Episode 36: Detlene (Jay)

Someday, Jay was going to be done wandering.

Done looking, done sleeping in weird places and meeting new strangers.

Someday, he might even go home.

But not without his brother.

Tonight, he was in a new place. Slaus and Bvradalia had brought him ‘home’ to the place where all the Rhoganoi in all the realms came to visit like a pilgrimage. It was where their phuri spent most of her time.

He loved it here. The crystalline lavender lake, the northern lights, the gryffons. None of them had talked to him yet, but he’d seen some watching him.

Here, everyone looked the same: ragged clothes; plenty of leather and embroidered fabrics; longer, beaded hair; children and some adults were barefoot.

Jay wore jeans, which he’d found at the Market of Worlds. Finding stuff from home was always rare. Having a way to pay for it was even more rare, since Jay didn’t have a job and survived off the hospitality of others.

No one had ever turned away the little boy looking for his kidnapped brother.

Jay knew he was almost out of time. He had stubble, broad shoulders, biceps from sword-fighting. He wasn’t the little boy looking for his brother anymore.

This, he suspected, might be his last chance to ever find Oscar. The world outside of his home realm was harsher. Where people at home frequently didn’t start adulthood until close to thirty, and even when they did the expectations weren’t brutal, here adulthood sometimes started as early as twelve, and Jay was seventeen.

Bvradalia grinned at Jay across the small cookfire near hers and Slaus’s vardo. “What you think?” she asked him.

Orange sunset over a lavender lake. Hickory smoke and music and children playing.

It was idyllic.

He said so.

She laughed. “Rhoganoi, it mean untouchable. Most people, they think we untouchable because we dirty, because we unworthy. We untouchable? Because everywhere we go, our hearts here in this place. We been locked in death camps, we been tortured, we been burned, we been in jail.” She pointed out to the lake. “Our hearts here. It don’t matter what happen to our bodies, because we here. This the Lake of Souls, nobody take that from us.”

She offered him a piece of unidentifiable meat.

Jay had eaten some weird stuff in his life. He’d discovered that it was better not to ask.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You Rhoganoi now, because we bring you here. You family. When you die, you come to the Lake of Souls and you be safe.”

She sat down next to him. “Most people, raklo, they go to realm of dead when they die. We come here, watch over our family.”

Raklo, rakli for girls, were non-Rhoganoi.

Jay had always thought gypsies were cool as a kid.

He never guessed he’d be invited to join them.

“Drink,” she said. She passed him a tin cup full of water. “The waters of life.”

He drank a cup of the lavender lakewater. It tasted like water, not like magic or bubble gum or flowers or anything else he would have guessed.

An old woman came over, the phuri. He’d met her earlier in the day when Bvradalia and Slaus had first brought him to stay at the Lake of Souls rather than with their family’s clan in another realm.

“You want find your brother, or you want find love?” she asked him. “You must pick one.”

He hadn’t set out six years ago to find love.

Not that he thought any eleven-year-old boy would.

He had to be the only seventeen-year-old virgin in this camp.

In the legends, there were always temptations to sway someone from their task. Jay wouldn’t be swayed. He wanted his brother safe; it was what he had come for.

“My brother.”

She grinned. “I take you to meet the ones who help you find him.”

Jay stood and waved a goodbye to Bvradalia. “Dasvidaniya,” he said, because he’d met her in a realm that spoke Russian.

She looked at the phuri, who shook her head. “You not meet her again. Better to part with goodwill and no expectation.”

Bvradalia smiled. “Speed to your search and strength to your soul,” she said to him.

The phuri grinned. “You need it,” she said ominously. She led him past a few dozen vardos, towards the sounds of music and dancing at the center of the kumpania.

While most danced or drank, one group sat in a small cluster and talked quietly. It was a young couple, with twin babies and a little boy.

“No,” the guy called, “Come back! The fire’s too hot!” he scrambled to his feet and swept the toddler into his arms, back to the safety of their sitting area a few feet from the fire. He tickled the toddler.

“We need to get this kid fire before he kills himself,” he told the girl.

Jay couldn’t hear her response, but it made the guy lean in and kiss her.

“You don’t want to singe all your awesome hairs off, do you?” the guy asked the boy. He spiked the kid’s hair out in all directions.

As Jay and the phuri stepped closer, Jay realized it was the hairiest kid he’d ever seen.

The phuri spoke to Jay, but loud enough for the couple to hear. “This Nim and Soren. They take you find your brother.” She bent over with a groan and smoothed the corner of the family’s blanket. When she stood, she said to the couple, “This Jay Laurens. His brother kidnapped by enemies of your family.”

The guy and girl – Soren and Nim – made eye contact.

Grinning, Soren looked toward Jay and the phuri. “Oh, yeah, we’re definitely going there,” he said. “We love enemies, visit them all the time.”

Nim laughed and tucked her feet under herself, probably to make room for Jay to sit. He knew not to decline an invitation, however subtle, so while he laughed too, he supplied, “I don’t know where he is. She seems to think you can help me find him.”

He looked over his shoulder, but the phuri was gone.

“We definitely do,” Nim promised. “Exactly where he is.”

From her sarcasm, he guessed they had no clue. He tried not to be disappointed. This search had always been two steps forward and one step back, but he intended to persevere.

“Is that, like, elsewhere? You know he’s not here?” he asked them.

“We know he is with someone on our finite list of enemies. That is a huge lead, considering only jerks and jealous people hate us.”

“With a jerk or a jealous person,” Jay pretended to take a mental note.

Maybe they were serious and could help, or maybe they were weird and he’d have to find others to help. Either way, they liked sarcasm and he liked sarcasm.

“Do you want a notebook so you can write this stuff down?” Soren offered.

Jay laughed. “I’ve learned that notebooks can be stolen.”

“I’ve heard anything can be stolen,” Nim joked. “I’m still wearing clothes though. When was he kidnapped.”

Jay wondered whether she knew that the clothes comment had instantly made him wonder what she looked like without. She had a nice body – sturdy but pliable – and would probably make good money in a slave market on some of the realms. Plus she had a proven ability to bear children.

Good thing Jay wasn’t a slave-trader, although he’d been offered a job with a group of them once. He’d stayed around long enough to sort out that they hadn’t taken his brother, and moved on. But he still knew what they looked for.

“About ten years ago,” Jay told her, to the kidnapping question. “We were playing in the yard and he vanished. I’ve traced him this far.”

“What realm are you from?” Soren asked.

“Babylon,” Jay said.

He knew Babylon was an ancient city in his realm, but he had no idea how the entire realm had come to be named after that one city, when there were so many other cool, influential, ancient cities to be named after.

“Is he at all like you?” Nim asked.

“We could probably pass for twins.” He hated that the only picture he had of him was ten years old, wrinkled and discolored, utterly wrong for finding someone who would be a teenager now.

“Brain twins or body twins or both?” she asked. “Because my twin and I could pass as twins in some ways, but he has the wrong pieces.”

Jay closed his eyes and tried not to think about pieces. It was kind of cruel of the phuri to bring up love right before introducing Jay to these two, who were so clearly attached to each other.

“We look alike,” he told her. He pulled a knife out of his shoe, sharp and imperfect and deadly. “I’ve trained with the Rhoganoi. I can be an asset in whatever else you’re doing.” Soren laughed, but Jay pressed on. “I would appreciate the help in exchange for my help.”

“We’re on a very important mission,” Soren told him in a way that suggested they had no plans whatsoever.

“You may not be up for it,” Nim warned.

Whispered, Soren revealed, “We’re trying to find the edge of the world.”

After a second, Jay laughed. They were messing with him. That was a relief. What if they’d been serious? He wondered if he still would have gone with them, in the hopes that they’d stumble on his brother.

“We do have an entrance exam into our group. Question One: Do you like, or have you ever liked, corn?”

“Corn?” he asked. What did corn have to do with anything? “I’m…I don’t hate it.”

“Fail,” Soren announced. “Next question.”

“Question Two: Do you like or have you ever liked corn farming?”

“I don’t know,” Jay answered truthfully. “I’ve never tried it.”

Soren shook his head, in either mock or real disappointment.

“Question Three: Do you like babies?”

“You do,” Jay hedged.

“I had twins and adopted one,” she defended, “but that doesn’t answer the question.”

“Do I like babies…they’re interesting. I wouldn’t ever hurt one. Do I want to have one right now? Not really.” He hoped that answer satisfied whatever.

He was a little relieved they’d adopted the hairy one, because she seemed really young for having a kid that old.

“Question Four,” Nim continued. “Do you have any magic or abilities or desire for such things?”

“I’m from Babylon,” he said, to avoid any questions about what training he had undergone over the past six years. He liked to keep his skill sets quiet. “I wish I could get some.”

“You can,” Nim offered. “That’s why I asked.”

He had two magics, one gifted and one grafted, which already served him. One was an extra skill with knives and swords, an instinct for where and when to strike. The Uumutuu had given him that in a ceremony when he was twelve, and they’d trained him in Shalak Ra, their art of swordfighting.

The other was a chemical implant someone had bought in Noc Thui from a group of refugees, and it made him unusually strong, although he’d been warned that its effects would fade in time.

“What kind of magic?” Jay asked. “And what price?”

One of the infants started to fuss.

“You have to be our slave until we actually find the end of the world. Three babies make a lot of diapers, and we don’t want to pollute so we’re just going to toss them over the edge.” The guy picked up the fussing baby and snuggled it against him, smiling.

“But in exchange, you get fire and water magic. Air, if you promise undying loyalty,” Nim added.

So they were fairies. Jay knew they existed, but from what he understood they preferred their home realm, Elesara. They were immortal, powerful, reclusive, with a handful of exceptions.

Maybe he would finally get to see the fairy home realm. He doubted his brother was there, but to see the place, to meet people who had lived for thousands of years…

No wonder Nim and Soren looked so young. They were probably two or three thousand years old.

“Fire and water sound good,” Jay said, careful not to sound too eager. “Yes, please. And I promise to find you a cliff somewhere if that helps,” he added, joking about their end of the world plan.

Nim sighed. “I guess we’ll keep looking.” She held up the baby in her arms. “This is Caden the survivor, Tsura the extraordinary, or extra-ordinary…your choice, and Meldrey the hairball.” She pointed to the infant in Soren’s arms when she said Tsura’s name, and the boy when she said Meldrey.

“Hello to all of them,” Jay said. Since things seemed to have relaxed more, he helped himself to some of their ollo, the red liquor Rhoganoi enjoyed. “I can help with your kids, in exchange for your help.”

He wasn’t exactly sure how he would help with kids, since he didn’t know anything about parenting, but keeping Meldrey out of the fire seemed like a good start.

Soren had some ollo too. “Where have you already looked? What do you know?”

“I went to this private school up near Susanville, and my parents wanted Oscar to go too. So he had to take a test to get in Someone stole all the tests. The next day, he disappeared. No one else thinks it was weird. So when I was eleven, I decided to try looking for him, and I went through a portal by accident and never found my way back home. But he’s with people who kidnap kids and use them. They’re dangerous and operate across a ton of realms and have no value for the lives they take.”

Soren whipped his head around and looked behind them, where the phuri stood. She’d joined them at some point without Jay noticing.

“Waaiiiit a minute,” Soren said to the phuri. “Are they enemies now or are they enemies because we help this guy?”

“Now,” the phuri told him. “Already they plot against you.”

Nim set her baby on the blanket in front of her. “So what we do is we have a spell made so that we can track him, and then…we plan to go get him. How many realms have you been to?”

“Nine, counting this one,” Jay said. “Someone warned me not to go to the one called Sylem and that if they took him he was dead, but someone else did something that showed he’s still alive.”

“Oh…not Sylem? Why?” Nim picked up the other baby, Tsura, and started nursing.

Jay shrugged. He didn’t want to reveal how little he understood about that warning. Some people could be trusted, some couldn’t. He thought Nim and Soren probably could be, but he always gave everyone a week before he made more than an initial judgement. “It sounds like they look for wanderers to use in their magic. The Rhoganoi avoid it.”

“We can explore there without trouble,” Nim said.

Jay took another swig of ollo. Trust. “We should start there, then, while I have your help.”

“That sounds good. We just need to stop at home and get you magic. The king or queen can give it to you.”

“Now?” he asked her. “Or in the morning?”

She looked at Soren, who frowned a little. “We should sleep,” he said, in a way that made it sound like he didn’t give a damn whether he or Jay slept, as long as Nim did. “Or at least try to. We can leave after breakfast?”

Nim looked at Jay. She sounded surprisingly fierce for someone who had just been laid back and goofing off a little. “Tonight we will dance and enjoy ourselves. Tomorrow, we go enemy hunting.”

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