Another World #2
The breastplate carried a single crest cast directly into the metal instead of painted onto it, which implied permanence.
A flame. Stylized, but not abstract enough to obscure intent.
Narrow at the base, widening as it rose.
The surface had been worked unevenly so that light shifted across it with movement.
The effect was subtle, deliberate, and old.
There was no other decoration on the armor. No gilding, no rank insignia, no attempt at intimidation beyond the practicality of the equipment itself. That made the crest stand out even more.
Its edges had been worn smooth by years of handling and repair. The plate had clearly survived long enough to be rebuilt several times rather than replaced. Whatever the symbol meant, it was worth more than the armor that carried it.
The sword came out when he was about thirty yards away.
I stayed where I was. This was less bravery than the paralysis of someone who had just run out of options and was defaulting to data collection. He was closing fast, his attention locked on me. I waited to find out what his assessment produced.
He stopped his horse at roughly twenty feet. Looked at me. Looked at the space around me. Looked at me again.
The sword went back.
He swung down from the saddle and walked the horse closer by the reins. Then he was next to me, and he opened the visor of his helmet, and I performed an involuntary recalibration of everything.
He looked like Calloway.
Well, he looked like Calloway if Calloway had been subjected to several additional years of wind and sun.
The jaw was the same fundamental structure.
Strong, slightly clenched, carrying the expression of someone who had been making consequential decisions long enough that the concentration had become architectural.
The eyes were darker. The stubble was more serious.
The grime of recent combat still lingered in the lines of his face.
This was, objectively, a problem. I had constructed a mental template for the kind of man I wanted, based substantially on James Calloway, and the man currently crouching in front of me was making Calloway look like a rough draft.
He had the same essential structure but it was weathered into something more final. The way a building looked better after it was around for a few decades.
He had earned his face. Every line of it.
My pulse had shifted into a register that had nothing to do with the three cans of NeuroXCore 8000 still pumping through my system.
He looked at me with total focus. He was genuinely trying to understand what he was looking at.
“I can tell you are not undead,” he said. His voice had deliberate precision. “How did you survive the night out here?”
I took a breath. “I don’t know. I just arrived. I’m not sure how. Where am I?”
He studied me for another moment. “You are outside Outpost Ely. The Zhaduun Mountains are behind you.” He said this like I should have already known this.
He looked at my sweater, my jeans, and my clearly not-armor and recalibrated. “Where are you from?”
“Philadelphia,” I said. “Pennsylvania. Which I’m recognizing, from your expression, is not a place you’ve heard of.”
He had not heard of it. His face was doing what faces do when they receive information that doesn’t fit their existing framework. He was not dismissing it, exactly, but filing it away while he dealt with the more immediate situation.
“You are four hundred miles from the Kingdom of Newardia,” he said carefully. “At the outpost line. Most people…” He chose his next words carefully. “Most people found outside this outpost do not survive the night.”
“I didn’t come here willingly. I woke up in this field with no memory of how I got here.”
The expression on his face was one I hadn’t seen before. He was confronted with something that fit nowhere inside his understanding of the world.
“You are not undead,” he said again, as if returning to the facts he could confirm was a reasonable organizational strategy.
He crouched to my eye level, close enough that I could see his attention fully shift into the mode of clinical assessment.
He looked at my neck. Both sides. He examined me with careful focus.
“What exactly,” I said, “are you looking for?”
He stopped.
Then he looked at me.
The look had changed.
Earlier, he’d been measuring risk. Then it shifted. His attention lingered. It moved to my mouth, then back to my eyes, then dropped briefly to my hair where it had fallen across my shoulder.
He looked at me the way men look at women they want.
Every woman knows that look. From a stranger at the end of a bar. From a man on the street who moves his gaze as you pass. Sometimes it’s welcome. Sometimes it isn’t. I don’t even think most men consciously realize they’re doing it.
My pulse did something it had no business doing given the circumstances.
He looked away. When he looked back, his expression had reassembled itself into something more professional.
“I am looking for fang marks,” he said.
“And?”
“You do not have any.”
“I’m aware of that.”
Fang marks. I filed that alongside undead, and the word vampire came to mind, which my brain flagged as obviously ridiculous and my nervous system quietly declined to dismiss.
I was being examined by a knight next to a medieval military installation with charcoal-colored mountains behind it. This was not the context in which one typically deployed the word ridiculous with confidence.
“You are safe,” he said. “I will take you inside. The outpost will shelter you until we can determine where you’ve come from and what to do about it.”
This was, I recognized, the most practical offer I had received since waking up in a field in what appeared to be a different world.
I looked at the mountains. I looked at the fortification.
I looked at him, at the quiet authority of him, the absence of performance in how he stood or spoke.
His competence did not require an audience.
“All right,” I said.
I folded the presentation notes as small as they would go and shoved them into my back pocket.
He turned to me.
“There,” he said, indicating the stirrup on the horse.
I attempted to use it. Incorrectly, apparently. My foot slipped sideways, accomplishing nothing except briefly convincing me I was about to die beneath several hundred pounds of muscle and irritation.
He steadied the horse with one hand and waited. To his credit, he did not laugh. His expression remained composed enough that I could interpret the silence as patience instead of restraint.
The second attempt worked. By “worked,” I mean that I was now on the horse rather than beside it. By the time I was seated, I felt less like someone who had mounted a horse and more like someone who had just failed the Presidential Fitness Test in high school gym class.
He climbed up behind me afterward with disorienting ease, the movement so efficient it made my own effort seem theoretical by comparison. One arm came around briefly to gather the reins.
He smelled like woodsmoke, metal, leather, and exertion. Not unpleasant. Just unmistakably physical in a way modern life rarely allowed people to be. The honest smell of someone accustomed to difficult work and uninterested in apologizing for it.
“Hold on,” he said.
I gripped the pommel in front of me.
I could feel his breathing. He was behind me, his chest against my back, his arms coming around me on both sides for the reins, his thighs bracketing mine, his body folded around me. Every breath he took moved through both of us.
I enjoyed being pressed against him while on horseback.
I had spent substantial private time constructing detailed hypotheticals about what it would feel like to be pressed against a man built like this, and the reality of it—his chest solid against my back, the shift and bunch of muscle through his armor as the horse moved, the warmth radiating off him even through the steel—was producing data that my analytical framework was not equipped to process neutrally.
He had it. Gravitas. He had that easy, un-self-conscious authority that announces itself before a man even opens his mouth.
There was a cruder phrase for exactly what he had.
Big dick energy.
This sounds reductive until you understand that it was never really about the physical—or only about the physical—but about the un-self-conscious authority of a man who moved through the world without the low-grade performance anxiety that characterized men who had less to be confident about.
The ease of it.
The absence of anything to prove.
I had been in his presence for approximately twenty minutes, and he had not once adjusted his posture, raised his voice, or done anything that suggested he had ever in his life needed anyone’s approval for anything. This was vanishingly rare in my experience.
So, I evaluated the relevant variables.
Based on the size of his hands and his height, moderation seemed unlikely.
The available evidence suggested something substantial.
Thick. Long. Substantial enough to leave its mark for days.
Focus, Meghan Callahan.
We rode toward the fortification.
I kept my hands where they were and focused on the physical reality of it. The horse moving beneath me, the armor solid against my back, the cool air on my face. These were real. I could feel them.
I was becoming increasingly convinced that hypothesis four was the correct one.
I was not in another city, country, or undiscovered region of Earth. I was somewhere else. A place where highways did not exist, where people carried swords as functional equipment, and where a knight considered it reasonable to check a stranger’s neck for fang marks.
The evidence was beginning to align.
More immediately, I had a practical problem requiring my attention. I was attempting to remain attached to a rapidly moving horse while a knight in armor sat behind me.
I tightened my grip on the pommel and concentrated on the more immediate objective of not falling off the horse.