clarified. I found myself breathless, a wave of dizziness sweeping me. The effects passed quickly. I was pretty good at crossing worlds.
“Oh my God,” breathed a voice that sounded vaguely like Wil’s.
Looking to my side, I saw his Otherworldly representation. Not even powerful enough to come over in elemental form, he appeared beside me much like any spirit in my own world would have: vague shape, translucent, and smoky.
“You did it. You really brought us over.”
“Hey, I live to serve.”
“Actually, mistress, that is our job.”
I turned around and tried to hide my surprise. My minions stood before me but not as I knew them in the human world. In this world, the Otherworld, they were more corporeal, appearing in their natural forms and not as a projected sending.
Nandi stood tall and rigid, a black woman in her mid-forties. Her face had hard lines and angles, beautiful in a regal and hawklike way. Iron-gray waves of hair framed a face as bleak and expressionless as her spirit version’s.
As for Finn, I’d expected him to be small and spritelike. He, however, was almost as tall as me with shining, sun-bright hair that stuck up at odd angles. Freckles covered his face, and the grin he showed me mirrored the amusement I usually saw when we were together in my plane.
Volusian looked the same as always.
I didn’t exactly know what to say, seeing them like this. It was kind of startling. They watched me silently, waiting for orders. I cleared my throat, trying to appear haughty.
“All right, let’s get this moving. Who knows the way to this guy’s place?”
They all did, as it turned out. We stood at a crossroads, mirroring the one we’d left in my world. The country around us was beautiful, warm and balmy in the evening twilight, pleasant in a different way from Tucson. Cherry trees in full bloom lined the roads, shedding pink-white petals to the ground as the breeze rustled their leaves.
“We stand in the Rowan Land, mistress,” explained Nandi flatly. “If we follow this road, we will eventually reach the part of the Alder Land where King Aeson lives.”
I glanced at the road. “What, no yellow bricks?”
Nandi didn’t get the joke. “No. The path is dirt. The journey will be long and must be taken on foot. Likely you will find it tedious and wearying, plunging you into misery and making you wish you had never set out on this quest.”
“Quite the endorsement.”
She stared at me, puzzled. “It was not an endorsement, mistress.”
We set out, and I discovered in about five minutes that conversation with this group was pointless. So instead I focused on studying my surroundings, like any good soldier would. I had crossed over in body a few times, but I had never stayed long. Most of my jaunts had been to chase down wayward spirits. I’d always jumped in, done my duty, and jumped out.
With such beauty, it seemed incredible the residents here would want to keep sneaking over to my world. Birds sang a farewell to the setting sun. The landscapes we passed were gorgeous and exquisitely colored, like a real-life Thomas Kinkade painting. It almost looked unreal, like Technicolor gone crazy.
There was also magic here. Strong magic. It permeated the air, every blossom, every blade of grass. It set my hairs on end. I didn’t like magic, not this kind, not the magic that filled living things. That was a gentry thing. Humans had no magic within them. We took it from the world with tools and charms; it was not inborn with us. Feeling it so heavy in the air unnerved me, almost making it hard for me to breathe.
Suddenly we crossed an invisible line, and cold wind blasted against my skin. Snow lay in drifts along the side of the road—which stayed miraculously uncovered—and icicles hung daintily on the trees like Christmas ornaments.
“What the hell happened?” I exclaimed.
“The Willow Land,” said Finn. “It’s winter right now. Here, I mean.”
I glanced behind us. A chilly, white landscape stretched back as far as the eye could see, no cherry trees in sight. I wrapped my arms around my body.
“Do we have to go this way? It’s freezing.”
“You are the only who is cold, mistress,” noted Volusian.
“Yeah,” said Wil brightly. “I can’t feel anything. How cool is that? I bet those boots of yours won’t protect you from hypothermia.”
I rolled my eyes. Stupid spirits. All of them. Alive or otherwise.
“How much farther through here?”
“Longer if we keep standing around,” said Volusian.
Sighing, I trudged along, pulling my coat tighter. I wore my usual one, the olive-green moleskin that went to my knees. I had put it on mainly to cover the arsenal underneath, and it had seemed too warm back in Tucson. Now it felt ridiculously thin. Teeth chattering, I followed the spirits, focusing mainly on putting one foot in front of the other.
In only a short while, we crossed another unseen boundary, and thick humidity slammed down on me, much like my sauna. Heat boiled around us, and this time I took off my jacket. In the fading light, deep green leaves rustled together, and cicadas sang in the trees. The flowers here were different than the delicate ones in the Rowan Land. These had richer, deeper colors, and their perfume was cloying. The minions informed me we’d crossed into the Alder Land. I cheered up, happy to find it wasn’t winter here and that we were so near our goal.
Until we crossed back into the pink-treed valleys of the Rowan Land.
“What’s this? Are we going in circles?”
“No, mistress,” said Nandi. “This is the way to King Aeson’s.”
“But we just came out of the Alder Land. We need to turn around.”
“Not unless you want to take days to get there. Your friend’s body wouldn’t survive that long.” Volusian inclined his head toward Wil’s ethereal form.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“The Otherworld doesn’t lie like yours,” explained Finn. “It’s hard to notice if you haven’t been here a lot. It’s more obvious when physical. The land folds in on itself, and sometimes what seems longer is shorter. And what’s shorter is longer. We’ve got to cut back through here to get to Aeson’s. Weird, but there you have it.”
“It sounds like a wormhole,” I muttered as I walked again.
“Worms do not travel this way,” said Nandi.
I tried explaining what a wormhole was, how some physicists theorized space could wrinkle and fold, making it possible to travel through those folds and end up on the other side more quickly. As soon as I reached the word “physicist,” I gave up, realizing I fought a losing battle.
We soon crossed into the Oak Land, a breathtaking landscape of fiery orange trees and scattered leaves, enhanced by the burning orange
