Chapter Twenty-One: Old Chums

I sat there, shocked at the unexpected appearance of my childhood friend, Ben Boyd. I now knew of five people, including me, who'd traversed the chasm between Earth and Alfheim (though, if Velda was right, there were many more in the south). Two of us, Calivar and myself, had come across in a freak, near-simultaneous resurrection mishap. The other three I knew of had flashed across in some strange magical event, and one of those three men was Ben. I stared at him for a moment, wondering why he didn't recognize me, wondering if his memory was compromised. It wasn't, of course - I didn't look a thing like Larry Born anymore, sitting prim as can be in the palace solarium in my silvery blue dress and silvery blue hair, my fae ears poking just past the little circlet of lavenders I'd grown around my head on a whim, staring at him with my piercing aquamarine eyes.

"Princess Leanne…" Ben said, and he bowed again. Like the German duo, Ben had no idea what decorum to observe, but he was overplaying it on the side of caution. He'd pronounced my name Lee-Anne.

"Lay-onna," I corrected him. "And I reckon I know you, Benjamin Boyd, you dog! Husband of Helen, father of Rosalind, and proprietor of the finest soda fountain in all Sioux City!""

I sprang to my feet and gave him a good-natured slap on the arm. He flinched so badly you'd have thought I socked him good, but a slap from my slim hand wouldn't do much damage. "H… how did you know that?" Fear flashed in his eyes. "M-magic?"

"Hell yes, magic! Magic that yanked me out of limbo after I blew up over the Oise and deposited me in this body. You knew me as Larry Born, your best buddy from back in Green Haven, Nebraska!"

He looked me up and down, squinting as if that might give him a glimpse of Larry Born beneath Laeanna's skin. Truth be told, though, I wasn't Larry Born any longer any more than I was the old Laeanna. I was some combination of the two - the soul that now inhabited her body and whatever had been left behind in that body when I occupied it, and with each passing day the new Laeanna became less and less of a façade over my inner tumult. Ben thought it was a trick, and it was hard to blame him - he'd seen ten times the impossible things in the past six weeks than he'd seen in his entire life before that. Who was to say Laeanna couldn't extract memories from his mind?

"I don’t know how to extract memories from people's minds," I said. "Not yet."

"How did you do that?"

I shrugged. "I know you pretty well. I'm not going to go through a whole rigmarole to prove it, though. Let's just say it would be very un-princessly of me to tell you how I lost my cigarette tin in Compeigne. If that's not enough for you, I guess you'll have to leave Vernal City being the friend of zero high and mighty princesses of the realm."

Ben stumbled over to the settee, his legs suddenly unsteady. "Larry… you're… you're alive? And a princess?"

"It's good to see you, too, buddy. But it's Princess Laeanna now - Larry got blown up over the Oise, didn't he? Why don't you tell me how you got here and then we'll figure out what to do about it. Care for some tea?"

"Have you got coffee?"

I laughed - mine was a very 'fae princess' laugh, silvery and melodic and about the furthest thing you'd ever expect from a former infantry grunt. "We haven't got coffee in Alfheim, but I've got Albrecht and Otto working on it."

"Tea will do," Ben said, finally settling back in his seat, a grin creeping across his face. "So… you got blown up over the Oise…"

+++++

When I'd accidentally blown myself up over the Oise, Ben had been shocked and aggrieved, but he stuck that emotion on the back-burner, because that's what you did in the middle of a fight. The dynamite had done the trick well enough - it had blown the middle of the bridge to bits along with me and Knut’s (currently the prince of Estival) stolen Mark IV tank and it sent the other tank tumbling over into the water. Now, there were men struggling to get out as the Oise inundated it and Germans shouted and scrambled about the other side. And the morning's mist was rapidly blowing away. As soon as the Germans spotted the platoon holed up behind an old retaining wall, they'd level whatever heavy guns they had against it and they'd all be toast. With me hurled up to limbo in little bits, Ben was the senior officer, so he stumbled back to the men and ordered the retreat, bringing the platoon back along their previous path. A path that suddenly, miraculously, contained the engineering company we'd been set to extract rather than some strange inter-realm between Alfheim and Earth.

There, the medics patched up Ben's shoulder as he relayed his orders to the engineers - orders that, unfortunately, had been blown up along with me. The engineers showed him their orders, co-signed by Black Jack Pershing himself: to secure and retrieve an item of special ordinance near Noyan. They'd found the 'ordinance', a strange and ancient artifact that glowed with an unidentifiable internal power source, but they had no idea how to move the thing and they'd been trying for days. It shouldn't have been that difficult - it was a little object like a chair atop an ornate, mechanism-packed bench along with a golden ring perhaps eight inches wide that connected to it via an intricate braided cable. The engineers had tried everything to pry the device up from its spot in the reliquary of the St. Michel church and had even broken the stone beneath it. The object had shifted down to rest lightly upon the broken stone but wouldn't budge an inch.

"Did you figure it was a magical device?" I asked Ben.

"You're damn right I did. Or at least unnatural in a way I'd never seen before. Thanks to my pa, I'm pretty good with machines, and I recall you were, too. What would you have done with the thing?"

I thought about I for a minute, trying to envision what the device must've looked like. I imagined a small throne-looking mechanism fashioned of the ageless brassy metal the fae called eternite - far more precious than gold even in fae the fae realms, which was the only place it could be mined. The mysterious glowing power source, I imagined, was fashioned from fae crystals. Ah. "I'd have put the loop on my head and sat in the chair,"

Ben snapped his fingers. "Bingo. I did exactly that."

He slipped the circle over his head like a crown - and nothing happened. But the instant he sat in the chair, the whole thing blinked to life. Suddenly, the thing would let itself be moved - despite its solid appearance, it didn't weigh more than fifty or sixty pounds - with one catch. After a few minutes, the lights would blink off and the device would refuse to budge again. They tried every man in the company, and only Ben could get their 'ordinance' to activate. Either he was a rare soul or it had bonded with him. Regardless, he was along for the ride.

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The Germans were pushing forward to the south but might circle around toward their position, so the captain of the engineering company had ordered them north with the device, just in time to get carried along by the Allied forces as they pushed straight through Belgium with the Germans retreating the whole way. Ben found himself, his platoon, and the mysterious artifact carried straight through to Antwerp, and from there they'd gone to Rotterdam, where a disguised Q-boat was waiting to carry them straight across to Dover.

"Only you got intercepted by the SMS Creusa," I said. What happened?

They were only twenty miles out from Dover when Creusa opened fire, missing its first few shots badly as the Q-boat turned about to engage. Nigel Coolidge, who was a stodgy VIP from the British admiralty ordered Ben to help them take the device to an armored, hidden room within the ship, just in case they were boarded or took damage. He donned the 'crown' and sat in the chair just in time for Creusa to land a shot right on the deck. Ben heard the crack of the explosion, and suddenly there was a brilliant blue flash and he was surrounded by frigid sea water and sinking along with the device. Fortunately, the water was only about thirty feet deep and Ben was able to extricate himself and swim to the surface, from which he was soon washed ashore and discovered during a break in the storm - the residents of the nearby town often scoured the beach after storms because it was rumored that valuable hauls from shipwrecks sometimes washed ashore.

"In this case, the 'valuable haul' was me. These fishermen hauled me up from the beach, got me warm, and tried to ask me what had befallen me, but I couldn't understand a damn word of their singsong la-dee-da language."

"Faeric," I said.

Ben shrugged. "Sure. Whatever we're speaking now. I got some grub in me, passed out, and woke up speaking it like it was my native tongue. I can't speak a damn word in English now."

"Try singing it."

"My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing!" He whooped loud enough that the guards peeked in on us. "Hot damn, it worked! How about that?"

+++++

I personally escorted Ben to his room, with my guard keeping a discreet distance. Actually, I gave him a free upgrade and escorted him to a nicer room closer to my own chambers, one normally reserved for visiting lords and ladies rather than the merely-decent junior officer's bunk that Albrecht and Otto had to split. Ben whooped when he saw it and flopped onto the big canopy bed, rolling over to look back at me.

"I swear I must've got my bell rung and this is all just some fever dream," he sighed.

"It's not," I said. "It's the craziest thing I could've ever imagined, but here I am."

"It's…" Ben sat up and regarded me carefully, standing there in my glimmering gown and my crown of lavenders. "It must be even stranger for you."

I smirked. "Why? Because I'm a woman? A fae? Or a princess?"

"Take your pick, sister. How does it feel?"

I sat next to Ben on the bed. He was about as tall as I'd once been - maybe an inch short of six feet with an average frame. His slightly-doughy physique, the product of too much sampling of his own product at the soda fountain, had become lean and rangy after months on the march. Even so, he was much larger than I was. Everything about my body now felt so natural that it was easy to forget the magnitude of how I'd changed.

"It feels good. Natural. I mean… maybe you can't imagine it, but try to. Imagine that your soul got whisked up to limbo and then sucked back down into the wrong body. Down into the brain of the wrong body." I tapped on my temple, just under my crown of flowers. "I'm not exactly sure how it works, since memories ought to be stored in your brain, too. But I've got all my memories packed into a brain that's wired up for this body and that's been living with this body for sixty-five years…"

Ben gawped. "That body is sixty-five years old?"

I shook my head. "It's looked like this for sixty-five years, give or take a year – before that, she was a child. Laeanna is eighty-two, if you’d believe it. The fae don't age like humans do. And… well, living in this body feels like the most natural thing in the world. Maybe more natural than when I was Larry Born. Everything about it, even…"

I stood from the bed and turned to face Ben. He just stared into my face for a moment, transfixed, but soon gasped in astonishment when I unfurled my wings, silvery and encrusted with little 'fae jewels' - glittering magical nodes that helped my flight beyond what physics would normally allow. I still had a little raw spot where the silvery membrane was healing after being shot through with an arrow, though I could now fly without pain. Ben just watched, and I couldn't decide whether the way he looked at me was flattering or unsettling… a bit of both, I guess. He noticed my expression and looked down to his hands - his rugged soldier's hands.

"Are you… I mean… since you feel natural in that body, and I'm sure I don't have to tell you about what a figure you cut… I suppose you're attracted to fellas now?"

I blushed. "Not really," I said. And that wasn't quite true. If I was being honest, Ben wasn't bad looking and I was slightly attracted to him. If I'd been stuck marrying a prince who looked like him, it wouldn't have been the end of the world. But Princess Laeanna was spoiled for opportunity, and she preferred tall, swaggering lotharios and buxom, feminine seductresses with about equal intensity, and nobody else tickled her fancy… my fancy… half as much. "I've actually got a girlfriend here…"

"You cheated on Abigail?" Ben's tone was accusatory, as if my sleeping with half a dozen whores in my few months in France hadn't been cheating. He spotted my reaction. "Cheating-cheating, I mean. You've got a relationship with a woman here?"

And, just like that, the waterworks came on. It's not the sort of thing you can control easily. I turned away so he wouldn't see my tears, and my cheeks burned with embarrassment. "I can't ever go back," I sniffed. "Even if anybody back home believed me, I'm a fairytale princess… and I love it here."

This admission startled me - that, despite all of the madness that had transpired since I got yanked out of limbo and sent to Alfheim, when I curled in next to Meliswe at night, her soft skin on mine, her scent in my nose, her sighs in my ears and running down my spine, I felt far more loved and contented than I ever had back home. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but I swear I genuinely loved Abigail, loved my maw and the children, and part of me still did. Maybe fae just feel everything more intensely, and Laeanna definitely felt everything more intensely, and that's who I was now. And I knew that, if tomorrow morning some magical genie offered to send me back home in my old body with a million bucks in the bank, I'd have told him to scram. I wiped my tears and turned back to him.

"I can't go back, Ben. I won't. But maybe you can…"

"What?" He blinked. "How?"

"That device of yours obviously bridged the gap between worlds. Maybe if we can get it back we can send you home. It's worth a shot…"

"It sank to the bottom of the sea, Laeanna. How would we ever find it?"

"Gaelin… he's my fae brother. Blue hair, a lot bluer than mine… the prince who sent you and the two Germans my way. Gaelin knows exactly where they recovered you, and you told me yourself it wasn't under more than thirty feet of ocean or so. If I’m right, the device zapped over along with the three of you and your respective ships. So we'll go out to Hibernal and find the thing, have you dive down to activate it, and then haul it back to shore. With any luck, we can figure out how to trigger the thing on purpose - if it can take you from Earth to Alfheim, I'll bet it can do the opposite."

Ben snapped his fingers. "Hot damn, sister. Where do I sign up"