She walks back to the estate, weaving through the traffic of humans, horses, carts, and the occasional ox hauling goods and people through the city. On arriving back at the keep she is scolded laughingly by the team for not having ridden.

“I wanted to walk,” she lies, a little defensively. “To see if I could find something familiar. Landmarks, buildings, you know.” They seem to accept this response – or at least to get bored of teasing her about it.

At lunch the serving woman is not there, but Jeno is. Now knowing that she is supposed to be the woman’s protector, the night before makes much more sense. Leah sits with the five to eat, but keeps an eye on the young woman at the head of the table.

“How much does Jeno know about my condition?” she asks Meredith.

“Nothing.”

“Should I say anything about it?”

“Best to merely describe yourself as ‘addled.’ That means confused,” Meredith clarifies. Leah is about to say she knows what it means, then remembers that she is supposed to be uneducated. She notes to herself that Meredith apparently is educated, and to watch for more signs of this. Who is this woman, and why is she the leader? Or is she not the leader, and I’m just misinterpreting the power dynamics here?

Leah continues to press her for advice. “Should I sit with her? Or talk to her, at least?”

“After lunch, maybe. Offer to escort her back to her rooms.”

“And where is that?”

Meredith sighs with a smile. “Just…follow a pace behind her, wherever she wants to go, unless it’s somewhere that looks unseemly. She’s well-behaved, from what you’ve told me, so she probably won’t want to go to any such place.”

Leah nods, and the team’s conversation shifts to running over their itinerary. They must run the horses through training exercises this afternoon, from which Leah is exempt. In the evening there will be another meeting with the Valerids, which she must attend lest the team’s reputation suffer and Leah be counted a lost cause.

“What sort of meeting?” Leah asks.

“Endless talk about nothing,” Iris says. “We won’t have any new information, probably, but they like to hold us back after supper some nights just to talk things over again. And again.”

Meredith glares at her, and Iris shrugs. “Debriefings,” Meredith says patiently. “They give us any new information, and we discuss potential strategies.”

Leah nods, privately thinking that despite Meredith’s confidence, she puts a little more stock in Iris’s impatience, to predict what the meeting will be like.

After she has finished eating, Leah waits for Jeno to finish. Once the plate nears empty, Leah approaches and waits for Jeno to notice and react; she does, with a discreet nod and smile.

“Shall I accompany you back to your chambers, or wherever you wish to go?” Leah asks.

Jeno smiles a tiny, polite smile. “It would be wonderful to have you back by my side again.” The young woman gets up, and Leah follows her out of the hall.

The two wander the parapets, and Leah finally sees why there are no crenellations: there is no line of sight from the top of the wall to any place on the ground where attackers might approach. Instead, there are rivulets down which boiling oil may be poured, and rooms with arrow slits above each bridge, topped with turret platforms for lookouts. She gets the impression that defence is an afterthought to the estate’s design – or perhaps that the river is supposed to do most of the defensive work for them.

Jeno is most interested in the birds in the rookery; she holds up the hem of her deep-pink dress, embroidered heavily with gold thread, to avoid it trailing in the muck, and coos at all the falcons and crows kept in cages. One corner, better lit, has a selection of songbirds.

“They were collected from every corner of the Gulf, for use at the wedding,” Jeno explains. A moment passes, and she seems upset when Leah doesn’t respond.

“Oh?” Leah says, at a loss.

“Usually this is where you make a joke that the birds seem too small for a wedding feast,” Jeno says.

“Oh. Do I often make that joke?”

“We always take this walk, sometimes every day. That joke is…a part of the tradition.”

“I’m sorry, my mind must have been elsewhere.” Jeno still looks upset, so she tries to cover herself with another joke. “Besides, it wouldn’t be too small at all. Isn’t there a poem that has ‘four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’ for a wedding feast? Or some sort of feast, I don’t remember.” She realises too late that this poem probably doesn’t exist in this world, but it is too late to take it back; Jeno’s brown eyes turn to her, bright and curious.

“I don’t think I’ve heard that one before,” the young woman says, obviously leadingly.

Leah wracks her brain. “Um…‘something-something-something, sing a song of rye, four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. Something-something…wasn’t that a dainty dish…” She gives up, laughing at herself and rubbing her head. “I don’t think I’ve heard it since I was about ten, sorry. It’s just not in there.”

“I suppose it must be an Algic song, and that’s why I’m not familiar with it,” Jeno says, poking her fingers through the bars to try and pet one of the birds.

“Algic?”

“Is that not where you’re from? Ie Stasse, in Algi?”

The name sounds familiar. “I’d forgotten I’d told you that,” Leah says. “Shall we continue the walk? We can cut it short if I’m being poor company.”

“Please don’t cut it short,” Jeno insists. “I cherish my time out about the estate too dearly.”

“It will be your estate someday though, won’t it? Or will Samson go live with you in…” She draws a blank. “Your family’s duchy?”

Jeno seems to interpret this as a return of Leah’s good humour, and laughs. They resume their walk sedately, passing down the stairs, out the doors of the estate, and past the stable. A beige and white horse whickers at them eagerly and wiggles its lips as though asking for food. Jeno steps up, pulls out a half-apple from a pocket, and offers it to the horse.

“I’ve been visiting her, while you were gone,” Jeno says sadly, and Leah assumes this must be Beeswax.

“Did I ever tell you why I named her Beeswax?” she asks, hoping to be told the answer.

“No, why?”

Shit. “Um. I…tamed her by feeding her honey.”

Jeno laughs brightly, with sincere surprise on her face.

“I found a hive up in a tree, and got stung to bits stealing from it. On the way home I came across a lovely wild horse, thin from hunger, and I tempted her out of the woods with chunks of honeycomb. Within the hour she became so friendly she was licking my hands clean.”

Jeno seems delighted by the lie, and Leah hopes she doesn’t get caught in it eventually. If I do, I can claim it was only a story meant to entertain, and hopefully Jeno won’t mind; the girl seems nice enough, from what I’ve seen so far. Sort of naive for her age, though. Leah suddenly realises she can’t guess Jeno’s age. As this is something she is probably supposed to know, she doesn’t ask.

After the stables they go back into the estate proper, and Jeno stops outside a doorway in the living area on the same floor as Leah’s own rooms. They politely say goodbye, and Jeno once again says how nice it is to have her back.

“You have the dagger!” Jeno suddenly realises, gesturing to the small black knife strapped at Leah’s waist, worn out of a habit that Leah hadn’t even been aware of. “I thought for sure you wouldn’t have been able to take it back with you…”

“Yes, the rest of the five, they found my things. Shield, spear…everything except my change purse.”

Jeno’s smile widens a bit. “Yes, but that’s the dagger I gave to you. I’m glad it’s still with you.” Leah bluffs that she remembers being given it, and nods with a smile.

Jeno thanks her for her company, and closes the door to her rooms. Leah begins to wonder if Jeno may be unhappy about her situation, and possibly relied on Leah to relieve her sadness. Were we employer-employee, or friends? Who could I possibly ask, to find out?

Her duties towards Jeno apparently done for the day, Leah goes back to her room and changes into the softest, warmest clothing she can find. She takes the tea packet out of her pocket and sniffs it; sage, mint, and many other things. Somewhere in there, salamander. She hides it under her mattress so no-one finds it and forces her to drink it.

When Kain comes by to tell her it’s time for supper, Leah straightens her gown and finds her own way down to the dining hall; she feels a great sense of pride that she doesn’t get lost. This evening is very like the last, in terms of food and guests, only this time she must attend the debriefing afterwards.

Unsure what to expect, she lets the rest of the group set the tone. The meeting is held in Lord Valerid’s office; an impressive private study, shelves lined with books and scrolls and maps, a large desk in the centre, and a broad window in the back wall made of many little panes of glass. The room is lit by candles in shallow brown marble dishes, to catch the drippings. Both the Lord and Lady are there, which Leah is intrigued by, but the Lord seems to lead most of the questioning.

During the debriefing, the questions eventually morph into a thorough grilling on what she remembers and what she learned during her time captive. “The tiniest detail might prove essential.” The Lord says, looking Leah directly in the eyes, around a quarter of an hour into the debriefing – though Leah doesn’t trust her sense of time in the dark room. The faint glow of moon that had been visible in the upper corner of the window is long gone.

“I could tell you a little about the layout of the room where they found me,” Leah says with a shrug, avoiding his gaze. “But I lost consciousness again partway through the rescue, so my teammates could give you better information than I could.”

“What about before the rescue?”

“I was unconscious,” she says, eyes flitting to Meredith, who does not notice. Damn it, some support would be appreciated! Leah thinks grumpily.

“But before, when you were just entering the castle. What did you notice? The moments before you fell unconscious, what did you see, or hear?”

At a strange disconnect, Leah sees the layout of her bedroom, the thin slit of streetlight peeking past the curtain of her window, reflected in the mirror. Her hair had been slightly wet from a shower, and she’d been tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable on her pillow, trying not to think about her odds of actually getting a call from any of the places she’d left a CV at, trying to just fall asleep finally and not have to stress for a few hours. All the concerns from that life start to build up again, compounded by the uncertainty of whether time is still passing, back in her own world – and how much time could safely pass before real damage was done to her life and situation.

Her breathing is getting choppy, she realises, and she can’t seem to control it. Finally, after an agonising eternity of everyone staring in silence, Meredith steps in.

“She was with us until she fell unconscious, sir,” she begins, drawing his attention away and giving Leah a moment to compose herself. “So there’s nothing more she can give that we haven’t already.”

“Not necessarily,” the Lord presses. “She might have noticed any number of details that she didn’t mention outright to you before she – ”

“Sir!” Meredith’s voice constricts. He falls silent, surprised. Even the Lady sits a little straighter. “My apologies. Sir, she doesn’t remember.”

A moment of silence. “She…”

“Her memories are gone.” This time it is Vivitha who speaks up. “She remembers her name, and nothing else. From the moment she awoke in the tower, she remembered nothing of her past life.”

The archer’s confidence – and her icy glare daring anyone to even think of making a negative comment – cushions the blow. The silence stretches. Kain subtly reaches out a hand under the table and squeezes Leah’s hand, just once. Somehow, the gesture succeeds in pulling her mind back from its wanderings, away from her old home and back to the debriefing.

Lord Valerid’s expression shifts from disbelieving shock, to unease. Fearing further probing – or worse, accusations – Leah looks up and meets his eyes, cutting him off before he can speak.

“I can only offer this as explanation: when I visited Wellen today – ” she hesitates, eyes flitting to Meredith. “Do they know…”

“They know who Wellen is,” Meredith says patiently, and Leah blushes, embarrassed. Looking back to the Valerids, however, she can tell that her question helped convince them of the truth of her missing memories.

“Right. So. Wellen said that whatever magic Seffon was attempting, the rescue mission interrupted it before completion. The amnesia is most likely a side-effect of that spell having failed.”

More than a few faces in the room seem impressed by her use of the word amnesia, and Leah tries not to be insulted.

“It must be strange,” the Lady muses, sounding sympathetic but not entirely reassured. “Are you capable of returning to your duties, like this?”

Leah hesitates, hoping one of the others will jump to her rescue again. “I believe so,” she says, with what she hopes is a polite and respectful nod. “Lady Jeno is no trouble to take care of.”

The Lady seems to find this amusing, and the debriefing wraps up shortly after. The Valerids are appeased, Leah’s brief emotional weakness was explained away by the reveal of her missing memories, and the five retire to their rooms in good spirits. Jeno, it turns out, has been waiting all this time to be escorted back to her rooms by Leah.

“Lady Jeno! I am so sorry – ” Leah begins, but Jeno waves this away.

“It was my choice to wait,” she assures her, tone smooth and polite.

Leah notices that the serving woman – who was also loitering a short distance down the hall – seems bothered by this, as though she had also wanted a chance to talk to Leah.

They walk up to the Auzzos’ section of the estate. A handful of guards wearing green and white enamelled armour stand watch throughout the halls; they nod politely to Jeno, and to Leah.

“Goodnight,” Leah says, once they’ve stopped at what she vaguely recalls as being Jeno’s door. Jeno smiles but does not immediately respond, seeming still a little down. “Is everything alright? Are you nervous, or afraid of something happening?”

Jeno seems more alarmed by this question than by whatever was bothering her before. “No, I was just…I was too deep in my thoughts. Goodnight, Leah,” she says, and retreats into her room.

Leah decides that arranged marriages are probably the norm in this world’s Middle Ages too, and the poor girl is a prisoner with no voice. Until she knows her way around this life, there is nothing she can do.

She goes to bed, finding her room only with difficulty, and once more hopes to wake up tomorrow at home.