Page 20 of Beds and Blades

Then I got into the bed.

It was narrow, and the blanket was wool, and it smelled like woodsmoke.

The mattress was extremely comfortable.

It was not my memory foam mattress at home. Nothing was my memory foam mattress at home, which I had spent four hundred dollars on in my second year of graduate school and considered the single best financial decision I had ever made.

That said, it was comfortable. Supportive. The comfort of something that had been doing its job for a long time and was good at it.

The hearth threw warm amber light across the ceiling.

Outside, distantly, I could hear the sounds of the garrison. Voices, the clanging of metal, the low hum of a place that did not stop.

I closed my eyes. I surrendered myself to the warmth of the hearth and drifted into sleep.

Chapter five

Siege

Iwoke to trumpets. Actual trumpets. Plural, close, and clearly communicating: something is fucking wrong right fucking now.

This was more visceral than the alarm I had been using on my iPhone since my sophomore year of college. Unfortunately, there was no snooze button that I could press to make the military trumpets go silent.

I was upright before I was fully conscious.

I went to the window.

The moon was wrong in the same way the stars were wrong. It was bigger than it should have been, its surface bright and textured but lacking the familiar craters and maria I had spent my entire life looking at. It cast the kind of light I had previously associated with stage productions rather than actual moonlight.

Under it, the courtyard below was alive with organized motion. Soldiers moving with urgency.

I stood at the window for another thirty seconds, conducting a rapid analysis of my options.

Option one: Remain in my quarters. This was the safe choice, the sensible choice, the choice that a reasonable person in a foreign world with no combat training and no standing in this garrison would make.

Option two: Go find out what was happening. I was a military historian in the middle of an actual military engagement. The idea of remaining in a small stone room while history unfolded on the other side of the wall was genuinely, physically intolerable.

The old Meghan would have stayed in the room.

I would have sat on the narrow bed and waited for someone else to tell me what was happening. Waited to be told what to think about it. Waited to find out whether I was allowed to have feelings about it at all.

Something had shifted since I arrived in this world. I was no longer the old Meghan.

I got up.

Mytharo was going to get a different Meghan than the one from Earth.

The new Meghan was already looking for her clothes.

The red sweater and dark jeans were on the desk where I had left them before falling asleep. The clothes were the last physical evidence that I had, until yesterday morning, been a doctoral student in Philadelphia with a presentation to give and a committee to disappoint.

I picked up the sweater. I looked at it. I put it back down. It was a perfectly good sweater for 21st-century Earth.

It was not a perfectly good sweater for whatever was happening outside this window.

I needed something else. Fortunately, more Mytharo-appropriate clothes were delivered to the room while I was sleeping.

A large trunk filled with neatly folded women’s clothing sat by the door. I looked inside and chose an outfit.