Ch: 291 Epilog

Shai watched her children play from the front stoop of her forge, looking out over her garden and hotspring with satisfaction. “Amy, Wilf, Rio! Bring yer brothers in fer dinner!” Her small herd came stampeding back, giggling and strumming their instruments in excitement. “Perry, Barry, Larry, put those instruments away properly!” She scolded the middle boys.

Her three brown haired, brown eyed lads all slouched in exaggerated misery and schlumped over to the wall of instruments. They put their toys away carefully, after wiping them down, despite their bellyaching and nonsense.

 

Lady Angie strolled in with Ester and Sir Rolf, just on time for dinner, as usual. She patted the slight swelling at her tummy with pride. While her handsome, burly husband twitched his blonde goatee and grinned like a fool. 

“Told ya.” Amy muttered around a taco. “It’s a boy, by the way.”

 

“Amy! We didn’t want to find out yet!” She scolded her sister happily. 

 

“I can’t help it!” She grumbled merrily. “I just know, every time.” She stuffed a taco into her mouth and chomped in quiet contemplation for a moment. “I blame Tawny and her tummies. I can’t remember how many babies have been born in our pool.” She sighed in a very world weary way, for a precocious ten year old.

 

“I like that feeling.” Wilf mumbled with a smile. “I gotta go change Harry.” He ambled off, with the rolling gait of a large man walking carefully among small things. “Hold on little brother… I’m coming” The sturdy eight year old boy called out to his tiny, toddling quarry, running away with a full diapie. 

 

The little brown haired, brown eyed waif sighed eloquently and let out a single bawling squawk of displeasure, before shucking his loaded drawers and breaking for the bath, with a mad giggle of infantile glee.

It was business as usual in the Ward house.

 

They retired to the garden at moonrise, as they did every night, to watch the show. The big, golden moon of the god of Beasts, sailed up from behind the mountains right on time, followed by his companion, the madman’s moon. 

Small, blue and green, it wandered erratically behind its bigger sibling, shooting off silent fireworks from time to time. 

Every few minutes or hours, a streamer of gleaming, multicolored light would shoot off, usually to vanish into the starry void beyond. Only a precious few had fallen to the ground over the years… the triplets had landed that night, near Herndon Town, in an apple orchard by moonlight. 

 

Shai smiled in bittersweet pleasure, as she thought on that lonely tearfilled day, when the old man with three babes in his arms had shyly knocked on her door at Otho’s urging.

Apple had sacrificed her favorite tree in that grove to embody herself and carry them to the nearest terrified human. Being confronted by a walking tree carrying three tiny babes could put anyone off their evening constitutional… 

When the monster had unambiguously demanded that the children be carried to Wheatford’s orphanage, in human speech, the terrified orchardist had complied without question or delay.

Old man Mcginty now held the most productive orchard in the duchy… and his hard cider tasted sweet as rainwater, while kicking like an angry mule.

 

“Shai…” A familiar, soft voice said from a shadowed corner, as Ward stepped into the garden. “I’m Sorry…” He said, as he had on every one of his not infrequent visits over the last five years.

 

“Hae ye found another?” She asked with a profound mixture of sorrow and hope on her tired, careworn face. “Hae ye?”

 

He shook his head and sat down on a chair nearby. “Shai, I know it hurts you to see me and I don’t really understand how you manage… but you… It’s been years… I wanted to be sure…” He stammered and fell silent as her face contorted with pain. 

 

He couldn’t avoid wrenching at the old wounds in her heart with his similarities… and differences. “Ward…” She choked through tears. “I know ye feel his loss, I kinnae substitute any of these wee bairns fer me lost boy… but I kinnae let even one grow unloved and forgotten, nae matter how it do hurt. They be mine, all of them.”

 

“It always burned him inside… that he couldn’t… For you…” He whispered in her boy’s own sweet voice, breaking her will.

 

“Silence, Foolish...” She gasped to a stop, holding her hand to her lips in horror. “Fie… I dinnae...”

 

Ward smiled sadly and shuddered a little at her faux pas. “No, sweet Shai… My ladies and I haven’t found another fragment of him, crying in the wilds…” He reached into his cloak of leather wings and smiled sadly. “We found this, and we don’t understand it… not at all.” 

He placed a simple clay pot on the table, planted with  a single thin stem, covered with gnarled, silvery bark and a few wide, five pointed fig leaves, coated with fine velvety silver hairs on the underside. 

From the single, slim branch on the weedy little tree, a single small green fig dangled, blushing ever so faintly silver at the bottom.

 

“What be this, a fig tree? Ward… I would nae lead thee on… yer face, it hurts me so…” She sighed sadly at his gift. “I kinnae accept a sprig of thee.”

 

“Xyll found it… She found it growing by the spring outside Z’s old cabin in the hills. This isn’t one of mine, or anyone’s, it’s an orphan, truly an orphan…” He whispered urgently. “Tap the fruit gently, and listen.”

 

She reached out one scarred, iron hard fingertip and gently flicked the fig. It chimed out a single high pure note of sweet musical goodness, which lingered on and on like a finely tuned bell of the most delicate crystal. 

A tiny black wasp, almost too small to see buzzed out of the opening at the bottom of the fruit, circled its home a few times, then flitted back inside. The smith woman almost felt like the bug was sassing her for disturbing it.

 

“Have count Liam plant this in your garden when he comes tomorrow… I sent Willow to bring him when we found it a few days ago.” Ward whispered.

“We wanted to be sure… the ladies and I, but you deserve to know now.”

A soft chomping and crunching sound near their ankles drew the two grieving, tear streaked faces downward, to the common room’s floor. 

 

“I made him a deal…” A tiny brown furred rabbit with antlers remarked, while nibbling a carrot pilfered from her garden and leaving muddy paw prints through her house, back to the scene of the crime. 

“I promised him he would die after he was done… technically, he got cheated.”

 

“Beast?” Shai asked gently, before deciding whether to fetch her broom for this varmint.

 

He nodded thoughtfully, while chewing and scattering clumps of soil and carrot fragments all over her floor. “They managed to take him before he finished the job, but he kept at it til the task was done anyway…” He murmured appreciatively. “Good kid, that one. That didn’t sit right with me; eternity is too long to hold regrets.”

 

“Be this…” Shai stammered, faltering before she could get the words out.

 

“It’s an egg…” Beast muttered. “After a fashion. It will take a few days to ripen, and you should probably stake that tree up, it’s a little scrawny.”

#

 

Liam and Tawny arrived, tired and saddle sore, an hour after fourth bell the next day. They hugged and kissed their way through a small gathering of close friends in the garden, beside Shai’s Forge and Foundry. 

 

They shared a quiet meal together, the entire band back together for the first time in two years or more. After lunch, the team and a few close ones gathered in a little courtyard behind the baths, hidden away and deeply private. Otho and Naomi joined the group there, with Angie, Ester and a thinly disguised sir Rolf, heir to Wheatford duchy, now that Tawny was a full cleric and the lady of county Kinnis.

 

Khan, Luna and Annie followed with Harry, the very youngest Ward balanced precariously, high up on the giant horsie’s back.

Kermal and Becky took charge of the little ones with assistance from Wilf, Rio and Amy; Shai’s little Harry was a sweet, quiet kid… The triplets were a handful. Perry, Barry and Larry had a noisy trio going over by the gate, playing a passable ‘Cotton Eyed Joe’ on a uke, a banjolele and a hoop drum. The older kids shut the noise down and helped herd the terrible trio over to the solemn group in the little courtyard.

 

“Boys, settle down… Shai needs us here with her.” Amy whispered to the rambunctious lads. Her scolding tone chilled them like ice water down their backs. 

“Yes Amy…” They whispered in chorus.

 

Ward and a few dryads stepped from beneath a tiny maple tree in the corner and joined the gang with a flurry of hugs and sober greetings. 

“We are grateful you could all be here today…” Otho began quietly addressing the older members of the family. “For, whatever this is… or turns out to be.”

 

The old priest sat down on the lawn among the kids and pulled Harry into his lap, directly out of a camellia bush he’d hidden in. 

“Children, Shai asked me to speak to you briefly before we begin, to clear up any confusion…”

He cleared his throat awkwardly and smiled at the four little brown haired, brown eyed boys all so different and so similar at the same time... “Children… your papa Gary perished just over five years ago… in a spectacular light show and with some upheaval in the heavens, which remains a mystery to this day. Since that time… children have begun appearing in the wildlands irregularly, all over the world. You four are such children, though distinctly different from the others…” He murmured. “We have never hidden that you are foundlings, discovered alone in the wilds… or nearly so.” He smiled at the three that came as a set, while tousling the youngest lad’s messy hair.

 

“You four are not so different from any other children… your mother loves you very much and your father would be very proud of you…” He took a deep breath, as if to brace himself for a mighty slap to the face as he stood and addressed the group.

“In so many ways your papa was an odd fellow… in life and in death. It seems we are to have a funeral for him after all… In a very odd way. Liam, if you would?”

 

“I’ve been thinking, Otho… Kermal, can I borrow a trowel for a moment?” Liam said with a sad, wry smile, holding out his hand.

 

“I don’t have one…” Sir Kermal Singh murmured in embarrassment. 

 

“Your sword, Kermie… he wants to borrow your sword.” Becky whispered. “Change it into a trowel, before you let the kids see, though.” 

 

The handsome young knight drew his yard long, leaf bladed weapon of gleaming bronze from its odd denim sheath… It had a ‘button fly’ and a small, rectangular, bright red cloth tag with a single word in an alien script sewn into one of the absurdly tiny pockets on the scabbard. Becky’s translation gift read it as ‘Levi’s’ which of course, made no sense. 

Gary had sewn the scabbard for Wanderer’s Legacy a few days before… and had left a note that the weapon was to be given to Kermal, who’d always held it in awe. There were a few other bequests in the strangely quirky will he’d left behind, under his sword, clad in its new pants.

 

The young warrior did… something, before the kids or any of the ladies could really notice the distinctly penile form of his weapon, as he drew it from its ‘pants’. 

In a darkling twinkle of shadow and moonlight, he handed Liam a wide bladed bronze trowel that was thankfully, not even vaguely dick shaped.

 

The lord of county Kinnis hugged the young couple and stepped over to a small and sickly looking potted sapling sitting on the lawn, forlorn and drooping. With a sadly hopeful smile, the  young lord knelt and began cutting a plug of turf from the lawn and digging a hole.

After a moment’s work, he took the clay pot and gently pulled the tree from it, the clotted soil and tangled roots coming out in a single clump. 

Liam took the keen edge of his bronze tool and split the root ball into quarters with deft and sure flicks of the blade. He slipped his hand in among the roots and gently teased them into a spreading mass of filaments. He nestled the poor thing carefully into the hole he’d dug, draping the roots over a mound of loosened soil in an artful spray, before burying them and much of the tree’s slim ‘trunk’. He staked it to a bamboo pole, with a simple support lashed on, to hold up the single skinny limb bearing that odd fig. 

 

Wilford came rushing over holding a watering can, freshly filled from the hotspring bath. He sloshed green tinged mineral water as he ran, smiling more widely than anyone had seen since that moonlit night.

#

Over the next three weeks the tree grew and spread, throwing out creepers and boughs that entangled into a dense bird’s nest under the not so slowly swelling fig. From tiny fruit, smaller than a pea it had become a truly massive teardrop shaped envelope of silvery skin.

 

When tapped or bumped, even gently, it would sing out in a clear, high E that carried far and continued for several seconds, sometimes a minute or more. To the touch it was warm and soft, smooth like human skin, smelling of wood shavings, old leather and green growing things. Its scent made Shai smile whenever the breeze carried it to her, which was often, as she spent most of her days and all of her nights tending that little garden plot… even though she had never gardened before.

 

Two weeks before the feast of Justice, Ipet’s sacred day, the fruit’s skin began to split and bleed from the orifice at the bottom. 

Wilford saw first, since he was collecting hot fruit and sparking blossom petals from the Wildfire plum nearby. He took off his heavy forge gloves and set his woven steel wire basket down on a flagstone, so the magical produce wouldn’t start a fire, and stepped close to peer at the giant fig.

 

The round, puckered orifice had enlarged and distended… like a puppy’s butthole when it was time to unload a steamer. “Mama! Come quick! Mama! Amy! Rio!” He shouted in his weird, grown ass man voice. Within a few minutes the little family and a few guests were gathered around, watching a disgusting miracle unfold… or extrude…

 

With agonizing slowness, the puckered, bleeding orifice surged in and out, swelling and bulging terribly. With a convulsive pulse, a shock of sticky wet hair appeared in the opening, followed by a human head, coated with red, blood colored fruit pulp and sticky juice. It heaved and thrashed horribly as the fruit pushed a whole human man, naked into the world through an aperture that would barely pass a garbanzo bean.

 

A large, muscular, brown haired man sprawled on the strange nest of tangled branches, boughs and leaves, silent until he drew a vast, choking, gasping breath.

 

“Oww.” He whispered, eyes still squeezed closed and coated with fruit goo and pulpy ooze.

 

“G… Gary?” Shai whispered in desperate, half strangled hope.

 

“Shhaai….?” He moaned weakly. “How?” A moment later, his eyes still glued shut, he scowled and sneered blindly at her. “No…” He growled. “I know your tricks, Morrigan… and I’ll kill you for that cruel little joke… and you’ll stay dead.” He snarled, thrashing weakly towards the sound of her voice.

 

“Gary…” Wilford said softly. “Amy and Rio are here too. And Becky, Liam… we’re all here.” He clambered into the tangled nest and took his papa’s sticky, nasty, hand in his.

 

“You gotta 'pologize to mama… you made her cry.” Amy murmured through tears of her own as she took his other hand a moment later. Rio got him by the shoulders and together they hauled their papa out into the world and back into Shai’s arms… He was all gross and sticky, as usual.

 

He whispered weakly, when he was once again floating helpless among his friends and family.

“Why are you all looking at me? Liam’s the protagonist…”

#