He shrugged. “Not much to tell. It’s the same dull, smelly, dangerous place you visited yourself.” As he spoke he was staring upstream. Mudge noticed the direction of his gaze, grinned and nudged the tall man in the ribs.
“Now you wouldn’t be worryin’ about a certain red-’eaded ’uman, would you, mate? No need to. She’s been tendin’ the ’ome fires, so to speak, ever since you left. I admit the rest o’ us tended to give up ’ope from time to time, but she never did. Not that flame-’aired lass. Oh, she’s ’ad one or two lengthy affairs, but aside from that. …”
“Mudge!”
He glanced back at the doorway. “Take it easy, luv. Old Jon-Tom knows when ’is mate is funnin’ with ’im. Come on, you skinny sight for sore eyeballs. I’ll run up with you.”
“Me too, me too!” The girl cub who’d chomped Jon-Tom’s leg ran up to join them. Mudge ruffled the fur between her ears fondly.
“This is Picket. Fancies ’erself the family lookout.”
“Does she always look out for you by trying to take a bite out of every stranger who comes down the road?”
“Usually,” said Mudge with exaggerated cheerfulness. “You’ll get to like ’er. You’ll get to like ’em all. ’Ave ’em callin’ you Uncle before you know it.” He yelled at another of his obstreperous offsping. “’Ere you, Smidgen, put that down or I’ll knock you in the creek!”
Together they shooed the other cubs away from Jon-Tom’s packages. Mudge studied them with interest. “Wot you got ’ere? Stuff from your world?”
“Treasures, yes. But I’d rather reveal them to everyone at once—if I can get home before your brood steals everything at that isn’t tied down.”
“Wot, me kids—steal?”
“Why not? They’ve got the most light-fingered instructor in this world.”
Mudge put one paw in the air and the other over his heart. “Take me for a cookfire cinder if I ever teach one o’ me own flesh an’ blood to take wot ain’t theirs.” He looked apologetic. “I swear I ain’t been teachin’ ’em, mate. They seem to come by it naturally.”
With the otter’s assistance Jon-Tom shouldered his heavy load. Not much farther now. A long walk from Westwood. “If there’s a gene for that I’m sure it runs in your family.”
Mudge frowned as he scratched his head uncertainly. “Don’t ’ave any relations name o’ Jean. They’ll turn out all right. Their mother’s the civilizin’ influence on ’em.” He turned to his daughter. “Be a luv an’ get Dada ’is favorite ’at, that’s a dear.”
Picket rocketed back toward the house, re-emerged an instant later carrying a red felt cap with two long white and yellow feathers protruding from the crown. Mudge carefully placed it between his ears.
“What happened to the green one?”
Mudge nodded at the unkempt beard. “Wot ’appened to your face? Time takes all things, mate. Even green ’ats.”
The trail led up the bank away from the stream and back into the woods. “Didn’t throw it away, though,” the otter continued. “Got it in a drawer somewheres. Sort o’ a memento o’ our former travels together. Each stain on it tells a story.”
“So I come back to find an old married Lutra with a family and responsibilities, a pillar of his community. What do you do for a living these days, Mudge?”
“You asked me that strange question before. Me answer’s still the same. I live. Still got your duar, I see.” The familiar double-stringed instrument hung from Jon-Tom’s right shoulder, as bright and shiny as the day they’d taken it from Couvier Coulb’s skilled hands. The varnish the old kinkajou had rubbed into the instrument protected the wood like Lucite.
“Yep. Been doing a little singing here and there. Being a wandering minstrel grows on you.”
They were in sight of the familiar grove. Little had changed in his absence. The ancient dimensionally expanded oaks looked the same. There were more flowers, evidence of Talea’s handiwork. A familiar figure let out a shout from the branch that hung over Clothahump’s doorway. Sorbl yelled a greeting, then vanished through an upper-floor window to convey the good news to the wizard.
Jon-Tom’s attention was on the tree next door. Every limb, every leaf was engraved in his memory. Mudge saw the look on his friend’s face and motioned for his noisy offspring to be silent. They were perceptive enough to sense that this was an important moment in adult lives.
The door opened and there was Talea. A little older and a little more beautiful. She’d been busy with housework and wore a bandana around her red hair and a large work apron over her shorts and halter. There was no wind to ruffle the vision she made.
He put down his oversized backpacks. “Hello, Talea.”
She dropped her broom and stared back at him. “Jon-Tom.” Slowly she walked up to him, stood there inspecting every line of his face, every hair, remembering. Then she kicked him in the shin, the same one that Picket had sampled. He yelled.
“Hello Talea, hello Talea—is that all you can say after years have gone by, you mindless son of a whore? Years! Not one letter, not one frigging postcard.”
“But Talea my sweet, there’s no mail service between worlds.” She advanced on him and he backed up as best he could on one good leg.
“Don’t give me any of your clever spellsinger excuses. Years I’ve been waiting for you, years hoping you would come back so I could tell you how angry I was that you went back without me.”
Four otterlings sat politely nearby and paid rapt attention to his unplanned lesson in adulthood. Mudge stood next to them, making salient points as Talea chased the apologetic Jon-Tom several times around their tree home.
“Now pay attention an’ maybe you lot’ll learn somethin’,” daddy told his brood. “’Umans do this sort o’ thing all the time. This is ’ow they show affection for one another after they’ve been apart for a long time. ’Umans are like clocks that always need windin’. Soon these two’ll run down. Then they’ll strike love an’ fall into each others arms.”
Sure enough, Talea was running out of breath. Jon-Tom let her run down, just as Mudge said, and then swept her against him. She was too weak to do more than batter feebly at his chest. Before long the pounding ceased altogether and was replaced by a different kind of contact.
“Now lady crying,” said Picket thoughtfully. “He hurting her?”
“No. They’re just demonstrating their love for one another,” Mudge explained.
“Humans are crazy,” said Nickum, one of two boys.
“Absolutely. All ’umans are crazy. These two are crazier than most. But they can be fun. We’ll give ’em another couple o’ minutes to sweat against each other and then we’ll see if we can’t find out wot me old friend ’as brought back from ’is own world, wot?”
Before that happened Clothahump put in an appearance. Jon-Tom thought the ancient wizard moved a little more slowly, a little more hesitantly than before he’d left, but those wise old eyes missed nothing.
“It is good to have you back, my boy. I’ve always felt, since you first came among us and we dealt in summary fashion with the Plated Folk, that you belonged here. Let us go inside. It is hot in the sun.”
Everyone moved into Clothahump’s tree. The otterlings were on their best behavior and Mudge only had to cuff one every two minutes to keep them in line. Jon-Tom sat in his favorite chair sipping Selesass tea while Talea curled up on the floor next to him. Sorbl provided refreshments.
