Sprite

Neistah took the long way around, dragging his two new charges through all sorts of terrain and over paths that weren’t really paths at all. The little boy loved it; the man, though, was starting to get suspicious and watched Neistah through narrowed eyes.

“Are you actually taking us somewhere or are we just wandering around aimlessly?”

Neistah leaned his head back, a telltale gleam in his eye. “We’ll get there—eventually.” He had actually brought them close to two of the changeling settlements and had been spotted by scouts both times, though he signaled them quietly to keep their distance. It was a credit to his Sprites that the hunter did not spot them. But then again, he had problems of his own to occupy him. Since Neistah had not allowed him to retain his knives, the taller man had to constantly watch his feet to avoid getting tangled in vines or the small plants that choked every inch of ground. Neistah deliberately avoided the more traveled trails. By the time they arrived at Hanan’s, word would have preceded them.

In the meantime . . . Neistah led them to a small pond in the middle of nowhere. While Tom slid the wriggling Andy off his shoulders, Neistah abandoned both of them to slip into the water. His reason was twofold: he wanted to remind them of just what he was, and he felt like swimming. It was a long time before his head broke the surface again, and when it did, he wasn’t surprised to see the two humans staring in horrified fascination at the spot where he had gone under. He grinned, and threw two fishes to shore. “Dinner,” he said, having already eaten his fill.

Tom moved to make a fire and find a flat stone on which to grill the fish. Little Andy wandered closer to the edge of the pond, and while his father wasn’t looking, Neistah snatched the child and dragged him underwater. He’d been wanting to do that since he had first seen the boy.

Andy struggled, his eyes wide with alarm, and opened his mouth to cry. Neistah quickly slapped a hand over it. The little boy frowned, making muffled noises against Neistah’s hand. Neistah pointed to his own mouth, which was tightly closed, then slowly took his hand away from the boy’s mouth. Immediately Andy started to open his mouth, stopping in surprise when water rushed inside. He closed it shut again as Neistah let him go completely and he hung suspended in the water, automatically moving his little arms and legs. The small slits on the side of the boy’s neck rhythmically opened and closed, allowing him to glean oxygen from the water.

Neistah circled around the boy in a sinuous loop, arms clamped closely to his sides, legs together, approximating a denizen of the deep, which he was. Andy watched him carefully, twisting his body around to follow Neistah’s movements. The boy was awkward in the water, but then again, according to his father he had never been swimming before. What a cruel fate for someone whose body was obviously made for the water! Neistah veered away, waiting to see what the little boy would do. At first, the child remained in place, twisting around and around as he tried in vain to locate Neistah. He hadn’t tried to breathe through his mouth again after that first startled breath, and he didn’t try now, even though he was clearly upset. Good instincts. Andy was not a sprite, that much was certain. His human body was thicker, and lacked both the coloration and the webbing of the sprites.

-Over here!- Neiestah sent, wondering if the boy would be able to hear his unspoken words. But the child still thrashed about under the water, becoming increasingly agitated. Ah, well—perhaps the ability to speak mind to mind, a necessity underwater, would come in time if more humans developed this particular mutation—for mutation it must be. A sensible one, in Neistah’s opinion.

He arrowed back over to the boy, circling him once before swimming off more slowly this time for the surface. Neistah broke the surface to find Tom distraught in the shallow end of the pond, screaming his son’s name over and over as he wove back and forth through the reeds. Neistah scowled. “Do you want to bring down more hunters on us?”

Tom started towards Neistah, his movements hampered by the long plants which wrapped around his legs. “Help me!” he implored him. “Andy’s gone. He must have fallen in! He’ll drown.”

Neistah laughed. “He won’t drown,” he assured the other man. “I expect he’ll find his way out any minute now.”

“What? What are you saying? Do you know what happened to Andy? Where is he?” Tom had reached half-way to Neistah now, where the sprite floated lazily in a clear patch of water away from the reeds. The water dropped off suddenly and Tom found himself over his head between one step and the next.

Like a shark, Neistah promptly disappeared to circle under the hapless human. He couldn’t resist. Tom’s wide, frightened eyes met his underwater. Unlike his son, Tom could not swim. He made a grab for Neistah, which the sprite easily avoided. Neistah waited until the man had no choice but to breathe out, and watched his eyes fill with despair before he grabbed hold of the man’s collar and swiftly towed him to the surface. Tom alternately choked and gasped for air.

“Ah, here he comes now,” Neistah commented, still holding the man up so his head was above water.

About a foot below the surface, a jerky brown streak headed stubbornly for the two figures. It grabbed Neistah around the waist, still underwater, and Neistah reached down with his other hand and hauled the little boy up so he could see that his father was with them also. “Daddy!” Andy said happily, the first words Neistah had heard the boy speak.

“Andy!” Tom struggled in Neistah’s grasp to get to his son. Neistah considered just letting him go. It would be easy to watch the hunter drown and just keep the boy. Whatever else the man might be, he was still a hunter. His son was a different matter.

Andy made a grab for his father and clung tight to his neck, despite the fact that the added weight dragged both of them down into the water. With a disgusted “tsk!” Neistah adjusted his grip on them and pulled the two of them to shore.

By this time, the fish had burned and the smell made Neistah turn up his nose. He immediately went back into the water, returning in a few minutes with two new fish. “See if you can do a little better with these,” he muttered. Tom was busy toweling off his son, using his own none-too-clean shirt to do it with. He looked up gratefully as Neistah dropped the fishes in front of him.

“Thank you for saving my son,” he murmured, making Neistah uncomfortable.

“Hurry up and finish those. With all the noise you’ve been making, and the stench from the fish, we probably have a whole army of hunters on our trail.” It wasn’t true—Neistah would have sensed it, and besides, his scouts were on the lookout, shadowing their movements at a safe distance. But the hunter should have realized how careless he had been.

Tom grinned at him, and sent Andy over to sit with Neistah while he cleaned the fish and set new stones on the fire, even turning his back on them so he could tend the fish. Neistah shook his head. The man trusted him with his son.

Andy tugged on Neistah’s hand and smiled up at him without saying anything.

“What?” Neistah asked.

Tom looked up at that. “He doesn’t talk much. Andy, tell him what you want or he can’t help you.”

This close, Neistah could sense the child’s thoughts. He wanted Neistah to take him back into the water. But Tom was right. If the boy could not communicate to others of his kind, no one was going to understand him. He waited for the boy to put his thoughts into words.

“Swim?” The boy pleaded with Neistah with his eyes. Neistah might have done him a disservice by introducing him to the water. Now, it was going to be hard to keep the child away from it. Sooner or later, the boy would figure out he could go into the water on his own, and then there would be no stopping him. But that would be his father’s problem, not Neistah’s.

“Why doesn’t he talk?” Neistah asked Tom. “He seems able.” He smiled back at Andy and shook his head slightly. -After dinner,- he sent out of habit, not really expecting the boy to pick it up. But Andy subsided, and went to sit by his father and watch the fish cooking on the fire.

Tom shrugged. “We’re not really sure,” he said. “We were always so careful about him, keeping him away from other people. I guess his mother and I got in the habit of anticipating his wishes. He doesn’t talk because he doesn’t really need to. Didn’t need to. His mother was really the one who took care of him.”

“Mama,” said the boy. He reached out a hand to touch the fish and his father good-naturedly slapped it away. “Fish.”

“You’re going to have to learn how to swim,” Neistah commented. “I don’t think you’ll be able to keep him out of the water.”

Tom gingerly took the rocks with the fish still on them out of the fire, first wrapping his hand in the same shirt he had used to dry off Andy earlier. It was his spare shirt from his pack; the one he’d been wearing when he plunged into the pond in search of his son was now hanging over a tree branch to dry. Neither shirt looked in any condition to be worn. Andy’s clothes also hung on branches to dry, and Neistah took the opportunity to inspect the rest of the boy’s body for any other signs that he might not be fully human. But, except for the thickened skin between his fingers and a similar thickening between his toes, Andy had no other fins or webbing on his body.

Andy ate his fish, blowing on his fingers when it was too hot. When he was done, he jumped up and pulled his pants off the branch and struggled into them, leaving the shirt hanging there along with his father’s shirt. Neistah couldn’t help notice that now all three of them wore similar outfits, if the trousers the two humans wore were a little on the long side. Andy grabbed one of his father’s hands and reached out his other hand for Neistah. “Swim? Now? Swim!” he said, jumping up and down excitedly.

Tom and Neistah glanced at each other over the boy’s head. “I’ll take him,” Neistah said. As if it were a chore instead of a joy. The quickly suppressed relief in Tom’s eyes showed he thought of it as a chore.

“Daddy?” Andy asked, as Neistah led him back to the water.

“Daddy can’t swim,” Neistah answered bluntly. “But we can!” He picked the little boy up and threw him, squealing, into the middle of the pond where his voice suddenly cut off and there was no sight or sound of him whatsoever. Tom started for the water in concern. “He’s fine,” Neistah said. “I’ll try to have him back to you by morning,” he added, laughing at Tom’s sudden intake of breath. Neistah dove neatly into the water, disappearing as completely as the boy had.

In reality, it was only an hour later that Neistah brought Andy, half asleep and exhausted from all the physical exercise, to the banked fire where Tom sat brooding. He accepted his son back without speaking, and turned his back on Neistah and the fire both. He pretended to sleep, and Neistah pretended to believe him.

The next morning they crossed Hanan’s metal boundary, and if Tom thought it strange that Neistah dragged over two fallen logs and propped them against the fence rather than just climbing over it, he didn’t comment on it. Neistah ran nimbly up the first log and down the second, waiting for them to follow.

“What’s this for?” Tom asked, regarding the fence which, except for sections where debris from last winter’s storm had damaged it, looked to be in fairly good repair. “I never saw a fence out here before. Is this where the changelings live?”

“You’ll see,” Neistah replied, leaving the former hunter to struggle along behind him with Andy perched once more on his shoulders. Tom obviously wasn’t one of Avery’s cronies, or he would have known about the Hanan compound. That was good.

A few yards beyond the fence they met Mack and his patrol, who pointed guns at the three of them as if Neistah hadn’t been right there beside them. “Who are you?” Mack asked gruffly, baring his sharp teeth, which looked even worse now that one of them was broken and hung jaggedly over his bottom lip. Neistah moved off to one side, ignored by the armed men. Tom glanced at Neistah for help, but the sprite just stared evenly back at him. He had brought the hunter and his changeling child this far; if they wanted acceptance among the humans, they had to ask for it themselves.

“I thought,” Tom glanced at Neistah again, but the sprite studiously avoided his gaze. “I was looking for a mutant village. A place for my boy, here.” He slowly reached up and helped Andy slide off his shoulders.

“He’s a mutant?” Mack asked skeptically. From a distance, Andy didn’t look all that different.

“I’m hungry,” Andy said.

Mack glanced at Neistah and noticed the faint grin on the sprite’s face. “Well, come on then,” he said, motioning for his men to fall in behind Tom and the boy. “Jim will have to decide if you stay or go, but I expect the ladies might have something to say about it.”

Laughing softly, Neistah fell in behind the men and trailed them up to the house. Tom’s surprise to discover that neither Jim nor his wife Miriam were mutants was worth the trip. Jim thought he might find some work for Tom to do, with the unspoken thought that it would be heavily supervised work, at least for the time being.

The ladies, as Mack had predicted, were thrilled to meet young Andy. Lara and Leane especially were intrigued by his particular mutation and for once their attention wavered from Roselle’s new baby. Andy was actually a little older than Jenny, who was excited to finally have a playmate near her own age.

-Are you certain he’s none of ours?- Lara asked wistfully as she watched the boy cavort in the water. He hadn’t the fluidity of the sprites, but he was learning, keeping his arms and legs tight to his body and trying to propel himself just by using his hands and feet. It had come naturally to Norah, but then again, her webbing was both finer and more encompassing, and the water was her birthright. Still, the boy did all right.

Leane took it one step further. She eyed Tom speculatively as he went about his tasks in the horse stables, trusting the sprites to watch over his young son. -He’s handsome, for a mortal,- she conceded. It had taken Tom a long time to get used to the easy morals of the sprites, and he still averted his eyes when they stepped in and out of the water clad only in their bright hair. -You say his woman died? Then perhaps it’s time he had some womanly comfort again.-

Neistah watched Leane sashay across the lawn towards the stables, shaking his head slightly in amusement. At least Jordy would be relieved, he thought.