Hi, everybody!
Below, I've included portraits of Val's family, the Vinzennos! This is close to what I imagine them looking like - I've made these using the site, Artbreeder, which is great for coming up with novel portraits and "original" art. Note that, in this picture, Val is about a year younger and a bit less serious than in her portrait, front and center on the cover art. Also, no crown.
-Ovid
Chapter Thirty-Four: Cousin Val
They took two days to make it to Port Rumm. They stopped overnight in a modest river-trade town where the Spring Rumm, which they'd been following, joined with a sister river to form the Great Rumm River. The Great Rumm would lead them straight to the port. Countryside stretched for miles around them in the gentle hills, and all of the low-lying areas had been irrigated for rice paddies. Men and women crouched in the afternoon sun, picking stalks of golden-yellow rice by the handful and stuffing them into the saddlebags of bored-looking water mules. Barges coasted down the river, sitting low in the water with grain and ore from the farmlands and mining towns upstream.
There wasn't time to drum up demand for fighting classes, and when Val asked if she could perform at the tavern, the innkeeper stated that he wasn't interested unless Val could play music. She had a little ceramic flute back in Verdenlecht, a present from Jasil, but it made her sad to play it because it summoned bittersweet memories and she'd never got very good with the thing. Galvan was decent with the fiddle, though, and he'd brought that with him.
Val and Galvan made their way to the little town square, a two-block courtyard of cobblestone lined with shops and with a fifty-seat amphitheater in the middle. Resonant Square could have gobbled up four of the squares and had room to spare. A troupe of acrobats and musicians had already set up shop in the amphitheater and were going through warm-ups as people gathered to spectate.
"Val!" Galvan shouted, but she was already sprinting to the center of the square, her heart thudding in her chest, the bracelets on her wrist clattering about.
Her hopeful smile disappeared in an instant. The troupe was Sheore, but it wasn't Jasil's tribe. The lanky girl practicing her flute didn't have half the nimbleness that Jasil did. Jasil of the midnight-dark hair and the hazel eyes. But Niko was Val's girlfriend now, so she and Jasil couldn't be more than just friends.
"What in hell's bells was that about?" Galvan asked, finally catching up.
"Nothing," Val said. "I thought I saw a friend. Do you want to perform over by the fountain? You can play your fiddle and I'll do tumbling and fire-juggling?"
Two hours netted them eight pfennigs, which wasn't much but was a lot better than nothing. "I'm not giving mom her half," Galvan stated. The rule was that, whatever you made on the road, Ginn got half since she was paying for room and board.
"She doesn't deserve it after what she pulled," Val agreed. "I might get a ceramic flute."
"You should save it," Galvan said. He slipped his four coins into his hidden pocket - a practice he'd picked up from Val.
"True," she said before spotting a vendor selling alligator kebabs. "I'll save three… I want to try 'gator!"
Val felt a surge of anxiety as they rode into Port Rumm the next afternoon. It was just beginning to dawn on her that she was about to meet Ginn's extended family - her brother, his wife, and however many children they had. Ginn admitted that she'd lost count, as she only corresponded with the man once or twice a year and had last seen him when he and his middle daughter had visited Verdenslecht five years before and she'd made the trip from Wayfair to meet up.
"Little Luella was eleven or twelve at the time," Ginn said. "Why… she must be close to a woman grown by now."
Galvan didn't seem to feel too strongly one way or another, but he just didn't understand: he was unquestionably part of the family, whereas Val was a recent addition. What if they rejected her or treated her like a complete stranger, which she essentially was? What if they castigated Ginn's cavalier addition of a strange girl to the… clan…
"Um, mom? What's your family name?"
"Uddy."
Val cringed. "I'll bet you didn't mind that name change."
"Not so much," Ginn agreed.
What if they castigated Ginn's cavalier addition of a strange girl to the Uddy clan? Were they a tight-knit family? Were her cousins friendly? How many were there? Would they want to be her friend? How old were they?
Ginn stopped a constable to ask for directions - it had been twenty years since she'd visited the city and didn't know the lie of the land. They passed a temple of the Pale Order, mendicant priests preaching the word and handing out pamphlets around the front, a great big bell ringing out six o'clock from the temple's old stone belfry. No penitent brothers, though, since the duke had outlawed them and his little sister, the new duchess, had never rescinded the order. Good riddance!
Port Rumm was larger than Verdenlecht but smaller than Wayfair and, in a lot of ways, it reminded her of the latter. It was a lot less clean than the duchy's capital for starters, where scrubbed cobblestones, white marble, and pink and pale limestone dominated the streets and the architecture was mostly well-maintained. Even the poorer parts of Verdenlecht had nice streets and no beggars. In Port Rumm, though, there were beggars aplenty. Begging was technically outlawed, but there was no rule against whinging passersby, offering to do small and pointless jobs for them. They would run up and offer to brush your horse while you were still riding it. Or would push grubby, weather-worn pocket maps of the city into your hands and then demand a pfennig for them.
Or at least they tried to push a map into Val's hand several times. Violet batted the first map-peddler away with an angry hiss, and after that Val took her smooth yew stick - the one she thought she might carve into a wand - and thwacked any hand that got too close. She did it right in front of a constable, who seemed amused about the whole thing.
Port Rumm smelled a lot worse than Verdenlecht, too. Or at least worse than everywhere outside of the capital city's small, occasionally-clogged canal district. Horses clopped through the streets doing what horses do, sewage trickled down the gutters along busy avenues, restauranteurs threw scraps of leftover food to free-roaming dogs, and the smell of old fish wafted up from the port. After being an orphan in Wayfair for years, it was a familiar experience - except now she was a battle-witch riding into town on Tulip, her spotted filly, her burnished brown solstice-present boots poised in the stirrups. Those boots alone were worth more than everything Val had owned as an orphan and her jacket would have cost twenty times as much if she hadn't got the family discount and hardened the leather herself.
After they'd stabled the horses, they proceeded on foot - or, in Violet's case, perched upon Val's pack and peered over her shoulder, her whiskers tickling against Val's cheek. Ginn counted the houses as they went since only every third or fourth one had an actual number posted. They eventually arrived at a well-appointed brownstone with a carefully-painted sign announcing, Msr. A.C. Uddy, Items Found, Items Protected, Msc Notary. When Ginn tapped on the door, a rotund man with a close-cropped beard threw the door open and assaulted her with a great, welcoming, Uddy-style hug. It would have been very bosomy if A.C. had been a sister rather than a brother.
"Wuldie!" Ginn said.
"Ginn! Welcome to Port Rumm… hope you found the place easily?"
A.C. Uddy was mostly known as A.C. since his full name was Aethylwulde Caelythane Uddy, which was a decent mouthful of a name. Caelythane was his mother's maiden name and, apparently, also Ginn's middle name. Aethylwulde's friends called him Wuldie, and Val was to call him Uncle Wuldie. That's what he told her as he brought her into a great, meaty, Uddy-style hug. He had Ginn's same build - a bit broader and taller than average and with a frame that would have seemed portly if he hadn't possessed the understated strength of a bear beneath a deceptive layer of soft. He hugged exactly like Ginn did.
"So I've got a niece! How am I just finding this out?"
Ginn stated that Val had joined the family in Wayfair and didn't mention a word about her being adopted. Uncle Wuldie didn't ask. He ushered the three of them inside and introduced them to three of their four cousins - little Ryvic was out running around the neighborhood somewhere and likely wouldn't be back until half-way through supper. He introduced her as Cousin Val, worthy of the exact same introduction as Cousin 'Galv' - which Galvan corrected, since nobody had called him Galv since he was a little kid.
Wuldie admired Galvan's pattern-work on Val's jacket, noting: "We've got two artists in the family, then! Ansibelle is apprenticing as a jeweler. Every necklace, earring, and ring you see is one of hers."
"I love your bracelets," Ansibelle said. Slim, dark-haired, and soft-spoken, she looked a lot more like Galvan's sister ought to look than Val did.
Val blushed. "Thanks. My friend made them for me."
Uncle Wuldie was Gifted just like Ginn - as was Cousin Luella, apparently, who was intent on taking over the business from dear old dad. Wuldie specialized in using his Gift to find lost valuables, in warding them against theft or destruction, and in notarizing magically-binding contracts.
"I think I signed one of those once for Mrs. Eatherfine," Val observed. "She's the dowager duchess."
That worried Cousin Luella, who warned: "You shouldn't sign a magical contract without a representative. At least somebody who's Gifted and knows the law. That's about the most dangerous thing you can do."
Val shrugged. "I was pretty new to magical anything back then. It doesn't really matter now that the duke is dead. Not that I'm glad he's dead… all the contract really said was that I had to say he was the rightful king, and he even got to be the king for most of a day."
"I take it back," Luella said. "Dealing with nobility is about the most dangerous thing you can do. It sounds like you did both. What… what was the Duke Ansibald like?"
"Like a fairytale prince," Val said.
Val hadn't meant it as a compliment, since she didn't really care for dashing princes and their silly machismo, but Luella sighed, her pretty smile going giddy. That made sense, since Luella looked like a fairytale princess - tall and lean, her hair a tumble of blonde curls, her eyes dark and mysterious and intelligent. Val could imagine her cursed to an enchanted sleep in a spooky crypt, waiting for some pearly-toothed lothario like Ansibald to smooch her on the lips and wake her from her slumber. But instead of that, she helped notarize magical contracts and track down missing, plausibly-magical family heirlooms for people.
"They usually aren't even magical," Luella added. "That makes them harder to track down, because then you're just looking after stuff. No magical signature. But if we don't find it, then we only keep the deposit and they don't have to pay another pfennig… so we have to be pretty competent at tracking down regular stuff, too. I'll ask dad if you can come with us tomorrow!"
Val nodded enthusiastically. "I can't wait!"
+++++
Val spent much of the next day accompanying her newfound Uncle Wuldie and Cousin Luella around the city in pursuit of lost objects. This turned out to be a lot less exciting than being a bondsman. Most of the time, they walked past likely locations with a little alchemical compass that detected magical signatures and, when they found a blip, they'd go in and take a poke about the place. They had a kit of different alchemical liquids they could add to the compass to make the search more precise or increase its sensitivity, which they added a drop at a time, taking very careful measurements in a thick notebook after each addition.
The only exciting bit of the day Val managed to miss completely. When she and Luella went inside to ask a shopkeeper about an 'invaluable' family chalice enchanted to make everything you put in it taste vaguely of berries, Wuldie caught a woman trying to sneak out the back, dosed her with a sleep-cloth (just like Ette would do), recovered the chalice, turned the woman into the constabulary, and then returned to the shop to tell Val and Luella that they didn't need to question the shopkeeper any further (for obvious reasons).
Then they went to oversee the signing of magical contracts that would ensure that the heirs of an estate would attempt no harm against one another. Wuldie assured them that the contract was unenforceable (magically-speaking), provided each of the future heirs thought that whatever self-interested nonsense they were doing was in the best interests of the estate, and not a one of them listened to him to revise the contract.
"They think that, just because they can make an argument to me about what the contract means, that'll somehow bend the laws of contract magic… which, by their very nature, can't be bent. But the pay's the same, regardless. So… what do you think of the work, Val?"
"It's mostly like being a bondswoman," she said. And, by that, she meant that it was mostly the boring stuff - asking people questions and waiting around to watch for stuff - and that she usually missed the exciting bits.
Afterward, she had supper, studied magic from the Uddy's anemic selection of magic books, practiced her combat exercises, and slept on top of a sleeping roll on the floor of Cousin Ansibelle's room when her cousin finally stopped droning on about the boys she liked. Val dozed off under the buzz of a chem-driven fan, the myriad sounds of the city filtering in from the open second-story window.
The next day wasn't too different, except Val managed to tackle a man who started running when he spotted them. It turned out he didn't even have any of the items they were interested in, though he did have a lot of stolen jewelry and a bounty, and Uncle Wuldie let Val keep half of the five-mark bounty when they turned the crook in. That was more money than she'd ever had of her own - until she remembered that she had to give half to Ginn, who would definitely find out about it from Wuldie. And, even then, it was still a lot of money. More money of her own than she'd ever had - one high mark, twenty-five pfennigs. But, as she padded into the Uddy's study to give Ginn her half of the earnings, her mom accepted the coin with worried eyes.
"Dad still isn't here," Val observed. He was two days late.
"Don't worry about it, Val," Ginn said. "He probably just got held up on something silly. You know how he is."
Val did know how Ette, her dad, was… which is what worried her. And Sabine and Niko were no-shows, to boot. If they'd been held up even a day, Ette would have sent notice to them. And Ginn knew how Val was about going after trouble, so she made her promise to wait two more days before they considered doing anything to find Ette. It was a good thing she didn't make Val sign a magical contract, because she broke that promise three hours later when she crept out after leaving a letter on the dining room table:
Mom,
Sorry about going behind your back, but you know as well as me that dad would be here if something wasn't very wrong. Since I’m the battle-witch in the family, it's my job to get him out. I promise I'll be safe, and I promise I'll do my best to get dad back safely. I expect to be punished when I get back, but I'd much rather be punished with dad safe than unpunished with him fighting for his life with no family to help.
Love,
Your Daughter,
Valkyrie
PS: I have some treat apples for Tulip that will probably go bad before I get back. You can give them to your horses instead if you like, but they're regular human apples, so you could also bake them into an apple spice pie like the one the two of us baked for Sabine's birthday.
PPS: I am technically not breaking my promise because I am going after Niko and Sabine.
OvidLemma
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-Ovid
Hi, everybody!
Below, I've included portraits of Val's family, the Vinzennos! This is close to what I imagine them looking like - I've made these using the site, Artbreeder, which is great for coming up with novel portraits and "original" art. Note that, in this picture, Val is about a year younger and a bit less serious than in her portrait, front and center on the cover art. Also, no crown.
-Ovid
Chapter Thirty-Four: Cousin Val
They took two days to make it to Port Rumm. They stopped overnight in a modest river-trade town where the Spring Rumm, which they'd been following, joined with a sister river to form the Great Rumm River. The Great Rumm would lead them straight to the port. Countryside stretched for miles around them in the gentle hills, and all of the low-lying areas had been irrigated for rice paddies. Men and women crouched in the afternoon sun, picking stalks of golden-yellow rice by the handful and stuffing them into the saddlebags of bored-looking water mules. Barges coasted down the river, sitting low in the water with grain and ore from the farmlands and mining towns upstream.
There wasn't time to drum up demand for fighting classes, and when Val asked if she could perform at the tavern, the innkeeper stated that he wasn't interested unless Val could play music. She had a little ceramic flute back in Verdenlecht, a present from Jasil, but it made her sad to play it because it summoned bittersweet memories and she'd never got very good with the thing. Galvan was decent with the fiddle, though, and he'd brought that with him.
Val and Galvan made their way to the little town square, a two-block courtyard of cobblestone lined with shops and with a fifty-seat amphitheater in the middle. Resonant Square could have gobbled up four of the squares and had room to spare. A troupe of acrobats and musicians had already set up shop in the amphitheater and were going through warm-ups as people gathered to spectate.
"Val!" Galvan shouted, but she was already sprinting to the center of the square, her heart thudding in her chest, the bracelets on her wrist clattering about.
Her hopeful smile disappeared in an instant. The troupe was Sheore, but it wasn't Jasil's tribe. The lanky girl practicing her flute didn't have half the nimbleness that Jasil did. Jasil of the midnight-dark hair and the hazel eyes. But Niko was Val's girlfriend now, so she and Jasil couldn't be more than just friends.
"What in hell's bells was that about?" Galvan asked, finally catching up.
"Nothing," Val said. "I thought I saw a friend. Do you want to perform over by the fountain? You can play your fiddle and I'll do tumbling and fire-juggling?"
Two hours netted them eight pfennigs, which wasn't much but was a lot better than nothing. "I'm not giving mom her half," Galvan stated. The rule was that, whatever you made on the road, Ginn got half since she was paying for room and board.
"She doesn't deserve it after what she pulled," Val agreed. "I might get a ceramic flute."
"You should save it," Galvan said. He slipped his four coins into his hidden pocket - a practice he'd picked up from Val.
"True," she said before spotting a vendor selling alligator kebabs. "I'll save three… I want to try 'gator!"
Val felt a surge of anxiety as they rode into Port Rumm the next afternoon. It was just beginning to dawn on her that she was about to meet Ginn's extended family - her brother, his wife, and however many children they had. Ginn admitted that she'd lost count, as she only corresponded with the man once or twice a year and had last seen him when he and his middle daughter had visited Verdenslecht five years before and she'd made the trip from Wayfair to meet up.
"Little Luella was eleven or twelve at the time," Ginn said. "Why… she must be close to a woman grown by now."
Galvan didn't seem to feel too strongly one way or another, but he just didn't understand: he was unquestionably part of the family, whereas Val was a recent addition. What if they rejected her or treated her like a complete stranger, which she essentially was? What if they castigated Ginn's cavalier addition of a strange girl to the… clan…
"Um, mom? What's your family name?"
"Uddy."
Val cringed. "I'll bet you didn't mind that name change."
"Not so much," Ginn agreed.
What if they castigated Ginn's cavalier addition of a strange girl to the Uddy clan? Were they a tight-knit family? Were her cousins friendly? How many were there? Would they want to be her friend? How old were they?
Ginn stopped a constable to ask for directions - it had been twenty years since she'd visited the city and didn't know the lie of the land. They passed a temple of the Pale Order, mendicant priests preaching the word and handing out pamphlets around the front, a great big bell ringing out six o'clock from the temple's old stone belfry. No penitent brothers, though, since the duke had outlawed them and his little sister, the new duchess, had never rescinded the order. Good riddance!
Port Rumm was larger than Verdenlecht but smaller than Wayfair and, in a lot of ways, it reminded her of the latter. It was a lot less clean than the duchy's capital for starters, where scrubbed cobblestones, white marble, and pink and pale limestone dominated the streets and the architecture was mostly well-maintained. Even the poorer parts of Verdenlecht had nice streets and no beggars. In Port Rumm, though, there were beggars aplenty. Begging was technically outlawed, but there was no rule against whinging passersby, offering to do small and pointless jobs for them. They would run up and offer to brush your horse while you were still riding it. Or would push grubby, weather-worn pocket maps of the city into your hands and then demand a pfennig for them.
Or at least they tried to push a map into Val's hand several times. Violet batted the first map-peddler away with an angry hiss, and after that Val took her smooth yew stick - the one she thought she might carve into a wand - and thwacked any hand that got too close. She did it right in front of a constable, who seemed amused about the whole thing.
Port Rumm smelled a lot worse than Verdenlecht, too. Or at least worse than everywhere outside of the capital city's small, occasionally-clogged canal district. Horses clopped through the streets doing what horses do, sewage trickled down the gutters along busy avenues, restauranteurs threw scraps of leftover food to free-roaming dogs, and the smell of old fish wafted up from the port. After being an orphan in Wayfair for years, it was a familiar experience - except now she was a battle-witch riding into town on Tulip, her spotted filly, her burnished brown solstice-present boots poised in the stirrups. Those boots alone were worth more than everything Val had owned as an orphan and her jacket would have cost twenty times as much if she hadn't got the family discount and hardened the leather herself.
After they'd stabled the horses, they proceeded on foot - or, in Violet's case, perched upon Val's pack and peered over her shoulder, her whiskers tickling against Val's cheek. Ginn counted the houses as they went since only every third or fourth one had an actual number posted. They eventually arrived at a well-appointed brownstone with a carefully-painted sign announcing, Msr. A.C. Uddy, Items Found, Items Protected, Msc Notary. When Ginn tapped on the door, a rotund man with a close-cropped beard threw the door open and assaulted her with a great, welcoming, Uddy-style hug. It would have been very bosomy if A.C. had been a sister rather than a brother.
"Wuldie!" Ginn said.
"Ginn! Welcome to Port Rumm… hope you found the place easily?"
A.C. Uddy was mostly known as A.C. since his full name was Aethylwulde Caelythane Uddy, which was a decent mouthful of a name. Caelythane was his mother's maiden name and, apparently, also Ginn's middle name. Aethylwulde's friends called him Wuldie, and Val was to call him Uncle Wuldie. That's what he told her as he brought her into a great, meaty, Uddy-style hug. He had Ginn's same build - a bit broader and taller than average and with a frame that would have seemed portly if he hadn't possessed the understated strength of a bear beneath a deceptive layer of soft. He hugged exactly like Ginn did.
"So I've got a niece! How am I just finding this out?"
Ginn stated that Val had joined the family in Wayfair and didn't mention a word about her being adopted. Uncle Wuldie didn't ask. He ushered the three of them inside and introduced them to three of their four cousins - little Ryvic was out running around the neighborhood somewhere and likely wouldn't be back until half-way through supper. He introduced her as Cousin Val, worthy of the exact same introduction as Cousin 'Galv' - which Galvan corrected, since nobody had called him Galv since he was a little kid.
Wuldie admired Galvan's pattern-work on Val's jacket, noting: "We've got two artists in the family, then! Ansibelle is apprenticing as a jeweler. Every necklace, earring, and ring you see is one of hers."
"I love your bracelets," Ansibelle said. Slim, dark-haired, and soft-spoken, she looked a lot more like Galvan's sister ought to look than Val did.
Val blushed. "Thanks. My friend made them for me."
Uncle Wuldie was Gifted just like Ginn - as was Cousin Luella, apparently, who was intent on taking over the business from dear old dad. Wuldie specialized in using his Gift to find lost valuables, in warding them against theft or destruction, and in notarizing magically-binding contracts.
"I think I signed one of those once for Mrs. Eatherfine," Val observed. "She's the dowager duchess."
That worried Cousin Luella, who warned: "You shouldn't sign a magical contract without a representative. At least somebody who's Gifted and knows the law. That's about the most dangerous thing you can do."
Val shrugged. "I was pretty new to magical anything back then. It doesn't really matter now that the duke is dead. Not that I'm glad he's dead… all the contract really said was that I had to say he was the rightful king, and he even got to be the king for most of a day."
"I take it back," Luella said. "Dealing with nobility is about the most dangerous thing you can do. It sounds like you did both. What… what was the Duke Ansibald like?"
"Like a fairytale prince," Val said.
Val hadn't meant it as a compliment, since she didn't really care for dashing princes and their silly machismo, but Luella sighed, her pretty smile going giddy. That made sense, since Luella looked like a fairytale princess - tall and lean, her hair a tumble of blonde curls, her eyes dark and mysterious and intelligent. Val could imagine her cursed to an enchanted sleep in a spooky crypt, waiting for some pearly-toothed lothario like Ansibald to smooch her on the lips and wake her from her slumber. But instead of that, she helped notarize magical contracts and track down missing, plausibly-magical family heirlooms for people.
"They usually aren't even magical," Luella added. "That makes them harder to track down, because then you're just looking after stuff. No magical signature. But if we don't find it, then we only keep the deposit and they don't have to pay another pfennig… so we have to be pretty competent at tracking down regular stuff, too. I'll ask dad if you can come with us tomorrow!"
Val nodded enthusiastically. "I can't wait!"
+++++
Val spent much of the next day accompanying her newfound Uncle Wuldie and Cousin Luella around the city in pursuit of lost objects. This turned out to be a lot less exciting than being a bondsman. Most of the time, they walked past likely locations with a little alchemical compass that detected magical signatures and, when they found a blip, they'd go in and take a poke about the place. They had a kit of different alchemical liquids they could add to the compass to make the search more precise or increase its sensitivity, which they added a drop at a time, taking very careful measurements in a thick notebook after each addition.
The only exciting bit of the day Val managed to miss completely. When she and Luella went inside to ask a shopkeeper about an 'invaluable' family chalice enchanted to make everything you put in it taste vaguely of berries, Wuldie caught a woman trying to sneak out the back, dosed her with a sleep-cloth (just like Ette would do), recovered the chalice, turned the woman into the constabulary, and then returned to the shop to tell Val and Luella that they didn't need to question the shopkeeper any further (for obvious reasons).
Then they went to oversee the signing of magical contracts that would ensure that the heirs of an estate would attempt no harm against one another. Wuldie assured them that the contract was unenforceable (magically-speaking), provided each of the future heirs thought that whatever self-interested nonsense they were doing was in the best interests of the estate, and not a one of them listened to him to revise the contract.
"They think that, just because they can make an argument to me about what the contract means, that'll somehow bend the laws of contract magic… which, by their very nature, can't be bent. But the pay's the same, regardless. So… what do you think of the work, Val?"
"It's mostly like being a bondswoman," she said. And, by that, she meant that it was mostly the boring stuff - asking people questions and waiting around to watch for stuff - and that she usually missed the exciting bits.
Afterward, she had supper, studied magic from the Uddy's anemic selection of magic books, practiced her combat exercises, and slept on top of a sleeping roll on the floor of Cousin Ansibelle's room when her cousin finally stopped droning on about the boys she liked. Val dozed off under the buzz of a chem-driven fan, the myriad sounds of the city filtering in from the open second-story window.
The next day wasn't too different, except Val managed to tackle a man who started running when he spotted them. It turned out he didn't even have any of the items they were interested in, though he did have a lot of stolen jewelry and a bounty, and Uncle Wuldie let Val keep half of the five-mark bounty when they turned the crook in. That was more money than she'd ever had of her own - until she remembered that she had to give half to Ginn, who would definitely find out about it from Wuldie. And, even then, it was still a lot of money. More money of her own than she'd ever had - one high mark, twenty-five pfennigs. But, as she padded into the Uddy's study to give Ginn her half of the earnings, her mom accepted the coin with worried eyes.
"Dad still isn't here," Val observed. He was two days late.
"Don't worry about it, Val," Ginn said. "He probably just got held up on something silly. You know how he is."
Val did know how Ette, her dad, was… which is what worried her. And Sabine and Niko were no-shows, to boot. If they'd been held up even a day, Ette would have sent notice to them. And Ginn knew how Val was about going after trouble, so she made her promise to wait two more days before they considered doing anything to find Ette. It was a good thing she didn't make Val sign a magical contract, because she broke that promise three hours later when she crept out after leaving a letter on the dining room table:
Mom,
Sorry about going behind your back, but you know as well as me that dad would be here if something wasn't very wrong. Since I’m the battle-witch in the family, it's my job to get him out. I promise I'll be safe, and I promise I'll do my best to get dad back safely. I expect to be punished when I get back, but I'd much rather be punished with dad safe than unpunished with him fighting for his life with no family to help.
Love,
Your Daughter,
Valkyrie
PS: I have some treat apples for Tulip that will probably go bad before I get back. You can give them to your horses instead if you like, but they're regular human apples, so you could also bake them into an apple spice pie like the one the two of us baked for Sabine's birthday.
PPS: I am technically not breaking my promise because I am going after Niko and Sabine.
OvidLemma
An Obligatory Message from the Author
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-Ovid
