A pretty girl in a doeskin jerkin

The gleam of a blade of surpassing brilliance,

A flash of light in a dark place,

A sense of loss, A kiss of laughter.

The meeting stanzas-From the lay of Thavis Wayland

I hit hard ground, as if defenestrated from one of the tower's upper rooms. I am not a lightweight, and gravity is not my friend. My left hand had plowed a deep furrow in the soil, and sword in grasp, struck jagged rock tearing away skin with an ice pick lance of pain.

Stunned, breathing dirt in time to the throbbing sear of bruises and cracked ribs, eventually I managed to pull myself together and groaning with effort stumbled upright. Before me wandered a wide trail; a footpath really.

As a blacksmith, I automatically look for evidence of divots on woodland lanes since farrier work is part of my business. It's odd how persistent such simple habits are, even when recovering from a fall. You focus on meaningless details, little things. In any case there was nothing like hoof prints here. The area around the tower was a favorite for horse owners but the absence wasn't registering right then.

Amazingly, my right hand still had a death grip on the sword, so I tried to tuck the poker into the belt of my jeans without cutting them up in the process. My hands were bloody, and fumbling with the blade inadvertently causing a little to smear on it. In that moment bizarre really entered my life, for unbidden, a whisper ran through my mind

So am I sealed to thee for life and to no other.

Now, my mind doesn't normally spout off enigmatic phrases so I put this to scrambled wits, something else to heap on my pile of confusion. The landscape looked altered. But as I took in the surroundings anger faded away to be replaced by quandary. In short, just where the hell was I?

I remembered turning to confront Markham, who had costumed himself in a robe and cowl like someone at a fraternity hazing. There had been a flash as the sword touched his robe, then blackness, and skidding in the dirt.

Confounded to be in broad daylight, I reexamined the unfamiliar surroundings. A climax forest crowded in on the trail. Tall, rough-barked oaks and maples overhung it segueing into a stand of smooth skinned silver birch farther away to the right. On the other side, the path wandered an uphill slope, over the crest of which rose the top of a stone tower. At first, it looked like the Scots tower but after a moment, I realized it was taller, darker, and newer. The light wind carried lush, sweet odors, missing the taint of city smog or nearby tarry roadways. Suffusing the wood came only a calming litany of birdsong and a threshing of wind grooming tall treetops. I sat under one of the oaks and tried to order my thoughts. The sword nearly severed my belt in the process so I removed it, setting it down on the grassy sedge.

Had I passed out and been moved while unconscious, during the night? I knew the countryside nearby pretty well, but the smells, land-forms and the trail before me were unfamiliar. My inner clock argued against having passed out. I ran through a variety of other possibilities but none of these made any sense.

I had been There, and now, I was Here. Forcing myself to relax, I sat and focused on binding my wounded hand with a pocket handkerchief numbly taking everything in while massaging abused legs and arms. Eventually an approach of footsteps coming from further up the trail broke this shocked reverie. A young woman with chestnut hair, perhaps in her mid-twenties trudged up the hill between the tower and my tree. I stayed seated, hands folded in my lap, wondering how stupid it would sound to ask where I was.

She spotted me before quite topping the rise and hesitated there. At least from her approach, the naked blade lying on the grass behind me couldn't be seen. Apparently she must have decided it safe to continue on and nodded to me as she walked. Something in my bewildered attitude must have encouraged her to speak. I can only imagine that the sight of me, confused and utterly despondent, moved her to the kindness.

"Are you hurt? Were you robbed? You look awful--are you alright?" She stopped, still at some distance, cocking her head to one side, eying my much abused blue jeans and stained white tee-shirt. "Not local, by your dress. Are you lost?"

"Not an easy question to answer. Lost is a good start. I...fell."

"You're not a runaway are you?" She asked, edging slightly away.

The question drew me out of my embarrassed daze; an odd thing to say, as I'm a little old to be featured on the side of a milk carton. Determined to keep her talking, I answered anyway assuring her that was not the case.

Her clear blue eyes seemed to laugh, lingering on the breadth of my shoulders. Her forearms canted out at the elbow in a puppet stance, as if daring an answer. It made the young woman's form only seem more beautiful, in that peculiar way that only a lithe girl can manage. I noted her trim waist, cross-laced into rough woven, loosely fitting pants. All in all, despite my situation I was too charmed to be less than honest. "I'm a blacksmith," I ventured, "a good one...not running from anything, just... confused. Where is this place?"

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She laughed aloud at this, then continued, "You don't know? A Smith, you say? You will not need to look far for work then, if that be your purpose on this road. You don't seem very certain of yourself. I am Dimanda, daughter of Mage Chord, look you, from that tower." She pointed toward it with her chin. "A civilized fief, if not quite Corbell. Mostly a farming community, as it happens. Some of the frontier colonies further out, are so in need of labor, that they indenture their criminals, rather than hang them, but such communities are not anywhere close-by. Sometimes, they do escape." She made a shooing motion with her hands, "Runaway." Once again her head canted to the side a bit and she asked, "Have you a name, Sir?"

"William," I volunteered. Her words whirled in my head. Fief? Indenture? Corbell? I felt lost, far from home, but the picture she painted was so out of expectation as to be barely understandable.

"Well, William," she said, "we meet at a bad time I'm afraid. I am headed the other way, towards the farms to barter for my father's services else I would introduce you, if you wished. As it happens, he is in need of a good smith, if you would care to work at the tower. Do you have any examples of your trade?"

I shook my head numbly, but then remembered the blade. "I do have a sword here of my forging." I motioned to the grass next to the tree, then mentally cringed. She would now run screaming from this park, or whatever it was, and fetch the police. Surprisingly, Dimanda picked her way past me, peered at the blade and even stooped to touch it.

"It's beautiful." Brown hair cascaded over her lovely features as she bent forward to see. "So, you are a sword smith as well...May I?"

She gestured at the sword. I gave my consent, and the girl took the hilt and pulled, but the blade remained tight to the ground as if glued there. She gasped, consternation wrinkling her smooth forehead. "You think to embarrass me?" she accused, hands snapping back to her hips."This is no ordinary weapon; the blade is arcane! You must be bonded to it, and so no one else may move it. You could have told me before I tried to pick it up. Just how is it that you do not know where you are?"

I stared at the piece, not understanding. I had seen her tug at it, she hadn't faked the effort.

For some reason, I remembered the words that had whispered in my head and bleeding on the metal. Suddenly all these inconsistencies overcame the shock of my fall, and I lost composure. All of my recent experiences poured out of me. Running up the tower steps, finding the blade, turning into darkness and waking here, not knowing where I was, all of it despite my intentions, releasing into her patient ears.

She listened quietly as I talked, and a softening slowly overtook her features. I felt sure she would think me mad. However she seemed genuinely concerned, and oddly, didn't question my account. At the moment, that helped some. Questions and scowls, at that point, especially questions I couldn't answer, would have unhinged me.

She squatted then, pulling up at her trousers to reveal a pair of well turned ankles. The girl eyed me tightly. "As a Mage's daughter, I see many unusual things, but your story is certainly unique. I am truly sorry. To be caught up unaware, in such a thing..." She shook herself. "It sounds as if you have been moved through the planes unwilling, and stranded, if I understand you. A sending of some sort. My father would know. You have my sympathy, Master William. Still, you can do well in this fief, if you wish to stay.

This," she indicated with a sweep of her arm, "is the fief of Lord Wayland, the nephew of our king, Fredrick Esterford the Second. My father stands as Baron to this patch, so you could do worse than to seek work with him. Anyway, you really should speak to my father about your plight, if not employment. She looked regretfully back towards the distant tower. "I needs must go now, or I will not reach the farms ere nightfall. Talk to my father. It is only a little further on. Good luck to you..."

With that and a look of wistful pity, she left me. I retrieved the sword in a renewed state of shock and continued up the path towards the tower lost in thought. I went over the conversation, trying to sift as much intelligence as possible from it. Her words suggested that this was not my world at all, but some other place entirely. The girl's talk of mages spoke of a belief in magic as if it were a fact of physics. Further, the inhabitants, according to Dimanda's statements, depended on barter, if her story of dickering with farmers pointed to the way goods were brokered here.

It then dawned on me that she had spoken in plain, if somewhat archaic English, which argued against her story to me. I cursed myself for a fool at this point. Yet, there remained some nagging oddity to the words we had passed, beyond just her strange tale of mages and fiefs. Something about my words themselves. Stopping, I voiced an old saw, "Rubber baby buggy bumpers" and listened closely to each syllable my mouth formed, making, much to my surprise, a variety of harsh consonantal noises, now that I tended to it. Yet baby buggies and rubber buggy bumpers sallied forth anyway, as I understood them. My sense of language seemed to also be somewhat altered, as if I now thought in the local mode, as it were.

My head instantly flooded with rationalizing terms like hypnosis, drugs and dreams, but I was not sleeping, hypnotized or high, just numb and shaken. Perhaps the fall had left me a little dyslexic, but what I understood had not matched the sounds made!

On the other hand, maybe my wits were scrambled. Was the building ahead of me some kind of weird commune, or asylum? If so, I might just have met one of the inmates, or be one of the inmates. I felt as though I should be shaking all this out of my head, reject what my senses reported and try to find a way back to the roadway and car that I intuited would not there.

I wandered about for a while staying well clear of the tower, but discovered no paved roads, electrical lines, or other appurtenances of civilization. Should I attempt the tower after all? Evening had swept its opaque curtain across the countryside before I finally, if hesitantly, approached the castle tower. It perched well up the rising slope of a shallow cliff-side. A branch of trail wandered up past a cavern and after several switchbacks, on to the citadel's front. Some smaller buildings and shadowed sheds dotted the far end of the stronghold's plot, all of these at a remove from the black cave entrance. Looking at the dark hollow of the cave, I thought it might offer a way to get out of the open and think about things further.

The moon shone whitely by the time I actually finished scouting the area and made for the cavern. However, a wavering luminescence now spilled out from the rocky mouth, and a pulsing beat of drums began to issue from it. I had not counted on the cave being occupied, but my curiosity, terminally piqued, overcame my fear.