Ari sank into Claribel’s bed and leafed through a book on golems. None of it made sense, half due to the looping handwriting that looked like sketches of theme park rides instead of words that could be understood. All that she’d managed to gleam from those pages and the help of Natty and Claribel was that golems were man-made: an attempt to recreate the Children of Lady Una, who were either superheroes, saints or abominations, depending on who you asked.

Perhaps it was a dead end, a distraction. She needed to focus. Focus on Miri. Focus on anything to fend off the searing lump of ice-cold hollow that slipped through with a few glimpses of Lady Malory, alive and smiling, despite Claribel’s defences. If it had been her own feelings, she’d have shut it in the box of useless things the moment it dared threaten her, but it was not, and it beat at her, wave after wave, relentlessly.

~You’re right.~ Claribel perked up momentarily at the mention of Miri. ~We must move on from our loss. I will help you find Miri. There is nothing I can do for Lady Malory, but there may still be loved ones awaiting for your friend’s return.~

Friend was a misused word, but it was true that they should leave the comfort of Claribel’s chambers and start questioning those in the Aquilon household; that was the easier theory to test compared to the idea of sieving through everyone in the country.

‘Why bother?’ Natty cut in, beating down a pallet of hay near the hearth, which she’d insisted was what fools slept on in this world and where she was planning to sleep tonight. ‘Life here is good enough. Why complete his mission? I mean… You know I’ll always help you… Don’t forget that. I’ll go with you, but you work too hard. It’s been a long day. Go to bed. Honestly, with a father like him, would you want to go home?’

‘But I have to, because…’

Because the mission was Ari’s only crutch without the words in the sky; because outside of missions, she barely knew how to live as Becky, much less as herself.

‘Because she might be in danger here,’ said Ari. ‘We should find her first. That’s still important. Then we can ask her what she wants to do. If the theory for the spirits having some connection to the Aquilon household is correct, then we should…’

…engage in the most terrifying act of all: small talk.

~Were you not looking for Duke Taur? Like I said, he is sure to be in the tavern by the port, La Petite Mort. We should go there tonight and observe the ladies near him.~

The port. Why did Claribel need to visit the port?

‘Are you… OK, hang on, you aren’t really planning to get to the port after dark, are you?’ said Natty.

‘Is there anything wrong with that?’ Ah. Perhaps… ‘Will your servants let you ride to the tavern after all that’s happened today?’

~Fret not. The tavern is not a fit place for a duke’s daughter anyhow. We shall go in disguise!~

Observing Tristram from the shadows suited Ari just fine; tonight, she couldn’t stomach trying to channel the words of a noble lady to comfort a man who’d just lost his sister.

~I have often successfully disguised myself as a common milkmaid. You will find a suitable change of clothes in my dressing room.~

‘I was actually talking about electricity,’ said Natty. ‘There’s none. It hasn’t been invented yet, and I have no idea how to invent it, which means… it’s going to be pitch-black outside, because pitch has been invented, and it really knows how to stink up a shipyard. More to the point, if you’re a milkmaid, you’re not going to be riding a chestnut palfrey. Those are ridiculously expensive. Like… that’s five years’ worth of some poor farmer’s income.’

‘What about riding a… a… donkey?’ said Ari.

‘…’

~… I… can acquire an oxen, cow, sheep or hen from my farm, but…~

‘But I can’t ride a hen,’ said Ari. ‘I’d crush it. Splat. No more eggs.’

‘Unless it was the size of a donkey,’ said Natty.

‘The egg or the hen?’

‘Hen, obviously. What are you planning to do with a donkey-sized egg? Hatching something larger than a baby dino?’

‘I was thinking of balancing on it and sort of walking on it like people do at the circus? But anyway, that’s not the point.’

‘Hey, hey, hey, you’re the one who started talking about riding chicken. Don’t off-topic me.’

‘I just… Where were we?’

~In my room. Still.~

‘Right… Can we walk there?’ Ari asked. ‘To the port?’

~It will take a little time, but the Moon is out tonight. We can make it to the port and the tavern before it becomes too rowdy.~

*

It took far longer to rip out all the pins that held together Claribel’s dress without the help of three chambermaids.

What was the deal with milkmaids in ‘Rosalind by Any Other Name’? The author had gone to great lengths to describe, even name, a milkmaid called Hannah, spending a whole page waxing lyrical about Hannah’s slender figure only for the unnamed Claribel to make disparaging remarks about her across two lines.

And now here she was, supposedly dressed as a milkmaid.

Ari didn’t need to look in the mirror to understand what kind of disguise she was wearing right now. This world might be fictional, but the people in it didn’t feel stupid enough to believe that a delicate girl wearing a satin dress dyed with bright yellows and greens, accessorised with a vibrant blue apron, both unstained and worse, unworn, could possibly be a real milkmaid.

The outfit would be enough to catch someone’s attention. Scrutiny would follow. What she had to offer for that was unblemished skin and soft, uncalloused hands.

She untied the apron and–

~Wait! Why would you do that? Doesn’t it suit me?~

‘If your taverns are anything like the ones I’ve read about, it suits someone who’d be stabbed and robbed,’ said Ari. It looked like a costume from a film set, and belonged in a world where mercenaries could march for days, leave their clothes unwashed, and still emerge with a stainless, well-ironed cape and manicured hands.

She stared at her own face in the mirror; it left much to be desired when she’d been used to concave light-up mirrors to ensure that her disguises would be flawless even in 4k. What a stroke of luck that she’d kept the same face. She’d spent her whole life learning how to deal with it. In this world, where make-up was unfamiliar, possibly poisonous, and you couldn’t just pick up a quick facial prosthetic from R&D, she had to go back to her old tricks.

It was a shame that Claribel’s garden, no euphemisms intended, was so well-tended.

‘I was thinking of a sting operation. What do you think?’ she asked Natty, deferring to the expert.

‘That… would certainly do it,’ said Natty.

‘No extermination of poxy people?’

‘No epidemic of smallpox or syphilis, and nothing like the Black Death at the moment. It’s already been and gone. They’re not going to quarantine you.’

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

~I’m sorry, what now?~

‘Don’t worry, sounds like you’ve got nothing to worry about,’ said Ari.

~That is exactly why I am worried.~

‘Will Lady Claribel be OK? I don’t think she’d ever gone through something like that before.’

Ari shrugged. ‘There’s a first time for everything. I’ll leave you to find some clothes and prepare everything we’d need.’

‘… which I’ve already done,’ said Natty, pulling out a sack from under the pallet of hay she’d set up by Claribel’s hearth with a children’s TV presenter’s ta-dah. ‘Behold. Proper peasant clothes I prepared earlier! I’ve been lugging it around all the way from Aquilon.’

Ari ran her hands across the undyed gown, tunic and breeches, all creased and frayed at the edges, but not too threadbare as to attract the opposite kind of attention. The perfect colour too. Brown could really take the feral glow out of her eyes and make them resemble the colour of mud.

‘We won’t be regulars,’ said Natty, ‘so we’ll be travellers coming to Eirene to watch the tournament. We can’t be two women travelling alone. There are too many bandits about to make that realistic.’

It would be harder to make Claribel’s body resemble a man’s, but Natty’s current body was ambiguous enough even without any stuffed socks and make-up.

‘Husband,’ said Ari, tapping Natty over her heart, then tapping herself, ‘and wife.’

Natty gave a quick nod. ‘I’m John.’

‘Hey John, meet Becky.’

‘What’s with calling yourself Becky? Wasn’t that going to be your cover when you tried to leave last time?’

‘I got kind of attached to that name.’ Ari shrugged. ‘It came up in a song. You know. I have… I had good hair.’

‘Since when did you start listening to Queen B? Like… I couldn’t get you to when we lived together.’

Ari shrugged again. When she no longer had Natty there, moving arrhythmically to the music, having it on in the background brought back an echo of those familiar, toothy smiles.

‘And anyway,’ Natty carried on, ‘being that kind of Becky is hardly a good thing.’

‘Since when did we ever do good things?’ said Ari.

‘That’s what you believe. Saving the world. Taking down the bad guys. Right?’

Right? The blood on her hands: a means to an end. Justified.

She pulled the shapeless woollen gown over her linen underlayer, then pulled out a worn leather belt to reduce the resemblance between Claribel’s body and a sack of potatoes. At the bottom, she found two over-the-knee socks. Kicking off Claribel’s old silken ones and embroidered garters, she wriggled into these new coarse brown ones, fastened with unadorned leather trimmings. Gone were the jewelled shoes, and on went brown leather brogues, soft but unpolished.

Unpinning the jewelled hairnet that had helped disguise Claribel’s brittle, thinning hair, she pressed the braids against her scalp and made the most of their lack of volume.

Ari gave the dress a twirl and added a final, finishing touch.

~Oh, the Fated One save me. What are you doing to my body?! Are you… are you slouching?~

‘What do you think,’ Ari checked with Natty.

‘You’re now a peasant woman who enjoys making puppets out of your old stockings once they’re so holey, they can’t be darned anymore, and you like to tell your husband that yours are better than the ones the famous puppeteer Dommy makes for his shows all over Eirene. You’re now here to show him! And I… Oh, who am I?’

Now without her jester’s outfit and jingling hat, Natty could have been anyone, fourteen or forty. Even Ari couldn’t be sure she’d be able to identify the real her from a line-up. There were only tuffs of curly, mid-brown hair, a sprinkle of freckles and a face that Natty kept friendly and blank.

‘You’re a farmer who married too young, but regrets nothing because things bounce straight off of you. You like to have a cider or two, but when you have three, you lose your mind and go on a rampage where you like to take their hands, stare into their eyes and tell them they are wonderful and deserve to be loved.’ Ari paused. ‘Actually, that’s what you do when you’re sober.’

~Is that before or after you kill them?~ This time, Claribel’s voice formed a mere trace in Ari’s head before it faded into nothingness.

‘That’s what people do when they’re feeling friendly!’ said Natty, oblivious.

~Then where is Fabia?~

A sob escaped from somewhere deep within. It couldn’t have been Ari’s; she instinctively reached out for what should have been an awkward pat on someone’s shoulder, but there was only her. Claribel. One and the same. Her outreached hand came to rest on the back of her neck, and she tried, tried to stop it, to stuff it back where it belonged: far, far from her world.

Another sob welled up.

A heaving, jostling jumble of things gripped her.

Fabia’s hands around her wrist, pulling her into the scent of pine.

Max’s voice, reverberating in her skull: I must go.

The soft caress of a silken handkerchief sewn with sunflowers, settling into the hands of another black-haired girl.

A crown of conkers, laid gently onto her head: Hey, what’s this? Don’t people make chains out of daisies? Don’t I suit flowers?

Someone used to know how to laugh.

‘…ri. Ari!’

How long had Natty been calling out her name, open palm hovering an inch away from her shoulder?

‘Can you hear me now?’

Ari nodded, and Claribel’s head moved with her, shaking off those unwelcome memories.

‘And can I touch you now?’

She nodded once more, but the crush of Natty’s embrace cut it short. The curls that nestled against her neck still felt unfamiliarly sparse, once occupied by Natty’s scratchier braids.

‘That was… weird. I haven’t seen you cry since… since the Chief took us,’ Natty spoke, still nestled against her. ‘It’s extra weird because you have the same face. Was that you or was that…’

Her voice trailed off. No matter. Ari didn’t have an answer anyhow, so she parroted Claribel’s words, breathing them out like a secret. ‘Where is Fabia?’

‘I… I’m afraid… I don’t know.’ Natty stepped back. ‘When I got here, she was still there, but she never talked to me or anything – not even a hello or a get-out, much less what you and Lady Claribel seem to do. One day, I just couldn’t feel her anymore. I know you don’t believe me.’

Claribel said nothing, thought nothing that Ari could read.

‘I think we should call it a day,’ suggested Natty once more, always a beacon of common sense. ‘On my first day here, I claimed to have a headache and slept for most of the day. The only thing I did was roll out of my pallet of hay and eat in the Great Hall. Things I didn’t do include running a fashion consultation for two knights, attending a burning in the presence of a cardinal and the royals, taking down a golem, and causing minor damage to the reputation of Lady Oriana.’

‘Only minor?’ That was a little surprising. Talk among the maids seemed to be that Lady Oriana had sent a golem to the burning because she couldn’t be bothered to attend herself: the seats were too uncomfortable, and she’d rather be out in the woods, hunting. Wouldn’t that be even more of a heresy than calling for a faster death for Lady Malory?

‘You can only do minor damage to something that’s already in tatters. What she’s done is also an offense against both the Church and the followers of Lady Una: a real double whammy, but she is Lady Oriana, so everyone will just wear their angry faces for a week or so and wait for her next scandalous move. There are puppeteers acting out her latest misadventures all over the kingdom. I saw “The Scandals of Lady Oriana: Part Eleven” in Aquilon, and believe me, it was packed – almost as popular as “The Rise of Rosalind” and “Ninus and Moracea”.’

‘You’re right. Maybe we should call it a night,’ said Ari, and waited. Nothing. Though she didn’t understand people, she had an intimate knowledge of danger; those hunches were never wrong. She loosened a knot she’d tied on her belt, and waited.

~But… You’ve finally made me look terrible. It would be such a shame to waste it.~

There it was. Claribel wanted her at the tavern, certainly not for Ari’s benefit. At best, she was trying to pull the strings on an Ari-shaped marionette. At worst, she was leading Ari off the edge of a cliff.

It was folly to indulge Claribel, to walk into a trap with eyes wide open, but some part of Ari – the wrong part – craved for those metal teeth to snap shut against her ankles, to tear into her flesh, to deliver the hunter a creature lying motionless against the forest floor, draped in silence. Moments later, the body that adorned the earth would be the hunter’s, a clean slash across the throat.

‘It would be a shame, wouldn’t it? But you don’t look terrible yet.’ Ari smiled. ‘We are still going though. Don’t worry, we’ll fix that soon enough.’

*

Ari pulled her woollen shawl closer against the cool night air.

Natty had donned a pair of leather gloves to fill the pouch with plants at the far end of the garden, while Ari merely stood by and watched the pouch grow fatter, just in case a servant were to pass by.

~What’s… in there?~

What was in there was the easiest way to destroy the healthy smoothness and glow in skin that had been looked after by a rigid regime of moisturisation and shelter from the sun.

Natty handed it over and said, ‘Should be enough now. If you’re sure…’

Ari took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. It had been a while since she’d last resorted to this, and as similar as Claribel’s face looked to her own, this was a different body, with a different tolerance for pain, but the mild discomfort would only be temporary, just like everything else in life.

She dipped her hand into the bag of stinging nettles and rubbed the leaves over her face. Carefully, she went over her cheeks, as if she was applying foundation. Claribel’s screams came from somewhere within, but Ari needed to focus on the task at hand. Now over her forehead, went a fresh, unsquashed leaf, and gently, gently, she inched it closer to her undereye areas. It needed to look natural.

~What the fuck is wrong with you?!~

The sting was worse than Ari remembered; this body’s nerves were still childish and untrained, but it would have to do. She identified the pain and the itching and sealed it into her box, then shoved it to the back of her mind along with all the other useless things. The way that the water reflected the night, staring, pulling her back in.

‘How does it look?’ she asked Natty.

‘Dominating.’

‘Good.’

Tonight, people would look upon her face and look again; with a face like hers, there was little she could do to avoid that. But when they looked, they would only notice the spots and welts.

Claribel whimpered as they stumbled across mud-paths, whimpered as they watched the light from the top of the manor’s chapel fade behind them, whimpered as the mud-paths grew into the cobbled streets of Eirene.

Out here, on the streets once more, where ravens pecked at discarded apple cores and others shoved past her without a single wave, Ari finally dared to feel half-herself again.