Geran woke up when the smell of breakfast began to reach him. I’ve known a lot of little boys over the years, and that’s one characteristic they all have in common. As a group, I’ve noticed that they’re always hungry.
‘What are we going to do today, Aunt Pol?’ he asked me after he’d spooned down his second bowl of porridge.
I ran one finger across the back of an unused chair and held it out for his inspection. ‘What do you see, Geran?’ I asked him.
‘It looks sort of dusty to me.’
‘Exactly. Maybe we ought to do something about that.’
He looked around the kitchen. ‘It shouldn’t take us too long,’ he said confidently. ‘What shall we do when we’re finished?’
‘There’s more than one room in the house, Geran,’ I pointed out.
He sighed mournfully. ‘I was sort of afraid you might feel that way about it, Aunt Pol.’
‘You’re a prince, Geran,’ I reminded him. ‘I wouldn’t want to offend you by making you live in a dirty house.’
‘It takes a lot to offend me, Aunt Pol.’ He said it hopefully.
‘It just wouldn’t do for us to live in all this filth, Geran. We’ll have the house all bright and shiny in no time at all.’
‘It’s a very big house, Aunt Pol.’
‘Yes, it is rather, isn’t it? It’ll give you something to do, and you can’t go outside to play.’
‘Couldn’t we just close off the parts where we won’t be living? Then we could clean the three or four rooms we’ll be staying in and let the rest go.’
‘It wouldn’t be right, Geran. It just wouldn’t do.’
He sighed with a kind of mournful resignation.
And so the Rivan King and I started cleaning house. He wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t sulk too much. The one thing I didn’t tell him had to do with the fact that dust keeps right on settling and web-spinning spiders are the busiest creatures in the world. Just because you cleaned a room yesterday is no guarantee that it’s not going to need cleaning again tomorrow.
We did other things, of course. There was a farm cart in one of the stables, and I periodically hitched Squire to the cart and went out to buy provisions from nearby farms. Geran didn’t go with me on those occasions. I left him in my library the first time, and when I returned, I found him sprawled in a chair looking disconsolately out the window. ‘I thought you’d be reading,’ I said.
‘I don’t know how to read, Aunt Pol,’ he admitted.
That gave us something else to do when we grew tired of cleaning house. Geran had a quick mind, and he was reading in a surprisingly short length of time.
We settled into a kind of routine, cleaning in the morning and lessons in the afternoons. It was a fairly comfortable way to live, and we were both quite content.
The twins kept me advised of the progress of father’s punitive expedition into Nyissa, and I passed the news on to Geran. He seemed to take a certain amount of satisfaction in his grandfather’s rampant destruction of the land of the Snake People.
Spring came, and my youthful charge and I took up gardening as a hobby. I suppose I could have continued to buy food from neighboring farms, but I didn’t really like to leave Geran alone, and if my face became too familiar in the area, a chance word dropped in some local tavern might alert a passing Murgo.
I think it was early summer when father and uncle Beldin come by to pay us a call. I still remember Geran coming down the stairs with a sword in his hand. He was very young, but he knew that it was a man’s duty to protect his women-folk. I didn’t really need protection, but his little gesture touched me all the same. He greeted my father enthusiastically and immediately asked if the Old Wolf had kept his promise to kill the Serpent Queen.
‘She was dead the last time I looked,’ father replied. He was a little evasive about it, I thought.
‘Did you hit her for me the way I asked you to?’ Geran pressed.
“That he did, Laddy buck,’ uncle Beldin said. “That he did.’
Uncle Beldin’s distorted appearance seemed to make Geran just a little apprehensive, so I introduced them.
‘You aren’t very tall, are you?’ Geran blurted.
‘It has its advantages sometimes, Laddy Buck,’ uncle Beldin replied. ‘I’m almost never after hittin’ me head on a lowhangin’ branch, don’t y’ know.’
‘I like him, Aunt Pol,’ Geran said, laughing.
Then father went into some of the details of the little get-together he’d planned. He pointed out the fact that the assassination of Gorek had been a major EVENT and that we’d probably better all gather in the Vale to consider our various options. He advised us that he’d go on to the Isle of the Winds to fetch Brand while uncle Beldin escorted Geran and me to the Vale.
Before we’d even finished crossing the Sendarian mountains, Geran and uncle Beldin were fast friends. I’ve never completely understood why old men and little boys always seem to automatically take to each other, and I’m always a little offended when the white-haired member of that little group shrugs it off by saying, ‘It’s a man sort of thing, Pol. You wouldn’t understand.’ They can talk about ‘man things’ until they’re blue in the face, but my own suspicions strongly lean in the direction of approaching senility and its accompanying reversion to childhood, if not outright infantilism, on the part of one of them. It was that journey that persuaded me that no woman in her right mind should ever allow an old man and a little boy anywhere within five miles of any patch of water. Their hands will automatically sprout fishing poles, and nothing at all will get done for the rest of the day.
When the three of us finally reached the Vale, Geran met the twins, and they fussed over him as much as uncle Beldin had. I began to feel definitely left out.
They did let me do the cooking, though – and the cleaning up afterward. Wasn’t that nice of them?
Father and Brand arrived after a few weeks, and we all got down to business. Geran sat quietly on a chair in a corner while we discussed the state of the world and what we were going to do about it.
Evidently my little charge had been greatly impressed with that tired old saw, ‘children should be seen and not heard’. It kept him from asking a lot of questions, though.
Uncle Beltira advised us that according to the calendar of the Dals, the Third Age had ended. All of the prophecies were now in place, and now that we had our instructions, all we had to do was carry them out.