Chapter Forty: A Fellow Traveler

There was a little pathway behind the Fiery Orchid, out to a cozy house that wouldn't have looked out of place in a small Vernal town, ruddy brick and black wood with wooden shingles treated to a glossy finish. Falvea, the proprietor of the Orchid, lived here with his family. It was late evening when we arrived, and we startled his wife, a pleasant-looking if weather-worn human woman doing needlepoint in a little rocking chair. She started to smile upon seeing her husband, but nearly dropped her needlepoint frame when she saw us enter after him.

"Oh! Falv… what's… have we done something wrong?"

I could only imagine how things were in Garsellast, when three fae entering your home was cause to assume the worst had happened. As I've said before, the fae pride themselves in being a fair people, and it is neither kind nor just to frighten the bejesus out of somebody for no reason. Ordinary folk shouldn't fear for their lives or safety… but Falvea's wife looked to be on the verge of tearing up.

"Mavi, these aren't…" his voice dropped to a whisper… "they aren't his people. I thought they might be able to help Franti."

"She's… she's refusing to eat now. She says everything tastes wrong…"

"We'll talk to her, miss," I said. "We might know some fae magic that can help…"

Mavi's hands clutched around the frame of her needlepoint, her fear ticking up again. "At what cost?"

"Pardon?"

"You fae… your help always comes at a terrible cost. What has my husband promised you."

I looked to Meliswe, who looked to be on the verge of tears, herself. She couldn't stand the idea that somebody thought us so callous or manipulative, even if they were an innkeeper's (well… resort-keeper's) wife living out on the fringes of civilization. I brought my arm around her waist and nudged her forward, prodding against her resistance until she stood front among us.

"Miss, we've asked nothing. I suppose our cost is that we'd like to talk with your daughter and see what she can recount to us about what happened to her. You see, we're on an expedition inland and need to know what to expect there and, if she'll tell us, what happened to her so it doesn't happen to us. I promise we aren't cruel…" She took a step toward Mavi, but the woman scooted her chair back, her pale eyes still deeply skeptical.

"She was in the wild when the sickness overtook her - she still bears the scar from the monkey that bit her," Falvea said. "The healer from her group pronounced her cured, but… well, you'll see soon enough."

Falvea and Mavi's daughter was a young woman, but fully-grown, just turned twenty-one according to Falvea. Two years before, she'd joined up with a group of 'claimers', the expeditions that journeyed out into the jungle, along the coast, or up the riverlands. The claimer's holy grail was to find an unplumbed ruin (or minimally-plumbed, as there were few if any truly untapped sites near Garsellast) and dig up intact artifacts and artifices for sale. Just a few high-quality items could be the find of a lifetime, affording years of easy living for the expedition members. Barring that, the claimers gathered rare or unusual items from the jungle, from animal bones to strange plants to wild resources rare throughout the rest of the world. This was usually what wound up happening - the proceeds of such expeditions wasn't enough for the claimers to strike it rich, but it was enough for a few weeks of revelry, followed by a month or two of modest living while the group planned its next expedition.

"The expeditions are mostly sauryx, since they're natural in the jungle, and dancers…" Falvea thumped his own chest with a bony fist. "We can camouflage and even disguise our scents, so the animals leave us alone. Obviously, Franti is half-human, but she can shift almost as well as a full-blooded dancer and has some of that absurd human endurance, to boot, so she was a natural. Her ma and I worry ourselves sick over it, but she'd always come back smelly but happy, with a few fat orioles in her pocket." Orioles were the golden pirate coins they used in the settled parts of the Outer Realms, more valuable than mithrins, though less dramatically valuable than you might expect, given the value and workability of fae silver.

He led us down the back hallway of his home, to the final door. The back window opened into the deepening evening, a great earthen cliff looming beyond with a verdant bonanza of jungle plants swaying at the top fifty feet above. Falvea knocked on the door to his daughter's room, gently pressing his ear against the wood to hear inside.

The voice within clearly said: "leave me alone."

"It's your father, my sweet-plum," Falvea said, his voice audibly wavering.

"Yes, I gathered that. I'm not hungry, thanks."

"I've got some people here who might be able to help you…"

We heard soft pacing within, and the door cracked open, a young woman's face peering out, her adorable face drawn into a scowl. "I'm not interested in quacks and crystal-gazers, thanks. You can't help me. Nobody can. I…" she trailed off as her gaze turned to us. "You're… you're fae?"

"What gave it away?" Calivar asked. I elbowed his side for being too cheeky for his own good.

Franti turned back to her father. "Fine. They can come in… please stay outside."

"Of course, sweet-plum."

"And don't call me that."

+++++

Franti was half-human and half-dancer, which meant she didn't have the beady-eyed cherubic face of her father's race. Instead, her human facial features dominated, albeit with an unmistakably dancer bent. In other words, she was a twenty-one year-old woman, taller than me with gangly limbs similar to those of a dancer, but her face remained that of an adorable twelve year-old. She'd probably retain that look until she was old and gray, adorably innocent no matter how poor her mood was.

Her room was a dimly-lit mess, with only a pair of kerosene lamps to light the place, the rough wooden furniture scattered about the place like she'd just had a social gathering there but everybody had left in a hurry. And everywhere there were sketches and loose notes, written in the Rostian language spoken in this part of the Outer Realms (though many, especially sailors and merchants like Falvea, spoke pretty decent Faeric). They were written in the Rostian language (which I'd read a few books on during our journey over, but was still only semi-conversant in), but in unmistakably Latin script, spelled irregularly and phonetically. That made sense, as Franti… or whoever now occupied her body… did not have access to the divine sight spell like I did.

"We know what happened," I said.

Her look suggested that she was extremely skeptical. "Do you?"

I knew exactly what had happened to her - she'd caught some sort of deathly illness out in the jungle and, when the healer in their group attempted to cure her, they had accidentally summoned an Earth soul into her body. Calivar and I might have spent hours trying to convince her that we very much understood her plight, even if we'd been much, much luckier about which bodies we'd wound up in. But how to get that across? Calivar came up with an answer before I did: he hummed the tune to My Country 'Tis of Thee… well, I suppose that, technically speaking, it was the tune to God Save the King. The point was that just about any American or European on Earth knew that tune, whereas it was virtually unknown in Alfheim.

"What… how?" she gasped, tears welling up in her crystal-blue eyes.

"Before nine months ago, I was Knut Dietrich, a schoolteacher and Oberleutenant in the 24th Landwehr. Now, I am pleased to call myself Calivar of the Estival." He offered his hand to the young woman, and she shook it with an unexpected firmness.

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"Lieutenant John Bishop of the RFC… former," he said, sighing after the last bit. "I suppose I'm Franti Mulschika now… that's who my so-called father insists I am."

Her obstinacy struck me as a bit odd - I'd assumed it normal that Calivar and I had accepted our new roles readily and, indeed, felt a sort of natural draw toward them. I hadn't been remotely like a fae princess in my Earth life - I'd been a man, a farmer with a wife and children… who, I'm ashamed to say, I barely even thought about anymore. Perhaps more of the old Laeanna had been left behind with my body than I'd realized. But I could easily see somebody becoming deeply unhappy about being in a body of the wrong sex (indeed, of the wrong species) and rejecting the life they'd been handed mid-stream.

"If you want to be John, you're still John," I said. "And we want to help."

He pursed his little half-dancer lips and regarded us with what might have been hope, but it was well-guarded. "How would you propose to do that, miss?"

"I'm Laeanna… formerly Lieutenant Larry Born, Nebraska-bred doughboy…"

He gawped at me. "You're… you're just like me… how can you stand it? You look… not too upset at your lot in life…"

"I'm not, but I understand why you are," I said - I wonder how I'd have felt being resurrected in a half-dancer body in the middle of the jungle. "As for how we can help… I'll be frank - I'm not sure. The Sun King…" I'm sure my tone suggested just how absurd I thought the title was… "has found a way to open a passageway to Earth, through which he's transporting tens of thousands of soldiers to join his army, along with their weapons and technology. From what I gather, that gate works both ways, so we should be able to send you back…"

John nodded. "And… this body?"

"You were brought to that body because your old one died," Meliswe said - no point in pulling our punches. "It is possible that we could manage an enchantment to change your appearance…" she muttered under her breath and then crushed one of the little bundles we used for our transformations into half-fae likenesses- they contained human hair bound up in a little capsule of mud and ash, thus allowing us to draw out those features and take on an almost-human guise. "This is temporary - with my skill, it'll last for a day or two until the spell falters… but on Earth, where I gather that magic is very weak, the disguise could well be permanent…"

"And… it feels like being human?"

"Almost. It's closer to the feel of wearing a very convincing costume," Calivar said. "I don't know if that would be enough for you…"

John tapped his lips and paced the room, suddenly full of far more energy than before. Before, he'd looked like a broken and hopeless girl, but now there was purpose in his step and energy in his eyes. "We can cross our t's and dot our i's when it comes to the brass tacks, but I sense that you've got quite a big ask before we're ready to get me back home…"

In the back of my mind, I wondered whether this we where we fae got our bad reputation from. Here we'd just given this man a hope he hadn't even known had existed until a few short minutes ago. And we'd given Franti's parents a hope that we could help their daughter. Well… their daughter was dead, and now John Bishop of the Royal Flying Corps was pacing the room in her body. If we gave John what he wanted and sent him back home in human disguise, we'd have deprived Falvea and Mavi of their daughter forever - a daughter who, for all intents and purposes, was already dead. We'd promised to help them, and the cost of our help would be that they'd never get to see her again… the insidious fae and their duplicitous bargains strike again! But, yes, we did have a big ask…

"The big ask is this," I said. "To have any hope of getting you home, we need you to show us the way to the Bastard King's city."

+++++

The real Franti Mulschika might have led us out to Aru-Khazi, the ancient city beyond the valley, without much trouble. Not that she would ever venture out there by herself, mind you, or with anything short of an experienced troupe of claimers with medicine and decent armament. But we were almost fifty-strong, many of us with magic and fighting skills at our disposal. We weren't the wilderness orienteers that the claimers were, but we could easily deal with anything that might give them trouble, short of getting lost in the middle of inhospitable jungle. Franti might have easily led us through the jungle valley, but John Bishop possessed only the remnant of Franti's wilderness instincts, plus whatever he carried over from his time as a pilot (not much). His memory of stumbling back through the jungle, traumatized over finding himself in the wrong body in a strange land and surrounded by toothy-mouthed lizard people, was understandably hazy.

"It seems to me, though, that Franti's old friends still care about her. To gauge by their recent arrival to check on me, I'd guess they arrived from another expedition perhaps two weeks ago - there's a very good chance they're still in town. We'll want to talk to Nakla - she's always been their main orienteer," John said.

It hurt my heart to see Falvea so hopeful, watching his daughter excitedly converse with the fae strangers in the little lodge restaurant, poring over maps as they awaited Nakla's arrival. I finally decided that my inaction constituted moral cowardice and, being a woman of principle, I marched over to him and broke the bad news:

"This woman isn't your daughter, Mr. Mulschika - she's a spirit summoned from the world beyond the magical storms… if I had to guess, your daughter's soul has gone to wherever it is your people go when they die…"

He frowned at me, perhaps trying to decide whether I was playing some sort of awful joke on him. "What do you mean… she's right there? Miss Lyna…" Lyna was the name I'd decided to go with - a human name similar enough to my own that I didn't get too confused when people called me that. "What's your game here?"

"No game. You just deserved to know - maybe that person will eventually accept being your daughter and things will be almost like they were before. That might happen, and I'll be very happy for you if it does, because then she can live your daughter's life. But there's a very real possibility she'll want to go back to her homeland…" It had occurred to me that Falvea would be even more confused if I started referring to his daughter with masculine pronouns - John could bring that up if he cared to.

"You can't take her from me," he stated.

"I will not take her from you, sir. But if she decides to come with us, I won't let you stop us, either. Believe me, you wouldn't want to even try. My concern is to the safety of my people first, the well-being of… the person your daughter has become… next, and sparing your feelings last. But I'm going to be straight about it with you, too. You deserve that."

"You fae give with one hand and take twice with the other - it's true what they say about you."

I looked him in the eye for long enough that he grew nervous - he'd forgotten his initial terror at these fae strangers who'd arrived at his little resort from out of the blue. "Consider that your perspective may not be the only one, Mister Mulschika, and proceed very carefully from here."

"I'll do that," he said quietly.

Nakla arrived later in the day, still a bit hungover from whatever revelry she'd decided to engage in before gearing up for her group's next expedition into the strange wilds of the Outer Realms. She was a tall and lean sauryx, the sort that reminded me a bit more of an iguana than of a dinosaur, though her coloration was intense green with little burstmarks of pale blue and lavender, unlike any lizard I'd ever seen. I imagined she'd camouflage perfectly in a flower-studded jungle backdrop. She sauntered into the Fiery Orchid, her regal bearing muddied a bit by her squinting at every bright light and occasionally shaking her head.

She was a bit hungover, but her bona fides were impressive. She pulled out a thick, water-stained notebook and flipped through it, showing us page after page of notes and diagrams written in cramped, neatly-printed Rostian. Maps of the valley, the locations of mountain passes, native villages, rivers, ruins, and of Aru-Khazi, the great ruined city of the northern Outer Realms and the Sun King's capital. There were a few sketches of the city's layout, too, and of the jungle beyond that, but the notes quickly became vague and sparse.

"I made these notes when the king was just a mad warlord living in the middle of the jungle," she explained. "Before he had tens of thousands scavenging everything for a dozen miles around, when he was a king in name only, before he became a true king…"

"A true king?" Meliswe asked with about as much distaste as I felt.

"What else do you call one who wields such power? His vizier invaded Autumnal, practically on a whim, and nearly defeated the fae there… no offense, I hope, if any of them were your kin. Only the freakish power of their storm-maiden managed to turn them back. If the mad lady of Autumnal is a queen, then our jungle-tyrant is every bit a king, for he rules the coast and the isles of the Outer Realms all the way out to Mistmane Island."

"You seem to have great respect for the Sun King," Calivar said. "You'll really lead us right up to his gate?"

Nakla nodded. "If I don't, then somebody else will and not half as well. If you're really determined to get yourselves imprisoned by the Sun King, I figure I can get paid and make sure you don't get offed by the tree-singers…"

"Fair enough."

Nakla drank only modestly that night, introducing herself to most of the members of our group as she circulated the Fiery Orchid. Falvea was clearly unhappy with the news I'd presented to him, and I couldn't blame him. Though I did think a bit less of the man for shooting the messenger. However, as we wound down for the night, his wife, Mavi, made her way out to me and sat at my table, leaning across to whisper.

"My husband says you're trying to trick us…"

I looked into her eyes in the way I'd learned often made people uncomfortable. As Laeanna, I have a piercing gaze that can be every bit as intimidating as my mother's. "I'm not."

After a moment, she managed a nod. "I don't care if it's not really her… after you do what you need to, will you please try to convince her to keep living with us?"

I nodded. "I can promise that much, but I can't promise that she'll agree."

"I understand."