatened?”

“We don’t wish him to feel cornered,” Iris says, “Duchess.”

“Not antagonizing him may allow the next two weeks to progress uneventfully,” the Lord says, nodding in agreement. “But he’s been testing us, so far; if we give a show of how strong our defences can be, he might decide this conflict is too much for him to take on.”

The Duke nods. “You know his mind best,” he says, and Leah thinks the Lord tenses a bit at that. “And if he can be cowed, that is the way to go. The less blood is shed, the easier it is for the conflict to end before it escalates to a war. If the next twenty years are filled with bitterness on both sides, the pressure will only build.”

“But if we don’t strike him down now, what if he allies with another pretender-lord?” the Duchess asks insistently. “Peace can be guaranteed if the enemy is gone, but can only be hoped for if the enemy is resting.”

“He will not ally with any of the other upstarts,” the Lord says dismissively. “He considers himself above them.”

“Why?” Leah asks, then mentally smacks herself.

“Yes, why?” the Duchess asks, nodding towards Leah. Leah feels slightly validated but still bites her tongue against any more slip-ups.

“He is a mage,” the Lord says, as though that says everything. “The others have the backing of Devad behind them and nothing more. Seffon is proud of his magic, and would not align himself with a country that cares so little for its power.”

The Duchess purses her lips, then tilts her head and nods.

“That’s another concern for us, as well,” Meredith says. “If we stop him at the border, we control the battlefield. If we seek him out in his lands, there could be any sort of magical traps set for us, and we can’t defend against that.”

All eyes pointedly avoid Leah.

“You could defend against it, if – ” the Duke begins, but the Lord raises a hand.

“These are capable fighters, proven a dozen times over. They know their work, and they have never needed magic before.” The Lord turns back to the Duke. “Your experience with battle is different, of course, but in Valerin we believe in fair fights.”

“Magic is not cheating, Lord Valerid,” the Duchess says, with a very careful tone.

“But neither is it guaranteed success,” the Lady says, apparently cutting off her husband before he can say anything to that. “And the five have found success at every turn without it. I would send them to any fight on familiar ground confident in their abilities, but if we changed the nature of their group with magic – no matter what bonus it granted – it would undermine their efficiency.”

The tense moment passes, and the conversation switches to tactics. The Lady and Duchess fall silent, and the Lord and Duke take over, poring over maps of the border with Meredith and Kain, and occasionally Vivitha, who apparently grew up near one of the weak points in the border. The meeting ends with not much having been decided, other than that the five ought to be ready within the week to head out to the border, unless new information arrives.

“New information – as if,” Iris says, as they leave the meeting and head up to their rooms.

“That one was actually more interesting than usual,” Leah says.

Iris gives a short laugh. “Yeah, to watch Lord Valerid get all huffy about magic.”

“Oh?” Leah notes this and moves on. “No, the Auzzos being there. I got the impression they were the ones who wanted us to make the push.”

“Well, I suppose if they don’t send us, they’ll have to send their own people, eventually.” Iris shrugs, stopping at the stairwell leading up to her floor. “And we’re more expendable in their eyes.”

“And less expensive, since they’re only paying one contract and the Valerids are covering four,” Kain says. She claps Leah on the shoulder and heads up the stairs, Iris waving and following a moment after.

Leah waves a quick goodnight to Vivitha and Meredith, then heads down the halls to her room, next to Jeno’s. Unsurprisingly, Jeno is in Leah’s bed.

Leah strips down to her bottoms then climbs in behind her, hugging her close and pulling the blanket over them both. “Your parents were at the debriefing.”

“Oh?” Jeno seems nervous a moment.

“Nothing bad, just…new.” Leah breathes deeply, petting Jeno’s hair down and out of her face. “Do you have any idea why they might want the five to push Seffon into acting before the wedding? Surely it would be safer after everything was settled? From a political perspective, that is.”

Jeno laughs a bit. “It’s so odd for you to be interested in the politics of the situation; that stuff always used to bore you.” Jeno snuggles in a bit closer. “But no, I don’t know. My parents don’t let me know all the details of Cheden’s politics. They think it’s inappropriate to worry me with the details when I’m not even set to inherit. I know they fear Devad’s prowess in creating deadly weapons of war. Part of my marriage to Samson is to ensure an ally, if ever war does break out between Cheden and Devad.”

“Is fear the only reason for the war?”

Jeno shrugs. “Devad is belligerent, and they’ve come close to war with us before, so it’s not so far-fetched.” She perks up suddenly. “Maybe I could convince Samson to hire you as our personal guard, if a war broke out.”

“Jeno, don’t wish for a war just so you can keep me close. We’ve got enough on our plate figuring out the Seffon situation. Now go back to your own bed.” She gives Jeno a kiss on the cheek, then pulls back the covers and pushes her away. Jeno giggles and stumbles upright, giving Leah a sour face. “Or I’ll carry you there myself.”

Jeno leans back over the bed and kisses Leah’s nose, then goes back through the door that joins their two rooms. Leah listens for the latch to close, then lies down in bed and settles in.

*

At night she dreams a strange dream of a rushing river with giant spiders in it; Vivitha is next to her, as well as a few other faces she can’t quite focus on. Eventually she realises the others are the five, and she sees herself from outside her body, hair tied back, clinging to a worked board of wood, spear in hand, shield on her back. The spiders are being swept away downstream with the rest of them, struggling to stay afloat.

Someone calls out to her, and Meredith, with wet hair hanging over her face, tells her to stop asking stupid questions of the locals. Leah turns back to the spiders, and sees they are now on dry land, talking to her in some language she can’t follow. She tries to parse the words, and feels in her gut that they should make sense. She responds, and her own tongue produces the same strange language. She tries to talk to Meredith in English, but can’t. Distressed, she starts shouting out to the five, who are all in the river still, while Leah runs along shore.

*

Leah wakes up trying to yell something, but she can’t be sure in what language. The room is dark, but a faint glow of sunrise shows through the narrow window.

Jeno enters in her nightgown, eyes wide. “Is something happening? Are the horns blowing?” The young woman looks to the window, but all noise from the outside of the keep is muffled.

“No, I – ” Leah rubs the sleep from her eyes, embarrassed. “I just had a nightmare.”

“Oh!” Jeno says, relieved. “What about?”

“Some nonsense about talking spiders and drowning. I couldn’t follow the details.”

Jeno kisses her, and returns to her rooms with a yawn. Leah lies down and tries to sleep, but can’t manage it. Sighing, she gets dressed for the morning and heads down to the courtyard to run through attack-drills against a straw dummy until sunrise.

Exhausted and sweating in the cool morning air, she finally heads back inside for breakfast. She finds the five in their usual corner of the dining room and joins them, dropping to the bench and yawning, stretching her shoulders.

“You look terrible,” Meredith says flatly, looking at Leah’s face. “Did you spend the night out?”

“Huh? No, just had a weird nightmare. Giant spiders, drowning, the usual stuff.”

Meredith drops her fork, looking at her in shock. Leah is about to ask why, when Meredith throws herself at Leah and gives her a crushing hug.

“What…”

“Wait, drowning? Was it in a pine forest?” Kain asks, listening in. “With broken wood in the water?”

“Why’re we talking about the capsizing?” Iris asks, taking a seat with a roll in her hand. “What’d I miss?”

“Leah’s remembering!” Meredith says, finally pulling out of the hug. “How much did you get? Why did you get that memory back, instead of any of the others?”

“What do you mean, ‘remembering?’ What was it?”

“Leah’s remembering?” Kain asks, coffee dribbling down her chin. “Finally! What did it?”

“It wasn’t a memory, it was just flashes,” Leah says.

“What did you see? What exactly did you see?” Iris asks, squeezing Meredith out of the way and sitting down beside Leah.

Leah recounts the dream, emphasising that the details were few and made no sense, but the others ignore this, instead prying for each morsel of information and treating it like a victory.

“So what was it? What did I remember?” she asks them, once there’s no more to tell.

“The five’s last quest,” Meredith explains, holding Leah’s hand. “Through the Gael’s Gree mountain ranges. We’d finished up our main job, clearing out a den of thieves, and on the way back we – stupidly – crossed a river during a rainstorm. The ferry capsized, and we were all washed many kilometres downstream. On the way back to the road, we had no map, and we accidentally wandered into a den of wild spiders that had grown to monstrous proportions due to some stray magic.”

The others turn breakfast into a mini-celebration, toasting with their coffee mugs and talking as though Leah’s road to recovery were well underway. Leah acts happy along with them at the evidence that this amnesia is finally wearing off, but internally is panicking at the implications.

If these memories are real, but buried, then what is the source of my memories of ‘real’ life?

*

Leah climbs her way out of a deep fog of sleep to find herself on a soft bed, in a cream-coloured room. She sits up slowly, checking to see if her head is clear. It feels like she has been sleeping for days.

The room has a shelf of books, a large mirror, and a white wooden desk with drawers. Piles of loose paper and doodads cover every surface. One corner has a white fabric basket full of clothes. There’s a dirty mug of black-glazed ceramic at the bedside. The floor is an unnervingly uniform light wood, maybe maple or pine, though it doesn’t exactly match anything she’s familiar with.

She checks the doors to see if they are open; one leads to a small cupboard with clothes hanging in it, and the other leads into a hallway with featureless white walls.

The room has one window, large and curtained with heavy white fabric. Leah pulls the curtain aside slightly and peers out through what she is surprised to realise is a single pane of glass, at least sixty by ninety centimetres. She looks to be on the second floor of the building. Outside is a small patch of grass, and a series of grey stone paths of different widths, all running parallel, the narrow ones at the side slightly higher than the large, striped, centre one.

She listens to hear if anyone else is in the building, but hears only the sounds of wind moaning and a faint buzzing, like that of insects. She decides to dress herself with whatever has been provided for her by her captor, before going out to discover where she is. In the closet she finds only decorative clothing, and no armour – Not surprising, she thinks bitterly, sifting through the options. She puts on the most covering clothes she can find, and pauses a moment while pulling on the shirt to look at herself in the full-body mirror hanging on the wall.

Her hair is too long. Her skin is too soft. Her muscles are too small. Her stomach is unmarred by the scar from a thief’s crossbow. Her nails are clean and carefully trimmed, and coated with a thin layer of something that makes them hard and shiny. The more she looks, the more she finds wrong.

She throws open the door and marches boldly out into the hallway, down a short way, and into an area that seems to be half sitting room and half pantry. The entire area is empty of people.

She turns in a slow circle, and looks at the decorations in the room: portraits on the wall with no visible paint marks; furniture upholstered in thick, rich fabrics; a sundial hanging on the walls with little sticks pointing between the numbers; a randomly patterned rug on the floor before the couch; a large black square of something vaguely shiny standing in the corner where the couch faces; white wood covered with a strange varnish making up every cupboard in the pantry; and as always, the same featureless walls, made out of nothing she can identify, and painted – how wasteful! – in varying off-white shades.

On one wall, the most baffling item. Covering a large glass double-door leading to a stone and metal balcony is a single curtain of many stripes of colour, arranged to mimic a rainbow. It moves slightly in the breeze from a white box in the wall that admits a stream of cool air from somewhere.

The excessive use of glass, the rich fabrics and dyes, the strange wood; they all point to opulence. Leah decides that wherever she is, the person who owns this building must be very rich, or very extravagant.

She is just turning back to return to the bedroom when she notices a small painting, almost a cameo, on one of the tables. In it is the not-Leah body, with long hair and no scars, standing next to two people who look vaguely like Leah’s parents, but different – yet still believably her parents, by how closely they resemble her, as though four totally different unrelated people could have had two daughters who happened to look absolutely identical.

She realises that the image remains clear even when she brings the picture close to her face. Testing her eyes, she realises that her vision is much improved. How is that possible? Skin can’t become un-scarred, eyes can’t spontaneously fix themselves. She realises, with absolute certainty, that this is not her body – not merely her body at an earlier point in time, but totally different.

Leah retreats in confusion to her room, and begins looking for some clue as to the identity of the owner of this building – of why her body has changed – of what date it is. Gods, is Jeno married already?

She reads the spines of books, with covers printed in brilliant dyes, and reads the text on the covers, looking for some indication of the mind of their owner. The third volume makes her stop dead in her tracks. It identifies itself as a fictional romance story about two women.

Leah looks up and around the room, then goes back to the mirror. She stares into it for a long time. She tests out her voice, and says into the empty room: “I am in no world I know.” She turns back and sits on the too-soft bed, with thin, soft sheets, and is aware of a nagging feeling that all this is familiar. She wonders absently if the owner has a diary, or other personal notes, and she looks through the papers on the desk.

The first ones she finds have all the information she needs:

Leah Louise Armande

343 Havellin Avenue, apartment 21

Joinsburg, QC, G8J 0A0

Attached to this larger sheet is a small piece of paper with a hand-written note, with another address on it and the name of a restaurant. It is in Leah’s own hand, only neater.

Alright, it’s fairly clear. This body is also called Leah, but with the wrong last name. She lives in no recognisable part of the world, and lives with luxurious goods beyond what I have ever witnessed in all my travels – and yet leather seems unknown to them, as does weaponry. She picks up the mug by the bed, and sniffs it: the faint remnants are rich and bitter, and Leah recognises the scent of black tea, like what their last employer in Bair used to drink all the time. Luxury everywhere, yet no servants to clean up after her. Or have I just not seen any yet?

Leah goes back to the sitting room, through the rainbow curtain, and tugs on the doors to try and get them to open. Eventually she finds the latch, and opens them to find a warm breeze that lifts the curtain behind her and brings her the smells of a deeply industrialised and alien city.

She feels herself start to tremble as she faces the enormity of the stone buildings surrounding her, the relative absence of people on the streets, and the square corners of every aspect of this world.

She retreats into the building again and bars the door without even thinking of the action. She faces into the room, and notices another door at the opposite side. It takes her a moment to figure out the latch and handle, but finally she unlocks it and pulls it open, to see an aisle full of identical doors with numbers on them, all starting in two. Hers is twenty-one.

A woman a few steps away looks up to see the open door, and smiles politely but neutrally at her. Leah smiles back and says hello tentatively.

“Hello Leah. Still on the job search?”

Leah hesitates. “Oh? Ah…yes, yes I am. Still searching.”

 “I hope you’re not going to have trouble paying the rent?”

“I don’t think so, no.” Rent? Rent on what? Can I be renting this whole living space? What’s my role in this building? Am I some sort of indentured servant, here? She has a painful flash of Kimry’s face, and how she must be worrying, but forces it down for the moment.

“You don’t think so?” The strange woman says, slightly accusatory.

“I’ve got it all worked out,” Leah says with a smile she does not feel, desperately hoping that it’s the truth.

“Well I hope so. It’s due in a week, you know, and I expect it on time.”

Leah decides this is who she owes her services to, and must figure out what her role is in this world. “Lovely talking with you,” Leah says, at a loss of any other way to end this bizarre conversation; the woman nods, seeming confused, and resumes walking.

Leah closes the door, locking it again. She resolves not to leave her rooms until she knows all she can find out about this new world. She decides, not grudgingly, to start by reading the romance novel about two women.

Note ¹ Chapters set wholly or partially in the “real world” with the other Leah will be marked with a Qc to make them easier to find