by Jean Johnson
“I think you need to return your attention to Shava-taje,” she merely said, rising from the stool once more. “She is our Chief of Teaching, and I need to go see how my son is doing, to make certain he is healthy.”
“Thank you for the lesson in love, Muan,” the other Fae stated. “I had forgotten to explain those things to my students in the last few years. It is good to remember to encourage emotional learning as well as mental and physical.” She had a young child of only four or five years playing with the long strands of her pale amber locks, plaiting them from the ends. The braid was a bit messy, inexpertly plaited at best, but Shava simply let the child play while she regathered everyone’s attention with a gesture toward the netting racks. “Elder students, please check and help with the nets of the younglings, now. They need to be as big as a bed before they can be considered usable.
“When each of them is that big, we will all head out together to the plaza and practice throwing them at the planting boxes, to simulate casting nets at flocks of birds. The object will be to center the net over the boxes. Kaife-taje has arranged for piles of rocks to be waiting for us, to help weight the edges of the nets after you’ve practiced casting a few times without them, so you can see the advantages and disadvantages the weights give.
“Additionally, all of you will get a treat for your hard work, a bite of honeycomb. But the top three teams who do the best job will earn an extra piece of honeycomb from Rua’s hives,” Shava promised.
The cheer that rose up at her promise was just what Muan needed to exit without being questioned further. Spotting the tall, black-haired figure of Ban, she detoured that way. If her son was deviating from appropriate behavior too much, well, she needed to hear again from Ban what he said his human friend had heard. And perhaps the two of them needed to go confront Udrin’s father, too.
She liked Dakin, even respected him, and had developed something of a friendship with the Efrijt over the last two decades. But theirs was not a marital partnership, just a parental one. She needed to know just what sort of parenting Dakin had—or had not—done over the last fifteen years. She knew how Udrin had been jointly raised during the first four years of his life, but once Udrin was deemed both weaned and old enough to be managed by one parent, she hadn’t known nearly enough of how the Efrijt had raised her son.
Time to correct that oversight, she thought firmly, still remembering that kiss and that grope—and that tongue-touch! She had not imagined that, she was sure of it. And time to find out exactly what the Efrijt have been pouring into the heart and the head of my son.
***
“I haven’t used those portable crystals in some time,” Jintaya murmured, glancing back over her shoulder at Udrin’s quarters. “He does have Efrijt blood, however, which does mean Efrijt magic. Perhaps there’s enough of a difference to block whatever I’d sense unaided these days, in a mix of Fae and local animadjic. Those crystals are pure Fae, however, calibrated for the energies of this world. They should discern the truth.”
Muan nibbled on her bottom lip, frowning in concerned uncertainty. “Do you think he’s actively hiding whatever is going on within him? That would imply he knows it’s some activity or something that would probably be restricted, or perhaps even forbidden.”
“Muan, even I can remember actively hiding things from my parents at his age,” Ban stated bluntly. “And it’s been over three thousand years for me. I even hid things from my own brothers, and we were close, if competitive. Your son is hiding something.”
“I just . . .” She didn’t know how to put it into words.
Jintaya touched her shoulder in comfort. “You’re his mother. You want to wish and believe and see the best in your child. Your closeness and your love, your wishes and your dreams, they all cloud your view of who he actually is. As it does all parents.”
“I did study the parenting texts we brought across, before the portal closed,” Muan muttered. “I just wish the portal would open again, so that we could hear what happened back on Faelan. It’s been stressful, having it shut for twenty full years, instead of just a couple months. There have been decisions we had to make that would never have happened if we’d just been able to consult with the others—and I wish my son had taken to one of the others among you, to have had a mentor who isn’t me. Someone to confide in other than his mother. We could have brought in someone who could have been a mentor for him. A good Fae mentor.”
“No child is ever exactly like their parent. Some more so than others,” Jintaya said. She shrugged, curling up a hand. “That’s why I agree that you should go ask his father and the other Efrijt a lot of questions. Including if there was anyone among them whom he considered a mentor. Who it is will tell us quite a lot about the person he has become. And if he has no mentor among them, no one whose advice he listens to or follows . . . well, that will tell us something, too. Not nearly as much, but it will be something.”
“I was thinking we should take the skydart,” Ban stated. “It’ll get us there and back fastest—Jintaya, if you find anything, don’t confront him on your own.”
“I’m hardly going to be in danger from him,” the Fae healer retorted. “I’m several times as powerful as he is, more than thirty-six times his age with all the attendant training, and I won’t let down my guard.”
“Krue himself would tell you that a grandmaster warrior fears not another master, but the merely quarter-trained student,” Ban countered, pointing an inked finger at her. She looked maybe three or four centuries old, half her actual age, which meant in her early thirties as a normal human, but only a fifth or so of his own years. Only a fifth of his knowledge of deception and treachery in life. “He is young, he is rash, he is unpredictable, and we do not know what the Efrijt have been teaching him. Don’t confront him on your own, whatever you uncover.” He glanced at Muan, his dark brown gaze a little troubled, then continued. “I’m beginning to suspect he’s been taking mercury.”
“What?” Muan protested. “No! No, not even the Efrijt would do that. They restrict it from their children. Sejo Zakal herself told me they don’t let anyone under the age of twenty-five have any mercury. Dakin confirmed it, his sister Nazik confirmed it—they all restrict access to it, because of how its antigeriatric properties in their species causes serious hormonal imbalances that . . . oh . . . stars and portals.” She rubbed her hands over her eyes. “He’s been acting out-of-balance. Hormonal. I swear, if anyone supplied recreational quicksilver to my son, I will show them exactly how much magic I can wield on this world! I will kick them offworld personally, with a boot-print-shaped fundament!”
“I find it ironic that I must caution a Fae to control their temper,” Ban muttered. He gave Jintaya a wry look. “I’ll keep her calm, if that turns out to be the case.”
“Good. Bring back a list of all symptoms of mercury dosing in Efrijt children and teenagers, while you’re at it,” Jintaya told them. “The fact that he is half Fae will complicate everything, biologically. To us, mercury is a poison that worsens mental clarity. To them, it is a recreational drug that enhances it. If we had access to previous records of Dai-Efrijt pairings, we’d have been able to look for the signs of trouble and corrected them long ago.
“I should go with you to have pointed words with the entire staff of Medjant Kumon . . . but I’m going to need to keep an eye on Udrin—I don’t even know if I can treat him with the usual detoxifying spells we use on humans, Dai-Fae, and full-blooded Fae,” Jintaya muttered, pressing two fingers to the spot just above the bridge of her nose where tension always gathered when some problem turned itself into a headache. “We all assumed that the Efrijt wouldn’t give him any doses of quicksilver. And they might not have. He has, after all, been living half his life near a region filled with the raw ore for it.
“Muan, you tell Sefo Harkut that the free-sharing of vital medical information is in the contract, and that Udrin’s health is in jeopardy.
If he doesn’t get you full and free access to all the medical records on Dai-Efrijt-Fae children in regard to mercury ingestion, the Medjant Kumon will be in violation of our contract. If they violate it, control of this world will default to us. Conversely, we have only one year to determine how much damage the stuff has done to Udrin’s mind, and try to fix him.”
“Is there a clause regarding insanity in the progeny that would invalidate the contract?” Ban asked dryly.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to check with Jinji and Kefer,” Jintaya muttered. She pressed her fingers to her brow again, wincing. “I haven’t read the thing in over two years.”
“That is the problem with living for hundreds of years,” Ban reminded her. “When things go well, and you’re used to them going well, you get complacent. And you all got complacent. To be fair, I did as well.”
“Yes, you pesky Shae. Remind me, whyever did I pick you up and bring you home again?” Jintaya teased. Free to tease him, these last few years, a freedom confirmed in his simple, faith-filled reply.
“Because you love me.”
Smiling softly, she cupped his cheek. “I do, Ban, and I always will. Be thorough in finding out what we need to know, but do come back to me quickly. I am greedy. I want every heartbeat with you that the multiverse grants.”
“Every heartbeat,” he agreed, turning his head just enough to kiss her palm.
Muan cleared her throat and pointedly moved away. “I’ll just go get Kefer, then, and get the skydart ready. We’ll meet you in the hangar, Ban.”
“I’ll be a few moments,” he told her. At her blushing wave, he gave the retreating Fae a stern look. “I want to activate the sky-scryer we used on the Efrijt for a while. The one where I sifted all those minuscule gemstones out of the desert sand,” he added, shifting his gaze to Jintaya.
“You wish to spy on the Efrijt? Or on Udrin when he returns among them?” the pantean leader asked him.
“No.” Ban corrected her while Muan disappeared down the stone and crystal hallway. “I want to spy on him. Or rather, I intend to have Jinji do it while I am gone. She has a keen eye for detail, and a sharp wit for piecing together fairly accurate information from scraps.”
Jintaya frowned at that, troubled and worried. “Do you think Udrin is a danger to himself?”
“Udrin could be a danger to anyone and everyone. He is suffering from the effects of mercury poisoning. The more I think of it, the more positive I am of it,” Ban reminded her. “We’ve guessed it affects his body, but there is no telling how much it affects his mind.”
“Yes . . . the Efrijt find it mentally stimulating. Other races become disoriented, and make increasingly poor decisions,” Jintaya said quietly, thinking.
“That’s a very polite way to put it,” Ban retorted. “But yes. He could end up a pile of babbling, twitching flesh that cannot do much under any real control, or he could end up excessively cruel and violent. Or he could try to ‘cure’ himself via magic. But last I heard from you, he does not have . . .”
“. . . does not have an affinity for healing magic, yes, I know,” Jintaya agreed. She sighed and pressed the edge of her first two fingers against her brow, wincing. “I am rather sick and tired of being trapped on this world with no backup we can rely upon. As distasteful as it is from the standpoint of individual privacy, spying upon the boy is a necessary tool in figuring out just what is going wrong with him. I will take up the task of searching through his belongings, too, to see if he left any written or other visual or tangible clues.”
“Guard yourself, from mercury, metal, and magic,” Ban urged her. “I will not be able to, until my return.”
She smiled a little at that, touched by his concern, and leaned in when he did, letting him press those brown lips in a kiss on her golden brow. “Be careful, yourself. I dislike it when you suffer, my Ban.”
Chapter Four
Three selijm north of Ijesh
Flame Sea Territory
Udrin worried enough over what he had done that he actually struggled to keep up with the others on the hunting trail. The north canyons were a good five hours away on foot, and thanks to the primitive humans in the mix, they couldn’t take any Fae-style slip-discs, or the flying rugs of his father’s kin, the anashak. It gave him far too much time to fret, to vacillate wildly between the emotions convulsing in his thoughts.
I shouldn’t have grabbed her breast like that. What a breast! Round and full, and so warm against my hand . . . No, focus. Jintaya. I have to report to Jintaya. She’s going to do a full exam this time. I have to hide the mercury. She’ll detect it. I don’t know if my spells can hide it from a full exam. I wish I could rip off her damned head and hide it. Maybe if I ran away for a year? Would that invalidate the contract? . . . Why am I worried about the contract? I’ll be a god, soon! Maybe I could just speed up—
“Udrin!” Fali-taje’s voice broke through his circling, snapping, twitching mess of thoughts. “Stop and take a rest.”
Dragging his focus back to the real world, he found he’d walked past the other student hunters. Fourteen through eighteen years, they were all younger than him. He hated the fact that he lagged behind their training and skill. Of course, instead of spending all his time practicing such primitive life skills, he spent it learning far more interesting things from both the Fae and the Efrijt. Advanced knowledge beyond what their primitive little minds could even imagine.
Finding a rock fallen from the cliffs around them a little ways from the others, he sat down on it. Then grimaced and sank his powers into the stone, shaping a far more comfortable, contoured seat. A throne. Fali frowned at him, but he gave the huntress-Fae no more thought than a pebble in a sandal, something to be dislodged and discarded.
Hundreds of thousands of visitable worlds in the multiverse, with different rules and different laws for things like magic and technology . . . and the Fae wasted that knowledge. For that matter the Efrijt did, too. There were few other races out there as advanced as those two, and they chose trade instead of conquest. It made no sense! Well, aside from the effort involved.
“Everyone drink more water,” Kadu urged. The human male lifted his own skin to his lips in example and swallowed several times. Lined with the stomach of a goat, such things always had a nasty taste to Udrin’s mind. “Don’t forget to eat some bread and meat, too. Refuel while you rest.”
He lifted his bota, the Efrijt-style water container designed to blend in with native primitive materials on the outside while being lined with clean, sanitary, taste-free waterproofing on the inside. No foul, primitive goat stomach lining for him, thank you. Not for a near-god born of two superior races! Of course, he didn’t have too many choices for the solid part of his snack. Dried meat of indeterminate source, prebaked bannock out of mixed grains, dried fruit of an excessively chewy nature . . . or one of the far more palatable Efrijt-made grain-and-nut bars he kept concealed in a rune-warded pouch. Because those were dusted with vermillion.
Udrin hesitated. On the one hand, the bars were so much tastier than the plebeian food of the humans. On the other, did he dare sneak a bite of something coated in vermillion dust in front of a Fae? His leg twitched and he wiggled automatically to cover it, humming and swaying his torso. A peek in her direction showed her chatting with a couple of the girls. Oblivious.
He snorted and pulled out the pouch. Breaking off a piece of bar, he tucked it into his mouth and chewed, licking off the gritty powder so that it wouldn’t noticeably stain his skin. Chewing the flavorful mass of crushed, pressed nuts and fruits, he looked around casually to see when he’d have another chance to take a bite unseen.
Luck came to him in the shape of one of the younger boys stringing his bow, murmuring to the fellow next to him. He, too, strung his bow, and they both rose slowly, arrows placed on their strings, staring at something in the distance. Everyone else froze, looking as much as they could with just
their eyes, trying to see what the two had seen.
Their arrows loosed. Something broke cover, a fast-bounding desert hare. The first shaft missed it, but the second thwapped home audibly, sending the beast tumbling into some of the flowering greenery that lay scattered across the landscape at this time of year. The others cheered, and even Udrin grinned at the victory, though he didn’t get up to go join the handful who moved with the two youths to help recover their prize, and he certainly didn’t start chatting with any of the others.
Instead, he pulled out a larger chunk of the granola and bit into it, chewing in pleasure. If that had been my kill, I’d have used anima to guide the arrow into the beast. In theory, even the hare’s own anima could be compelled to guide it straight into danger . . . Heh, I never considered that before! The vermillion is working quickly, today.
I know I’ve drained anima from living beings, even if everyone frowns on it for anything but healing someone else. The more advanced the life-form, of course, the stronger and more refined the anima is; that’s why even these primitive humans can draw it up from within themselves in order to seize on the anima of the world around them. He shook his head slightly, deep in his thoughts, and broke off another piece of powdered bar.
Chewing on it slowly, savoring the grit, Udrin let his mind race. The animadjet think that stone-based anima is “strong” because there’s so much stone under our feet . . . but after decades of study, Éfan said he suspects the anima generated comes from the bacteria that live deep in the pores of the rocks. Rua thinks that’s accurate, because she claims there are hundreds of pounds of bacteria down there, stretching down hundreds of yards deep. So we’re tapping into a column of diffuse tiny life radiating anima into the stone, which doesn’t generate it, but stores it.
