An Accident of Stars Read Free Page B

“Just call me Gwen.”
    â€œAll right. Are we, um…?” She nodded her head at the door. “Are we going outside?”
    â€œEventually, yes. Not yet.”
    â€œOK,” said Saffron, strangely relieved to hear it. Swallowing, she put down her bag and wondered what to say. “So, ah. You come here often?”
    Gwen raised an eyebrow, lips quirking in reluctant humour. Saffron mentally replayed the question, recognised its resemblance to a bad pick-up line, and blushed to the roots of her hair. “I didn’t mean it like that!”
    â€œI’m flattered, really.”
    â€œThat’s not what…” She broke off, feeling strangely lightheaded, and looked at the room again. The floor was made from the same stone as the walls, the uneven surface covered in dirt, dust, straw. There were some empty sacks in a corner, a broken crate in another. It was all so achingly mundane, it made no sense at all that she’d come here by magic. Maybe she’d been drugged instead, knocked out and put in a van and driven away, and the hole in the world was just some hallucinatory way of dealing with a traumatic situation. “Go on,” Gwen said, suddenly. “Get it out of your system. Tell me what you’re trying to convince yourself actually happened, and see if you can still put faith in it once you’ve said it out loud.”
    â€œI’m not trying–”
    â€œOf course you aren’t.” Her mouth was hard, but her eyes were soft. “Oh, child. You don’t know what you’ve done.”
    â€œIt’s just a room,” said Saffron, mouth dry. A shining rip in the world. “We could be anywhere. We could’ve… I could be hallucinating the rest.”
    â€œCould you?”
    Saffron didn’t answer. She scuffed her shoe on the ordinary dirt of the ordinary floor, feeling the exact same mix of fear and exhilaration as when she’d first cut class to hide on the library roof, as though her understanding of rules and limits had quietly rearranged itself.
    A tramp of footsteps, coming from outside. Gwen froze, and Saffron inexplicably froze with her.
    Someone banged on the door.
    It wasn’t knocking; more like a solid thump. The handle gave an abortive turn. The door rattled in its frame, unyielding, and whoever was trying to get in – a man, by the sound of it – called out in an unfamiliar language. Faintly, Saffron heard two more people respond, another man and a woman. The door shook again, harder than before, as though someone were kicking it. A woman’s laughter followed, more words were exchanged, and then they retreated, the unintelligible conversation growing faint with distance.
    Saffron let out a breath she didn’t remember holding. There were plenty of languages she’d never heard before, and whose phonetics she was therefore unlikely to recognise. For all she knew, they might be in the Ukraine, or Scandinavia, or Timbuktu. But just at that moment, with the sight of a pink-tinged portal seared into her memory, she doubted it.
    â€œ Arakoi , most likely , ” Gwen said, jolting her back to the present. Her voice was even, but the tightness of her shoulders said the abortive visit had rattled her. “Vex Leoden’s private forces. They’ve taken to patrolling outside the city walls since he came to power. Rumour has it, he’s started actively looking for temple castoffs and runaways to train as soldiers – – anyone happy to use magic without conscience.”
    â€œProve it,” Saffron said.
    â€œProve that magic exists?”
    â€œProve that we’re really in a, a–” god, it sounded so stupid , “– another world , and not some random cupboard.”
    â€œOpen the door, you mean? Let us out?”
    â€œJust so.”
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBecause it’s locked from the outside.”
    â€œHow