7. Crypt
Chapter seven
Crypt
My room was exactly as I had left it.
I removed the boots first. This required more effort than I appreciated. Then the belt. Then the coat. The corset presented a brief logistical challenge.
The bed was even more comforting than the night before.
When I opened my eyes again, the light had changed. Later. Brighter. The clean light of a day that had apparently continued without consulting me.
For several seconds, I did not move. I lay on the narrow bed with one arm trapped beneath me, my hair somewhere across my face, and waited for my brain to provide a location.
Pennsylvania?
No.
Stone ceiling. Wool blanket. The faint smell of smoke in the walls.
Mytharo.
Right.
I had slept for what felt like either twelve minutes or three years. My body had selected the second option emotionally and the first option physiologically.
Every muscle I owned had opinions. My shoulders ached. My hands hurt.
I sat up slowly.
The room did not spin, which I chose to interpret as progress.
Someone had left a basin of water on the small table by the wall. I washed my face and hands, which improved my condition from battlefield-adjacent to merely alarming. My hair had reached a state I could only describe as post-siege academic. I attempted to smooth it down. It rejected the premise.
I was hungry.
This announced itself with enough force that all philosophical reflection stopped.
The cosmological implications of interstellar travel by energy drink would have to wait. Breakfast had just become the dominant priority.
I found my way down by following the sound.
The mess hall occupied a long room on the ground level of the keep, built with the same total disinterest in decoration that characterized the rest of the outpost. Long wooden tables ran the length of the space, scarred by years of knives, mugs, elbows, and whatever other abuse soldiers inflicted on furniture. Benches sat on either side.
A hearth occupied one wall, and iron pots hung over the coals, sending steam into the rafters.
The room smelled incredible.
This was inconvenient, because I had been prepared for medieval food to be historically interesting rather than good. My expectations had involved gray porridge, questionable sanitation, and bread dense enough to serve as siege equipment.
Instead, the air was full of warm bread, browned butter, onions, and herbs.
A woman near the hearth handed me a wooden bowl.
The bowl held a thick grain porridge, but not the sad institutional kind.
Barley, I thought, or something close to it, cooked with broth until it was creamy and rich.
There were pieces of roasted root vegetables in it, soft and sweet at the edges, and strips of salted meat that had been browned until the fat crisped.
Someone had finished it with herbs and a sharp cheese that melted into the top in small, glorious streaks.
There was bread, too. Dark, crusty, still warm. Butter beside it. Actual butter, pale gold and soft enough to spread.
I sat at the nearest table and took a bite.
The food was good. Deeply, offensively good.
The barley had absorbed the broth. The cheese had bite. The vegetables were sweet from the fire. The salted meat contributed a level of practical, unpretentious excellence that suggested whoever ran this kitchen understood morale at a military level.
I had eaten enough continental breakfasts at conference hotels to understand that the word breakfast was often aspirational.
“This is excellent,” I said aloud.
The soldier across from me looked up.
She was young. Perhaps nineteen, perhaps twenty, though I was rapidly learning that life at a frontier garrison complicated the usual visual markers of age.
She had olive skin, dark hair braided tightly back from her face, and a narrow scar along her chin that made her look more serious until she smiled, at which point the seriousness vanished entirely.
“You sound surprised,” she said.
“I am,” I said. “I had certain assumptions about food in a stone fortress.”
“That it would be bad?”
“You could say that. I was very wrong.”
She nodded toward the pitcher near my elbow. “Deeproot?”
I looked at it. The liquid inside was dark and steaming.
“Oh thank God.”
She poured some into a cup and pushed it toward me.
I drank.
The effect was not as dramatic as it had been the first time, probably because I was no longer in the immediate aftermath of interdimensional displacement and facing possible execution.
Still, within moments, the thick wool of exhaustion began to loosen around my thoughts.
The world sharpened slightly. The edges came back.
“I’m Meghan,” I said.
“I know.” The girl seemed to realize how that sounded and sat a little straighter. “I’m Flavia.”
“Nice to meet you, Flavia.”
“You’re the one who saw what Morvanna’s army was doing. Everyone says that you knew they were only distracting us.”
“I recognized the pattern.”
“That is not what people are saying.”
“What are people saying?”
“That you looked at the whole battle once and told the High Commander where the real attack would come.”
Flavia studied me with open curiosity. It was the look of someone trying to reconcile the story she had been told with the woman in front of her, who was eating barley porridge like civilization depended on it.
“You do not look like I expected,” she said.
“What did you expect?”
“I’m not sure. Someone taller, possibly. More visibly prophetic. Someone with long robes like a mage.”
“I’m afraid the prophetic wardrobe department was not consulted.”
“Is it true you are from another world?”
I considered several possible answers. There was no real advantage, at this point, to hedging.
“Yes.”
“What is it called?”
“Earth.”
“What is Earth like?”
I took a sip of deeproot and considered how to summarize indoor plumbing, antibiotics, nuclear weapons, representative government, space travel, the internet, and pornography.
“Magic doesn’t work there,” I said. “At least not openly. But we’ve compensated with technology.”
Flavia leaned in slightly.
“Some of it is extraordinary. Medicine. Telescopes. Machines that let people speak across oceans. Libraries you can carry in your pocket. Hot showers.”
“Hot showers?”
“One of our greatest achievements.”
“And the rest?”
I took another sip.
“The rest includes weapons powerful enough to destroy cities, institutions no one understands but everyone is angry about, and a communication network that allows humanity to share its worst opinions at the speed of light.”
Flavia looked concerned.
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It is,” I said. “But it also has a vast archive of people recording themselves doing intimate things for the viewing pleasure of strangers.”
Flavia stared at me.
I took another sip of deeproot.
“I would like the record to reflect that I am listing that under achievements.”
Flavia laughed.
I took another bite of breakfast and found myself smiling. A small, improbable thing in the middle of an outpost that had almost fallen before dawn.
The mess hall moved around us with the low rhythm of recovery.
Soldiers came and went. Some still wore armor.
Some had bandages. Some carried bowls in both hands and ate standing because sitting down apparently required more faith in their ability to get back up than they currently possessed.
Voices stayed low. Laughing occasionally.
Complaining. Asking for bread. Someone at the far table was telling a story involving a mule, a missing helmet, and what sounded like a senior officer making a poor decision.
Life was aggressively persistent.
A fortress could come within minutes of being breached from the inside, and four hours later someone still had to make breakfast.
Flavia tore a piece of bread and used it to collect the last of her porridge.
“Did the High Commander really kiss you in the courtyard?”
I choked on deeproot.
This attracted attention from at least three nearby soldiers, which was both unnecessary and unwelcome.
“I’m sorry,” I said, after recovering enough to speak. “What?”
Flavia’s expression was innocence arranged over curiosity with almost no structural integrity.
“People saw. Was it because you saved the outpost?”
“That is not usually how military commendations are administered where I come from.”
“But he did kiss you.”
I looked into my cup.
The deeproot, regrettably, did not contain an escape route.
“Yes,” I said.
Flavia’s smile widened.
“It was a private moment,” I added, which was a bold statement regarding something that had apparently occurred in front of half a garrison.
“Not quite.”
Flavia grinned.
Her tone suggested she would respect that privacy after asking perhaps six more questions.
Before she could begin, the mess hall door slammed open hard enough to strike the wall.
Every conversation stopped.
The room changed instantly. One second it was breakfast, soldiers, bread, low voices. The next, every person in the hall had gone still with the collective attention of people trained to understand that a door opening that way meant something had gone wrong.
A soldier stood in the doorway, breathing hard.
He had one hand braced against the frame and the other pressed to his side as if he had run too fast too soon after being wounded.
“The crypt door is open!”
The words meant nothing to me.
They meant something to everyone else.
Benches scraped backward. Someone swore. Flavia went white.
The soldier swallowed.
“There’s someone in the courtyard,” he said. “Drained.”
At first, no one moved.
Then the mess hall erupted.
***
By the time we reached the courtyard, half the garrison seemed to be moving in the same direction.
Skip was already there.
He crossed the stones toward the crypt with his sword drawn but lowered, his expression so controlled that it took me a second to recognize what was underneath it.
Calculation.