Previous: Searching for Answers

They spent hours looking at the papers before they had to go back to their childhoods, back to chores and schoolwork and things that, some days, seemed downright constraining.

Barbara’s mother, happy she was “taking some initiative” helped her put together a flyer for babysitting, and helped her post it at the Library – the proper downtown one, which had never been abandoned because, bright and shiny and brand-new, it didn’t tend to lose kids in its recesses.  It had no portals to other worlds.  Barbara had looked.

With three others posted  – grocery store, post office, and their church – Barbara returned home to some math homework that was only exciting if she thought about it in terms of national economies and some literature homework that was so stultifying she added in a 2-page book review of The Wealth of Nations.  Surely that counted as literature, didn’t it?

They were going to find another portal.  Part of the problem was: would she go blind with boredom by then?

She looked up Millie Dioli in the phone book, but they had said they’d do that together.  They did almost everything together, on this side. Even over there, even back – well, where they belonged – they tended to stick near to each other.  You didn’t want to be left behind; you didn’t want to lose anyone.

She ended up going through her parents’ old yearbooks and scrapbooks instead, taking notes in her class notebook about people she’d never seen, people who vanished between years.  If her parents had been paying attention, she supposed it would have seemed suspicious.

Then again, for all her mother’s involvement lately  – mostly when the school called, Barbara thought – she had gotten away with far more than the rest of her little team for a reason.

She dreamed of Ombrion that night, being kicked out over and over again.  She dreamed if adulthood, of being a Queen, and the moment Verdana had kissed her forehead, kissed all those foreheads, and told them “forget, until the time you need to remember again.”

They had never forgotten.  They had never told Verdana, either, in case () found another way that actually worked.

She dreamed — not for the first time, although when she had been younger, it had been a nightmare — of the portal in the library opening into a dark world, a world that expected them to be young and, more importantly (because in some sense, they still-and-again were young) innocent and inexperienced.  She dreamed of taking up a proper sword again.  She dreamed of battle.

She woke smiling, and put on her school clothes as if she was preparing for a meeting with the Ambassador from Fregoran.

It wasn’t her friends who noticed the change in her demeanor first; it was Thomas Zenbar, a boy who she might have been interested in, if she didn’t have the sense that he was young enough to be her son, instead of four months older than her.

“Barbie!  Did you, um, do something different?  Something new?”

“No,” Ralph muttered, “she did something old.  Hale and well-met, Your Brightness.”

“Hale and well-met, Your Eloquence,” she murmured back to him.  To Thomas, she simply said, “I’m having a good day.”

“So why are you having a good day?” Clarence breathed in her ear.  Any closer, and there would be teachers separating them.

“I had that old dream again.  I think… I think we’re going places.”

First, of course, they had to go to classes.  They had to sit through lessons, some of which seemed painfully unimportant and some of which they had already been taught, in some cases over and over again (Verdana knew their natures, but many advisors and scholars and aides over the years had not truly understood).  They had to re-learn skills their bodies did not remember, even if their minds did.

If Barbara went into the dark world that expected them to be victims, she wanted her still-too-young body to be capable of surprising them as much as her Warrior Queen mind might be able of.

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