Copyright
J.B. Norman
“I’d just like to remind you both that the last time we babysat, we got jumped by assassins!” Lucia notes, holding the little girl in her arms.
The girl gasps.
“Sassins! Uh oh!”
If Lucia didn’t know better, she’d swear the little girl was making fun of her.
“Well,” Petra notes. “That baby was a potential claimant to the Duchy of Colline in the middle of a succession crisis.”
“We are not going to have to fight off assassins today, Lucia,” Apolline insists.
“No sassins!” the girl reassures Lucia, patting her head.
Lucia, Apolline, and Petra haven’t found much real work lately. Though they did meet a frazzled young mother at the Art Gallery, and since her daughter seems to love the three adventurers, they’ve volunteered to babysit.
The girl has decided that Lucia is her favourite of the three, and that Lucia’s ears are her new favourite plaything.
“Why are you hands sticky?” Lucia cries as the girl grabs handfuls of her ears. “Apolline! Help!”
“Not Bunny,” the girl says, gravely shaking her head. She points to Lucia’s ears. “Big ears. Foofy ears.” She shakes her head again. “Not Bunny.”
“That’s right,” Lucia says. “I’m a lynx.”
“Inx!” the girl exclaims happily.
“Close enough,” Lucia mutters.
The girl looks over to Apolline.
“Song, peese?” she asks.
Apolline smiles warmly. “Would you like a song, Elisa?”
“Song peese! Song peese! Song peese!” Elisa says eagerly, punctuating her words by punching Lucia in the face.
“Alright,” Apolline says, “why don’t you and Lucia sit down on the couch, and I’ll sing to you.”
Lucia sets herself on the couch and Elisa hops excitedly on her lap.
“Song peese! Song peese!”
“You have to sit still, Elisa,” Apolline says.
Elisa nods and immediately drops down on to Lucia’s lap.
“Ow,” Lucia mutters.
The girl smiles expectantly up at Apolline.
“Song peese?”
Apolline sits down beside Lucia and Elisa and begins to recite another traditional Aurorean song for them:
Sauvaherra, standing by the river, wandering by the water,
His songs was singing, voice as fair as sunshine
Where Goldhorn’s stream was falling,
At foot of the smoking waters —
Where the pool was swirling, where the stream was churning.
River-woman’s daughter, fairest maid of Goldhorn:
Tulva of the Waters
Sat by her pool and listened
To doughty Sauvaherra.
Lovely Tulva, she of smoking waters,
Heard his song rising up the Goldhorn
Resounding up the mountain.
She gazed from her pool and saw him:
Handsome Sauvaherra, singing by the river
Where Goldhorn’s stream was falling,
Tumbling down the mountain.
By the time Apolline is finished her song, Lucia and the little girl are curled up on the couch sound asleep. The girl is in Lucia’s lap, sucking on her thumb — not her own thumb, Lucia’s thumb.
“Look out!” Lucia murmurs in her sleep. “Assassins! I knew it! There’s always assassins!”
Elisa stirs slightly in Lucia’s arms.
“Sassins!” she gasps “Uh oh!”
She rolls over in Lucia’s lap, settles down and goes right back to sucking Lucia’s thumb.
But, seriously, why are small children’s hands always sticky? It’s a riddle for the ages.
Follow me here:
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
