Koteran I

Jayla’s nose wrinkled. “With them?”

“Sure,” I said quietly. “You should know better than to discriminate.”

“It’s not discrimination, I just heard—well, for one, they think men are better than women, for some reason.”

“They’re more patriarchal than you; but they’re still a lot better than people on my continent used to be.”

“Patriarchal? I don’t know what that means—I just dunno if we should travel with them.” Jayla bit her lip again. A sore was starting to develop near its center.

“It’s fine, okay? I promise you—no one’s just the stereotypes or bad things you’ve heard about their people. Also, you’re one of the bravest people I know. You can handle anything, right?”

She nodded.

The wagon owner’s wife had joined him in the argument, and a couple of the others were pitching in.

With an annoyed, “The answer will stay no!” the guard slammed down his window.

The wagon owner sat down on the edge of a wagon and sighed.

“‘Scuse me,” I said, approaching.

He startled.

“Where’re you heading? We’re wondering if we can get a ride.”

“We don’t take freeloaders,” the wagon owner said; “‘Round Ky’an’th, the long way,” his wife said.

“We won’t be freeloading, we can work.” I said. “We’ve got some money too to pay you an initial fee.”

“Um…and, here,” Jayla said in Ry’ke’si, holding out the last chicken that’d been left with an intact body. “Meat.”

The wagon owner took it.

“Her name’s Lele,” Jayla said.

The wagon owner’s eyes softened. “Your pet? Don’t worry; we’ll treat her with respect and thank her for nourishing our own.” He gave a slight bow to both Jayla and the chicken.

“Think that means you can come along,” his wife said. “I’m Ao May-ri. My husband here is Ao Kit-na.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

That was how we ended up traveling with a Koteran clan.

The trip I guessed to be a little more than two months: Mail, which was delivered at all speed possible, took two or three weeks to reach from the capital city to this part of conquered Asania. Travelling by train when possible and on a fast horse in between would take four or five weeks. On a cart transport like this, resting at night, the trip would take at least a month and a half, and the people we were traveling with planned to take the scenic route and make some money in between.

Kit-na, who was in his fifties, was the oldest able-minded man and thus the group’s leader. They all considered each other related in various ways, though that was cultural and mostly divorced from blood ties—and were friendly enough, though in the first week of the journey it was hard for me or Jayla to make proper friends. A small flock of teenagers kept eyeing Jayla, seeming too scared to make contact—probably because I was always talking with her.

“Stop hanging out with me,” I told her, “go hang out with some of those kids your age for once.”

We were walking alongside the wagons; I was trying to spin thread on a Koteran spindle, which I was extremely bad at.

“Do you need help?” Jayla asked.

“No I don’t need help.”

The thread snapped again.

“Anyway, they obviously seem like they want to be friends with you.” I tied a new piece onto my lumpy mess. “Why don’t you talk to them?”

Jayla fidgeted.

“Do you not like them?”

“No! It’s not like that, they’re really all nice people, I just…well, I guess I never really talked to other people my age. What if I seem strange?”

“Weird people are the best people. Trust me, I’ve been a weirdo for twenty-six years.”

Jayla laughed.

“Go, go.” My hands were full, so I tried to point with my elbow. “I think they’re over there, on the other side of the wagon.”

“But you have to make friends with someone your age then,” Jayla said, and before I could answer, ran off to the other side of the wagon.

I sighed, but was unable to keep myself from smiling.

After a moment of thought, I approached a woman—I was pretty sure her name was Eri-le—who seemed around my age (in deference to Jayla). “‘Scuse me…do you know how to twist fiber back on properly? I can’t figure it out, so I’ve just been tying it.”

We ended up in a conversation—so, that day, Jayla and I both started to make friends.

A few days later, we ended up in a gallery forest alongside a river. After doing laundry—hot, difficult, work that I, feeling awkward, wore my jeans for, and everyone else did wearing nothing for the sake of washing everything—the hot water got used as a bath. Rather than fighting over or waiting ages for a turn, I figured it was hot enough out already and went to go flop around in the river with a bar of soap.

The water was a shock to my system, but after paddling around a bit, I realized it was really pretty warm. I lay in a backfloat and watched thin clouds move across the sky, occasionally doing a backstroke to keep myself in place against the current.

Eleven days made this all very real. I’d ate, drank, and slept here; made friends, met my characters—who’d then died. It didn’t feel anything like a coma or a prank show anymore, but I still had no idea how I’d ended up in this world.

I’d been thinking that if I went back I could fix the deaths of Casselian and the rest by rewriting the novel, but the thing with isekai was that the main character usually never went back. If they did go back, it could feel quite random or was because they’d died in the other world too. Most of the time it was reincarnation, after all. I also didn’t know how the novel interacted with this world. So, if I wanted to make an impact, I’d have to do it here. And I had to make an impact; it was my responsibility to the people I’d killed.

Water splashed upriver. Seemed that more people had had the same idea as me. I flipped around and started swimming up to meet them—we’d need to talk, anyway, about the show soon.