The stars sparkled overhead, like so many glittering diamonds scattered on an indigo cloth. They looked so close, I wanted to reach up and touch them, to let their cold, brilliant light cleanse me of all impurities.
I sat up and spat out the bit of grass, half a daisy, and a very surprised potato bug. I looked around. Although the moon was high in the sky, a quarter moon that was as bright as a full moon, closer to earth a reddish haze hung over the land, like smoke from an odd sort of fire.
Directly in front of me were the three shapes of my two mothers and Mrs. Vanilla, the last of whom was being supported by the former.
“You guys are OK?” I asked, getting up. “I guess I owe Mrs. Vanilla an apol—”
The words dried up on my tongue as Mom Two shifted, allowing me to see beyond her.
A semicircle of men in plate-and-mail armor stood looking at us, each of them holding a drawn sword.
“Oh, hell,” I said on an exhale of breath.
“Anwyn, not hell, I think,” Mom Two corrected.
As she spoke, the ranks of men swept aside like a human parting of the Red Sea. Through the opening strode a woman, tall, pale, and slender. She was clad in a black leather bodysuit and had daggers strapped to either hip. Her eyes were a dark shade of green, and she had long black hair with green extensions that matched her eyes.
She looked like she belonged on the set of a martial arts movie. “Who are you?” she demanded as she approached, making an impatient gesture toward us.
I pushed my way in front of my mothers. I wasn’t abnormally courageous, but I had no intention of letting someone who looked like she could kick Jackie Chan’s ass get pushy with my moms.
“My name is Gwen. These are my mothers. The old woman is Mrs. Vanilla. Who are you?”
“Holly,” she snapped, her gaze raking us all over for the count of three. She turned, and with an imperious wave of her hand at the nearest guy in armor, added, “Arrest them. They’re spies.”
“What?” I shrieked as the men moved in. “Wait, we’re not spies! This is Anwyn, right? The afterlife? The happy bunnies and sheep and lovely rolling green hills place?”
Two men grabbed each of my arms and more or less frog-marched me toward an array of sharp black silhouettes. I looked over my shoulder to see my mothers being escorted as well, but they didn’t appear to be in distress.
“You all right?” I asked my mother, who was immediately behind me.
“Of course. You were the only one who fell coming through the entrance.”
“No talking,” the man on my left arm said, his voice gruff, if muffled, behind his steel helmet.
I bit back the words I wanted to say to him, instead focusing my attention on where we were being led. The black shapes resolved themselves into tents, of all things. Small fires dotted what could only be called an encampment, with at least a hundred (and probably more) tents of differing sizes arranged in orderly concentric rings, with larger tents in the center and the smallest on the outer ring. There were a number of dogs roaming around, all of which appeared to be of the same breed: that of a medium-sized hound that looked like a cross between a beagle and a greyhound.
A few men and women were present as we moved through the camp, some of them wearing armor like the guards, others in what I thought of as Renaissance Faire clothing—lots of leather jerkins, cotton tunics, and leggings that were bound by thin leather cords. It had the feel of a medieval military camp, which just confused the dickens out of me.
“What is a military camp, a medieval military camp, doing in the middle of Anwyn?” I asked loudly so my mothers could hear.
“Anwyn is the place of legends. Why shouldn’t there be a medieval army here?” I heard Mom Two say before she was told to be quiet. My own guards squeezed my arms in warning as we continued to trek through the tents. A small army of dogs fell into place at our heels.
In the center of the camp was a massive tent, at least three times the size of the next-largest one and flying a couple of fancy banners. I couldn’t make out what was on the banners when we were marched past the big tent, but it definitely looked like the prime accommodation.
It was not, needless to say, our destination. The guards—they couldn’t be anything but soldiers, given the armor and the way they obeyed the woman named Holly—stopped in front of a silver tent.
My hopes of a structure from which we could make an easy escape were dashed when the tent flap was pulled aside to reveal two tall iron-barred cages. They weren’t small—the two of them filled the entire tent—but they were very much a prison.
“Right. I am not going in that,” I said as one of my guards released my arm in order to open the door to one of the cages. It was about seven feet tall, and probably a good twenty feet wide, containing what looked like a couple of camping beds, two wooden chairs, and a small table. “I am not a spy, no matter what stabby girl says. I refuse to be caged like an animal.”
“Enter,” the guard said, flipping up his visor to give me a good glare.
“Like hell I will.”
He made like he was going to pull me into the cage, but I didn’t go through three years of self-defense classes to put up with being stuffed into a box. I dug my feet in, shifted my weight, and flipped him over my hip, heavy armor and all. He hit the ground with a loud crash and a grinding of metal, the dog nearest him managing to scramble out of the way just in time, but before the other man could so much as shout, I was on my nearest mother’s guard, trying to find a point of vulnerability that I could exploit.
Here’s the thing about armor—face on, there’s not a lot there to exploit. With little choice, I did what I could to disable him before intending to move on to the next mother-guarding man.
“This is intolerable!” I yelled as the door-holding guard ran over to pluck me off Mom’s guard, whom I was beating on the head with his own helm. A couple of dogs leaped about excitedly while I was hauled off the man, who now had a cut over one eye that ran in gruesome glory down his face. I tripped over another dog, apologizing as I did so. “Sorry, doggy, but this mean guard jerked me and made me step on you. Look, buster, I don’t hold with people abusing animals, so stop dragging me over the top of these dogs. Boy, there are a lot of them, aren’t there?”
I didn’t have time to continue, since my two guards threw me bodily into one of the cages, slamming the door behind me. I heard a key turn in the lock as I picked myself up and ran to the steel-barred door in an attempt to wrench it open.
Two dogs sat outside the door, panting and clearly hoping I would continue the fun romping game.
“Gwenny, dear, are you hurt?” my mother asked as she, Mom Two, and Mrs. Vanilla were placed in the matching cage. The guards didn’t manhandle them, I was relieved to note. Although there was a space of about six feet between our cages, I was comforted by the fact that they were nearby, and as safe as an unjustly incarcerated person finding herself in the Welsh afterlife could be.
“No. Just very, very pissed. Hey, you, plate boy. My mothers are old, and Mrs. Vanilla is really elderly. Give them some food and water and blankets and stuff.”
The guard said nothing, just lit a torch inside the entrance, and left, letting the tent flap drop as he went.
“Bastard,” I muttered, and began to prowl the cage to look for weakness. The dogs accompanied me. “Sorry, guys. I’m not going to play right now. Maybe later, OK?”
Oddly enough, the dogs seemed to understand, because they both turned and wandered out of the tent, leaving us alone. A few minutes later, another guard appeared, this one minus his helmet but with his arms full of blankets, with two carefully balanced jugs on top. A second guard carried a couple of long flat metal platters bearing bread, cheese, and what looked to be some sort of smoked meat.