Abernathy turned red. “Well,” he managed.
“Maybe we should go now,” Questor advised. “To your house, Elizabeth. We really need to sit down and talk.”
“Sure,” Elizabeth quickly agreed. “Let me tell my friends I’m leaving. I rode down here on the bus, so we’ll have to take the bus home. I’ve got enough money for the three of us, I think. Hope so, because I bet you don’t have any. Boy, this sure is strange, isn’t it, meeting again like this?”
Questor Thews nodded, looking around absently at the crowds and the festival. Music rolled across the open spaces between buildings. Flags and balloons floated in the warm breeze. Cooking smells filled the air. Laughter and singing rose from every quarter. Bumbershoot, festival of the arts. Seattle, Washington, United States. The High Lord’s old world. Now Elizabeth. It was strange, all right. It was also the most colossal coincidence he had ever encountered—or it was something far more complicated. He didn’t say so, but he favored the latter interpretation.
He thought they might do well to figure it all out before anything else happened.
Graum Wythe Redux
After Elizabeth had made excuses to her friends, she guided Abernathy and Questor Thews through the Bumbershoot crowds past a building called the Center House, a collection of mechanical rides filled with screaming children, and a series of food stands to a platform that serviced a monorail—which was something new to Questor, who hadn’t spent as much time in the High Lord’s old world as Abernathy. After a brief wait they boarded the monorail and rode downtown. Abernathy took great delight in his familiarity with things, his spirits further buoyed by the incredible fact of his transformation. As they sat in the monorail and passed down the track toward the tall buildings of the city, he kept looking at his reflection in the glass window next to him, not yet quite able to believe that it was true, worried deep inside that he might change back again at any moment.
But it was true, and there was no indication that he was going to revert. He was himself once more, a whole man, the exact same man, in fact, he had been when Questor had first changed him into a dog, rather average-looking, medium height and weight, hair dark and lank where it framed his bookish face. His rimless glasses sat comfortably upon his nose, fitting him perfectly, as if it made no difference whether he was a man or a dog. His eyes were wide-set and brown in color. His mouth was full, and his chin firm. An average face, certainly, but still and all a good one.
And it was his. Looking at it in the window glass, he felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. The last time he had passed into Ben Holiday’s world, he had been forced to pretend he really was a dog to avoid a good many unpleasantness. Magic was not accepted here. Talking dogs were unheard of. Abernathy had been an oddity of monumental importance, and there had been more than one attempt to exploit the fact. So he had crept about like a thief in the night, playing at being something he wasn’t, embarrassed and frightened. Now he could walk about like everyone else because he looked like everyone else. He fit comfortably in place. Well, more so than he would have if he had still been a dog. This was, after all, not his own country. But when he finally got back to Landover…
It made him smile to think about it.
“How does it feel?” Elizabeth asked him suddenly. She had been watching him. “Being a man again?”
Abernathy had the decency to blush. “I can’t seem to stop looking at myself. I apologize. But it does feel wonderful. I can’t tell you how wonderful. It has been a very long time, Elizabeth, since I was…” He trailed off. “I… I’m very happy.”
She grinned in response. “Do you know something? You are quite handsome.”
His mouth gaped. He could feel his cheeks burn.
“No, really,” she insisted. “You are.”
He expected at that point to hear a snide comment from Questor Thews, but the wizard was not paying attention to the conversation, his gaze turned away as he stared off into space, lost in thought. Abernathy muttered something unintelligible to Elizabeth and looked out the window at the passing buildings. Enough of admiring himself. He should be thinking, too. He should be trying to figure out what was going on. What was it that had brought them to this place and time, changed him back into a man, and linked him up once again with Elizabeth? Like Questor, he thought it an awfully large coincidence. He had the sense that there was machinery at work that he didn’t understand and probably should. But for the moment he was so caught up in his transformation that he could not bring himself to think of anything else.