Midwinter

"You'll forgive me," said the Unseelie scholar, who introduced himself as Hereg. "So many months surrounded by these bars have weakened me. I no longer know what year it is, I have trouble remembering. Is it Midwinter in the Seelie lands?"

Mauritane nodded. "Firstcome eludes us for awhile yet."

Hereg shook his head slowly. "I'm afraid it's my fault that you all have been brought here. For whatever is to happen, I am to blame."

"What is to happen, Hereg?" said Mauritane.

Hereg smiled. "In a cage, even the sons of Mab and the sons of Titania may comfort one another," he said. "Perhaps more of us ought to be in cages, eh?"

"We must bend to circumstances," said Mauritane. "But answer the question."

"Have any of you trained in the magical arts?" he asked.

"I have," said Silverdun, the hood finally pushed back, his hair flowing. "I studied Elements at Queensbridge."

"Ah," said Hereg, rocking forward and back on his knees. "A man of the Elements. Just so, just so. You are, perhaps, aware of the Unseelie master of Spatial Thaumatics, Beozho? His Works?"

"I know of it," said Silverdun.

"Beozho teaches that the spaces between spaces may be enlarged and contracted. He describes the four axes of spatial harmony and gives manipulation keys for each." Hereg rocked forward and drew in the dirt with his finger, making a crude picture of a cube. "Using a premonitive resonator," he said, "the frequency of the space within a space may be tuned to achieve sufficient stability for passage, creating a doorway." He drew lines placing the cube upon a planar surface, then rubbed them out and altered the perspective with new lines. Depending on how Mauritane looked at the cube, it appeared to be either extended away from the plane or sinking into it.

"I cast runes to find one who is premonitively gifted," said Hereg, looking from Silverdun, to Mauritane, to Raieve, to Gray Mave. His eyes stopped on Mave and he pointed. "He is the one. He is to be my resonator."

"What does all this mean?" said Mauritane.

"I know what it means," said Silverdun. "He wants to use Gray Mave as a crowbar. Except instead of a packing crate, he's going to open a space between two worlds."

blue sky of earth

Night fell. Hereg continued to speak, sometimes veering into heavily accented High Fae that Satterly could not decipher. Eventually, he gave up listening and wandered to the edge of the enclosure. As much as he hated to admit it, none of it made sense to him. The nuts and bolts of Fae magic sounded more like an alien differential calculus than the storybook finger twiddling he'd once imagined. And it always came back to the equally alien concept of re, the magical essence, or sense, or power, or whatever it was that let the Fae do what they did. Trying to understand how Fae magic worked without being able to sense re was like trying to understand music theory without being able to hear.

It was unspoken among his fellows, but obvious, that the presence of iron in the bars was beginning to affect them unfavorably. It was bad luck even to speak of iron, so no one said it, but no one needed to. The mere proximity of it seemed to act as a depressant, dulling even Mauritane's reactions almost to the point of stupor.

Satterly stood at the edge of the cage and looked at the guard. He was a young man, no more than thirty, his long greasy hair tied back into a ponytail. He was so tall he had a tendency to hunch forward; his head was permanently angled outward like a turtle's. He leaned against the back of one of the huts, a shotgun within easy reach.

"How'd you get mixed up with them?" the man asked, out of nowhere.

"Me?" said Satterly, surprised. "Oh, well, it's a long story. My name's Brian Satterly."

"So y'all are all together? Like, you're friendly?"

Satterly puffed out his cheeks in thought. "Well, we're not enemies, but I wouldn't go as far as to call us friends, either. Let's say we're joined by circumstance."

"Joined by circumstance," the man repeated, enunciating each word. "Huh."

Satterly frowned and changed the subject. "So, uh, what are all you people doing here? How did you get to this world?"

The man laughed. "We drove," he said.

The woman named Linda skirted around the huts and joined the guard at his post. Back near the fire, some of the children peered in their direction, but most of the adults looked studiously away, as though trying to ignore them. Linda whispered quietly with the guard for a few seconds, pointing and gesturing.

She stuffed her hands in the pockets of a pair of threadbare jeans and approached the cage. "You," she said, pointing at Satterly. "What's your name?"

"Brian Satterly," he said. "I just went through this with your friend."

"My name is Linda Grossman," she said. "I want to apologize for all of this."

"I'd feel better about that if I knew what `all of this' was," said Satterly.

"Come on out," she said. "Just you, none of the others. We'll talk."