I said, “Jack knows what he’s talking about. Come with me. Jack, Harmony is in charge. You did well. Take a holiday.”
I turned and led Alice, Brenda, and Val in the direction of the farmhouse. We walked quickly, but didn’t run.
I said, “No questions yet. It’s all going to be fine. Jack is a surprising boy.”
Brenda said, “He certainly is. So that’s it? It’s all settled. What did you talk about?”
I said, “He asked me to make you my wives and to be his and his sisters’ father. He said that he was the man of the house until he turned it over to me and that he would announce it. And in a minute, you’ll see why he was in a hurry to get it done. I have good reason to trust him.”
It was about two hundred yards to the house from where we had been, so it didn’t take us long to get there.
As we approached, a woman who had been at the house with Jean and Lucy ran toward us and said, “A man is asking for Brenda and Alice. We didn’t like the look of him, and he was told to wait farther down the drive, toward the road. He’s down there. I was told to find you all and not let the ladies go unless Ronin was with them.”
I thanked the woman, and we hurried on. After another thirty feet, I slowed down.
I said, “There’s no hurry now. Breathe deeply and be calm. It’s all going to be fine.”
Alice said, “Ronin, what’s happening?’
I said simply, “Brenda, who is you husband?’
Brenda laughed and said, “Jack told me in no uncertain terms that you are. Of course, you were already.”
We walked another fifty feet and as we rounded a bend, we saw a wagon, with a burro, and a man and a woman leaning against the side of it. They were only twenty feet away, and as the man lifted his head, Brenda gasped and quickened her pace.
She screamed, “You bastard! You horrible bastard! Get back in your cart and go straight to hell. They said you died in the orchard. What did you do? Abandon us?”
The man, Ichabod said, “Be quiet. I’m your husband. I’m back now. Let’s go home.”
Brenda screamed again, “Like hell. You’re dead. A dead man is no one’s husband. And no one’s father either! And don’t claim to know me. I don’t consort with the dead and have no friends in hell.”
Ichabod said, “Get in the cart and we’ll sort this out later.”
Brenda said vehemently, “It’s sorted out all ready. We don’t know you. And if you insist on molesting us, my husband will send you back to hell where you belong before you lay a hand on me.”
The man did reach for Brenda’s arm at that point, but I caught him before he hardly moved.
I said, “Old man, I don’t want to harm you. You seem fragile enough that I hate to touch you. But do not lay a hand on my wives.”
He pulled his hand away from me and said, “These two are my women. Poor excuses for wives that they are. I did right by them for sixteen years and …”
Brenda interrupted and said, “You never did right by us from the day we met you. I don’t know you. This man is the only husband that I have ever had. And the only father that my children will ever know.”
He said, “Fine, go with him. But you, you come with me,” indicating Alice.
Alice said, “You have mistaken me for someone else. I don’t know you.”
I said, “You’ve come to the wrong village. You better be on your way. We’ll take you back to the road and send you on your journey.”
Brenda said under her breath, “Your journey to hell.”
I said, “Get in the back of your wagon. I’ll guide your burro until we get to the road.”
Brenda said, “If he touches either of us, I’ll kill him. Val, may I borrow a knife?”
Val shrugged and handed Brenda a knife from her belt.
I made sure that the man and whoever the woman with him was, climbed into the back of the cart, and then I took hold of the burro and started walking down the path in the direction of the road.
Brenda said, “Alice, did you know?”
Alice nodded.
Brenda said, “I’m glad you told us the truth. You told us that the man we lived with, who was never our husband, died a month ago, and it’s the truth. He probably died in the orchard, but no one knows for sure. And even if he came back from the dead, I wouldn’t take him back or even say that I knew him. You there, woman. I don’t know what you have to do with this, but your best bet would be to believe me when I tell you that this man is already dead. He may not beat a woman, but he leaves her unloved, unfilled, abandoned with no money, and he has no cock. Get yourself a nice broom handle and call it your husband. And you, you bastard, if you even look at me again, I’ll see to it that … well, never mind. You know what, I should cut off that tiny thing between your legs as a kindness to women everywhere.”
We walked along in silence, except for the occasional grins and laughter under our breath as we thought about how angry Brenda was.
She said, “I feel better now. Better than I have I a long time. I feel really alive. Ronin, I’m going to need to have a nice talk with you after this. I feel really good.”
I said, “Ladies, there’s no need for you to come any farther. And, I don’t want you to have to walk so far. You say that you don’t know either of them, so I can take them to the road and send them on their way. If you want to go back to our picnic, go and have a good time and I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
Then, I went to Brenda and whispered, “Brenda, I’m concerned about your bruises. I don’t want you to have to walk so far.”
Brenda kissed me blatantly on the mouth and whispered back, “The bruises are tender, but it’s the soreness from being loved so much that makes it hard to walk.”
I said, “That’s what I was really afraid of. If you are done with this, go back and talk to the children and find a way to start celebrating.”
Brenda kissed me again, and Alice said out loud, “Husband, I love you. I love you so much. Come soon and let us show you how a wife makes love when she truly loves a man,” and she kissed me hard.
Val kissed me as well, and the three of them turned back the way that we had come.
I walked a few more paces and said, “Ichabod, do you understand the situation? You died in the orchard. Everyone knows it. And you can’t come back from the dead now.”
The woman spoke for the first time and said, “Don’t speak to my husband like that. He has a house in that village and it belongs to us.”
I smiled and said, “Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that. You see, until just now, I didn’t know if you were with him willingly or not. If not, I would have had to rescue you as well. But now we know. Your fate is your own. And, as for the house, he took enough money when he left to forfeit the house. The house belongs to the village. The women, were left destitute, and it was the village who cared for them. The house is the property of the kind people who provided for two widows and their children when this man died, taking every penny they had with him to his grave. Ichabod, do you understand the situation?”
No one spoke, so I explained it, saying, “OK, let me lay it out. You are a stranger here. You have no friends or family. If you trouble my family in any way, I will not be kind to you. You are dead already, and if you die a second time, no one will even know. I don’t think that it would be me who might kill you if it came do that. My Brenda is adamant that you are not to even look at her. But let’s not talk about that. Let me keep my threats a bit more veiled. If a dead man walks into the village, a dead man will be carried out of the village. But that won’t happen. You are going to leave. I am going to take you to the road and you are going to head east. You can make it to Marjan’s Dock. Get provisions from there and keep going. Never let me or my family see or hear about you again. I would suggest that you should find a very remote place, at least three hundred miles from here. And never, ever, show your face again. If you hear that I am in the area, you should run to the hills and hide until I’m gone. I don’t actually hat
e you that much. But I love my family more than you can understand. For their sake, you are dead. I won’t allow them to see you make trouble for them. Do you understand the situation?”
Ichabod said somewhat angrily, “I think I do. You are depriving me of my property and my worthless women. I’ll go alright. But I’ll see you someday. And when I do, the sheriff will deal with you.”
I said, “Oh, I was hoping that you wouldn’t say that. Give me a few minutes to think.”
I walked on beside the cart, considering what I could do to convince the man to just leave us alone. I looked to see if I could detect any elven blood in either of them, and I couldn’t. If I had, perhaps I could have used some chord to make them uncomfortable. I wanted them to go away, but I didn’t want to threaten or hurt them much. Lucy and Delilah had the ability to be very persuasive; I wondered if I could do something similar. Delilah’s influence worked best on those with no elven blood, so maybe that was something. I began to concentrate not on threats, but a sense of foreboding and fear. I pictured a dark cloud emanating from me, spreading uneasiness.
When I had a plan in my mind, I said quietly, forcing them to listen carefully, “Ichabod, you left the village for a reason. Because it was dangerous. People were disappearing. There was no food. Money was getting scarce. Everyone was expected to work and sacrifice for his neighbors. It was dangerous. Legions of giant rats burrowed under the ground and no one new when they would tunnel up through the floors, into their very bedrooms and toilets. And something worse was in the orchards. We know now that it was kobolds. Hideous green skinned kobolds with tusks and claws. Monsters coming silently at night, carrying away old men and young women, dragging them back to their camps, gutting and eating them, sometimes while they were still breathing. You heard their screams coming across the meadows as dozens of monsters devoured them raw. And we don’t know what their breeding practices were or how those women, and even the men suffered until their turn for death came as the kobolds had their breakfasts. You left while you still had life in you. Many weren’t so fortunate. Even now, we see their partially eaten bodies, kept alive by who knows what sorcery, and we hear their screams as yet another part of their bodies are torn from them for breakfast or dinner for the kobolds before they come down for another raid. You saw the devastation at the farm, the hopelessness and despair as we huddled together, secretly hoping that it would be our neighbor taken next, and not ourselves.”
I paused and walked farther and then said more brightly, “So, now that I look at things more clearly, I have an idea. Yes. A good idea. I tried to drive you away for your own sake, but I can see how it will be better if you stay, just the way that you want to. We will go to the village. And you can have your house back. Oh, I like this plan. Two wonderful strangers to the village. We’ll make you very welcome I think. We’ll make you very welcome. Two wonderful strangers. And one of you dead already, an d the other unknown to any of us. You’ll have food and wine and a comfortable bed. And we will get you some fine clothes and you won’t need any money because we want you to stay with us for as long as you can. This is a wonderful idea. Strangers will always be welcome here from now on. We don’t get nearly enough visitors these days. And, soon, I will send people to tell others that they should move here and that every traveler must stay overnight and we won’t charge them a thing. Especially if they are, um, shall we say, large? And especially if they are weak or old or feeble or an old woman. You two are the perfect kind of strangers for us now, except for being somewhat thin. It’s settled. When we get to the road up ahead, we’ll turn toward the west and go to the village and get you into your house. And don’t worry, we will post a guard at your door to make sure that you are safe and happy and don’t slip away, I mean get lost. Oh, don’t thank me. Having two strangers is a relief to us. You will be welcome.”
The woman looked terrified and the man was clearly scanning for an escape route.
I said, “Oh, don’t thank me at all. I’m glad that you convinced me. And to think that I was planning to run you out of town and tell you never to come back. No, I have changed my mind. Brenda will be very happy when she hears my plan, and how you two have decided to stay on with us. Yes, we need more visitors, not less. Food is very scarce, but we’ll manage somehow. And maybe we can work out some trades with the kobolds. If we give them things that they want, they might agree not to take so many of my friends. Of course, you and I won’t be friends, because I have so many. And I’ll have more when the village hears my plans. And you will be a big part of the plan. This is wonderful.”
The woman yelled, “No, I have changed my mind. It’s too much of a burden. We’ll go away.”
I said, “Nonsense. No burden at all. You are fairly old, aren’t you? And Ichabod is past his prime for sure. You’ve had a full and wonderful life, and now you can spend the rest of it here. And a guard will be posted at your door to make you feel secure.”
She shot Ichabod a terrified glance and he said, “Um, look here. I was hasty with what I said before. We won’t trouble you. Let us go on our way and we will head east.”
I said, “Oh, no. We want you to come and visit with us.”
He said, “Oh, we will. I just remembered some business that I have to the east. I have to go and do it, and when it’s done, we’ll come back and stay with you. But, my business is very pressing. I was a fool to forget about it. Let us go now and don’t trouble yourself.”
I said, “No, it’s late in the day. You can come to the village and leave in the morning. I insist. It’s just one night. And the screaming has died down substantially. It means that the kobolds will come again very soon, but during the lull, it’s really quite pleasant. We’ll go and you can stay the night. And if you still want to leave in the morning, you can.”
We had reached the main road now, and I let go of the burro and put my hands on my hips and looked up into the sky. I took a deep breath and smiled.
I said, “The day seems brighter now. This is a very good plan. I’m so glad that you decided to come here. Um, I’m afraid that I need to relieve myself though. Stay right here, and when I come back, we’ll all go to the village together. I’ll only be a moment.”
I grinned as wickedly as I could and walked into the trees. And as soon as I was out of sight, I heard them jump to the driver’s seat of the cart and whip the burro so that it started running east down the road.
I yelled, “Wait! I’ll help you stop the burro. Jump from the cart! Come back! I will follow you and bring you back. If you come to a village, stay there and I’ll find you and bring you back!”
But they drove away as fast as they could make the poor animal run. I very much doubted that we would ever see either of them again. I wondered how far they would actually run before they felt safe again. I thought that there was a good chance that they might never feel safe, no matter how much time or distance passed between us.
Unfortunately, now I had a slight problem.
Chapter 23 - New Family
The problem was this: I’d just told the most terrifying ghost story in the most convincing way that I could. The clear implication had been that I would gleefully feed Ichabod and his companion to kobolds who would eat them alive. I knew that it wasn’t remotely true, but the fact was that I had acted as if it was, even feeling the feelings that I was describing to them. Yes, I had once again handled this by ‘fighting without fighting’, but there was a cost to me nonetheless. Instead of banishing them from the village, threatening them, and so on, I had invited them to stay. I had encouraged them to stay. I had insisted that they stay. But, they chose to leave. In a big hurry. Without any kind of a fight at all. If anything, they were fighting for their lives to get away from my insistent hospitality.
My first tactic, telling them to leave, hadn’t been working. Ichabod wasn’t afraid of me. He felt that he had rights and he was going to get someone to enforce them. He wasn’t afraid of me, but he was afraid of monsters. So, I offered to let him stay, as long as
he was willing to live with monsters. In some ways, I had become the worst monster of all. Instead of a warrior hero, I became the village lunatic who would deliver them as a sacrifice to other monsters. Ichabod understood betraying friends and family for his own selfish reasons. It made perfect sense to him that I would betray him to the kobolds in order to save myself.
But now, I had temporarily become that monster, and I needed to reset my emotions. It wasn’t an immediate process. There was no way to know how long it would take, or what would help me do it. It might take an instant, under the proper circumstances, or it might take days, given the wrong environment. A short talk with Lucy might do it. A nice conversation, and possibly some lovemaking, with any of the girls might do it. Any number of things might do it. I hoped that I could get one of those things soon. But, I couldn’t just go make it happen. It had to happen to me. I could put myself in a place to be open to it, but I couldn’t guarantee that any particular thing would be the answer. I could go find Lucy and ask her to talk to me, and that might work. Then again, it might not. I would do everything I could to let go, but I knew that the thing that kicked me into a more peaceful place would be a small surprising thing, not a prescription for a potion, whether real or emotional. I would relax how I could and receive the change when it came. But for now, maybe I needed to live with it for a while.
I walked slowly back toward the farm house and the fields where my new family would be waiting for me. Jack would want to know what happened; they all would, but Jack would want to hear all about the war that I had fought so that he could report it to his thousand imaginary soldiers, his invisible spies, his advisers, and his wizard. The girls would just want to know if I was OK. Alice and Brenda would want to know that they were safe now. If I told the story well, maybe I could satisfy all of them at the same time. But then there were the younger girls, my daughters now, April and Tanya. And I had no idea what they would be thinking, or even who they really were.
The Edge of Harmony: The Guardian Maidens Book 2 Page 21
