Prince of Attania, 2

Ben’s box truck rattled around the empty bowl that was Midver and slowly settled to a stop in front of the town’s only store and market. Besides leading the Sons of Men, Ben traded at Low City’s docks for supplies for his own organization back in Parrion. It wasn’t hard to throw in a few extra supplies for the people of Midver.

Attan helped him unload crates filled with fruit and vegetables from different parts of Attania. Thanks to Jet’s intensive growing initiative between Family and non-family, food was plentiful even in autumn.

The supply store clerk was happy to see Attan again. “You came back!” He greeted Attan, smiling. “And you kept your word.” He glanced curiously at Ben. “Did Tom send you?”

“No,” Attan and Ben said together.

“No,” Attan repeated. “This is my father’s friend, Ben Reaves. He brought the food you see here.”

The people of Midver didn’t know Attan’s father was the King, but they knew he was Family. They might have accepted Attan, but the clerk’s jaw hardened at the mention of Attan’s Family father. “Roger,” he introduced himself grudgingly. “We don’t take charity.”

Ben stepped up to the counter. “No charity,” he agreed, smiling a placid, noticeably non-family smile. “I was hoping you’d have something to trade. A village like this must have seen an awful lot of mining in its day.”

Attan gaped in surprise. Mining? He’d thought the villagers were so poor because they didn’t have any work.

Roger hesitated. “Well,” he began. “To be honest, we still do some mining though the mines are all but tapped out. It’s the carvings that really bring in the money, though. Tom sells them for us every now and again, though sometimes he just takes the raw stone. Would you like to see?”

“I’d love to see,” Ben replied, and just like that, they were long-lost friends, chatting amiably about things that, for the most part, went right over Attan’s head. Attan trailed behind them, not sure what to make of the new turn of events.

The carvings were in a workshop beneath the small chapel. Attan’s elemental friends greeted him enthusiastically, and were sorely disappointed when he did not transform to be with them.

Ben ended up taking ten of the small stone carvings and promised to buy more later if these sold. They were really quite nice, finely detailed, in an assortment of muted colors. Most depicted human or animal forms, though a few showed more whimsical representations.

Attan picked up a pale blue stone which looked like a wave cresting. It was translucent at the edges, lightening to almost white at the wave’s peak, with its center darkening to an almost midnight blue. “What’s this?” he asked, in case he was wrong about what it was supposed to be.

“The sea,” Roger replied, taking it from Attan and reverently placing it back on the shelf. “It’s meant to represent the sea.”

Elementals surged in and out of the carving, distracting Attan from his questions. He wished he could join them.

“Would you like it?” Ben asked.

“What?”

“Would you like to have the carving of the wave?” Ben clarified. “I’ll buy it for you.”

The storekeeper frowned in disapproval. “It’s delicate,” Roger said. “And expensive. Not the best choice for a young boy.”

Ben smiled. “This young boy knows how to be careful around breakable stones. How much?”

They haggled back and forth for a few minutes while Attan lightly touched the carving without taking it down from the shelf. Yes, this one spoke to him. He’d rarely been to the sea, though it surrounded Attania on all sides. He wondered how it would feel to be a wave in the endless ocean.

A hand reached over Attan and plucked the carving from the shelf. “Here. It’s yours.” Ben handed him the blue wave.

Attan cradled the small carving carefully as he followed Ben and Roger back through the darkened chapel to the town’s store. There, the two men concluded their bargaining, shaking hands, as they made arrangements for more trade in the future.

As they drove out of Midver, Attan looked with new eyes at the scarred inside of the bowl Midver sat in. Those must be the rocks that the townspeople mined. No wonder they were sitting in a hole.

“I’ve heard of this place before,” Ben commented as they cleared the last turn on the single road in and out of Midver. “It used to be famous for its carvings.”

“What happened to it?”

Ben shrugged. “Time. Those hillsides must be almost tapped out. I’m surprised they still do any mining at all. I’m surprised they stayed.”

Attan didn’t mention the spirits. He didn’t see how it could matter, really, since they were actually elementals, not spirits at all. “What about Tom?” he asked.

“We wait,” Ben said. “Sooner or later he will turn up again, and when he does, we’ll be there.”

X x X x X x X

Jet was furious when Attan told him what he had done on Jadock’s mountain. “What was Ben thinking? You’ve never done anything like that before. You could have killed them all!”

“But I was careful,” Attan said. “Ben said I did a good job.”

“I’ll have a few things to say to him about that when I get back,” Jet promised.

Attan decided not to mention Ben’s offer to join the Sons of Men. He switched off the communicator and sighed. The blue wave carving sat on a shelf above Attan’s bed. On impulse, he turned to light and merged through the carving, liking the way it diffused and muted his light essence and scattered it around the room. Perhaps he would be better off joining the Sons of the First rather than the Sons of Men. He understood them better.

Attan went back to Midver once a week for the next several months, all through Attania’s bleak winter. The people of Midver became used to him, and several of them told him they didn’t think of him as Family anymore. Attan wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not.

Attan asked Roger if he could visit the carving workshop below the chapel, which is how he found out that Tom’s mother, blind Emma, was the one who had carved his wave statue. The elementals surged back and forth, through Emma and through the rocks she lovingly carved.

Emma showed Attan how to hold a lump of raw stone and slowly shape it with a small metal chisel. Attan did it her way, though it would have been much easier to just form it through elemental means. Instead, he learned to let the ‘true shape of the piece,’ as Emma put it, emerge from the stone as he carved.

By the time spring arrived, Attan had managed to carve two little figures by hand. The proportions weren’t exactly right, but Attan was enormously proud of them. “I’m giving these to my parents,” he told Emma. Now that she’d stopped asking about her missing son, she was pleasant enough to talk to during the hours they spent together in her workshop. Most of Emma’s figures were fantastic creations, although Roger had told Attan that once, she was famous for her nature carvings.

The elementals, whom Emma talked to as easily as she talked to Attan, gathered around whenever she was near. Occasionally, Attan would release his physical form and play with them, figuring that Emma, being blind, wouldn’t notice, or even if she did notice, wouldn’t mind.

Tom led his Sons of Men all across Attania that winter, but he must have had a loyal network of supporters who sheltered him because Ben’s Sons of Men never quite caught up with him. Attan didn’t think he would show up in Midver after what he had done, knowing that the real Sons of Men were after him.

So when Midver’s elementals excitedly surrounded him one early spring morning, Attan didn’t quite catch what their images of my, mine, sent with gleeful anticipation, were all about. He clattered down the stairs to the workshop, eager to put the finishing touches on his two carvings.

Attan froze at the bottom of the stairs. Tom Jadock sat beside Emma on the low stool Attan usually used, staring coldly at Attan. “You’ve caused me a lot of trouble, little Prince,” he said.

Emma looked up, too, as if she could see Attan standing there. “Young Spirit, look! It’s my Tom! He’s come back!” She smiled happily.

The elementals echoed her joy, to Attan’s dismay. Now he understood their excitement. Emma was ‘theirs’ and Tom was Emma’s, so Tom was ‘theirs’ too. That made what Attan had to do more difficult. The elementals didn’t understand the true situation; Emma didn’t understand it, either.

“No matter, I’ve come to collect,” Tom continued. “I need you to do another job for me.”

Was he serious? Attan, on the verge of transforming, changed his mind. “No. You lied to me last time. You’ve lied to everybody!”

As Attan’s temper flared, tiny rocks and pockets of dust rattled and swirled around the workbench. At first, Attan thought the elementals were causing it, but he quickly realized that his anger was feeding their agitation. Through it all, Tom sat calmly with his arms folded across his chest.

“Oh, you’ll help.” Tom leaned back in his chair. “Right now my men are entertaining the little children over at Roger’s store. Do you want to take a chance that you can get over there before there’s an ‘accident?’” Tom tapped his jacket pocket.

He had a communicator! His men must have one, too. Attan hesitated, one foot on the stairs. What should he do? If he transformed now, Tom would signal his men and they would harm the children. “What do I have to do?” he asked, resigned.

Smirking in satisfaction, Tom sat forward.