In her dream, there were three deities—two goddesses and one god—all tall and golden and brimming with power. The male god paced like a tiger, alternately restles and still. "Send her back," he said. "She's weak and frail and ugly, not like Eloise at all. She won't survive."  But the middle goddess, who was tall and achingly beautiful, shook her head and touched Jane's shoulder... 

When Jane woke, it was past dawn. For a moment, she lay with her eyes closed, trying to remember other details of her dream.  The middle goddess had said something about Jane being carefully chosen... that Jane would go home when she completed three godstests and Wrote in the Book of Truths... And there had been some mention of rules...

Groggily, Jane opened her eyes and sat up. She wished she could remember more. Perhaps if her back didn't smart so much from lying on the ground... if her head didn't ache from lack of sleep...

Nikolay sat beside her. He looked tired too, and Jane wondered if he had slept at all. Absently, he rubbed his right forearm; Jane thought she saw him wince. A book lay open in his lap.

"You're awake." He did not look up from the book. "Eat quickly. We leave in ten minutes."

Jane accepted the tasteless porridge offered by one of the Riders. Then she did a double-take.

"That's my textbook."

"Yes." Nikolay glared down at the letters as though they had personally offended him. "What, may I ask, is an al-gor-ithm?"

Jane rubbed sleep from her eyes. It was too early in the day to be quizzed. "An algorithm... is like a set of rules, a list of instructions a computer can follow in order. Usually you use a particular algorithm for solving a particular problem. For instance, the problem of sorting a list of numbers. One algorithm might be to run through the list picking out and removing the smallest remaining number each time. Another algorithm is to divide the list in half recursively and then merge the halves in numerical order..."

"So they are used for making machines work." His lip curled scornfully. "Yes... Earth is full of machines that run off something not-quite-magic which perform great feats. Primitive, but I suppose to survive in a world without magic, one must become inventive."

"How did you... Have you been to Earth?"

A smile played about his mouth, as though he was amused at some private joke. "I should like to see it someday," he said. "I've heard a great deal about it."

"From who?"

"Former avtorkas." He toyed with a loose sheet of paper. "Tell me." He pointed to the middle of the page. "Is this a good score in your world?"

"Wha—hey, give me that!"

Jane snatched the report card out of his hand. It had arrived in the mail the previous day, and in her ensuing fight with Sandra, she'd stuffed it into her algorithms textbook and forgot about it.

"It appears you are quite a genius. It's good to know that the new Avtorka has some degree of intelligence." He smiled slowly, gently. "Hopefully your aptitude with books will translate to an aptitude toward the tests you will face to get home."

Jane frowned. Somehow, she doubted any aptitude she possessed toward books and book learning would help her navigate this foreign world. And she didn't trust Nikolay's sudden change in tone at all. Beneath his pleasant inflections, he radiated insincerity.

What horrible thing did I do in a past life to get so lucky?

Jane's lips twitched. Sometimes—when her brain felt in danger of melting from over-studying – she read embarrassingly cheesy, badly-written fantasy stories, books her friends and Sandra could never know about. In them, it was an unspoken rule that on arriving in a new world, the heroine always fell in love with the first man she saw.

I've been shortchanged, Jane thought grimly. I should send the gods a formal complaint. Or request transfer to a new planet, where the male lead is not Obviously Evil.

The thought was absurd enough to make her snicker, and she was in a far better mood as she mounted the wyvern.

They flew almost nonstop, with only a brief break to water the wyverns and snatch a few mouthfuls of food. The land below them had morphed from towering mountains into gently rolling hills, and Jane saw farmers below tending livestock. As the sun dipped low in the sky, a castle and a town came into view, bisected by a winding, narrow river.

"Sengilach castle," said Nikolay. "Beside it, is Tolsk, the capitol of Somita. Does your precious Earth have any places that can match this?" And before Jane could reply that most of Earth's towns were quite different, their wyvern dropped into a dizzying dive. When they drew level once again, they were much lower, low enough such that Jane could make out people below in the streets. Some of them looked up as they flew over. She saw a few raise their arms. "Avtorka!" they shouted. "Avtorka! Gods'-chosen! Avtorka!"

Jane felt more nervous than ever. Her dream last night disturbed her greatly. It corroborated everything Nikolay had told her... a magical book she had to write in to get home... tests she had to endure to prove herself...

And there was that one god who was sure I'd fail... Her hands clutched the saddle-horn of their wyvern. "What... are the expectations of an avtorka, exactly?"

"The tsar will tell you when we arrive."

If possible, this alarmed Jane even more. But before she could ask more questions, Nikolay coaxed the wyvern into another dive, this one steeper than the last. Jane clung to the wyvern's neck. When she finally dared raise her face from the wyvern's scales, they were alighting in the middle of a lavishly decorated courtyard.

Jane descended shakily from the wyvern as the palace doors opened before them. A line of soldiers assembled on either side of the stairs leading up to the hall. An overdressed man in a vibrant blue cape hurried down the steps, eagerly adjusting his coronet.

"The Crown Prince of Somita," said Nikolay's voice in her ear. "You may want to bow."