The Land of Always Summer

Book II of III

Book One: The Stranded
Book Two: The Land of Always Summer

Christopher G. Nuttall

http://www.chrishanger.net
http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/ChristopherGNuttall
https://mewe.com/page/5cd32005dc9f631c9973f058

Cover by Brad Fraunfelter

www.BFillustration.com

All Comments and Reviews Welcome!

Contents
Contents
Cover Blurb
Prologue: England, 1605
Prologue II: Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter One: Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Two: Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Three: Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Four: Edinburgh, Earth, Now
Chapter Five: York, Earth, Now
Chapter Six: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Seven: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Eight: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Nine: York, Earth, Now
Chapter Ten: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Eleven: Near Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Twelve: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Thirteen: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Fourteen: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Fifteen: Manchester, Earth, Now
Chapter Sixteen: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Seventeen: Manchester, Earth, Now
Chapter Eighteen: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Nineteen: Manchester, Earth, Now
Chapter Twenty: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Twenty-One: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Twenty-Two: Lake District, Earth, Now
Chapter Twenty-Three: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Twenty-Four: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Twenty-Five: London, England, Now
Chapter Twenty-Six: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Boundary Line, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Gatehouse/Boundary Line, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Thirty: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Thirty-One: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Thirty-Two: York, Earth, Now
Chapter Thirty-Three: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Thirty-Four: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Thirty-Five: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Thirty-Six: York, Earth, Now
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion/York, Earth
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion/York, Earth
Chapter Forty: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion/York, Earth
Afterword

Cover Blurb

Centuries ago, the magic left our world ... and the magicians went with it, stepping into the Gates to Mystic Albion and leaving OldeWorld - Earth - forever.  Since then, the two worlds have remained separate, until now.

When they found themselves trapped on Earth, Richard, Brains and Helen befriended Janet and Steve, a brother and sister growing up in a poverty-stricken estate, and taught them the basics of magic, before discovering that sinister forces were slowly moving against them. Now, Richard and Brains have taken Janet back to Mystic Albion to study magic, while Helen and Steve remained behind to track down the rogue magicians and stop them before it is too late.

But as Janet struggles to get used to practicing magic, and living in a whole new world, it becomes clear that the two worlds are not finished with each other yet, and dark forces are lurking at the edge of the gate, ready to bring them into conflict once more …

Prologue: England, 1605

Cecil, Lord Burghley, sensed the messenger coming before the mounted rider galloped up to the gates, showed his credentials to the guards and was shown straight into the mansion. The gossamer-thin wards protecting the estate were nowhere near as powerful as they had been during the reigns of King John, Henry VIII, and Mary Tudor, much less the Wars of the Roses, but there was still enough magic left to alert him to newcomers. It was a far cry from the days in which his estate had been practically invisible, magic making it difficult for the monarch to take notice of its existence, but it was still something. And yet, he felt the wards  weaken with every passing day. It would not be long before the magic was gone.

His heart churned as the messenger was escorted along the corridor to his study. The days in which magicians had been powerful and influential were long past. Magic was flowing out of the world, the brief flowering under Elizabeth Tudor proven to be nothing more than a false dawn. Elizabeth had had court magicians and alchemists and others but her successor – James VI and I – loathed and feared magic with all the hatred of a man confronted with something he didn’t understand. The burners - witch-hunters - were already on the prowl. Cecil knew himself to be relatively safe, as long as his family served the crown. Others were not so fortunate. Those who had dawdled too long before stepping through the gates were doomed, as the burners did their grisly work. Wise women, cunning men, and ladies who happened to be merely inconvenient, when large estates were at stake, were being denounced and murdered. It did not matter that most of the victims knew nothing about magic. King James had commanded that witches should be wiped out, and his henchmen intended to oblige.

And in trying to destroy the fake magicians, Cecil reflected grimly, he may destroy us as well.

He cursed under his breath. King James was a religious fanatic. His loathing of magic was so profound that Cecil feared what the king would do, if he found out there were practising magicians within the English aristocracy. The alliance between aristocrats and the folk magicians, the hidden communities of common-born magicians, had been born of desperation. If they hadn’t had everything at stake, Cecil knew the alliance would never have come to pass. It had once suited his people to pretend the other group didn’t exist. Now, they had to work together or die, together.

The doors opened. The messenger was a young man, too young to understand the gravity of the message he bore. Like Cecil himself, he had grown up in the secret world of aristocrats who dabbled in magic, a world that many people pretended didn’t exist, a world threatened by the decline in magic and the king’s determination to destroy what little was left. And yet he had no idea what would be lost, when the magic went away for good. Cecil wondered, despite himself, if the young messenger was not one of the lucky ones. He would never feel the lack of magic in his veins. He would never grow old as a cripple, all too aware of what he had lost. 

“My Lord,” the messenger said. Cecil knew what the messenger was going to say before he said it. He had been an aristocrat long enough to recognise the expression of a man who feared his master was going to blame the messenger for the message. “I come from Gatehouse.”

From York, Cecil mentally translated. The first and last of the gates lay there. And if you have come so quickly … 

The messenger visibly swallowed. “My Lord, the gate has closed.”

Cecil said nothing for a long, cold moment. In truth, he had feared that he might have left it too late for far too long. There had been seven gates in total and four of them had closed the moment Elizabeth Tudor breathed her last. Two more had closed the following year, leaving only one gate between the mundane world and the realm of magic Anne Boleyn had found for her people. Cecil could have crossed the gate at any time, but he had thought it more important to organise the exodus before the burners could discover and destroy the gate. In truth, he admitted in the privacy of his own mind, he hadn’t wanted to give up the power and prestige that came with being one England’s foremost men. His ancestors had not climbed their way to the top, simply to have their achievement casually discarded by one of their descendants .

I would have had to start again, he thought. The English aristocracy, magic or not, was nothing special on the far side of the gate. They would be equal to commoners, forced to rise and fall based on merit rather than blood. Their vast estates simply did not exist in the other world. The power and prestige they had used to compensate for the decline in magic would be gone. And what would I have become, if I had been forced to rebuild the family from scratch?

It was a terrifying thought. Merrie England was a precisely ordered society. A man was born into his place and would stay in his place, unless he was very lucky or unlucky, until the day he died. Very few rose above their birth and fewer still made it stick. It was the way of things. A farmer was born to be a farmer, a blacksmith was born to be a blacksmith … there was something fundamentally wrong with trying to change the place God had given you, when you had been born into this sinful world. Had not Cecil’s own family defeated the upstart Earl of Essex, when he had sought to rise above his station? Had not …?

The messenger shifted uncomfortably. “My Lord?”

Cecil frowned, realising he had let the silence go on too long.

“That is tragic news,” he said. It was, he conceded. The commoners trapped on the near side of the gate would never see their families again. No one was quite sure what manner of being Anne Boleyn had summoned, or what she had done to bargain with it, but they had been cautioned it could not be repeated. “Go to the kitchens. Tell the cooks I said to feed you. I’ll send for you when I need you.”

The messenger bowed, then retreated.

Cecil stared down at his desk. It really was tragic news … and yet, it was also an opportunity. The common folk were doomed, either through the lack of magic or the king’s forces hunting them down, but the aristocrats could go on. They knew how to hide themselves in the warp and weft of society, to use what little magic remained to keep the king and everyone else from noticing what they really were. It was one thing to accuse a random woman from a nameless village of being a witch, but quite another to aim such a charge at a powerful nobleman and expect it to stick. And besides, if the fortune-tellers were correct, the kingdom was on the verge of a major upheaval. Who knew what he could do, if he took advantage of the crisis to blend his people even further into the government?

But it would mean betraying the common folk, Cecil thought. It would mean …

The plan took form in his mind. The betrayal cost him a pang, but it would be a small price to pay for the survival of his people. The common folk could die. There would be no place for them in the new world order. And he knew where many of the remaining common-born magicians were, here and now. If he betrayed them to the burners, if he convinced the burners that they had burnt them all … 

Quite calmly, he summoned the messenger and issued his orders. One door had closed; another, one he had never considered, had opened. It would come with a price, but it was a price he was prepared to pay. And he would do anything to ensure the survival of his family.

The old world was dead. The new world was about to be born.

And all it would cost him was a simple, bloody, betrayal.

Prologue II: Mystic Albion, Now

It was rare for the six princesses of Mystic Albion and the Merlin, Headmaster of Gatehouse, to meet in person. Both law and custom were clear that they had to remain in their domains as long as they were in power, save for the equinox celebrations, unless the matter was truly urgent. But what, the Merlin asked himself, could possibly be more important than the first contact between Mystic Albion and OldeWorld in centuries? They had thought - they had known - that the gates were gone. In hindsight, perhaps they should have wondered if the gates were merely closed.

No one could have expected a trio of students to accidentally open one of the gates and fall through, he told himself. Hiram of Hardwick – Brains, to his friends - was an up-and-coming genius, and Richard of Eddisford and Helen of Burghley were no slouches either, but it seemed improbable that they could have accidentally jumped to OldeWorld. If he hadn’t known it had happened, he wouldn’t have believed it himself. And no one could have expected them to make it home either.

It was fascinating, and terrifying. The Merlin never given much thought to developments in OldeWorld after the gates had closed. There was no way to know what had happened since 1605, and no way to return to OldeWorld. They had thought it impossible. And yet, it was now clear they had been wrong. Three students had fallen into OldeWorld; two had returned, bringing with them a native magician from OldeWorld and news of other magicians – unfriendly magicians - on the far side. The Merlin wasn’t sure what to make of their detailed descriptions of OldeWorld’s technological and sociological development, and some of their stories were just unbelievable, but it hardly mattered. What mattered was the simple fact that contact between the two worlds was now proven to be more than just a dream.

“There has been no major public reaction,” the Princess of Londinium said. “But that will change.”

The Merlin could not disagree. The incident at Gatehouse - in hindsight, the side-effect of the gate being triggered briefly - could not have been covered up, even if he had wished to try. Too many students had seen or felt the earthquake that had threatened the entire school, if only for a few short moments. Too many adults had heard from their children about the disaster, then followed it up with the staff. News had spread across the entire country before the staff had even begun to work out what had happened. They hadn’t even grasped the full truth before the portal had reopened, briefly, to allow two of the three missing students to return. And now it was only a matter of time until panic set in.

“They may see this as a chance to open relationships with our cousins on the far side,” the Princess of Salisbury said. She was the oldest of the princesses, yet perhaps the most optimistic. “Their technology” - she struggled over the strange, foreign word - “has apparently developed in directions we did not anticipate.”

“How could we?” The Merlin had read papers speculating on how OldeWorld would develop without magic. They had assumed, perhaps optimistically, that King James and his successors would rule over a stagnant world. Without magic, there were limits - they had thought - to how far the world could go. “We did not anticipate that they would have an … industrial revolution.” 

He cursed under his breath. The students had brought back a great deal of information, but it was very limited. There were vast gaps in their knowledge, questions that remained unanswered … and probably would remain so unless they reopened the portal. The Merlin was not sure that was a good idea. He wanted to know what had happened, in the centuries since the last gate had closed, but he was also afraid of what contact would mean for his society. The students had seen enough of OldeWorld to know that it was both terrifyingly advanced and frighteningly degenerate. He had heard plenty of exaggerated stories from his students, but these stories had the ring of truth that so many others lacked.

The Princess of Edinburgh tapped the table. “I suppose there is no reason to make a quick decision,” she said. “They can’t get to us.”

“Our students were able to open a portal,” the Merlin reminded her. “The magicians on the far side might be able to do the same.”

“And they are not friendly,” the Princess of Canterbury said. “They were intent on preserving the magic for themselves.”

“Their very limited magic,” the Princess of Edinburgh said. “They lack the power to open a portal to our world.”

“They may find a way to do it,” the Merlin said. It was a basic rule of magic that you could do almost anything if you had enough power. OldeWorld might be lacking in raw power, but if there had been no magic on the far side of the gate his students would never have been able to make it home. “Our students might have accidentally showed them the way.”

“Careless,” the Princess of Canterbury said. “They should have anticipated the possibility.”

The Merlin shook his head. “I went through all the research notes, after the first earthquake,” he said. “The equations check out. There was no reason to think, even with the advantage of hindsight, that mapping out the magical topography would accidentally reopen the closed gate. There are no grounds to punish them.”

“What’s done is done,” the Princess of Salisbury said. “We just have to deal with the consequences.”

“There is another problem,” the Merlin said. “Helen of Burghley.”

“She made her choice,” the Princess of Canterbury said. “If she chose to stay in OldeWorld …”

“Her parents do not agree,” the Princess of Londinium said.  “They want her home.”

“And do they want us to reopen the gate, just to get her home?” The Princess of Canterbury spoke quietly, but firmly. “Even if we did, how could we be sure of finding her?”

“We couldn’t,” the Merlin said, flatly. “The gates open to the corresponding location in OldeWorld. There would be no way to be sure of anything, from her location to what else might be waiting for us on the far side.”

“Her family is bringing intense pressure to bear on me,” the Princess of Londinium said. “They may be able to have the issue debated in council.”

The Merlin sighed. The princesses had considerable power to act without reference to their councils, but that power had limits. If Helen’s family made a fuss, and demanded their daughter’s immediate return, it would be difficult to keep them from putting the matter before the City Council and demanding results. It was hard enough keeping them from demanding punishment for the two students who had made it home. They were arguing that Helen had been uninvolved in the project, and from what Richard and Brains had said, that was true.

It may be unfair for her to suffer because of their project, he thought. But the world is not fair.

“Then I suggest we play a waiting game,” the Princess of Canterbury said. “There is no immediate danger. We can continue to research the gates and figure out how to reopen them at will, preferably somewhere nicely isolated from the rest of the world. At that point, we can determine how best to proceed. It’s possible that this was just a freak accident.”

“It’s also possible that is merely the precursor of something much worse,” the Princess of Salisbury said. “We just don’t know.”

“And Helen?” The Princess of Londinium looked unimpressed. “What do we do about her?”

“She will have to survive on her own, for the moment,” the Princess of Canterbury said. “There is nothing we can do to help her until we know how to reopen the gate safely.”

The Merlin winced. It was hard enough moving from one community to another. It would be much harder to move from Mystic Albion to OldeWorld, where there was no magic and the rules were so different that it would be easy to wind up in very bad trouble indeed. Helen was far from stupid, but she had had no experience moving between communities until she wound up in OldeWorld. Could she blend in? Or would she be exposed very quickly? There was no way to know.

“It seems we have a consensus,” the Princess of Londinium said. “We will play a waiting game.”

“And study our new student,” the Princess of Caernarfon said. “We will learn a great deal from watching how she adapts to our world.”

 The Merlin nodded. “I have already started her on magic lessons,” he said. “She has a great deal to learn too. As do we all.” 

On that note, the meeting ended.

Chapter One: Mystic Albion, Now

Janet sucked in her breath.

The air seemed to sparkle with magic. Her fingers tingled with raw power as the magic hummed through the air. She had never felt so alive, so happy, to be anywhere near a school in her entire life, but then she had never been a particularly apt student. Now … her fingers twitched, her tongue twisting oddly as she spoke the magic words. She didn’t know what they meant, which she had been cautioned would be a major problem until she learnt to speak the language like a native, but it didn’t matter. She could still work magic.

Her fingers twisted as she shaped the spell. The power built and built until it felt as if she was holding a small thunderstorm in her hand. Light flared as the spell tightened, a twisting ball of magic taking shape and form in front of her. Sweat prickled down her back as she finished the spell, twisting reality right in front of her. It felt like a dream, like a wonderland she couldn’t quite believe existed. She had pinched herself so often, in the first few days, that her power arm was bruised and sore, yet she hadn’t woken up. She still wondered, at times, if she wasn’t in a coma, dreaming of wonders while her body was trapped in a hospital bed, but it was growing harder and harder to worry. The new world around her was just too bright. It had to be real.

The magic flared one final time, then died away. Janet found herself staring at an image of herself, a perfect three-dimensional reflection. She shook her head in disbelief. The girl in front of her was a strange mixture of familiar and very alien. She had always had long brown hair, which she had a habit of chewing when she was nervous, and a slightly dumpy frame, but she had never dared wear wizardly robes in her entire life. She had simply never had the confidence to do anything of the sort. Now … there was a hint of confidence in her eyes that startled her, every time she saw it. It came, she supposed, with having actual power of her own for the first time in her life. If the girls who had picked on her at school saw her now …

I could turn them into frogs, she thought. She had been cautioned that using spells with bad intentions could backfire – seriously - but part of her couldn’t help thinking how wonderful it would be to turn her former tormentors into small hopping things. Or slugs. It would be a vast improvement. I could make them leave me alone.

The magic flickered. Janet felt a flash of panic and reached out with her mind, solidifying the image. It turned slowly, displaying her back and rear before the eyes came around to face her again. The face was subtly different. Janet frowned as she studied the image. She had always been a plain girl, and not the sort of plain girl who would turn into a supermodel if she were given a makeover, but now the image looked prettier, in a manner she could not quite describe. She was striking, without ever seeming to change. It took her a moment to realise the spots she’d hated so much were gone.

She blinked as she heard the sound of someone clearing her throat. “You are using too much of your inherent power to fill in the gaps,” Madame Justinian said. “And the image is no longer a reflection of yourself.”

Janet jumped, and tried to hide it. She had almost forgotten Madame Justinian was there, sitting on the other side of the table and watching her through calm blue eyes. The elderly woman spoke calmly, yet there was something in her voice that made it difficult not to take her seriously. Perhaps it was magic. Janet had seen the older woman cast spells that were so far beyond her that she feared she might never catch up, perhaps even far beyond Richard and his peers. She doubted Madame Justinian would ever have any difficulty keeping control of a class. She had enough raw power to intimidate even the rowdiest students from York.

“I lost control,” Janet confessed. “And then I tried to fill in the gaps.”

“That’s what went wrong,” Madame Justinian said. There was no condemnation in her tone, but Janet couldn’t help flinching. Her teachers back home had rarely given her any personal attention and they had never been particularly patient with any of their students. Janet was all too aware that Madame Justinian had taken time out of her busy schedule to mentor her. “You are trying to do too much, too quickly.”

Janet nodded, chewing on a strand of her hair. There were three types of magicians: Heads, Hearts, and magicians who combined the two. A Head would put his spell together piece by piece, as if it were a complex mathematical equation; a Heart could make things happen simply by wishing them to be so. They had their strengths and weaknesses, she had been told; magicians who combined the two could use one set of attributes to make up for the weaknesses of the other. Magicians like her …

It’s like learning maths, she told herself. You have to show your working as well as coming up with the right answer.

She stared down at her hands. She had put the spell together carefully, but it had started to fall apart and she had tried, unintentionally, to patch together the holes. It wouldn’t last long, she had been cautioned, once she took her mind off it. Heart magic was powerful, but rarely lasted; Head magic was weaker, yet tend to linger far longer than its counterpart. It was funny, she reflected sourly, how she had so much power and yet no real awareness of how to use it. Proof, perhaps, that it was not all just a figment of her imagination. If it had all been a dream, she wouldn’t have had to work to get control of her powers. She would have had to do nothing more than snap her fingers to make things happen.

“I don’t understand what went wrong,” she said. “Why …?”

She clenched her teeth. It was galling to admit that she was no more than a newcomer, despite being sixteen years old. She hadn’t been so ignorant since she had gone to school for the first time, and even then she had been able to talk! Here … she felt a flicker of sympathy, suddenly, for the students who had immigrated to Britain and found themselves dumped into a school system that was profoundly unsuited even to native-born students. Even when they spoke the same language, they lacked any understanding of how society really worked. The youngest student at Gatehouse knew so much more than her that she sometimes feared she would never close the gap.

“You have been studying the language for a week, more or less,” Madame Justinian said. “I expect it will take you several months, at the very least, to achieve enough fluency to patch up the holes in your spellwork.”

“Several months,” Janet repeated, as the last of the magic faded away. She wasn’t sure she could do it in several years. She had never tried to master any language, and the handful of French lessons she had had at school had left her profoundly unequipped to speak the language to a native, and she was starting to suspect she had no talent for languages. It didn’t help that there were enough differences between English on Earth and English on Mystic Albion for her to fear that she was missing something every time she spoke to someone new. “How long do I have?”

“You have promise,” Madame Justinian said. “And you have time.”

Janet felt a rush of affection. The teachers back home had been little more than timeservers. They had done the bare minimum and little more. She supposed she couldn’t really blame them - they had no authority to punish students for everything from not doing their homework to bullying other children and making it impossible for them to learn anything - but it was still frustrating, in hindsight, to realise how far she could have gone if she had had a little support. Perhaps she should have been one of the rowdy kids. It was astonishing just how much care and attention were lavished on them.

She sobered. She had no idea what would become of her when she graduated … if she ever did. Gatehouse had taken her in, when Richard and Brains had brought her to their world, but it was clear the school didn’t quite know what to make of her. She had imagined it would be like Hogwarts, with students studying magic and preparing themselves for their future careers, yet … it was nothing like that. It was … different. What sort of career could she have in a world of magic? Harry Potter had been eleven when he had gone to Hogwarts and his peers had been as ignorant as himself. She was sixteen, nearly seventeen, and her peers were so far ahead of her …

If Steve was here, she thought, he’d be an archmagus within a week.

She felt an odd little pang of homesickness. She had grown up on an estate, and she had hated every last bit of it, but she had loved – loved - her mother and brother. The thought of never seeing them again was terrifying … she wondered, not for the first time, just what Steve and Helen were doing on Earth. And their mother … Janet hoped Steve had told her that Janet had decided to travel to another world … Janet felt a surge of guilt. The opportunity had been one she could not let slip by, yet she had left their mother without even taking the time to say goodbye. There had been no time, but she still felt guilty. And who knew what was happening on the far side of the gate?

“You are doing fine, for someone who did not believe magic was real for years,” Madame Justinian said. “It is not wise to judge your development against the development of someone who grew up in this world and spent years studying magic and magical languages before coming to school. You will have enough time to learn to master your powers.”

Janet blushed. She had been praised by her mother, but her teachers had rarely had anything to say to her, good or bad. She had been one of those girls who passed unnoticed, neither pretty enough to draw the eye of men old enough to know better nor rowdy enough to draw attention from older female teachers. She had never had the nerve to act out, or to experiment with boys, or anything. There had seemed no point in working hard. She had been sure she would never get out of the estate. And now she was in a whole new world.

“Thank you,” she stammered.

“It is no more than the truth,” Madame Justinian said. She stood, brushing down her dark green robes. “We’ll meet again tomorrow morning.”

Janet nodded and watched as her teacher left the chamber. It was funny; she was sensitive to magic, yet she needed to train herself to understand what she was sensing. Richard had taught her a few lessons, showing her how to feel out her own body and magic so she could sense someone casting spells on her, but he had barely scratched the surface. There was so much to learn and so little time. Janet wanted to know everything, from the basics to the magics so advanced that very few magicians studied them, yet she felt as if she were getting nowhere.

She leaned back in her chair, centring herself. Her body felt … different … these days, a strange sensation that she couldn’t quite put into words. It felt as if she had grown a new organ, one that was part of her and yet new and alien. She hadn’t felt so strange since she had gone through puberty, when her body had changed rapidly despite her fear and trepidation of the future, but then she had known what was going on. Her mother had had no trouble explaining what was happening - and what was going to happen. Here … she was unique. There was no one else in Mystic Albion who didn’t at least know about magic. The vast majority of the population could perform a few simple spells.

Janet let out a breath, then forced herself to stand. The chamber would be needed by someone else soon enough. She allowed her eyes to wander along the bookshelves, crammed with books written in languages she could neither read nor speak, then shook her head as she headed for the door. She had never considered, back when she had been writing bad fan fiction, that there would be a language gap when Hermione Sue went to Hogwarts. An upper-middle-class girl growing up in 1990s England would not speak Latin and might not have any real understanding of French or German or any other language with ancient roots. She would have to learn before she could start reading ancient tomes.

The door opened. She walked through and made her way down a long staircase to the lower halls. Gatehouse was an immensely big castle, bigger than anything she had seen on Earth, and it somehow managed to be bigger on the inside. She had been told the building helped people get to where they wanted to be, but she had yet to figure out how to convince the building to help her. The passageways seem to shift, completely at random, so frequently that there was no point in trying to memorise the interior layout. It was disorienting. Some parts of the building were very much like the castles she had seen, others were more like schoolrooms or even nursery playrooms. It had amused her to discover that some of the more advanced classes were held in the latter, the students trusted enough to be allowed to sit in the circle or study on their own. Janet found it hard to understand, but it clearly produced results. The students were more well-rounded than anyone she had met on Earth.

It helps that the staff can expel troublemakers, she thought. There weren’t many rules in Gatehouse, or so she had been told, but the few that existed were enforced. If someone goes too far, they get the boot.

A bell rang as she made her way into the hall. Students, released from class, flowed past, laughing and chattering as they hurried to the dining halls or the door or even the great outdoors. Janet stared at their faces, drinking in the sheer … happiness of students studying what they wanted to learn. There was so much joy in the air. She had to bite her lip to keep the envy from showing. The girls and boys surrounding her were practically glowing with life, compared to the students she recalled on Earth. There was no strict dress code, no pressure for anyone to conform. There were students wearing robes, or trousers, or outfits that wouldn’t have been out of place in a carnival. Some were showing bare flesh, others were buttoned up from head to toe; shehe smiled, despite herself, as she saw a girl wearing a dress made out of living flowers. Older Students - adults dropping in for further education or a handful of lectures - seemed a little more restrained, rather than trying to regain their long-gone childhood. It was an improvement on the older students she’d seen going to the local university. They had always struck her as creepy.

Her skin prickled. Students were looking at her. It was an uncomfortable sensation. She had never wanted to be the centre of attention, but she was the one and only student from Earth – OldeWorld - at Gatehouse. Richard and Brains were notorious enough, from what she’d heard, and many students were avoiding them, yet her …? No one seemed quite sure what to make of their mysterious transfer student. Janet wondered if they were laughing at her or pitying her. The kind of casual cruelty that had been so common in her old school was missing here - and she certainly didn’t miss it - but she didn’t want them looking down on her either. She wanted to have a fair chance to prove herself.

The crowd faded away as she kept walking. Most of the students would be heading outside, she guessed, or going to the dining hall for lunch. It was difficult to wrap her head around a school dining hall that actually served decent food, even though she has been at Gatehouse for a week. The catering at her old school had been done by a company that also catered to jails, which explained a great deal about the quality of the food. Gatehouse’s cooks didn’t have much imagination, from what she had seen, but they cooked very good food. She had often found herself going back for seconds, something that had never happened back home.

She smiled, despite everything, as she reached the dorms and private bedrooms. The air was heavy with magic, protective spells buzzing around the doors as she walked past. Janet felt her legs twitch, unpleasantly, as she passed too close to a handful of doors, the spells trying to convince her to walk faster. The students valued their privacy. Janet understood, all too well. She had had little back home.

This is your home now, she told herself, as she knocked on Richard’s door. And you don’t know if you will ever see Earth again.

Richard opened the door. “Come in,” he said. “How were your lessons?”

“I make progress,” Janet said, giving him a tight hug before drawing back and carefully stepping into the chamber. She had to be careful where she put her feet. The room Richard shared with Brains was as messy as always, the desks piled high with papers and magical components scattered over the floor. She had wondered, the first time she’d seen it, how they could bear to live in such a mess. “But I have an awful lot to learn.”

Chapter Two: Mystic Albion, Now

Richard allowed himself a moment of pleasure as Janet closed the door behind her.

She was not, part of him acknowledged, the kind of girl he would normally have dated. A young man of his background would rarely date outside his own social class. The idea of a girl like Helen looking twice at him was just absurd. He lacked the intelligence or raw power that would make up for deficiencies in his background. He had expected, when he had bothered to think about it at all, that he would marry a girl from a nearby village or a fellow student, rather than someone from further afield. But Janet … Janet was kind and pretty and not afraid to take a chance to make a better life for herself. He liked her more than he had ever liked anyone.

He felt a twinge of embarrassment as Janet looked around the room. The bedroom he had shared with Brains was gone, the contents and the underlying stonework destroyed in the instance that had transported them to OldeWorld. Richard could not help shuddering at the thought of how close they had come to total disaster. No one had known that the gate was still there, merely closed; no one had realised that their experiments could accidentally reopen the gate. They had been very lucky that the entire school had not been destroyed. Losing everything in their bedroom, from their collection of magical tomes and devices to their beds and desks was a small price to pay for the safety of the school. Their new room was considerably larger, with plenty of room for two teenage boys to spread out without crashing into each other. It hadn’t taken long for them to turn it into a mess.

But we never invited any girls to the old room, he thought. Helen had been their only female visitor and she had never been welcome. Richard was mildly surprised that the sight of Brains’s living quarters hadn’t put her off the idea of an arranged marriage, but she hadn’t really been given a choice either. He wondered, not for the first time, what Helen was doing on OldeWorld. We might never see each other again.

“Take a seat,” he said, trying not to blush at the realisation the only place she could sit was his bed. There were chairs somewhere in the room, burrowed under piles of books and scrolls and Brains’s notes. Richard didn’t want to risk uncovering any of the chairs for fear of disturbing the notes. Brains had a habit of putting documents in places that made sense to him, if not anyone else, and then complaining loudly when they were moved. “You might be better off sitting on the floor.”

Janet reddened, just slightly. Richard felt his cheeks grow warm too. He had grown up in a world where young men and women were quite open about their feelings, from friendship and compassion to attraction and sexual desire. OldeWorld was very different. The rules of courtship weren’t just strange, they changed so often that was impossible to tell which set of rules were in operation at any given time. But then, OldeWorld had no way for women to safeguard themselves against hostile men and men to protect themselves from false accusations. The spells every youngster learnt as a matter of course simply didn’t exist on OldeWorld. Janet could no more protect herself against a strong man, who might see her interest as an invitation, then she could will herself not to become pregnant. It was hard, even after their unplanned visit to OldeWorld, to wrap his head around how different it was. And how hard it could be for a young woman to grow up in such an environment.

“I don’t dare sit anywhere,” Janet said, eyeing the piles of paper. “Where is Brains?”

Richard grimaced. “He is currently explaining to the committee, again, what happened when we accidentally reopened the gate. I don’t think they believe a word of what he’s telling them.”

“Crap,” Janet said. She cocked her head, chewing a strand of hair in a manner Richard found unbearably cute. “How much trouble are you in?”

“I wish I knew,” Richard admitted. There were laws, and school regulations, against opening portals and gates, but no one had known a gate could be opened by accident. Brains could have easily put together a spell to open a portal, and he would have been in deep shit if he had actually tried to cast it, yet … that wasn’t what had happened. The committee had asked a number of pointed questions, demanding to know if either Richard or Brains had thought it was even slightly possible to open the gate, but it had gotten them nowhere. “It depends how much they blame us for the accident.”

Janet looked worried. “Can they blame you?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “On one hand, the experiment we planned to conduct did not cross the line into … well, the line into where we needed approval before we carried out the experiment. On the other, the experiment was carried out in a place where there had been a gate, at one point, and assessing the magical topography of the region might just lead to probing the remnants of the dead gate. And then …”

“On the gripping hand,” Janet put in.

Richard smiled. “On the gripping hand, they interrogated us under truth spells. They know we didn’t mean to reopen the gate. We had no idea it was even possible, nor did anyone else. All the stories about magicians falling back into OldeWorld, or going exploring in the far realms, were debunked long ago. Our … experience ... is the first documented contact between the two worlds since the last of the gates closed, the first contact in four hundred years.”

And they don’t know what contact will do to our society, Richard thought. Or theirs, for that matter.

Janet met his eyes. “Are you in any trouble for bringing me here?”

“I don’t think so,” Richard said. Janet was a mixed magician, a type rare enough for the school staff to overlook any irregularities about her enrolment. It cost him an odd little twinge to acknowledge her power - she would be far more powerful than he was, once she had some training under her belt - but he didn’t regret his choice. Janet had deserved better than to grow up in the soulless concrete nightmare of OldeWorld. “They were quite happy to have you.”

He smiled, again. “Do you want to go out for a picnic?”

An odd flurry of emotions crossed her face, before she nodded. Richard had to smile despite the grim awareness he might say something to frighten her, or offend her, quite by accident. It had been hard enough on OldeWorld, when he had been all too aware he was in a very different world, but here … it was disconcertingly easy to fall into old habits. Helen would have laughed in his face if he had invited her on a picnic, then probably turned him into a frog. Janet might fear he was trying to get her alone.

She leaned forward. “Will they give you a picnic basket?”

“Of course,” Richard said. There was no of course about it on OldeWorld and they both knew it. The idea of the school providing a picnic for students on day trips was laughable. The best the students could hope for was cheese sandwiches and bottled water, which would be turned into ammunition rather than eaten. “Shall we go?”

He tried to see the school through her eyes as they made their way down to the dining hall. Gatehouse was commonplace, to him, but to her it was fantastical. It was hard, so hard, to comprehend how anyone could live, let alone mature, in one of OldeWorld’s hellish schools. Richard had heard tales of schools from the final days on old world - the Elizabethan era, the natives called it - where students had been regularly flogged for the slightest offence, yet none of the tales had been quite so bad as the reality. Janet had to think she had entered a fairy kingdom, a world of limitless wonder and magic. He saw a gaggle of students walking past, chattering loudly, and wondered what she made of it. The depression that pervaded her old school like a shroud simply didn’t exist here.

“You have people coming in and out of the building all the time,” Janet said. “Why?”

Richard blinked in surprise, then nodded. “Gatehouse isn’t just a school,” he said. “It is a university, and a college, and a research site, and a library that is open to all. A person who wants to come in and attend classes, or research in the library, or even meet up with friends for a cup of tea, is welcome to do so.”

Janet shot him an odd look. “And that doesn’t bother you, to have strangers walking through the school?”

“Not really.” Richard could see her point. On OldeWorld, it was illegal for someone to enter the school without special permission. It was difficult to be sure the visitor did not intend to harm the students, and very easy to get in serious trouble for letting the wrong person into the school even if you had no way to know it was the wrong person. And yet, denying people the right to better themselves through education was outrageous. “They can’t get into the private areas, such as bedrooms, and everything else is open to everyone.”

He shook his head. Gatehouse was a treasure house of knowledge, knowledge that belonged to all. His father had gone to the school to find new and better ways to grow crops; his grandfather has attended lectures, after he had passed the farm to his son, and earned himself a degree. John had wondered, at the time, if his grandfather had not been wasting his time, but he knew better now. The elderly man had had every right to explore his interests as his life neared its end.

But it was different on OldeWorld. The system was designed to keep the poor and ill-educated in their place. It was expensive, in money and time, to go into higher education and study, particular when you had to hold down a job. Richard found it impossible to imagine just how screwed up the system really was. OldeWorld’s technology was more than capable of meeting the basic needs of its citizens. There was no reason why they couldn’t let the poor better themselves.

Perhaps it has something to do with the sheer population pressure, he thought. Mystic Albion had around two million people, more or less. The last census had been conducted before he’d been born. OldeWorld England – Britain - had around sixty-five million citizens, a number he couldn’t even begin to wrap his head around. It was impossibly big. He recalled Janet’s home, on the estate, and shuddered. They just don’t have room to live.

Janet didn’t seem convinced as they made their way into the dining hall, collected a picnic basket, and walked through the side door and into the bright sunlight. It was so bright Janet had to cover her eyes, at least until Richard muttered a spell to help her eyes cope. She looked around, seemingly lost in wonder as a pair of dragons flew overhead, followed by a handful of students on broomsticks and pitchforks. Richard wondered what she was thinking as the riders swooped around the towers, tossed balls to each other, and finally landed neatly on the pitch at the back of the school. Broomsticks gave witches and wizards a degree of mobility their OldeWorld counterparts lacked. Apparently, young men with cars were incredibly popular. Richard understood. There was a limit to how far someone could travel on their own two feet.

The air hummed with magic as they walked into the gardens. Richard felt himself smile broadly as the magic soothed him, the plants and flowers carefully planted to encourage students to relax, to let their minds take a break from thinking about their lessons and the future. There were fewer students in sight, save for a pair of volunteer gardeners tending to their crops. The gardens were planted to be in tune with the local magic, channelling the power into the school. It had looked random when he had visited the gardens for the first time, years ago, but now he could pick out the plant-formed runes that made the gardens a surprisingly important part of the school.

They kept walking, the foliage growing thicker as they made their way further from the school. Richard spotted treehouses half-hidden within the branches, some put together from wooden planks and others growing from charmed trees, the wood spelled to grow in the right direction. There was no sign of anyone actually living within the trees. He had heard stories of students who preferred to live in the great outdoors, but he’d never seen anyone do it. It struck him as just another schoolyard legend.

Janet sighed as they found a convenient clearing and spread the rug on the ground. “This place is so peaceful,” she said. “There’s nothing like it back home.”

“There must be gardens near your home,” Richard said, although he knew what she meant. The local parks and gardens where havens for drug dealers, not places anyone sane would take their children or a girl they wanted to date. “How much …?”

He bit off the question before he could finish it. He had never enjoyed having students - Helen, in particular - remind him that he was a poor boy from poor family. If he hadn’t befriended Brains, she had pointed out time and time again, he would be nothing, just another magical student with few prospects beyond returning home and putting his magic to use for the good of the community. It wasn’t the worst fate in the world, Richard had thought even before he’d actually fallen into OldeWorld, but it was frustrating. He lacked the talent to rise high.

Janet sat, looking more beautiful than ever as soon as she relaxed. Her eyes followed a flight of butterflies as they darted through the air and vanished into the woodland, then looked up to see birds flying overhead. They were common, in the lands around Gatehouse, but vanishingly rare in its counterpart on the far side of the gate. It was impossible to believe there were many birds on the estate. Richard sat next to her and opened the picnic basket, unwilling to break the mood by trying to talk. The food smelled heavenly.

“I can’t believe they just gave this to you,” Janet said. “Chicken drumsticks, crusted bread and ham and cheese … did they include lashings of ginger beer?”

 “Just milk and tea, I think,” Richard said. “Why do you ask?”

Janet looked weirdly downcast as she took a drumstick and eyed the chicken as if she had never seen anything like it before. “There was a book series, written when my grandmother was a little girl, about four children and a dog who had adventurers in an England that never really existed. Reading them was fun when I was a kid, even though their world was quite alien to me, but as I grew up it became tragic. Their lives were just …”

She sighed. “The world was a simpler place back then,” she added. “Or the complexity was kept from the children.”

“You can’t keep people in ignorance forever,” Richard said. He had grown up on a farm. His parents had never tried to hide anything from him. He had helped around the farm from the moment he’d been old enough to walk. Janet and her peers had never had a chance to actually do something useful before going into adulthood. “The truth always comes out.”

“I think there were limits about what the author could say, or show,” Janet said. “One of the girls was a tomboy who insisted on being treated as a boy. The other was decidedly feminine and did all the stereotypical feminine things; she cooked, she cleaned, she was looked after by the other three and generally treated as more of a living doll than a person in her own right.”

Richard had to smile. “I don’t think they would be very popular over here.”

Janet smiled back. “But you have wonderful picnics all the time!”

She tucked into the food with undisguised enthusiasm. Richard smiled again as he ate himself. The school cooks had the best of ingredients and knew how to bring out the flavours in a manner he had never truly appreciated until he had seen OldeWorld. Janet had eaten processed foods – Richard tried not to gag when he recalled the burger he’d had to force down his throat - rather than home-cooked meals made from fresh ingredients. The picnic basket was nothing new to him, but to her … it was as magic as the rest of the school. He made a mental note to take her out again as soon as possible. She deserved more magic in her life.

“This is …” Janet sighed as he started to pack up the basket. “This is just wonderful.”

Richard reached for her, gently. Janet leaned forward to kiss him. Richard didn’t press too hard. A girl like Helen would have no trouble telling him when he was going too far, or vice versa, but Janet …? It was well to be careful. The kiss deepened as she wrapped her arms around him. He could feel her heartbeat pounding like a drum as he hugged her back. The magic in the air was driving them on. It wanted them to make magic of their own …

… And then he felt the presence.

He drew back. “We’re not alone,” he said. “Someone is coming.”

Chapter Three: Mystic Albion, Now

Janet would have happily murdered the intruder if she had thought she would get away with it.

She had never really thought she would date anyone, let alone have a relationship that was deep enough to be truly intimate. The boys at school were nasty, either entitled bastards who thought they had the right to do what they liked to the girls in the class, or little creeps too afraid to approach girls or so socially awkward that they put girls off just by opening their mouths. Norris - she felt a twinge of dislike, mixed with self-righteousness, as she thought of the poor boy - had been unspeakably socially awkward, unable to talk to girls without making an utter fool of himself. She had more or less resigned herself to being alone, like so many other women on the estate. The lucky - or unlucky - ones were single mothers.

And then Richard had entered her life.

He was different, from a society that had very different ideas about how men and women should relate. He treated her as a person, not as a sex object or someone too lowly even to be a receptacle for a man’s lusts. He had taught her magic, and Janet would have forgiven anyone anything for giving her the first taste of real power. More than power, really. It was the chance to make something of herself. And he hadn’t even pressured her into going further than she felt comfortable. It was a very low bar, but so few of the boys she had known back in school managed to clear it. They tended to demand sex as quickly as possible and to hell with what the girl thought about it.

She straightened up, adjusting her robes slightly as the intruder came into view. He looked like a man out of a period drama, perhaps one of the ones that showed an unrealistic take on the Edwardian or Victorian eras; a dark suit, a dark top hat, a white shirt, a pocket watch clearly visible on one breast and a coat of arms on the other. Janet sensed, more than saw, Richard tense. The coat of arms was oddly familiar. It took her a few moments to place it. Helen’s distant relatives - the ones who had stayed on Earth - had had the same crest on their gates. Seeing it here …

Ice ran down her spine. She was sure it wasn’t a good thing.

“I apologise for interrupting you,” the man said. He had a plummy accent that reminded Janet of Helen, although there were slight differences that seemed to mean something to Richard. “I was unable to talk to you earlier.”

Janet shifted, uncomfortably. Her lips felt puffy, almost swollen. She was sure the intruder knew precisely what they had been doing, what he had chosen to interrupt. Back home, there had been older boys who delighted in interrupting and disrupting intimate moments, some because they were assholes and others because their culture believed young women should be kept under firm control. Here … Janet wasn’t sure about etiquette, but she was fairly certain that interrupting a tender moment was not a good move. And yet …

“You could just have written a note,” Richard said. He sounded like a young man who had just been confronted by someone older and wiser. “What does House Burghley wish with us?”

“I am Lucas, Lucas Trent,” the intruder said. “I speak on behalf of Lady Burghley.”

Richard visibly bit off a sarcastic remark. Janet had no idea what was going on, but it felt ominous. Lucas Trent reminded her of Draco Malfoy’s father, an aristocrat who would take offence if she made the slightest mistake. The fact the man had chosen to speak with them in private, without making any attempt to arrange a meeting, boded ill. And yet she didn’t know what it meant. Back home, a man hunting her down would be bad news. Here …?

“Please to meet you,” Richard said, coldly. “What can we do for you?”

Lucas sat on the grass, without seeming to care about staining his suit. “Lady Burghley is extremely concerned about her daughter’s fate,” he said. “She would like Helen to return to our world, to safety, as quickly as possible.”

“I’m sure she would,” Richard said. He sounded more than a little ambivalent about the situation. Janet understood. Richard and Helen had hardly been friends, even when they had been forced to work together to escape Earth. Helen’s decision to remain behind and hunt down her relatives hadn’t displeased him. “However, Helen made her own choice.”

“A choice that left her stranded in a very alien world,” Lucas said. “Her mother wants her to return home as soon as possible.”

Richard said nothing. Janet frowned inwardly. Helen had been told she would be marrying Brains, whatever she thought about the situation. Janet suspected that at least part of Helen’s motivations for remaining behind were to avoid an unwanted wedding. Brains was hardly a bastard - or a stranger – but she couldn’t blame Helen for wanting to make that decision on her own. Marriage was not something minor, like deciding where to go eat; it was a lifelong commitment. Janet would have resented it if someone had presumed to make that decision for her. Helen might have felt the same way too.

“I see,” Richard said, finally. His tone sharpened, sounding almost like Steve when he was pretending to be obtuse. “And what does that have to do with us?”

Lucas showed no visible reaction. “The princesses are dragging their feet on reopening the portal,” he said, calmly. “There is no suggestion they will make the attempt to open contact with OldeWorld, or even make a second – secretive - incursion. My mistress believes they will quietly refrain from doing anything, in hopes the matter will fade away. If that happens, Helen will be stranded for the rest of her life.”

Janet felt an odd mix of emotions. She had read quite a few books, when she had been younger, in which the heroine had no intention of returning home and refused to even consider the prospect. She didn’t want to go home either, but she didn’t want to lose contact with her mother and brother either. The heroine of the books had had a drunkard for a mother and an abusive bastard for a father. But Janet’s mother had been overworked, but decent, and her brother was a very good man. Janet wanted to see them again, at some point, even though she had no intention of returning to Earth permanently. She didn’t want to lose contact completely.

She couldn’t help a twinge of guilt. You knew you might never see home again when you stepped through the portal.

Richard was definitely pretending to be obtuse. “And what does that have to do with us?”

“Lady Burghley does not want to leave her daughter stranded for the rest of her life, whatever the princesses have to say about it,” Lucas said. “She wants her daughter home.”

Janet frowned. “Even against her will?”

Lucas’s eyes narrowed as he looked at her. Janet had the strangest feeling he was dissecting her with his eyes, not mentally undressing her but seeming to scrutinise her right down to the smallest molecule. It was an oddly disconcerting experience. Lucas didn’t seem to think of her as a person, or a sex object, but … a curiosity. She supposed it made a certain kind of sense. There were very few immigrants in Mystic Albion and only one from Earth.

“Her mother wants her daughter home,” Lucas said, flatly.

“Lady Burghley is an extremely powerful woman,” Richard said. He made no attempt to hide his displeasure. “She is quite within her rights to petition the princesses to reopen the gate, or push for a public debate on the matter.”

“Her Ladyship believes the princesses will decline to reopen the gate, at least in a hurry,” Lucas said. “Time is pressing. We have no way to know what is happening on OldeWorld. Helen might be in serious danger – or dead.”

“Or living her best life,” Janet put in.

Lucas looked as if he thought she had said something incredibly stupid. Janet supposed he had a point. Helen was an intelligent and powerful young woman, but she’d lost most of her power when she had fallen through the gate, making her vulnerable to her enemies or even random attackers. And she knew so little about her new world that she could easily make a mistake that would land her in jail, or hospital, or an early grave. Janet had no idea what the government would do, if they found Helen, but she doubted it would be pleasant. They might think she was a mutant, or living proof there really was a wizarding world existing alongside the muggle world … which wouldn’t be too far wrong, she admitted sourly. Helen’s relatives really were a secret magical community. She felt a hot flash of burning anger. Why hadn’t they made contact with her?

Richard cleared his throat. “Get to the point,” he said, his tone rude enough to make Janet blink in surprise. He had only ever taken that tone with Helen. “What does she want with us?”

“She wants you to find a way to reopen the gate safely,” Lucas said, calmly. “She is prepared to pay a significant sum, and offer significant patronage, in return for your efforts.”

Janet stared. It was hard to comprehend his words, not because she didn’t understand them but because they were so alien to her experience. The idea of tracking down a mere schoolboy and giving him the task of accomplishing an impossible task was just absurd … no, it would have been absurd on Earth. The rules were different here. Richard and Brains had experimented on their own, and made magical discoveries on their own, rather than merely learning from their teachers. And it really had been Richard and Brains who had – accidentally - reopened the gate. 

Richard said nothing for a long moment. Janet could see the dilemma on his face. He didn’t like Helen and her family, and yet he was being offered something he couldn’t refuse. Janet didn’t quite understand how the local social structure worked - it was a bizarre mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy – but Lady Burghley’s patronage would be worth a great deal. It wasn’t as if she could go back on the agreement either, from what Janet had heard. A reputation for breaking promises would bite her – hard - if she did it too openly. 

“A very tempting offer,” Richard said, finally. “Are you aware of the dangers?”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “I believe there is no reward without risk.”

“The risk, in this case, would be borne by us,” Richard pointed out. “Reopening the gate, with or without permission, would also put the entire school in danger. Again. Last time, we have no idea what could happen. This time …”

Janet nodded. Gatehouse was very tolerant of student experiments, and indeed actively encouraged them, but there were limits. There had to be. She suspected Richard and Brains had been very lucky not to be expelled after they returned home. If there had been the slightest hint the experiment could have caused an earthquake, they would have been for the high jump. Or at least kicked out of school. Back home, the prospect wouldn’t have bothered her. Here …

“Her Ladyship does not want you to reopen the portal.” Lucas looked irked at the unspoken suggestion. “She wants you to figure out how to do it, safely, without actually putting the school at risk. Or risking uncontrolled contact with the other world. Ideally, she wants a workable collection of spells and devices that can be shown to the princesses to convince them to authorise reopening the gates.”

“That might be tricky,” Richard said. “I would have to discuss it with Brains. He is the brains of the operation.”

He smiled at his weak joke. “We might also need supplies, some of which are restricted. Will Lady Burghley undertake to obtain them for us?”

“Within reason,” Lucas said. He rested his hands on his knees. “Her ladyship is prepared to go the extra mile, to allow her daughter to return safely to her home. She will pay any reasonable sum, obtain any reasonable supplies, to save her child. If you succeed, you will be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams.”

“I have some pretty wild dreams,” Richard murmured.

He straightened. “Janet and I will discuss the matter with Brains,” he said, “and then get back in touch with you. I assume we can just send a letter? Or call you?”

Lucas nodded, and withdrew a small gemstone from his pocket. “This vibration is my private contact,” he said. Janet guessed it was something akin to a mobile phone number. If you use it, you’ll be connected directly to me. After that, I can either come to Gatehouse to speak to you or you can meet me somewhere neutral.”

“And you would prefer the latter,” Richard said. He took the gemstone, studied it for a long moment, then placed it in his pocket. “We’ll see what we can do.”

Lucas stood and bound. “That’s all we ask,” he said. “Good day.”

He turned and strode away into the trees. Richard removed the gemstone from his pocket and dropped it in the picnic basket, putting the lid firmly closed. Janet stared in puzzlement, then realised it would be very easy for someone to attach an eavesdropping spell to the gemstone to spy on the conversation. Richard had told her that one spell could easily act as a cover for others, if cast properly. The thought made her shudder. Voyeurism was rare at Gatehouse, if only because the students were mentally healthy, but spying on each other’s experiments was disturbingly common. She wasn’t sure if it was an improvement or not.

“Interesting,” Richard said. He sounded as if he had bitten into a fruit and discovered, too late, that it had gone off. “He made no attempt to get in touch with us openly.”

Janet stared at her hands. “What does that mean?”

“Trouble,” Richard said. “He thinks the Merlin would object if he tried to contact us openly.”

“I see,” Janet said. She wasn’t sure that was true. Back home, an older man making a secret approach to a student would be very bad news. It could signify anything from criminals wanting to recruit the student to sugar daddies and paedophiles trying to open a sexual relationship. Here … she wasn’t so sure. “Would the Merlin object?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “Discussing reopening the gate, even working out how to do it, isn’t exactly illegal. Or forbidden. Actually doing it, on the other hand … I don’t know how they would react to us building a device to do it, even if we have no intention of using it. It could get tricky.”

Janet said nothing for a moment. She had never met Lady Burghley. She had met Helen and she had to admit that she had never liked Helen, even when the other girl had needed her help. Helen had been … Janet had never been sure how to put it into words. Helen was proud, but she had a great many accomplishments to be proud of. She might have been born an aristocrat, yet she hadn’t been allowed to let the grass grow under her feet. She was smart and intelligent and far more capable, as far as Janet could tell, than any of the students at her old school. Helen had had a better education, with teachers who had taken their job seriously and administrators who had backed them up, and it was easy to envy her for that, but she had also worked very hard …

… And yet there had been something about Helen that Janet had never liked.

Her mind churned. It spoke well of Helen’s mother, Janet supposed, that she was prepared to go out on a limb to get her daughter home. And yet, Helen had decided to stay on Earth. No one had forced her to remain behind, no one had refused to take her back through the gate … Helen had made her choice. Was Helen’s mother truly concerned about her daughter, or intent on bringing her back under her thumb, or both? Or was there something else going on? Helen hadn’t known she had relatives on Earth. But had her mother also been unaware?

“There are dangers in reopening the gate,” Richard added. “But there are dangers in doing nothing too.”

Janet sighed. The magicians she had met, briefly, on Earth had not been friendly. They’d deliberately spread misinformation about magic, misinformation designed to cripple or kill newborn magicians who tried to learn without proper supervision. They had kept a watch on the old gate, under her old school, and tried to capture or kill Richard, Brains, and Helen when they had fallen through the gate. And God alone knew what else they had done, over the years, to make sure magic remained firmly in their hands.

And what will they do, she asked yourself, now they know the gate can be reopened?

Richard squeezed her hand. “Do you want to go home?”

“Not to stay,” Janet said. She wanted to make that very clear. “But I would like to see my family.”

“I suppose Helen might feel the same way too,” Richard said. He let go of her hand and stood. “We need to discuss it with Brains. And then we can decide what we should say to Helen’s mum.”

Janet frowned. “What will she do if we say no?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. He helped her to her feet. “But I would be very surprised if we were the only ones she’d approached.”

Chapter Four: Edinburgh, Earth, Now

Helen gritted her teeth as the train rattled towards its final destination.

She had never experienced anything like it, from the cramped and smelly compartments to the endless delays and rowdy passengers drinking and singing, getting louder with every passing moment. The train had left Manchester two hours late and suffered further delays along the way, to the point she had seriously considered suggesting they take an earlier train and use magic to convince the ticket inspector that their ticket was valid. If she hadn’t been all too aware that her relatives, hostile magicians, were watching for them, she might have done it. As it was, the delays were rapidly growing unbearable. She was just too cramped for comfort.

The singing grew louder. She tried not to glare at the young men as they drank their fill. The rest of the passengers seemed to be pretending to ignore them, even they had to be all too aware of the racket. She wished for even a fraction of the power she had enjoyed back home, the power to snap her fingers and turn them into toads, or statues, or even small birds. Birds sang too, but at least they made a pretty noise. She felt her head start to pound. No one would have complained if she had told them to shut up and then enforced it, back home, but there were no packed trains back home either. People used portals or flying carriages or broomsticks to get from place to place. There was no need to spend hours cooped up with hundreds of strangers.

She looked at Steve, who shrugged apologetically. OldeWorld – Earth - was overpopulated. There was nowhere to go to get away from the crowd, not unless they wanted to live somewhere completely isolated from the rest of the world. Helen was starting to see the attraction, although she knew it would not be as easy as it would be to live alone back home. She could conjure almost everything she needed, with enough magic, to survive. That wasn’t an option here.

The loudspeaker crackled. “This train is now approaching Edinburgh, where the service will terminate,” it said. The drinkers cheered loudly. “Please make sure you have all your personal possessions before you leave the train.”

Steve swung his laptop around to show her the screen. Helen glowered at the device. It would have been easy to tell herself that OldeWorld was a soulless concrete nightmare, blighted by the absence of magic, but the laptop was living proof there was more to the other world than too many people and too little decency. There was nothing like it back home. She had spent hours digging through books and papers, when she had been a student, instead of going online and searching the internet. The laptop was a minor miracle. The computer network was an even bigger one.

Her eyes narrowed as she read the article. There was a decidedly crackpot tone to the words, as if the reporter was having trouble believing what he’d heard, but … the report hinted that something magical had happened in Windsor, near London. The details are vague, and a little contradictory, yet it seemed a girl had cast a spell on a boy and cursed him to impotence. Helen read the article twice, unsure what to make of it. There were quite a few charms that could be used to render a man impotent, yet she hadn’t taught them to her students before all hell broke loose. Had someone devised the spell on their own? Or was it just nonsense? There was no way to tell. Steve had cautioned her that the tabloids often lied or exaggerated the truth to the point of absurdity. It seemed no one ever held them to account for their bullshit.

Steve met her eyes. “One for the file?”

“Yes, please,” Helen said. “File it with the others.” 

She sighed, inwardly. They had been collecting newspaper articles about magical incidents since they’d been forced to flee York. It was hard to tell how many of the stories were true, or had some truth in them, or … who knew? Her relatives had excellent reason to suppress any true stories, while burying real magical knowledge under a mountain of utter nonsense. She wasn’t even sure what had happened to her other students. They had lost contact with the girls – and a handful of boys - who had learnt magic. She hoped they were safe, but she feared the worst. The riot at the mansion, and the near-destruction of the school, had been kept out of the news. It was a grim reminder that her relatives were staggeringly powerful.

The train entered the station and rattled to a halt. The drunkards jumped their feet and partly danced their way down the aisle to the door. Helen had to bite her lip to keep from casting a spell on them, perhaps a simple abstinence charm or something nastier. It was easy, too easy, to convince herself that casting such a spell would actually be good for them, even if it would steal something of their free will. She sighed as Steve packed up the laptop, then picked up her bag and followed him out onto the platform. The air smelled of fuel and too many humans in too close of a proximity. She tried not to wince as she spotted the policeman at the far end of the platform. There was no need for law enforcement to have such a visible presence back home. But here, crime was a steadily growing problem. Helen didn’t know why the locals put up with it.

They have very little freedom, she reflected. It was hard to comprehend the sheer power of the local government, even when it wasn’t intentionally repressive or evil, or how its sheer size made it unresponsive to individual concerns. Helen’s mother had made no pretence at being anything other than an absolute ruler of her domains, but she had taken more care of her people than any local democratically-elected MP. She had known her people could just walk away if they felt mistreated. Here, there’s nowhere to go.

The crowd was closing in around her as they made her way up the ramp and into the open air. She tensed as she felt a hand touching her ass, completely without permission, and cast a spell to curse the groper. Her anger bubbled over, giving the spell enough power to linger for years. She hoped he’d learn a lesson. OldeWorld would be much more tolerable if misbehaviour was punished immediately, rather than being ignored or excused by people who didn’t have to put up with it. Her lips twisted at the thought. The spells she had taught the girls in York would alter the balance of power beyond repair. And they could only be cast if the caster had a cause …

She sucked in her breath as Edinburgh Castle came into view, looming over the city. The pangs of homesickness surprised her. The castle was the nearest thing to a traditional building she had seen, even when she had explored the older parts of York. It existed in both universes … something that, in hindsight, made little sense. Had the castle been duplicated? She wasn’t sure why anyone would bother. The days of walled castles standing firm against enemy attack had been drawing to an end, in the time of Elizabeth Tudor. There had been no reason to build a whole new castle. And yet, someone had.

Steve caught her eye. “Welcome to Edinburgh,” he said. Helen had no trouble recognising someone pretending to be a little more experienced than they were. Steve and his sister had grown up on the estate, with little hope of ever leaving. She didn’t think he had ever been more than a few miles from his hometown. “What do you think?”

Helen felt her knees wobble. She had visited Edinburgh - the other Edinburgh - and there was just enough familiar in the city around her to be incredibly disconcerting. The castle was practically identical to its counterpart, but the lake below the castle was missing - replaced by a park and railway lines - and the skyline to the north was completely different. Her Edinburgh was a relatively small city, one of the six princedoms. This Edinburgh was a sprawling overcrowded nightmare that spread out in all directions. There were so many people milling about that she thought the entire population of Scotland had descended on the city. It was hard to believe that it was only a small fraction of the population, even though she knew it to be true. It was just …

Steve put out a hand to steady her. Helen shook it off, feeling a twinge of discomfort. She liked Steve and yet … she had the feeling that when the locals talked about helping and protecting women they really meant keeping women under control. It was completely alien to her, but then her magic had made her equal - if not superior - to any man. Here … she had come very close to being raped by a lout unworthy to even look upon her. It would never have happened back home.

“It feels weird,” she said. Edinburgh had been a centre of mystical energies before King James the Witchburner had come to the throne. Her Edinburgh was still home to hundreds of magicians. This Edinburgh felt dead and cold. She almost wished they had gone to another city, but there were few choices. “I can’t feel any magic at all.”

Steve pulled out his smartphone and checked the maps. “This way,” he said. “We’ll go up and see the castle.”

Helen nodded, bracing herself for more disorientation as she started to walk. They had only had six possible destinations, all corresponding to a closed gate, all of which - she had reasoned – were known to their enemies. Helen wasn’t sure if the local magicians knew she had survived, and escaped the burning school, but she dared not assume they thought she was dead. They would send guards to each and every former gate, if they weren’t already guarded. They had certainly had someone watching the gate under the ruined school and now they knew it was more than just an exercise in paranoia. And yet … she had reasoned it out. Of all the gates, Edinburgh was the least likely to be heavily guarded. The well of mystic power in the city had been drained well before King James had become the ruler of England as well as Scotland. It had been the first gate to close.

She kept her eyes open as they walked up the Mound and onto the Royal Mile. The buildings were a curious mixture of ancient and modern, some akin to one she recalled and others looking like intruders, as if they didn’t belong there at all. There were cars everywhere, save for the Royal Mile itself. She saw graffiti scribbled on some of the walls and shuddered in disgust, then winced as she saw a handful of homeless people begging for money. What did it say about the local society, she asked herself, that it left people to live on the streets? It would be so easy to feed them, to offer them jobs, to find them a place to stay. And yet …

The castle rose in front of them. Steve paid the entrance fee, then led the way into the castle itself. Helen had never seen so many tourists in one place, cameras and smartphones clicking as they made their way around the castle. The giant structure didn’t feel quite real to her. The castle back home was an administrative centre, but this was just a facade. A handful of tour guides, wearing costumes that made them look ridiculous, pretended to be guards or the nobility as they showed their charges around. Helen listened to a pair of lectures, then shook her head. There was no hint of any magic within the castle.

She found a seat and sat down, pretending she was gathering her breath. Steve hurried over to the concession stand and purchased a pair of hotdogs, passing one to her. Helen tried not to bite his head off as she took the hotdog and ate it, grimacing at the taste. The locals seemed to do something to their meat that made it pretty much inedible, compared to the food she enjoyed back home. It made a certain kind of sense - the local population was much higher and needed more food - but it still bugged her. Was it really that hard for the school’s dinner ladies to cook something edible?

Steve glanced at her. “Anything?”

Helen closed her eyes and reached out with her mind. OldeWorld’s background magic had always been terrifyingly low. The absence of power for her to draw on had practically crippled her, the day they had fallen through the gate and arrived here. It had taken weeks of practice to learn how to make use of what little power remained, then to draw on modern technology - such a strange concept - to enhance her spells. And if she could do it, she was sure her relatives could do it too - and better. They had had nearly four hundred years to practice.

The castle still felt dead and cold. The magic was so drained the castle felt like a cardboard box, without even the faint traces of magic she’d sensed elsewhere. A true home would have been shaped by magic, no matter how cheap and nasty the construction, but there was no trace of that either. The magic was gone, gone so completely it had left a void. She looked at the visitors and wondered, not for the first time, just what they thought they were seeing. Edinburgh Castle was nothing more, now, than a tourist attraction.

“Nothing,” she said, frankly. “Nothing at all.”

Steve looked unconvinced. “Where is the gate? Was the gate?”

Helen found it hard to put the concept into words. Steve and Brains had become fast friends - she tried not to be jealous – and Brains had taught Steve a great deal about magic, but there were aspects of magic the locals found impossible to comprehend. The ways their world worked and Helen’s world worked were so different that someone too completely schooled in one way of thinking could not hope to understand the other. The gate had been tied to a physical location, but it had also not had any fixed location. To her, it was no contradiction; to locals, it very definitely was.

“Here,” she said after a long pause. They were close enough, she thought, for her to sense the gate if there was still any trace of it. They should have been able to trigger the spell if they had the right equipment. “But it isn’t here any longer.”

She scowled, then looked around. No one seemed to paying any attention to them, but she couldn’t help feeling paranoid anyway. Were the tour guides secret agents? Or the guardsman on duty in the sentry boxes? Or the cleaner pushing a plastic trolley from bin to bin, collecting litter before the bins overflowed? Her head spun. They had searched online for names she knew from her world and found little of any real use. There were either too many people with the same name, too many to narrow it down to people who might be related to powerful families on the other side of the gates, or too few. Steve insisted that might be a bad sign. The local magicians were certainly powerful enough to erase all traces of their existence.

And there has been enough upheaval over the past four hundred years for them to break all ties with the past, Helen thought. She hadn’t anything like enough time to study OldeWorld’s history, but enough had changed – Charles I, Cromwell and the Civil War, James II and the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution - for her to suspect the magicians might have simply changed their names and hidden themselves.  We might be wasting our time.

She rubbed her forehead. She had assumed her relatives were not the only magicians remaining on OldeWorld. There had been others, the last of the Folk, who had been left behind when the gates closed. She didn’t know what had happened to them, but she found it hard to believe they had vanished. Surely, they could have adapted. Or … she didn’t want to consider the possibility, but she had to admit the Burners might have gotten them. King James hadn’t been the last monarch or religious nutcase to try to wipe out witchcraft. It was clear that most of the victims hadn’t had any real magic, and they had merely been women who had refused to conform to society’s demands, but it was possible they had killed a few real witches. Something had to have convinced them that they needed to hunt down all magic users …

“We might have to go back to York,” she muttered. She wasn’t keen on the idea - if there was anywhere their enemies would be guarding, it was York - but they might have no choice. “If we don’t find something here …”

Steve stood. “We’ll go to the lodgings,” he said. It was mid-afternoon. They had planned to arrive earlier, but the railway company had had other plans. “Get something to eat, and a good night sleep. And then we can decide what to do in the morning.”

Helen couldn’t disagree, even though she had a sense they needed to move fast. Her family hadn’t become one of the most powerful in the world by letting the grass grow under their feet, and she dared not assume her relatives were any more indolent. If they were just like her …

They know they can open the gate now, she thought. The thought haunted her as she followed him back onto the street. What will they do with that knowledge?

Chapter Five: York, Earth, Now

Norris Nicolson felt utterly out of place.

He sat in the waiting room and looked around, resisting the urge to turn and run as fast as he could. The chamber was perfectly tasteful, everything from the wooden furnishings to the portraits on the walls and the paint designed to create a calming sensation that made it easier to wait to be seen. He had been in places he felt like a fish out of water before, like the sports hall or the martial arts taster class he had taken once, but this felt like a whole new world. He felt scruffy and poor and … just by sitting on the leather armchair, he felt as if he was polluting the room by his mere presence. It wasn’t his idea of a comfortable waiting room. He was too nervous for the calming sensation to have any effect.

His heart sank as he looked from portrait to portrait. The men and women captured by the artists looked as if they were so far above him the gulf could never be crossed, not even briefly. The men were handsome and brave and noble and true, while the young women were so elegant they made the prettiest girl he’d seen at school look positively dowdy in comparison. They were so secure in their own supremacy that they saw no need to boost themselves by putting others down. He couldn’t say how he had that impression - perhaps it was magic - but it refused to go away. His eyes lingered on a young woman so beautiful she took his breath away, then dropped to the carpeted floor. It wasn’t fair. He didn’t belong here. The girl existed - he was sure she existed - but she wouldn’t give him the time of day. Why would she?

He squirmed on the seat, feeling uncomfortably as if he was going to see the headmaster of his school. The man had pretended to be everyone’s friend, but Norris hadn’t wanted a friend. He’d wanted a headmaster who kept order in his school; his headmaster had been a laughable failure, allowing bullies and racists and rapists and nearly every other sort of monster free rein to do as they wished to anyone who could not stand up to them. Norris had been knocked down so often, on the first day he entered school to now, that it was hard for him to even consider fighting back. He had internalised the idea that resistance would only make the beatings worse so completely that, even when he had been given a taste of real power, he had been unable to use it. His mind had just frozen. And he had resorted to desperate measures to save himself …

A flicker of guilt danced at the back of his mind. He had killed with magic. He had killed one his tormentors. Part of him was shocked, and had had nightmares about the stench of burning flesh as the bully died in agony; but the other part of him felt guilty, even though the bully had deserved to die. Norris had known him for ten years. He had never seen a single hint of human feelings, of anything other than delight in tormenting anyone he could. It was a sick joke that such a monster had been successful, a star on the playing field and a hit with the ladies. The asshole had lost his virginity very early, then bragged of his sexual conquests to anyone who couldn’t get away. Norris wanted to believe the boy had been lying, but he couldn’t force himself to believe it.

He looked up as a door, as perfectly pleasing to the eye as the rest of the room, opened to reveal a young woman only a year or two older than he was. She was dressed in a simple suit and skirt that covered everything from her neckline to her knees, yet hinted at her curves so beautifully that it was hard not be drawn to her. Norris found himself staring and made himself lower his eyes. Girls hated being ogled, even though the only boys who got called out for staring were the ones who couldn’t push back. He had been embarrassed, publicly humiliated, for looking at a girl, yet there were boys who had gotten away with flipping up skirts to reveal her underwear or even, in one case, flashing a girl’s bare ass to the entire room. It just wasn’t fair. The strong did as they pleased. The weak suffered.

“Mr. Nicolson,” the girl said. Norris felt, again, as if he somehow tricked his way into the room and was now about to be exposed as a fraud. Mr. Nicolson was his father. “His Lordship will see you now.”

Norris forced himself to stand, somehow. He caught a whiff of the girl’s perfume as she nodded, then turned to lead him through the door. His eyes dropped to her rear, admiring the shape of her buttocks against the skirt. He thought she wasn’t wearing underwear. A flash of shame ran through him, followed by bitter resentment. He was a virgin. He could no more talk to a girl about anything than he could score a goal on the football field. And yet …

His mind raged. Just once, I’d like to score, he thought. Just once!

Then take her, a voice whispered at the back of his head. You have magic. Take her.

Norris gritted his teeth. He hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to kill his tormentor, even though the risk of being caught was almost non-existent. He had … in truth, he wasn’t quite sure what he had done. He’d given himself a split personality, created a part of himself that was brave enough to do things he couldn’t. It had been Norris2 who had killed the tormentor. It had been Norris2 who had taken the lead when Norris had been arrested. It had been Norris2 …

A simple compulsion spell will bring her to her knees, infuse her with a demand that only you can fill, Norris2 whispered. You could make her yours.

The images washed through his mind. The girl kneeling in front of him, her lips wrapped around his manhood and her fingers stroking his rear. She was naked and willing and … he bit himself, trying to drive the images out of his mind. It would be wrong, morally wrong, to force a girl to go to bed with him. It would be rape. There would be no excuse, nothing that could possibly justify his actions, either to himself or to a jury. And yet, he was so tired of being a virgin. He was so tired of being called an incel.

He forced himself to keep his eyes on the back of her head as she led in into an office. He had half-expected something akin to his headmaster’s office, but in hindsight that had been foolish. The office was as attractive as the waiting room; two walls lined with bookcases, a third broken by windows looking out over the grounds, and the final wall covered in paintings of men in aristocratic garb. The desk was heavy and wooden, without even a trace of modern technology. There was no computer, no phone, not even an electric light. But it wasn’t that that caught and held his attention. It was the man seated behind the desk.

“Thank you, Polly,” Lord Burghley said.  “You may go.”

Polly curtsied - Norris had never seen anyone do that outside of period dramas - and backed out of the room, leaving the two men alone. Norris tried not to stare. Lord Burghley was tall, his dark and curly hair long enough to brush against his shoulders, wearing a suit that cost more than Norris would ever make in his entire life … and he had an air of command, of presence, that guaranteed no one would ever make fun of him. Norris had heard boys bragging they were alpha males, the top of the scale, but Lord Burghley was the first genuine alpha male he’d ever met. He didn’t have to push anyone around, or brag about his superiority to anyone. He didn’t need to. He just was.

You want to be him, Norris2 whispered. You could, if you just reached out and took it.

Norris felt a rush of shame. Again. He hated being weak. He hated being unable to assert himself, unable to defend and stuff, unable to even carve out a space for himself that was invaded whenever someone bigger and stronger than himself felt like some fun. He was right at the bottom of the social hierarchy. There was no one for him to pick on, no one he could take his feelings out on … he didn’t want to do anything of the sort, but it would be nice not to be at the bottom. If there was just one person below him …

“Mr Nicolson,” Lord Burghley said, indicating a chair. If it had been anyone else, Norris would have thought he was being mocked. Lord Burghley made it sound sincere, as if he thought Norris was genuinely important. He would discover his mistake soon enough, Norris reflected as he sat, but for the moment he would bask in it. “Thank you for coming.”

He sounded as though he meant that too. Norris almost laughed. He had nowhere else to go. The police wanted him on suspicion of murder, although they had no idea how he had done the deed, and his family had probably already disowned him. His parents had certainly never given a damn. They had done nothing to help, refusing to listen to his pleas for him to be moved to a better school. And he had betrayed his first teacher. He really did have nowhere else to go.

“You’re welcome,” he managed. He tried to sound confident, but he knew he sounded weak. It was just a matter of time until he was discarded as casually as a chocolate wrapper. He was just … useless …

Then make yourself useful, Norris2 thundered. The sound was so deafening that, for a moment, Norris feared he had spoken out loud. He won’t discard you if you are useful to him!

Lord Burghley seemed to take him seriously. “You are aware, of course, that our guests came from another world?”

Norris nodded, slowly. He had thought it a sick joke when Steve had convinced him to attend the afterschool class. Steve was one of the better boys - he wasn’t a bully, nor was he abusive to his sister - but that didn’t mean he was a good guy. Norris was all too aware his weakness kept the other boys from getting close to him, for fear of being picked on by the bullies. Steve was stronger than he was - Norris had no illusions about his own punches being any stronger than the average toddler - but not strong enough to defy the bullies. Their shared interests were not enough to make them friends.

And yet, Norris had seen magic.

If he hasn’t seen it, he really would have thought it a joke. But he had …

The memories mocked him. He had studied and practised as if he had finally – finally - seen the chance to strike back at his tormentors. Or defend himself. Or even just to impress a girl. He had done well - he knew he had - and yet he had been beaten down so completely that he couldn’t defend himself. And he had had to give himself a split personality to do the work…

Let me handle it, Norris2 whispered. I can get what you want.

Lord Burghley spoke calmly, but firmly. “We attempted to prevent them from reopening the gate and returning home,” he said. “At that, we failed.”

Norris tried not to cringe. He was going to be blamed. He was always blamed. His father blamed him for not being the son had always wanted, his mother blamed him for not being a little girl, his classmates turned him into a scapegoat for everything and his teachers just let them get away with it because they didn’t dare try to call the tougher boys to account. There was no point in trying to escape blame, or to justify himself … or to justify something he hasn’t even done. It was all his fault, even when it wasn’t.

“It was most unfortunate,” Lord Burghley continued, “but it wasn’t a total loss. We had sensors emplaced around the gate from the moment we realised it wasn’t gone, merely closed. The oscillating egress point, and the core of magic surrounding it, was difficult to track, but we learnt a great deal. It was unfortunate that we lost people who could teach us much about the other side, yet …”

Norris blinked in surprise. He wasn’t being blamed?

Lord Burghley smiled, as if he had read Norris’s thought. “We believe we can open the gate to their world ourselves,” he said. “We would like you to be one of the first explorers.”

“I …” Norris swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. “I …”

It was hard to think clearly. He had always wanted to be an adventurer … but he had never had the nerve. And there had been nowhere left to explore. The world had been charted. There were no more lost cities, or undiscovered countries, to be found and the age of exploration was now seen as a minor embarrassment. The space programme was a joke, and even if it had been more successful Norris had no illusions about his chances of becoming an astronaut. They were comparable to a girl like Polly deciding she wanted to have sex with him.

He swallowed, again. He had wanted to be Kirk, or Picard, or Sisko, or even Janeway. He had feared he was too much like Wesley “Shut Up” Crusher. God, he had loathed Wesley with a searing passion so illogical Mr Spock would have felt compelled to point it out. The little brat had had all of Norris’s weaknesses, but he had never been punished for them. He had been rewarded instead! It was funny, part of his mind reflected, that the idea of Wesley being allowed to fly the ship and treated as someone who was actually important was more unbelievable than a faster-than-light starship …

“They will know I’m from another world,” Norris said. The magicians knew that at least one other world existed. They knew travel between them was not impossible … indeed, that it happened only a week ago. “They’ll catch me the moment I show myself.”

He wasn’t sure, in all honesty, if he was putting forward valid arguments or if he was too scared to go. Part of him was terrified. He had studied enough magic to be sure there were magic spells that could not be performed on Earth, but were easily possible on the other side. He might wind up a frog, or … or what? If he said or did the wrong thing, and revealed what he was, he might be killed on the spot. And yet …

You need to be useful, Norris2 hissed. If you turn him down, he will discard you.

“We believe we can prepare you for the mission,” Lord Burghley said, with a confidence that was hard to disbelieve. “We know more than you might think about their society.”

Norris knew better than to question authority figures, but he had to ask. “It’s been five hundred years,” he said. “How can you be sure?”

“The gates were first opened when Elizabeth Tudor came to the throne, in 1558, and started to close shortly after her death in 1603,” Lord Burghley explained. “While my ancestors declined to emigrate before the last of the gates closed in 1605, they did collect a great deal of information on how the newborn society was developing. A great many questions, I admit remain unanswered, as most of my ancestors had no idea there would be a permanent split between the two worlds, but we know enough to prepare you.”

“Back then, the world was much less advanced,” Norris pointed out. “Queen Elizabeth needed weeks to get from one end of her country to the other. Now, we can get around the world in less than a day. Their society must have grown and developed too.”

He stopped himself, too late. It really was unwise to question. And yet …

“We believe that their society has not grown and changed in the same way as our own,” Lord Burghley told him. “We suspect we can use our own knowledge of magic, different from theirs in several crucial ways, to provide you with a cover story. They do not have computers and are completely unaware of spells devised by computer programs and cast through computer systems. As long as you are careful, as long as you don’t break cover too openly, you should remain undetected.”

Should, Norris thought. He was still reeling that he hadn’t been punished for speaking his mind. His life would have been different, and better, if Lord Burghley had been his father. Norris had no idea if Lord Burghley had children, but if he did, they were luckier than any of his classmates. If this goes wrong …

This is your chance to shine, Norris2 said. His other personality bore down on him. This is your chance. If you say no now, you will never get a second chance.

Norris hesitated. He was a coward. He was a coward who made Peter Pettigrew look like a brave man. Pettigrew had been brave, in his own way. Norris have never understood why Pettigrew hadn’t been satisfied with what he had. His friends might have looked down on him, and that would have taken a toll on Pettigrew’s psyche, but it was so much better than anything Norris ever had. Now …

He took a breath. “I’ll do it,” he said. “When do we start?”

Chapter Six: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now

Richard tried not to show his irritation too openly as he led the way back to the school and up to his bedroom.  He had hoped Janet and he could further their relationship, not be interrupted by someone who could have written them a letter … they were lucky, he supposed, that they hadn’t gone further than kissing.  If they’d been caught naked …

He felt a twinge of guilt, mixed with something he didn’t care to look at too closely. A girl from his world would be quick to either declare her interest or make it clear she wasn’t interested. Janet was not from his world and might not understand how it really worked in Gatehouse. Or … he shook his head in annoyance as he pushed the door open and stepped into the room. She could not be blamed for not understanding how the local culture worked. He knew he had had his own problems coming to terms with how things worked in the other world. He’d been lucky not to make a total fool of himself.

She grew up in a world with fewer options for youngsters, Richard reminded himself. And she adapted herself to the options she had.

Brains looked up as they entered, blinking owlishly. His desk was covered with more and more papers, each one depicting a new take on the magical topographic sensor that had started the whole affair. Richard hoped that was a good sign. Brains was given a great deal of latitude, both because of his family and because of his obvious genius, but there were limits. He’d feared his friend would be told not to experiment again on pain of expulsion - or worse. Brains wouldn’t become a Sinister - he wasn’t the type of person to lose himself in bad feelings and malicious intentions - but that didn’t mean his work couldn’t be dangerous. Richard suspected there would be new limits on student experiments once the council got over its shock and started thinking rationally.

“Brains,” Janet said. “How are you?”

“I have been better,” Brains said. He looked as though he had been through the wringer. It was normally Richard who translated Brains’s work into something everyone else could understand, but the council had flatly refused to allow Richard to attend their discussions with Brains. Richard hoped the councillors had one hell of a headache after listening to him. “How do they not understand the simplest of concepts?”

Richard had to smile. Brains might be a genius, but he wasn’t an insufferable one. It had never occurred to him that his brains made him superior to everyone else, or even that the rest of the world might have trouble keeping up with him. The council would have been wiser to write down their questions, have Richard pose them to Brains, and then have him scribble down the answers in a manner anyone could understand. As it was, they’d probably need to bring in more researchers just to understand what he was telling them. But at least they hadn’t told him to stop experimenting.

“They are not researchers in their own right,” Richard said. “They are more concerned about the effects of the experiment, rather than how it happened.”

Brains looked peevish. He had an insatiable desire to work out how things happened - and why. It wasn’t enough to know that something worked, not for him. He wanted to know the details. Richard found it irritating at times, but he had to admit it had its uses. A magician could not improve upon his spells unless he understood how they worked. He recalled Steve complaining about how the latest computers could not be modified by their users and shuddered. If a user didn’t know how his machine worked, how could he fix it when it went wrong? He’d have to send it back to the shop to get it repaired.

“You would think they would at least send someone who could hold up his end of the conversation,” Brains said. “I have to explain the simplest concepts to them.”

Richard looked around for an uncovered chair, then sighed and motioned for Janet to sit on his bed. He leaned against the wall himself, unwilling to sit too close to her with Brains in the room. Brains had never shown any real interest in anyone, not even after his family had arranged a match with Helen, but there was nothing to be gained by embarrassing him. If, of course, he even noticed. Brains had come out of his shell a little, after their unplanned trip to OldeWorld, but he was still more interested in his own thoughts than anything else.

“We had a visitor,” he said. “Lucas Trent.”

Brains looked uninterested. “And who is he?”

“One of Lady Burghley’s retainers, I think,” Richard said. No one would wear a family crest unless it was genuine, or if they were tired of life. He hadn’t had a chance to check the verification spells on the crest, but he doubted Lucas Trent would take the risk of wearing one if it wasn’t valid. It would be easy for him to look up the household and see if Lucas Trent genuinely worked for Helen’s mother. “He had a proposition for us.”

“Did he?” Brains didn’t look as if he was any more interested. “Should he not be applying to our parents?”

Richard felt a flick of jealousy. He didn’t envy Brains very often, but there were times when it was all too easy to be aware of the gulf between them. Brains had been born into a wealthy and powerful family that could give him the best possible education, fund his experiments, and pull strings to make sure Brains and Richard stayed together. And pair him up with a young girl from a similar background, with power and intelligence capable of complementing his. He was aware, intellectually, that his friend had obligations as well as privileges, but he found it hard to believe it. It didn’t help that Brains showed no interest in such things. He was truly unaware of how good he had it.

I could have robbed him blind and he would never have noticed, Richard thought. He wouldn’t have done anything of the sort, but … it was irritating, on some level, to know he could. He even gets away with not honouring his obligations to his family.

“It isn’t that kind of proposition,” Richard said. If it had been someone else, he’d have thought it a terrible joke. Brains wasn’t the sort of person to joke about such things. “He is offering to fund research into reopening the gate.”

Brains looked up. “More funding than we could get here?”

Richard blinked. It wasn’t like Brains to care about things as inconsequential as money. “What did they tell you?”

“They don’t want me spending more money here,” Brains said. There was a hint of irritation in his voice. “We are not allowed to produce any more devices without prior permission.”

“They just want theory,” Richard said. He outlined everything Lucas Trent had told him. “They think that if they have a way to reopen the gate, it will speed things up when the council decides to do it.”

“They might be right,” Brains said, slowly. “Right now, we have to worry about adjusting oscillations for …”

Richard hid his amusement as Janet’s eyes glazed over. Brains had no qualms about discussing magical equations and theory that were far over everyone else’s head. Janet was far from stupid, but she lacked even the basic principles of magic she’d have to master if she wanted to make something of herself. She had an advantage over some students - she had grown used to using her power to take shortcuts - yet it wasn’t enough to make up for her deficiencies. Brains’s technobabble might as well as be a foreign language, as far as she was concerned. Hell, she had to master a foreign language if she wanted to make progress. The vast majority of spells were written in Latin.

And OldeWorld stopped teaching Latin decades ago, Richard thought. Coincidence? Or deliberate malice?

“I’m sure I got all that,” Janet said quickly, when Brains finally stop speaking. “You don’t have to repeat it.”

Richard hid his amusement. Brains would take Janet’s words at face value. Richard had seen it before. Someone would insist they understood, just to stop Brains talking, only to discover - a little later - that Brains thought they really had understood and his next lecture was even more incomprehensible, because he thought they understood what he’d said earlier. He made a mental note to warn Janet about it later. She was even less prepared to handle it than most of the other students.

She leaned forward. “I don’t get it, though,” she said. “Why is he approaching you in the first place? How does the system actually work?”

Richard nodded in understanding. He had found it hard to figure out how OldeWorld worked. The idea of a constitutional monarch was strange and alien to him - the monarch should have real power or he should be discarded - and elections puzzled him, not least because the system was too big for anyone to feel truly represented. It was difficult to tell if any of the MPs generally cared about their people, but the estate they had seen suggested they didn’t. An MP who thought he could be voted out of office at any moment would be a little more motivated to make his people’s lives better.

“It’s complicated,” he said. It was as natural as … well, magic to him, but to her it was a complete mystery. “Do you want me to start from the beginning?”

Janet shot him a shy smile. “They do say men like to show off their knowledge.”

Richard smiled back, although he wasn’t sure he could explain properly. How could he look at his own society from perspective of an outsider? How could he explain something that made perfect sense in context, but none at all outside it? How …?

He took a breath. “There were originally seven gates from OldeWorld to here,” he said. “One of them, the oldest, was here, at Gatehouse. The remaining six were opened in six cities – Londinium, Edinburgh, Salisbury, Winchester, Caernarfon and Canterbury - all nexuses of mystic power. Those gates became the core of the new cities, in locations that corresponded to cities on the other side. With me so far?”

“I think so,” Janet said.

Richard hoped that, this time, she was being truthful. “The six cities were founded by six families. Each of the families set up a throne in their city and used blood magic to link that throne to their population. The city’s princess - by custom, it is always a princess - sits on the throne and feels a link to her people, allowing her to form an impression of what her people actually want. She can then make decisions on their behalf.”

Janet looked troubled. “What if she lies?”

“She can’t,” Richard said. “It’s part of the magic woven into the thrones that she has to take notice of public opinion. If you move to one of those cities, and you want to live there for a while, you’re expected to add a little of your blood to the throne, to allow the princess to sample your opinions. If you don’t, your opinions are not counted.”

He paused. “There are also places ruled by specific families, like Helen’s, and places that exist independent of the cities,” he added. “Helen’s family are in charge of their lands, but they can’t keep their people prisoner. If someone doesn’t like their rule, they can just leave. It forces them to be honest. It’s a little more complex than that, but I think that is the basic idea.”

“I see,” Janet said. “And why are Helen’s family approaching you?”

“I suspect they think the princesses will refuse to reopen the gate, leaving Helen stranded on the far side,” Richard said. “Or they think there will be a delay between the decision to make contact and actually putting together the spells to do it. Either way … they are prepared to pay for our research.”

Janet said nothing for a long moment. Richard wondered what she was thinking. Helen stranded in a strange and alien world, but Janet was stranded too. If the gates were kept apparently closed, Janet would never see her home again. Richard wouldn’t blame her for feeling a little homesick, even though her home had been … he wasn’t sure how to put into words. Janet’s family had been lovely. Janet’s hometown had been a nightmare. He knew how he had felt, when he had thought he would never see his home again. Janet might feel the same way too.

She frowned, finally. “Do you trust them?”

“They do have an incentive to cooperate,” Richard said. He had never liked or trusted Helen at least until they had found themselves on the wrong side of the gate. Her family had a reputation for being grasping, for claiming everything they legally could and more besides. Helen herself had been obnoxious right up to the moment she had lost most of her power. “I assume they do want Helen home.”

Janet nodded. “And … are they asking you to do anything illegal? Anything that could get you in real trouble?”

Richard understood. OldeWorld no longer had a tradition of gentlemen scientists and inventors. There were tales of great companies founded in garages, but all of those stories tended to leave out a great many details. Richard wasn’t quite sure what Steve had meant, when he had talked about an atomic Boy Scout, yet it was clear that kids were discouraged from experimenting on their own. A teenager who experimented with chemicals was more likely to be arrested for urban terrorism than given the education he needed to become a truly great inventor. Hell, it was impossible to take apart many modern gadgets to see how they worked. They might as well be magic.

It was Brains, surprisingly, who answered. “There is nothing illegal in researching and developing theories,” he said. “Actual experiments may cross the line, depending on how much threat they pose to the world around us. If we are the only ones at risk, we might get a pass, but if we put others at risk we might wind up in real trouble. If all they want is theory …”

“They might try to open the gate from their lands,” Richard pointed out. “Could they not duplicate the original device?”

“They can easily duplicate the device,” Brains said. “It doesn’t matter. They can’t use the device unless they position it in a location where they can reopen the gate. The device does not create a whole new gate, merely triggers the gate that is already there. We had no idea that it would open the gate until we turned the device on.”

Richard considered it. If Brains was correct, and he was rarely wrong where magical theory was concerned, there was no harm in researching the theory. Helen’s family would not be able to make use of the theory, unless they set up the device in one of the cities. The nasty part of his mind wondered if they knew that, if they understood they couldn’t reopen the gate without cooperation from the princesses or the Merlin. He was tempted to take them for all he could get. Helen, if the stories are true, had been a real chip off the old block. Her mother had a reputation for being one of the most ruthless aristocrats in the world.

And yet she cares more about her people than the aristocrats on the other side of the gate, thought. She has no choice.

“So we do it,” he said. “And hope for the best?”

He looked at Janet. “Do you want to go home?”

A flurry of emotions crossed her face, coming and going so quickly he couldn’t grasp them before they were gone. It would have been easier, he supposed, if she had no family ties on the far side. She could have left OldeWorld behind without hesitation. Richard wished, not for the first time, that they had been able to bring Steve and their mother through the gate. It wouldn’t have been that hard to find a place for them. Helen and/or Brains had family who would help, if there was nowhere else to go.

“I don’t want to go home to stay,” Janet said, slowly. “But I would like to see my family again.”

Richard looked at Brains. “We research how to do it. If the princesses give their approval, we will be ready to reopen the gate. If not … at least we will know how to do it.” 

Brains nodded. “There is plenty of room for original research, even if we don’t reopen the gate,” he said. “Our original experiments into magical topography should continue. We might be able to find ways to open portals right across the land, or even open a gate somewhere well away from the original gates. It must be possible. Those gates didn’t come out of nowhere.”

There was a knock on the door. Richard tensed, then triggered the spell to open the door. A young student stood outside, clutching an envelope in one hand. Richard felt a glimmer of fellow-feeling. He’d been a messenger himself, back in his first year. It was a simple way for a student to make some money.

“Your class schedule,” the student said, passing the envelope to Janet. “Good luck.”

She turned and left, closing the door behind her. Janet opened the envelope and ran her eye down the list of classes. “It’s real, isn’t it?”

Richard nodded. He hoped she kept her enthusiasm when it dawned on her how hard many of her classes were going to be. He was surprised she was being assigned to classes so quickly, although there were limits to how much private tutoring the school could give her. Perhaps the idea was to drop her into the deep end and see if she could swim.

“Good luck,” he said. “And be careful.”

Chapter Seven: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now

Janet wasn’t sure what she had expected when she stepped into her very first magical classroom. Something out of Harry Potter, perhaps, with Professor Snape glowering at her while deducting points for everything from being improperly dressed to blowing up a cauldron full of magic potion. She couldn’t help a twinge of fear as she walked into the classroom and looked around. She had never liked her old classrooms, with rows upon rows of desks positioned carefully to ensure the teacher didn’t have to take notice of misbehaviour, bullying, and sexual harassment. This classroom was different.

She stopped and stared. The seats - comfortable chairs - were arranged in a loose semicircle around the blackboard. There were no desks, something that puzzled her until she saw the writing boards positioned next to the chairs. It seemed she was supposed to balance a board on her knees to write, rather than hiding behind the desk. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. The teacher himself, a middle-aged man who looked nothing like Snape, stood by a shelf of books, reading a leather-bound volume that looked older than anything she had seen at her old school. She half expected to see dust dripping from the text and falling to the floor.

The teacher looked up. “Janet, is it not?”

Janet nodded, wordlessly. She had no idea how to act. Back home, she had done everything in her power to keep from being noticed. The teachers just couldn’t be trusted, neither to treat their charges fairly or enforce order. There was no shortage of horror stories about older teachers who hit on their younger students, some of which she knew to be true. Should she keep her head down? Or was it worth trying to impress the teacher? The teachers she had known had had very little authority. That wasn’t true here.

“Please, take a seat,” the teacher said. “Sit anywhere.”

Janet hesitated, then picked a chair at random and sat. The arrangement made it hard for anyone to remain out of sight. She hoped, praying to a god she didn’t quite believe in, that none of the chairs were already claimed by the other students. Back home, it was all too easy to take a chair that effectively belonged to another student, a student who wouldn’t hesitate to beat you up if they thought you had done it deliberately. Here … who knew? Her heart began to race as other students stepped into the classroom, a strange mixture of children and adults. Richard had told her that classes were graded by ability rather than physical age, but it was still strange to see so many ages mixed together. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. It was impossible to believe the different ages mixed socially outside of class.

A young girl, apparently the same age as herself, sat next to Janet and eyed her curiously. Janet tried not to withdraw into her shell. She was the school’s first immigrant … the first true muggle-born student. Her lips twisted at the thought, her heart sinking as it dawned on her how difficult it might be to make friends. She had entered late, after all the friendship circles had been formed … not, she supposed, that she had ever been any good at making friends. She had never had a true friend …

The girl stuck out a hand. “I’m Elizabeth,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”

Janet shook her hand carefully. It was impossible to tell anything about Elizabeth just by looking at her. She wore a robe that was more like a dress, carefully tailored to show off her curves without revealing any bare flesh; her curly red hair fanned around her face and fell to her shoulders, highlighting the sheer perfection of her skin. If she had been on Earth, Janet reflected, the boys would have been falling over themselves to ask her out, and she wouldn’t have paid any attention to Janet at all. Here …

“Pleased to meet you too,” she said. It was hard to speak. She didn’t know what she could say that wouldn’t cause offence. “It’s my first day.”

Elizabeth shot her a reassuring smile. “I had a first day too,” she said. “It does get better.”

Janet hoped Elizabeth was right as the last of the students drifted into the classroom, the door closing with an ominous thud. Elizabeth pointed out a handful of students, muttering names Janet knew she would never memorise until they were repeated again and again. There had been students back home who had shared her classes for years, yet she didn’t know their names. They were just … background characters, as far she was concerned. Others had come and gone so frequently that getting to know them seemed pointless.

“I’ll try to remember them all,” she said, although half the names had gone in one ear and out the other. “How do you keep track of everyone?”

She cringed, the moment she said it. Could she possibly have said anything stupider?

Elizabeth smiled. “I’ve been here for a while,” she said. “You’ll learn all the names in time.”

The teacher - his name turned out to be Professor Heywood - took his seat and called for attention. Janet found herself leaning forward as he started to outline the course and his expectations of his students. It was galling to be in a remedial class, but she supposed it beat having to enter school and share classes with the youngest students. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad here - there were men old enough to be her grandfather only a few seats away - but back home it would have been embarrassing beyond words. The idea of going back to primary school, a teenager in a classroom of children, was just …

She took the offered notebook and forced herself to take notes as Professor Heywood discussed basic charms work, describing how one could draw runes and sigils as part of a spell. Janet had known she was ignorant of more than the very basics, but it was still humiliating to realise just how little she knew. She promised herself she would go to the library straight after the day ended and look up everything she could before the class advanced and left her behind. Richard had promised to help, but she didn’t want to bother him. Would he still like her so much if he had to explain every little detail to her? She knew she would have trouble, if her boyfriend needed her to read to him, and he might feel the same way too.

She’d expected a lecture and nothing else, but Professor Heywood had different ideas. “Draw out this pattern,” he said, sketching out a series of runes on the blackboard, “then modify it to suit yourself.”

Janet hesitated, then reminded herself that two-thirds of magical education was ruthlessly practical. Elizabeth was already shooting ahead, drawing out the runes on her paper. Janet braced herself, before drawing out the first rune herself. The lines lit up the moment she completed the first one, a thrill of pure delight running through her as she saw the spell. It was magic. Real magic. She felt her hand shake as she sketched out the remaining lines, a complex network of lights flickering into existence above the paper. They wobbled alarmingly until she gritted her teeth and stared at them, willing them to solidify. They suddenly felt impossibly real.

“You shouldn’t use your power to make the spell work,” Professor Heywood said. Janet tried not to flinch. She had been a weak little girl back home, the sort of student who would be punished because there would be no comeback from her parents or relatives. Teachers had felt free to scold her, or worse. “Just focus on drawing the lines properly and the spell will work.”

Janet nearly fainted in relief. She had expected … she wasn’t sure what she had expected. The professor might have called her out in front of the entire class, or made her stay behind after classes ended for a day, or … or what? Writing hundreds of lines? Detention? Corporal punishment? Instead, the teacher had been calm and polite and … and educational. She could have kissed the older man. She took a new sheet of paper and sketched out the runes for a second time. This time, the spell worked much better.

Elizabeth nudged her. “Try and remember the spell isn’t actually part of you,” she said, quietly. “The idea is to draw on the background magic rather than your own power.”

“Thanks,” Janet muttered. Professor Heywood didn’t seem to hear Elizabeth’s advice. Janet suspected he wouldn’t have told her off offering it, even if he had overheard. It was good advice. “How do I change the spell?”

“Just draw different lines,” Elizabeth said. “As long as it makes sense …”

It didn’t. Janet couldn’t help being reminded of watching a new house being put together - first the framework, then the walls, then finally the interior - but a house designed by a madman or, more likely, someone who really didn’t know what he was doing. The spell fell apart the moment she tried to change it, then steadfastly refused to go back together again. She had to go back to the start, yet … she gritted her teeth in frustration. It just didn’t make sense.

“You will learn,” Elizabeth assured her. “It’s your first day, remember?”

Janet nodded, then sighed inwardly as she realised Elizabeth wasn’t the only student helping others. Quite a few students were offering advice, or tips, or just sharing the bits of knowledge that seemed to help the others. Professor Heywood didn’t try to stop them, unless advice was genuinely bad, and when he corrected the speaker he was neither cruel nor sarcastic nor intent on rubbing their noses in their own mistakes. He spoke with a quiet authority that made it clear he didn’t have to be an asshole. She had only had one lesson with him and he was already her favourite teacher.

The bell rang. “Practice drawing out new structures tonight,” Professor Heywood said. “I want each of you to sketch out a stable spell-structure for tomorrow’s lesson.”

Elizabeth grinned at Janet. “Do you want to come to lunch with us?”

Janet hesitated. She had never been invited to eat with anyone back home, not since she’d gone to secondary school. In hindsight, the fact Annabelle had never asked her to lunch had been proof that Annabelle had never really given a damn about her. Janet had thought she would be eating alone, or joining Richard and Brains. She was scared to say yes and yet she didn’t want to say no …

“If you’ll have me,” she said. Elizabeth was beautiful. She wasn’t the only beautiful girl in the class. The idea she’d willingly spend time with Janet was bizarre. “I’d be delighted.”

Elizabeth grinned, then led the way down to the dining hall. It was nowhere near as soulless as the dining hall back home, with small eating rooms and isolated tables rather than row upon row of tables, benches, and plastic cutlery because the students could not be trusted with glass and metal. The food was very Olde English - roasted meats, boiled veg, puddings so sweet she feared she would get diabetes just by looking at them - but it was so superior to everything she’d been served back home that she had no intention of complaining. She could tolerate the absence of curry if it meant you didn’t have to look at the meat and wonder what it really was. At home, it was drenched in so much sauce it was difficult to taste the original flavour.

She took a plate of food, then followed to a backroom. A handful of girls were already there, some from the class and others completely new. One - a blonde girl Elizabeth introduced as Dora - seemed very standoffish, but the others were definitely friendly. Janet wasn’t too perturbed by Dora. She’d had much – much - worse from Annabelle.

Elizabeth smiled at her. “What is OldeWorld really like?”

“And you must have met my relatives,” another girl said. Janet thought she was called Mary, but she couldn’t have sworn to it. “What are they like? Do they miss us?”

Janet found it hard to answer both questions. How did she explain Earth to people from a completely different world? How did she explain that she had never met Mary’s relatives - and even she had, she would never have known? She knew there were other magicians on Earth … Mary’s relatives? She had no way to know. She’d certainly never met any of them.

“It’s big,” she said. “There are cities with more people than this world’s entire population.”

The words seemed so inadequate. How did she explain the differences between the two worlds? There were no computers in her new world, no cars or aircraft or railways or tanks or guns or … so many other things she had taken for granted simply didn’t exist here. She had looked at a history text, during her first lesson, and she’d being struck by how little had changed over the years. Mystic Albion had never really needed to change. The social problems that plagued her world never existed in Mystic Albion, nor had they needed solutions. Women didn’t have to fight for rights when they already had those rights. It was hard to say women were inferior when they could be just as good with magic as the men.

“Big?” Dora seemed unamused. “How big?”

Janet found herself stammering as she tried to answer. It was difficult to explain just how many people there were in Britain, let alone the rest of the world. The politics of the modern world were just too different for them to understand, let alone the political systems and ideologies that had taken root in the oddest places. She just couldn’t put it into words and she had the feeling that, if she did, they’d think she was lying. It was so alien to their experience that they would find it hard to wrap their heads around it.

Just like I had trouble believing in magic, she thought. If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have believed it.

Elizabeth came to her rescue. “Don’t ask too many questions,” she said. “Give her time to adjust.”

Janet shot her a grateful look. It was hard enough for immigrants even when they moved to society that was used to immigrants. Here … she was the only immigrant. Mystic Albion was too different to lull her into a false sense of security, a mistaken conviction that she understood how the world actually worked, but… she was relieved they were cutting her any stack. They didn’t have to be horrible to expect her to know more than she did; they just had to be unaware she was from a very different world. Intellectually, they knew it; emotionally, they’d find it hard to believe.

“I know too little,” she said. “Where do you come from?”

The girls smiled and chatted. Janet forced herself to listen. She had never been very good at paying attention to other people - some never spoke about themselves, some talked about nothing else  - but she needed to know more about them. Elizabeth was from a merchant family; Mary was from a farming village, just like Richard. Dora was an aristocrat … Janet couldn’t help wondering if she was related to Helen. They looked nothing alike, but that was meaningless. Steve and Janet didn’t look very much alike either. It was sometimes hard to believe they were siblings.

“I think Richard is pretty cute,” Mary said. “You’re a very lucky girl.”

Janet flushed. “Thanks,” she managed. She had never dared admit she was attracted to anyone, back home. The best she could hope for, if anyone had discovered her crush, was a lifetime of mockery. At worst … she knew one girl who had been publicly humiliated after admitting she fancied a sporty boy, a boy so conceited that he’d found the idea of such a lowly girl liking him to be unthinkable. “I …”

“Just remember to use the proper spells, when you get between the sheets,” Dora said. It was difficult to tell if she was offering sincere advice or being snide. “You don’t want to get pregnant in school.”

Janet felt her flush deepen. It wasn’t the kind of conversation she’d ever imagined having with anyone. Her mother had given her a lecture on the birds and bees, when she’d been old enough to realise the differences between boys and girls, but otherwise … she felt a sudden urge to run. She’d overheard enough conversations to know that girls could be just as crude as boys when it came to discussing sex and relationships. She wasn’t sure what was worse. The romantic claptrap about buying flowers and going to fancy restaurants or the blunt crudeness around oral pleasure, kissing, and other sexual acts she had trouble believing anyone did in real life. The idea of a man putting his cock in her … she didn’t want to think about it. It was hard enough to conceive of giving head.

“Don’t embarrass her.” Elizabeth winked. “If you want advice, you can always ask me. Or the nurse.”

Janet scowled. “Does she keep her mouth closed?”

Elizabeth seemed shocked by the question. “Of course,” she said. “What else would she do?”

Tell everyone, Janet thought. There had been a boy at her old school who’d been outed for being gay and a girl whose parents had been told she’d gotten pregnant. No one in their right mind told the nurse anything.

The bell rang.  Janet breathed a sigh of relief. She liked the girls, but they were a bit much. And yet they seem generally interested in her …

“I have potions,” she said. “I’ll see you all later?”

“Of course,” Elizabeth said. “Be seeing you.”

Chapter Eight: Gatehouse, Mystic Albion, Now

“You need to clarify this section,” Richard said. The pile of notes in front of him was growing larger by the hour. “It just doesn’t make sense unless you have a background in advanced magical theory.”

Brains seemed unimpressed. “Anyone who picks this up is going to have a background in theory,” he said. He sounded as tired as Richard felt, unusual for someone who been known to stay up for several nights in a row to complete his work. “This isn’t a random theoretical paper, but an outline of everything we know from the first set of experiments.”

Richard rubbed his eyes. He had never thought he would miss classes, but the last few hours had been surprisingly tedious. He wasn’t the genius Brains was, of course, yet he knew enough to get by. His readers - the people who were going to be studying the complete paper - might be ignorant of everything, up to and including their own ignorance. Richard wondered, not for the first time, if the process wasn’t a form of punishment for accidentally opening the gate. Or if the staff didn’t really know what to do about them. It wouldn’t be hard to just send them back to class …

Brains yawned. “There are limits to how much we can dumb it down for the readers.”

“You need to go to bed,” Richard said. Brains had to be tired if he was being so unpleasant about his readers. Endless meetings with the committee, endless repeats of the same thing over and over again … that would be enough to weaken anyone, even someone as lost in his own mind as Brains. “It’s evening. Go to bed and I’ll see you in the morning.”

Richard frowned as Brains started to clear the piles of papers off his bed. Brains would normally argue if he was told to get some rest, no matter how much he needed to lie down before he collapsed. Richard had spent plenty of time telling him to eat, wash, and sleep, yet it had been all he could do to get Brains to follow a regular sleep schedule. It was astonishing how many times Brains had abandoned the schedule, just to follow up an idea. And now he was just going to bed? It was worrying. Richard would almost have preferred to believe his friend was just pretending to go to bed, planning to get up again once Richard left the room.

“Don’t disturb the piles,” Brains said, as he placed the paperwork on top of both desks. “I need them in order.”

Richard nodded curtly. “Just make sure you get some rest,” he said. He started to point out that putting papers on his bed wasn’t exactly helpful, then stopped himself. He could sleep on the floor or even bed down with someone else, in exchange for future favours. “You can get a shower in the morning.”

He sighed, inwardly. Brains was completely oblivious to mundane matters like dirty clothes, unwashed hair, and smelly bodies. Richard found him a little rank at times even though Brains was his best friend. Helen would have real problems living and sleeping with him, if they ever got married. The thought cost him an odd little pang. Helen might be stuck on the far side of the gate for the rest of her life.

There was a sharp knock on the door. Richard stood and opened it slightly, just enough to see Janet standing outside. “Brains is going to bed,” he said quickly. Brains might not care if Janet saw him naked, but his family - and Janet herself - certainly would. “I’ll be along in a moment.”

He helped Brains into bed, feeling more like a nursemaid than a friend, then turned out the light and left his friend alone. Brains would be fine, he was sure. A few hours of sleep would make him feel a great deal better, tomorrow morning. Who knew? He might wake up so refreshed he cracked all the remaining problems with an hour or two of getting to work.

Janet looked different, somehow, as he stepped through the door and closed it behind him. Richard wondered, for an insane second, if someone had kidnapped her and taken her place, before dismissing the idea as ridiculous, a product of his own exhaustion. It wasn’t something he could put his finger on, yet … it bothered him. Something had changed and he didn’t understand what. It certainly wasn’t her hair or her clothes.

“Do you want to go to my room?” Janet sounded … odd … as she asked the question. “Or the library?”

Richard hesitated, unsure. “Your room,” he said, finally. “If that’s all right with you.”

It was hard to think clearly as they made their way down the corridor to Janet’s room. There were going to be problems, a few months down the line, when it dawned on the other students that Janet had a private room. Very few students were allowed a room all to themselves, even wealthy and powerful students who could bring immense pressure to bear on the school authorities. Richard suspected that Janet would have been told to share with Helen, if Helen had come back from OldeWorld. If she hadn’t been an immigrant, there was no doubt she would have been paired up with a stranger.

He took the seat she offered him and closed his eyes for a long moment, mentally kicking himself. Helen could have defended herself with ease, if she invited the wrong man into her room. Janet could not. And he’d accepted an invitation he suspected she hadn’t meant him to accept.

“It’s been a long day,” he said. “How was your first day at school?”

Janet smiled, so brightly it completely transformed her face. Richard had never thought she was ugly, but … she was radiant. She was … he reminded himself, again, that her last school had been hellish. Gatehouse couldn’t have been worse even if the staff had deliberately tried to put her through hell.

“It was wonderful,” Janet said. “I made new friends!”

Richard felt an odd stab of jealousy followed by shame. It was quite reasonable for Janet to make friends with her classmates. Richard hadn’t been allowed to go back to classes, not yet, but even if he did they wouldn’t be sharing classrooms. Janet had so much to learn before she could match him, let alone leave him in the dust. Richard didn’t have many friends. He wouldn’t begrudge Janet making friends of her own. He didn’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t had Brains. An outcast life was not worth living.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, finally. Janet would still have time for him, wouldn’t she? “How was it?”

“It was wonderful,” Janet gushed. She spoke so rapidly her words tumbled over each other as they spilled from her mouth.  Her enthusiasm was astonishing. “Everyone is so … helpful. The staff knows what they’re talking about!”

Richard blinked.  “That’s a surprise?”

“Yes!”  Janet’s smile – impossibly – grew wider.  “They never know what they are talking about back home!”

Richard suspected she was right. Helen and himself had been math geniuses, compared to the teachers assigned to teach them. They had known nothing about history, politics, or other current affairs - of course - but that had just been a matter of reading the right books and parroting the right answers. He hadn’t been impressed, even by the more practical subjects. The chemistry teacher had given the impression he was only a chapter or two ahead of the students and the biology teacher had been so confused over what he was allowed - or not - to say that his lessons had been difficult, if not impossible, to follow. But that wasn’t possible at Gatehouse. A teacher who didn’t know what was talking about would make a fool of himself very quickly.

Janet smiled at him. “And no one is nasty! There are no bullies here!”

She looked downcast, her expression morphing so quickly he feared she had cast a spell. “Why? Why didn’t they do anything about the bullies back home?”

Richard hesitated. He didn’t want to burst her bubble. He didn’t want to make her downcast again. He didn’t want to ruin her day.

“There are some bullies,” he said. “But …”

He shook his head, unsure of how to put his feelings into words. It was true that physical bullying was rare at Gatehouse, where physical strength meant nothing. He was bigger and stronger than Helen, yes, but her magic had been much stronger than his. There were limits on what students could do to each other, without drawing attention from teachers who had the authority to stop troublemakers in their tracks, yet …

Janet met his eyes. “What happens?”

Richard grimaced. “Students will often play magical tricks on each other,” he said. “There are limits, depending on the motives, but …”

His voice trailed off. “Helen … cast spells on me, a few times,” he said. It wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. “She was not very nice at times.”

Janet looked incredulous. He supposed, from her point of view, that it did sound a little unconvincing. Helen had been badly weakened by the unexpected transit to OldeWorld. She had never shown Janet how much she could do, when her powers were at their height. Nothing anyone had been able to do on OldeWorld, even the native magicians, matched her power. Helen had turned him into a frog with a snap of her fingers. Janet, given time, would be able to do the same and more.

“Why?” Janet shook her head. “What did she do?”

Richard sighed. “Turned me into a frog, turned me into a statue, froze me … she was jealous I was so close to Brains, you see. She wanted to be in my place. It was not a pleasant time. She was strong enough to simply overwhelm my defences, no matter how much effort I put into them.”

“But the others … the others aren’t like that, are they?” Janet sounded as if she wanted reassurance. “They wouldn’t have invited me to lunch if they didn’t like me, right?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. He wished he had paid more attention to whoever had to retake the remedial classes. There might be a few trouble-causers in the class, although they would be careful not to draw too much attention from the professor. Janet might not mean to cause trouble herself - he was sure of it - but she was from a very alien world. She might cause trouble quite by accident. “I never got invited to lunch by anyone.”

It wasn’t entirely true, he admitted privately. There had been a few social events, back in his first year, when all the students were getting to know each other. He had gone to a couple, but he had been a farm boy from a farming village and he’d had very little in common with the aristocratic students. Helen and her friends had known each other for years before they went to school, forming social circles that had little room for anyone new. He wouldn’t have been so close to Brains if they hadn’t been sharing a room. He wondered, sourly, if Janet was drawing attention because she was unique, the first student from OldeWorld. Her presence would be warmly welcomed, at least at first. Helen’s peers would want to brag about having such a unique student in their ranks.

“They were asking if I would like to go broomstick flying,” Janet continued. “Should I?”

Richard said nothing, but his thoughts churned. He was honest enough to admit, at least to himself, that he was a little jealous. No one, not even Brains, had invited him into their social circle so quickly. Janet was unique, and beautiful, and potentially very powerful, and part of him feared she would ditch him the moment she realised she had other options. Richard was nowhere near powerful enough to convince the aristocracy he would make a good husband for one of their daughters. Janet, on the other hand, was powerful enough to draw interest, yet also too ignorant to be aware of the dangers. She could be entrapped into a very one-sided marriage contact very easily. And if that happened …

He scowled. And I worried for her, because she could be duped, or am I worried for me because I could lose her?

The thought mocked him. He had sisters. He knew what they would say if he tried to control their lives. But his sisters also knew the dangers of making promises, or stepping across the boundary lines, or anything else that could put one’s life and freedom in danger. He had nearly been killed a hundred times on OldeWorld because he hadn’t recognised the danger of stepping onto the road without looking in both directions first. How many dangers would Janet miss because she didn’t know they even existed, dangers her new friends wouldn’t point out because they didn’t realise she didn’t know? Helen, or something like her, might be the least of Janet’s worries. Saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or entity, could land her in hot water.

Janet cleared her throat. “Richard?”

Richard blinked, then realised he had been lost in his own thoughts. “I think you should make sure you know how to fly a broomstick first,” he said. “If you learn how to fly safely, you can go anywhere you like on one.”

“I never learnt to drive,” Janet said. “Or even ride a bike.”

“Don’t let them think you can handle it,” Richard warned. “Many of your new friends will have grown up on broomsticks, or learnt to ride them at school. They won’t realise that someone your age will never have even touched a broomstick until now.”

Janet looked downcast. “Will they laugh at me?”

Richard reached out and squeezed her hand. “Remember when I nearly got knocked down by a car?”

Janet nodded, curtly. She had saved his life by grabbing his arm and yanking him back a second before it would have been too late. Afterwards, she had been completely stunned - at first - by how he’d put himself in so much danger. It had been completely insane, from her point of view; it had been nothing better than attempted suicide. But he hadn’t realised the danger. There were no horse-drawn carriages in his village, let alone cars or trains.

“I didn’t know about cars,” John reminded her. A magical carriage would have no trouble evading a possible obstacle. A mundane car would run straight into it and splat. “What  don’t you know about broomsticks?”

“Nothing,” Janet admitted. Her voice darkened. “Apart from a set of terrible jokes about having something long and hard between your legs?”

“It’s funny how many boys make that joke,” John said. The first version was around four hundred years old and none of its successors had been any better. “And then they realise the joke is on them.”

Janet smiled, although there was little real humour in her expression. “What should I do?”

Richard hesitated, torn between his desire to keep Janet all too himself and an awareness that she deserved a chance to make other friends. He was worried about her safety, and all too aware she didn’t understand the dangers, and yet … was that an excuse to keep her under his thumb? She was dependent on him, but she wasn’t … not really. Certainly, no one else would see it that way. 

His conscience won the internal debate. “Make sure you get them to give you a few lessons, before you try flying outside the castle,” he said. “There are safety spells to protect you from serious danger, within the grounds, but outside it is a different story. If you fall, and hit the ground, you will die. Magic can heal anything that isn’t immediately fatal, but a fall is certain death.”

Janet paled. Richard felt a flicker of guilt. “You could join the broomstick lessons,” he said after a moment. He wasn’t sure he would trust any student to teach Janet. She was just too old for her own safety. No matter how much he reminded himself she was a dangerously ignorant immigrant, it was very hard to believe it. “The teachers would be able to show you the ropes before you go flying with your friends.”

“I think I will try and do that,” Janet said. She dug into her pocket for her schedule and ran her eye down the list. Richard pretended not to notice how much was missing. It would be a long time before Janet had the practical skills to join those classes. She wouldn’t graduate with his class. “How do I apply?”

“Go ask,” Richard said. Gatehouse’s teachers did not need signed permission papers and orders-in-triplicate to agree to take on a new student. OldeWorld’s bureaucracy was truly absurd, although he knew he should be grateful. If the system hadn’t been so huge and unwieldy, they would never have been able to pretend to be transfer students from a school that would be very surprised to know they even existed. “The worst they can do is say no.”

Janet let out an odd little laugh. “I’m going to ask for extra lessons,” she said. She sounded as if she couldn’t quite believe her own words. The old Janet had had as little to do with school as possible. The new Janet had other ideas. “Life really is different here, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Richard agreed. He hated himself for bursting her bubble, for picking her happiness with a razor-sharp needle, but it had to be done. “And while you’re asking for extra lessons, you might want to take some self-defence classes. Not everyone here is your friend.”

Janet looked unconvinced. Richard hoped she was right.

Chapter Nine: York, Earth, Now

I feel like a bloody idiot, Norris thought, as he stared at his reflection in the mirror.  And I look like one too.

He scowled.  His reflection scowled too. He had worn some terrible outfits when he had gone to school, his mother too poor to buy the latest fashions, and the bullies had never failed to mock him for his clothes. They would have mocked him if his clothes had been the height of fashion - they had never needed an excuse to make fun of him - but it still rankled to be reminded that he was poor as well as a weak little nerd. The shame and humiliation boiled up, threatening to drag him under once again. He’d tried to kill himself, two years ago, and he hadn’t even been able to do that!

You were too weak, Norris2 whispered. But you are not weak now, are you?

Norris gritted his teeth. The outfit looked like something out of the distant past - a nicely sanitised version of the past, the one presented by historical dramas that bore little resemblance to actual history. Grey trousers, grey shirt, a grey flat cap …  anywhere else, he would have thought the dressmaker was taking the piss. It wasn’t the first time someone had played a cruel practical joke on him, setting him up to be laughed at by everyone. If it hadn’t been so serious …

They won’t laugh at you now, Norris2 pointed out. You can make them pay if they laugh.

Norris turned away, uncomfortable in his clothes. The last four days had been nothing more than spotting, practising spells that might - or might not - work in the magical world and memorising details that would give him a workable cover story. They hoped. It had been four centuries since the last open contact and Norris knew enough history to be all too aware of just how much could change in that time. He could wind up looking like an idiot, although he had to admit it was better than looking like a spy. He had no idea what would happen if he were caught, but he doubted it would be pleasant. The potential for a fate worse than death was terrifyingly high.

You are not powerless now, Norris2 said. You can fight.

Norris shook his head. It was hard to believe, impossible to believe, that he could defend himself. Twelve years of schooling had drilled into his head that resistance was futile, that trying to fight would only make things worse. It was difficult to accept that someone might think him dangerous, that someone might see him as a threat. He’d been lectured on the importance of not threatening, or appearing to threaten, a young woman and it has taken all his willpower not to laugh. There wasn’t a single girl who was afraid of him. What had she to fear?

Me, Norris2 said. I can make them pay for you.

The images rushed through his mind, each one tempting. His bullies, screaming in pain as his spells tore them apart. The girls he had lusted for, approaching him on bended knee to beg for his favours. It would be easy, so easy, to make them do whatever he pleased. He knew it would be rape, he knew it would be no better than the boys who had bragged of forcing girls to go all the way with them, who had insisted that girls needed a little push to make them do what they want to do. He knew it was wrong, that there was no difference between physical rape and mind control, but it was hard to convince himself. He wanted a girl, any girl. And her feelings on the matter could be ignored. Who had ever cared about his feelings?

No one, Norris2 reminded him. Why should you care about them, when they never cared about you?

There was a sharp knock at the door. Norris took one last look at himself, cringing inwardly, then opened the door. The girl on the other side gave him a quick onceover, then nodded in seeming approval. Norris was sure she was faking it … and yet, when had girls ever bothered to fake anything with him? There was no need to pretend they liked him, no reason to fear him … he refused to let himself believe that she really approved. And yet …

“You look suitable,” the girl said. It was pathetic, but true, to realise it was the nicest thing any girl had ever said to him. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Norris said. It was a blatant lie, and she probably knew it. He wanted to run, to leave the mansion and flee … flee where? He had nowhere to go and he knew it. “I’m ready.”

Pathetic, Norris2 hissed. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Don’t waste it.

Norris swallowed hard. “What is your name?”

He regretted it, the moment the words left his mouth. Girls did not give him their names. They laughed and mocked him because he was a safe target, because they could humiliate him without retribution. They could tease him and threaten him and do whatever they liked to him, secure in the knowledge he couldn’t push back.

That isn’t true any longer, Norris2 reminded him. You can make them pay.

“Eve,” the girl said. She held out a pair of loose friendship bracelets. “These are charmed to give you a certain degree of cover, as long as you don’t make your presence known too openly.”

Norris nodded. Lord Burghley and his allies had explained that magical development had clearly diverged between the two worlds. Their magic used very little power – they had very little raw power to draw on - but their spells were so precise it was very hard, almost impossible, to pick them out even against a magicless background. If their tales of the other world were true, there was so much raw power over there that it would be impossible for anyone to notice such subtle spells. He wouldn’t quite be invisible – that had been made very clear - but as long as he didn’t make his presence too obvious to ignore, the locals shouldn’t be able to realise he wasn’t who or what he claimed to be. He hoped that was true. The cover story might be believable, but there was no way to be sure. Norris would have raised his eyebrows if someone came to him and claimed to be a naval officer on a sailing ship, and over there it might be disastrous. If he told a lie that was obvious to everyone but him …

Eve smiled at him. “Put them on, then tell me how you feel.”

“Got it,” Norris said. 

He placed the bracelets on his wrists and closed his eyes, feeling them out. The bracelets felt warm against his skin, the magic a reminder of how the world had changed. He thought he smelled burning flesh and shuddered, doing his best to ignore Norris2’s snicker. It was hard to feel any guilt for killing a bully and yet … he did. No, it wasn’t guilt. It was the fear of being punished.

Pathetic, Norris2 said. If someone had given you a Death Note, an untraceable murder weapon, would you have been too scared to use it?

“It works,” Norris said. “Or does it?”

Eve shrugged. Norris tried hard not to notice what it did to her breasts. “I know you’re there, but they don’t. You will always be very hard to see.”

“So no change there then,” Norris said. He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “No one will see me as anything other than a wallflower.”

“It’s time,” Eve said. She didn’t respond to his comment, somewhat to his relief. “You’d better come with me.”

Norris flushed - Norris2’s laughter hissing in his ears - as he followed Eve out of the room and up a flight of stairs. It was hard not to stare at her rear, hard not to fantasise about reaching out and running his hands over her curves. Norris2’s laughter grew louder and crueller, reminding him that he could take her at any moment … if he were prepared to shatter her free will. It would be so easy … perhaps not. Eve had known magic existed for far longer than himself, long enough to know how to defend herself. If he tried to take her, to rape her, it might end very badly. For him.

Coward, Norris2 hissed.

Shut up, Norris thought.

His other self kept laughing, even as the stairs levelled out and they walked into the most bizarre room Norris had ever seen. It was half research lab, with computers and sensors and devices that had no visible function scattered everywhere, and half … he wasn’t sure what the other half actually was. It looked like a strange cross between a church and a primitive doctor’s surgery, the sort of place where they would treat an ingrown toenail by cutting off one’s foot. The walls were lined with bottles of reddish liquid - he tried not to think that it might be blood - and strange artefacts that look like Rube Goldberg machines. The chamber was huge, easily larger than his mother’s apartment, yet it felt very cramped. Norris felt crowded even though there were only two people in the room. There was magic in the air. 

Eve grinned at him. “What do you make of it?”

Norris had no answer. He liked to think he was smart, and he had the exam results to prove it, but he was depressingly aware of just how little he really knew. He had wanted to be a scientist, or a computer engineer, yet … most modern-day engineers did little more than run antivirus programs and fix minor errors, while sending the more complex problems back to the manufacturer. Hell, the exam results might be worse than useless. He had memorised countless facts and figures long enough to write them down, then forgotten them again. But then, those facts had been useless. What was the point of teaching him the difference between a moraine and a ravine? He could have looked it up easily, if he’d ever had any practical use for the knowledge. They might as well have forced him to study the Norwegian Leather Industry. In the long run, it might have been more useful. It certainly had more practical applications.

He wanted to pretend he understood what he was seeing, but it would be a lie. An obvious lie.

“It looks very complex,” he said finally. “Can you be sure it will work?”

“The researchers are very sure it will work,” Eve assured him. “The idea is not to create a whole new gate of our own, but to trigger the gate that is already there.”

Norris looked up, sharply. “Doesn’t that mean we will … ah, jump right into the heart of their territory?”

“No,” a new voice said. Norris turned and saw a man who could have been a dead ringer for the Demon Headmaster, right down to the white laboratory coat he had worn in his final appearance. He felt a flicker of fear that had nothing to do with the man’s steel-grey eyes. He had thought mass hypnosis was impossible, certainly the kind of naked mind control the headmaster had used, but he knew now it wasn’t. “The gate has an oscillating terminus.”

Eve winked at Norris. “Professor Wilson, can we get that in plain English?”

Wilson looked displeased. “Everyone thinks of the gate as … well, a gate. It would be more accurate to say that the gate is a region in the local interdimensional fabric that is considerably weaker than the surrounding area, weak enough to allow the fabric to be torn and opened, thus allowing passage from one side of the interdimensional fabric to the other. In layman’s terms, the river is already there. We’re just dredging it out and building harbours and canals to make it easier for ships to navigate from one end of the river to the other. We believe that our gate will not open in Gatehouse, but somewhere nearby.”

Norris felt cold. “Can you be sure?”

“The math is perfect,” Wilson said. “I can show you the equations if you wish.”

Pointless, Norris2 said. You wouldn’t understand an interdimensional equation if it came with a detailed user guide and a cheat sheet.

Norris cursed under his breath. Norris2 was right. His school barely taught anything resembling advanced mathematics, let alone anything that might render Wilson’s equations comprehensible. He could stare at the equations for hours without understanding a single word, let alone how the equations could be translated into practical machinery. The gulf was just too wide to be closed in a hurry. He wondered if there would be time to study, perhaps after private lessons, then feared it might already be too late. He was seventeen years old. He might already be too old to start again.

He put the thought out of his mind as Wilson indicated a mass of wires that looked like a makeshift circle. “The gate will appear here,” he explained. “You will step through and into the other world, taking with you a device that might help to stabilise or reopen the gate.”

Norris blanched as Wilson passed him a severed hand, with the fingertips removed and replaced by candlesticks. He wanted to believe it was a movie prop, but it felt real. He’d never seen, let alone touched, a dead body before, yet there was something about the hand that made it impossible to convince himself it was a fake. His skin crawled as it touched it, the sensation so unpleasant he barely heard the professor’s explanation of how it worked. It was just … disgusting.

“You’ll be fine,” Eve said, quietly.

Of course you will, Norris2 whispered. You have me with you now.

Norris felt his heart started to pound as more researchers and technicians made their way into chamber, taking up positions at the computers behind the protective screens. He couldn’t help thinking of NASA mission control, of operatives monitoring the computers as each rocket was launched into space … a thrill of excitement ran through him, despite his gnawing fear. He’d wanted to be an astronaut, but the space programs were a joke. Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon and then no one had gone back. It just wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t he do that? Why couldn’t the entire world do that?

“Take your place,” Wilson said. He pointed to a platform right in front of the gate. “It’s time.”

Norris stepped up, then heard something moving behind him. He glanced back to see a trolley being wheeled into the room, a young girl lying on top, her hands and feet chained to the metal. She was naked, a thin sheet protecting her modesty. He forced himself to look at her face and regretted it instantly. Her eyes were wide with fear  … Norris realised, to his horror, that he recognised her.  Jennifer Luann …

Remember how she laughed, when Colin pulled down your pants? Norris realised, numbly, that Norris2 had worked out what was going to happen before him. Remember how she mocked you to your face, laughed at you for being exposed in public? Remember how she laughed? She’s not laughing now!

The memories rose up, bringing with them emotions he’d hoped had been buried forever. Colin had walked up behind him, yanked down his pants, and exposed his manhood to the entire world. Everyone had laughed, particularly the girls. They had said he was small … no one had given a damn. If Colin had done it to a girl, he would have been punished - the girl’s parents might have gone to the police - but to him? No one cared! And Jennifer had been one of the ones who laughed.

Of course she laughed, he thought. She was too scared not to.

Do you think that’s true? Norris2 thundered in his brain. She was a girl. Colin would not have dared do anything like that to her!

Norris swallowed hard, torn between two conflicting impulses as he worked out what was going to happen. He had loathed Jennifer, just as he had loathed so many other girls for laughing at him, for taking their bitterness and resentment out on him, but he had also found her attractive. She was no supermodel, but what did it matter? He had entertained fantasies of saving her life, of defending her, of …

You could save her life a hundred times and she would still laugh at you, Norris2 hissed, coldly. It was true.  Norris wanted to tell himself otherwise, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t lie to himself. You are nothing to her.

Norris turned away, as the machinery started to hum. The magic in the air grew stronger and stronger. Lightning flashed from device to device as they powered up. Eve stepped back and walked behind a protective screen. Norris was vaguely aware of Wilson standing behind Jennifer, but he didn’t turn to look. His feelings were a tangled mess. Part of him wanted to protest; part of him thought she deserved it. And part of him was afraid to speak out.

Jennifer cried out, but the sound cut off abruptly. Magic surged, the lightning spinning into a circle right in front of him. Norris felt his legs tremble, his very soul screaming in pain as he forced himself to stagger forward. He felt as if he was on the verge of walking over a cliff, of committing suicide … properly, this time. Jennifer had died - Jennifer had been murdered - to open the gate. Would it work …?

Move, you fucking coward, Norris2 snapped. His legs trembled again, as if his other self was on the verge of taking control. Move!

Norris stepped forward, one final time.  The light swallowed him.

PURCHASE THE COMPLETE BOOK NOW!