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 avoided one political disaster and planned another…
The garden was not, strictly speaking, ready for a wheelchair.
Teri had suspected as much from the window, and confirmed it approximately thirty seconds after Lady Sariat had wrestled the chair down the back stairs with a focus that Teri was choosing to read as determination rather than grimness. The paths were stone-flagged, at least, but the spring rains had left the joints between them uneven and slightly treacherous, and every third push produced a small jolt that made Teri’s leg remind her, in detail, of its current opinion of the situation.
“I’m fine,” she said, before Sariat could ask.
“I didn’t say anything, milady.”
“You were thinking loudly.”
Sariat made no response to this, which Teri was fairly certain meant she was smiling.
The garden itself was in the controlled chaos that she recognized from the window. There was scaffolding along the eastern wall, a small army of workers moving with military precision around the temporary pavilion structure, and two men having what appeared to be a deeply personal argument about bunting. The enchanted fabric was not yet visible, which meant Roos had already started moving it. He was either very efficient or had not actually gone to bed at all. Teri suspected the latter.
“Overseeing preparations,” she said to no one in particular, trying the excuse out loud. It sounded plausible enough. A countess in a wheelchair with her lady-in-waiting, taking the air, keeping an eye on things. Perfectly normal.
She hated her brain sometimes.
A blur of chocolate brown came around the far hedge at considerable speed and resolved itself into Theo at a full gallop, tongue out, ears flapping, with an expression of joy that he wanted to share immediately with everyone.
Behind him, at a dead run and losing ground fast: Gervyn.
“THEO!” He was shrieking with laughter, arms pumping, all eight years of him entirely unbothered by the fact that he was chasing a dog twice his weight who could outpace him without trying. “THEO COME BACK!”
Theo ran a large, triumphant circle around Teri’s wheelchair, shook himself vigorously in her direction, and then sat down looking deeply pleased with himself.
:Found the smallest puppy,: he announced.
“I can see that,” Teri said with a heavy sigh.
Gervyn skidded to a halt on the path, suddenly aware of her presence all at once. Like a switch his whole body went stiff and formal. He was flushed and bright-eyed and had something that might have been mud (or worse) on his left knee, and he studied Teri, obviously calculating whether he was in trouble.
Two of the nearby gardeners had gone very still. A third had taken several steps back. Teri noticed that none of them were looking directly at Theo, avoiding what they found unsettling.
“He came to me,” Gervyn announced, with the dignity of a legal defense. “I wasn’t bothering him! He came to me first.”
:Accurate,: Theo confirmed, without a shred of remorse.
“I know.” Teri waved her hand around. “It’s fine.”
Gervyn stared at her. Then he looked at Theo. Then back at her. His expression cycled through several things very quickly and landed on something like cautious wonder. “He’s not — most familiars don’t—” He stopped. Tried again. “Aurguth said if I touched him I’d probably lose a finger.”
“Aurguth is not wrong as a general rule,” Teri said, which seemed like a safe thing to say based on what she knew of AFC lore. Close enough, in any case. “He seems to like you, though. Don’t push your luck.”
Gervyn immediately looked like he wanted to push his luck as far as it could go. He was already the most Gervyn person she had ever encountered. She had repeatedly read all four books about this child and somehow he was still more than she had expected. Maybe he mellowed with age?
Definitely not, she decided, eyeing him.
“Go find your siblings,” she said, before he could try said luck. “Tell them I’m in the garden. And don’t run near the workers, you’ll knock someone over. Or Theo will.”
“Yes ma’am! Milady!” He spun around and started running, Theo joyously at his heels, directly toward where the gardeners where (not) working. She watched him go with the feeling she was getting used to: fond, slightly exhausted, and faintly terrified on his behalf. Surprisingly, it was pretty close to how she felt about the older version of him in the books.
The gardeners slowly returned to work after boy and dog passed by. None of them said anything. The one who had stepped back was still a half-pace further away than he’d started, and showed no signs of correcting it.
Sarait continued shoving the reluctant chair down the walkway. A few minutes later, Robern arrived first. Of course he did, Teri thought with chagrin, recognizing the Type A type. He was sixteen, the eldest, and felt responsible for everything, which Teri found both admirable and heartbreakingly relatable. He came around the path at a measured walk, with a carefully held posture, and stopped a polite distance from her chair.
“Milady.” A pause, a bow. “Are you, uh, enjoying the garden?” He looked at the wheelchair with a complicated expression: he wanted to help and wasn’t sure if offering would be welcome.
“The garden is bumpy,” she said. “But the air is good. Come relieve Lady Sarait of her burden, and tell me what you know about the pavilion layout as we go. You’ve been watching the workers, haven’t you?”
The relief on his face, that she had given him something useful to do rather than just stand there, was not subtle. He took Lady Sariat’s place and started pushing Teri’s chair, his height and strength making the journey slightly less wobbly and incremental. He explained what he’d observed about the eastern pavilion and the logic of the support structure, and Teri listened and asked questions and thought that in another life this boy would have made an extraordinary architect or engineer. Too bad in seven years he’d be dead.
The twins arrived together, because they always arrived together, which was either solidarity or tactics and possibly both. Aurguth came slightly ahead, marching boldly into battle. Vycette came a half-step behind, watching her sister (and everything else) carefully.
They stopped. Looked at the wheelchair. Looked at Teri. The gardeners near the eastern wall found reasons to be interested in something in the opposite direction.
“You’re outside,” Aurguth said, cocking her head in curiosity.
“I am.”
“Dourwin said you weren’t supposed to go outside until the end of the week.” Vycette offered judgmentally.
“Dourwin said I wasn’t supposed to go outside unassisted.” She gestured at Sariat and Robern. “I’m assisted.”
Aurguth seemed appeased, but Vycette’s eyes moved to Theo, who had reappeared from wherever he and Gervyn had gotten to and trotted over to stand at Teri’s side. Lady Sariat stepped away just a little. Teri considered it progress.
Theo watched the twins with focused, assessing attention. The twins watched him back.
“He played with Gervyn,” Vycette said. It wasn’t a question, more like an accusation.
“He did.”
Another pause, loaded with obvious distrust. Then Vycette’s gaze moved back to her, sharp and measuring. At twelve she already had the quality that would eventually make her “the Revant Mage,” that sense of someone who was always playing a longer game than the one in front of them.
“Are we allowed at the gala this year?” Aurguth asked. Her tone was careful, and she glanced between Robern and Vycette as she asked.
Confused for a moment, Teri looked at them—all four of them now, because Gervyn had reappeared and was hovering at the edge of the group with a stick in his hand, apparently having abandoned the idea of getting Theo to fetch it. Robern had gone quiet behind her.
She thought about what she knew: Ferdiff didn’t like his children and had kept them firmly on the seen but not heard end of every social occasion he attended before he died at the end of book one. The speculation in fandom, never verified by Fuckin’ Chad, was that none of the kids were actually his. If a man like Ferdiff thought he had been cuckolded by the woman he was obsessed with, then it was more of a miracle that the kids were still alive at all. Shoving them out of sight was, on the whole, a merciful approach. She thought about the ball in three days and the guest list Roos had summarized for her and the political tightrope she was already walking.
A promise was a dangerous thing to make to children who had learned not to trust promises.
She reminded herself that this was just a damn coma dream, and she could do what she wanted.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “You’ll be there. Properly, and not just for the presentation and then sent upstairs. The dancing, the dinner, all of it.” She looked at Vycette, who was trying very hard not to look like this mattered. “You’ll need appropriate clothes. Lady Sariat will arrange it.”
Beside her, Lady Sariat made a small, surprised sound that was definitely approval.
“Father won’t like it,” Robern began.
“He’s not here.” Teri said, waving her hand around. “Leave your father to me.”
She said it with more confidence than she felt, which was a skill she had developed over twenty-three years of university administration and was discovering transferred surprisingly well to medieval countess-ing. Robern looked at her with caution, and a little bit of awe.
Gervyn dropped his stick. “Can Theo come?”
“Theo goes where I go,” she said. “So, yes.”
Gervyn pumped his fist with enthusiasm, which made Theo bark, and that startled one of the gardeners to drop a trowel.
Teri looked at Vycette again, and found her already being looked at with that steady, measuring gaze that gave nothing away.
“Thank you, milady,” Vycette said finally. Perfectly correct. Perfectly neutral.
Teri nodded, equally neutral. It was probably a mistake to allow the kids to attend, she thought.
But it was a coma-dream, so what did it matter?
NEXT: Gala, Interrupted
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Somehow I’m thinking those last words are going to come back and haunt her.