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  The older man held out his hands. “Good morning, my friend Joe. Come closer. I would touch you.”

  Joe felt the shiver grow to a tremor of anxiety. People said the Great Mage’s touch let him play a person’s heart strings like a harp. Joe had never found the experience unpleasant; if anything, he always felt soothed afterwards. Still, like medicine that made you feel better, the mage’s touch wasn’t entirely welcome. “I’m fine, sir. I haven’t had any more nightmares.”

  “And yet, yesterday you disobeyed me, Joseph. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, sir,” Joe said, distressed to find himself sweating. The Great Mage seldom called him Joseph, and when he had, it had not been a good thing.

  The Great Mage slipped his hands into his voluminous sleeves. He wore a simple gray robe, much like Mother Wilhelmina’s. His short, crisp beard had gone white, and his hair had thinned to nothingness in a spot on the back of his head, but he was only ten years older than she was. “Do you remember what I said when I gave you leave to stand on the platform during battles?”

  The Great Mage was half a head shorter than he was, but Joe felt somehow as if he were looking up. “Yes, sir. You told me I could take the telescope and watch the fighting so long as I stayed on this side of the Barrier.”

  “Precisely! And yet you thought you that you had license to jump the wall?”

  “I didn’t mean to disobey. It was just—”

  The Great Mage waited, but Joe was unable to articulate his reasons.

  “Well?” the mage demanded.

  “It was just that the boy—I mean the woman—looked so young and vulnerable. The thought that he—she—might die seemed too horrible to contemplate. I didn’t do it consciously. I just couldn’t stop myself.”

  The Great Mage’s expression stayed impassive for a moment, and then he gestured to a low-backed chair. “Sit, Joseph.”

  Joe sat down. It took an effort of will to stay seated and let the mage come up behind him. When the older man put his hands on Joe’s shoulders, he couldn’t stop himself from jerking in reflex.

  “Relax!” the Great Mage said.

  A feeling of calm well being crept over Joe. He took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh of relief.

  “That’s better,” the mage said, his hands still warm on Joe’s shoulders. “Now tell me about this woman who looks like a boy.”

  Joe related the story of watching the fight, of vaulting the wall and retrieving the fallen enemy soldier. He rambled on about the twisted, bloody rings in the soldier’s mail shirt, and the way her red blood had pooled on the green grass.

  “Very good,” the Great Mage said when he finally finished. “Now tell me about your dream last night.”

  Joe thought back to the moment he had awoken, groggy from sorting out the old reality of his dream from the new reality of this world. An image flashed in his mind. He had ordered a large black coffee, but the young woman who handed it to him from behind the counter had had delicate, pale yellow wings. Not so real after all.

  He hadn’t said anything aloud but the Great Mage spoke anyway, amusement in his voice. “The woman who gave you this beverage you crave had wings?”

  “Yes, sir. Very pretty wings. Rather like a moth.”

  “Ah! And do you know of any people in our world who have wings?”

  “No, sir.” No, there were no fairies or elves here. Mages and dragons, yes—although he had never seen a dragon—but no fairies or elves.

  The mage’s voice held warm concern. “Then why do you think you dreamed of a person with wings?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I suppose she represented magic, and there’s no other way I can explain what happens in this universe except to say that here, magic rules science.”

  “I suppose that’s as good a way as any of putting it.” The mage lifted one hand from Joe’s shoulder and placed it on his forehead.

  Joe felt an incredible heat, as if he suddenly had a fever.

  “Do you remember what I said about the difference between myself and the dark lords?” the Great Mage said.

  “That you’re a benevolent despot. You said you’re all despots, but there’s nothing benevolent about them.”

  “Remember it, Joseph. I will not tolerate disobedience.”

  Joe held his breath, but the mage’s hand slipped from his forehead to rest briefly on his shoulder, and he sensed a return of favor.

  “Now,” the mage said, sliding his hands back into his sleeves, “I think I had best see this young woman warrior myself. You will accompany me, Joe.”

  “Must I, sir?” Joe asked, rising to his feet. “She screams every time she sees me.”

  “Does she, indeed?” The mage smiled as if he found this amusing. “We shall see.”

  The woman did scream. She took one look at Joe and let out a fierce cry of rage. Sister Gertruda had to restrain her.

  “I told you, sir,” Joe said. “May I leave?”

  “Certainly not,” the mage said. “Stop that, young woman.”

  “Please, sir,” Sister Gertruda said. “Call her Phillip. She won’t answer to anything else.”

  “Be quiet, Phillip!” the Great Mage ordered. “Be quiet, or I shall cast a spell on you!”

  Phillip shut her mouth and stared at the Great Mage in alarm, then scrambled to the far side of the bed. “Who are you?”

  “I think you know who I am.” The Great Mage looked her up and down and frowned. “I begin to suspect that I know you, also.”

  “My name is Phillip!”

  The mage’s eyes lit in an amused smile. “Phillip it shall be. How are you today, Phillip?”

  She didn’t answer right away. She looked at each of them in turn. “I’m well enough.” Her tone sounded both reluctant and wary.

  The Great Mage nodded. “I’m pleased to hear it.”

  “Her wound wasn’t deep, my lord,” Sister Gertruda said, “and it’s healing well.”

  “Am I a prisoner?” Phillip asked.

  The Great Mage’s smile became inscrutable. “Have you been treated badly?”

  “No.” Again there was reluctance in her voice.

  “We don’t often take prisoners,” the Great Mage said. “Usually your lord’s soldiers test the strength of my magic by assaulting the Barrier. We retaliate, and they retreat, slaying those of their wounded who cannot walk. My friend Joe has truly saved your life.”

  Phillip looked across the room at Joe, but he couldn’t see any gratitude in her glance. She didn’t speak.

  “Now,” the Great Mage said with brisk efficiency, “Where did you get your necklace, Phillip?”

  She flushed and lifted her chin. “I’ve always had it.”

  “Ah!” The Great Mage moved closer to the bed and scrutinized her intently.

  She returned his stare, not flinching even when he stepped closer. “You don’t frighten me, old man.”

  “Don’t I?” Suddenly the mage lunged forward and grabbed her by the arm.

  Phillip gave a strangled gasp but didn’t otherwise cry out. It looked to Joe as if she wanted to pull away but couldn’t. Joe could identify with that feeling.

  “Joe!” the mage said. “Take the stone in your right hand. Pull it as far away from Phillip as you can without hurting her.”

  Joe obeyed reluctantly. He folded his right hand into a fist around the stone, then pulled the chain to its full length, which was not very far.

  The Great Mage took a step closer and shifted his grip to Phillip’s shoulders. She gave a little sigh, a faint, breathy whisper, and closed her eyes.

  The three of them stayed frozen for almost a full minute. Joe was wondering if Phillip had fallen asleep when she opened her eyes and looked at him.

  She seemed to Joe to be staring at him hungrily, as if he were something she wanted very badly.

  “Now,” the Great Mage said, “let go of the stone, Joe, and step back a pace.”

  Joe obeyed. As soon as the stone again lay on her skin, Phillip’s angry gla
re returned. She said nothing, however, until the Great Mage released her and stepped back.

  “Keep that man away from me!” She shouted at the mage, but she pointed at Joe. “Keep him away, or I’ll kill him!”

  Her fierceness stunned Joe. She sounded sincere.

  “You have a poor sense of gratitude,” the Great Mage said. “Joe saved your life.”

  Phillip grimaced and gave Joe a sulky scowl. “Thank you. Now go away.”

  “Fine with me,” Joe said. “May I leave now, sir?”

  “Not just yet,” the Great Mage said. “I’ve finally determined why you came to us, Joseph.”

  Joe blinked in surprise. “Sir?”

  “I said when you accepted me as your overlord that I would keep you close until the day I found enlightenment about your purpose here. Do you remember?”

  For the past three years Joe had wondered if that day would ever arrive. “Yes, sir.”

  The Great Mage’s expression grew serene. “Your purpose is to help Phillip find her true self. You’ll have to start right away.”

  Joe’s jaw dropped, and at the same time, Phillip blurted out an angry expletive.

  “Now, now,” the Great Mage said. “Such language isn’t appreciated here, Phillip. You’ll have to learn to guard your tongue.”

  Sister Gertruda fluttered near the bed like a moth near a candle. “My lord, she must keep quiet! The wound could reopen if she doesn’t.”

  “Precisely,” the Great Mage said. “I think a small sleeping draught is in order, sister.”

  “A curse on you and all your progeny!” Phillip shouted. “May they all sicken and die terrible deaths!”

  “I have no progeny,” the Great Mage said, unperturbed. “No child of my body, in any event.”

  “Then may the worms eat you, as you lie cold and forgotten in the earth!”

  “The worms eat everyone who dies,” the mage said. “No one lives forever, and no one is remembered forever. Your curse applies to everyone, sooner or later.”

  “Then I shall make it sooner!” Phillip cried, lunging at the Great Mage.

  Joe jumped to intercept her. Holding her back without hurting her proved a difficult task.

  Sister Gertruda entered the fray with a cup of sleeping draught, but it was only when the Great Mage took hold of Phillip’s arm that she became calm enough for Sister Gertruda to hold the cup to her mouth.

  The wounded woman choked and swallowed, then dashed the cup to the floor. “Take your bloody swill elsewhere, you pig of a woman!”

  “How much did you manage to give her, sister?” the mage asked.

  “Enough,” Sister Gertruda said with grim satisfaction. “She’ll sleep soon.”

  “Bastard!” Phillip pulled free from Joe’s slackened grasp and sank down upon the bed. “For all your high sounding phrases, you’re no better than a dark lord.”

  Sister Gertruda gasped in indignation. “Mind your tongue!”

  Phillip looked as if she would like to retort, but instead, she merely lay down as if she were exhausted.

  “The sleeping draught is working,” Sister Gertruda said, pleased.

  “Yes,” the Great Mage said, as Phillip closed her eyes. “As soon as she’s sound asleep, have her conveyed to Joe’s room.”

  “My room?” Joe blurted out. “Why?”

  “Because you’re going to tend her while she heals,” the Great Mage said. “You need to get to know each other better before you leave on your quest.”

  “What quest?” Joe said, feeling as if the floor had rocked under his feet.

  The Great Mage shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  Three: A Quest

  Joe set his shoulders and nodded at the guard who stood outside his door. The man looked impassive as he held the door open, but Joe suspected he would grin at the other guard after he had closed the door behind Joe.

  The screaming started as soon as Joe stepped into his room.

  “Get out, you bloody bastard! May the plague take you and all your kin!”

  Joe set the tray down on the dresser. Phillip made no move toward him, but Joe knew that was only because she was manacled to his bed by the short chain on her ankle.

  He kept out of her reach and sat down on the cot he had slept on since the day that a sleeping Phillip had been carried into his room. “I don’t like this any better than you do, but neither of us has any choice. The Great Mage gave me orders to take care of you, and I have to follow them. Would it hurt to shut up and eat your dinner?”

  She glared at him but said nothing.

  “That’s fine,” Joe said, encouraged. “You don’t have to talk. If I pass you your dinner, will you eat it and not throw it at me?”

  This time the glare was more restrained. She had enlivened breakfast with a flight of crockery in his direction. Angry at having to clean up the mess, Joe had declined to bring her any food at noon, so he knew she must be hungry now.

  “Very well,” she said.

  In the three days he had cared for her, Phillip had cursed him, struck him, and shouted at him, but she had never lied to him. He removed his own dinner from the tray, placed the tray on the floor, and pushed it toward her with one foot.

  Phillip retrieved it as soon as it came within reach. She sat on the edge of the bed and ate hungrily, but with a cautious air, never taking her eyes off Joe.

  On the other hand, she didn’t shout at him. “That’s better, isn’t it?” he said. “Surely you don’t want to live like this?”

  “Of course not.” She rattled the chain on her ankle. “No one wants to be a prisoner.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean the screaming and shouting. Why do you hate me so much? You don’t act like that with anyone else.”

  “I don’t know.” She made the admission grudgingly, as if she disliked the fact that she couldn’t account for her own actions.

  “You don’t remember me from the fight, do you?”

  “You weren’t in the battle.” She said it flatly. Hardly surprising since she had been unconscious by the time he had picked her up.

  “I wasn’t in the fighting, but I saw you fall. I ran to fetch you.”

  “Why were you watching?”

  Joe shrugged. “I trained many of our soldiers. The Great Mage won’t let me fight with them, but I feel a need to be there.”

  Finally, this piqued her curiosity. “You train soldiers, but you’re not a soldier?”

  “I was once, but not in this world.”

  Her eyes grew wide at this. “Not in this world?”

  Joe nodded. “In the universe I was born into, the world is a very different place. The moon is the same here, and I can find familiar patterns in the stars, but the land and the people are different.”

  Phillip looked baffled. “How are people different here?”

  “Well,” Joe said, “in my world, there’s no magic, but people make things using science.”

  Fairly hooked, Phillip tucked her feet under her as she sat on the bed, the chain on her ankle rattling noisily. “What things?”

  Joe related a little about what life was like in the United States of America in the early twenty-first century.

  Phillip tilted her head and managed to look both amazed and skeptical. “But, if there’s no magic, what makes the machines go that carry you so quickly?”

  “Their engines make their wheels turn. The engines burn fuel called gasoline.”

  “Where do you get gasoline?”

  “Out of the ground.”

  “Pish!” she said. “You can’t burn dirt.”

  “It’s not dirt.”

  She still looked skeptical. “How did you get here? Are there more people like you here?”

  “Not that I’ve met, although the Great Mage said there were some in the past.” Joe leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “I came through entirely by accident. I was on an Army exercise when—”

  “So you were a soldier?” Phillip interrupted.

&nbs
p; Joe decided not to try to explain the concept of part-time military service. “Not all the time, just every so often.”

  Phillip wrinkled her nose. “But how did you get here?”

  “I don’t really know.” Had it been his destiny to come here or merely the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? If he hadn’t needed the ROTC scholarship in college, he wouldn’t have been in the Reserves. “I was on a training exercise. We were waiting for orders when I saw this peculiar glow a little ways up the hill from me—bright and hazy, like a fire except there was no smoke.

  “I walked closer, and I heard a scream, like someone was hurt, so I ran. When I came over the hill, a sort of golden haze enveloped me like a fog. I tried to run back, but somehow I wasn’t in a meadow in Illinois anymore.

  “There was this house, and it was burning. A woman was screaming. A man was holding her down on the ground while another man looked like he was going to rape her. I shouted at them to stop, and they looked up and saw me.”

  Joe paused as the memory overwhelmed him.

  Phillip waited a moment and then prompted him. “What happened?”

  Joe shrugged. “They looked as surprised as I felt. They said something that sounded like cursing, but I didn’t understand it.

  “Two more men ran out of the house, and one of them came at me with a sword. I managed to avoid him, but someone hit me from behind. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a dungeon in Lord Elsen’s palace.”

  She said nothing at this, but her gaze narrowed and Joe thought she looked faintly suspicious.

  “I was chained, and there were rats everywhere,” he went on. “They had taken all my clothes and left me with a big lump on my head, but no food and no water. After a while, three men came in. One was a guard, one was there to ask questions, and one was a torturer.

  “He was a good torturer,” Joe said, his tone grim as he recalled the details, “but I didn’t understand a word any of them said. I would have told them anything if I could have made them understand me, but I couldn’t. So eventually, I passed out.

  “When I woke up, they gave me some water and started again. After three days of that they threw a few rags on me, hauled me out of the dungeon, and took me to Lord Elsen.”