Giving up on ever remembering the final ingredient of gunpowder, much less the required ratios of each, Leah instead goes back to studying the Auzzo family. Returning to the first book, she tries to find recent information about the Ben-Lia region.

She finds interesting passages on the planting of vineyards on the mountain slopes, and finally identifies the “Burning Bluffs” by a more detailed map of the duchy: tall cliffs with veins of quartz running through iron-rich stone which the spray from the ocean causes to rust and run red over the crystals. South-facing, they catch the sun all summer and glint like flame.

John knocks on the door gently, just as she’s reaching the end of a dry description of the region’s geology.

“Are you free teu deu another language lesson?” he asks with a small grin, looking curiously at the book in her hands. “I don’t want teu interr…interrut.”

“Interrupt,” Leah says, setting aside her book. “And no, you’re not. A break would be good for me, right about now.”

They spend an hour going over grammar, the translation guide open between them, filled with ink and pencil markings, things crossed out and underlined, the margins packed full of annotations.

For the most part, grammar is identical between each language. The exceptions they discover are that all verbs can be negated in Olues (synau; bynau; havenau, gonau) – Leah mentally classifies this with the French ne_pas – and that prepositions can be shifted to follow the verb or to be between multi-word verbs like in the perfect tense, though never to the beginning of a sentence (who are you with – who are with you; where did you go through – where did through you go; where are you going to – where are to you going; tell it to them – tell to it them; leave it on the stove – leave on it the stove; it was taken off – it was off taken; you have been near – you have near been; it is leaning against – it is against leaning). The verb-preposition combo is apparently seen as very casual speech, used only between friends and family or in informal settings.

They work a bit on accents and pronunciation as well, but Leah’s ear is still incapable of picking up the subtlety between a ‘long’ and ‘short’ consonant, though the distinction seems essential to telling apart some otherwise identical words. John tries earnestly, with little to no success, to teach her to hear the difference. At this point, however, Leah has become distracted and fidgety, and John can tell. They give up on the language lesson and instead talk about local issues, stretching out on the chairs and relaxing.

John explains that he is from a farming family to the east of the Hold, closer to the Valerin border but further inland than the path Leah took. He does not study magic, but he does take occasional botany classes taught by one of the senior magic students. It is, as far as Leah can understand, his way of following gender norms; he enjoys the military training and siblinghood of the militia, but unless he wants unsavoury labels applied to him he must also be seen to show an interest in intellectual matters.

Himbo discrimination, Leah thinks, but listens attentively.

She asks what sort of unsavoury labels, and John seems momentarily uncomfortable before explaining in an off-hand manner that a woman who is too intellectual or a man who is too concerned with his body or appearance is often seen as ill-formed.

“Ill-formed?”

John goes back to looking uncomfortable. “Is that nau what e’s called in Volsti?”

“It might be, I’ve just never heard the term before.”

“Well…I suppose people don’t talk about e.”

Leah feels like there’s more to know here, but contents herself with the confirmation that it seems that going against gender binaries gives you some sort of queer label. “Do people see me as too intellectual? I mean, because I spend so much time in the study, or talking with Seffon.”

He seems shocked, and reaches over to squeeze Leah’s bicep. “No? Of course nau?”

Leah shuffles awkwardly, but is reassured. “How big of a problem is it, in this part of the world, to be labelled as ill-formed?”

John is clearly overwhelmed with the sudden turn the conversation has taken. “If e gets proven, e’s bad. How is e en Volst? Or Algi?”

She hesitates. “About the same, I guess. In Volst it’s one of the biggest taboos, equally as bad as public nudity, or spilling alcohol on a nation’s emblems.”

John nods knowingly, so Leah is reassured that she won’t have to talk about it any further. However, his mentioning of Algi bothers her, considering she thought it was common knowledge that she had no memories.

“How much do the people of the Hold know about my condition? My memory?” John looks lost, so she tries a different approach. “What do people think is the reason I’m here?”

John explains that the common rumour was at first that she was an assassin, and then when she didn’t kill anyone they thought she might just be a spy, and then when she saved Seffon’s life they decided she was a defector, come to protect them from her old allies. He doesn’t mention the betting pool, Leah notes, but she supposes that was confined to the students.

Even so, what he does say throws off her understanding of her own role in the Hold – strange and tenuous though that role may be to begin with. “But what about all the magic sessions with Seffon?”

John shrugs. “We assumed you were informing him of th situation in Valren, or helping him scry, or doing some sort of magic teu prepare for an attack.”

Leah is shaken, and ends their conversation casually to go seek out Seffon.

She finds him on the third floor of his tower, doing tests on the gear taken from the final invader. The guards at the front door let her in without question or complaint, and Leah wonders what they must think.

The second she emerges from the stairwell into the plant-filled upper room, she asks her question. “Does nobody outside of you and Sewheil know about my memory?”

Seffon sets aside the iron loops and takes a moment to focus on what she’s said. “I thought it was for the best that no-one else knew; if people started to think too much about a parallel world, existential questions would come up, and people would be afraid of threats from beyond this world.”

“What?” Leah asks, all the indignant anger she had built up on her walk sizzling out.

He sighs and faces her fully. “Your existence here terrifies me.” Noticing Leah’s expression, he continues. “Does that surprise you to hear? You have knowledge beyond us, and we can’t even figure out the basics of how you got here. Have other people undergone the same switch as you have? Have they brought knowledge from your world into ours, or from our world into yours?”

Leah is humbled. “I guess I assumed you were only ever humouring me; that you didn’t really believe that my memories were real, or if you did believe that you didn’t understand the implications.”

“I didn’t fully, until you started explaining the science of your world, and the scale of it. I suspect that there’s much more you’re not telling me; information that would shake this world, but which is mundane to you.” He looks at her face carefully, and Leah does not try to hide the fact that he’s hit the nail on the head.

“World-shaking is not my area of expertise, unfortunately,” she says, trying to bring levity back into the conversation. “But I am sorry that I can’t give you any more information about chemistry and such…I was never very good at the sciences in school.”

Seffon sets down his tools “In school? You went to school? How many years?”

“From age five to age nineteen; elementary school through to trade school.”

He leans back in the chair, exhaling heavily. “You are a decently educated woman by our standards, then. Are you set to inherit anything where you’re from?”

Leah shakes her head, and explains that even though she is an only child, her family owns no titles. “Maybe the car, and a few possessions…the fancy kitchen knives…my mum’s clothes…not sure about the farm, they’ll probably sell it before they die and that’s not a mortgage I could handle at this point of my life.”

“So you are peasantry?”

“My family are rural, but we have money,” Leah says, a little tartly.

“And you worked on the farm?”

“When I was a kid, yeah. As an adult I lived in the city, on my own.” His eyes flicker for a moment at that, but he does not interrupt. “I worked in kitchens and cafes, mostly. I’m trained in cooking and pastry-making – I’m quite good at Spanish cuisine.”

Seffon shakes his head. “Your world functions along different lines than our own, socially and economically. I don’t think I could understand even the surface level of it without weeks of study. And yet, you. You survived undetected for two weeks in this world, knowing nothing about it.”

Leah shrugs and leans against a table by one of the windows, trailing her fingers along the waxy leaves of a sprawling potted plant. “A lot of it I recognised from my world’s past. The middle ages, we called them. The weaponry is similar, as well as the noble titles. I also had the five to help me blend in; they covered for me often. I adapted to the more foreign parts easily enough once I figured out what era-equivalent I was in.”

Seffon turns in his chair to face her. “Do you understand now why this is so frightening? You are not just from a different world; you are from a future world. A future without magic, a future that never had magic. People here do not need to know that such a world exists; the implications are many, and almost all bad for us.”

Leah thinks over what Teo said. “I think it’s not as bad as it seems.”

“I’m sure it’s not. But the people of this region have been seeing mounting evidence of a war that will seek to wipe them out or subjugate them; they are not in a hopeful or forgiving mood.”

Leah nods sombrely. “So they can’t know.”

“I hope to send you home, and bring the other Leah back, if possible.” Seffon has returned to his formal tone as he says this. “Once that’s done, I will burn all my research, and hope that this accident never happens to anyone else.”

“Are you any closer to finding out how it happened?”

He gestures to the iron rings. “You have been overshadowed; I must focus on this first.”

Standing from the table to approach, Leah looks at the rings spread across the desk, and at the notes Seffon has scrawled in Olues. She thinks about what Seffon had said, about them being anti-scry. “You knew what they were, though, from the moment the scouts mentioned them. You said it had something to do with scrying.”

“We know what they are, yes; we’ve just never been able to study a set to figure out how they work.”

Leah asks to pick one up, and Seffon gestures for her to do so, going back to his notes, all the while muttering about Devadiss mentions of “arcs.”

Up close, the rings are smooth, and the inner parts that would lie adjacent to the wearer’s body are studded with amber chunks. Looking out a nearby window, Leah once again notices the tall metal spikes on the wall around the Hold. She stands straight, eyes flying wide open.

“Many dumb questions first, but I’ve got an idea.”

“I’m used to that at this point; go ahead.” Seffon looks back at her with smiling eyes.

“Do lightning storms interfere with one’s ability to scry, or generally cast spells?”

Seffon looks at her discerningly. “Yes, actually.”

“What about…brass door handles in rooms with wool rugs? Or brushing a cat?”

The specificity of this makes Seffon’s forehead scrunch up in thought. “I’ve heard of that interfering with it, yes…the shock that it produces can affect a person’s focus, though few people cast so constantly that even while opening a door or grooming a pet they are engaged in casting.”

“What about…solar flares? Are there auroras, to the far north? In late winter, the sky sometimes fills with ribbons of light.”

Seffon gives a very odd look. “It’s a component of some of Nent’s cultish ceremonies…something to do with the Goddess of Murk.”

“Who?”

“A goddess of liminal spaces; birth and death, sunrises and sunsets, any time the sun or moon behave differently than they ought.” At Leah’s prompting, he explains. “Eclipses and sundogs and such. Solstices. Ribbons of light in the winter sky.”

“What do the auroras do? The lights, in the sky, how do they impact magic?”

“They never reach us down here, we’re too far to the south. What in sanity do these things have to do with each other? I know you must be going somewhere with this, you always are.”

“I want to see a sample of the invader’s clothing; we need to do a test on it.” Seffon sends a guard to fetch it, and it is brought to them speedily. Leah puts on the long-sleeved jacket, which is made from a sturdy, supple leather, but has brown cuffs of a different sort of material than the rest of it – more of a knit, or felt, like her cape. Sliding on one of the bracelets, she rubs it around over the sleeve, and a faint crackling sound starts to be heard. She then reaches out her arm. “That should do it; touch the cuff.”

Looking curious, Seffon takes her wrist. A spark of static electricity arcs to his fingers as he does so, and he flinches. His eyes then widen.

“Never mind gunpowder; I’ve got more important information,” Leah says, her eyes sparkling. “Forget anachronisms, forget non-interventionism, forget the prime directive. Your opponents apparently have an understanding of electricity.”

“Of what?”

Leah grins a Cheshire cat grin. “I need: very fine copper wiring, lots of it; several glass jars; iron filings, if you have any, very fine; a selection of whatever metals you have; and some acid. Those vials…maybe they weren’t weapons, or at least not the kind you thought.”

“You can recreate the effect?”

“I remember some of it…I’ll be able to experiment and figure it out.”

Seffon calls in the same guard he sent for the clothing, and directs her to fetch the required ingredients.

“I’ll set you up in one of the test rooms. Is it likely to be dangerous?” he asks, and Leah shrugs. “Either way, it’ll be well-lit and well-insulated, so we can test the effects in controlled conditions.”

“My own laboratory, perfect. The mad scientist and the magician; I like it!”

Seffon does not even try to understand, but is swept up in her energy. “What do you think it will do?”

“At the least, we’ll be able to duplicate the effect of the anti-scry rings. At the most, we’ll be able to temporarily shut off a person’s ability to do magic.”

Too late she remembers Teo’s comments. Turning back to see Seffon’s reaction, she finds shadows of the open horror he’d hinted at earlier.

“You thought you were terrified of my knowledge before now; just you wait and see.”