De Vries was tall and skinny, bald on top but with the thick, cultivated mustache of a Victorian gentleman. He was wearing a burgundy smoking jacket, the velvet a little worn around the cuffs. Elsa thought of him as tragically old, though there weren’t any Veldanese older than about forty years, so she supposed she didn’t have much basis for comparison. In any case, he had laugh wrinkles around the eyes and frown lines between his brows, and at the moment the latter were the more prominent.
“Elsa, dear, what are you doing here? Where’s Jumi?” he said in Dutch, adjusting his wire-frame spectacles as if she might be some sort of illusion.
“A lot has happened. Let me in, it will take some time to explain,” Elsa said, smoothly switching to Dutch.
One of the characteristics scribed into the Veldana worldbook gave Veldanese the ability to speak a new language within minutes of hearing it—no fuss over grammar, no laboring to memorize vocabulary. Though Elsa had known de Vries since she was a baby, so Dutch felt almost as natural to her as Veldanese.
“Of course, of course,” de Vries said, holding the door open wide and running his other hand over his hairless pate.
De Vries reached to unburden her, but Elsa held on to the books and pushed past him up the stairs to his second-floor flat. Out of politeness, she waited at the top for de Vries to let them both in.
“So?” de Vries said as he closed the door behind them. “Are you going to tell me why you’re soot-stained and smelling of smoke?”
Briefly, Elsa wondered how de Vries could even tell, considering that both he and his sitting room smelled strongly of pipe tobacco. She dropped the stack of worldbooks on a credenza beside the door and said, “Montaigne was killed. The library was in flames when I came through from Veldana. I saved what I could.”
De Vries swore a long chain of words he really oughtn’t say in front of a lady. He had been close friends with Montaigne—how that had worked, given the uneasy truce between Montaigne and Jumi, Elsa couldn’t guess—and the loss of Montaigne’s library was a terrible waste by anyone’s standards.
“De Vries!” she said, needing him to focus. “That isn’t all. I don’t have the Veldana worldbook. Jumi is the only one who can open the chamber where it’s kept. Veldana was still in the house when it burned.”
“Oh, Elsa. That doesn’t mean…,” de Vries began, awkward in his gentleness. “I don’t know much about the design of her wall safe, but the worldbook may very well have survived the fire precisely because it was locked inside.”
“Perhaps. But if the worldbook’s damaged, I can’t risk going back there. Not ever.” Elsa ground her teeth together, determined not to let him see the anxiety that burned like acid behind her breastbone. A damaged worldbook meant a damaged world, and without its core properties intact—properties like breathable air and solid ground—she’d be opening a portal to her own unpleasant demise. Not to mention that there’d be no one left alive to return to.
He put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “If Veldana is intact, your mother will realize you’re missing and port here to look for you. Don’t worry, you won’t be stuck with me for long.”
“No, I’m afraid she won’t.” The words caught in her smoke-roughened throat, and Elsa had to force them out. “She’s gone, de Vries. There was a kind of smoke that makes you sleep, and when I woke up, she was missing. Taken.”
“Gone,” he repeated, and sat down suddenly on a footstool, the news landing like a blow. “Jumi is in the hands of God knows who?”
“Which means there’s no one left in Veldana who knows how to operate a portal device. The link between our worlds is severed, if Veldana still exists at all.”
“It means more than that,” de Vries said, his lips pressed together in a grim line. “A talented scriptologist like Jumi being abducted … it could mean someone is making a play for power. But who? The French government?”
Elsa blinked, unfazed by his concerns. “I don’t particularly care for your Earth politics. What I need is to find a way to ascertain the status of Veldana.” Quietly, she added, “And a way to find my mother.”
He nodded. “We can go to the house in the morning. If Veldana was destroyed, we may be able to establish it from the wreckage. And either way, we should look for clues while the scene is still fresh. Whoever took Jumi must have come through the portal from Veldana at Montaigne’s house, and they may have left something behind in their haste.”
A seed of shame planted itself in Elsa’s chest. Montaigne’s house was the only link she had to her mother’s abductors, and she’d run away from it like a scared little girl, naively hoping de Vries could make everything all right. “We should go back now…,” she said, reaching for the doorbook.
He raised his eyebrows. “And do what, precisely? Stand in the street all night while the fire brigade stops the fire from spreading? Dig through the ashes in the dark? No, we’ll get some sleep and go in the morning. Then, at least the ashes will be cold.”
“The ashes may be cold, but the trail will be, too,” Elsa said, folding her arms.
“I imagine that’s why they killed Montaigne and set the house ablaze,” he said quietly. “To make it impossible for anyone to learn who had been there.”
“So you’re saying it’s hopeless?”
“I’m saying this isn’t the sort of problem we’re likely to solve before supper. Which I’d guess you could do with some of, after your ordeal.”
Elsa wanted to snap a denial at him, but in truth she was famished. Since breakfast, she’d had nothing but a couple of wild plums found during her survey work. She sighed, relenting. “I’ll go try to find something clean to change into.”
In de Vries’s guest room, Elsa unbuckled her belt and shed her soot-stained Veldanese apron and dress, then filled the washbasin and cleaned herself up as best she could. Only then did she discover that both of her knees were quite impressively bruised from the spill she’d taken on the slate floor of the cottage. There hadn’t been time to notice the pain.
Leaving in such a rush, she also hadn’t spared a moment to let anyone know what was happening. Assuming Veldana still existed, did everyone back home think she and Jumi had abandoned them? Elsa couldn’t claim to be friends with Revan anymore, but she found she didn’t like the thought of him wondering why she’d vanished.
Of course, he might not be wondering anything anymore. He might never again have the chance to feel anger or hurt or any other emotion. Revan, and everyone else in Veldana, might be dead. The thought made Elsa’s chest so tight she could barely breathe, and she had to splash water on her face again to dispel the panic. She did her best to push the idea out of her mind.
In the wardrobe hung a couple of her mother’s spare dresses—French fashions with high collars and puffed sleeves, ridiculously impractical compared with simple Veldanese garb. She’d worn them whenever she came to visit. Elsa leaned close to take one of the dresses off its hanger, but froze when a familiar smell reached her nose: lemon verbena, Jumi’s favorite scent, still lingering in the cloth. Suddenly, she wanted her mother with the fervency of a small child lost in the woods, her eyes stinging with the start of tears. The weight of everything that had happened, losing Jumi and Veldana in quick succession, felt like it was crushing her. She bit down on her lip hard, and swore to herself she would not cry.