Chapter 3: The Examination
The walk to the manor house was a silent, suffocating procession. Master Rylan rode ahead, a dark silhouette against the fading afternoon light. Agnes walked with a stiff-backed dignity that made Ellie want to cry. May’s hand, hidden in the folds of her skirt, trembled against Ellie’s.
The building was not a castle, but a fortified manor of grim gray stone. It smelled of damp and dog and something else, a cloying incense that couldn't mask a deeper, fouler odor. They were not taken to a grand hall, but down a narrow corridor to a heavy oak door. Rylan pushed it open without knocking.
The Inquisitor’s chamber was a contradiction. A fire crackled in a large hearth, yet the room held a chill that seeped from the stone itself. Tapestries depicting pious scenes covered the walls, but their colors were muted, the threads fraying. The air was thick with the smoke of expensive herbs—sage, myrrh—layered over the stale scent of old fear. A large, plain table dominated the space, lit by a single beeswax candle that guttered in a draft.
Behind the table sat the Lady Inquisitor.
She was younger than Ellie expected, perhaps in her forties, with a face that might have been handsome were it not so utterly still. Her hair was a severe, dark brown under a simple linen wimple. Her hands, resting on the table, were clean, the nails perfectly shaped. She wore a dark dress of fine wool, unadorned. It was her eyes that rooted Ellie to the spot. They were a pale, watery blue, and they moved over the three of them with the dispassionate interest of a scholar examining beetles pinned to a board.
“Leave us, Master Rylan,” she said. Her voice was soft, cultured, and utterly devoid of warmth.
Rylan’s jaw tightened, but he bowed and left, pulling the door shut with a definitive thud. The sound echoed in the quiet room.
The Inquisitor let the silence stretch. She looked at Agnes, then at each girl in turn. Ellie fought the urge to fidget, to adjust her coif, to wipe her dirty hands on her dress. She remembered Agnes’s warning: Keep your eyes lowered. She stared at the flagstones, seeing the ghost of her modern sneakers superimposed on the worn medieval leather.
“You are Agnes, the herb-wife from the bogside hut,” the Inquisitor stated. It wasn’t a question.
“I am, my lady.”
“And these are your cousin’s daughters. El and Mara. From the North Downs.” She repeated the names as if tasting them, finding the flavor unsatisfactory. “A long journey. Tell me of your family there. What village?”
Agnes began a rehearsed tale of a burned steading, of fever taking their parents. Her voice was steady, but Ellie heard the strain beneath it.
The Inquisitor listened, her expression unchanging. When Agnes finished, the woman rose from her chair. She moved around the table with a quiet, predatory grace. She stopped first before May, who was doing an impressive statue impression.
“Look at me, child.”
May’s dark eyes lifted, wide with a fear she couldn’t fully mask.
The Inquisitor’s gaze was clinical. She reached out, not touching, but tracing a line in the air an inch from May’s face. “Your features are… unusual. Not of the North Downs. Nor of anywhere in this kingdom, I would wager.” She turned to Ellie. “You as well. The hair. The shape of the eyes.” She leaned closer to Ellie, and Ellie caught a scent of lavender and cold stone. “You have been working hard. Your hands are convincing. Your skin is weathered. Agnes has been thorough.”
A flicker of hope, fragile and stupid, sparked in Ellie’s chest.
The Inquisitor’s pale eyes dropped to Ellie’s exposed forearm, then to the sliver of calf above her muddy shoe. Her head tilted. “But she could not change everything.” Her hand darted out, too fast, and pushed back the coarse sleeve of Ellie’s dress, gripping her wrist. Her fingers were surprisingly strong. “See? Smooth. As a babe’s. No hair.” She released Ellie and turned to Agnes, her voice dropping to a conversational murmur that was more terrifying than a shout. “Women of the North Downs, women who work the land, do not have arms and legs as smooth as polished marble. It is… unnatural.”
Agnes’s breath hitched. “They are young, my lady, they—”
“Silence.” The word was a slap. The Inquisitor returned to her seat, steepling her pristine fingers. “I am not a fool, herb-wife. I have questioned followers of the old ways before. I have seen strange markings, heard whispered invocations. But this…” Her watery gaze swept over them again. “This is different. They are not your apprentices. They are something else. And you will tell me what they are, and where they truly came from.”
“I have told you,” Agnes insisted, a desperate edge in her voice.
The Inquisitor sighed, a sound of profound boredom. “Very well.” She leaned forward, the candlelight carving deep shadows into her face. “Let us speak plainly. If you persist in this fiction, I will have you taken to the dungeon. It is unpleasant, but you are a strong woman. You might survive it.” She paused, letting that hang. Then she shifted her gaze to Ellie and May. “These two, however… I will give them to Master Rylan and his men. They have been on the road a long time. They have… appetites. The girls will not see daylight again. When the men are done, what remains will be buried in the midden heap. No one will question it. Two strange, rootless girls who disappeared.” She blinked slowly. “Now. The truth.”
The threat didn’t feel like a dramatic pronouncement. It felt like a weather report. Matter-of-fact. Inevitable. The casual horror of it stole the air from the room. Ellie’s vision swam. She saw May’s knees buckle slightly, then lock.
Agnes stared at the Inquisitor, her weathered face collapsing inwards. The defiance drained from her, leaving only a raw, terrible defeat. She looked at the girls, her eyes swimming with an apology so deep it was a physical pain. She had tried. The bog, the scrubbing, the work—it had all been for nothing. They had been preserved, as the bog preserves, but now they were to be consumed.
The Inquisitor watched this silent communication, a faint, cruel curiosity on her lips.
Agnes opened her mouth. A dry, rasping sound came out. She closed her eyes, gathering the shattered pieces of her resolve. When she spoke, her voice was a broken thing.
“They are not of this world.”
The words hung in the herb-scented air, impossible and undeniable.
The Inquisitor did not laugh. She did not scoff. She leaned forward, the candle flame reflecting twin points of light in her pale eyes. “Explain.”
Agnes swallowed, her throat working. “They came from the air. From a… a door of light, in the circle of stones on the high moor. Three nights before the last full moon. They were dressed in garments no weaver could craft, speaking a tongue no man could know. They are… lost.”
Ellie felt a dizzying disconnect. Hearing their reality stated so plainly in this dark room made it sound like a madwoman’s tale. Yet the Inquisitor was listening, absorbing.
“A door of light,” the Inquisitor repeated softly. She looked at Ellie, then May, with new, fierce intensity. “From where?”
“We don’t know,” Ellie whispered, the words escaping before she could stop them. She couldn’t play the simpleton anymore. The game was over. “Our home is… beyond. We were studying the stones. There was a storm. Then we were here.”
“Your home.” The Inquisitor’s gaze was scalpel-sharp. “Describe it.”
May found her voice, a thin, shaky thread of sound. “Towers of glass and metal that touch the clouds. Chariots that move without horses. Lights that burn without fire. We can speak to someone on the other side of the world, instantly.” She was describing a fantasy, she knew. It sounded like one.
The Inquisitor was silent for a long minute. The only sound was the spit of the candle. She believed them. Ellie saw it in the calculating depth of her stare. She didn’t believe in towers of glass, but she believed in the fundamental, terrifying otherness of them. Their smooth skin was proof. Their words were proof.
“Why come here?” the Inquisitor finally asked.
“We didn’t mean to,” Ellie said, desperation cracking her voice. “We want to go back.”
“But you cannot.”
“No.”
The Inquisitor leaned back, the chair creaking. A slow, cold smile touched her lips, devoid of any happiness. It was the smile of a gambler who has just been dealt a perfect, unexpected hand. “A door of light. Visitors from another world.” She mused aloud, her eyes distant. “The Church speaks of angels and demons. Philosophers muse on other realms. And here you are. Flesh and blood. Not spirits. Not visions. Real.” Her focus snapped back to them, sharp and hungry. “You are not prisoners. You are not heretics. You are… specimens.”
The word was worse than any threat. It sucked the remaining warmth from the room.
“You will remain with Agnes,” the Inquisitor decided, her tone brisk now, administrative. “You will continue as you were. You will be seen, you will work, you will be normal. But you will also… observe. You will tell me of your world. Its secrets. Its arts of war, of healing, of building. You will write them down. Agnes, you will teach them their letters properly if they lack them.”
She stood, signaling the audience was over. “This is now your only purpose. To be my window into a place no other soul has seen. Do this, and you will have my protection. Master Rylan will not touch you. The village will not question you.” The cold smile returned. “Fail me, lie to me, or attempt to flee… and I will revisit my original proposition regarding the dungeon. Not as a threat, but as a promise. Do you understand?”
They nodded, numb.
“Good.” She walked to the door and opened it. Master Rylan stood waiting, his expression grimly expectant. “Escort them back to the herb-wife’s hut,” the Inquisitor instructed. “They are under my protection. Their safety is your responsibility. Ensure it.”
Rylan’s confusion was palpable, but he merely bowed. “Yes, my lady.”
The walk back through the corridor, out into the cool evening air, felt like escaping a tomb only to be handed a longer, slower sentence. The Inquisitor’s protection was a cage made of silk and shadow. They were not to be consumed by the bog or the dungeon. They were to be preserved, studied, and used.
As they trudged behind Rylan’s horse once more, the darkness gathering in the woods around them, Ellie felt a new kind of dirt on her skin, one no amount of Agnes’s sand and herbs could ever scrub away.
As they trudged behind Rylan’s horse once more, the darkness gathering in the woods around them, Ellie felt a new kind of dirt on her skin, one no amount of Agnes’s sand and herbs could ever scrub away. The knight’s silence was a palpable force, a brewing storm of resentment at his new role as their guardian. May walked so close their shoulders bumped with every step, a tiny point of contact that was the only thing holding Ellie together.
The hut, when it appeared through the trees, was no longer just a shelter. It was a fragile sanctuary under a microscope. Agnes pushed the door open, the familiar scent of herbs and peat smoke flooding out. It smelled like safety, but the illusion had shattered.
“Inside,” Agnes whispered, her voice ragged. She didn’t light a tallow candle, relying on the faint glow of the banked fire in the hearth. The darkness felt safer. They stood in the middle of the single room, three shadows trembling in the gloom. The quiet was broken by a single, choked sob from May. It was a raw, ugly sound that seemed to release the valve on Ellie’s own terror.
“She’s going to have us write a book,” Ellie blurted out, her voice too loud in the small space. “A ‘window into a place no other soul has seen.’ What does that even mean? We’re not a zoo exhibit.”
“We’re worse than an exhibit,” May said, swiping at her cheeks. Her words came out in a frantic, logical stream. “Exhibits are just looked at. She wants data. She wants actionable intelligence. Gunpowder. Germ theory. The printing press. Tell her the wrong thing and we literally change the course of human history. We could break the world.”
Agnes sank onto a stool by the fire, her face looking ancient in the low light. “You cannot tell her nothing. A hungry wolf offered a scrap of meat may wait. A wolf offered nothing will attack immediately.”
“So we have to feed her something,” Ellie said, pacing the packed dirt floor. “But it has to be… useless. Or so basic it doesn’t matter. Or better yet, something she can’t possibly replicate.”
“Like what? The chemical formula for aspirin? The principles of flight?” May’s laugh was brittle. “Even if she can’t build a plane, the idea alone could send her down a path. We have no idea what the butterfly effect is here.”
Ellie stopped pacing. An idea, desperate and thin, flickered. “We tell her stories. But not how-to guides. We tell her… concepts. Philosophy. Stuff about our government that would sound like insane fairy tales here. Democracy. Universal suffrage. It’ll sound so absurd she might just think we’re harmless idiots from a strange land of fools.”
“It’s a risk,” May muttered, but she was thinking, Ellie could see her brain working in the dimness. “We could mix in real but unhelpful stuff. Describe a smartphone but say it’s powered by ‘captured lightning’ we can’t explain. Talk about medicine but say our healers use tools so precise they’re made by machines other machines built.” She let out a shaky breath. “We buy time. That’s all we’re doing.”
“Time for what?” Agnes asked quietly.
The question hung there. The peat in the fire settled with a soft sigh.
“Time to find the door,” Ellie said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “The one we fell through. There has to be a way back. It wasn’t magic. It was… physics. A storm, the stone circle, a specific alignment. It was an event. Events can repeat.”
May nodded, a fierce, sharp movement. “We need to research. Properly. Not just local gossip. We need records. We need to find out if anything like this has ever happened here before. Agnes, are there stories? Legends about people appearing from nowhere? Lights on the moor?”
Agnes was silent for a long moment, staring into the embers. “There are always stories. Old wives’ tales. Songs about the ‘Gentry’ stealing people away to their hollow hills. Tales of doorways that open on certain nights.” She looked up, her eyes reflecting the dull orange glow. “But they are just tales to frighten children.”
“They’re data points,” May corrected gently. “We need them. We also need to get back to that stone circle. Study it. Map it. When was the last full moon? We need to track the phases, the weather. Everything.”
A new, grim energy replaced the paralyzing fear. The problem had shape now. It was a treacherous, two-pronged path: appease a dangerous patron with carefully curated fiction, and hunt for a needle in a temporal haystack.
“We’ll need to be careful,” Ellie said. “The Inquisitor will be watching. Rylan certainly is.”
“Then we work,” Agnes said, straightening her back with a resolve that seemed to fortify the very walls. “You will do as she asks. You will write your harmless ‘philosophies.’ And you will listen, in the village, at the market, to every old song and senile ramble. I will listen.” She poked the fire, sending up a shower of sparks. “The bog preserves what is given to it. It does not give it back easily. Your door will be the same.”
Outside, an owl called. The sound was lonely and vast in the dark. They had a plan, fragile as a cobweb. It was better than nothing. Ellie looked at her hands, the new calluses stark in the firelight. They weren’t just for show anymore. They were tools for digging, for holding on, for clawing their way back home.
The days began to bleed into a strange, dual rhythm. Dawn meant the bog, the relentless, muscle-burning work that Agnes devised. They cut peat until their shoulders screamed, the black squares stacking up like grim bricks. They gathered specific mosses from the north side of rotting oaks, their fingers turning numb and pruned in the constant damp. They harvested foul-smelling fungal growths from fallen logs, scraping them into clay pots with wooden spatulas.
“It’s not just busywork,” May grunted one afternoon, wrestling a particularly stubborn tangle of roots from the muck. Her hands, once quick and precise on a keyboard, were now crosshatched with scratches, the nails permanently edged in black. “She’s teaching us what sustains life here. Calories, medicine, tinder. It’s a survival course.”
Ellie wiped sweat from her brow with a filthy forearm. “Yeah, well, my survival instinct is currently screaming for a hot shower and a double cheeseburger.” The medieval diet of coarse bread, boiled turnips, and occasional stringy fish was a constant, gnawing emptiness in her gut.
The work was a kind of brutal baptism. Dirt became a second skin, ground into their pores, the scent of peat and decay a permanent note in their clothes and hair. Agnes’s nightly ritual with the sand and dried, crushed herbs became a welcome relief, the abrasion scouring away the day’s grime even as it reddened their skin. They were being worn down and rebuilt, grain by grain, into something that belonged to the landscape.
Once a week, Agnes would pronounce them presentable for the village. These trips were exercises in controlled exposure. They walked behind her, heads slightly bowed, baskets on their arms. Ellie felt every glance like a physical touch. The village of Blackmere was a cluster of wattle-and-daub huts around a muddy central green, home to maybe two hundred souls who all seemed to know each other’s business.
“Agnes’s strange nieces,” a woman drawing water from the well would murmur, not quietly enough.
“Look at their walk,” a man mending a fence would say, spitting into the dirt.
They were curios, but Agnes’s grim presence and the invisible, implied shield of the Inquisitor’s “protection” kept outright hostility at bay. They traded moss salves and dried bog myrtle for salt, a precious lump of hard cheese, or spare wool for mending. Ellie used these trips to listen, her historian’s mind cataloguing everything. She heard fragments of ballads sung by old men by the smithy, tales of the “Shining Folk” who’d steal your name if you answered their call on a misty night. She stored them all, every useless, tantalizing scrap.
The briefings with the Lady Inquisitor were a different kind of labor. They occurred at irregular intervals, always a summons delivered by a tight-lipped Rylan. The walk to the manor house never got easier. The chamber always smelled the same: cold herbs and parchment.
They stood before the heavy table. The Inquisitor never offered them a seat.
“Tell me of your world’s governance,” she would say, her quill poised over a clean sheet of vellum. “You mentioned… democracy.”
So Ellie would talk. She described voting, representatives, the chaotic spectacle of it all, framing it as a bizarre, inefficient carnival. “And so every few years, everyone argues, and they all write names on scraps of bark, and whoever gets the most scraps gets to make the rules until people get angry again,” Ellie finished, making it sound as sane as dancing naked in a hailstorm.
The Inquisitor’s expression remained unreadable. She wrote a few neat lines. “Ineffectual. And your… healers. Their tools.”
May took that one. She described a stethoscope in minute, mechanical detail, the concept of listening to a heart. She explained sterilization, germ theory, using words like “tiny invisible beasts” and “cleansing with fire and strong alcohol.” She made it sound like a mix of obvious sense and mystical hocus-pocus. “But without our special glasses to see the beasts, and our forged steel tools that take a year to make, it’s just… a idea,” May concluded, shrugging.
The Inquisitor’s eyes would flicker with something—frustration or intellectual hunger. She knew she was being fed crumbs, but they were crumbs from a feast beyond her imagination. She couldn’t replicate any of it, but the concepts themselves were contaminants, shifting the foundations of her thoughts.
“And your structures? These… towers of glass?”
“They’re held up by a skeleton of steel,” Ellie said, “which is iron cooked in a special way we don’t know how to do here. Without that, glass is just fragile sand. A tall tower of it would just… fall over.” She saw the Inquisitor’s knuckles whiten slightly on the quill. It was a small, vicious satisfaction.
After each briefing, they were dismissed with a silent wave. The walk back was always lighter, charged with a shared, secret defiance. They were building a portrait of a wondrous, useless civilization. It was their armor.
One market day, under a drizzling gray sky, the dynamic shifted. They were at a stall examining some poorly spun yarn when a figure approached Agnes. He was a traveler, his cloak stained with miles of mud, a lute case slung across his back. His eyes were a bright, unsettling green.
“Herb-wife,” he said, his voice melodious. “I hear you have knowledge of the old stones. The circle on High Moor.”
Agnes went very still. Ellie, pretending to examine the yarn, felt her pulse jump.
“I know it’s there,” Agnes said flatly. “As do all. It is just stones.”
“Some say they sing on certain nights,” the traveler said, his smile not reaching his eyes. “When the moon drowns in cloud and the veil is thin. I collect such songs.” His gaze slid past Agnes, lingering on Ellie and May with an interest that felt entirely different from the villagers’ dull curiosity. This was recognition, of a kind. “Strange things are drawn to such places. Or so the songs say.”
He placed a small, tarnished silver coin on the stall before Agnes. “For your troubles.” He nodded once, his green eyes sweeping over them all again, and melted back into the market crowd.
Agnes palmed the coin as if it were a live coal. She didn’t speak until they were well away from the green, on the bog path. The rain was colder now.
“That was no simple minstrel,” she hissed, her voice low. “He was a seeker. A watcher. Perhaps for the Church, perhaps for others who traffic in old ways.” She looked at them, fear etched deep beside her eyes. “The Inquisitor’s protection is a flag, not a cloak. It marks you. It draws other eyes.”
That night, in the hut’s smoky darkness, their plan felt childish. The stone circle was a beacon they couldn’t safely approach. The world wasn’t just passively watching them adapt; it was starting to actively probe.
The next summons came only two days later. Rylan’s expression was grimmer than usual. The Inquisitor did not ask for a briefing on their world.
Instead, a worn, leather-bound book lay on the table before her. She placed a hand on it. “This was taken from a traveling storyteller. It contains coded references to ‘star-fallen women’ and ‘doors in the mist.’” Her pale eyes pinned them. “He described two women with the herb-wife of Blackmere Bog. One with hair like fire, one like a raven’s wing. He is currently in the dungeon, reconsidering his repertoire.”
The air left the room.
“My protection has limits,” the Inquisitor continued, her voice soft as a blade being drawn. “Your value is in your uniqueness and your secrecy. If the world begins to whisper of you, that value diminishes. And my patience for diminished value is nonexistent.”
She leaned forward. “You will not return to the village. Your work with Agnes will be at the hut, or deep in the wood, seen by none. You are done being seen.” She paused, letting the isolation sink in. “Furthermore, your… academic reports are insufficient. I grow weary of philosophy and descriptions of impossible tools.”
She stood, walking around the table to stand directly before Ellie. “You will write for me a treatise on the principles of your world’s warfare. Not toys. Strategy. The movement of large forces. The logistics of feeding an army across great distances. The engineering of siege.” A cold smile touched her lips. “The minstrel’s song suggests you are sought. History suggests that what is sought is often taken. I intend to be the one who holds you. And to hold you, I must be able to break whatever comes for you. You will provide the tools.”
She turned her back, a dismissal. “Rylan will collect your first writing in one week. See that it is both thorough and… actionable.”
The walk back was silent, the weight of the new task crushing. They weren’t just curiosities anymore. They were being weaponized. Their knowledge, however fragmented, was to be translated into medieval conquest. The path home through the stones seemed farther away than ever, now shrouded in the gathering smoke of a war they were being forced to design.
Ellie looked at her hands, the calluses hard and yellow. They weren’t just for digging or holding on anymore. The Inquisitor was shaping them into tools for something else entirely. The dirt under her nails felt like grave soil.