Page 60 of Beds and Blades

“The mages of Sanctumspire have known of your world for a very long time,” she said. “Longer than I have been alive. The records go back centuries. There are many accounts of women crossing from Earth, and rarer accounts of others crossing in the other direction. Some carried knowledge. Some carried stories. Some misremembered what they had seen. But the pattern is real.”

I sat back.

“You knew,” I said.

Caen did not look away.

“When I arrived. When you read me and verified where I came from. You knew about Earth.”

“Yes,” she said.

“And you chose not to tell me?”

“Yes.”

The answer was clean. No flinching. No defensive embroidery. I found that irritating.

“Why?”

She heard the question for what it was.

“Because you had arrived in an unknown world alone, without resources, context, or protection,” she said. “You needed to understand where you were before you could usefully understand what your arrival meant.”

“That is a very reasonable justification for deciding what information another person is ready to receive.”

“Yes,” Caen said. “It is.”

“I am not certain I find it entirely satisfying.”

“I did not expect you to.” Her mouth curved slightly. “I expected you to find it accurate and to be annoyed by it anyway.”

I felt the annoyance settle behind my ribs, sharp and orderly.

“If I had told you in those first hours,” she continued, “I would have given you weight without foundation. It would not have helped you. It would only have made you afraid. You were not ready.”

That landed too accurately for comfort.

I looked back toward the window. Sunlight. The mountains beyond the walls. Druvenfall waiting above all of it.

I closed my eyes and took a slow breath. I was annoyed. I was also not an idiot.

Caen had withheld information, and I had every right to object to that. But she was answering me now, and I needed the answers more than I needed the satisfaction of making her defend the order in which she had provided them.

I made a silent compact with myself. Less abrasion. More listening.

“Can you tell me who these people from Earth were?”

Caen’s expression shifted into something more careful.

“There have been many,” Caen said. “I do not know all their names. Only the accounts I studied during my years at Sanctumspire, and even those were incomplete. Fragments, mostly. Warnings preserved more carefully than histories. But every one of them was a woman.”

She folded her hands around her cup.

“One woman helped the High General of Newardia understand what Morvanna had become. Several were involved in the war against Zhor. Another helped break the Elven Sovarith Imperium’s rule over the humans of Traxzis. Her name was Hannah, or something close to it.”

Caen’s mouth tightened slightly.

“Hannah from Earth helped overthrow an empire?”