Chapter One
POV: the-stranger
Summary
The stranger snaps awake on his feet with his fists already up, adrenaline hammering, certain for a second that he is mid-fight — and finds himself alone in a sunny, furrowed grain field with the trees of a small forest at one edge. There is no fight. There is only the field, a noisy bird, and a charred circle perhaps ten feet across burned into the young grain around him. Inside the ring the plants are scorched to ash; directly under his boots they are not. When he steps off the spot he sees, stenciled in unburned green, the perfect silhouette of his own body.
He searches his memory and finds nothing: no name, no history, no idea how he got here. The only thing he can retrieve is a faint, baseless dislike of swimming. He inventories what he has instead. He is male, ordinarily built, in laced boots, a long shirt, a brown tunic and a bright cloak — and, beneath the tunic, a pair of blue jeans, an incongruity that briefly persuades him he must be a cosplayer who blew himself up at a Renaissance faire. His pockets are empty except for a ballpoint pen. There is no camera, no phone, no keys, no pile of belongings — nothing that fits the photoshoot theory.
A fluttering scrap of paper between two stalks catches his eye. He retrieves a singed page reading "The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England / Fourth Edition / By Cecil G. Bagsworth III," and immediately downgrades his theory: this is not a costume hobby, it is some kind of themed attraction. A second, more badly burned page yields two readable fragments. One discusses an arrival process that can be traumatic and a recommended recuperation location chosen as part of one's package, and suggests the reader use a notation page at the back of the book to jog loose other details about their own life. The other is marketing copy contrasting premium dimensional packages — servants, a luxury manor, medical staff — with the leaner, more self-reliant Frugal Wizard option. From these fragments the stranger gathers that he bought some kind of bodily travel package, that the trip was hard on the mind, and — in a flicker of insight that surfaces and is gone — that he had wanted to come here. None of which explains why his promised recuperation site turned out to be a smoldering field.
Voices on the road interrupt him. His body chooses cover before his head does: he is into the trees, back to a trunk, breath quiet, hand reflexively going to a sidearm that is not there, before he has consciously decided to hide. The reflexes alarm him almost as much as the amnesia does. He stays put and listens. Three locals arrive at the burn-circle and discuss it in perfect, modern-sounding English with a faintly European accent — speculating about a landswight, then about Logna's flames, then about a man burned alive by fire from heaven. The stronger voice — Ealstan — rules out a wight and gives orders: lay out sacrifices that night, and send a boy to chase down Hild, a skop who had departed the village earlier, in case they need a binding, or worse, a loosening.
When the trio retreats toward the cluster of thatched buildings on the horizon, the stranger peeks. Two men and a woman in plain earth-toned tunics and loose trousers — not the hose he half-remembers from a museum exhibit — with Ealstan distinguished by a vibrantly orange cloak too bright to feel period-accurate. He notices a fourth person hurrying up to them carrying a sheaf of burned paper: most of the handbook's pages have evidently blown toward the village, and someone has been collecting them. The villagers do not keep up any Renaissance-faire affectation now that they think themselves unobserved, and the question of whether this is a theme park starts to slide. Whatever it is, every page of the book that might explain it is being carried out of his reach. He accepts the new objective: he is going to need those pages back.