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His name was Matteo Rossell, and he hadn’t spent this much time riding horses since he’d visited his uncle’s farm in Catalonia as a teen.

That had been a fun summer. The past three weeks? Those had been a fever-dream mix of heaven and hell.

He still wasn’t sure if this was a VR world or not. He didn’t think so—everything was too real, and it had been going on for too long. No VR world could have a person in it for weeks, unless someone was doing something excessively illegal and probably impossible for what technology he knew existed on any market—but Hell, what was he supposed to think? This was all so fantastical. Straight out of a high fantasy VR game. He was literally riding on some mystical quest with a prince and two elves, and he’d seen all three of them do magic.

Shit, he’d done magic. Some kind of paper thing with a symbol on it. Master-at-Arms Treng had pulled him to a burn pile outside the castle walls, handed him the paper, then told him to say ‘riyan’ and throw it at the pile.

The damn thing had lit. Through him.

He had no idea how he was going to explain that to his commanding officer, if and when he managed to get his AWOL butt back to Earth. He’d just put it as ‘implausible ability, probably hallucination’ in the daily report log.

Christ. He didn’t know what to believe, anymore. But, real or not, one thing was certain: he was stuck here. And if he wanted to go back to Nashville, these people were his best shot.

So, he’d been studying his ass off in the castle—God, he’d gotten to stay in a castle! Whatever else this bizarre experience was, a whole lot of his childhood fantasies were coming into extremely solid reality—as much as possible, cross-referencing three different dictionaries and programming as much vocabulary into his brain—and his HUD’s language recognition program—as humanly possible.

He’d also been learning how to fight with a sword.

That had been fun. Even if it did use muscles he didn’t typically use in normal Guardian Corps duties.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as horseback riding, however.

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They’d set out at sunup on the first day, making a brief stop at the baker’s in Brighton—he’d added six more items of vocabulary to his HUD dictionary—then eating up the road at a strong pace until noon, their horses’ legs eating up the mileage. He’d been given a docile sorrel gelding who was happy enough to follow along with the others. Matteo knew just enough to pull his head away from eating random roadside plants and to kick him along when he made signs of wanting to stop and roll in the river. Other than that, he tried to stay out of the horse’s way and not bounce around too much.

When they stopped, he gave his legs a thorough stretch.

They’d still be sore, but he hopefully he’ll still be able to walk in a day’s time.

After lunch, they continued on. The sun had burned the fog from the passing fields, blazing bright and hot from a silty blue sky, but the air kept a hint of mugginess to it. His sweat chilled in the occasional patches of deeper forest along the road. The sounds of insect and birdsong and rustling underbrush fauna filled his ears. The scent of pine and water and the occasional musky odor of passing deer filled his nose. He half-listened to Doneil bicker with Catrin over something. Just ahead of him, Prince Nales was quiet in his saddle.

Around midafternoon, they emerged from a particularly deep patch of forest to find themselves surrounded by flowers.

Matteo was stunned by the view.

Before now, the farms they’d passed had been mostly homesteads. Small, less than twenty livestock, a scattered number of ducks and chickens, a handful of growing fields. Nothing big, really. Nothing industrial.

This, he thought, came close.

The field on the left wore alternating stripes of color. Yellow, pink, purple, white, each of them organized into sub-rows within their color. A piece of machinery sat at the end of one row, its wheels blocked to keep it from rolling. His mind blanked when it attempted to guess its purpose. Cutting? Planting? Weeding?

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

It was only blind luck he recognized some of the plants. Daffodils were closest, bold and upright, their nose like the bell of a trumpet with a cone of petals around it. The pink row next to them were tulips, except these seemed to have some sort of spiky fringe on the ends.

After that… Hell, he had no idea. Some plants with rich purple flowers all stood up in a bundle at the end of its stalk. The white one looked like small, scraggly… daisies?

On the right, the fields stretched out in a sea of pink and purple. He had no idea what those flowers were. No idea.

His parents would have known. They’d been gardeners.

He wished he could show them. He wished he could show them all what he was seeing. The flowers, the elves… the magic.

God, how much could Earth benefit from the healing Doneil could do? And he’d been told it was a learned skill?

How did a person learn that? Could he learn that? Maybe with the paper, like Treng had shown him?

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He dismissed the HUD message, shoving it into the backlog like the rest of them. He’d put them all into a report later, just like he’d done the rest of them. For now, he just focused on the bumping gait of his horse, the smell of sunlit flowers and earth, and the lilting conversation of his companions as they rode on.

***

Erlin’s main road was lined with lilac trees. Their strong scent washed over him as they rode through the streets, past the cutting smell of hot metal from the smithy and toward what looked to be a main square. He picked up his reins a little, more for show than anything—as if he were actually in control—and took in as much as he could. The town looked like a cross between Brighton and Pemberlin. More lavish than the town and more town than the castle. Higher population, more merchants. The cobbles and flagstones here, as well as the stonework on the building facades, were brighter, like some of Pemberlin’s walls and stables.

Had the castle sent away for the stone? Not too far, he surmised, given they’d had only a day's ride.

Still, a day was a long way to transport stone.

He wondered if a river provided better connection. Or perhaps that train he’d seen in the distance once.

He wondered where that went.

His companions turned to the left. Matteo caught sight of a castle, up on a hill above the town and sporting the same bright stone, and wondered if they’d be staying there, but his companions turned to the left, and he found himself riding under the hanging leaves and trailing lilac blossoms of an ancient, gnarled vine.

Wisteria. Another of the few plants he recognized.

His father had been obsessed with it. Now, he saw why. The tree and its siblings—equally ancient, their tan-colored, stringy bark riding from wells in the cobbles to trace drapes of green and violet up the stonework wall of an inn.

Straight from a goddamn fairytale.

He bent his head as some of the flowers slid over his head. Then, when the prince and elves in front of him halted, he endeavored to not look like an inept buffoon when he dismounted.

To his surprise, he was moderately successful.

Maybe the few riding lessons he’d taken over the past two weeks had worked.

Either that, or he was going to be able to move tomorrow.

Catrin and Nales took the bags from their saddles—along with the weapons, he noticed—and headed for the side entrance to the inn. Matteo looked at Doneil, eyebrows raising in question, and the elf made a staying motion with his hand and pointed to the horses.

“They go pay,” the elf said, enunciating each word slowly. “We finish horses.”

Doneil used a dumbed-down version of their language with him—which he very much appreciated. Two weeks was not long enough to get any sort of fluency in a new tongue, and the elf had tutored him enough to be well aware of Matteo’s level. Hell, he appreciated that the elf talked to him at all. Or that anyone did.

The entire castle had been accommodating, for the most part. Only a few people—some of the stable hands and kitchen staff—hadn’t tried to talk to him.

The Master-at-Arms had been… truly indispensable.

Severn Treng had sat him down and, in a broken melding of Catalan, Spanish, and English, had answered as many of his questions as he could, coaxed out his origins and his basic description of Earth, and mapped out as much of how his new world worked as he could.

He still didn’t know much about the interworld gate-system these people had, but it gave him hope.

If they could access other worlds, perhaps finding a way back to his was not impossible.

He and Doneil brushed down the horses, led them to fresh stalls with runs, wiped and stowed their tack, then washed their hands and headed back under the wisteria and through the hewn stonework arch and intricately-carved doorframe of the inn’s entrance.

The smell of wood enveloped him in an entranceway of brown, well-worked timber. A set of stairs appeared to his left, a polished banister leading to the upstairs rooms. The front desk nestled into their bend, a wall of mail cubbies criss-crossing like the diagonal gridwork of shelves in a wine cellar.

Maybe it was. Mayve they’d re-used the shelving.

A tall, portly man greeted them from behind the desk, dark eyes glancing over Doneil, moving to him, then doing a double-take at them both. A gaslamp flickered beside him.

Doneil shot him a merry smile and an exuberant greeting, forestalling any awkwardness—the elf did that a lot, he noticed—then led the way into the common room before the man could say anything else.

As the smell of food and drone of conversation washed over them, his HUD pinged again.

He moved to dismiss the message—to shove it into the backlog as he’d done all the rest—but a different flicker in the text made him stop.

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