Chapter 2

The man on the horse, who was wearing armour—not clean shiny armour—and wielding a sword—a really big sword—, leapt down yelling, and ran, at remarkable speed, past Kristabell only to impale another man on his sword. The dead man, the one with the sword through his middle, had been about to knock an arrow to a bowstring. Kristabell had been his planned target.  

Kristabell fainted.

*

The man pulled his sword free and cleaned it before sheathing it. He removed the breast plate of his armour just as another man rode up.

“Rowan. Did you get the last one?” the big man asked, still seated on his horse.

Rowan passed the breast plate to the other man and said, “Yeah, he's just over there. I think he was going to try to take this girl hostage instead of fighting.”

The big man sat on his horse holding the breast plate and looking puzzled as his friend knelt and picked the girl up. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Rowan looked at his friend and shook his head. “Don't be thick Leif. I'm taking her with us. She's unconscious. We can't just leave her here.”

“Oh. You mean she's not dead? That's kind of nice.”

Rowan shook his head again and smiled as he somewhat awkwardly mounted his horse with the girl in his arms. He settled her head against his chest, took the reigns, and they turned, heading back to where their pack horses were waiting on the main road and continued on their way.

“Where do you suppose she's from?” Lief asked.

“I don't know,” Rowan admitted. “She's not from the fort,” he motioned to the large stone castle on the hill top behind them. “Other than that, there aren't any settlements for miles and I don't recognize her as being from any of the big families, but she's soft and clean and she smells really nice. She isn't a poor man's daughter. Her clothes are just a little odd somehow though. Fine and well made, but worn too. And her hair . . .” which was loose and spilling over his arm. “A farm girl wouldn't have time to stop and brush her hair out like this in the middle of the day.” 

The two men rode along and speculated like this for about a half an hour, coming to the consensus as they did, that she must have somehow crossed over from the other world, and as they rode and talked this over, Kristabell slowly came to. At first she was dreaming that she was dreaming. In the dream she had fallen asleep on her bed in an uncomfortable position after her bath and she was dreaming that she was being carried by a friendly, though smelly, knight through the forest on horseback. But as she became more lucid she realized that the part about her bed was the dream and the parts about the knight, and the uncomfortable position, were real. There was armour digging into her back and chain mail against her cheek. Kristabell tried to adjust to this highly improbable set of circumstances but she couldn't think straight until she got into a more comfortable position, so she opened her eyes and tried to shift. Shifting, of course, alerted the two men to her conscious state, and it also caused her to over balance, which in turn forced the knight with whom she was riding to hold onto her more tightly. 

“Whoa!” he said, shifting her so that she was looking into his face. Kristabell gulped as she found herself staring into a pair of dark, amused eyes. She leaned back just a little so that she could get a better look at his over all appearance. He had dark shoulder length hair and handsome features. A refined nose and good cheekbones. Even with a week’s worth of stubble and grime he was . . . Kristabell gazed at him for a long moment trying to put her finger on it. He was just a bit . . . pretty . . . in a way that made her want to keep looking at him. Cripes Kristabell, she though to herself. Stop staring at him and wake up. You're still dreaming! But she was awake and she knew it. She couldn't tell from where she sat, basically in his lap, but she didn't think that he was a very big person. He was however, really quite strong.

“Are you alright?” he asked. 

“Um, sort of. I mean, I'm not hurt. I'm just confused,” she paused, “Where am I?”

“You're in the coastal Kingdom of Nova Britannia. My name is Rowan. I'm the captain of the King's Army. This is my second and my foster brother Leif.”

Kristabell looked over at the other man. He was the polar opposite of Rowan. Where Rowan was compact and dark, Leif was huge and blond with waist length dread locks, a beard, bright blue eyes and a sunburn. He grinned and waved at her. She sat there stunned for a moment then said, “My name is Kristabell and . . . I don't think that I'm from around here.”

They rode on in silence for a few minutes before it occurred to Kristabell to ask, “Why were you in the forest and who was the man with the bow?”

“He wasn't a man. Leif and I were ambushed on the road by a group of elves but they were inexperienced and under-armed. That one ran as soon as he realized they were in trouble and I followed him.”

“Are elves . . . bad?”

“Always. They are evil. That one would not have been kind to you,” Rowan answered, and his voice was hard and stern. 

Leif turned to her and said something but she couldn't understand him. It was strange because it was as if he was speaking English but none of the words were quite right, and even stranger was the feeling she had that she'd heard people speak like this before and even though she could understand Rowan, his accent and the cadence of his voice were just like her parents faded Irish accents. 

“Why can I understand you but not him?” she asked Rowan.

“I don't . . . really . . . know,” he answered slowly, hesitating with each word. “But magic works strangely. Maybe it's because I'm the first person who you met after you crossed the threshold between the worlds. Or maybe it's because I saved your life. Sometimes magic creates special bonds like that, but I'm not a good one to ask. You'd need to talk to a druid to get a proper answer.”

“Thank you for saving my life,” she told him.

“Oh, no problem,” he said as if she'd thanked him for passing the salt. “I would have killed the elf anyway but, I'm glad he didn't kill you first.”

“So . . . I'm from a different world, magic exists here, and elves are bad, right?”

Rowan turned to Leif and translated what she had just said. She could still understand Rowan even when he spoke to someone else and she felt self-conscious hearing her words repeated. Both men started nodding in agreement. “Sounds about right to us,” Rowan told her, but it didn't sound as if either he or his big friend were especially disturbed by the facts. At least, not as disturbed as Kristabell was.

Kristabell tried to absorb these new bits of information. An hour ago none of this could be real, now somehow she had managed to open a door to a . . . Kristabell looked around her and back at the hill that was disappearing into the distance. Had she somehow walked into a parallel world? Or, was she really lying with a concussion somewhere in the woods having a hallucination brought on by too many fantasy novels? She looked around some more. The lay of the land and the flora were just right for Vancouver, but there was no Vancouver. They were riding along a dirt road through a forest on a route that would have been approximately equivalent to King Edward Avenue. Finally it occurred to Kristabell to ask where she was being taken, “Where are we going?”

“Home,” Rowan answered in a tired but satisfied tone, then it seemed to occur to him that this was not an adequate response. “We're heading to my family's home. We were fighting north of here but everybody needs to start preparing for the winter, including our enemies. We had a major skirmish a week ago but we've forced them back into the eastern hills. It will take them time to regroup and their supplies and weapons are running low so we have a bit of time to breathe. Hopefully they will stay quiet until the spring, but for now we have a chance to go to our homes, rest, and help with the harvest.” 

Kristabell thought about her own garden back home and how the vegetables were all ready to be picked and the thought of home reminded her of her parents. She felt a pang at the thought of them worrying about her. Was time passing at the same rate here? She hoped her parents weren't worrying. Rowan seemed to sense her sudden discomfiture and said to her, “Don't worry. You'll be welcome at my family's home. They're good people. They'll make sure you're alright.” The way he said it made her trust him although she couldn't think why.

They rode in silence for what seemed about an hour before she asked, “Where is your home?”

“It's not too much further. We'll be there in time for the evening meal.”

“Do we keep riding east of here?”

“Yes, and north a little. It's by a lake. In a while, we will be able to see it when the road swings past the west end of the lake. The house is at the east end, high on the hill.”

“Deer Lake,” Kristabell said mostly to herself. 

“Yes. That's what we call it too, but we use the old words. Fiannasmere,” Rowan replied, a note of surprise in his voice.

Kristabell sat and watched the forest go by. It was beautiful lush forest. Intoxicatingly lush, with pure clean air flowing out from the shade, and the sounds of birds echoing from within. The trees were massive majestic columns. This was, she realized, old growth forest. Two hours ago, in her existence, this would have been streets, traffic, stores and houses. It almost made her cry to see the beauty of the forest and then to think of it decimated in favour of houses and concrete. As she let her eyes wander deep into the forest she saw a flicker of white.

Now, there is a big difference between what we expect to see in our lives, and what we want to see, and it took Kristabell a few strange jarring moments to let herself believe that what she was seeing deep in the forest was real, because if she let herself believe only to find herself mistaken, the disappointment might crush her. But as the flicker of white moved closer Kristabell realized that it truly was a unicorn, glistening white and silver in the dappled light. She sat bolt upright and almost overbalanced again, forcing Rowan to put a hand around her waist to keep her from losing her awkward side saddle perch in front of him. “Look!” She had to make an effort to keep her voice down. “I knew it! I knew they had to be real somewhere! I knew that it was impossible to have feelings so strong for something that was imaginary!”

The big man, Lief, looked at her and said something. “He wants to know if you have unicorns in your world,” Rowan told her.

“No,” Kristabell shook her head. “There is an old story about a flood and a man called Noah who built a ship big enough to save a male and female of all the animals in the world and in the official version there is no mention of unicorns, but in the unofficial version they tried to get the unicorns to come but the unicorns were to foolish or crazy and they drowned in the flood.”

“We have the same story,” Rowan told her, “Except in our version, it's the king of Babylon, and he sends his son out to find two unicorns and the son fails, so the daughter runs off the ship at the last possible moment just as the storm is really beginning to rage. She's gone for just a short time and comes back with two unicorns. A male and a female. And so they say we have women to thank that there are still Unicorns in the world.” 

The unicorn disappeared back into the depths of the forest and Kristabell sat quietly as they continued to ride. Her heart was filled with the deep rapture of one who's had a life’s longing fulfilled and she was beyond speech, or so she thought, but just at that moment they came to a bend in the road and rounded the western end of the lake. There, like a glowing beacon of beauty and wonder was a castle, high on the hilltop, partially surrounded by trees at the eastern end of the lake.

It was like no castle Kristabell had ever seen before. It was earthier than the pictures of medieval castles she'd seen in books, and nothing at all like Neuschwanstein. It's smooth walls reminded her of old adobe and it had pillars formed of giant cedar logs. There were several graceful turrets, two of them topped with domes like elongated onions, like the ones on Russian orthodox churches, and a high wall from which she could see armed sentinels scanning the landscape. It looked delicate somehow, and golden and ethereal. As they made there way around the lake towards the road that lead up to the gates she could make out great carved wooden doors in a graceful archway. “I can't believe how beautiful it is. I've never seen anything like it in my life!”

Rowan and Leif just smiled.

The awe Kristabell had felt since waking up to find herself in this . . . Situation . . .? Predicament . . . ? She wasn't sure what to call the curious turn her life had taken, was almost enough to push aside the awkward self-consciousness she felt at riding so close to Rowan, but she couldn't help notice that her presence didn't seem to be bothering him in the least. She guessed that he was just a gentleman and, as it would slow them down if she walked and there was a shield, a bow, a quiver of arrows and a bed roll tied to the saddle behind him, there wasn't anywhere else she could ride. The other concern that was stirring anxiously in her chest was that, despite Rowan's reassurance, she really didn't have any real idea as to what was going to happen to her once they reached the castle, but it seemed as if she was about to find out.