When it stopped for a third time, I was ready to get out. Fortunately, this time the doors to my compartment opened with a screech of hinges. I pulled on pack magic, which answered my call sluggishly, but it was enough for me to scoot out of the luggage compartment and into the shadows of the twilight surrounding a tourist-friendly hotel.

The bus had traveled all day. That meant I was approximately five hundred miles from wherever in Italy I’d been to start with, give or take a couple of hundred miles. I could smell a freshwater river nearby but not an ocean. There were no large mountains, but there seemed to be some rise and fall to the land.

I found a place behind a pair of giant potted plants near the corner of the hotel that left me a dark shadow to hide in. With the pack magic to help, I didn’t think anyone would see me as long as I wasn’t moving. I took some time to examine my surroundings.

Buildings rose all around me. Not skyscrapers, but four- or five-story buildings, most of which dated back a few centuries. I saw a street sign and it had a few marks above the letters no Romance language had—but it wasn’t Cyrillic, either, at least not any version of Cyrillic I was familiar with.

After a few minutes of observation didn’t help me figure out where I was, I took a tighter hold of the threads of pack magic, faint because my pack was a very long way away, and ventured out into the growing darkness.

As I traveled through the city, heading for the origin of the scent of the river, the buildings got older—a lot older by centuries—and the streets turned to cobblestones. There were distinctive red-tile roofs and artwork on the outside of buildings. Probably not frescoes, though that’s what they looked like. My liberal arts education had given me enough of a basis in architecture that I could tell the difference between Gothic and Romanesque with about 70 percent accuracy. It did not tell me what it was called when there were designs all over the outer surface of a building.

The overall effect was an exuberant, almost boisterous, eclectically historical architecture. Here and there, aggressively plain buildings squatted between the beautiful, centuries-old masterpieces like defiant toads set between swans, hinting that this city had spent some time behind the Iron Curtain.

I had my suspicions about where I was. But it wasn’t until an hour later, when I’d found the river and looked down it to see the most famous and unmistakable of its many famous landmarks, the grand old medieval Charles Bridge, that I knew for certain where I was: Prague, the heart of Bohemia.

I knew a little bit about Prague. The first thing that came to mind was that Prague citizens had a habit of throwing powerful officials out of windows—the Second Defenestration of Prague began the Thirty Years War in 1618. There wasn’t another capital city with a First Defenestration that I knew of, let alone a second one. Prague was full of my kind of people.