Kelsam

The sound of footsteps woke Kelsam before dawn. Esar was still fast asleep; was Jason awake? Did he need something? Bleary-eyed, Kelsam got up to check. He opened the bedroom door and someone in the hallway jumped.

“Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. But since I did, can you tell me where your bathroom is?”

“Wha-?” His sleep-fogged brain was slow to parse her words. “There,” he said, pointing.

“Thanks,” said Naomi. She scooted by him, leaving Kelsam to realize that the girl was not only awake, she was up and about, acting as if nothing at all was amiss.

He hurried back to wake Esar.

“Were you dreaming?” Kelsam asked breathlessly.

Esar glared up at him. “No.”

“She’s awake,” Kelsam said.

Esar threw the blanket aside and got up, took his dressing gown from the hook and wrapped it around himself. Kelsam belatedly grabbed his own robe; he’d slept in old clothes, as he usually did when guests stayed in his house, but the extra layer felt more decent.

They were both waiting in the hall when she emerged from the bathroom.

“Oh! Well, this is embarrassing.” Naomi looked back and forth between the two of them for a long, awkward moment. “Um, thanks so much for letting me stay here and taking care of me. I really appreciate it.”

“How are you feeling?” Kelsam asked.

“I’m feeling a lot better now, thank you. Not all better—I mean, my head is like . . .” She moved her hands in and out over her head to demonstrate and laughed nervously. “I wonder if this is what a hangover feels like? I wouldn’t know but I bet it’s kind of like this.”

Kelsam didn’t think his eyes could open any wider. He looked to Esar, who seemed to be in a similar state of shock. Perhaps he’d made a mistake? The girl standing in front of them couldn’t be more different than anything he knew about the Rispara.

“Ah . . . do you want some water?” Kelsam asked.

Naomi smiled. “That sounds amazing. I would love some water.”

“I can’t do this right now.” Esar turned back into the bedroom and shut the door.

“Did I say something wrong?” Naomi asked.

Kelsam winced. “No, it’s fine. He’s just . . . I’ll get you something to drink.” Was he still asleep, and this was all a dream? He splashed water from the spigot onto his face to wake himself. It was cold and wet and real. Then he brought a glass back to the Rispara.

“Thank you,” she breathed after taking a few gulps. “Do you need to go back to sleep? I don’t mind. I really didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“It’s fine.” Kelsam intended to keep making conversation, awkward as it was, to buy time until Esar was ready to come out and deal with their strange guest.

“It’s nice of you to say that.” Naomi smiled sheepishly. “I know I’ve probably been a lot of trouble to you, and I’m sorry about that. I’ll try to be on my way as soon as I can. Only problem is, I don’t know exactly where I’m going. I don’t . . . well, I don’t even know where I am.”

Where did he even start? Kelsam still couldn’t believe that a relic from the ancient past—a creature with incredible power that no one had seen in four hundred years—was sitting across from him at his dinner table, drinking a cup of water and making small talk. He wouldn't have believed it if she wasn't looking at him with those odd red eyes.

“You’re welcome to rest here for a while,” he heard himself say.

“Thanks. Seriously. I owe you, big time.”

Kelsam understood her meaning on the Current, but every now and then she used phrases that didn’t come across clearly. He reached into his pocket to check his attuner, but he doubted that there was anything wrong with the device. It was made to interpret the meaning of Elorhan languages, and translating a language from a different world was stretching it beyond its capabilities.

“I’ll find some way to make it up to you,” Naomi continued, staring down into her empty cup. “I don’t know how yet, but I will.”

“I’ll get you some more water. It’s important to rehydrate after . . .” Kelsam couldn’t finish the sentence, and let it drift off as he left to refill her glass. Did any of the normal rules apply to a Rispara? Judging from the state she’d been in the previous evening, he wouldn’t have expected Naomi to be able to stand today, let alone carry on a normal conversation. But she was still young, and far from home, and Kelsam suspected that her friendly, casual air masked a deeper anxiety.

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When he brought back her glass, she drained half of it immediately. “Thank you! Now, um, where am I?”

“What do you mean?” Kelsam asked. Naomi gave him a wide-eyed, blank look. “You’re in my house . . . in the Sanctuary of Norana . . . in the province of Sulair, in Elorhe?”

“Wow. I’ve never heard any of those names before.” She let out a heavy sigh. “I’ve really outdone myself this time.”

“What are . . . where are you . . .” Kelsam drifted off. He didn’t know where to begin. He needed Esar, but Esar was . . . Kelsam tried a different direction. “You seem very well compared to your condition last night. Has your vitricity replenished as well as your physical health?”

“My what? Oh, the magic?” Naomi knitted her brows. “I don’t know. How would I know?”

Kelsam shook his head as words failed him once more. How could you explain how it felt to be tired or energized, hungry or satiated? “You just . . . feel it.”

Naomi squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m trying, but it’s all so weird. I don’t know what happened. It all just kind of gushed out of me yesterday.” She demonstrated by sweeping her arms outward, and a bit of water sloshed out of her glass. “Oh no, I’m sorry!”

“It’s all right, it’s just water,” Kelsam said. Could this girl be just as ignorant about vitricity as Jason had been, in spite of the power within her?

“Where’s Jason?” Naomi asked. She was quieter now, not so flippant, but it was still far beyond Kelsam’s ability to guess at what might be going on in the girl’s head.

“Sleeping.”

Naomi sighed. “He’s really mad at me, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t mean—I didn’t know it was going to happen like that. I didn’t think—“ Naomi looked down at her lap, hiding behind the hair that fell in her face. “I guess that’s the problem. I didn’t think. What am I gonna do?”

“Esar said you can send him home. I thought you weren’t going to be up to it for a few days, but if you’ve recovered this quickly, then maybe—”

“I can send him home! And then it would be all right.” Naomi brightened at the idea, but Kelsam wasn’t sure it was going to be that simple.

The floor creaked behind him, and Kelsam turned to see Esar walk into the room. The light of dawn was barely perceptible through the window, but Esar was already fully dressed in a formal tunic, more suited for the royal court than the lax standards of the Sanctuary.

“What are you doing here?” he asked flatly, directing the question at Naomi.

Naomi looked up at him, wide-eyed, and Kelsam studied her face. She looked like a student caught in a misdeed, figuring out how best to tell her side of the story. “I was . . . we were looking for someone. A man named Jim Thompson, at least, to start with.”

“That name means nothing to me,” Esar said.

“You’re telling me. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a specific guy named ‘Jim Thompson’? There are like, a thousand of them. It’s a super common name. And then when we actually did find him, the right one, he didn’t respond to my email, and when I called he told me not to call him, and all we had left to do was try to meet him in person, because we didn’t have any other leads to go on, you know—”

“Slow down,” Kelsam said, with a desperate look back at Esar. “Does this make any sense to you?”

“Let’s . . . back up a bit.” Esar said, his expression pained. “Who are you?”

“Who am I . . . I mean, maybe it’s weird, but that’s what I have been trying to figure out, too, actually. My name is Naomi Zervos, but that’s not what you meant by the question, is it? And I’m weird. Everyone says I’m weird, and I’ve never felt like I belonged anywhere. But now I’m kind of wondering if maybe that’s because I didn’t come from there at all. Earth, I mean. Maybe it sounds crazy, but I’ve had these weird dreams all my life. And there’s my eyes, right? And that magic—vitricity, I guess?—that came out of me when I touched the false door—I don’t know what it all means but I think maybe I was meant to come here. I think the dreams were guiding me there so I could come . . . home.”

She looked up at Esar with such a hopeful, plaintive expression, like a child looking to the teacher for reassurance she’d given the correct answer. The silence stretched out before he replied.

“I have no idea whether you were ‘meant’ to be here.” Esar sighed. “But there was apparently nothing that could stop you from showing up on my doorstep, so I suppose that I’m stuck with you whether I like it or not.”

“What do you mean, ‘stuck with me’?” Naomi asked, crossing her arms.

“I dreamed about you, many years ago, but those dreams never came to pass. Only recently I started seeing you in my dreams again,” Esar said, casting an apologetic glance at Kelsam. “I hoped that those dreams, too, would not come true. But here you are.”

“You dreamed about me? I’ve never dreamed about you. What did you dream about me? Do your dreams normally come true?” Naomi asked.

“I dreamed that you would need someone to teach you to control your power. You don’t even know what you are, do you?” Esar said.

“Um . . . what do you mean?”

“You are a Rispara,” Esar said. “Those red eyes of yours prove it, and the fact that you had the power to activate the door that brought you here. Not to mention the fact that an ordinary person would have needed days to recover from such an exertion, while you are already back on your feet acting as if nothing happened.”

“What’s a Rispara?” Naomi asked.

“A person with extraordinary vitricity. The Rispara were capable of legendary feats that broke the laws of reality itself. And they were thought to be completely extinct. I take it there are no Rispara in your world, then?”

“There’s no vitricity in my world,” Naomi said. “Are you saying that I could break the laws of reality? Me?”

Esar paced across the floor. “As you are, completely untrained and unaware of your power, there’s no telling what you might do. Frankly, the idea terrifies me. I only hope that I can help you learn to control your powers before you harm anyone else.”

“What do you mean? Who did I hurt?”

Kelsam and Esar both looked at her. She didn’t seem to be a bad person, Kelsam thought, just a little thoughtless. She was just a teenager, no matter how much power she might hold within her.

Naomi’s face fell. “Oh, right. Jason . . .”