Is this her special dress? Her limbs are longer than mine, so it would fit her better. The communication barrier prevents me from asking. I can’t discard the garment, either, unless I want to go naked.
From without the flap Kosi calls an inquiry. The old woman answers with long-suffering in her voice. He enters, taking in the sight of me on my feet and Tolla’s distressed stance. In two steps he is at her side, one arm around her shoulder as he kisses her cheek. She smiles gratefully, ignoring a grunt of displeasure from the old woman.
That interaction speaks volumes to me. Kosi and Tolla are lovers, and the old woman doesn’t approve. Is she Tolla’s mother? Her grandmother, more like.
Commotion travels from the smoky room next door, followed by the unceremonious entrance of a second man.
“Kosi—” he begins, but he stops short upon seeing me.
I stare back at him. He’s tall and, unlike Kosi, clean-shaven. His astonished eyes flit from my head to my feet and back again. I give him a similar inspection. He has every appearance of a warrior, right down to the sword that hangs at his waist.
“Dima?” says Kosi, drawing his attention. Is that his name, Dima?
The question jolts him from his stupor. He rattles off a string of unintelligible words, but his message ends with something that pricks my attention: he says my sister’s name.
“Aitana?” I repeat sharply. My mind flares. She’s here? Did she come through the Gate after me? If anyone could open it, Tana could. I’m half hope and half disgust. Is she off in another room, safe and sound while I’m recovering from my encounter with a monster? Knowing her, she’s probably already mastered the language and enthralled a score of admirers with her beauty.
But she’d also be a familiar face among strangers.
“Aitana is here?” I say. “Where is she?”
My onlookers exchange uncertain glances with one another. The newcomer studies me, a deep frown upon his face.
Kosi issues him a command. He immediately ducks back out of the room. Kosi turns his attention to me and says something that includes the words “Dima” and “Aitana.”
I point to the door. “That was Dima?”
He frowns, as though contemplating what I mean. Then, tentatively, he pats his chest and points to the door. “Dima.”
The newcomer’s name is confirmed.
Chapter Eight
I cannot contain my nerves. If Tana’s here, when did she come? Did she see my graceless tumble down the hill, twice? Did she see me on that battlefield, facing off against that monster astride his mutant horse?
Was it possibly her magic that blasted into that enemy host, and not mine at all?
The beast within awakens from its slumber, incensed that I could think of such a possibility. It exists, and it won’t allow my self-doubt to rob it of its victory.
Kosi and Tolla stand on the other side of the room with the old woman, speaking in low voices—an unnecessary precaution, given that I can’t understand a word they say anyway—and I sit upon my cot. My hands cannot keep still, pent up with nerves as I wait for the warrior, Dima, to return with Tana. I twist my fingers around and against one another, my anxiety burgeoning.
Can I really work magic? Will I be able to prove it to her, or to anyone else?
I raise one finger in the air, level with my eyes. Even a spark would be enough. It would prove I wasn’t making things up.
Magic flows like a river—
The start of the first fundamental courses through my mind, but I shove it away. Rubbish theory. Magic bursts like a volcano, I think instead. I only need a tiny eruption, minuscule, just a flame on my fingertip.
I will it.
Light and fire engulfs my whole hand from the wrist up.
“Ahh!” I yelp, shaking off the effect like snuffing a match. It winks out as quickly as it came. My hand has not a singe upon it.
A gurgle from the other side of the room draws my attention. Kosi, Tolla, and the old woman huddle together, silent as death, staring at me with huge eyes.
“Whoops. Sorry.” I try to laugh it off.
Kosi, in his fright, has pulled Tolla into a protective embrace. The old woman, regaining her wits, notices this and swats at his hands.
I can’t help it. I laugh outright. They are terrified of magic, it seems, but the old woman’s first instinct is essentially, “Get your hands off of her, you rogue.”
She chatters something to Kosi and gestures to the door. He argues under his breath, glancing askance in my direction. She wants him to go, and he is afraid of leaving the two women alone with me.
“I won’t do anything,” I say, and I hold up my hands defensively.
Belatedly I recall that the last time I held my hands up like that, I blasted away half of a demon army. Kosi, Tolla, and the old woman remember as well, it seems, because they cringe together again as though they expect immediate death.
I drop my hands behind my back and say nothing.
Upon this scene, the door flap parts. Dima reenters, leading a woman by the hand. Her blond hair falls in waves almost down to her waist, and her pale blue eyes regard me with apprehension.
I sit up straight. Dima and this newcomer tip into obsequious bows before me, and he speaks a string of words that end with my sister’s name, “Aitana.”
But this is not my sister. Someone else in another world has her same name? What are the chances?
Confusion snakes through me, followed by a terrifying epiphany.
Someone else does bear my sister’s name—not someone in another world, but in another time.
“Aitana,” I say as the puzzle pieces in my mind click together. She looks up from her bow, uncertainty playing upon her pretty face.
My gaze shifts to the others as my epiphany takes root. Tolla should have been my first clue, but the pronunciation is different than I’ve ever heard.
“Tora,” I say. She tips her head, a frown between her brows. I move on to the man beside her, who still has his arm around her waist. If Kosi is only a nickname, then logically, he must be… “Etricos.”
His eyes bulge. He looks to Tora in growing alarm, and her expression mirrors his.
My gaze moves on to the second man, my heart quickly sinking in my chest. “Demetrios?”
He straightens, the blood draining from his face.
“Sek-nu-es-mi-nam-uh?” he says.
“She knows my name?”
The vowels are wrong, the consonants are off, but my brain latches onto the familiar and everything shifts into place.
The “gibberish” is not some otherworldly tongue. It’s my own, seven hundred years removed from its modern form. Shock thrums through me with a sickening realization.
The players of our country’s founding legends stand assembled before me: Etricos, Tora, Demetrios, Aitana. Only the goddess Anjeni is missing.
Except that Anjeni is also here.
Either I have unwittingly supplanted my own namesake or I am her.
And both of these options are a complete disaster.
Heedless of my injuries, I tear from the cot and through the door flap. A fire smolders at the center of a circular room beyond, the top of the tent open to allow the smoke an escape. There are two other flaps that lead out of this central room. I bolt for the larger one to my left, uncaring of the protests that sound behind me.
An earthy nighttime scent assaults me as I emerge beneath an endless canopy of stars. Campfires and circular tents dot the field around me, like mushrooms and fairy lights beneath a huge, gibbous moon. I whip my head around, assessing the scene before plunging toward the nearest rim of darkness, the edge of the encampment. Footsteps follow me. The dry grass beneath my bare feet harbors treacherous sharp stones. I hike up my skirts, the better to see the ground as I pick my way up the swell of a hill.
“Goddess Anjeni!”
I glance back. Etricos and Demetrios have both followed me. Further down, by the mouth of the tent, Tora and Aitana stare up in wonder. I cont
inue on my way, to the top of the hill.
At its crest, I stop. The valley before me bears the scars of a wildfire. Even in the dark of night I can see the wedge of black that cuts through the grass and spreads across the opposite hill. To my right, on another jutting hill, a familiar, ancient stone arch reflects the moonlight.
I knew, in the back of my mind, that the second army had taken me in after I lost consciousness. When I thought them backward aliens from another world, I did not question their inaction prior to that. But these are not aliens. These are my people. These are the heroes I worshipped from my earliest years. They are supposed to be brave and stalwart, forging the way to a new and glorious nation.
Instead, like sniveling cowards, they watched from afar as I battled a monster.
Etricos and Demetrios have stopped three or four steps behind me. They think I’m a goddess. They won’t touch me without my permission.
“Why did you do nothing?” I ask, my attention fixed upon the battlefield. The terror of those first moments through the Gate rips across my mind. “Why did you just stand here watching? Why did you do nothing?”
My voice rises to a yell, fury upon me as I turn to them. They stare, uncomprehending.
Of course they don’t comprehend. I speak with a modern accent, with modern vocabulary. It might as well be another language.
I don’t even care at this point. I fling one hand toward the scarred field. “You left me down there to die! What kind of heroes are you?”
Etricos raises his hands, a placatory tone in his voice. I only catch about half of his words. “Goddess Anjeni… people saved…”
“I almost died. Do you understand that? If this smug, sentient magic in me hadn’t finally decided to wake up, I would be dead.” My mind races with thoughts of what might have been, with what almost was. I’m going to be sick. Our legends claim that the goddess Anjeni appeared through the Eternity Gate and saved our people from a demon horde. No one ever said she tumbled through, or that she was nearly slaughtered by an over-muscled demon and its genetically mutated horse.
Or maybe I’ve altered history. Maybe the legends will say as much when I return home.
If I return.
A sob catches in my throat. According to legend, Anjeni disappears through the Eternity Gate again, but no one knows where she goes from here. If the Gate chooses the destination, I might be wandering through time for the rest of my life. In sudden panic, I pick up my skirts and bolt for the distant stone arch.
I get no more than five steps before a strong hand snags my elbow and jerks me backward. I tumble off-balance into a pair of ready arms.
Demetrios has dared to catch hold of his goddess.
I look up into his dark eyes—eyes full of concern, of apprehension, eyes set in a handsome face with a straight nose and a chiseled jaw.
No way am I getting caught in a love triangle with this beefcake.
“Get off me!” I fling myself away. He lets go, and I nearly lose my balance again, but I right myself on the hillside. Realizing how undignified I must look, I glare first at him and then at his brother. “So what, you and your army thought it would be fun to stand up here and watch a teenaged girl get slaughtered? Couldn’t lift a finger to help me? Worried you might strain a muscle or something?”
They both stare back at me, bewildered. It doesn’t matter. I’m only venting my frustration.
Maybe they thought from the beginning that I was a goddess, that I didn’t need their help, that I was sent from ethereal realms beyond to save them.
And oh, they’ll get their goddess. The fickle Eternity Gate can wait. I pick up my skirts and march back down the hill. The two brothers gape at me as I pass. I hear them fall into line behind me. The encampment, with its mushroom tents and specks of firelight, looks pitiful against the expanse of fields beyond.
Beside the flap from where I emerged, Tora and Aitana have stepped back. In their stead, the old woman stands with her hands on her hips, ready to scold me. Others have gathered, warriors and women from the nearby tents. I stalk forward, my mind calculating with every step. As I approach the cluster of gawking souls, I pause and cast my hands heavenward.
“Erupt, you beastly magic,” I say through gritted teeth. A massive fireball shoots into the sky, spiraling upward with the intensity of a miniature sun. My onlookers cry out and cover their eyes. Many of them drop to their knees or prostrate themselves fully before me. For a solid thirty seconds, the fireball illuminates the camp as though it’s noonday instead of the middle of the night.
“Worship me, peasants!” I yell. As the fireball winks out, I sweep into the tent, leaving a dumbfounded crowd transfixed in my wake.
This power might be going to my head. I should probably reflect on my behavior.
Chapter Nine
The dress that Etricos brought me to wear is Tora’s wedding dress. Or, more specifically, it was supposed to be Tora’s wedding dress. The old woman—her name is Huna, but everyone else calls her Baba—told me as much, a glimmer of disapproval in her eyes.
I thought it was disapproval for me, but I was wrong. She does not approve of Etricos.
Five days have passed since I came through the Gate, and I am as sick as a dog. After my spectacular display of power, Etricos arranged for me to occupy a tent removed from the rest of the cluster: a goddess cannot live among commoners, after all. They mounted the structure atop the same hill from which they watched my near demise. He acted none too soon.
Fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea. I have dysentery, as best I can guess. It hit on my second day here, the natural outcome of whatever parasites colonize this place. Huna stays with me. She is my constant attendant.
Even wracked with deathly illness, I am yet a goddess. Or so the people beyond these tent walls believe.
She scrutinizes me as she ladles a cup of the brew she keeps over the fire at the center of the tent. I am listless, my short hair sweat-plastered to my neck and forehead. Behind her, on the opposite wall, Tora’s dress hangs, butter-yellow against the rough brown of the tent.
That first night, after my tantrum, Huna alone followed me. In the midst of her scolding, she made clear the dress’s significance, though I did not fully understand her words. I took it off, replaced with a simpler garb that she offered in its stead. Her insistence unwittingly spared it from the effects of my impending illness.
I left it behind, too, when Etricos transferred me to this tent. Tora herself brought it, eyes downcast, sorrow on her face. She would not meet Huna’s gaze as she presented it. Huna said not a word, but she received the gown and hung it where it still remains.
It is an offering. If I reject it, I reject Tora. What a ridiculous culture this is.
Huna sets the cup of brew beside my sickbed and helps me sit up to drink. I’m as weak as a newborn, completely dependent on her aid. The delirium has passed, though—thankfully—and I believe I am on the mend. She holds the cup to my lips. Its herbaceous contents scalds my tongue and slides down my throat.
One small sip at a time, I drink the whole of it.
“Tell me about Tora and Etricos,” I say as she helps me recline again. I am acquiring the language bit by bit, like assuming a new dialect. Huna, in her ministrations, is happy to talk, and the more she does, the more I understand.
A dark cloud crosses her face. She glances towards the dress on the opposite wall.
“Why are they not yet married?” I press.
“The tribal elder died,” Huna says, and her wrinkled mouth presses into a thin line. “There is no one to perform the ceremony.”
Of all things, this seems trivial. These people, to the best of my understanding, represent the last of their tribe. My studies of this time period maintained that Etricos was the only warlord to withstand the invading demon army. At this point, then, all the other tribes have been conquered and enslaved.
And some warlord Etricos is. There are, at most, three hundred people in this encampment, including women and children.
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“Is there no rite they can perform?” If the officiating elder is dead, surely there must be some other means provided to recognize a couple as husband and wife.
“He is inconstant,” Huna says.
The bitterness in her voice startles me. “Etricos? He loves Tora.” It might seem stupid, but this is important to me. I have seen his letters in the National Archives. His adoration for his wife is legendary. I don’t want that veneer stripped away with all the others I’ve already lost.
Huna shrugs, and she gestures back and forth from one hand to the other. “He loves her, he loves another, he loves her again, he cares nothing for her. So it has always been, since they were children. And now, he gives her dress to a goddess and visits that goddess daily.”
I can’t fully contain my scoff. Etricos visits, but not on any amorous errands—and Huna knows that better than anyone. I understand her bitterness, though. This tribe has fled from their homes. They are refugees. That Tora brought along her wedding dress, an extravagance amid the bare necessities required in their flight, speaks of its significance to her.
For Etricos to hand it to another, then, is a terrible crime.
And yet, it too makes sense.
“I am a goddess, after all,” I say.
It’s Huna’s turn to suppress a laugh. The smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. Kindly she smooths a damp lock from my brow.
After five days, she is well aware that I am no goddess at all—if she ever believed it in the first place. No goddess would succumb to such an illness. We use the term between us more as a joke than anything else.
“Etricos loves Tora,” I tell her. “Is there no way for them to marry?”
That clouded expression reappears. I understand her concern. Everyone else may call her “Baba,” but Tora alone can lay claim to that name; she is Huna’s granddaughter, and her only surviving family. “I cannot have him make excuses afterwards, should his desires change. Should he say it wasn’t a true marriage, Tora would suffer. He serves his own needs first.”
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