Authors: Scott V. Duff
“Y’all are gonna have to come up names we can pronounce,” Jimmy said, shaking his head in frustration. “Bwkaanr— Bwkannres. I can’t say that.” Giggles ran through the sprites at Jimmy’s slaughter of their family name.
“His mother was worried that I was upset about her son being among the Changed,” I said, trudging on through Jimmy’s gaff. I couldn’t say it either, truth be told. You had to flex your tongue twice through the ‘B’ sound and hit the ‘K’ hard with the back flex and roll the ‘R’ with the front flex. We just weren’t built for any of the Fae languages. “I would like you to assure everyone during your travels that I hold no prejudices against the Changed or their families. My only concern is to their safety and well being, that their Change isn’t in some way detrimental to them. Please make certain that everyone is aware that they face no reprisals due to something they have no control over.”
“Yes, Lord Daybreak,” the Deas chirped. Deason hesitated, then said, “Lord, we are outside of the limits Shrank…”
“Oh, I didn’t realize. I’m afraid that’s my fault,” I said apologetically. “I’ll move them up to the lake until after Wednesday, then. Thank you for reminding me, Deason.” I sent them back to the village they came from and turned back to the reunion. I didn’t want to, but I was going to have to break it up now and move them again.
Just as I started across the shallows to them staying atop the water this time, the toddler squirmed out of his sister’s arms, slipping to the ground. She grabbed his hand, letting him roam in a semi-circle around her while she listened to her brother and parents talk excitedly. The female nymph was the youngest in her immediate family and her parents had come with Jimmy alone. The toddler was uninterested in all of the adults and dragged at his adolescent sister’s arm insistently to the water’s edge. She followed distractedly.
Admittedly, though, I wasn’t looking either when he fell in. No one was. We all heard the splash, though. I acted, but pulled back when I saw his big brother move, too. Without looking back, he leapt from ankle deep water straight into the air in a perfect parabolic path, cutting the distance to his brother from thirty yards to five and diving beneath the surface. He came up underneath the tiny little sprite in jet of water with his hands wrapped around his chest squeezing lightly, pushing water out of his lungs and mouth. It wasn’t much; the tike hadn’t been under for a second or two, but it shocked and scared him. Once he got his breath back, he screamed, loudly, and clutched his brother’s neck. The nymph cooed in the toddler’s ear about being safe in his river and patted his back affectionately as he waded back to the shallows.
“I guess we’ll have to learn to swim,” I heard the girl’s father mutter to his wife.
“At least that way you’ll take more frequent baths…” his wife retorted, giggling.
When we walked up, their parents got another shock. His parents hadn’t met Jimmy and her parents hadn’t realized I was there. Neither of us needed introduction—Jimmy’s identity was emblazoned on his shirt after all—but there were a few moments of awkwardness as they sorted out their awe. I was ready to return to the anonymity of Earth.
“Do you like this spot?” I asked the couple.
“Yes! Oh, Yes, Lord Daybreak!” they both squealed and then went on in different directions talking and jabbering at the same time about different aspects that made this their ideal spot to start their family. He threw his arms around her, finally stopping talking, and cradled her against his chest, his chin resting on top of her head.
“That’s very good,” I said smiling. “But unfortunately, I’ve made a mistake and I’ll have to deprive you of this until after the Claiming. It’s just a little too far away.” I cringed at their heartbroken look. “It’s just for a couple of days and your parents can stay nearby if they want. Let me make it up to you, please.” I was trying to find a place along the river as nice as this one, following it all the way back to the lake. There were several spots that were ‘nice’ but nothing shouted out. There was only one place that I knew would be perfect, so I shifted the lot of us there. “How about spending a couple of days here?”
The nymphs looked down at their feet, noticing immediately that their feet weren’t in their river anymore, then looked up at me, then behind me, in shock. The Palace loomed over my shoulders, proudly and majestically. The sun had yet to rise over the top of it, giving it a hazy aura in the morning light. The female nymph’s father stepped out into the water with his daughter to see what so shocked his child. His reaction was to freeze.
“It’s just a big building, guys,” Jimmy said, grinning about it. “There’s only nine of us living there right now. You could play kick-ball in Seth’s room and he wouldn’t know it.”
“NNNNnnnn, yeah, I would, don’t do that,” I said, chuckling. “But he’s got the right idea. You could live here if you wanted, but in the long run, I think you’ll be happier on the river where we were. Here, sooner or later, you’d end up under constant scrutiny of some snobby aristocratic jerk who wanted to tell you how badly you were raising your children while his own kids where driving cars off cliffs. Not worth the trouble. But if you prefer it here, I certainly have no problem with Gilán’s first water nymphs residing in the Palace’s lake.”
The girl smiled delicately. “Thank you, Lord Daybreak, but I believe the first home you picked is too wonderful to pass on.” Her mate agreed, virtually erupting into smiles and hugs. I was beginning to understand the sexual undertones of the water nymph mythos. They were a very affectionate couple, both together and toward their family.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” I barely heard the shouted question from Peter. I looked up to find him a speck on a balcony several hundred feet up. I waved at him, choosing not to answer just yet.
Turning to the sprites, I asked, “Will you be staying with them or would you like us to return you to your homes? I’m sorry, but I just don’t have the time to ferry you back and forth right now.” Both parents agreed to stay, but I caught two brief flashes of thought from one of the mothers and one from the sister. Two very brief laments, deeply regretted and cast aside by both of them.
Well, if a new dress was all it took to make a woman feel special, then I could arrange that, especially since she wanted to do all the work anyway.
“Jimmy, I have another errand for you…” I sent Jimmy the name and image of the sprite and his parents that I wanted him to talk to.
Isn’t she a little young for that?
He asked across the link.
By our standards? Definitely. But not by theirs and she is not, um, ‘new’ to the experience. That’s also why you’re talking to his parents first, just to be sure I’m not overstepping any boundaries.
“Can’t hurt to ask,” he said nonchalantly and shifted himself out. Cool, he was learning.
“Now ladies, if I can borrow you three for a moment,” I said, not waiting for an answer before shifting us to a supply room in the Palace. The room lit up in our presence and showed us a vast array of textiles in a wide range of colors and fabrics. Millions of spools of thread covered one wall, thousands of different scissors and shears filled shelves. It was a freakin’ warehouse of sewing supplies. “Can you find what you need to make your gowns here?”
“Yes, Lord Daybreak,” they said in unison. They were getting good at saying that in unison.
I felt more shifting through the Palace, telling me that more people were getting up. “My brothers are getting up now, so let me go tell them we have guests in the Palace before they go scaring everyone. Take what you want. I’ll send someone back in a few minutes.” I was trying to hurry, I really was, but I wasn’t
quite
fast enough. Ethan came running out of Mike’s balcony and jumped, whooping through space at an unreal arc that could only happen with a magical boost, and committed several fantastic acrobatic feats during his dive into the lake. I saw this from Peter’s balcony.
“He’s gonna scare the crap out of the nymphs,” I said, surprising Peter who hadn’t yet had the time to recognize me standing beside him.
“The nymphs?” he asked, grinning at me, putting Ethan and nymphs images together.
“Busy morning already,” I said, as Ethan plunged into the surface of the clear blue water. “Be right back.” I shifted again, this time to the surface of the lake itself, following Ethan’s wake. He swam a few moments under the water like a seal, enjoying himself. When he kicked up off the bottom and shot up to the surface, we were fairly close to the shore where the sprites waited for the ladies and me to return.
“Good morning, Seth!” Ethan said when he finally came up for breath.
“Good morning, Ethan. There’s a naked girl behind you, you know.”
He snorted. “Yeah, right. Pull the other one and candy comes out.” The girl giggled and Ethan whirled around in the water, surprised. Then he disappeared.
You could have told me we had guests!
He was nearly shouting in my head and I was laughing out loud, thankful that the nymphs remembered him and not run for cover.
And you could have put some shorts on regardless,
I sent back.
“I thought you might want to know
where
I grew that inch…” he said, splashing water into the air at me as he dropped back into the lake wearing shorts this time.
Okay, I did not need that image. “Perv.”
Jimmy slipped in beside the sprites, kneeling down beside another sprite. He dwarfed the little guy. He was a head taller than him, at least, and he looked … well, he looked like a baby.
Ethan snickered, “Yeah, I’m a perv. You’re running a fairy baby mill here and I’m the perv.” He swam off doing a backstroke, grinning up at me until I dropped a few hundred gallons of water on top of him. The nymphs thought it was funny as they glided under the water nearby. It was very peculiar watching them talk and so casually interact with each other under water. I felt like they should be panicking to get to the surface. The new kid felt that way, too, apparently, since the girl’s father was pulling him out of the lake and laughing.
I stepped over beside Jimmy. “Is he even old enough to have a girlfriend?”
“They are at the very beginning of puberty and just now coming of marrying age, according to his parents,” Jimmy said calmly. “And if their puberty is anything like ours, he could shoot up overnight and be the star center for his basketball team.”
Ethan shot up out of the water on a ten-foot spout, laughing heartily all the way ashore. He shook his head like a big dog, sending a spray of water droplets across both us and the sprites standing nearby, waiting on their women to return. “Boy’s got quite an arm on him,” Ethan said, grinning at us and throwing his thumb over his shoulder.
The boy nymph waded into shore behind Ethan, twice as excited and grinning just as big. He spoke rapidly with his family in his native tongue about how the Lord’s brother had him throw him out of the lake and how far up he went in the air. When he started talking about the lake and how to clean the river enough so that their eddies and shallows stay that clean, I faded out of the conversation to check on the women. They gathered where I left them, but they’d barely picked up anything.
“Richard’s cooking breakfast at Peter’s place,” Ethan said, washing the sand off his feet in the lake. “Y’all coming?”
“Yes!” Jimmy called out, almost yelling.
“In a moment,” I said, glancing over at Jimmy sideways, grinning. “I need to get the ladies back and get the sprites settled in for the day. Shouldn’t take but a few more minutes.”
Ethan nodded, smiling, then said to the sprites, “Good to meet y’all!” and disappeared back into the Palace leaving ripples in the surface as the water filled the space his feet vacated.
Shifting Jimmy along with me, I moved back to the storeroom. “Talk to them,” I told Jimmy, then started moving through the bolts of clothes, and since I told Ethan a few minutes, I moved with a quickness. The dresses the mothers had in mind
were
pretty, but they were supposed to be made with supplies-at-hand in the field and not from a storeroom. Even in a few short minutes, they’d changed their designs to match what was available here and even planned in moderate changes to take them apart to re-use them—regular frontier women. But they still had me pegged, not as a man or an elf, but somewhere in between. I would judge what they took as too much, regardless.
I was back with enough fabric for the three of them before Jimmy got even halfway through with his anecdote, telling how I’d split my wardrobe twice already between Mike and him, giving them the “clothes off my back” when they didn’t have anything. As I went back into the bins of cloth thinking of the male sprites waiting by the lake, initially I headed for the sedate and stately black and white dressy colors I was used to seeing at high society events. But it occurred to me that this was my society’s customs and not necessarily theirs. So I dipped a little into the eldest female’s mind for their parties and found them much more colorfully attired, both male and female. Using complementary colors gave me more room to choose.
The two older women barely came up to my shoulders when I sat down cross-legged on the floor beside them and parceled out the fabric I’d collected. I went a little heavy on the blue, but there was a lot of it. I checked the supplies they were holding; they still needed a few things, so back I went. The sewing needles made of silver and platinum, scissors and shears, a measuring tape with strange tick marks on one side and inches on the other. By the end of my flurry down the aisles of the storeroom, I was tossing items over my shoulder through holes to the piles in front of the sprites.