The mid spring forest was eerily quiet, even in the depths of the deciduous trees. Outside the city wall of Tinian and away from the Haunted Tower's remains, halfway to the river, Ro reclined lazily on the ground, studying the forest and trying to determine where to begin. She knew why the lands were this empty, having encountered and dismissed the threat years ago. The young woman could only wonder if Queen Titania knew and was punishing her for that, too. If Eupa ever found out, she was going to be hell to live with until she died.
Well, she was already hell to live with, but it could always get worse.
Ro hoped distantly that her sister wasn't getting herself killed, and tried to push the thoughts aside so she could listen to the forest.
Over here!
Rarely did the spirits of nature give her signals she translated into words. Usually her own would appear as wolf cubs, and others would flit by as foxes or occasional hawks, and none of them spoke.
"What's over here?" she asked, getting to her feet. "I hope it's something new I can plant, there's hardly songbirds."
Here!
The cub appeared riverways and yapped. She sighed and stumped on, annoyed to be diverted from her self-given task of bringing her forest back to life.
"It better be good," she grumbled to the spear in her hand, but it didn't respond. Instead, the yap continued, and then a second accompanied it. The third remained silent, but all three were manifesting, this had to be big.
Only there was nothing here.
All three stood in a circle on the riverbank with their tails wagging, a gray one with socks growling at the mud and a black one with a white mask giving Ro a curious look, then gazing back to the space between the pups.
"Okay?" Ro said, and she gingerly reached down, starting tall then getting lower, eventually kneeling, lowering her palm to the ground until it was barely a foot off, and she discovered the rough feel of a dried spun material woven into either a hard cloth or soft wood basket.
"Okay?" she repeated, but all three spirit-pups excitedly bounced on their toes, one adorably patting alternative feet. Ro felt all around the object to determine its shape, and maybe its contents.
Soft-ish with a flexible, tightly woven rope fiber; spherical or oblong, flat at the bottom where whatever was in it had settled. She felt some lumps but nothing definitive, and she didn't know what to think was inside.
It didn't smell like anything, not even the fibers. This deeply unsettled the hunter.
The usual rules were not to mess with magic. Or, at least, those were Eupa's rules and they were pretty reasonable. Or at least it made more sense to leave this alone than to mess with the invisible sack in a place known as The Haunted Forest that was actually a Faerie Forest and therefore worse in numerous ways.
Eupa also had no respect for her own capacity to handle a threat, let alone hers and Ro's together, and also Eupa wasn't here to catch any fallout, and also it was her forest, now, as decreed by the Summer Queen herself. Even if it was petty vengeance on behalf of Lord Shee.
Ro found a straight line of lump that she eventually determined to be a seam. She sought out a single common thread that pulled the length of the lump, and she cut it. From there, against a backdrop of purple cloth through eyes in the seam, Ro could see another layer of seam, which she also cut.
The basket's end split in half, revealing another two seams perpendicular, letting the end open like a flower. The globe-shaped basket was lined with cloth, Ro could see pink and blue and white along the edges and "petals". The actual contents looked like more cloth until she nudged it the rest of the way open to see light brown skin.
Ro leapt to her feet.
And she still couldn't smell it?
Warm, but no heartbeat?
"Is it fake?" she asked them aloud.
One growled impatiently. It wasn't manifested anymore, but she felt it.
"Is it the basket hiding everything?"
An affirmative yap told her what she needed, and she scooped the basket and the baby it held under an arm.
Not in the Faerie Forest, and not alone.
Instead, she went to the wall of the city where it met the forest, found a spot at the top she wanted to be, and slipped into a gap between worlds to land up there, and then again to get down, landing on the roof of The Screaming Harpy.
The old wooden building was a tavern for adventurers, magicians, and locals who liked the type. Brotz was probably still asleep, this time of morning, as he tended to stay up late playing, singing, and fighting.
The solid building reeked of magic, and there was a fighting ring out back now that Brotz had been here for a while. Most of the furniture had been repaired magically and mundanely, and in general, while Ro didn't feel at home indoors, she didn't feel as out of place as usual.
The keeper remembered her, pointing straight up when she lifted her brows at him, and she gave him a nod on the way to the stairs around the lobby.
Brotz was big, even for this place. The enormous half-dwarf filled the narrow bed from shoulder to shoulder, lying flat on his back with his massive hands resting on his belly, snoring fit to disturb a hibernating dragon. His braided hair was coming undone, his clothes were dirty, he hadn't shaved–overall he looked like he'd spent about ten days trying to drink off a bad adventure. That he squeezed ten days out of six was remarkable, but he was known for doing all kinds of remarkable things, which was why the huntress figured he was a safe place to examine whatever bomb this happened to be.
Plus, he was immortal and while there were some risks, nothing smelled offensive about the magic, just protective, so he would be able to open it more safely than Ro could.
(The "why" of Brotz's immortality was a mystery, but Eupa spent a disturbing amount of time studying the "how", and they had yet to find any way to permanently end his life.)
The werekin huntress placed the basket on Brotz's lap and cut the remaining petals apart to let it fall open, revealing more fat brown arm and dark curls, and she studied the basket while she waited for her companion to wake up.
The big man took an hour to roll his head and blink his eyes open, muttering, "I'm up." He glanced at Ro standing at the foot of his bed and stretched with a massive yawn, unbothered. The next stretch moved the basket, alerting him to its presence, and he sat up in one swift motion to see the open woven ball resting on his lap. He blinked blearily, then again as he refused to see it properly, then again at Ro with his amber eyes going wide and mouth falling open.
After several attempts to speak, his lips twisted and he gave a weak chuckle. "You've been a faerie ruler thing for maybe a week and you're already stealing babies?"
Ro hoped the reproachful look came across. "That's not fair, I'm hardly a ruler. You'd probably argue with me on that– but no, I did not steal this, I found it. It was extremely well-hidden, and is still magicked to stay that way for a long time. It came from upriver, but most of its pieces and contents, including the baby, did not. The materials themselves are from at least three different regions, one of which is where you came from, or at least smells the same as your sash, and the fruit is from the southwest coast, and the baby is human. I brought it here because I suspect the amount of magic and work that went into hiding the baby means that it's sought after by people that warrant that kind of magic use."
He listened, but Ro knew at least half of it bounced off his head and the other half was struggling to get through the sleep-fogged hangover. Fortunately, he didn't need to hear to know this was bad news. As he peeled away layers of blanket, the smirk fell and the heavy brows lowered.
The baby remained still while Brotz scooped her out of the basket with one enormous hand. The purple blanket fell away, revealing the plain, normal, healthy-looking human infant in a cloth diaper. It might have been a year old, big-bellied and big-headed with all the good fat rolls. A small heart-shaped birthmark was stamped on its heel, and Ro heard the spirits yapping about not liking her, with one howling about her eyes.
The baby reeked of magic, every sense Ro had that could pick up magic was screaming at her. It was work to bring her attention back to the baby itself. She was warm, breathing. Ro couldn't hear the heartbeat earlier and figured that was the basket hiding it, but now she wasn't so sure– no mess in the diaper, still asleep, freezing in time made more sense, but that took strong stuff and was hard to pull off.
Ro sniffed the inside of the basket again, but there were too many spells and sigils to count, much less identify. "I think the basket keeps things inside from moving through time, like those boxes we found in the mountains," Ro explained, but he was ignoring her. "She's just asleep, probably taking the same nap she was put down for when she was placed here. Guessing by the love, it was her parents' doing."
Brotz scowled and gave Ro the lowered brows again. "Love? You found her in the river."
Ro frowned back at him, and he looked back down to the baby, then at the blankets, and the scowl softened. "Trying to keep her safe," he said then, and he checked the diaper. "You said her?" he said, pointing.
Ro shrugged and gestured at the spear on the wall. "S'what they said. I believe them, but we can ask when she's older."
Brotz didn't seem to know what to make of that, blinking at Ro again, but he apparently dismissed it for the matter at hand and picked up the last blanket folded at the bottom of the basket. This one was fluffy wool, and two soft fruits tumbled out with it, and another, smaller blanket that was worn smooth by use and age.
The purple one stung Ro's hands as though caked in tiny shards of glass, and she spread it to see the runes knitted in. "This is impressive work," she said aloud, refusing to touch the patterns. It wouldn't do anything but sting, but it wasn't worth poking for the sake of it. "This was long in planning, too," she added. "This blanket took a while to make, even if it was mother pinned by nursing, and these patterns are nothing to dismiss."
Brotz knew slightly more about knitting than Ro, but his reaction was still underplayed. "I don't like it," he grumped.
Ro frowned at Brotz with another small shrug. "They seem pretty satisfied that I picked her up, though one doesn't like the smell of her and keeps calling her 'wrong', but it feels that way about wheels and cheese, too. I'm pretty sure it's the magic smell coming off her– she's either magic herself or born of someone who was. One of them says something is wrong with her eyes."
Brotz turned the baby gently in his hands, then laid her on the bed between his knees. "Looks normal human," he reported. "But I can't sense that stuff."
Ro agreed, he couldn't, and politely didn't say anything.
"We're keeping her, right?" Brotz asked, looking up at Ro with the expression of a kicked dog. He just now considered the possibility of handing her off. Like she could pry the baby out of his hands now that he loved it.
"What would you say if I tried to tell you no?" she asked insincerely.
He shrugged and frowned. "I'd say we need to help her parents, 'cos that's the only people I'd give her back to, and they need help or they're dead already, if they're tossing their baby into a river."
Ro agreed silently and she waited for him to come around to the next question.
"I'm gonna kill Eupa," he rumbled, not bothering to make it a question at all. "That's the only thing for her, especially if you try to stay with me."
Ro waited to see if he was going to offer another suggestion, but that seemed to be dealt with. She wondered if she could talk him out of it. "If you actually succeed, I won't try to stay with you," the huntress told him. "I love you dearly, but I'm afraid that Eupa is still my twin and I don't think raising a child with her murderer is an acceptable life to lead."
Brotz's lungs heaved like a volcano venting. When he finally spoke, his voice rumbled, emanating more from his back than his mouth. "I'll make it a threat 'til I think she's actually gonna do something. And I mean I think she's gonna, not waiting for her to do it, not waiting for her to say something about it, I'm not even gonna let her get the words out of her mouth. I'll strangle her half to death the first time she thinks too hard about it and the rest of the way the second time."
"That's fine," Ro conceded. Eupa needed to be dealt with harshly, she couldn't deny, and preemptively attacking was the only way to stop her from hitting you first. "You gonna name her?"
"Brina?" Brotz offered, and Ro gave him what she hoped was a kind smile.
~
Ro smelled Eupa at least a day off. She warned Brotz so he could brace himself, but he was still bristling when she came back in the morning.
The room was clean, except for a few spare traveling bracers and a single leather glove the baby apparently chewed, and a shiny cooking pan. Brotz was using a sunstone to heat a basin of water, apparently forgetting that sunstones didn't produce heat, despite his holding it.
"Are you anxious about Eupa's return?" she asked, picking up the heating stone and dropping it into the basin. "Why are you giving the baby a bath if you're nervous like this?"
"Figure you can run with her if you need to, figure I'll be too busy keeping the baby from falling to kill Eupa without a good reason. I'll kill you, too, if Eupa hurts her."
"I won't let her," Ro swore, but she wasn't sure what she was going to do if she had to run anyway. Give the baby to someone else, she supposed, though Brotz would probably try and follow it and Ro would have to decide whether or not the sin was egregious enough to finally leave Eupa behind.
Because Eupa didn't have any excuses to hurt the baby, but she had many excuses to reject it, and there was a genuine glaring reason to actually be upset at them no matter who did what.
"What're we going to tell her about the eye?" Ro asked him. "I've been trying to come up with something since she woke up, and the truth is… far too plain."
Brotz watched the baby crawl into his backpack, then back out, and then back in, and then back out to turn around and scoot backwards into it, initially getting a leg stuck. The purple eye was only visible half the time, but that half was distracting, and Brotz didn't even feel magic the way the twins did, he was just looking into an eye that happened to have every star in the sky behind it.
He couldn't keep the grimace down. "What do you think we should tell her?"
Ro shrugged a shoulder, but her face was annoyance at best. "I don't think it's entirely important, because she will be enraged no matter what. But I have only come up with telling her that the baby is magic and has a chunk of universe-stuff in her face. It's probably not a good idea. But lying isn't going to help."
Brotz fetched the baby from the backpack, where it was just beginning to get its feet in first. It objected, flapping and kicking, but when she saw Brotz, she giggled and grabbed his bottom lip. Ro giggled when he grunted in pain as the little nails dug so that even his tough hide bled, and the baby giggled with her.
"I'm glad she likes you," Ro said with a soft smile. "I think Eupa'll be reaching west gate soon, and if she doesn't stop anywhere, will be here in maybe twenty minutes?"
The process of testing and correcting the water temperature kept Brotz busy while she talked, and he grunted noncommittally to let her know he heard. She was almost amused at the way his scowl evaporated when he knelt to watch the baby merrily slap the water.
He was still in the same place twenty minutes later when the lobby below went dead silent, and he looked to Ro where she stood next to the door.
"I'll kill her," he warned with thunder in his lungs. The baby swiveled in the basin to watch Brotz with a concerned frown.
"I know. I'll even help find her," Ro agreed. "But wait until she's actually posing a threat in a way that isn't existing in the vicinity."
"That's the only real threat she ever poses before you're dead," he rumbled, but he breathed the fire out and waited to see what happened when the door creaked open.
Normally, Eupa would have snuck around the room and gotten half-undressed before she let anyone notice she was there. This time, she slunk through the cracked door, behind Ro, and to the corner; then she dropped her backpack loudly to one side and yowled, "What the fuck is this?"
Eupa was an inch shorter and fifty pounds lighter than her sister with sleek black fur and no mane to speak of. The soulless eyes gleamed yellow and the only things sharper than her tongue were her sword and daggers, which were all strapped to her legs with the simple leather armor set she wore for travel. She was the deadliest creature that both Brotz and Ro had ever encountered, and everyone that stood too close was reminded of their mortality in ways that knocked knees. Such was her wickedness, there were times Brotz only stayed with them specifically to stop her from committing atrocities for fun. She was the worst person that most people ever met in their lives.
Murder, however, was her only real trick. She was merely annoying, otherwise. If murder or threats of murder weren't the solution, she was out of answers aside from making someone angry enough to leave. Brotz being immortal, she posed only a miniscule threat to him, and she loved him too much to hurt him more than she deemed necessary.
And when that didn't work, he usually threatened, sincerely, to break her sword arm, collarbone, leg, or foot. He also threatened, insincerely, to end her life, but he loved her too much to follow through. (She pushed it a few times.)
Eupa was watching Brotz, rather than the baby, and her face was moving through expressions, first rage, then annoyance, then fear, then back to rage. "You're already in love with it, aren't you," she snapped at him. "I see it, you've gone baby-brained, I see it– Ro, the fuck did you give him a baby?! Where the fuck did you find it?!"
"How do you know I found it?" Ro argued lightly, aiming to keep Eupa's rage from finding a single target.
Eupa's mouth opened and closed as she stammered and stuttered, finally giving up and pointing at Brotz and Brina across the room. "The fuck?!" she demanded. "Did you knock him up!?"
"I did find it," Ro admitted, rocking to her heels, not wanting to get into the joke. She hoped to resolve this quickly, even if Eupa decided to leave. "And yes, he does already love it. We've had it here about half the time you've been gone, so he's gotten very attached, even if he wasn't when I first brought it to him."
Eupa's gray lips twisted into a snarl, baring the jaguar teeth, then her head snapped up and she stepped back fast enough to bump into the wall. Ro looked to see the big half-dwarf looming dangerously over the basin, glaring at Eupa with eyes almost as soulless as her own.
"Don't bare your fangs at her again," he rumbled in the floor-trembling bass.
"I'm not even looking at the shit," Eupa argued, which was true. She was looking at Brotz, and she had a knife in her left hand. "You don't get to threaten me for shit I haven't done yet."
"You have."
Eupa sniffed derisively. "I wouldn't kill your kid. That'd be a great way to get crushed to dust and jelly limbs-first, and I need to sleep more than you." She looked between Ro and Brotz again and her lips turned up, but she tucked her mouth into her cowl to hide it. "I don't have twenty fucking years to sit down and not do shit, my hips will be bad before it can feed itself."
Ro and Brotz exchanged glances and shrugs. They were ageless, so they'd overlooked that part. They also weren't going to change their minds or courses for her.
Eupa visibly weighed out their decision and spun in place to throw herself to the bed with her back to the room. "You guys are assholes. Fuck you both, every time I leave either of you alone for ten minutes, you're trying to ruin our good times, you did this last time, this is bullshit," she was grumbling, but otherwise wasn't moving very fast.
It felt like a thunderhead looming and waiting to burst. Both the bigger adventurers kept glancing at one another and waiting for their friend to snap.
"Are you leaving us?" Ro asked.
"I can't decide," Eupa replied, but her voice cracked. "Fuck you both," she added. "I fucking hate you both."
"The forest is mine whether or not we adopted the baby," Ro explained softly, watching Brotz take Brina out of the basin and dry her off. "So I'd have to stay or post a guard and visit."
"The fuck are you doing with a forest?" Eupa demanded, turning where she sat. "You said you wanted to fix it, you didn't say it was yours."
"I thought I told you," Ro sort-of-lied. She told Eupa about wanting to help the forest, she might have called it her own, and she didn't explicitly say there was an obligation to the place. "It is mine because Queen Titania said so, since I dethroned its previous keeper."
Eupa sat up and blinked at Ro. "So, what, you pinned him with a baby and you're hoping I'll stay 'cos you two are here? Even if there's– is that a fucking human–"
Eupa twisted the other way to see the species, but with Brina looking at Eupa and Eupa looking at Brina, the purple eye was now visible, on display, and apparently captivating to the irritated werekin. For several long seconds, she stared with her mouth agape, lost in the window to infinity in the child's head. Unable to pry her eyes away, her head remained stationary as she stood up and spun the rest of her body so that she was on her feet with her hands planted on the bed. Her mouth worked silently to eventually force out a strangled, "No!"
Brotz squared his shoulders and set his feet but Eupa didn't back down. "The fuck is that!?" she shrieked. "That's not even magic anymore, that's just trouble, fucking bright purple trouble–"
"Which is exactly why she needs people like us to raise her," Brotz rumbled. "If you want to run, you can, but I know what I'm doing."
The lanky woman spun in place, then narrowed on the redhead and pointed fiercely at him. "You don't know what you're doing, you know what you decided to fuck up!" she yowled. "Fuck yourself, the fuck are you gonna do when she's six and turns you into a pile of worms? She won't even mean to and she won't know how to fix it! And– that's not a girl, the fuck is wrong with you both?"
"They said it was," Ro explained, waggling the spear. "I actually sort of agree with you about the power, except I agree with him, too. Brotz is difficult to turn into worms. We've seen him completely bounce off spells from full grown, fully trained magicians. No six-year-old, even armed with the cosmos, is going to unmake Brotz the Eternal."
Eupa gave Ro a narrow glare. "I'm pretty sure I could've."
"You could've unmade me with a damn knife when you were six," Brotz grumbled, but he was feeding the baby and out of her reach, so he was calm for now. The baby was enthusiastically mouthing the pinched-off fruit in his fingers, occasionally needing some gentle nudging to stop her from trying to take the fruit itself from him.
"You found it where?" Eupa demanded, throwing herself back to sitting on the bed in one fluid motion. "Why can't we put it back?"
"I found her in a basket in the river," Ro said.
Eupa uttered, "and why can't we put her back," under her breath. "So of course you picked up a fucking basket in the Faerie Forest and opened it?"
"My Faerie Forest. It was more or less my responsibility to at least find it a place to live."
"So naturally, you took it to the biggest sap– no, you did that shit on purpose. Lucky find with the baby, but you knew what you were doing when you gave it to him!"
Ro wagged her head. She knew it would happen, but she didn't know any other answers, and they really did need to find a good reason to either stay here or visit a lot. She was planning on using it as a landing point between hunts when she was old, but she knew Brotz would stay even if Eupa didn't.
"The fuck are we gonna do with a baby?" Eupa continued griping as she got undressed. "Gonna build a house and pretend the family we are isn't ten kinds of fucked up? Like we're not an assassin, a drunk, and a lion that keeps forgetting to walk on all fours? The fuck can we do with a baby? Put it in a backpack and hope it doesn't freeze– no wait, Ro's got a fucking forest now. I can't believe that shit, I'm gonna have to have a whole fucking rage at you, too, just for that!"
"How about you tell me about your trip, first?"
Eupa darkened under her fur and turned away without saying anything. "Anyway, we take turns getting ourselves mortally wounded, the fuck are we gonna do? Hells, Brotz just fucking dies."
"It's been a year since I died at the hands of anyone that wasn't you," Brotz argued. "So if you stopped that, it would just be you getting mortally wounded."
"Ro got fucked up a couple of times," Eupa yelped indignantly, but he flinched away. "I didn't even mean that time, but shit, yeah! Then, too!"
"I have only been mortally wounded that one time," Ro complained. "The rest were simple injuries."
"The rest was the whole planet coming together to freeze, crush, or completely throw you," Eupa snipped. "And I'm not gonna get into whatever goes on when you wander off into Faerieland, but I'm gonna guess 'safe' ain't a word we can attribute to it."
Ro glanced at their red-headed friend, who narrowed his eyes at her, and then back to Eupa. "We can raise a child. Especially the three of us, we all make up for each others' shortcomings."
The yellow-eyed werekin snarled at her twin. "Shut up, you're just trying to keep me mad at him for you getting us stuck here. I can't even k–"
Brotz cut her off before she got started again. "If you finish the sentence, I'm gonna take the chance to get this thumping I'm saving out of my blood. Been ready to fight since Ro said you were on your way, and I've been ready to fight you since this morning."
"What, practice blindfolding yourself?" Eupa growled. "You'll never see me coming."
"Turned the eight count into a ten count, 'cos you're always slower after a long trip," he barked.
The snarl and roll of her head indicated that she didn't like the truth of the answer. "Thump me and you'll wake up with a damn stumped arm," she growled insincerely. "Hack it off so many times it won't even grow back while you're dead."
"You've tried," Brotz reminded her, but now that she was making threats without intent, he was satisfied.
Eupa slapped the bed with the bracer she was removing, but she didn't argue anymore. "So aside from miracle births of baby suns that happened in half a fucking moon, and a secret fucking land tract that we've been made responsible for, is there anything else I need to know?"
Ro didn't have patience for Eupa's impatience. "Are you going to live with us or not?"
Eupa didn't move for a while, slouching where she sat and glaring at the floor. "Ask me again when I've recovered. Probably not. Why haven't you hunted down its parents?"
"We suspect they're dead. If they're not, they're in a position that led to them hiding their child so that even they couldn't find it."
Eupa scowled and flopped sideways on the bed. "Fuck. I hate you both. Why the fuck– I can't even go stab someone in the back of the fucking head in half a moon, I swear– And a Fairy Queen–" Eupa sat back up and wheeled on Ro, "--gave you a fucking forest?"
~
They built the cottage on their own, working with Ro's instruction and Eupa double checking with sketches and an architect. They had a short discussion about the bath house, as Eupa and Ro didn't understand why Brotz would want one, but they didn't have a good reason not to.
The oven was agreed upon and built with some study of local works, and more expert feedback. Brotz eventually got Eupa to take him with her, because he was certain she was holding people at knifepoint, but she wasn't. Instead, she stole blueprints similar to their own drafts, compared and adjusted, then returned the stolen blueprints. He watched her do it from the street. Damnedest thing….
The stone walls and attic rafters and layered roofs took ten days to finish, the bath house took six more, and they had a liveable home within the month, with final touches and reinforcement and adjustments being made as needed.
The twins didn't feel the need for much furniture, but Brotz's idea of a house did, so they compromised and made beds, a dining table, a cooking counter, and a living chair, with Eupa's floor cushion being constructed after a month more.
It was a settled house Ro ventured into one morning, and she opened the shutters to let the light in. "Brotz?"
The big man sat in his chair with the baby on his lap, amber eyes watering as he stared into empty space. "Hey, Ro."
Brina stood on his lap and played with his nose, mouthing at her own fist. Ro picked the baby up and put her on her hip. Brotz sat up to watch her. She smiled at him and bounced Brina merrily. "Are you okay?" she asked. "It looks like you're asleep sitting up and eyes open."
He shook himself and sat back again, then stood up. He looked to Brina, then Ro, then sat back down.
"Oh you poor thing," Ro laughed. "I knew men could get the sadness, but I didn't know you could get it from adoption!"
Brotz's heavy brow furrowed. "What's that mean?"
"Oh, new parent sadness, sometimes just feels a little inadequate, sometimes outright insanity, it's something that happens. You're worrying yourself literally sick."
Ro was relieved to see that he wasn't going to argue. Instead, he sat back and breathed deep, like he was getting ready to fight. "What if I'm fucking up?"
"Do you think you're fucking up?"
"Kinda."
"I mean, do you think you've done anything wrong, not, do you think you've made a bad decision."
"No."
"Eupa will skewer your ears at the first chance she gets at a fuck up. We promise to keep you in line," she laughed, but then she looked to Brina.
The baby flapped an arm and pet Ro's strong shoulder with the other hand. Ro put her nose to the baby's forehead and resisted the urge to rub her teeth on the little scalp. "Your Daddy is worried about you," she told the infant, who swung her head to face Ro.
"Da?" Brina asked.
"Da," Ro agreed, pointing with Brina at Brotz a few steps away. "He's worried, but he's forgetting the most important part."
"Da?"
"Yep. The most important part is that he's your Daddy and he loves you and wants what's best for you, and he's willing to learn how to give you the best he can." She kissed Brina's head and put the baby down, letting her hold a hand. The baby led the way back to Brotz, letting go of Ro's hand to stagger two steps to his chair on her own.
"Well hells, I said first steps weren't far off but I didn't mean right now," Ro muttered as Brotz failed to fight the sappy smile on his face.
"Da!" Brina shouted, patting his leg. He picked her up and hugged her to his chest before he let her sit on his knee.
"It'll be okay," Ro promised. She was pretty sure it was, anyway.
