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Section 1
### Chapter 1: Chapter One
Sometimes Mira wondered how common it was to not know how you died. In her experience, it was about 50/50. There were some deaths -illness, deprivation, and other slow endings- that she remembered in great detail and some where she’d only realized that she’d died until well after the fact. As she opened her eyes in an unfamiliar bed with her heart in her throat, she realized that this was one of those occasions. There were some bits that she remembered surrounding the incident that made her think that -whatever had happened- it was at least quick. She remembered being stopped in traffic, on her way to work, not really doing anything except trying to find a radio station that had music and no people talking. Then? Nothing. Whatever happened must have hurt because when she did wake up, she was so convinced that she was dying that it took several minutes for her to realize that she was somewhere else and that nothing hurt. It took a few more still before she realized she was some one else too. Mira lay flat on her back, staring at a plasterwork ceiling rose overhead as she cataloged her circumstances. She was in a bed. That was good. She was dressed, even, in a high necked nightgown trimmed with (she lifted an arm to check) exquisite needle lace cuffs. The bed itself was a solid four poster canopy bed surrounded on all sides by heavy, light blocking and insulating drapes that hung from brass rods set into the ceiling. One side was parted slightly and gave a view of the room, which was small and well-appointed—albeit impersonal. Something itched in the back of her head and whispered ‘hotel.’ She covered her face with both hands and fought the urge to groan, unable to deny it any longer. She’d died. Again. The reason she couldn’t make any noise just yet was because someone was moving about the room, trying to stay quiet, but in the way a servant would as opposed to an assassin. In a perfect world, she wouldn’t have to worry about the latter, but she didn’t manifest in living bodies. She entered the body almost as soon as the former occupant left it, so whatever killed them, either accident or illness, was usually still around when she woke up. Mira lay quietly and watched the gap in the bed drapes until a young woman passed by in a neat, yet practical blue dress with a peter pan collar and long cuffed sleeves under a loose charcoal-colored cross back apron that was designed for comfort and ease of movement. She wore her light brown hair braided away from her face so there was no disguising the reddened rims of her eyes as she carried a tray to Mira’s bedside. On the tray was a pitcher of water, a small tureen of thin soup, and an invalid’s cup. The woman didn’t have the busy demeanor Mira tended to associate with nurses so this was a maid, or however they referred to domestic staff in this new place. Sometimes Mira got very tired of learning how to live in new places. Her last life had been comparatively long, but had started in infancy. She’d woken up in the NICU that time. At least she was a bit older this time around. Being a baby might seem relaxing if you’d never been a fully conscious adult trapped in a body that couldn’t even roll over on its own, but the reality of the situation depended entirely on the circumstance you were born into and Mira hated feeling helpless above all things. In any event, the maid seemed unhappy, but not like she resented her work so Mira didn’t bother with pretending to be asleep when the girl set her tray down and opened the drapes. “Oh!” the girl chirped, surprised when she saw Mira’s eyes were open. “Miss, you’re awake!” It sounded like that came as a surprise. She crouched down at the bedside. “How are you feeling? Does anything hurt? You’ve been unconscious since yesterday. Do you think you can take some water?” Mira was still settling into her body by degrees. She knew from experience that it took a little bit before she started to receive those usual bodily communications everyone takes for granted like hunger, thirst, and pain. Her tongue was dry in her mouth. It wasn’t very bad right now, but she was certain that she would feel much worse later if she didn’t drink something now. “Yes, water,” she rasped. The girl filled the invalid cup and hitched her hip up on the edge of the mattress to help Mira sit up in bed. They took it slowly, letting Mira first wet her throat and then hold mouthfuls of water until her tongue stopped feeling like leather. She’d been a little worried about having servants again, but her host body had either treated this girl well in the past or hadn’t treated her so badly that she took it personally. “Do you think you can try to eat a little, miss?” the maid asked hesitantly. “I have a thin potage for you to try.” “Was I nauseous before?” Mira asked. The one place where a person in her situation could get away with asking strange questions was the sick bed and she intended to make full use of this opportunity. “You don’t remember?” the maid asked, sounding worried. “It’s fuzzy,” Mira dropped her gaze so she didn’t have to guess at what the original owner of this body would have done. The women whose lives she inherited tended to follow a certain trend so she had a vague idea of what to do, but the devil liked to hide amongst seemingly inconsequential details. “What happened?” “You had a seizure, miss,” the maid explained in a halting tone. That stirred something in her head. Mira closed her eyes and let the memory wash over her, relieved to be getting any memory at all. Sometimes she didn’t and those lives were especially hard. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. She remembered waiting in a small, well-appointed sitting room as she stared at the door with her fists clenched in her lap. Finally the door opened, admitting an older woman in a severe suit dress with a tall collar that was softened only slightly by the black-on-black cabling down her front. Her lips were pursed and pale with tension as she came over to stand in front of Mira. “They’re not coming, Miss Violet,” she said. “Sir Fenby has decided not to pursue the connection between you and young master Gawain. There is no welcome letter.” The memory didn’t convey the exact thoughts Mira’s host had about this welcome later, but she could feel Violet’s simmering anxiety boil over into a full fledged panic attack that spiraled and spiraled and spiraled until the memory cut off altogether. Presumably that was when the seizure hit. Mira was in luck, though, because that memory triggered others and finally fleshed out the most immediate details of her present situation. The maid’s name was Annette Byrde, called Anna, and she was Violet’s chief attendant. The woman in the dark suit dress was Matron Clotilde Byrde, Violet’s housekeeper and former nanny. The sitting room in her memory was decorated in a style close enough to this bedroom that Mira suspected it was part of the hotel suite she was staying in. Anna said she’d been unconscious since yesterday. Mira wasn’t sure yet why she was in the hotel or why she’d been so afraid before the seizure, but one thing at a time. What she had been able to piece together from the remnants of Violet’s tumultuous feelings was that Violet had been a very sheltered young woman and had never had only herself to rely on before. ‘Poor lamb,’ Mira thought, not without sympathy. Given all the clues she now had at hand, she was able to hazard a guess about what had happened to her host body. Violet had been alone in a stranger place and scared with only a few servants for support. She had been counting on a marriage to save her from her uncertain future and that marriage did not materialize. Normally, she should have survived a little upset. Humans were resilient, but she’d already been stressed and had a medical condition; possibly even one she didn’t know about. The seizure had come as a brutal surprise in Violet’s final memories. She hadn’t understood what was happening to her. “Has a doctor come?” Mira asked. That was the important thing right now. She wasn’t a sheltered child. Given two assistants and a little bit of money, she could probably conquer the world. However, a seizure disorder wasn’t something Mira could handle without specialist care. So, the good news: her room and the quality of her servant’s clothes suggested this society had been through or was in the midst of an industrial revolution. She’d come to learn that fabrics, especially fabrics that the middle and lower classes could afford for an ordinary work day, were a good signifier of a culture’s technological capability. Her most junior servant was wearing machine-woven cotton with machine-stitched seams, which usually started out expensive and then got very cheap once there were enough factories to make it accessible to the masses, so the medical technology around here couldn’t be too primitive. General medicine and mass production tended to develop at around the same pace in her experience. Mira was actually surprised there wasn’t a doctor in the room already. It had been a day, at most, since the seizure. Actually, that was a worrisome thought. Was there no money for a doctor? Mira had been hoping that this body was wealthy, just going by her gown and this room. Her host bodies were almost never poor and even when that did happen, it was more like a rich person’s idea of poverty than the real thing. Violet had been very scared for herself before the seizure took her. She may have come from a privileged background, but Mira knew that even the best fortunes could turn sour with very little warning. Anna nodded, though. Thank goodness. “Yes, Doctor Lister gave us instructions to let you wake up naturally and said you’d be fine afterwards, although he did show me how to help you drink if you slept for too long. He said you should try to eat a little when you wake up.” How strange. There’d been an attending doctor, but he didn’t notice his patient’s heart had stopped? Mira wasn’t very familiar with the processes that her host body went through before she was injected into it since her hosts tended to be neglected by their guardians, but medical professionals could usually tell that something bad had nearly happened to her if they examined her in time. She’d woken up under defibrillator paddles before, in other lives. Maybe she was expecting too much from a house call? Mira nodded to herself since that did seem reasonable and let Anna help her up. She ended up needing the help too. Something was wrong with her coordination and her grip was weak so her attempts to hold the cup by herself didn’t go at all well. Of all the ways she and her host bodies had died, seizures were new to her so she didn’t know if this was normal or not. She knew what to do in an emergency for someone else, but that was a far cry from actually managing an epileptic condition by herself. Anna patiently fed her until Mira felt like she’d had enough for the moment. Then she helped Mira sit all the way up and arranged the bed cushions so that they supported her back. “I’ll alert Matron Byrde as soon as she returns,” Anna said as she picked up the tray and bobbed a small curtsey. “She is picking up your mail from the post office.” “Call a different doctor to examine me when she returns,” Mira instructed. She was too weak, even after water and a meal. Something was wrong. Whatever relationship Violet had with that other doctor, he’d clearly blown her off. Mira couldn’t trust any diagnosis from someone like that. “I’d like a second opinion.” Not only did Anna not argue, but she agreed with enough speed that Mira got the impression that she wasn’t the only person unhappy with the quality of service they’d received. That made her feel a bit better on Violet’s behalf. At least someone had cared about her welfare. That wasn’t usually the case for her hosts. Anna drew back the bed curtains when she returned and revealed the rest of the room. The sight of it didn’t stir any memories beyond ‘this is a hotel room’, but it was pleasantly situated with a sturdy little cast iron stove across from the foot of her bed. The presence of two matched floor lamps with silk fringe and incandescent light bulbs further confirmed Mira’s earlier suspicions about Violet’s background and the level of technology in this society. They had electricity, which meant they probably had the crucial comfort of interior plumbing. If she never saw another chamber pot ever again in any of her future lives then that would still be too soon. Anna opened the grate on the stove to toss in some table scraps and, to Mira’s surprise and delight, a little fire elemental popped its head up out of the black belly of the stove to snap them out of midair. It looked like a little axolotl with blue flames for gills. She recognized it as a common Salamander phenotype. Mira felt her heart start to race and clenched her fists under the cover of the blankets to keep from showing her excitement.
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### Chapter 2: Chapter Two
Starting over in a new life was never easy, but this was the first time in a very, very long time that she’d lived in a society with general access to both sophisticated industrial technology and magic. Humans always seemed to prioritize one over the other even in worlds where both were possible, so she hardly ever landed in a world like this and those worlds always ended up being one of her favorites. Mira got more hints about Violet’s circumstances when Anna brought over a box of cosmetics and lotions. Neither of them brought up the possibility of her getting out of the bed. If she couldn’t hold her own cup then Mira wasn’t ready to see what it would be like if she tried to walk so she submitted to being wiped down and made up while still in bed. The soaps and lotions Anna brought out all had the faint scent of magic to them and Anna used it all with the kind of confidence that said she wasn’t concerned about replacing anything that got used up. Anna didn’t seem stupid or careless, so that implied good things about Mira’s financial situation. Just because Violet had been frightened to death about her prospects didn’t mean she had no personal assets; just that she had no experience managing personal property nor any idea of how to start. Hopefully that was the case. If not, then Mira had a lot of work to do and no healthy body to do it with and that would be hard. Matron Byrde returned from her errands just as Anna finished putting Mira’s hair back up into a silk bed cap. Mira didn’t notice her right away until she heard a soft ‘oh!’ from the open door. The older woman from her earlier memory stood just inside with a coat draped over one forearm and her fingertips resting gently on the doorframe. She had soft, gentle features and wore her graying hair up in a cottage loaf pompadour. Looking at her evoked a slew of memories–enough to know that this was not only Violet’s nanny, but she was also a major maternal figure in Violet’s life. Nanny Byrde had once been Violet’s mother’s personal attendant and got promoted to nanny when her mistress died in childbirth. Violet’s memories of her nanny were all of soft hands and Nanny Byrde’s blatant partisanship on her behalf. Violet’s relationship with her family looked strained in those memories so Nanny Byrde must have been her central support while growing up. It was no wonder, then, that the older woman went along when Violet left home to be married. Another realization Mira had, and this one was less welcome, was that she should have been able to see Nanny Byrde in her peripheral vision from where she was seated. There was something wrong with one of her eyes. “Miss, you’re awake,” Nanny Byrde dumped her coat and hat on one of the chairs near at hand and hurried over to fuss over Mira. “How are you feeling? Have you had anything to eat or drink?” “I’m fine,” Mira’s hands came up to cover Nanny Byrde’s seemingly of their own volition, which confirmed that Violet had had a closer than usual relationship with this woman. Mira had had biological mothers who didn’t touch her with this much care, including her first one. “A bit confused,” she added. “Anna helped me take some water and soup.” “Good girls, good girls,” Nanny sighed. “What’s this about confusion , miss?” Mira was an old hand at this particular con, but it was still frightening every time she had to do it; like putting your foot over a ledge and trusting there would be a glass bridge there to catch you. “I’m having trouble remembering things,” she admitted, making sure to sell her hesitation and vulnerability. It wasn’t difficult. She was scared. She was confused. So, those feelings were available for her to draw on. “She didn’t remember the seizure earlier, but I’ve heard that’s normal surrounding a fainting spell,” Anna admitted as she stepped back to give Nanny room to fuss. “Are you having trouble remembering anything else, miss?” “Most things,” Mira ducked her head and concentrated on the feeling of lowering her eyelids. Only one of them moved and the urge to touch her face was overwhelming. Nanny and Anna didn’t seem to think anything was wrong with her face so whatever was wrong with her eye had been wrong since before the seizure. She’d been thinking that Violet’s engagement had fallen through for financial reasons, but that might not be the case. What had happened to this child? “The memories are there,” she hastened to reassure Nanny, who’d gone a ghastly shade of greenish white. “They just seem to need prompting. I remembered a bit of the incident in the sitting room when Anna mentioned it, but… everything feels so vague.” Nanny nodded slowly. “I–I understand, miss. Anna, use my crystal to call the doctor back…” Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. “A different doctor, please, Anna,” Mira reminded her. “...the Capitol Teaching Hospital then,” Nanny corrected herself. She didn’t argue with Mira’s direction either and she pivoted smoothly enough that she had to have already been considering alternatives. “Describe Miss Violet’s condition to the dispatch nurse and ask for the best visiting physician who is available and don’t…” “I won’t use her name,” Anna promised, which was an interesting wrinkle. Was there a scandal going on that Mira didn’t know about? Was that why Violet’s marriage failed? “The petty cash chit is in my reticule. Use that if they ask you to pay a deposit,” Nanny directed and Anna hurried out of the bedroom. “I remembered you as soon as you walked in,” Mira consoled her former-nanny before she could ask and that did seem to help as some of the tension seeped out of Nanny’s shoulders. “It took a moment to remember Anna though.” “She’s new, dearie,” Nanny sighed as she pulled a chair over to the side of Mira’s bed. “I don’t have any doubts about her loyalties. She’s my sister’s girl and I hired her special when we learned that we’d have to leave your lord father’s house. I didn’t want to take any of the girls your stepmother sent over the years.” She looked away and huffed at the mere thought of it. While the words ‘your lord father’ didn’t pay out any useful memories, it was a useful hint about who she was in this world and where she fit into it. ‘Your stepmother’ evoked a sense of anxious nausea and a brief flash of a woman with red hair and golden eyes who always seemed to be looking down at Violet from a great height. “Were they that bad?” Mira asked, wondering just how broken that relationship was. Maybe, if she was lucky, she’d been totally disowned and would never have to deal with the woman personally. Nanny glanced back at her and softened once more. “Nothing too sinister, dearie. They were just very stupid and prone to thoughtless chit chat. They never had bad intentions, but if we’d brought any of them along then they’d soon give your private business away in exchange for a pat on the head. Anna is a friendly girl, but she understands what you can and cannot say to outsiders.” “Why did we leave my father’s house?” Mira asked. Might as well go for the big question. “I remember you saying that a Sir Fenby would not send us a welcome letter.” Actually, even just saying the words ‘welcome letter’ stirred up yet more memories. These were less episodic and felt more like she was recalling something she’d learnt once, but then forgot. The ‘welcome letter’ was part of the marriage process in this world. Interestingly, there wasn’t just one kind of marriage although the exact details of the different types eluded Mira at present, but what she could remember was that Violet was in the middle of the process of a common citizen’s civil union when everything came apart. Civil unions took place in two parts; Violet had to be released from one family and then formally welcomed into the other. That, then, must be where the ‘welcome letter’ came in. Mira closed her eyes as she triggered yet more memories of Violet’s last anxious days. She hadn’t wanted the marriage, that was sure, but she also felt cornered by something else. Sir Fenby must have waited until after Violet was released by her birth family to break the news that he’d be reneging on the engagement. What a piece of garbage. “Perhaps it would be better to wait until the doctor has come to see you,” Nanny said as she hesitated. “Dear, you had a nasty shock already and look what happened.” “Then reassure me,” Mira said, trying a different angle. “How secure are we here? Do I have money to support us?” Fortunately, Nanny just chuckled and tapped Mira’s chin fondly with one knuckle. “There’s nothing to be concerned about there, miss. I’ve managed your accounts since you were a little girl and you’ve never been a hard spender. Even if we only had your leftover allowance, we could all live comfortably on that for some time without needing to budget. There’s also your bridal properties, which I haven’t yet shown you. There wasn’t time before, but we can do it now if that will set your mind at ease. Shall I get the ledger?” “Yes, please,” Mira replied and was pleased to find, once Nanny brought over a little maroon leather folio, that Violet was a very wealthy young woman. Not only was there her savings, but -whatever her relationship was with her father- he’d sent her off with a substantial dowry and an experienced manager for it all in the form of Nanny Byrde. There was a lump sum of cash from him in addition to a few properties, mostly shop space that had already been rented out to long term tenants that generated a tidy monthly income, but then she discovered that she also had received a townhouse, several businesses, and two hefty annuity funds through her biological mother. “...the millinery and the dry goods shops are managed, along with the rental properties, by an agent’s office for the moment,” Nanny explained. “They settle rents monthly and profits from the shops quarterly. You also have some money invested in the Four Percent Fund, which pays out annually. So, dearie, even if you lived in this hotel for the rest of your life and did nothing except eat bonbons, you won’t ever have to worry about expenses or paying your staff.” That came as a relief, but Mira had the persistent feeling that Violet knew nothing of this. Nothing Nanny had said stirred a single memory for her, as if it was all new information to this body, and she couldn’t help but wonder if Violet would still be here if someone had had the foresight to sit her down and explain her resources to her. In fact, just looking at the ledger gave her a subtle sense of wrongness, like her absent memories were trying to project something else into that space and failing. “Nanny…” Mira glanced over at Nanny Byrde. The word ‘nanny’ sprang so naturally to her lips when addressing the older woman so it must be what Violet had called her. Muscle memory to the rescue! “...this doesn’t feel right. I can’t think of what’s wrong, though, it just seems like too much.”
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