Transmigrated Teri is an ongoing isekai/portal fantasy series about Teri Graves, an embittered middle-age GenX office lady who gets into a massive car accident and wakes up in the world of the fantasy series she loves to hate, The Allisar Fireborn Chronicles. She knows the characters, she knows the plot, and she knows that its all a massive coma dream…except for how nothing is as it should be. Worse? She woke up in the body of the doomed evil stepmother! She escaped a pandemic for this?
Previously: Teri started building her coalition… again…
When the truth finally bared its teeth, it did not come with a flourish of villainy, but with Roos’s familiar calm—those dark eyes unreadable, that careful neutrality held like a shield even as everything behind Gervyn began to burn. For one suspended heartbeat, Gervyn could not make his mind accept what his senses already knew; betrayal had always been a thing that belonged to legends, to courtly whispers and distant wars, not to the quiet man who had stood by his side and carried messages and watched them all with that dry, precise restraint. Then the moment shattered, and anguish tore through him raw and violent, hotter than any flame he had ever summoned. Vycette’s last breath, Aurguth’s broken cry, the sudden absence where Valerontarius should have been—all of it slammed into Gervyn at once, and guilt rose like bile because he had trusted, because he had not seen, because he had been too young and too certain. The fire inside him surged in a blind, desperate wave, and for the first time it felt less like power than like grief given teeth.
~ Allisar Fireborn Chronicles, Book 4: Forge of Fate
A week after her conversation with Robern, Teri’s leg had improved enough that she could sit in the upholstered chair by the window for several hours at a stretch without wanting to bite through her own knuckle. This was, by the standards of the past fortnight, a significant victory. She celebrated it by staring out at the courtyard below and cataloging every location in Telsharden she intended to visit once she could walk properly.
The Caves of Melifinaar were first on the list, obviously; she had paid good money for fanart of that spot, and wanted to see in ‘in person.’ Then the floating markets of Ungretoffden, which Fuckin‘ Chad had described in loving and logistically improbable detail in book three. The Wayaard islands, where Gervyn had spent an extremely eventful summer being seasick on a pirate ship. The great library at—
“The point,” Ota said from the chair across from her, flapping his fan with the boundless energy of a mediocre man making a profound philosophical argument, “is that yellow in the wrong register reads as illness. I will not have my spring ball look like a fever dream.”
“Mm,” Teri said, which she had found was sufficient to keep him talking indefinitely without requiring her actual participation.
“The gold-adjacent yellows are perfectly acceptable, obviously. Saffron, amber, harvest! Those are warm yellows, they have depth. But your common canary? Your lemon? Absolutely not. I would sooner cancel the entire event.”
“Mm.”
Lady Sariat, perched on her stool in the corner with her embroidery, held a careful expression that Teri knew well, the evidence of a young woman who had learned to make herself invisible while the men around her blathered on. Lady Elisandar, significantly less invisible in her armchair, looked up from her own needlework with a steely-eyed expression, and Teri braced herself for the incoming scorn.
“It is such a shame,” Lady Elisandar said, in the tone she used when she was about to say something that was not, in fact, a non sequitur, “that milady has no steward at present to assist with the arrangements.” She looked down at her embroidery. “So many decisions to be made. So many logistics requiring someone with actual authority to manage them.”
Teri noticed that Lady Sariat’s needle paused for a fraction of a second before resuming its work.
The late Lord Greyrage’s steward—Lady Bonarae‘s steward, she reminded herself, her steward in whatever technical sense applied—had been executed approximately three weeks before the void howler incident, for reasons that the household had collectively decided not to discuss in front of her given her supposed amnesia (even the kids were quiet about it, which bothered Teri the most). Teri had pieced together enough to know it had been vicious and almost certainly not warranted. She tried not to think about it too directly. It sat in her chest like a stone she couldn’t put down, but she had to remind herself that everything was fiction and Layd Greyrage did not exist, either in reality or here in Teri’s custom boutique fever dream.
“Mm,” she said again, not quite sure what Lady Elisandar was getting at.
Ota brightened with the luminosity of a man who had just had what he considered an excellent idea. She eyed him warily.
“Roos!” he announced.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Roos could help!” He snapped his fan shut and pointed it at her triumphantly. “He manages my affairs wonderfully, and I confess I have been borrowing him already for some of the ball preparations. He has a gift for logistics. Also he is much better at telling people things they don’t want to hear than I am, which frankly is most of what stewards do.”
“You’re volunteering your own steward?” Teri tried not to look as horrified by the man’s name as she felt. Roos showing up would mean nothing but trouble for her.
“Only temporarily! Just until Ferdiff returns and sorts everything out properly.” He waved a hand. “Roos won’t mind. He never minds.”
Lady Elisandar returned to her embroidery with satisfaction, indicating that her plan had worked precisely as intended. Lady Sariat was staring intently at a knot in her threads.
Teri thought deeply about what she knew of Roos from the books: minor character, barely a handful of scenes, mostly glimpsed at the edges of Ota’s appearances. Loyal and reliable, in the text. A useful background figure... until book four, when the revelation happened that made the fandom lose its collective damn mind for months: the quiet, competent steward who had been there the whole time, watching, waiting, and had turned on Gervyn in the worst way. It was his actions that had led to the deaths of the twins, and Teri herself had written a six-thousand word meta essay on the betrayal. She knew it better than Fuckin‘ Chad probably did.
But what could she do right then? Was he even a traitor yet? Chad had suggested the reason for Roos seemingly nonsensical betrayal would be revealed in book five, which meant Teri had no idea what his actual motives were, and therefore had no just cause to oppose Ota’s suggestion.
“Fine,” she grumbled. “Send him on.”
Roos arrived twenty minutes later, which meant he had been nearby. He was not what she had expected, although she could not have said precisely what she had expected, since the books had given him no physical description worth mentioning, and fanart of minor characters was always unreliable. He was perhaps thirty, lean like a long-distance runner, with a strong, sharp jawline. Dark eyes, watchful. The kind of face that didn’t announce itself.
He bowed correctly to Teri and then to Lady Elisandar, which was the right order, and waited.
Theo, who had been asleep across Teri’s feet, opened one eye.
Looked at Roos.
Kept his head up.
“Lord Ota tells me you’ve been assisting with the ball preparations.” Teri gave a softball opening volley, not sure what she was supposed to say.
“Among other things, milady.” His voice was even, with a faint dryness to it that she suspected was permanent. “I’ve been managing the household accounts since Steward Ferwick’s—” a beat, almost imperceptible, “—departure.”
Well, she figured, that was understandable. She fished around for something else to say and finally fell back on what she knew from her job: people who were planning shit always loved talking about the budget for it.
“And the spring ball budget specifically,” she said. “How does it stand?” She knew it came across as if she was testing him, and in a way, she was. Just less lethally than the actual Lady Gregyrage would have.
Something flitted across his face, not quite a wince. “It stands at approximately one and a half times what was allocated for it.”
The silence that followed was deep. Even Lady Sariat looked up in shock at that pronouncement.
“Lord Ota is passionate about the event,” Roos added with practiced neutrality.
“I can see that.” She looked at him steadily. He looked back, not quite meeting her eyes and not quite avoiding them either, which she found more interesting than either would have been. She could just send him out the door, but overall, she was pretty bored, and if she sent him away, Ota would probably come back and make her even more bored.
And if she was going to make a good escape, knowing more about the infamous traitor might serve her well. She couldn’t trust him, but she might be able to use him.
“Sit down. Let’s talk about what we can knock off, and where we can find the rest.” Budget review was, after all, part of her job description at the university. She hated accounting, but she was good at strategy.
He covered his surprise well, she thought, as he sat down, produced a small, neat ledger from somewhere about his person, and opened it to a page that was worn and full of marks.
Theo put his chin back down on Teri’s foot, but tellingly he did not close his eyes.
:Something’s off about him,: he said, so quietly it barely registered. :Can’t tell what. Like a song with one wrong note.:
:Now you’re a poet?: She reached down and patted his head. :Don’t worry,: she thought back. :I know exactly what it is. We can’t trust him, but I’m trying to figure out where he stands right now.:
Except she didn’t know exactly. Not really. She knew what he did a decade from the point in time she was currently at, but she didn’t know why. She didn’t know what made a person who was, by all appearances, perfectly competent and quietly decent decide to burn everything down.
She looked at Roos’s neat ledger and his careful face and thought that was probably the most dangerous thing about him.
“Right,” she said. “Start from the top.”
When they had successfully identified three areas of Ota’s vision that could be scaled back without him noticing (the third tier of the flower arrangements, the second dessert course, and whatever a “ceremonial atmospheric fog enchantment” was) Teri was beginning to feel that Roos was either genuinely nice or very good at performing it.
The door opened without a knock.
Lord Kerelyn Rustad looked at Roos first, then at Teri, and smiled a calculating smile that sent chills down her spine.
“Milady. I heard you had found yourself some assistance.” His eyes moved back to Roos with a quality Teri could not quite name exactly. It wasn’t hostility, but definitely not warmth. Recognition, maybe. The way someone looked at a piece on a chess board.
Roos closed his ledger with a quiet click. “Lord Rustad.”
“Roos.” A pause a half beat too long. “How is Lord Ota?”
“In excellent health and possessing strong opinions about flowers,” Roos said pleasantly.
Kerelyn’s smile widened slightly. He looked back at Teri, and the quality of his attention shifted to become more focused and deliberate. She had felt it in their first meeting, the way he seemed to instinctively assess her.
“I won’t interrupt,” he said. “I merely wanted to inquire after your health, milady. The preparations for the ball must be taxing, given your recovery.”
“I manage,” she said flatly.
“Of course.” He bowed, the precise depth of courtesy required and no more. “Roos.” And then he was gone.
In the quiet he left behind, Teri looked at Roos.
Roos looked at his ledger.
“Third tier floral arrangements,” he said, opening it again. “I believe we were discussing substitutions.”
“We were,” she agreed.
Theo finally lowered his head back down.
NEXT: Guesses and Questions
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Hmmm, can Teri redeem Roos too, or is he a more powerful chess piece than he lets on? Guess I’ll have to wait until you’re back from your retreat to find out!