Alboim lay on a tile, not stone, floor, with large alternating black-and-white tiles. He lay bound on the floor facing two women, or at least people in floor-length dresses. Behind him, he could hear his two captors. One skirt shifted, and he realized its wearer knew he was awake when she squatted down to his level.

  She was middle-aged, edging into elderly, with liberal streaks of gray running through chestnut hair that hung in a braid. Chocolate brown eyes, so similar to Father’s that it hurt to look at them, regarded him solemnly. Her dress, of thick wool, was dyed a sapphire blue and stitched with gold and silver thread. The woman spoke sharply in her language, then smiled at him gently. Her mannerisms were regal, he supposed. She reminded him of the way Dad acted in public. She reached out and traced something on his forehead.

  Instantly, the headache he had not realized he’d had receded, and he heard the woman say, “This is not Arnulf,” as she stood, “although he does look like my brother, but with Brigid’s coloring. Their son, I would assume? The age is about right, at least. Untie him, please. He is no danger and is not the criminal we sought.” Her voice was pitched higher, but reminded him of Dad’s. No one moved. She turned her head to stare at one of his captors severely. “Harralt, untie him now.” Her voice was one used to command and used to being obeyed. “Someone will have to inform the King. Elaboim will not be happy that we failed again.”

  One captor pulled a knife and bent over, effortlessly slicing through the cords binding him. He offered a hand to Alboim and spoke to the elder lady in a low tenor voice. “How could we have known, Lady Elspith, that he was not the fugitive?” From his tone, he was not offering excuses, merely describing his reasoning. “You must admit, my lady, that he fits the description, and in that magic-starved world, his awra blazed like the sun. It was just like the reports of Lord Arnulf, and very similar to your own. I tested him myself twice. Had he not passed them, my lady, we would never have taken him.”

  Elspith? What an unusual name, Alboim thought, though he supposed he couldn’t say anything given his name. Rubbing circulation back into his wrists, Alboim took the proffered hand and stood slowly. For the first time, he inspected his captors. The two who had kidnapped him were a few years older than he, perhaps nineteen or twenty. The first was tall, thin, and sallow-skinned, with brown eyes and hair. His nose had been broken once and reset badly. He flashed Alboim a cheeky grin and said, “Sorry about the mistake. My name is Harralt.” He extended a hand, which Alboim hesitantly took. His grip was powerful and calloused—the mark, Alboim knew, of a fencer. He had a similar set.

  The other was short and muscular, with an unusually deeply tanned skin, ginger hair, and green eyes. “And I am Oswalt, Oswalt of House Alour. No hard feelings, just doing as the king ordered us.” Oswalt spoke slowly, almost in a drawl. He bowed formally from the waist, a precise forty-five degrees.

  “If you were looking for someone my dad’s age, how could you mistake a teenager for a middle-aged guy?” Alboim challenged them.

  “Magic can do a lot for a man’s physique.” the short kidnapper answered. “My father could be mistaken for a man in his thirties.”

  Alboim’s eyes narrowed at the flippant answer. Magic didn’t exist. Dismissing the two, he turned to study the women.

  The lady Elspith clearly headed the entire operation. The second woman was younger, about twenty-five, a little on the short side, and plump, with mousy brown hair, brown eyes, and light brown skin. She kept shifting from one foot to another, and her face had an absent-minded-professor look to it.

  They were standing in a long, wide hallway. The walls were of white marble, streaked with darker colors, shades of red and gray, mainly, and lit at regular intervals by soft white lights set inside ornately carved decorative bronze disks the size of dinner plates. Large double doors stood closed at either end of the hall. On one side, bay windows, decorated with smaller circular motifs that vaguely looked like Celtic knot-work, looked down onto a courtyard, while several doors, again closed, lined the other.

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  Elspith spoke again. “Hello, young man. My name is Elspith, the Countess of Brantle. My companion,” she gestured to the other woman, “is Moara of House Balu.” She smiled warmly. “And what, if I may ask, is your name?”

  Oswalt and Harralt wore short swords, just barely too long to be called daggers. The plain hilts and worn scabbards proved the two men were familiar with their use. Elspith carried a heavy, knobbed cane that probably wasn’t just for walking. Only the younger woman, Moara, was weaponless.

  Alboim dismissed the thought of running almost as soon as it popped into his head. Four-to-one odds were hardly ideal. Warily, Alboim regarded the group. “I am Alboim. Alboim Artur Adams.” They hadn’t searched him, so he still had his phone in his back pocket. Cautiously, he reached for it and felt for the panic button. A simple code; dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot activated the alarm, and the phone rang 911, recording their conversation in the police data cube. Now, all he had to do was wait to be rescued.

  “And was your father named Arnulf Dexter, and your mother Brigid Hannasdotir?” Elspith asked excitedly, a gleam in her eye.

  “No,” he replied. Those had been the names of the heroes in Dad’s books. “They were Wilson and Brittany Adams.” This was crazy. Was all this a joke? Some sort of fevered dream? He didn’t remember getting sick at all, but all this was just too weird. Maybe an effect of getting hit on the head? Alboim was beginning to doubt his own senses at this point. His eyes narrowed. Was this a prank someone was pulling on him? Sam couldn’t pull this off. If it were a prank, the cops would be pissed. But he still could not think of who could pull something like this off, not with this much realism. “Who are you people? What is going on here? Where am I?” he asked, glaring from one to another.

  Oswalt answered him. His voice was measured and low, his hands gesturing calmingly. “We are all servants of King Elaboim of Barugaland in Iosa. Specifically, we are mages in His Majesty’s service, except for the Lady Elspith, who is also the Countess of Brantle.”

  “Oh, good God! This is a prank after all. This is all right out of Dad’s books. Next, you’re going to start talking about dragon invasions and summoning heroes from other dimensions! Did Sam put you up to this?” Alboim scoffed. This was getting ridiculous.

  “Ah, no,” replied Harralt. “A hero would only be needed once or twice a millennium, to deal with a cataclysmic disaster. Your situation is quite different. Our task was finding the traitor Arnulf Dexter, the brother of Countess Elspith, and the Summoned Hero Brigid Hannasdotir. You were merely mistaken for Arnulf.”

  “Yes, no one in their right mind would even think of asking you to take on a swarm of goblins, much less a dragon.” The other woman, Moara, replied. Alboim was sure that Moara meant her smile to be reassuring as she continued. “Summoning a hero is much different from trying for any one particular individual. You see, to find a particular person, you have to search all the worlds for a specific awra, which can be quite difficult if the world is particularly magical, or has a high population, or if the person doesn’t want to be found and knows how to hide or suppress their awra. A hero search, however, you only need one person who fulfills a set criteria. There could be billions of candidates for–”

  “Moara, please.” Elspith sighed, cutting the other woman off with a wave of her hand. “You’re babbling again.” She turned back to Alboim. “Whatever they called themselves, I am sure that you are my brother’s son. You look so much like him, your awra is almost exactly like his, your name is the same as our father’s. Please, look out the window.”

  Alboim crossed the hallway and looked. They were on the third story of a massive building overlooking a courtyard. While it was too dark to see clearly; dark shapes that could have been benches, or shrubbery, or statues gave off weird double-shadows from the twin moons.

  The boy jerked his head up to stare at the night sky. Behind the full moon, somewhat smaller and redder than the moon he was used to, shone a second, blue-white colored moon three-quarters full. “Oh. Shit. There are two moons.” He staggered away from the window all the way to the opposite wall; he felt his knees buckle and slid down it until he was sitting on the floor, feeling as though he’d been gut-punched. “I’m not on Earth anymore, am I? What about Mrs. MacTaggart? What about Susan and Agatha? What about my friends, and school?” The police would not come; he was on his own.