POV: john-west
Summary
John reads on horseback on the road toward Wellbury — awkwardly at first, since the recovered handbook is loose-leaf and he keeps dropping pages, but he eventually settles into a rhythm. Ealstan watches with diminishing fear and growing puzzlement; the aelv-act is, if nothing else, entertaining. John is hunting an answer to a question that increasingly bothers him: where in history is he? Nothing he has seen looks like the medieval Britain of his movie memories — no castles, no knights, no jesters, no meat pies. Ealstan has never even heard of a fort built entirely from stone, and treats John's descriptions of castles as fantasy. Sefawynn, from ahead, allows that she has heard of such places in stories of the Black Bear's lands; the name silences Ealstan.
Sefawynn pushes for more speed. Ealstan resists — the horses can't sustain it, and the kidnappers will have stopped to sleep, which means Stenford's party can beat them to Wellbury and lay a trap with the reeve. John has to break that hope: Ulric and Quinn don't need sleep, and depending on what they brought through, their horses won't either. He covers the truth with aelv-language about an Amulet of Vigor and his own weekly trance "to be renewed by the beauty of my homeland," which Ealstan takes gravely. Sefawynn drops back beside him and whispers her own theory — root chicory — and asks why he believes the kidnappers' horses aren't mortal. He gives her his best honest non-answer: it's a secret of the runians, and he isn't trying to grift her. She looks bone-tired but pushes on, and he promises he will get Wyrm back.
He digs through the pages. He keeps drifting off into recovered memory — childhood in Tacoma, the police academy in his mid-twenties, gaps still missing on either side — and into thoughts of Jen, who died on a trip to Europe. Her family never liked him. He found out by text. There was no funeral. She had always wanted to travel to one of these dimensions; he is, in part, here for her. He cannot reconcile whether he came on operation or in homage, and decides it must be both.
The handbook finally pays out. A page on "Wizard Wildcard" dimensions walks the reader through identification flags. No castles, knights, or banners — not High Middle Ages. No Caesar, no red-cloaked soldiers — not Roman. No blue face paint, but the local swords look like iron — probably not Celtic. Vikings-with-renamed-gods? He asks Sefawynn to name the gods her people worship, and she does: Woden, who claims all words and arranged all worlds. Ealstan adds Logna mother of monsters, Tiw the warrior, Thunor son of Woden, and Friag wife of Woden — the first to create writing, who died in the war against the Black Bear, after which Woden forbade writing. John recognises the names through the spelling drift. Anglo-Saxon dimension. He has lost page 186 but the surviving fragments confirm it: warlike Germanic settlers, tribal names like Aengli and Seaxe, the Waelish called *waelisc* meaning foreigner. Cross-referencing with what he knows of the Norman invasion in his own world, he places himself between AD 500 and 1066.
He spends the next stretch trying to think of anything modern he could actually do. Gunpowder, electricity, antibiotics — he understands none of them in detail. His real education was learning *how* to learn, plus the ability to look anything up; without internet, his vaunted modernity is mostly useless. Pulleys, shield walls, waterwheels — Ealstan has them all and laughs at the questions. John doodles in the margin of the Anglo-Saxon page to keep his hands busy.
Sefawynn, riding beside him again, suddenly demands to know what he's done. He looks down and sees what he's drawn beside Sefawynn's name: a quick line portrait of her face, with perspective, crosshatched shading, the suggestion of bone and muscle under skin — the entire post-Renaissance vocabulary that this culture has never been shown. Hot damn. His expensive modern education, it turns out, wasn't entirely useless after all.