Her voice trailed off and then picked up again. “Heather’s parents were very successful people, but it was just my mom and me.”
He said, “That had to be kind of hard.”
She said, “Yes,” in a tone that told him just how hard it had been. He didn’t know what to say to her after that. Fortunately, she spoke. “What do people do for fun here? I mean, the humans. There’s no television or nightclubs. You don’t have phones. What do they do all day?”
He said, “Live. If they want to talk to each other, they just go to each other’s houses or stop in the street or in the stores.”
She said, in an abrupt shift of subject, “Did you spend much time in my world when you were younger? I know you said you went, but did you spend a lot of time there?”
He said, “Yes. By the time my parents took me over there, though, your world was much different from the world they had known.”
She said, “Tell me what it was like, my world I mean, when you were young.”
He said, “Well, we didn’t go to your city. We went to the city in Europe. That’s actually where my family is from. Back then, the portal opened there and nowhere else. It was beautiful. There were so many people, even then. There was a man and he had a court. My parents managed to use a lot of the things we have here, the jewels and so on, to buy things to make us look like we were very rich. Then we snuck into the court.”
She stopped walking and faced him. Her mouth hung open. “Why on earth would you do that?”
He burst into laughter. My father protected a king. My aunt, Max’s mother, was a princess.”
Her eyes went wide and round. “A real princess?”
What was it with women and princesses anyway? “Yes, a real princess. Her father was a king. And she was to be queen. That’s probably why the wizard fell in love with her. He was really in love with power.”
She asked, “Was your mother a princess?”
They started walking again, and that time her body was closer to his. He wanted to slide his arm around her neck and bring her closer still, but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure how she felt about what happened between them or if she wanted him to touch her, so he kept his hands to his side. “No, she was a witch.”
“Okay, now you’re kidding me, right?”
He said, “No, not at all. She was going to be burned at the stake and would have been if my father had not fought his way through a crowd and freed her from it.”
She sighed. “Oh! How romantic!”
Blake knew there had been nothing at all romantic about that. There had been a lot of priests who had wanted to see his mother dead, a whole crowd of villagers determined to enjoy her death is entertainment, and only his father and a sword standing between her and death. Times had been different then, stark and often brutal.
He said, “He loved her very much.” That was true. His father had loved his mother enough to ride into that village knowing that he might never ride out again, that he might join the woman that he had fallen in love with on that pyre. To his amusement, he realized that she was correct. It was in fact, quite romantic.
She said, “Guys just don’t do that anymore. Now you’re lucky if you get them to pay for their own damn coffee. Oh, but then again, we also have indoor plumbing now. Speaking of which, the castle has it. How did you know to put that in? I mean it’s not like it existed back when your parents were in my world.” How she could go from something as romantic as a story as his parents, to something as practical as plumbing boggled his mind.
“It was the dwarves. They live in caves you know.”
Her shoulder brushed against his, sending little thrills down his side. “Wait a minute. What do dwarves have to do with toilets that flesh?”
He said, “The dwarves have always had them. It seemed like a quite practical thing to have so we put them in.”
She muttered, “To think, my world’s plumbing could’ve been modernized much faster if we just believed in dwarves.”
For some reason that struck him as funny and he burst into laughter. She looked at him for a second and then she burst into laughter too. She said, “I want to think that you’re just pulling my leg. That there’s no way in the world that a dwarf gave you guys indoor plumbing, but I’m terribly afraid that you’re serious.”
Between guffaws, he said, “I assure you, I’m quite serious.”
She asked, “Are there still dwarves?”
He said, “Yes, they are still here. They don’t like us much. They really don’t like humans. They’re not evil though; they just prefer to keep to themselves. You’ll mostly know that you stumbled into a dwarf’s layer by the fact that you take a step down on something that appears to be solid earth, but which is in fact not. Before you can even blink, you’ll be tumbling down into a mine shaft. They’re constantly mining. It’s a wonder they haven’t riddled this entire world with sinkholes.”
She said, “Is that were all the diamonds and things that are all in the furniture come from, the dwarves?”
He said, “Yes. They show up every now and then with a problem they can’t solve for themselves. They’ve gotten into a battle with the Orcs or some other creature and they need assistance. The pay is in the things they mine.”
