“Troll poison is very strong.”
“But there’s something you can do.” He deliberately phrased it as a statement and not a question.
“I’ve mixed up something that may help.” Miriam set the leaf on his father’s chest, allowing Thaddeus to see a small mound of a thick, darkly colored substance. She spread a layer of the paste over the wound then pressed two small leaves on top. “There. Let’s leave that overnight and see how it looks in the morning.”
“It’s going to help, right?” Thaddeus said, his voice almost a whisper.
“It should, my dear,” Miriam said. Her sad expression was like a dagger to Thaddeus’s heart, and she must have seen it in his face. “I’ll put together a comfy spot close to the fire and send Fetter, Teofil and Astrid back to help you move your father. How does that sound?”
Thaddeus had been watching his father sleep and only half-listening to what she said. Now, he looked her in the eye. “We’re not leaving him behind. Do you understand? We’re not.”
“Let’s all rest tonight, Thaddeus. We’ll get some sleep and see how he’s doing in the morning.”
Thaddeus took his father’s hand again. His skin was much too cool, and the feeling made tears well up in Thaddeus’s eyes once again. Despite his emotional state, he understood the meaning beneath Miriam’s words: If his father was still alive in the morning.
As Miriam left him to help her children set up camp in the new spot, Thaddeus sat holding his father’s hand. How had this happened? This wasn’t how everything was supposed to end. He’d just learned so much new information about his past and his family, and he needed his father to tell him more. Thaddeus wanted to know how his father and mother really met, not the bland version he’d always heard that they’d met “in college,” but the actual meeting. Had it been during a magical lesson? Or in a fairy circle during a full moon? He wanted to hear all of it and find out what his mother had really been like.
All the years he’d been growing up, Thaddeus had worried about losing his father. It had been just the two of them for as long as he could remember, no grandparents or aunts and uncles, no cousins for him to grow up alongside. If something happened to his father, he had no idea what would have become of him. Foster care system, most likely, shuffled about between homes. The foster parents might be nice, but they wouldn’t be his father.
Now, under the starry sky, with his father breathing deeply beside him, Thaddeus wondered what would happen if his father didn’t make it through the night.
Chapter 3
A dense gray fog lay heavy across the grassy plain the following morning. Everything was damp from the touch of the mist, including Thaddeus himself when he started awake and sat bolt upright. He squinted into the roiling fog that surrounded them, then looked at his father who lay alongside him, covered with blankets. His face was white, and the flesh beneath his eyes dark and puffy. His dry, cracked lips were slightly parted, and the tip of his tongue poked out. For a moment he feared his father had died overnight, without any of them being the wiser, and a great canyon of grief and guilt split open inside him.
His father let out an abrupt and phlegmy snore that startled Thaddeus and sent a tide of relief through him.
“How is he?” Teofil whispered from Thaddeus’s other side.
“Worse,” Thaddeus replied.
“He looks worse than he is,” Miriam assured him as she materialized from within the fog. She had fresh firewood in her arms and a handkerchief bulging with something that stained the material a bright yellow.
“Mooshberries!” Astrid said, apparently recognizing the color of the stain. She held out both hands and smiled eagerly. “Where did you find them?”
“The edge of the forest is a veritable field of them.” She dropped the firewood and poured a few plump, yellow berries into Astrid’s hands. “Who else wants breakfast?”
Thaddeus held out one hand and sniffed the berries Miriam doled out to him. They smelled sour and acidic, and he gave Teofil a skeptical look. Teofil laughed as he popped three berries into his mouth.
“Don’t give me the stink eye,” Teofil said. “Just try one. They taste better than they smell.”
Thaddeus bit one of the berries in half and was surprised at the sweet juice that filled his mouth. He quickly ate the other half, then finished off what he had been given. The berries were meaty and filling, but he was still a bit hungry and realized he should have taken another handful while he had the chance.
“Here,” Teofil said with a smirk. “I took a little more than you did. You can have some of mine.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that.”
“It’s okay, take these.”
Thaddeus held out his hand, and Teofil tipped the berries into his palm.
“Thanks.”
“Gotta keep up your strength for our hike,” Teofil said.
Thaddeus looked at his father again. “I’m not sure I can leave him.”
“Nonsense,” Miriam said, then looked at each of her children in turn. “Fetter, Astrid, Teofil, see to the fire.”
“But we built the last fire!” Astrid whined.
“Astrid….” Miriam drew out her name in a low tone that left no room for argument.
The three gnomes went over to the stack of wood and began to whisper in low grumbles. Miriam ignored them and lowered herself to the ground next to Thaddeus. For a short time, they watched Nathan sleep, and then Miriam spoke in a voice too low for her children to overhear.
“When I was about your age, Thaddeus, my father, Jozafat Peony, fell ill. He had always been a force of nature in the hollow where we lived, and his illness caught not just my family by surprise, but our entire tribe. He wasn’t a leader in any official sense, but he was well-respected and liked by every gnome for miles around. When he first took ill, I spent all my time nursing him while my mother looked after my brothers and sisters. If you think fourteen children is a lot, my parents had twenty-two.”
Thaddeus gasped. “You had twenty-one siblings?”
“A large family, to say the least. I was the middle child, number eleven, and I took it upon myself to nurse my father. For weeks I catered to him. I cooked for him and fed him and fetched him water and helped him up when he needed to move about. I let my studies slide… and my friends. All I could think to do was care for him.
“Despite all my attention, his condition worsened. Finally, one morning, he looked over to where I sat in a rocking chair darning socks for my mother, and he said, ‘Miriam, I need something from you.’”
She smiled, and Thaddeus could see tears in her eyes as the conversation between Teofil, Astrid, and Fetter drifted to them from out of the fog.
“What did he need?” Thaddeus asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.
“He said, ‘I want you to go to the village center and get me some mooshberries.’”
Thaddeus smiled. “Mooshberries?”
Miriam laughed, glancing at him as she dabbed at her eyes. “Mooshberries. That man dearly loved his mooshberries. Now, mind you, I did not want to leave him on his own. I told him I would send one of my siblings for them. But he was insistent, and he told me I was the only one who knew how to choose the sweetest, most perfectly ripe mooshberries. So, I put down my darning and off I went.”