Here’s Chapter 9 in my book, “Hero Interrupted”. In it, Megan and Juniper both meet the King of Avsar, and the Empress of Urendell — but not together. I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 9

It was also at that moment that Seth, with Juniper in tow, gained the Great Hall. It was one thing to read about such things in books, Juniper realized, but it was another entirely to be there in person, in the middle of it all. There were the servants from the kitchen, of course, but now she could see those whom they served. In a panorama before her, filling the Great Hall, were the lords and ladies, barons and baronesses, and the pageantry of the Royal Court. The King and Queen were conspicuously absent, twin thrones on a diaz at the end of the room empty, but elegantly dressed courtiers in brocaded vests, gowns of satins and fine embroidered linens and pleated sleeves made small talk in clusters. Gold banners with castles, signifying the Kingdom of Avsar, hung from the rafters and drifted slightly in an unseen breeze.

And the sound of it all added to Juniper’s first impressions. The warm murmur of cultured voices, the clatter of the carts as their accompanying servers maneuvered them deftly through the crowds from table to table, trusted cup bearers delivering goblets to table after table, a lively yet respectful tune from the court musicians gyring through the air over everyone’s heads, all created an experience one could relish through ears alone.

Seth looked at Juniper, to see if there were signs that she was losing her composure, or rejecting what she was seeing. He might as well have been waiting for a unicorn to suddenly appear in the middle of the room. Then he remembered not to expect a unicorn. Expecting unusual things to appear was a good way to make them materialize. The Alterwhere might not be what it once was, but expecting things to show up out of thin air still tended to manifest them.

Juniper was darting from one gaggle of banquet guests to another, listening in on conversations, being distracted by details in everything from the splendid array of foodstuffs, some of which she didn’t even recognize, to the finery worn by the ladies, to the splendid tapestries depicting fantastical battles with giants, dragons, armies of what looked like elvenfolk, and more. Of course there would be elves, she thought. The way this day is going, I’d have been disappointed if there weren’t.

At length, Juniper returned to Seth, who had been standing off to one side keeping a watchful eye on her.

“I see an awful lot of overdressed people here,” she remarked. “That’s a lot of upper crust. Are there supposed to be so many here at once?”

“Oh yes,” said Seth, gesturing broadly. “Dukes, duchesses and earls, princes and princesses from neighboring kingdoms, respected merchants to the crown and their wives and consorts, that sort of thing.”

Juniper followed his grand wave with her gaze. “So why are they all here?” she said, “nearly everyone has some sort of circlet or crown.” And she was right, nearly every head was decorated with shiny bejeweled hoops of gold or silver, some with points or spikes, indicating some sort of higher title.

“Remember what we were talking about earlier? Some are hoping to align themselves behind the King, seeing him as strong and resourceful. Others see him as weak and vulnerable, and are plotting to fill a power vacuum. Even if they have to instigate that power vacuum themselves. They are playing a risky game,” Seth mused.

“What do you think will happen?”

“That’s what’s bothering me. With the two of you here in the same story, I haven’t got a clue. And I always have a clue. And that’s not even counting Glenford, who shouldn’t be here at all.”

It was at that moment that the royal herald separated himself from a small group of palace household officers to whom he had been speaking in low tones, and stepped out into the center of the room.

That was the moment the court herald chose to kick things off with a fanfare and an appeal to the gathered throng: “Hear ye, hear ye, pray attend!” The murmur of the crowd faded almost at once. “Please rise,” continued the court herald, “and honor His Majesty King Ansel, Crown of Protector of the Kingdom of Avsar!” And with a flourish, he stepped aside. The lavishly decorated doors at the back of the Great Hall opened, and a line of horn-bearing heralds strode into the room in double file. They wore gold tabards bearing the Avsarean castle, and their horns bore silken banners. Sounding an elaborate fanfare, they parted, forming an aisle, their horns tilted upwards in a steepled tribute to the King, His Royal Majesty, King Ansel.

At the sound of the fanfare, everyone stopped what they were doing, and stood as he entered.

The King’s entourage preceded him into the Great Hall, dressed in their finery, with notes of red satin. The King himself was an imposing figure, trim and broad shouldered. He was resplendent in a red doublet and trousers, with a fine white linen chemise, elaborately embroidered at cuff and collar with gold filament that looked to Juniper like real metal, and wore an ornate saphron doublet.

All the finery was important for him to have, as well, for apart from his sturdy, squarish frame and the clothes he wore, he had a face like the back end of a bus. Without his regalia, and apart from his shock of wavy silver hair and neatly trimmed beard, he would have looked like any peasant farm hand. With the regalia, though, he could not be mistaken by anyone for anything other than royalty. The members of his processional were as easily identifiable. They all had that sturdy, salt of the Earth look to them, even the bookkeepers and members of the royal household. If if could be made with wood, stone and mud, labor and sweat, you could depend on an Avsarean to get it done, and they all looked the part.

The King made his way to the royal table, and stood behind his chair. The members of his royal court followed suit, arraying themselves to his right.

All remained standing, because the horns sounded again, this time in a more ethereal harmony, and the herald flung more words at the crowd to announce the arrival of her Exalted Highness, Empress Sylphia of Urendell. While the conversations in the room had largely paused out of deference to the King, they fell completely silent in response to what happened next.

The crowd parted to create an aisle from the doors in the rear all the way up to the raised dias where the thrones and the king’s tables were, as though it were a choreographed dance move. The rear doors were opened wide, and the King’s procession began.

As much as King Ansel’s entourage was impressive in manner and appointment, the entourage of Empress Sylphia struck awe in the onlookers. There were the Imperial guards and standard bearers, with their banners of shimmering green, each emblazoned with a seven pointed star. They mostly looked like they didn’t want to be there, and made a point of pushing the crowd back out of the path of the oncoming entourage.

Then came the Empress herself, and the attendants who followed her, holding her train to keep it from the floor as she walked. Beside her strode her Sorceress, Tensia. While Sylphia strode with an ethereal, regal bearing, Tensia moved more like the mystic shaman priestess she was, fluid and directed, but shrouded in a cloak of dark wraps that hid her precise movements. After that came members of Sylphia’s court, followed by their aides and attendants, followed in turn by their aides and attendants. After them came came more guardsmen with their spears, swords and wands (apparently there were wizards among their number).

The further back in the procession one looked, the less likely its members were to be able to pass as human from any closer than a few yards away. Towards the end of the queue, the individuals present seemed wildly unnatural. While most were human-sized, some were no bigger than a cat, and resembled nothing more than creatures of the forests and moors, which, in fact, they were.

The ones that resembled lizards or toads, or some curious mix of the two, wearing waistcoats but no trousers or shoes, were the gnomes. They moistly hobbled or hopped, sometimes walking on two legs, sometimes on four as it suited them, not being built for graceful motion. The fairies looked like miniature humans, properly dressed, though simply. They walked briskly to keep up, and might have passed for human except for their size. Some of them carried scrolls or ledgers, of a sort far too small to be useful to a normally sized person.

The smallest of them tended to have wings, and flew rather than walked as a matter of convenience. They darted and weaved in convoluted arcs, as though they were looking for something. One of them flew right up and hovered for a moment a few inches from Juniper’s nose.

Each possessed an otherworldly quality to them, as though they were made of legend and light, not flesh and bone. All of the fey present looked to be somewhat uncomfortable with their surroundings, and it was clear that more than a few of them fervently wished to be elsewhere.

Some of the onlookers managed to keep their composure as the spectacle of the Empress’s entourage made its way slowly along the carpeted aisle toward the diaz and its two thrones, but most of them suffered the indignity of abnormally widened eyes, pale countenance, open-mouthed surprise, or some combination of these.

The mere presence of Megan and Juniper in the room was causing a ripple effect through the Fae, who were particularly susceptible to the effects of proximity to the two women. Many of them were having moments of self-awareness for the first time in their existence. They all knew things relative to who they were in the Alterwhere’s story lines for them, but for the first time they knew that they knew, and the revelation was, for each of them, quite profound.

The most singular problem for the onlookers was that to them, both Megan and Juniper were actually the same person. They weren’t identical twins, but one person whom one instinctively knew was named Celestia without being told, and who apparently had the uncanny ability to teleport from one part of the room to another when no one was looking. Those who had seen both women were readily discernible from those that hadn’t, because the ones that had were wearing a particularly boggled expression.

Two of the Fae were having an especially bad time with it. They were an odd pair of footmen in the Queen’s tertiary ranks, just behind a gaggle of winged fairies. One was a rather aloof looking lizard fellow named Basker, who walked upright on two legs and sported a blue waistcoat that clashed with his brown, mottled skin, and a rather incongruous powdered wig which he was continuously adjusting because it was constantly threatening to slip off his smoothly scaled head. The tip of his forked tongue occasionally slipped from his mouth to taste the air. He was very conscious of this, and tried not to do it in polite company if he could help it.

The other was Dartmouth. He was rather jarring in appearance, a plump gnome-like toad with moist mottled green skin and protruding golden eyes, and wore a similar but far less well-tailored waistcoat. He stood on two legs when he could, but preferred to spend more time on four when he wasn’t actually walking. Both carried a small handful of scrolls in an attempt to look more important than they actually were.

And both footmen were doing their best to disguise their discomfiture at Juniper/Megan’s seemingly supernatural ability to be in two places at once.

“How rude,” commented Basker in a thin, reedy voice as he eyed some of the more slack-jawed onlookers. “Using magick just to show off like that.”

Dartmouth looked up at Basker and swallowed nervously, making a noise like guglum as he did so. The noise appeared to surprise him, as he’d never been self-aware when he’d made the noise before, and had never actually heard it himself until now. Basker stared at him. “Sorry,” croaked Dartmouth, and surprised himself once again.

“Dartmouth,” said Basker in a stage whisper. “Who is that human girl? No don’t look around – stop it, you’re being conspicuous, look to my left. No, wait, to my right.” He nodded first toward Seth and Juniper, then to Megan. “They clearly don’t belong here, and the girl keeps somehow being across the room without crossing the space in between.”

Dartmouth looked to his right at what seemed to him to be Celestia, then to his left at Celestia again, and registered his surprise with a little jump and a wet squeak. Then he looked right again, and there was Celestia again. Again, he jumped. And squeaked.

“The girl looks familiar somehow,” Basker continued, clearly rattled but not quite as discombobulated as Dartmouth was. “I can’t quite place her. What are they doing here, I wonder? I wonder, do they suspect what may come?”

Dartmouth looked, and clumsily shrugged, and blinked, his large wet eyes receding into his head as his eyelids wiped over them. To him, it seemed that Basker was collected and comfortable not only with the both of them being newly self-aware, but had opinions on what was going on around them. Dartmouth, on the other hand, was still having trouble processing the fact that he was aware of the feel of the carpet on the soles of his bare flippers, and that if he closed his eyes he could hear the sound of his own breathing.

As for the bilocating Celestia, and the curious old man with the bowler hat, Dartmouth had never seen anyone who looked anything either of them. He turned away and blinked again in introspection when he realized that he had never paused in introspection before that he was aware of. It was a recursive thought, and maddening. He rolled the new word “recursive” around in his brain.

Basker and Dartmouth’s attempts at being subtle were anything but as they poked one another and whispered back and forth, and so of course they caught Seth’s eye. The two Fae footmen suddenly realized that Seth had seen them watching, and they made a show of ignoring him and turning their attentions back to Empress Sylphia and King Ansel.

“I’ll be very glad to get back to Urendell when we are done here,” Basker whispered. “We have far too much to do to stay here for long. All this inter-kingdom marriage talk is just for show anyway. A Plainfolk and a Fae – the very idea!”

Dartmouth flinched a bit. “Not out loud,” he hissed, and with a low guglum noise that resonated deep in his throat, he blinked again, this time wiping his left eye with the tip of his tongue.

“Must you do that in public? Filthy habit!”

Instead of replying, Dartmouth pointed at Seth and Juniper, and when he was sure he had Basker’s attention, pointed in turn at Megan. “Something is amiss. Some people are here who should not be,” he replied. “The great plan is at risk. And there – two of them look identical. I have never seen two Plainfolk that looked identical before.”

“Identical?” Basker squinted, the better to compare the two young women in the dim light. “You’re right. Something is definitely amiss here,” he remarked. “The Sorceress will want to know about it.”

“I can see them both clearly from here,” said Dartmouth. “They must’nt get too close to the Empress.”

As they watched, Seth strode purposefully toward the remarkable assemblage of royalty in the front of the room, as the royal guests began to seat themselves. Juniper was close behind.

“Follow me, and stay close,” said Seth in a stage whisper.

“Where?” Juniper whispered back. “Oh, it’s Megan, I see her! What’s she doing?”

“This!” cried Glenford, who had appeared at Juniper’s elbow seemingly from nowhere. “This this this!”

Juniper whirled, and as she did so, the locket around her neck swung out like a pendulum – straight into Glenford’s waiting hand. He gave it a sharp yank, and the chain it was on snapped, yielding both amulet and chain. He darted off. “I’ll give it back later, I promise!” he shouted over his shoulder.

“Stop him,” Juniper shouted at the crowd around her. “Stop him, m, he stole my necklace!” But the courtesans afforded her perhaps a glance here or there, and otherwise did nothing. As Juniper turned to chase Glenford, Seth grabbed her by the sleeve.

“Now isn’t the time,” he admonished over her protests. “We’ll catch him later. There’s nowhere he can go where I can’t find him.” He gestured toward the front of the room. “I think something essentially important is about to happen.”

“But..!”

Seth put one hand to each side of Juniper’s head and forcibly turned it in the direction he wanted her to look.

“Isn’t that you up there talking to the royals?”

And she looked.

And it was.

-~-

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