by Tracey Tobin
Jacob gently lead Tori to the bench by the wall. He gathered a pile of pillows and blankets before helping her to sit and carefully wrapped the softest blanket around her shoulders. He bit his lip and looked like he wanted to say something, but instead turned and walked over to the kitchen. With a strange shiver that she couldn’t seem to control working through her entire body, Tori watched him start a fire in the pit with some flint. It’s like I’ve gone back in time, Tori thought, shell-shocked. Back in time and god-knows-where in space.
Jacob poured some water from a jug into a clay cup, added what looked like a bunch of herbs and spices, and then used a crude wire rack to heat it over the fire for a few minutes while Tori stared. When the concoction was heated thoroughly he wrapped the hot cup in a towel and handed it to Tori. “Drink this,” he instructed.
Tori gazed into the cup. The water had turned a dark, bluish color. He wants to poison me. “What is it?”
Jared grabbed another pillow and blanket and plopped himself on the floor in front of her so that he was looking up to her face. “A recipe my father used to make,” he told her. “It will help to calm your nerves.”
Tori sniffed the liquid. It smelled a bit like cinnamon. You’d be a fool not to assume that this is poison. She took a cautious swig and immediately gagged and sputtered. “It tastes like ass!” she cried.
Surprising them both, Jared actually laughed out loud. “I apologize, Victoria,” he said in between the chuckles. “It is a bit of an acquired taste.”
Tori stuck out her jaw and glared at the young man. It’s not poison, you idiot. He’s trying to help. She stared at the too-long auburn hair and sky-blue eyes and couldn’t help but feel like she was sitting with Jared. “Why do you look exactly like my friend?” she found herself asking.
Now it was Jacob’s turn to stick out his jaw. “I was actually hoping that you would be able to answer that question for me.” He looked genuinely distressed by the thought of someone else out there with his face, and Tori couldn’t honestly blame him. “I have no living male relatives,” he explained, “so it is highly unlikely that anyone out there would bear such a striking resemblance.”
Tori watched the steam rising from her cup. She felt that she was formulating a thought, but it wouldn’t quite come to the surface.
“Was that truly another world?” Jacob asked. When Tori looked back at him she saw that he was practically on the edge of his pillow. “The buildings were so big and colorful, and there was light everywhere even though the sky was dark, and your people wear such strange, garish clothing.”
Tori looked down at herself. She was wearing jeans and a pink t-shirt, sneakers, and a dark blue hoodie sweater. When she looked up again Jacob’s cheeks were a little red.
“I, uh, didn’t mean that-”
Tori shook her head and leaned her forehead closer to her cup to breath in the cinnamon smell. “I get it,” she assured him. “Your clothes look weird to me too.” She adjusted herself on the pillow so that she could lean down a little closer to him. “And to answer your question: yes. I think… I think we come from two different worlds.”
That seemed to hush Jacob. He was looking at her with clear interest - not like her classmates at home who looked at her with gossip in mind, but as though she was something mysterious and unique. “How could such a thing happen?” he eventually muttered.
The question had been one of a dozen at the forefront of Tori’s mind since she’d looked up at the multi-colored stars. She reached toward her chest and touched the crystal around her neck. Though she was confident that it wasn’t going to suddenly burn like fire the way it had before, she felt the need to take it off. Once she’d done so she laid it gently on the floor between Jacob and herself. “I think it has something to do with this,” she suggested. “I didn’t put it together at first, because it was like…I kept forgetting about it, for some reason. It was like my brain kept getting erased. But as soon as I put it on yesterday things started happening. I started hearing and seeing things that weren’t there; or, at least, I thought they weren’t there. Now I think that I was actually catching glimpses of this place.” Suddenly she remembered Jared and Krista staring at her in horror from the other side of the invisible barrier that had kept them from saving her. Her hands started to shake a little, causing the liquid in the cup to tremble. “Oh god,” she whispered, reverting all at once to her previous panic. “Oh god, how do I get home?”
She looked so distraught that Jacob had to say something. “If the pendant brought you here, perhaps it could bring you back?” he suggested.
Tori’s eyes lit up. With little concern for the contents, she practically threw her cup on the floor and retrieved the necklace. She examined it closely, but to her dismay the inner design did not seem to have the glow it had before. She felt confident that this meant that whatever power it had held was gone, but she clasped it back around her neck anyway. She held her breath as the crystal fell to her skin, but as she had suspected, nothing happened. “I don’t think I’m going to get back this way,” she whispered.
After a long, uncomfortable silence, Jacob cleared his throat. “Well, um, I don’t have much, but you’re perfectly welcome to stay here for as long as you require shelter.”
The thought of it made Tori shudder. How long would she be here? What if she was stuck here for the rest of her life? If there was one thing that she’d learned about herself these past weeks it was that she was one of the most useless people she knew, in a pinch. How was she supposed to survive here? Was she supposed to rely on this familiar-looking stranger to take care of her for the rest of her days?
“It’s funny,” she said aloud, mostly to herself. “A day ago I would have given pretty much anything to escape my life, but now that I have I feel like I’m being punished even more than I was before.” Unbidden, a few tears started to fall down her cheeks.
Jacob clearly didn’t understand what she was talking about, but he understood the tears. He seemed to think for a while. “I have an idea,” he suggested gently. “I have to take a trip to the nearby village for some supplies. I can’t make any promises, but maybe if you come with me the elder there will have some ideas.”
Tori sniffled. “How far away is this village?” she asked.
“Not very far.” Jacob shrugged. “About a day and a half on horseback.”
Tori almost choked, but just barely managed to straighten out her expression at the last moment. “That… That sounds great,” she lied. With an insurmountable effort she managed to offer a small smile. “At least, it’s better than sitting around and doing nothing. Thanks. I mean, for helping me even though I kinda just dropped in on your life.”
A hint of pink appeared on Jacob’s cheeks. He cleared his throat and allowed his gaze to wander off to a random point on the wall. “Well, then,” he said quickly, jumping to his feet. “It’s still quite early in the morning, so why don’t you lay down in the bed for a few hours. I’ll have us ready to leave by midday so that we should be able to reach the village by sundown tomorrow.”
Tori gazed over to the bed in the other room. She thought that she should probably feel extremely weird about sleeping in a stranger’s bed, but she was very exhausted all of a sudden, and Jacob was so very much like Jared that she found she felt oddly comfortable around him. “Okay,” she agreed. “That sounds good.”
Jared seemed to sense her fatigue and reached out to help Tori to her feet before leading her toward the bedroom. He stood by the door while she slipped off her sneakers and crawled sleepily into the bed. The blanket on top was hand-knit, just like her mother’s. Noticing this almost brought the tears back, but she forced them away because Jacob was still watching, clearly curious.
“Good dreams, my lady Victoria,” Jacob said. He gave a short bow that seemed way too formal for this strange situation.
“Thank you,” was all that Tori could think to offer back.
Jacob untied the blanket doorway, blocking the light from the lit
tle kitchen fire. Only a small beam of early-morning sunrise peeked in through the tiny window on the adjacent wall. The second she was sure he was gone, Tori reached into her sweater pocket, pulled out her prescription bottle, and popped four pills in her mouth.
She was sure that she wouldn’t actually be able to sleep, given that her entire world had been turned upside down and thrown out the window, but within moments of the pills sliding down her throat she began to drift off to the odd thought that Jacob’s bedsheets even smelled like Jared.
She didn’t dream, and when next she woke Tori allowed herself to believe, just for a moment, that she was snuggled up in her mother’s quilt at home. Then the smell, a mixture of young man and woodsiness, brought her back to reality. For a while she lay beneath the sheet with her eyes closed tight, willing herself to return to sleep and wake again in her parents’ bed, and considering her unbelievable predicament. She had this strange, detached feeling that she wasn’t reacting properly to this entirely insane emergency. She thought perhaps that she should be having a mental breakdown, bawling her eyes out, scratching the skin off her arms while rocking back and forth in a corner. Wasn’t that how someone with a thread of sanity would react to being transported to another world? But mostly she felt resigned, like her short sleep had helped her to accept the fact that something crazy had happened and now she was trapped. Case closed. Deal with it.
Of course her heart still clenched at the idea of possibly never going home, but in her desperation to remain sane she’d already begun coming up with small comforts. At least she didn’t have to learn how to pay bills and deal with bankers. At least she didn’t have to hang around an empty house, surrounded by all her parents’ possessions. At least she didn’t have to deal with hushed voices and pitying eyes following her everywhere she went.
It was with those thoughts that she managed to drag herself up out of the bed and back into her sneakers. Unable to locate a mirror, she did her best to finger-comb her hair, pulled it around her shoulders as she’d become so used to doing automatically, and took a deep breath to face the world.
Outside she found Jacob affixing saddles and packs to a pair of horses. One of the two was smaller than the rest - she assumed that one was for her - but ‘small’ was all in the perspective. To Tori it looked like a monstrous beast that was as likely to eat her as it was to let her ride on its back.
“I’m going to make a confession,” she said by way of greeting. “I have never ridden a horse before.”
The expression Jacob returned to her indicated that he found her declaration very odd indeed. “How do you travel long distances?” he asked.
Tori bit her lip. This world might be nothing like your own, a voice in her head pointed out. Though she had a feeling she knew how he was going to react to her response, she told Jacob, “Cars. Planes. Trains. Bikes, even.”
Sure enough, Jacob’s face was a question mark. This cemented the idea that Tori had already begun to form in her head of a world without technology as she knew it. She wasn’t yet sure exactly how that made her feel, but an additional little flash of panic rose in the center of her chest.
“Well, no worries,” Jacob was telling her. “Ashes here is very gentle.” He patted the smaller horse, whose coat and mane were a lovely ash gray. “I promise she’ll take good care of you.” As he spoke he tightened the pale leather saddle around the creature. Then, quite suddenly, he was offering a hand to Tori to help her up.
Tori’s mouth seemed to turn to sand all at once. “Oh,” she said. “Are… Are we ready to go?”
“The sooner we leave, the sooner we’ll get there,” Jacob offered with his hand outstretched.
Tori examined the mare with a wary eye. It’s fine, she told herself. After all that you’ve been through, surely you can handle this. It’s just a horse. Cautious, she took Jacob’s outstretched hand and put her left foot into the stirrup. She pushed off, but not nearly hard enough, as her right leg didn’t come anywhere near clearing the horse’s back. She would have gone crashing to the ground if Jacob hadn’t grabbed her rear end with his other hand and hoisted her up with a powerful shove. The next thing she knew she was sitting in the center of the saddle with a face as red as a tomato. When she sheepishly looked back down at Jacob it was to find his face a similar shade.
“That was, I mean, I-” He stuttered incoherently for a moment before simply turning away with stiff shoulders.
I’m completely useless and he’s so bashful you’d think he’d never met a girl before. What a pair. The thought that sprung to her mind almost made her laugh out loud, although it also made her feel a little like crying.
Jacob lifted himself up onto his own chocolate brown horse. He whispered, “Let’s go, Strider,” and flicked the reins. As Strider began to move, Ashes automatically followed. Tori scrambled to hold onto her own reins to keep herself steady. Ashes gave her a funny little snuffle noise in reply, as if to say, “What’s your problem, lady?”
They rode around to the other side of the house, toward a well-worn path in the woods, and for a while they traveled in uncomfortable silence. The path was clear and flat, and the horses seemed to be able to handle it on their own, even when the occasional tree root cropped up. Tori felt nervous, but seemed steady enough, so she took the opportunity to take note of the landscape that she was traversing. She recognized the grayish-green trees with spiky leaves as the ones she had envisioned up and down Main Street, and she could hear a number of birds chirping and flitting around up in the branches. When a cool wind blew up around them she was reminded irresistibly of the breeze that had plagued her alone during World History class. She pulled her hood up against the chill, while taking note of the fact that Jacob was still wearing his leather vest with nothing underneath, leaving his arms completely bare.
“What season is it here?” she asked. Mentally she had her fingers crossed as she thought of all the extra clothing she didn’t have. She didn’t think she could handle any snow in her immediate future.
“Early Spring,” Jacob replied, eliciting a sigh of relief from Tori. “It should be warming up soon.”
“Aren’t you chilly without a shirt on?” Tori asked next. She was shivering just looking at him.
“I’ve trained for the cold,” he explained. “It doesn’t really bother me much.”
Tori couldn’t help but become curious. “Trained?”
Jacob slowed his horse and turned to look at her, and she was sure she saw a kind of pride in his eyes. “My father used to be a royal knight,” he told her. “We left the royal city when I was still a baby, but he trained me to be a fighter and a survivor, like him. He always said that someday I might have to fight to protect what I care about.”
For the first time since they’d left Tori noticed that the sword and shield from Jacob’s cabin were affixed to one of the packs on his horse. “Is there, I mean- Do you usually have much need to fight?” she found herself asking.
Jacob gave a nonchalant shrug. “Not so much out this far,” he assured her. “We are about as far as we can get from the royal city, and we have little of interest to the king and queen here. It’s extremely rare for their emissaries to come out this way. It’s why my father chose this spot to settle.”
The more he told her the more curious Tori found herself becoming. “Why did he leave the royal city?” she had asked before she could stop herself. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”
Jacob shrugged again, but the look that flashed across his face indicated that he’d often asked the same question. “My father would never tell me the whole story,” he admitted. “All I know is that we were there when everything changed and the king and queen began their reign of terror. My mother was caught in the crossfire, so my father took me and ran off, and I’ve lived here ever since.”
It sounded a lot more horrible than Jacob was making it out to be. Reign of terror? Tori began to wonder just what kind of world she was stuck in. After a moment of quiet thought she found herself s
aying, “I’m sorry. About your mother, I mean.”
Jacob offered a little nod to let her know that he appreciated her sentiment. “I never got to know her because I was so young,” he said. “I was lucky to have my father for the fifteen years that I did.”
“Oh!” Tori exclaimed. “I’m sorry!” She gripped her reins and stared down at Ashes’ mane. “I didn’t realize. I mean, the way you were talking about him I just assumed that he was still around.”
Jacob let out a little chuckle to assure her that it was okay. “I do tend to talk about him that way,” he agreed. And then, without prompting, he offered the story: “He went on a hunt with the Maelekanai from the village we’re headed to. There was an attack. I was in denial about it for a long time, thinking that I should have been there. But luckily the Maelekanai took care of me, and eventually I was able to move away from those beliefs.” He seemed thoughtful for a moment. “Of course, I still miss him.”
Tori chewed on her lower lip. She said nothing for a long time until finally the words just spilled out: “Both of my parents are gone too.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Jacob said, and she could tell that he genuinely was. “Was it recent?”
Tori nodded and ran a hand through Ashes’ mane. “Very recent. It was a car crash.” At Jacob’s inquisitive glance she added, “It’s a bit difficult to explain, but it was a single accident that killed them both.”
