An Accident of Stars (2 page)

T
he portal point
turned out to be a nature strip. Technically, it was part of the school grounds, but happily for Gwen, it was right at the outskirts, and – better still – deserted. True, there were some classrooms nearby, but most of their windows were on the other side of the building, leaving the strip in a convenient blind spot.

Now all she had to do was wait.

Gwen hated waiting.

Irritable with unspent energy, she sat down on a tree stump and tried to remind herself why it was she'd left Kena in the first place. With Tevet dead and the rebellion with her, Gwen and her allies had lost their best shot at removing Leoden from power. They'd needed to lie low, regroup, and after a solid year away from Earth, Gwen had taken the opportunity to accomplish both tasks while proving to her parents, who'd retired to Australia years ago, that she was, in fact, still alive. Such reunions were always bittersweet, complex; none of her relatives or remaining friends had any idea how she lived her life, which made the act of lying to them more chore than holiday. And yet she was glad to have visited, if only because it left her that much happier to return to her (dangerous, wonderful) reality. She'd kept in contact with Trishka through the dreamscape, however patchily – and now, at last, she was going back to help fix the mess she'd made. Those were the facts, but just at that moment, they didn't stop her from feeling as if she'd slunk off with her tail between her legs.

Guilt, after all, was the rightful province of people who'd had a hand in ruining whole countries, whether they'd meant it or not. Rationality didn't enter into it. Her lips quirked in private irony: her son, were he privy to her thoughts, would doubtless see things differently. But then Louis had chosen a life stranger even than Gwen's, and though she loved him dearly, she didn't always understand him. Which was doubtless true of most parents, for all that she'd raised him in somewhat exceptional circumstances, even by the standards of the Many – or had she? Certainly Louis himself had seen nothing unusual in it, and if he harboured any resentment on that point, he'd never brought it up. Not for the first time, Gwen wondered if children, even when grown, weren't inherently more complex than the multiverse, and decided, now as always, that some questions were better left unanswered.

Like water flowing downstream, her thoughts turned from Louis towards the white girl – Saffron – and that parting look of gratitude on her face. Helping her in the moment had been easy, but as with so much else, Gwen hadn't really changed anything. That awful boy would likely still continue to bother her, and the school's apparent indifference to the problem would persist.

I was still right to help
.

It was a small comfort, but against the looming weight of Leoden's coup and Kena's complexities, Gwen would take what victories she could find.

S
ighing
, Saffron put her head on her desk and stared sideways at the clock. Her last class of the day was Personal Development, Health and Physical Education, also known as PDHPE, also known as a complete and utter waste of time, partly because she'd be dropping it next year, but mostly because the kind of sex education deemed suitable for state school students was vastly less accurate, detailed or relevant than anything she could find on one of a half-dozen sex positive YouTube channels run by people who, unlike Mr Marinakis, could say
penis
without twitching.

I need to find her,
Saffron thought.
I need to say
– well, not
thank you
, because she'd already said that, but… something. She wanted to explain herself, or ask the woman's advice, or maybe just spend five minutes in the company of an adult who might actually take her seriously. It was irrational and pointless and she couldn't stop thinking about it, and when the last bell finally rang, she ended up walking towards the bus lines in a virtual fugue state.

“Saff! Hey, wait up!”

Saffron stopped and turned, smiling as her little sister, Ruby, came running over.“Didn't you hear me?” Ruby asked, glaring. “I had to call you, like, five times!”

“Well, I'm hearing you now. What's up?”

They started walking together, Ruby launching straight into a lengthy description of her day. But as much as Saffron usually enjoyed her sister's acid observations about high school life, she couldn't quite focus; she was only half-listening, still scanning the school for the mystery teacher.

“…so I told her, look, this isn't a Monty Python sketch, there aren't any strange women lurking in the nature strip, and she said–”

“What?” said Saffron, suddenly jerking back to the moment. She stopped, a hand on Ruby's arm. “What about strange women?”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “God, you really don't listen, do you? I literally
just said
, Cora was
convinced
there was some random lady hanging out in the nature strip behind the chem labs all afternoon, and I just… Hey! Where are you going?”

“Forgot something!” Saffron said, already moving off. Remembering that she'd left her phone charging in her bedroom, she turned and added, “Tell mum and dad I'll be home later, OK?”

“Tell them yourself!” Ruby called, but Saffron didn't answer.

Heart pounding, she made her way across campus, trying and failing to explain to herself why on Earth this felt so important – or why, more to the point, she felt so damn certain that the woman Cora claimed to have seen was her mystery teacher.
What the hell are you hoping to accomplish here?
she asked herself.
School's over, dumbass – even if she was there earlier, she'll be long gone by now.
And yet she kept walking, ignoring the awkward tug in her chest that said she should just go back to the bus lines. She passed the science block, turned the corner, and stopped.

There, standing in the middle of the nature strip, was the mystery teacher. She was side-on to Saffron, but unaware of her presence, head cocked as though listening for something. Saffron licked her lips and stepped closer, too concerned with trying to think of what to say to question why the woman was there at all.

And then it happened.

Scarcely three metres from where the teacher stood, a crack appeared in the world: a gaping, pink-tinged tear in reality's flank, scything through the naked air like some sort of impossible
portal
. It almost hurt to look at, and as Saffron gulped and thought
it's real, I'm seeing this and it's really real
, her whole body went weak with shock, the way it had done last year when a clumsy driver had knocked her off her bike. Her blood was alive with panic, fear, excitement – what should she do? What should
they
do? And only then did she see that the teacher was smiling, striding towards the gap as though its presence was the most natural thing on Earth. In the split second before the teacher crossed the portal's threshold, Saffron made a decision. All she could think of was that she'd wanted to talk to her, and now she was escaping, moving through a hole in the world that had no business existing
anywhere
, let alone in a nature strip behind the chem labs. And so, in her shock, she did the only thing she could think of. Saffron ran forwards and followed her through the gap.

B
lack light blinded her
. A frightened cry died in Saffron's throat, and then she was stumbling, falling into a small, square room. The walls were made of pale stone, the only light coming from cracks in a wooden door. The transition was so sudden as to be unreal, but when she turned, the rip – the portal, whatever it was – had vanished. All she saw was another stone wall and the mystery teacher, staring at her in shock.

“Oh, no. No, no,
no
–”

“I followed you,” said Saffron, stunned. “I wanted to talk, and then I just–”

“You
just
? You senseless, impulsive…” She broke off, visibly willing herself to calm, and into the silence, Saffron asked, “Where are we?”

“Somewhere you shouldn't be,” came the snapped response. “Down the rabbit hole. Through the wardrobe. Over the bloody rainbow.”

“You're not a teacher,” Saffron said. The realisation left her fighting inappropriate laughter. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

The woman sighed. “My name's Gwen Vere.”

“Guinevere? Like the queen?”

“Like my father fancied himself a comedian. Gwen-space-Vere. First name and last.” She said it with the tired cadence of someone used to explaining their name to strangers. “Just call me Gwen.”

“All right. Are we, um…?” She nodded her head at the door. “Are we going outside?”

“Eventually, yes. Not yet.”

“OK,” said Saffron, strangely relieved to hear it. Swallowing, she put down her bag and wondered what to say. “So, ah. You come here often?”

Gwen raised an eyebrow, lips quirking in reluctant humour. Saffron mentally replayed the question, recognised its resemblance to a bad pick-up line, and blushed to the roots of her hair. “I didn't mean it like that!”

“I'm flattered, really.”

“That's not what…” She broke off, feeling strangely lightheaded, and looked at the room again. The floor was made from the same stone as the walls, the uneven surface covered in dirt, dust, straw. There were some empty sacks in a corner, a broken crate in another. It was all so achingly mundane, it made no sense at all that she'd come here by magic. Maybe she'd been drugged instead, knocked out and put in a van and driven away, and the hole in the world was just some hallucinatory way of dealing with a traumatic situation. “Go on,” Gwen said, suddenly. “Get it out of your system. Tell me what you're trying to convince yourself actually happened, and see if you can still put faith in it once you've said it out loud.”

“I'm not trying–”

“Of course you aren't.” Her mouth was hard, but her eyes were soft. “Oh, child. You don't know what you've done.”

“It's just a room,” said Saffron, mouth dry.
A shining rip in the world.
“We could be anywhere. We could've… I could be hallucinating the rest.”

“Could you?”

Saffron didn't answer. She scuffed her shoe on the ordinary dirt of the ordinary floor, feeling the exact same mix of fear and exhilaration as when she'd first cut class to hide on the library roof, as though her understanding of rules and limits had quietly rearranged itself.

A tramp of footsteps, coming from outside. Gwen froze, and Saffron inexplicably froze with her.

Someone banged on the door.

It wasn't knocking; more like a solid thump. The handle gave an abortive turn. The door rattled in its frame, unyielding, and whoever was trying to get in – a man, by the sound of it – called out in an unfamiliar language. Faintly, Saffron heard two more people respond, another man and a woman. The door shook again, harder than before, as though someone were kicking it. A woman's laughter followed, more words were exchanged, and then they retreated, the unintelligible conversation growing faint with distance.

Saffron let out a breath she didn't remember holding. There were plenty of languages she'd never heard before, and whose phonetics she was therefore unlikely to recognise. For all she knew, they might be in the Ukraine, or Scandinavia, or Timbuktu. But just at that moment, with the sight of a pink-tinged portal seared into her memory, she doubted it.

“
Arakoi
, most likely
,
” Gwen said, jolting her back to the present. Her voice was even, but the tightness of her shoulders said the abortive visit had rattled her. “Vex Leoden's private forces. They've taken to patrolling outside the city walls since he came to power. Rumour has it, he's started actively looking for temple castoffs and runaways to train as soldiers – – anyone happy to use magic without conscience.”

“Prove it,” Saffron said.

“Prove that magic exists?”

“Prove that we're really in a, a–” god, it sounded so
stupid
, “– another
world
, and not some random cupboard.”

“Open the door, you mean? Let us out?”

“Just so.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's locked from the outside.”

“How
convenient
.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.” Gwen's tone turned serious. “If it hadn't been, the
arakoi
would've found us. Luck only knows what they'd have made of you, but if they'd recognised me, I doubt things would've gone well.”

“Recognise you? Why on Earth would they recognise
you
?”

Gwen sighed. “We're not on
Earth
, girl – we're in Kena, on the outskirts of the capital city of Karavos. And that, I'm afraid, is very much the point.”

Saffron felt as though she were spiralling inwards, teetering on a precipice she couldn't truly see.
Sarcasm is armour,
she told herself, but for once she couldn't think of a comeback. Her mental blank was interrupted by a soft, sudden knock on the door, followed instantly by the scrape of a key in the lock. Saffron watched as the door swung open, heart right back in her mouth. The light was bright enough that she raised a hand to her eyes, watching through a crack in her fingers as Gwen strode out. Her body blocked the sun as she crossed the threshold, and in that fleeting moment of darkness, Saffron was more afraid of abandonment than of whatever lay outside.

She grabbed her bag and followed.

A white sun many times the size it ought to have been sat low on an unfamiliar horizon. Forested hills and rocky soil stretched out in all directions, blanketed here and there with long, thin grass the colour of gum leaves. Even the sky was the wrong shade of blue. Saffron started shaking. If not for that impossible sun, she could've believed she was just in another country on Earth, but now–

“Shut your mouth, girl. The flies here are enormous.”

Saffron shut her mouth. Gwen placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“And stay close to me, hmm? You really don't want to get lost.”

There was a cough, and only then did Saffron remember that someone had let them out. Turning, she came face to face with a slim, gold-skinned woman with wide-set eyes and four black braids looped back around the rest of her unbound hair. She wore a long, red skirt that was slit at the sides; her belt was tight, made of large, overlapping bronze discs, and her creamy blouse was stiff at the neck and collar with red embroidery. She looked to be in her late twenties, and her lips were twisted in an expression of obvious surprise. Raising an eyebrow, she turned to Gwen and spoke in a language that Saffron didn't understand.

“Gwen?” she asked, hesitantly.

“It's all right. She's a friend.” Gwen made a wry noise. “Well, sort of. It's a long story.”

“
W
ho's the girl
?” asked Pix, by way of greeting. In her court accent, the clipped Kenan words sounded oddly fluid, an affectation that Gwen had always found strangely delightful. “Don't tell me you've found an acolyte. Really,” she added, forestalling Gwen's protests with a raised hand, “
don't
tell me. Not yet, anyway. We need to get moving. The arakoi are still nearby.” And yet she hesitated, looking Saffron over with a mix of puzzled disdain and shock. Despite every danger of the situation, Gwen was not above taking a moment to appreciate the effect that the girl was having on Pix's cultural sensibilities. Kena being what it was, the only white-skinned locals were Vekshi expatriates, whose women were known for and distinguished by their shaved heads, loose trousers and long tunics. Saffron, with her dishevelled hair and school skirt, must have looked like a complete inversion of stereotype. Though she usually enjoyed poking holes in Pix's worldview, Gwen knew that they didn't have time for it now.
More's the pity.

“There were complications,” she said instead.

“Aren't there always?” Pix muttered, moving at last. “You're just lucky I brought three
roa
– they needed the exercise.”

“Only three?” Gwen blinked, surprised. “Where's Matu?”

Pix's face turned grim. “I'll tell you when we reach the compound.”

As Saffron stared uncomprehendingly between them, Gwen sighed and switched to English. “We need to get going,” she explained. “And–”

The enormity of the problem Saffron represented hit her like a slap. Language at least was an easy fix, provided they could get her to the compound – but
could
they get there? Curling her right hand into a fist, Gwen gave a small shake of her head and forced herself to confront each hurdle in turn.

“We have to ride somewhere,” she said. The thin grass crunched beneath her boots. “Have you ever been on a horse?”

“A few times, at riding camps and excursions and things like that.” Saffron shouldered her bag, glancing around the landscape as though fearing attack. “Are there horses here?”

“Yes,” said Gwen. “But they're less common in cities than… other alternatives.” She didn't attempt to describe the roa; the main thing was that Saffron had riding experience. That problem dealt with, she turned back to Pix and switched to Kenan. “You brought me a
taal
to wear
?
”

Pix wrinkled her nose. “Don't I always?”

“Good; Saffron can have it.” Her own skirt, blouse and steel-toed boots were odd, by Kenan standards, but Gwen looked Uyun, not Kenan, and Saffron's need was manifestly greater. “We should hurry. Being exposed like this puts eyes on my neck.”

“Better eyes on the neck than knives in the heart,” Pix said, completing the proverb.

As Pix sped up, Gwen turned and hooked her arm through Saffron's. It was less a gesture of comfort than it was an attempt to keep her close, but either way, the girl didn't object.

“What happens now?” Saffron asked, meekly.

Gwen glanced around them. The building they'd exited was one of several empty storage barns, clustered starkly on the hilltop like teeth in a codger's gum. Trishka had brought her through to this distant place for the same reason Gwen had been forced to enter from the high school: they'd used the compound too often and too recently, and each new portal there was an unnecessary risk. They'd hoped to avoid the arakoi patrols by keeping their distance from the city, but evidently they still hadn't travelled far enough.

Leoden's getting paranoid,
she thought; it was hardly surprising, after Tevet's rebellion. And yet she couldn't quite shake the suspicion that the increase in patrols was more personal than that, as though Leoden was specifically looking for
her
. It was sheer narcissism, of course – Gwen had erred badly in helping Leoden claim the throne, but the error had been in his favour, and even though she'd opposed him since, she was still only one person. He'd wanted her dead in the aftermath of his ascension, but now that he'd consolidated his power – now that her knowledge of his treachery was no immediate threat – what could he possibly want with her? It was a question with many frightening answers, and she felt momentarily furious that now, of all times, she'd managed to find herself saddled with a clueless initiate. But as Saffron looked to her for an explanation, Gwen remembered her own first foray into the Many, as she'd come to term the myriad, magically accessible worlds, and wondered,
Was I any better, or less naïve?

As they passed into the shadow of nearby trees she heard the low, distinctive crooning of the roa, and smiled.

“Now,” she said, “we see if you really can ride.”

W
eird day
, Saffron thought, indulging in the sort of understatement that tends to accompany severe shock. She'd locked down on her desire to run screaming, and was now in an alternate mental state characterised by selective ignorance and a vague sense of building panic.
Rapidly getting weirder
.

Their guide, Pixeva, led them away from their arrival building and down the curve of a hill. Though the surrounding countryside was hardly exceptional – Saffron could see nothing other than trees, grass, and yet more hills – small details kept on leaping out at her, like the shade and shape of the leaves and the brightness of some unfamiliar red flowers. But as they entered a copse of strange, twisting trees, she found herself confronted with much more startling proof that this was an alien place.

Saddled, bridled and hitched to a tree were three utterly foreign creatures, snuffling in what Saffron could only hope was a friendly greeting. She couldn't help herself: she let out a yelp, then clapped an embarrassed hand to her mouth.

“They're called roa,” Gwen said, lips twitching. “Intelligent, sociable beasties, though they stink like wet dogs.”

Beastie.
The single word coiled in her chest. Ruby's kitten at home was called Beastie, and that sudden, unexpected reminder of his white-sock paws and deep purr almost brought her to the brink of tears. Yet it wasn't sadness that moved her so, but poignancy: some weird and beautiful emotion all wrapped up in the instant at which she'd drawn a link between the world she'd left and this new place she'd come to.
Kena
, Gwen had called it. All at once, the roa were nothing compared to the fact that she'd watched magic tear a hole in the world – in the
worlds
, she corrected herself, feeling a thrill of excitement at the plural – and been brave enough to cross over. She approached the roa, made bold by the fearlessness with which their guide was rummaging through the panniers attached to one of their saddles. They looked a bit like cuddly velociraptors – that is, assuming your definition of
velociraptor
included a camel-like head, “hands” with fingers like a tree-frog's toes, and a long-haired coat that resembled nothing so much as a shag pile carpet. Each one was at least Saffron's height at the shoulder, their colouration ranging from a dirty white-and-tan mix to a sort of gunmetal blue. Their ears swivelled attentively at each little sound, while their long, plumed tails swept slowly back and forth, though whether the motion denoted happiness, boredom or anger, Saffron couldn't tell.