Page 123 of Stealing Tink

Still, I tear my attention away from the girl as the man—Nox, was what he said his name was—begins to speak. “I’m going to try to put this in a way where it won’t come as a shock to you.”

Blaise, his equally pale wife, peers over her teacup at her husband, her brow raised. “Good luck with that.”

“When you were a child, you were kidnapped by Queen Abra.”

“An excellent, non-shocking place to start,” says Blaise.

“Well, I figured we might as well rip off the bandage.”

“I’ve been kidnapped before,” I say. “That’s not as shocking as you might think.”

Blaise grins at me over her teacup, then nudges her husband. “I like her,” she whispers loudly.

Nox smiles at her fondly, as if she’s complimenting him and not me.

“What I don’t understand is why I don’t remember this,” I say.

“Right, I should back up,” says Nox. “You see, centuries ago, the fabric between realms was impassable, until…” He stops when he glimpses Blaise’s expression.

“Too far back,” says Blaise, patting her husband on the shoulder. Then she turns to me. “There are multiple worlds, multiple realms. That’s basically what you need to know.”

“That’s a bit of an oversimplification, don’t you think,” says Nox, and not at all like it’s a question. “But yes, basically, think of it that you originated in this realm. Our realm.”

I stare at him like he’s crazy, although I am the one who woke up only knowing what I could have very well possibly dreamed. “So what I remember? That was real too? It just happened in another realm?”

“That seems to be the most likely explanation,” says Nox.

My heart twists in different directions. The idea of being separated from my home realm—that it was never my home realm to begin with—competes with the relief that at least it was all real. John, Wendy, Michael, the N⁠—

Well, at least I didn’t just dream it all up.

“When you were taken by Queen Abra, she placed you in a sort of magical slumber. She used a servant at the time”—Nox’s throat seems to close up, and Blaise holds his hand—“who was skilled at weaving tapestries like the Fates did, to weave not just your subconscious, but you, into several different worlds.”

“If he wove me into different worlds, why was my body still here? How could I have been two places at once?”

“Bodies are funny things, don’t you think?” says Blaise. “They’re both you, and also not you.”

Apparently that’s supposed to be an adequate explanation, because Nox continues, “For years, your body remained undisturbed. But then, well, through a course of events that would take several hours to explain⁠—”

“—And a few rather embarrassing details for me,” says Blaise.

“A few embarrassing details for the both of us,” admits Nox, this time holding his wife’s hand before continuing, “the situation changed. The queen had a son who had died a long time before, whose death she mourned. She kept his ashes in an urn on her shelf.”

A chill creeps up my spine as I remember the Nomad’s seal, the shape of the mark on the back of Wendy’s neck.

“She found a way to bring him back,” Nox continues, “but there were consequences. Consequences to me. Not to mention, the son was a danger to this realm.”

“So I put the queen’s son to sleep, in the same way she had put you to sleep,” says Blaise. “And while he was asleep, his consciousness trapped in another world… Well, he ran into you.” She grins, like she knows something I don’t.

My heart patters in my chest as I hang on their every word.

“You must have made quite the impression,” she says. “Because he died in that world saving you.”

“How do you two know all of this?” I breathe.

“The tapestries,” explains Nox. “New ones keep showing up in the room where you’ve been kept.”

“We thought he was dead for good after the first one,” explains Blaise. “But then we saw him in one of the tapestries. It was a tapestry of the three Fates. He appeared there, and it depicts him petitioning for something. When we kept seeing him show up in your tapestries, that solved the question of what he’d petitioned for. He had asked them to put him back in the tapestries with you. If he could follow you into the worlds where you wandered.”