She had already sensed she wasn’t wearing much beneath the robe, including a bra. The undergarments proved to be just a thin, long shift, skirt, and white leather boots. What had happened to her Earth clothes? The thought made a rush of questions and anxiety seize her and she desperately wanted to talk to the boys, so she rinsed her hands in a bowl, not finding soap, and headed back. She returned to where she’d left them, finding them talking quietly together. They turned as one and she saw only serious expressions.
Letting out a sigh, she sat on a couch that looked like the expensive furniture at the LaRue estate, albeit in medieval style. Out the window behind her waited a balcony that she wanted to check. It might be nice to view their setting without onlookers asking questions she had to dodge.
She asked, “What did I miss?”
Eric pursed his lips. “Well, we’ve agreed we’re not dreaming or having a shared delusion of some kind.”
Ryan added, “At first, I thought it was and didn’t take it at all serious. I wish I had. Now I promised that queen we’d do something.”
“Yeah,” said Matt. “I kind of wished you hadn’t.”
“How was I supposed to know?”
Matt joined Anna on the couch and pulled what looked like a spell book from a bag he’d arrived with. As he flipped through it, she thought that any artist could have drawn the fantastic pictures, but the pages had the look of frequent traffic. There were spills and stains, bent corners, and torn pages. Someone appeared to have used this thing. Extensively.
Anna remarked, “Something tells me this isn’t even Earth.”
Eric pulled out the short sword he’d arrived with and examined it while saying, “This…wizard, Sonneri, can probably tell us how this summoning thing works, to send us back, though I doubt we’ll understand it. It appears to be magic.”
“Or science that they think is magic,” observed Matt, not sounding like he believed it.
“If it’s just science,” Ryan began, pulling out his own sword, “there’d be more of it, right?”
Anna nodded. “Right. I saw no electricity, air conditioning, even plumbing. No planes or cars. Out the windows I only heard wagons and horses’ hooves on stone, and I saw people buying things with gold, silver, and bronze coins, not credit cards or even paper money. There’s certainly no internet, TV, or smart phones. If we’re still on Earth, we’ve gone back in time, which is just as implausible.”
At her own mention of smart phones, she cast a look at Ryan, but he hadn’t reacted. They didn’t need him realizing he couldn’t check on Daniel right now. Seeing his scrutiny of the sword, she looked and bluish-silver steel, with elegant, golden script flowing down the blade. Similar script curled around the shaft of Matt’s staff and graced the pages of the book he continued flipping through.
Eric interrupted her thoughts. “This sword is perfectly balanced.”
“This one, too,” said Ryan. “Really light, too. It’s surprising. It doesn’t seem like any metal I’ve ever seen.”
“I hope you don’t need them,” Anna remarked.
“Hard to argue with that,” admitted Eric, putting it away and feeling around his outfit for something, which she realized was throwing knives when he pulled several out, testing their balance in his hands. “Whatever happened at Stonehenge could’ve been technology we just don’t know about. You know, something like motion sensing lights could seem like magic to the ignorant. Even Sonneri appearing to light his pipe by snapping his fingers could just be technology that reacts to sound.”
Anna knew they might have indeed traveled by science regardless of what anyone on Honyn thought, and maybe it was better for people here to think that whatever the truth might be. After all, performing magic took skill, talent, knowledge and discipline, which were all reasons Matt was no Soliander. But science required none of these things. Once someone smart enough to build a device had done so, anyone could use it. People with automatic guns didn’t need skill to kill a highly trained Samurai. It was how the weak could defeat the strong and upset what some considered the natural order of things. Then again, magic items allowed unskilled people to cast spells, too, but within limits. If Soliander’s staff, which they apparently had, possessed some power to facilitate this Dragon Gate closing, maybe they stood a chance of doing that, but it was an unknown and far too risky.
“So what do we do?” Anna asked. “We can’t really do this quest.”
Eric nodded. “If this is for real, and we just decided it is, then there’s a real dragon out there, too, and it sounds like she wouldn’t hesitate to kill us for trying to screw up her plans.”
Ryan said, “True, but this world is in serious trouble, and they think they can’t protect themselves and we can, so we’d be turning our backs on them.”
“Not really, because we’re not who they want,” Matt observed, “and they don’t even know that. They’ve got to send us back and try to summon these four people again. Maybe it will work this time.”
Anna nodded, thinking she’d almost like to stick around and watch the result. “Yeah, it’s the only responsible thing to do.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Ryan agreed. “So when do we tell them?”
“Before this banquet tonight,” suggested Anna, feeling guilty. “We’ve got to do it before everyone gets too excited.”
“I think it’s a little late for that,” Eric remarked ruefully, rising. He cocked his head and Anna had the impression he’d heard something from another room. That impression grew when he started moving in that direction.
“Sonneri’s probably the one to send us back,”
