“You’ll scrub the table before you go to bed,” Ginny warned.
Their daughter shrugged. “Yep. Daddy, guess how many frogs I found!”
“How many?” Clay asked.
“No, guess!”
He eyed the four frogs on the table. “Umm … one?”
“No! More than one!”
“Hmm … fifty?”
Tally cackled, moving a hand to head off one of the frogs as it neared the edge of the table. “Not fifty! I got four, silly. Can’t you count?”
She proceeded, with the glowing pride of a horse trader showing off her stable of prized stallions, to introduce her amphibious prisoners one by one, pointing out the peculiarities of each and announcing them by name. She held the big yellow in two hands and thrust him up for Clay to see.
“This one is Bert. He’s yellow and Mom says he’ll have wings when he grows up. I got him for Uncle Gabriel.” Tally looked around, as though just now realizing Uncle Gabriel was nowhere in sight. “Where is he, asleep?”
Clay shared a brief glance with Ginny. “He left. He said to say hello.”
His daughter frowned. “Is he coming back?”
Probably never, he thought. “Hopefully,” he said.
Tally spent a moment digesting this, staring down at the frog in her hands, and then she grinned great big and wide. “Bert will have his wings by then!” she announced, and the nubs on Bert’s back twitched as if in demonstration.
Ginny came over and smoothed Tally’s hair the same way she did Clay’s. “Okay, whelpling, time for bed. Your friends can wait outside while you sleep.”
“But, Mom, I’ll lose them,” Tally protested.
“And you will no doubt find them again tomorrow,” said her mother. “I’m sure they’ll be very happy to see you.”
Clay laughed and Ginny smiled.
“They will,” their daughter assured them. One by one she picked up the frogs and walked them outside, bidding them farewell and giving each a kiss on the brow before setting them free. Ginny winced with every kiss; Clay was just glad none of them turned into princes. He’d had enough of company tonight, and there wasn’t stew left anyway.
After Tally had scrubbed the table clean she left to wash herself. Griff scampered off behind her. Ginny sat down at the table, took one of Clay’s big hands in both of her own, and squeezed. “Tell me,” she said.
So he told her.
Tally was asleep. The lantern beside her bed, shuttered by a metal blind cut with star-shaped holes, cast a flickering constellation across the walls. Her hair glimmered in the soft light, veins of her mother’s gold amidst the plain old brown she’d inherited from her father. She had insisted on a story before bed. She wanted dragons, but dragons were forbidden because they gave her nightmares. Tally asked for them anyway, of course. She was brave that way. He offered her mermaids instead, and a hydrake, which he realized midstory was sort of like seven dragons at once, and he hoped she wouldn’t wake up screaming.
It was a true story for the most part, though Clay embellished it somewhat (told her he himself struck the fatal blow against the hydrake, when in fact it had been Ganelon) and left out a few details his nine-year-old daughter—or her mother, for that matter—didn’t need to know. Suffice it to say the mermaids had been very gracious afterward, which explained Clay’s fairly comprehensive knowledge of the famously mysterious mermaid anatomy. Truth be told, though, he still didn’t quite understand it.
He let the story trail off when Tally’s breathing deepened to indicate he was speaking only to himself. Now he sat looking at her face—her tiny mouth, her blushing cheeks, her small, porcelain-perfect nose—and marvelled that Clay Cooper, even with Ginny’s evident contribution, could have produced something so extraordinarily beautiful. He reached out, unable to help himself, and took her hand in his own. Her fingers tightened instinctively on his, and he smiled.
Her eyes fluttered open. “Daddy?”
“Yes, angel?”
“Is Rosie going to be okay?”
His heart froze. His mouth opened and closed as his mind groped for a suitable response. “You were listening earlier?” he asked. But of course she’d been. Eavesdropping had become a favourite habit of hers since overhearing him and Ginny whispering one night that they were getting her a pony for her birthday.
His daughter nodded sleepily. “She’s in trouble, right? Is she going to be okay?”
“I don’t know,” Clay answered. Yes, he should have said. Of course she is. You could lie to children if it did them good, couldn’t you?
“But Uncle Gabe is going to save her,” Tally mumbled. Her eyes drooped shut, and Clay hesitated a moment, hoping she had fallen back asleep. “Right?” she asked, eyes open again.
This time the lie was ready. “That’s right, honey.”
“Good,” she said. “But you’re not going with him?”
“No,” he said softly. “I’m not.”
“But you would come if it was me, right, Daddy? If I was trapped by bad guys far away? You would come and save me?”
There was an ache in his chest, a seething rot that might have been shame, or sorrow, or sickening remorse, and was probably all three. He was thinking of Gabriel’s broken smile, the words his oldest friend had uttered before walking out.
You’re a good man, Clay Cooper.
“If it was you,” he said in a voice still fierce for how quietly it spoke, “then nothing in the world could stop me.”
Tally smiled and tightened her tiny grip. “You should save Rosie too, then,” she said.
And just like that he cracked. Clamped his teeth shut on a sob that threatened to choke him, closed his eyes against the well of tears, too late.
Clay had not always been a good man, but he was certainly trying. He’d curbed his tendency toward violence by signing on with the Watch and using his particularly limited skill set for the greater good. He did his best to be a man worthy of a woman like Ginny, and of their daughter, his darling girl, who was his most precious legacy, the speck of gold siphoned from the clouded river of his soul.
But there were … measures of goodness, he figured. You could set one thing against another and find that one, if only by the weight of a feather, came out heavier. And that was just it, wasn’t it? To make a choice between the two—the right choice—was a burden few had the strength to shoulder.
To sit idly by—no matter the reason—while his oldest, most cherished friend lost the only thing he’d ever truly loved wasn’t what a good man did. Whatever else he knew, Clay knew that.
And his daughter knew it, too.
“Daddy,” she asked, her brow furrowed, “why are you crying?”
He imagined the smile he put on looked something like the one Gabe had been wearing earlier on the outside step, brittle and broken and sad. “Because,” he said, “I’m going to miss you very much.”
Chapter Four
Hitting the Road
He said good-bye to Ginny on the hill that overlooked the farm. Clay figured she would wave him off at the door, or turn back where the lane ended and the long road began, and he’d dreaded the moment like a man waiting for the black-hooded executioner to wave him onstage—Your turn, pal! But instead she led him on, speaking quietly of small things as they walked hand in hand up the slope. Before long he was nodding away, chuckling at something he wouldn’t be able to recall when he tried to later that night, and had very nearly forgotten he might never hear her voice again, or see her hair catch fire in the morning sun, as it did when they reached the summit and saw the world span gold and green beyond it.
Hours earlier, both of them still awake in the grey dark before dawn, Ginny had warned him she wouldn’t cry when she said good-bye, said it wasn’t in her nature, and that it didn’t mean she would miss him any less. But on the hill at sunrise, after telling him again what a good man he was, she went ahead and wept anyway, and so did he. When their tears dried she took his face in both hands and looked hard into his eyes. “Come home to me, Clay Cooper,” she told him.
Come home to me.