And standing there in sunlit silhouette was the other mother.
SHEA HAD TO admit that U’ru had been the very soul of patience. When sunrise had caught them a few miles short of Island Town, the great lady had let Día hurry on ahead – as long as Shea went along to mind her, of course. When night fell, U’ru had been perfectly delighted to put her family business on hold for the sake of a grand reunion with her beloved island home. Even this morning, with the festivities concluded and the Azahi satisfied and Hakai safely installed with Fours, the Dog Lady had lingered on the sight of Yashu-Diiwa overspilling the bed, and decided to let her tired puppy sleep.
Now he was awake, and it was her turn.
Which was news to the boy. He jumped, and then fumbled with whatever he was doing over there by the farther stalls – Shea couldn’t see more than a flinching brown blur.
“Whoa, hey!” he snapped. “How ’bout y’all wait outside, huh?”
Honestly, had there ever been a more inconsiderate, ungrateful child? Shea scowled. “How about you try that again, you mannerless mongrel sheepf –”
What is he saying? U’ru wanted to know. Why is he scared? She didn’t know him well enough to be able to read his thoughts, and any Ardish she’d learned was long since forgotten, but one didn’t need to be an earthly god to hear stress in a human voice.
He doesn’t understand, Shea answered. The story of his life.
By then the boy had composed himself, and even found the guts to come a little closer. “Fine – here it is again. Thank you very much for fixing my friend Hawkeye. Now I would please like you to stand aside so I can get on home.”
U’ru said nothing, but Shea could hear the anxious whine in her throat. “Will you let her answer you?”
Even Yashu-Diiwa seemed to consider that that might be the least his selfish carcass owed her. Shea couldn’t see much of his expression from here, but his arms folded under his poncho. “Sure – if she can do it without manhandling me or eating my brain.”
Shea stepped forward. “Listen, you callow shit –”
Then U’ru grabbed her by the back of her ill-fitting hood. Don’t scare him! she pleaded.
Right. Yes. Reconciliation. Kid gloves. Shea tried again. “Just... listen, all right? She’s not going to bewitch you, she’s not going to suck out what passes for your – look, Elim, do her one kindness in your life and hear her out, can’t you?”
There was just enough silence to give Shea hope, and perhaps a firmer set to his jaw. “... all right. All right, sure.”
Hopefully that actually meant something. “Right,” Shea said. “Now pay attention with your mind, with your heart – she doesn’t have anything for your ears.”
Go ahead, Mother. He’s ready to hear you.
U’ru took a nervous step forward, and Shea could feel her sprouting a single tiny blossom of hope.
My puppy. My baby. My Loves-Me.
She took a second step, and Shea sucked her teeth – but Yashu-Diiwa didn’t flinch back.
I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to lose you. I would have done anything to keep you. And I see how you’ve grown without me, and I know you have another home, another mother who loves you and wants you and misses you. I know you must be a good boy, and not want to make her cry... but you must also know how much I love you too. U’ru began to take a third step, but then seemed to fear that that would be too much. She stood where she was, hands clasped tight over her soft furry stomach.
I hope that you will want to be with me too, at least sometimes, and that you will let me start to know you again. I want to learn who you are now. I want to teach you who I am. Please, will you let us be a family again?
To his credit, the boy met her gaze all the while, paying her the strictest, most rapt attention...
... until his gaze drifted back over to Shea and dissolved into confusion. “Well?” he said. “Is she started yet?”
Shea’s heart missed a beat, and briefly considered giving up altogether.
And in the deciding-space between, she heard Marhuk’s voice again. You were not a good mother to your children, the old crow had said. And so you will have no children.
After all, the earthly gods had no tongues, and could be heard only by those who wished to listen... and as it turned out, a consenting mouth was no substitute for an open, willing heart.
I’m sorry, Mother, Shea said at last. He can’t hear you. He is deaf.
MAYBE THAT WAS the wrong thing to say. The fishman didn’t reply, but Elim could see the other mother’s expression wilt like a paper flower dropped in a puddle.
And harden as she advanced.
And Elim’s first thought was that it didn’t matter how many women he sent away crying today: his only job was to get back home to the one woman who had been left weeping far too long already. He stood his ground, shoring himself up to stall or run or fight, if he had to – to find the violence in him one more time, to bite or kick or trample whoever got between him and that door...
But the look on his face was apparently a lethal weapon all its own. The other mother staggered to a stop, poisoned by whatever she saw in him. Her eyes filled with tears.
Elim ought to take advantage of that. He ought to leave now, for good and all this time.
But whether it was his boots or the barn or the lady Boone waiting for him outside, Elim felt safer in himself now than he had before – more anchored in his own skin. He was reliably different from the barefoot native woman in the furry brown robe, even in spite of the likeness in their faces. She had no power over him.
But he was indebted to her.
So it was easier to find the kindness that maybe he should have shown her earlier, and to try to stanch a little of her sadness. “Well, look,” he said, his gaze switching between her and her fishman. “Maybe you could tell her something from me instead. Maybe you could tell her that I’m sorry for my meanness. I’m sorry that things happened like they did, and I’m sorry this didn’t work out like it was supposed to.”
What else was there? Elim dug down further, abashed in spite of everything. He’d just been so caught up with everything, so hounded with guilt and fear and brutal bone-wearing exhaustion, that he hadn’t sat down and really thought about any of this. He didn’t know half of what he should, and he couldn’t afford to stay long enough to find out.
Still, if there was one thing he probably didn’t need to be told, it was that a pagan goddess wasn’t liable to be taken advantage of, or to wake up on the wrong side of someone else’s bed. Which meant that for the first time in his life, Elim could entertain the idea that he was neither an accident nor a consequence – that he had been born wanted.
And that was a hell of a thing.
And the part of him that wasn’t practically dragging him back across that border, that wasn’t just mad with the thought that he was standing less than a thousand yards from Eadan territory, would have liked to find out more about that. About who his father was, and what he was made for and what went wrong, and what might still be put right.
But at the end of the day, there was nothing he could learn about the family he might have had that would justify his leaving the one he already belonged to, and every minute he spent dallying here was a cruelty to both.
“Anyway,” he said, “I got people back home that I’m obliged to, and I can’t leave them. Maybe someday that’ll be different... but right now I’m all out of time and promises. I hope she – I hope you understand. I hope you can find some other happiness.”
If the fishman was translating, Elim couldn’t hear it – but then, the other mother had apparently spoken to him, and he couldn’t hear that either.
But some of that must have gotten through, because she came at him with open arms and leaky eyes, and the wild, horsey, runaway thing in him took a hard rein as Elim made himself meet her halfway.
It was a good hug: warm and strong and soft, all wrapped in the smell of doggy fur and musk. He could believe she would have been a good
mother. But the moment she touched him, she provoked his inheritance: in an instant, Elim felt himself growing height and hair and a dangerous pressure inside the swelling leather of his left boot… and strangeness was a luxury he could not afford. He pulled away.
And despite her wet face and trembly hot hands and stifled hiccup breaths, she didn’t try to keep him.
“Lesson four,” the fishman said from behind. “Ugly and ungrateful as you are, your mother still loves you more than you’ll ever know.”
One day, Elim decided, he would come back and learn how to understand the Dog Lady. Then they wouldn’t need an arbitrator, and he could punch that fishman in its smarmy snaggle-toothed face.
That day was not today. Elim sighed. “Yeah, thanks, short-stack. I got that.”
But he still hated to see that unbearable sadness on his – on the other mother’s face. He couldn’t stay… but that didn’t mean he couldn’t leave something behind. “Here,” he said, after a moment’s thought, and pulled off that poncho. “For you – if you want it.”
He might as well have handed over a bouquet. She pressed the dirty wool to her face, inhaling sun-fermented weeks of Elim’s skin and sweat, and one look at that expression of rapturous canine bliss promised that this new lovey was never, ever getting washed.
The fishman apparently considered that a good note to go out on. Elim watched it tug at her arm, coaxing her toward the door before she came down from that fleeting, smelly high. “Well, good luck and good riddance,” it said over its shoulder – before digging in the pocket of its oversized native costume and chucking something shiny-bright straight at his face. “Do us a favor and try not to get yourself killed out there, can you?”
Elim’s right hand snapped up and intercepted the thing before his nose could do the honors. It was a beautiful sterling silver pocket-watch – which, knowing the giver, had probably been stolen off some unsuspecting dandy. But as it ticked quietly away, it melted his hoof-hard palm back into soft, brown, ordinary human flesh.
Elim stared and wondered at it for a moment, recalling all those tales of heroic soldiers loading their last silver bullet to fight the onrushing heathen hordes. Lead made them monstrous, the old-timers said. Silver turned them human.
Then he worked the watch between his hands like a bar of soap, massaging his palms with the soft circular contours until the metal was warm and just slightly slick – until his height and hair and the rest of his animal oddities had withdrawn back to his bones to hibernate.
It was hard to know what to think about that. Certainly he was glad to have such a handy souvenir – a little pocket-magic to help keep him on the right side of his heritage. And yet it was unnerving to realize that he might actually have a need for it – that this-all might not vanish like a bad dream once he was back home again. He already knew he’d lived too long here in this wild other-land: eaten its food, made friends and enemies of its people, left a trail of his blood and footprints from here to Atali’Krah. For better and worse, this place was in him now. More than that, though, meeting the other mother had broken open something inside him, maybe forever. Maybe he would spend the rest of his life as a mended shovel: still fit for work, but always liable to break along that same conspicuous fault.
That would have been worth putting up with the fishman to ask her about... but by the time Elim looked up to do it, the two of them were long gone.
Elim stood there for a minute, marshalling himself in the solitude of the hay-strewn sanctuary around him.
Yes, he could fill a book with everything he didn’t know.
Yes, this-all almost certainly wasn’t going to wash off in the river.
But at the end of the day, if you were going to be sick or sad or have bad dreams, there was nowhere better to do it than your own bed.
So Elim picked up his old homespun shirt and pulled it on over his head, infinitely relieved to feel the soft, thousand-times-washed cloth drop over him, and to find that it still fit. And when he had safely contained himself, he went back out again – homeward bound at last.
EVER THE OPTIMIST, Elim had naively assumed that he and Sil would be out by mid-morning, and eat breakfast in the saddle. But by the time Elim had finished offending all his callers and packed up Molly, it was well on towards noon.
And Sil still wasn’t done.
So there wasn’t much to do but balance the load – namely, by shifting a substantial portion of the food in the saddlebags to Elim’s stomach – and then wait.
Elim used to like waiting. Waiting was admitting that yes, you had done everything in your humble power – ate, dressed, packed, fed, raked, tied, bridled, and saddled – and entrusting the rest to God.
That was harder to do now than it had been previously.
“’Bout time!” Elim said, when his truant partner finally deigned to appear. “What took you so long?”
Sil smiled as he approached the corral – and God Almighty, they were going to have to put that boy in new clothes somewhere between here and Hell’s Acre – and nodded out towards the town square. “The Azahi wanted to send us off in style. You know, for posterity.”
Well, that was probably better than having their posterities booted straight into the river. In fact, as Elim led Molly east through the square, among the charred spots and litter that were usually hallmarks of one hog-killing good time, he realized that they weren’t going to have to swim or hire a boat or anything: their modest audience was waiting for them at the eastern gate, the one whose drawbridge could actually put them straight across onto Eadan soil.
Well, hot damn.
It wasn’t much of a receiving line, which was just fine by Elim. He and Sil hadn’t done much to endear themselves to the locals, and they all had work to do.
But it was good to see the Azahi again – so much better than seeing him through a set of cell bars! – and to meet his golden-eyed gaze on equal footing.
“Well, Elim Horseman,” he said in his honey-soft voice. “This is a right thing that you have done. We are glad to see you returned.”
And it was hard to know whether that last part was glad you made it back or glad to be getting rid of you. But there was no mistaking the rifle in his hand, or the ceremony with which he laid it flat across his palms and offered it back to its owner.
“Thank you kindly,” Elim said, and took it with equal solemnity. The significance of the gesture wasn’t lost on him. “Thank you for giving me the chance.”
And Día was there too, thank goodness: a little red around the eyes, but otherwise back to her old spirits – or at least some reasonably agreeable new ones. “Elim, I’m sorry about that just there,” she said, her expression full of relief as she said it. “I shouldn’t have asked. Please excuse me.”
Well, at least she’d said excuse and not forgive – because as far as Elim was concerned, there was little enough for the one, and none at all for the other. “It’s all right,” he said, careful not to mention any particulars that she might not have already shared with the other folks within earshot. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out. But I’m so much obliged to you, and I hope you feel better. Really, Día, you are God’s living gift… and Him willing, I’ll see you again.”
That worked out better than the plum. She smiled – an uncommonly handsome sight – and dipped her head. “Thank you. I’d like that.”
It didn’t seem quite right to hug her – not when she was a woman of the cloth and he was a mule of questionable repute and Fours was probably watching from behind a twitching curtain somewhere. But Elim was glad to offer his hand, and gladder still when she took it at the forearm – as if to assure him that he was more than a job to her, and that she should be more than an acquaintance of his.
And then there was the lady sheriff, flanking the Azahi’s opposite side. She had squared her feet and her shoulders, her hands clasped behind her back, and was watching Elim like a sergeant inspecting the troops. He wished he knew enough Marín to thank her properly and in private: there
were no shortage of translators here among their present company, but she never seemed comfortable around him in public.
Well, he at least knew how to say ‘thank you’. “Grese,” he said.
The lady-sheriff awarded him a professional nod – and from behind her back, she proffered Elim’s own weather-beaten gray hat. God only knew where she’d gotten it.
“Hat.”
It was the longest Ardish speech he’d heard from her – perfect eloquence paired with matchless brevity.
Under the circumstances, Elim felt perfectly gallant in putting it on and doffing it again. “Hat,” he pledged.
And when they had run clean out of well-wishers – not that Sil had lifted a finger to acknowledge any of it – Elim turned to see his partner dickering with something in one of the saddlebags. “Is your lordship about ready?”
“Just about,” His Grace breezily replied.
But as the two deputies at the end of the road set about lowering the bridge, and Elim and Sil drew up to a halt to wait for it, something ominous prickled the air between them.
“What?” Elim said.
“I didn’t say anything,” Sil protested.
But Elim knew that just-a-smidge-defensive look, and he knew he wasn’t going to like whatever it portended. “You were going to. Spit it out.”
“Well... actually, I had meant to tell you –”
Elim had already turned to face him, and at Sil’s first automatic downward glance, Elim caught sight of the discomfort on his face – and the envelope in his hand.
“No,” Elim said, ice trickling through his bowels. “Hell no. Don’t you even think about it, Sil – don’t even joke.”
But when Will’s little brother looked up at him, there was nothing but gravity in his cold blue eyes. “Do you see me laughing?”
“I see you trying to run out on me!” Elim cried, keenly aware of those still-watching eyes behind them – the ones Sil hadn’t bothered to say goodbye to.
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