Back and Back
Chapter Twenty-Seven
BACK AND BACK
Leo
A rmed with the spell, the doll, and the instructions, Leo took off towards the courtyard at nightfall.
The dwarf had been hanging around the yew again during the day, but he had vanished once more by the time Leo reached the spot in the middle where he’d taken the fateful measurements that sent him falling through time.
Leo lay the doll down on the grass and took a measurement with his magimeter. There was no storm in sight this time, and if he was going to try to work magic for himself again, he might as well see if he could get some decent readings from it.
Leo had never had success with magic before. As a researcher of it, he’d tried it a number of times, of course. But if he had any sort of affinity for it, it seemed to have been buried somewhere deep, likely during his upbringing, which had been filled with more kooky superstitions and silly rituals than genuine magical practice.
At least, Leo thought it had. It would be fun to go back home with the magimeter someday, if he could bring himself to do it.
Leo opened the journal and began to read the incantation under the light of the full moon:
“Break thy bond, break thy chain,
Leave ‘til only good—”
He heard the slam of a door. The dwarf was there, running across the courtyard from the library.
Leo grabbed the doll and took off in the opposite direction. He ran into the cloister and opened the door into a hall he didn’t know, slamming it behind him.
He was in the western building. In his panic, he had run directly into the one place he was trying to avoid.
He looked around. It was dark in the corridor, with little moonlight reaching through the unbroken cloister to shine into the windows. He felt around for the light switch instinctively before remembering there wouldn’t be one.
There was a sinister laugh somewhere nearby.
Leo raced through the hall. He’d seen from outside that there were other doors into the cloister. If he just kept going, he was sure to reach them—
He smelled smoke.
There was that laughter again. It was closer to him now.
Leo kept running. The doors were there. If he could just get back to the courtyard, he could maybe outrun the dwarf and make it to Ceri’s room—
The doors were locked. Leo pulled on them helplessly.
He couldn’t see in the hallway. The smell of smoke was growing stronger.
He could pick the lock, he realized. He knew how. He needed something to apply torque and something to pick the pins within it. If he bent the magimeter, maybe it could apply the necessary torque—
He could see the fire now in the hall, spreading fast.
Did the doll have something he could use to rake the pins? He was running out of time. He coughed from the smoke. How could he have been so stupid to come in here?
He reached in his pockets, coming up empty.
Then he had it: his spectacles. If he could just bend the loop at the end of the arm—
Through the smoke, he saw the white face of the dwarf coming towards him.
“No!” he yelled. “Stay back!” He waved the magimeter towards him. Its meter was reading off the charts.
The dwarf kept coming. Leo threw the doll at him. The dwarf knocked it into the fire.
Desperate and not knowing what else to do, Leo screamed the lines of the incantation at him:
“Break thy bond! Break thy chain!
Leave ‘til only good remains!
By light of moon and fire of sun!
Let us end what has begun!”
The dwarf reached for him and grabbed him. He was incredibly strong. Leo fought and thrashed against him, but to no avail. The dwarf dragged him back down the hall, back towards the rapidly approaching fire.
Leo shouted the lines of the spell over and over. S'il vous pla?t, mes Dieux. Aidez-moi!
The dwarf said nothing. He dragged Leo along in silence.
This was it. The fire was so close now Leo could feel the terrible heat of it. There was no escaping this.
The laughter filled the hall until it became a scream. It wasn’t coming from the dwarf. Not this dwarf, at least.
The dwarf threw the door open and threw Leo out into the courtyard.
The edge of Leo’s journal had begun to catch fire. He threw it to the ground and stomped the flames out.
The dwarf was behind him. He fell to the ground and rolled, extinguishing the flames on his face and his shirt.
Leo looked at the dwarf. He’d thought this dwarf was the one who had set the fire, that’s what the others had said, but it seemed like he’d saved him.
The dwarf looked up, and Leo was struck with recognition.
“Groundskeeper Tomasar?”
“Who are you? What were you--?”
Leo’s world lurched backwards. He fell to the ground.
It felt as though the entire planet had come off its axis. It felt as though he could fall into the sky.
It turned and twisted and finally sent him crashing back into the ground as if he’d just fallen a dozen feet.
With the wind knocked out of him, he tried to pull himself up onto his elbow to look around.
The dormitory was gone. In its place was a plaster structure with dark wooden beams and a thatched roof. A child was crying somewhere in the distance.
The world lurched backwards again. It took him several minutes to recover this time.
The ground beneath him was dusted with snow. It was daylight again, the cloisters were gone, and the building that had replaced the dormitory was gone as well.
In its place were the stone walls of a castle.
The young Groundskeeper Tomasar was nowhere to be seen. The journal was still with him—thank the Gods—as was the magimeter.
Leo pulled himself upright. It was freezing cold out here. He needed to find shelter, quickly. Ceri’s room was gone, but could the magic still be in that space? There was a tower in its vicinity.
Were the rest of the objects still there? He’d left the lighter behind, but it seemed that the dwarf that had started the fire had gotten it anyway. Perhaps if he went to the wrong place in the castle, it wouldn’t matter that the objects were within the fairy magic ward.
What else was left? If the doll had been destroyed—and it seemed like it had, judging by the skip backwards in time—it would be just the dagger and the horn.
And maybe the lighter, although Leo wouldn’t mind it right about now.
Leo entered the tower through a door at its base. On the way in, he noticed the yew: all of the heartwood had returned, and the diameter of the trunk had shrunk a small amount. It was still an enormous tree, but it seemed as though Leo must have gone back centuries.
Of course, the castle was a decent clue to that itself.
Leo followed a narrow spiral staircase up into the tower after pausing a moment at the lowest hearth to warm his hands. There seemed to be no one around, but Leo didn’t count on that to last.
There was a landing and another hearth with a single bed beneath the staircase. On the floor, Leo saw the horn, the dagger, and the bag of food.
He placed the objects back into the bag. He knew it was a risk, but if the world kept changing, he worried he might lose them.
Then he collapsed onto the bed. His lungs still ached from the smoke.
Groundskeeper Tomasar saved him from the fire. Had that been the way he’d gotten his scars?
Was this version of this place somehow connected to the past? It seemed impossible—not just because time travel was impossible, but also because this clearly wasn’t the full version of events. Where were all the people? Why could he see some and not others?
As if the world could hear him, he heard sounds from outside.
There was a small rectangular window that peered out into the courtyard, or the bailey, as it would have been called in this time.
There was smoke from beyond the dining hall.
Leo heard something tinny in the distance like sword fighting.
It was sword fighting, Leo realized.
Leo opened the bag and measured the dagger.
Oh, yes. It was definitely the dagger’s turn.
There was still the spell. He didn’t know if it had worked before, or if it had been the fire that managed to destroy the doll.
He looked down into the bailey. The ground was covered with snow now, but he could tell the location of the spot he’d used before from the location of the yew.
He heard a crash and saw dust and stone go flying from the ramparts across the way.
The castle was under siege.
Leo grabbed the bag and the thin woolen blanket from the bed and ran back down the stairs, sprinting across the bailey with what was left of his energy.
He made it to the spot. He placed the dagger on the ground, and as he did so, the ground rumbled.
A battering ram? Leo heard voices shouting in a language he could not understand.
He tried the spell.
Then he tried it again.
It was no good. Nothing was happening. The dagger read as high as ever on the magimeter.
“Inward!” a voice shouted from entirely too nearby.
That was a word Leo knew.
There was a thundering sound of armored knights entering into the bailey.
They were elves, Leo realized. His own people. Some of them likely still lived.
They didn’t seem to recognize him.
Leo grabbed the dagger and the bag and ran for the tower, screaming.
A whipping sound flew past his ear: an arrow. They were bloody shooting at him!
“I’m an elf! I’m an elf!” he shouted at them as he ran. He realized his modern school apparel and Modern Loegrian language probably weren’t helping his case any.
“Elfe! Ye olde elfe!” he yelled. The only thing he knew about Middle Loegrian was that it had a lot more “E”s in it.
An arrow pierced the wood of the tower door, and then another.
If he kept running for it, they’d hit him for sure.
Leo cut back and forth across the bailey, trying to move as unpredictably as possible.
And then, in the corner opposite the yew, he spotted his salvation.
A forge. Leo could see the fire burning within it through the large window in front of it.
Leo reached into the bag for the dagger as he ran, hoping to get it by the handle.
Or the blade. He’d take the blade at this point.
“You see that?” he said to the dagger once he had it in his hand. “That’s where you came from. You’re going back there.”
An arrow struck his bag. Another grazed his long ear.
He was nearly there now. He leapt over the windowsill and took cover underneath it. They would be on him in seconds; they were as fast as he was, and they were wearing armor.
He said the incantation three more times—who knew if it helped?—and threw the dagger into the fire.
Oh Gods, they were still coming.
Leo crawled around on the floor, trying to get under a table.
He’d nearly made it there, nearly made it, when the world lurched backwards again.
When Leo awoke, there was no castle to be seen.
The ground was clear and dry. Tall trees loomed overhead, their yellow leaves falling gently.
He heard movement nearby.
He sat up on pure instinct. He was exhausted, but his impulse to survive refused to let him give up so easily.
A woman emerged from behind a tree. She was wearing strange furs, and behind her were a pair of white, feathery wings.
She said something to Leo in another language he didn’t know.
He scrambled to his feet, nearly falling over from the effort.
“Please. I need a break. Can we have a break before you do whatever it is you’re going to do to try to kill me?”
The woman shook her head.
Leo sighed.
“Come on with it then,” he said. He stretched out his hand in expectation.
The woman gestured to someone else behind the trees. It was another woman, this one older.
In her hands was a horn. It was just like the horn in the bag.
“I guess that makes sense,” said Leo. “What are you going to do with it? Gore me?”
The women shook their heads and said something to each other in their language.
The older woman held out the horn to Leo, keeping a careful distance from him.
Leo reached for it. Might as well get it over with.
The horn was filled with water.
“Water?” asked Leo.
The women shook their heads, but they gestured to him to drink.
Leo smelled it. It smelled of nothing, but for all he knew, it was filled with deadly poison.
He took a sip anyway. He was too tired to fight it, and Gods, was he thirsty.
It was water.
More men and women emerged from behind the trees. Leo tried to move away from them, but they came over to him slowly, gently, like they were approaching a frightened animal.
They brought some of the furs, and they wrapped them around Leo’s shoulders.
He shivered and pulled the furs closer to him.
The strangers touched his ears and whispered in their strange language. One of them tied something soft, a plant of some kind, to his ear that was bleeding from the arrow wound.
Then they led him into the trees. He followed them up a ramp and into a hut.
Inside was a set of furs for sleeping.
Leo looked at the strangers. They gestured for him to lie down.
He didn’t know what to do. He was scared and exhausted and had no idea whether to trust these people.
They gestured to the bed again. A child ran in, laughing, to show him how to lie down. She must have thought he didn’t know how. Then she got up and fluttered her wings to land on her father’s shoulders.
They weren’t going to hurt him. They wanted to help him.
Leo slowly lay down on the bed and cried.