“Not naturally, but you’ve been traveling between dimensions,” he said. “The membrane that adheres to you should be enough to power . . . never mind.” He shook his head, clearly abandoning the thought. “I know you can’t have been doing your own ink, not if it’s magically-imbued, and whatever your artist told you has to be what we go by. But Alice, what was the charm you just activated?”

  “Contraception charm,” I said. “I have five more. I don’t think we want to be heading back to Earth with me pregnant, and I think we both have a concerted interest in repeating the activity that might risk it. I don’t have an implant, and I don’t travel with condoms.”

  Thomas blinked. “What ‘implant?”

  “It’s one of the options women have for contraception these days,” I said. “If you have one, you won’t get pregnant, even if you’re sexually active.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I’m sure catching me up on the ways the world has changed will be the work of several years.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “As am I. But Alice . . . why did you need contraception charms?”

  “I’m a woman who’s mostly been traveling alone through some dodgy places, filled with pretty dodgy people,” I said. “It seemed like, well. Better safe than sorry if that makes sense. And it never happened.” It seemed suddenly very important to be sure he understood that. “I was being cautious, for once, and I was always, always armed, and the sort of people who want that sort of thing were usually the sort of people who didn’t want to be shot repeatedly.”

  “So why so many, if it was just a precaution?”

  “Oh, because it turns out they don’t just work to counter possible pregnancy,” I said. “They also work on parasites and oviposited larvae.”

  He was silent for a long moment, but I could see his jaw working as he chewed over what he was going to say next, so I waited for him to catch up with his own thoughts. Finally, slowly, he said, “Alice, why do you know that?”

  “A surprising number of the dimensions adjacent to Earth are overrun with Apraxis wasps,” I said. “Seems like once they get in there, they tend to take over, and they see anyone who passes through as an opportunity to expand the hive mind.”

  “And did you learn this before or after you started requesting contraception tattoos?”

  “It takes three days from implant to hatch. I made it to Empusa on time.” I’d collapsed on Naga’s doorstep with almost eight hours left before the infant Apraxis finished their gestation and emerged from my flesh, chewing their way out of me and swallowing my mind in the process. I’d been shaky and unsure of who I was for days after that, although there hadn’t been any permanent damage that we’d ever been able to confirm. Naga had been so angry.

  His anger was nothing to what I saw now, brewing in Thomas’ eyes. “And you kept going in that direction?”

  “It seemed promising,” I said. “Contraception charms are small. They don’t take up a lot of skin.”

  “That’s not why I’m . . . Alice, didn’t you ever stop to ask yourself whether it was worth it, if finding me meant you had to put yourself through that?”

  “No,” I said. “Never.”

  He was silent for a moment, and then said in a measured tone, “It’s been long enough that I don’t know whether I get to say I don’t approve—I rather feel like I lost that privilege when the crossroads took me away from you and our children—but I don’t like it. You are precious to me, Alice. You have always been precious to me, even when we’ve been far apart from one another. The idea of someone harming you makes me want to harm them. So how am I meant to react when the person doing the harm is you, to yourself?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that, other than with anger, and anger didn’t feel like the right reaction, not yet. Still, a part of me wanted to rage. How dare he? After all this time, after I’d done all this work, how dare he judge me for how I’d done it? He was lucky I’d bothered to come for him at all, when he was the one who’d sold himself to the crossroads in the first place. I could have stayed in Buckley with my babies. I could have learned how to let go. Mary had been more than willing to help me do that if I’d wanted to. And instead, I’d chosen fifty years of running and bleeding and loneliness, for the sake of a man who wanted to judge me?

  Even as the anger flared in my chest, I did my best to damp it down, reminding myself that he had made his bargain to save my life. If he hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be here because I’d be dead. All my other choices had been my own. The only person who’d done any of this to me was me.

  “I did what I had to do,” I said. “I’d do it all over again if I knew this was where we’d wind up. And I’m not sure I approve of all your choices, either. To start with, what’s with this whole Autarch deal? The last thing I expected to do was get here and find out that my husband has turned into some sort of dystopian warlord—and with a harem, no less!”

  “A . . . harem? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t all those women belong to you?”

  “God, no.” He looked horrified enough by the idea that I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Good,” I said. “Because just so we’re clear, I don’t plan on sharing you with any other wives.”

  “I forgot how adorable you were when you let yourself give in to jealousy,” he said, with the kind of smile that meant he was suppressing a laugh.

  I glared at him. “I’m glad you’re finding this amusing, but given that when I woke up—again, let me stress, basically naked—the first person I met told me I was in the women’s quarters, and all newcomers were under the protection of the Autarch, perhaps you can see how I might have gotten the wrong impression.”

  “Yes, and I’m sorry about that,” he said. “The situation is . . . somewhat complicated, and I owe you an explanation.” He sat up, leaning back against the wall beside me with his shoulder touching mine, and reached out to intertwine my fingers with his, apparently feeling safe to do so. I didn’t pull away. We had a lot of unpleasant conversations ahead of us, and we had to hold onto each other.

  “When I first arrived here, I landed in the middle of a war,” he said. “The crossroads threw anyone they’d made a bargain with and wanted to dispose of into this convenient killing jar, and some of those people . . . well, weren’t very nice. They were killing each other. I arrived and realized I would have to put a stop to it if I wanted things to be stable enough to let me research a way out of here. So I took over.”

  He made it sound so simple. From the shadows in his eyes, it had been anything but. He looked like a man who’d seen things he could never unsee, done things he could never undo, and regretted that fact every day of his life.

  “Some of the people making war on their neighbors were doing it for the control of resources,” he continued, looking down at his hands, resting as they were between his knees. “Water is scarce here. Food was equally so before we began establishing the necessary safety to let us tend our fields. Both of those were things to be controlled.”

  “Guessing ‘women’ also made that list, huh?” I ventured.

  Thomas nodded miserably. “Not only women—the strong enslaved the weak without much regard for gender—but yes. They were in hell. This is a hell world, and they were literally in hell. So when I took everything else as my own, I took the people as well. But it isn’t quite how it appears.”

  I raised my eyebrows and said nothing, giving him the space to continue.

  Thomas sighed. “I became Autarch by killing the previous Autarch, but he wasn’t the only—how did you put it?—dystopian warlord this world had produced. There are still other factions here who are very much in that mold, and over the years I’ve found the most effective strategy is to let them believe that I’m cut from the same cloth, only stronger and more ruthless. If my people suspect a new arrival may have been sent to infiltrate our ranks, we don’t let them see how things truly operate until we know if they can be trusted.”

  “So all that was just . . . what, a show for my benefit?”

  “Much of it, yes. Do you really think all those women have nothing better to do than sit around all day pretending to be my concubines?”

  “I’m sure some of them wouldn’t mind,” I muttered. “And I can see how Sally might be your type.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “My ‘type’?”

  “Human, stubborn, likes to get into fights?”

  “If I have a type, it’s only because of you,” he retorted. “Sally was seventeen when she arrived in this dimension, and even were I not a married man, if you’ll recall, I refused to see you in that manner until you were well into your twenties. What’s more, Sally has no interest in the male of her species. She’s quite content to serve as my lieutenant, and she has no illusions about our relationship.”

  He looked at his free hand, where his wedding ring caught the light. “I can’t say others didn’t offer, but I never took any of them up on it. It would have meant admitting that I had given up all hope of ever getting home. I couldn’t do that. Not to you, and not to our children, and most of all, not to myself. Some days, the pretty lie of finding a way out of here was all that could keep me from giving in to despair.”

  I didn’t say anything, just tightened my fingers around his. Thomas flashed me a quick, grateful look before looking away again, like this was all easier to say when he didn’t have to face me as he said it.

  “So you thought I was another of those crossroads assassins,” I said, and shook my head. “But why were the crossroads trying to kill you? They already had you. I thought the point for them was to torture you as much as possible, and being trapped in hell seems worse than just being dead.”

  “You would think so. But ‘the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a Hell of heaven.”

  “Now you’ve lost me.”

  “I’m a sorcerer,” he said. “A fully trained, adult sorcerer who understands what my own magic is capable of. This world doesn’t have much magic remaining to it, but everyone the crossroads deposited here was ripped through multiple dimensional walls on their way to the final barrier, and they landed with a heavy harvest weighing them down. With their consent, I’ve been collecting it all this time, and using it to power various passive effects.”

  “Like the Keep Out signs Sally was talking about?”

  “Yes, those are a major one. I can’t actually close the border between us and the world we’re still somehow connected to, but I can make it more difficult to penetrate. The translation spell that runs through the public areas is another. It slows language acquisition on the occasions when someone new does arrive, but also eases integration sufficiently that we have fewer conflicts and less panic. For the most part, my people cooperate to our common advantage, and we have no slavery, rape, or murder. I suspect the crossroads didn’t care for my improvements to their terrarium.”

  “They wouldn’t,” I said. “So if the biggest standing spell is the barrier, what happens to the linguistics when you run out of magic taken from new arrivals?”

  “We’re working on learning to speak to each other outside the spell’s border,” he replied. “I don’t have enough personal magic in this world to fuel that one on my own. The barrier will hold until it doesn’t. You were the first person to arrive in some time.”

  I paused. “About three years?”

  “Yes. How did you—”

  “I think I might know why that is, but it’s going to take a long time to explain and just distract us from the conversation we’re trying very badly not to have, so if you could trust me on this? I don’t think you need the barrier anymore.” The crossroads wasn’t going to be pitching anyone through the walls of the universe, and the locals on Cornale hadn’t been the sort to go hunting for ways into the dead world they hated.

  Thomas looked at me gravely for a long, long moment before he said, “I’ll trust you, providing you will explain at some point. And I’ll answer the question we’re both avoiding first, but once I do, I’ll expect the same reply from you.”

  “Of course.”

  “Very well, then. Using the magic I get from new arrivals to fuel the standing spells has freed up my own, limited as it is here, for more selfish uses.” He let go of my hand to press two fingers to the tattoo on his throat. “This anchors a spell that keeps me from aging at the customary rate. It took me five years to design it and gather the necessary strength to power it, but once started, it continued running, and will until I make it stop.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged, looking briefly sheepish. “I still had hope, five years in, that I was clever enough to find a way out of this place, out of this predicament. If I could return to the wider reality, I could navigate my way home. I knew I needed to get back to you and the children before too much time had passed, and I know time can run at different rates in different dimensions. So I . . . stopped myself, for lack of a better phrasing.”

  He’d been afraid of the same thing I was: of adding too much time to the distance between us and not being able to find his way home. “That makes sense. Was that always something you could do?”

  “It’s something any sorcerer who’s managed to grow past their element can do,” he said. “Which brings us to the part I suspect I’m not going to like very much.”

  “I know what you want to ask,” I said. “So go ahead. Ask.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath, before he opened them, looked at me, and said, “If I were a betting man, I’d lay odds that right now, physically, you’re not of legal drinking age in the United States, unless it’s been lowered to nineteen while I’ve been gone.”

  “Nope,” I said. “It’s still twenty-one.” Thomas might be the only person who could look at me and accurately estimate the current age of my body. He’d been there the first time I passed through all these years, when I’d been moving at the normal rate, and not going in jumps and starts. “But I was never a big drinker, unless you count the cooking sherry.”

  “I’ve looked you over fairly thoroughly at this point, and none of the tattoos I’ve seen have been keyed to counteract aging. Nor would they be enough, as single-use charms, unless they were activated as soon as time had passed, and then you’d have no room left for anything else.”

  “That’s not how we’ve been putting me back together.”

  “So what have you been doing?”

  “Oh, it’s easy,” I said brightly, and began to explain the process, starting with the moment when they lowered me into the bath and continuing until I passed out. He only interrupted twice, the first time to ask if I was awake for the whole process, and the second time to ask how many sessions I’d been through. Neither of my answers seemed to make him very happy. After the second he got off the bed and started pacing around the room, still naked. It would have been funny, if he hadn’t looked like he was getting ready to murder someone with his bare hands. I shrank back into the pillows.

  “Thomas?” I asked, voice small. “Are you mad at me?”

  “What? No. If anything, at myself. I should have anticipated that you’d continue to be yourself after I was gone and would orchestrate some means of coming after me. And I should absolutely, without question, have prepared you better to take care of yourself out there. This was all predictable. I should have seen it coming.” He turned to look at me. “I am, of course, absolutely furious with your adoptive uncle, and will be seeing how much he enjoys being skinned alive while forced to remain conscious and aware of the entire process, although I’m afraid I lack the stomach or the malice to put him through the process once for every time he had it done to you. He’ll die much more quickly than I believe is fair, or just, but at times we must accept our limitations.” His eyes were hard. “As long as he dies screaming, I’ll consider this debt paid.”

  I watched from the bed as he resumed his pacing, a frown on my own face “I don’t understand why you’re so angry,” I said. “Naga has been helping me. If it weren’t for him, I would never have been able to stay alive long enough to find you. I’ve been injured pretty badly a whole bunch of times now—badly as in ‘verge of death’ badly. And he’s always gotten me back on my feet.”

  “Back on your feet, covered in carnival charms, and back to making him the richest man in his home dimension,” Thomas snapped, before he paused and looked at my expression. Visibly calming himself, he walked back to the bed and sat on the very edge, twisting so he could watch me as he spoke. “He told you that you needed single-use charms because you weren’t a sorcerer, correct?”

  “Correct,” I said warily.

  “That’s true under normal circumstances. If you’re not magically gifted, you can’t draw on the pneuma yourself. You can use portable charms and objects, like the darks that people make for bogeymen, regardless of any inborn capabilities. Tattoos are a riskier proposition. They’re anchored to your flesh, and if you haven’t the magic to power them, they’ll consume you instead. I would never risk a non-practitioner with magical tattooing.” His voice turned hard again at the end, and I had to fight the urge to shrink away.

  This was Thomas. He was the man I’d married, the man I’d thrown away everything to make my way back to. More, he was naked. While I was naked, too, my mother’s guns were at the foot of the bed in easy reach. If things went poorly, I’d bet on me before I’d bet on him.

  “But those are normal circumstances,” he continued. “In the case of someone like a routewitch, who can use distance itself to fuel their magic, tattooing is much safer.”

  “I’m not a routewitch,” I protested.

  “No, but you’ve been traveling between dimensions. Remember how they work? Every time someone passes between worlds, a trace of the pneuma from the membrane separating them adheres to the traveler’s skin. It’s why snake cults remain so popular.”