Trial by Fire

Lily crested the rise and met the implacable wall of the castle. Running along its side, she reached a turret that blocked any further progress along the edge and quickly realized that there was no way around the fortification. This structure was built to keep invaders out, whether they approached by land or sea.

She put her hands on the stones, feeling the lichen covering them and inhaling their flinty smell, but still not fully believing they were there. Pacing back and forth along the precarious edge, Lily kept looking over her shoulder at the unchanged shoreline. This view, the one facing out to the ocean, was exactly the view she remembered. She’d seen the same rocks and the same unmistakable shape of the shore nearly every day of her life. Then she turned back to the wall that looked like it had stood there for hundreds of years. It had no business being there.

“What the hell!” Lily shouted, hysteria threatening to take over.

She heard footsteps along the top of the wall, and clapped a hand over her mouth to stop her screams. Men’s voices drifted down to her from the thirty-foot-high barricade—hostile voices barking orders. There was nowhere to hide. Lily looked around frantically, but she knew that if she ran or stayed it would make no difference. She was trapped between a rock wall and the ocean.

A man dressed in dark clothes and holding some kind of foreign firearm aimed his weapon at Lily from over the wall. She stuck her hands in the air in surrender.

“Lady! How’d you get out there? When did you…,” the young soldier bit off his questions, as if realizing that he shouldn’t be asking them, and lowered his weapon.

An older soldier joined the young man. He stared down at Lily for a moment, his mouth agape, before finding his voice and addressing her cheerfully.

“Forgive us, Lady. Would you like to take a walk on the beach? We’ll send a detail down to you,” the older soldier said evenly.

“A walk? No, I … who are you?” Lily asked. Her voice broke, and she found herself shifting from foot to foot, trying her hardest not to cry. “I just want to go home.”

Half a dozen more men joined the two soldiers. They all stared at Lily in disbelief. The older soldier called the others to attention.

“Go down and escort the Lady of Salem back inside her Citadel,” he said crisply. The two soldiers stiffened and saluted.

“Yes, Captain Leto,” they chorused, then rushed off to obey.

Lily stared up at the men on the wall, holding her tongue. Silently, she took in their clothes, which seemed to be made of a new kind of fabric that looked a bit like leather but moved and bent with more ease. The weapons were strange to her as well. From what she could see, most of the soldiers were carrying crossbows, but not old-fashioned crossbows. These were high-tech and looked lethal. In fact, very little about this place struck Lily as medieval—somehow it seemed both modern and old at the same time.

And, judging from everyone’s deferential tone, apparently she looked like their ruler. Before she could crack that mystery, two soldiers who were hardly older than she was called to her from the beach.

“Would you like us to come up the rise and carry you down, Lady?” one of them asked, still out of breath from running to get her.

“Of course not,” Lily replied warily. “I can make it down to you just fine.”

She had no idea what was expected of her at this point, or more accurately, what was expected of this Lady of Salem they seemed to be confusing her with. Regardless, Lily didn’t want two armed soldiers carrying her anywhere. She half walked, half slid her way down to them. The two soldiers flanked her, waiting for her to take the lead.

“Which way?” she asked in as neutral a voice as she could manage.