Page 9 of Beds and Blades

So, I evaluated the relevant variables.

Based on the size of his hands and his height, moderation seemed unlikely.

The available evidence suggested something substantial.

Thick. Long. Substantial enough to leave its mark for days.

Focus, Meghan Callahan.

We rode toward the fortification.

I kept my hands where they were and focused on the physical reality of it. The horse moving beneath me, the armor solid against my back, the cool air on my face. These were real. I could feel them.

I was becoming increasingly convinced that hypothesis four was the correct one.

I was not in another city, country, or undiscovered region of Earth. I was somewhere else. A place where highways did not exist, where people carried swords as functional equipment, and where a knight considered it reasonable to check a stranger’s neck for fang marks.

The evidence was beginning to align.

More immediately, I had a practical problem requiring my attention. I was attempting to remain attached to a rapidly moving horse while a knight in armor sat behind me.

I tightened my grip on the pommel and concentrated on the more immediate objective of not falling off the horse.

Chapter three

High Commander

Iheld on to the saddle with determination. I had survived getting onto the horse and was not going to let the rest of the journey undo that achievement.

The wind was cool and sharp and smelled like nothing I had a category for.

I had made a decision, somewhere between the field and the horse and the man currently taking up an inadvisable amount of my attention: I was going to operate on the assumption that this was real.

Everything I could observe suggested it was real.

The grass had been wet under my hands. The air smelled like something that had never shared space with a combustion engine. The morning sky had stars in it. The man behind me had blood on his armor that was not decorative.

More importantly, the alternative hypotheses were not operationally useful.

Suppose this was a hallucination.

Fine.

The correct response to a hallucination involving armed strangers, fortifications, and large predatory-looking mountains was not to begin experimenting with reality. The correct response was still to avoid danger, gather information, and refrain from doing anything catastrophically stupid.

Suppose I was dead.

In that case, the afterlife appeared to have a military frontier, a functioning chain of command, and a concerning number of references to the undead. The sensible course of action remained exactly the same.

Every path led to the same conclusion.

Act as though it was real.

In my study of military history, the commanders who survived almost never had perfect information. They accepted the uncertainty and decided anyway.

Freaking out would not alter the facts on the ground. It would only make me less capable of dealing with them.

Real.