.
It was fully night-time when Serera dismissed me. Right away, a lesser fairy and the other half-fairy snagged my hands and pulled me to my feet.
“Let’s go, Sister!” quoth the lesser fairy, a cutie with moss-colored hair and matching eyes.
“You’re supposed to say ‘Your Highness’,” the silver-haired half-fairy remonstrated her.
“Go where?” I asked, a bit perplexed.
“My mother is a naiad, Your Highness,” the half-fairy told me as she grew her wings, “And Moire is a xana. We also need to bathe. We’re going now.”
I had alerted them to my need for water before we arrived at the fairy camp. Since the half-fairy was taking to the air, I grew my wings as well.
There had been a word I didn’t recognize though. “A xana?”
“I’m a normal river maiden, Your Highness,” the aptly-named Moire answered. In fairy, the name ‘Moire’ means ‘River Beauty’. “In Rénin’s home country, they call my kind ‘xana’.”
Only they and I needed to recharge water mana, but as soon as I took to the air, I found myself surrounded by lesser fairies in gently glowing raiments, which made for a surreal trip to the bath. Their raiments had decreased dramatically in coverage since daylight, as well. They were letting me have a very good view.
It seemed nearly everyone who wasn’t on patrol had suddenly decided a swim sounded fun. We had an entire flock with us, eight additional women, for the short flight downhill to a beaver pond hidden within a heavily wooded hollow .
Rock beavers are monsters, but only a problem if they start building somewhere where they are a nuisance, like a populated area. Mortals do hunt them, but this pair had found a wonderfully safe location, because their fairy neighbors would be keeping away the predators, including mortals.
They are clever enough to realize that the fairies who come to borrow their pond are not enemies. And mortal visitors seemed quite unlikely, because only fairies would be unconcerned about the wildlife in the surroundings. It was quite safe for us to swim here, at the bottom of a deep valley surrounded by a dense forest of oak and aspen.
I looked around as we arrived, wondering out loud where I should undress. Not an issue for my raiment-clad companions, or so I thought.
“We have a perfect spot, Your Highness!” Moire told me as she and the others flew directly to the beaver lodge near the middle of the pond.
Rock beavers are enormous in comparison to natural beavers, as big as a medium-size boar, and instead of wood they chew rock to sculpt it into building blocks and gravel. The lodge was like a misshapen stone igloo rising from the water, and it was somewhat flat in spots.
I had neglected to notice a very good reason that these fairies would have a spot worked out already. They still needed to cache their weapons.
The spear girls went first, standing their weapons up in a teepee formation near the center of the lodge. Then the sword girls and archers laid their equipment on another flat spot. Rien showed me an additional flat spot near the water’s edge where I could undress and leave my dress, slippers and sword belt.
I sighed as she followed the other fairies into the water. Their “perfect spot” for me to disrobe was right in the middle of a freaking beaver pond, with not even shrubs for cover!
Perfect for what? A striptease stage?
The fairies had remodeled the banks of the beaver pond to create places to sit and relax. Diara, ever the scholar’s daughter, gave me the details on the process. If they gradually removed the giant beavers’ stones from the lodge or the dam, one or two at a time, the creatures sculpted new ones to replace them. The fairies used the old ones for their own construction work, like this comfortable submerged couch were I currently reclined.
She told me this while reclining suspiciously close to me. She was maintaining just a few thin bits of raiment, but at this point she might as well be nude. Rénin, the other half-fairy, had me bracketed from the other side, and had dropped her raiment completely.
Half-fairies are higher than lesser fairies in the pecking order, and these two had wordlessly used their higher status to claim spots at my sides. The touching was still very tentative, so I hadn’t pushed back yet, but I wasn’t doing anything to encourage them, either.
But they were definitely dropping hints. Like Rénin noting, “All these other girls will go back up to the camp, but Moire and I always stay here overnight.”
Naturally. Moire would have to stay in water almost as much as Grandmother, and Rénin probably had similar needs as Mother.
“I stay down here with you sometimes, too!” Diara protested. Her mother was a nymph. Their needs aren’t as dire, but they are somewhat more reliant on Water than other non-naiads. She probably has to recharge once a week or so.
“That’s true,” Rénin conceded. “It’s the three of us sometimes.”
Her fingertips brushed my upper arm lightly as she noted, “Perhaps it’s the four of us, tonight?”
We’re talking about the four of us sleeping here, right?
Even though fairies tend to be hostile toward humanoid monsters, I seemed to be getting a tentative pass thanks to either my royal status or my half-fairy status.
Fairies are rarely hostile to monstrous beasts. Frankly, they see them just like natural beasts, as an integral part of the ecology. But they tend to be hostile toward the intelligent monster species. Gnomes and a few other minor species that get manage on mana-rich plant life are the exception, but they are repulsed by how, for the rest of us, the greater need for stabilized mana makes intelligent mortals like dwarfs, elves and humans our natural prey.
This pool, the work of rock beavers, was a good example of their friendliness to monstrous beasts, but so were the ghostly curtains of giant spider webs that I was now beginning to see out in the surrounding forest. The phantom walls were becoming visible as the greater moon rose higher into the sky and its beams reached between the trees to light them up. From the pond, the strands looked like long strings of tiny gemstones, but I knew they were as strong as steel cables. Elven craftsmen make their best rope from the stuff.
“Isn’t it dangerous to let those things live so close?” I wondered to Rénin, who had been hovering close to me most of the time.
She looked at where I was pointing, a particularly close web, and shrugged.
“The captain doesn’t want us to disturb them, Rôn. True fairies are strong enough that they don’t have to be afraid of them, so she laughs it off when we complain. She says they’re good for keeping the pests away. Like humans.”
Yes, to most fairies, the human adventurers that show up from time to time aren’t much different than cockroaches.
By the way, I was getting called “Your Highness” in Dorian and “Rôn” in Fairy. Although I was hearing very little Fairy, because it apparently isn’t well-known among lesser fairies. It seems lesser fairies usually speak the local language instead, which explained why the girls working for the Hart River lord hadn’t understood me. Rénin and Diara regularly made comments to each other in Fairy, but that was it.
I had a reason to be a little nervous about giant spiders, though. “Are you guys safe? I mean, giant spiders are strong. I’ve fought one before. It was tough.”
Specifically, Tiana fought a spider which had caught Brigitte and Melione. That was a frightening experience. Giant spiders are seriously tough opponents. Their carapaces are like tank armor.
It was fortunate that Melione was such a strong healer. She was able to stop the venom inside herself, and just barely keep Brigitte alive, wrapped up in a cocoon next to her, until Tiana got them free. But that was only after Tiana managed to defeat the beast.
By the way, Tiana was fighting alone that time, but it wasn’t because the guys were useless. What happened was, they had split up to find the missing girls. Tiana had the advantage of her fairy senses and tracked them down first.
Rénin shrugged.”We do a daily patrol to rescue anybody who’s been caught. It’s happened a few times. One time, we caught ourselves a human girl that way.”
Responding with a laugh to my expression, she said, “Don’t worry. We brought her home. She was a bit too young to play with.”
A couple pairs of our fellow bathers were getting a bit intimate, and I could tell that Rénin had her eyes on me. Diara had closed in on the other side, and I was beginning to feel a bit like a small prey animal.
Rénin glanced the direction I was looking and let out a light laugh, then gave my arm a languid stroke. “You had such a long flight, Your Highness. Perhaps we could help you to relax.”
