Prince of Attania, 2

Greg was waiting for Attan outside of school, his head down, unruly red bangs hiding his expression. He looked up as Attan approached, wariness warring with belligerence in his eyes, before falling into step beside Attan. “Are you going to tell?” he muttered, low so that only Attan would hear.

“About Midver?” Attan whispered back, a little surprised that Greg would worry about such a thing. Hadn’t he promised not to tell?

“Yeah—no—I mean all of it.” Greg pulled on Attan’s sleeve and drew him to the side as the rest of the students pushed past them into the practice room. “Tom,” Greg clarified.

Attan shook his head. “Not about Midver or Tom.” Not yet, anyway. “Why? Did Tom tell you to talk to me?”

“My dad did,” Greg confessed. They were drawing looks from some of the other pairs of students in the room. Greg was not usually the chatty kind. “He thinks because you’re the King’s son you’ll go running to your father and he’ll get arrested or something. Forget it. We’d better get going.”

Macek Merrell had already started speaking. Greg and Attan slipped into place next to the other Family/non-family pairs and waited for their assignment.

Their teacher and Attan’s cousin, Macek Merrell, remarked on Attan’s seemingly changed attitude when Attan flawlessly redirected the stocked fish in the Mattick River to Greg’s waiting net. “Your father would be proud of you,” Macek said as they all filed into the classroom area after practice. You’re finally taking your responsibilities seriously. You’ll make a fine King one day.”

At the end of the instructional class, Greg shoved his books into the desk they shared and muttered to Attan, “My sisters want to know if you’re coming over for dinner.”

Dinner? Again? Attan’s stomach knotted at the thought.

“Uh, not today. I can’t.” Attan wanted to go back to Midver—without Greg this time. Midver fascinated Attan in a way that not even the Capital at Darcy or Parrion did. He still wanted to visit Parrion one day to see what all the fuss was about, but Midver was his. His secret, his problem to solve.

Greg shrugged as if it didn’t really matter to him. “See you tomorrow, then.”

Ideally, Attan would have liked to avoid Macek too, but his cousin lay in wait just outside the classroom. “A word, Attan,” he murmured. “Your mother is worried about you. I know your father feels you are capable of handling yourself, but she worries when she doesn’t hear from you for long periods of time.” He put his hands on Attan’s shoulders and peered into the younger boy’s eyes. “She fears you will disappear, do you understand?”

“I won’t,” Attan promised. He knew Macek wanted to merge, to make sure Attan was telling the truth, but Attan stepped back. He wasn’t worried that Macek would find out about Midver if they merged; he was worried that he felt he had to hide it.

Macek’s talk changed things. Attan hurried home to reassure his mother that he was in no danger of reverting to his elemental state permanently. He even planned to eat lunch with her, if that’s what it took. But Doll wasn’t home. She had duties as Jet’s Queen, and today was her day to visit hospitals in Low City, to see and to be seen. Attan left her a note, and decided to visit Greg’s sisters after all. Maybe he was becoming more used to being in his physical body. The thought of Molly‘s apple pie actually made him hungry.

Attan didn’t have an opportunity to visit Midver for several more weeks. When Macek was called away to Darcy, he brought the King’s wife and Queen with him and cancelled classes for the length of the trip. Attan was to stay with his grandparents while they were gone. As long as he made sure he was back at their house by nightfall, Attan was free to do as he pleased during the day. He headed out for Midver the very next morning.

There were always elementals about, as much a part of Attania as its living, breathing inhabitants. Attan joyfully merged with them as he released his physical body and with it, the cares and obligations it carried. Free elementals did not think as much as exist in the moment, which suited Attan perfectly.

He traveled with them, or ones like them, for who could tell where one elemental began and another one ended? Wind was wind, light was light, water was water, whether it was a fine mist or a raging river. Attan was wind—and light—and water—as he moved among Attania’s free elementals towards Midver.

What differentiated Attan from the rest of the free elementals was his purpose. As tempting as their way of existence was to him—and to countless other Family who had succumbed to the temptation and permanently released their physical selves to become free elementals—Attan had reasons to go back. Today, that reason was Midver.

Midver’s elementals greeted Attan enthusiastically, kicking up gusts of wind or manifesting as sudden rain squalls which disappeared as fast as they formed. Attan swept through the town center where the steadily bubbling fountain was the sole remnant of the elementals’ earlier manifestations. The well water surged upward at his nearness, startling a young woman who jerked back her bucket at the last minute so she wouldn’t get soaked.

The riot of overgrown foliage which had so recently covered houses, walkways, and even the insides of some dwellings, was now withered and brown. Attan quickly realized that without Family to guide them, the free elementals reverted to their natural states, and the natural state of Midver in late autumn was decay.

At least the townspeople had gotten one good harvest out of the deal. It was probably for the best that the nearby fields were once again bare. If any other Family came around, they would have no reason to suspect Midver of hoarding a harvest from the rest of Attania. The new rules were share and work together for the good of all Attania. But for little towns with poor resources like Midver, it didn’t always work out that way. Tom had been right to ask the free elementals to help this village, though Family might not agree.

Attan followed the free elementals back to the small chapel where a great number of them liked to concentrate. He still didn’t understand why. Several people were inside, including the blind woman, Emma. The concentration of elementals was thickest around her. It was as if the elementals enjoyed the fact that these people knew of their existence.

Emma looked up. She couldn’t possible see Attan, but he dipped, flowing from wind to shadow to avoid her sightless gaze. He could swear he felt amusement all around him. Free elementals shouldn’t be that aware!

“Tom! Where is my Tom?” Emma’s tremulous voice floated up towards the ceiling.

Attan took no chances. He merged through the back wall of the chapel to get away from the uncanny woman. The free elementals could go or stay as they chose. Attan rose high over Midver as wind, and saw just how isolated it was, cut off from all but one road as well as from the Mattick River by broken rocks which might have once been mountains. Midver sat in a shallow bowl of earth, barren of trees except at the perimeter. Inside the bowl, a few flowering trees, gifts of Midver’s elementals, looked weak and spindly from lack of rain. Attan would have to have another talk with the elementals, but it might just be easier to come out here periodically himself to do something about it. Not too much, but enough to make Midver self-supporting.

Attan became a thundercloud and rained upon the land. He wasn’t surprised when some of Midver’s free elementals joined him. Like this, he showed them. He didn’t think they would remember to do it on their own, but they could be guided. It was what Tom had hoped for, only Tom wanted to use the free elementals without turning to Family as a go-between, which was impossible. Even these elementals, who interacted more with the physical than any others Attan had ever encountered, could not do it. You had to be physical in order to understand it.

“Young spirit! Young spirit!” Emma stumbled over loose rocks and withered cornstalks as she made her way across the muddy field. So much for her not noticing him. Attan took his body back with a sigh.

“It’s Attan,” he said, taking her arm to steady her. “My name is Attan.” She was soaking wet and so thin he could feel her bones through her clothes. He dried her with a thought, admonishing “her” attendant spirits at the same time for not doing so already. Naturally, it hadn’t occurred to them.

“Is my Thomas with you?” Emma asked plaintively.

Attan shook his head, remembered, and said, “No.”

Emma digested that for a moment, then gave a wan smile and said, “He’s very busy. But you’re here, and you brought the rain. You’ll bring us food too, won’t you?”

Attan was puzzled. There should be plenty of corn left from the harvest Midver’s free elementals had provided, even with the excess that Tom had carted away. When they had left a little over two weeks ago, the bins in the center market had been full.

Watch her, he sent, turning to wind.

Attan merged through the thin wooden walls of the community market, hoping to see stacked bins of ripe corn instead of the bare shelves which had been all he saw the first time he visited the market. Hoping—not expecting, not anymore. He materialized in the middle of an almost empty store. A weary clerk stared at him in shock when he appeared out of nowhere.

“What happened to all the corn?” Attan asked.

“You—you’re--” the man stuttered, pointing at Attan. “You’re that Family kid who was with Renn and his boy.”

“The corn.” Attan reminded him, stepping closer.

The man blanched. Attan might be a child, but he was a Family child, and that made him dangerous. “Tom said he could sell it for a good price and then he’d come back with better supplies for us—flour, meat, fish.”

That was over two weeks ago.

“Did Tom send you? Do you have our supplies?” The man asked hopefully.

Inwardly, Attan seethed. How could Tom do this to his own people? “Wait here,” he said, disappearing again.

If ever there was a time Attan hoped he could convey physical concepts to non-physical beings, now was the time. He gathered as many of Midver’s free elementals to himself as he could and explained—or tried to explain—the situation. Concepts like food and hunger and even death were alien to them. But they knew fish and they knew grow from before, so Attan led them away from Midver to the Mattick River and the rich soil adjacent to it.

Attan showed them how to fish the way he’d learned it at school, and Midver’s water elementals eagerly swirled into the Mattick’s murky depths, scooping up fish in a great waterspout, which the wind elementals took high into the air so that it appeared the fish were swimming across the sky.

An hour later, Attan triumphantly deposited a boatload of fish onto the market’s floor, with only a minimum of riverbottom to go with it. “I don’t know what you need to do to preserve it, but you should probably do it soon. Next time I’ll bring some vegetables.” There hadn’t been enough time today, but the earth elementals had happily scrambled in the rich soil on the Mattick’s banks, so Attan felt confident they could reproduce it here with a little guidance.

The clerk was already clanging a big bell he had behind his counter, startling some water elementals, who moved to investigate it closer. Don’t. It will rust, Attan cautioned.

Already, people were starting to pour into the little market, jostling one another as the ones in front stopped suddenly to avoid stepping on the mounds of wriggling river fish which covered most of the floor.

“Don’t just look—help me!” the clerk snapped. But some eyes darted to Attan, who stood self-consciously in the middle of the pile of fish, and no one moved forward.

“Your spirits did this,” Attan explained. “I just helped.”

Emma pushed her way into the market and people made way for her. “I told you my Thomas would provide,” she said. “He sent the young spirit back to us.”

Attan rolled his eyes.

“He’s not a spirit. He’s Family,” someone muttered, but nobody argued. The clerk doled out two fish to every household, and then organized a group of people to carry the rest to a small stone building at the far end of town, where they would smoke and store the remaining fish.