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 met an infamous character…
The great hall of Luttiron was a masterpiece of contradictions: soaring ceilings that spoke of ambition, tapestries that told of conquest, and at its center, Lord Ota Allisar, who was currently arguing with a florist about the precise shade of yellow appropriate for spring festival garlands. The florist, a small woman of advanced years, advanced wrinkles, and advanced patience, had so far withstood forty minutes of his aesthetic philosophy with the fortitude of a woman who had survived worse and would somehow survive it all again.
~ Allisar Fireborn Chronicles, Book 1: Embers of Destiny
The process of getting settled always took longer than Teri’s dignity preferred.
It involved Lady Elisandar on one side and Lady Sariat on the other, a careful shuffle from the bed to the chair that required three adjustments of her weight and one moment where she had to stop entirely and breathe through her nose while the pain soared, topped out, and fell again. The magicked wrappings on her leg glowed a faint, sulfurous amber through her dressing gown when she moved wrong, which she chose to interpret as a feature rather than a bug.
“There,” said Lady Elisandar with satisfaction, depositing Teri into the chair like a difficult package. She tucked a pillow behind Teri’s lower back and stepped away to assess her handiwork. “You should not have tried to shift your own weight.”
“I’m aware,” Teri said, through her teeth, and then, because she was trying to be a better person than the original Lady Greyrage: “Thank you.”
Lady Elisandar accepted this with a small, private smile that suggested she knew exactly how much that had cost.
Lady Sariat had gone immediately to the window, adjusting the drape so the morning light came in at an angle that was warm rather than blinding, which was so precisely what Teri would have asked for that she suspected the girl had simply learned her by now, the way servants in BBC historical dramas always knew when to walk in with the tea set.
Theo arranged himself on the floor next to her chair as if he was a sacred animus for protection and not because it was the best place to beg for snacks. The amber glow of the wrappings reflected softly in his dark eyes as he settled.
:Better?: he asked.
:Getting there,: she told him. :Give me a minute.:
Outside the window, the courtyard was coming alive with the organized chaos of the Spring Gala’s preparations, the culmination of two weeks of budget meetings with Roos and endless whining about bunting by Ota. She could see the edges of scaffolding below, and what appeared to be a very tense conversation between two men in aprons about a wooden frame structure she didn’t recognize but fortunately did not look like a gallows.
Preparation was officially three days out, which meant this was the part where everything that had looked fine on paper began to reveal the fault lines. Teri had organized enough conferences and lecture series for the university to know full well that “no battle plan survives engagement with the enemy.”
She gazed out the window and mentally cataloged what she would visit once she put her escape plans in action. The Caves of Melifinaar were still first on her mental travel list, she hadn’t moved it, but she was considering moving up the Wayaard Islands when there was a knock at the door.
Not the polite, I-will-wait-indefinitely knock of someone who had something scheduled but the slightly-too-sharp knock of urgency.
Lady Elisandar raised an eyebrow at the door. Lady Sariat was already moving toward it quickly with a glance at Teri, who nodded.
She opened the door, and Teri watched Roos take in the room in a single, practiced glance—Elisandar, Teri, the general state of morning-not-yet-settled—and recalibrate his entire demeanor from tense down to merely formal. Teri could tell that something was wrong.
“I apologize for the hour, Milady,” he said with a studied evenness that was even drier than the day before. “I would not have come so early but for—” he paused with the fractional hesitation that Teri already knew was uncharacteristic of him. “—a development with the ball preparations that requires your attention.”
“Of course it does,” she said. “Come in then. Lady Sariat, would you—”
“Tea,” Lady Sariat said, already turning toward the side table where the pot sat warming.
Roos stepped inside, and Teri noticed that his gaze went to Sariat for just a half-second before returning to the neutral middle distance he favored. And she also noticed that Lady Sariat set the cup down with slightly more care than the situation strictly required.
Huh, Teri thought.
:He likes the bitch; I have smelled his interest in him.: Theo confirmed in the worst way possible.
“What have I said about that word?” Teri snapped at him, and he rolled his eyes before setting his head down again. Everyone watched the exchange warily.
:She likes him too,: he offered as a not-apology.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Milady?” Roos squinted at her.
“That was for him, not you,” she said, waving a hand over Theo. “Sit down and tell me about the development that brought you here so early.”
Roos settled into the chair across from her with his usual confident economy of movement: diffident, but secure in his place. He produced the ledger from somewhere about his person, which she was starting to suspect was less a book and more a physical manifestation of his brain, and opened it to a page near the back.
“Yesterday, Lord Ota commissioned an order of decorative fabric for the great hall,” he began. “Enchanted banners and draping—moving scenes, I’m told. Blooming flowers. The effect is apparently quite striking.”
“That does sound like Ota,” she said.
“It is very much Lord Ota,” Roos agreed, with the tone of strong opinions he was keeping in a very small, very secure box. “The fabric arrived this morning from the guild in Pellavar.” He paused for a beat just slightly too long. “The Pellavar Weavers’ Collective, specifically.”
He looked at her steadily, and Teri realized with a small internal sigh that this was one of those moments where she was supposed to know something she didn’t.
“And?” she said, because she had learned that ‘and?’ delivered flatly enough could paper over almost anything.
His expression shifted to wariness. He was testing her, she realized. He had expected a reaction and had not gotten the one he anticipated, and he was now deciding what that meant.
“The Collective,” he said, with careful patience, “supplies predominantly to the eastern lowland houses. House Brevvik in particular is one of their primary patrons. Lord Haavar Brevvik is—”
“One of Ferdiff’s men,” Teri said, without thinking. She decided to commit to it anyway, since she couldn’t un-say it. “That is my understanding, but I could not say why.” She gestured vaguely at her own head, which was her all-purpose warning for amnesia, don’t push it.
“Yes,” Roos said, after a moment. “Lord Brevvik is a significant supporter of the Count. And he is particular about the loyalties of those his allies do business with. The Collective has a long-standing and rather public relationship with Lord Sovven Dray.” He paused. Waited.
“Not one of Ferdiff’s men?” She guessed.
“Emphatically not.” The dry quality of his voice deepened fractionally. Lady Elisandar snorted behind them, making her own opinion clear.
“They have what might charitably be described as a difficult history,” Roos said diplomatically, implying that he was underselling it by a lot.
“Does this involve assassins?” She made another guess.
He cringed, just a little, which was answer enough. It made sense, since the trade collectives in AFC were a lot like medieval guilds: powerful, and operating more like minor states-within-states by their own rules.
Teri looked at him. He looked at his ledger. Outside, she could distantly hear someone in the courtyard shouting something about a support beam.
“So the fabric,” she said slowly, working it through the way she’d worked through a hundred catering vendor disasters and a hundred more conference sponsorship tangles, “is from a collective that is publicly associated with a man that Ferdiff considers an enemy. And Ota ordered it, paid in full.” She stopped. Looked at Roos, who looked back at her with an expression of exquisite, practiced blankness.
“Without realizing,” she added, because that was clearly what she was supposed to say. She almost believed it too, given how profoundly dumb Ota was, but she did have a shred of doubt. Maybe he just wanted to piss off his older brother...an instinct she knew came naturally to younger siblings, having two herself.
“Without realizing,” Roos agreed smoothly, his expression giving nothing away.
She might have believed him entirely, if she hadn’t read the book series in full over twenty times and read just as many meta breakdowns on tumblr about Roos’ eventual, unexpected betrayal. But as flighty as Ota was, he was also petty, and just simple enough not to understand that lives were on the line with his attempt to poke at his brother’s pride. But Roos knew. She was quite certain of it. Roos knew exactly what Ota had done and why, and he was here in her room at an unreasonable hour with his ledger because he had to fix it without being able to say “no” to his lord or the vendor.
She found, somewhat against her will, that she respected that enormously.
Don’t, she told herself. She knew what he was like, and she knew the cost of trusting him.
But she also knew that the great hall was currently being decorated with magically blooming fabric that was going to read as a direct provocation to one of Lord Allisar’s most powerful allies, and that the gala was in three days, and that the vendor knew exactly what they’d sold and to whom.
“Where is it installed?” she asked, rubbing her temples.
“The main entrance and the eastern gallery. The most visible positions in the hall.”
“Of course they are.” She rubbed her temples. “And it can’t go back?”
“The deposit was non-refundable and the enchantment is keyed to the hall’s dimensions. Returning it would—” he glanced at his ledger, “—cost more than keeping it.”
Teri looked out the window at the courtyard below, at the scaffolding and the arguing men in aprons, and thought about the time she had rearranged conference signage two hours before start because a sponsor had turned out to be the university vice-president’s former employer. The one that had fired said university vice-president.
“The eastern gallery,” she said finally. “How much of it?”
“Three large banners, six framing drapes.”
“Move two of them. Put them somewhere interior like the private dining room, the music gallery, somewhere Lord Brevvik won’t walk past unless specifically invited. Leave one in the eastern gallery but flank it with something unambiguous. House Allisar colors, if Ota has them somewhere, or something equally neutral.”
Roos was writing. She noticed he had started writing before she finished the sentence.
“The main entrance is harder,” he said.
“The main entrance we cover with flowers.” She gestured at the ledger. “We were planning to cut the third tier of the floral arrangements anyway. We’ll have to eat the price, but move it instead. Put it at the entrance, make it large enough that the drapery is secondary. Frame the doorway. Ota gets his spring aesthetic, the fabric is visible but not the statement piece.” She paused. “Will that be enough?”
He looked up from the ledger and really looked at her, for the first time since he’d walked in, with something approaching admiration, if tinged with a bit of suspicion.
“It will not be invisible,” he said. “But it will be deniable. Lord Brevvik may choose to take offense, but he would have nothing solid to point to if the choices were approved by Lady Greyrage herself.”
Which was clearly what Roos had been hoping for. She nodded. “Deniable is enough,” she said. “Deniable is usually enough, anyway.”
He nodded once, slowly, and wrote something else.
Theo had not moved from his position at her feet. But she could feel, through the low, constant hum of whatever link existed between them, that he was awake and attending, and that his attention was on Roos with that same quality of focused unease that she was trying very hard not to let influence her.
:I know:, she thought at him. :I know. Bear with me.:
She just didn’t know yet what she was going to do about it.
“Is there anything else?” she asked.
Roos closed the ledger. “Nothing that can’t wait until a more reasonable hour, milady.” He stood, and again she noticed that his gaze didn’t go to Sariat. Actively, deliberately, in the way of a man making a point of not doing something. “I’ll have the repositioning arranged before tomorrow.”
“Good.” She looked back out the window. “And Roos.”
He paused at the door.
“Next time there’s a development, you don’t need to wait until it’s a full-blown disaster. Earlier is better.”
A beat. Then: “Noted, milady.”
The door closed quietly behind him, and Teri sat with the morning light and her cooling tea and the uncomfortable feeling of trusting someone she absolutely could not afford to trust.
Theo sighed heavily. :I still don’t like him,: he said.
“I know,” she said, out loud, to no one in particular.
NEXT: Forced Interlude
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I know we don’t like him, and he likes Sariat, but Teri and Roos do work well together, even when he’s challenging her.