I Will Never Abandon You
When Juhwan first met the child, he could neither understand the language nor speak it. He knew nothing of how Dorothy had lived, or of anything she had endured.
He heard her past only after she had already come to follow him with her whole heart.
Poor thing, he had thought. I ought to love her more. Whenever Dorothy laughed until she shook, he told himself only that an unhappy child had grown happy because she met him, and that this was why she could shine so brightly.
He brushed his fingers along the sleeping child's eyelids and found a little dampness there. She was crying. The child who had only ever smiled was crying, and it felt as if ice water had been poured over his heart.
Juhwan drew them both in—the child pillowed on his arm, and Lizzie beside her.
Everything they had lived through together passed through his mind, one thing after another. The fight with the goblins at the cabin. The day bandits fell on the merchant caravan. People dropping where arrows found them. The kidnapping that had so nearly succeeded.
All of that must have been frightening. Yet none of it had changed the child in any great way. She cried a little and she was scared, and then she was all right. If anything, she had seemed proud that her dad was strong.
The only time Dorothy had shown another face was at the very end, when she was nearly taken. She said she had seen a child. A girl with a red pomegranate.
So that was it.
He could not understand every corner of her heart. But he thought he knew what Dorothy had been afraid of.
His thoughts went to the life she had lived without even a name, cut off from any village, raised in a mountain where there was no one. There had been only her violent father. She had watched her stepmother beaten to death in front of her. Even among the wretched children of this world, Dorothy had lived in the darkest place at the very bottom.
No one nearby could have helped her. There were only the cries of birds and beasts; he had heard that the villagers almost never came up into the mountain. In that silence, little Dorothy at two, and again at four, must have cried alone.
A child abandoned in the mountains cannot live. When her hunter father left the house, how had she gotten through the days by herself? He could not believe the man who had not even given her a name had left her food enough, or prepared anything at all for her sake.
The violence must have been terrible. But even a violent father was life itself; without him, she died. Every day she must have waited only for him to come back.
Her words circled in his ear. I don't want to be alone. He had taken it for an ordinary child's fussing. Perhaps it had been a scream she herself did not recognize.
"...Mm..."
In her sleep she burrowed into his arms. Her arms and legs were as thin as ever.
It had been only about two months since they met. He was not certain of the count, but he had arrived on Christmas Eve and was now enduring the last of the cold, so it must have been something like that. She was eating with all her might, and still she was a long way from growing plump.
That was all it had been.
They had become a family too easily. There had been no slow growing-close, no legal anything settled between them. He had never given her the certainty that this would go on. One day, out of nowhere, Dorothy simply had a dad who would protect her.
What comes easily is easily lost.
Perhaps she had been afraid that if a better girl appeared, she would be thrown away. As easily as he had become Dorothy's dad, she might have thought he would go to some other child the moment he met one.
The girl who had lured her with a pomegranate might have looked pretty to Dorothy. Or she had been quicker on her feet, or better with words—better, anyway, in some way Dorothy could see. A rival had appeared where none had existed in their life as a family on the mountain, and fear had rushed in. Dad might leave.
He did not know whether the child knew she was thinking it. It might live in her without her knowing.
Don't leave me, she mumbled again. Asleep, the sounds were slurred.
I won't abandon you, Dorothy.
Juhwan raised himself a little and bent his head to her ear. If she was inside a sad dream, he wanted to step into it and tell her.
"No matter what becomes of this world, I will never abandon you. I'm your dad. I came from a very long way away for this. I'll always be beside you."
He hoped his voice would travel all the way down into the depths of her dream.
"Pii."
Oz crept close with a small cry and pressed a warm face to the child's forehead. The rabbit's heat passed into her.
"Oz, stay with Dorothy. Be her friend. Don't ever let her be lonely."
He set a finger to Oz's brow and gave over a thread of mana, and the horn began to glow, faint at first. The horn that had been white deepened to the red of Santa's coat. Small and crimson, it flickered as if it were answering.
They left the village at dawn the next day. Dorothy slept on inside the wagon.
She woke when the morning sun had climbed high. From behind the driver's bench of the jolting wagon, her voice popped out all at once.
"Mom! Dorothy's tummy is crying. Oz says Oz is hungry."
"That isn't Oz. You're the one who's hungry, Dorothy."
Lizzie smiled.
The child had woken at a reasonable hour. They had not eaten yet.
Lizzie handled the horse with an easy skill and drew up close behind the Red Sword wagon going on ahead.
"Lizzie, you really are good with horses."
A little strength went into her shoulders at that. She said nothing, but she was proud.
Moments like this reminded him how young she still was. Twenty-one. Yes—to a man of thirty, still far too young. It left him feeling like a thief.
Lizzie held the reins in one hand and flicked her fingers: time to eat. They had grown close enough by now that the women spoke more and more in signs that belonged only to them.
Jessie, swaying up and down and side to side with the moving wagon, caught it and raised a hand. Marie, who was driving, slowed at once.
Sometimes Juhwan could not follow them at all. A little finger, a glance, and some meaning passed between them that he could not begin to decode. It belonged to an entirely different order from the signals men traded with a middle finger and a fist. Watching it was like hearing the languages of Mars and Venus.
Lizzie shifted. Her waist went a little crooked; one side of her, pressed to the wagon floor, must have been aching.
The wagons of this world shook without mercy. Sit long enough and your backside hurt, and the driver's bench was bare hard wood, which made it worse. It was perhaps time to think of padding the seat thick, like a cushion, and covering it in leather.
The longer they went on, the more there was to do. Refitting the wagon, laying in food that would keep—this and that. If they were to live with any comfort, he would have to put his hands to a great deal.
He hoped time stacked up that way might give Dorothy a certainty. What it meant that they had become a family. That she need not be a good child, or pretty, or quick on her feet—that from now on, the bond would not break.
Don't rush. It would take time. This was not a thing words could make her understand. It had to be built, piece by piece.
They must have struck a stone. The wagon lurched hard, and Juhwan wrapped himself around Lizzie at once.
They bounced and came down on their seats. Lizzie let out a pained grunt. A cushion really could not wait. He would have to stuff straw into something and make one before the day was out.
Behind the bench, though, inside the wagon, someone was having a fine time. Dorothy's laugh rang out, bright and helpless.
He lowered his gaze and looked in. She was rolling over and over on the straw bed—this way, then that. The bed was narrow, so she tumbled a few turns and then rolled back the other way, and after that she rolled head over heels. Oz bounded along with her.
Yes. Laugh. A smiling face suits you best. A very small smile touched the heaviness in his chest.
They drove a little farther, found a likely place, and stopped. While Lizzie and Red Sword got the meal ready, Juhwan looked the ground over. There was nowhere obvious for anyone to hide, but you never knew.
Once he was sure it was safe, he started back toward the wagon and saw that the ice in a patch of sun had melted a little. The seasons here were not so different from Korea's. Spring would be along before long.
They ate simply: meat, and vegetables fried ahead of time. They were not staying, so they lit no fire.
Only yesterday Dorothy had been glued to him. Now she seemed all right. She sat perched in the open doorway of the wagon and ate meat with Lizzie, while Juhwan took a small rock across from them.
When Lizzie scolded her to eat her vegetables too, the child hopped down and ran to him.
"Dad! Mom says eat the vegetables."
Dorothy was grinning, meat-grease all over her mouth and her hands. Lizzie, still perched in the wagon, laughed as if she could not believe her.
Yes. He had decided.
He looked at Lizzie.
"Lizzie, there's something I want to say."
"What is it?"
She tipped her head.
"When this month of traveling with Red Sword is over, I'm thinking we should mostly hunt magical beasts."
"Magical beasts?"
"Yeah. I worried it might be dangerous, but I thought it might be better if we lived quietly on our own for a while. The owner of the Miller Trading Company said it wouldn't be dangerous for me, so I want to try."
Lizzie laughed under her breath.
"Do whatever you want, Juhwan. I don't care what it is, so long as I can be with you."
"You don't want to stay in a city?"
"It's nice to visit sometimes. But I like being with you and Dorothy more."
"Dad! Are we going to live on the mountain? Again? Just us?"
Dorothy's face lit even brighter all at once, like a flower come suddenly into bloom.
Just as I thought.
The child still needed time. She did not yet have the certainty of being truly family—the faith that nothing could cut the tie. That it was all right to make trouble, to not be pretty, to be slow or not clever, even to do something bad and be scolded for it. He had not given her that faith.
"We're not going to live on the mountain, Dorothy."
Her shoulders sank a little.
"But it'll be just us. We'll go around in the wagon, hunt magical beasts and animals, and sometimes stop at an adventurer village to sell what we take."
"Just us?"
"Yes. Just us."
"When we catch the magical beasts, does Dorothy go too?"
"I don't know yet how it'll work. Dad's never hunted them either. But we'll always be together."
Lizzie looked at his face as if something had just come clear.
Dorothy seemed glad once she had heard him. She climbed into the wagon and began explaining magical-beast hunting to Oz.
What she described was nonsense, but she was earnest in her own way. She called up every scrap of imagination she had and built a strategy. The heroes of that hunt were Dorothy and Oz. Dorothy went wham, and Oz bit the beast and killed it. Mom was on cooking duty. Dad was the hired hand who dug the traps. But the beasts ran off just before they could be cooked, or just as they were about to tumble into a trap, and in the end Dorothy caught every one of them.
Lizzie climbed down from where she had been sitting and came to him. Quietly, she laid her head against his chest.
"I didn't know."
That was enough. He understood that Lizzie had seen the child's heart too. For a little while the two of them stood like that, watching Dorothy.
Theirs was a party of women, and so they were often ignored by men, or treated roughly. Red Sword had no great fondness for the existence of men.
Soaking hard bread and salt-smelling jerky in cold stew until it softened, then chewing, Marie muttered out of nowhere.
"I wish I'd had a dad like that."
Jessie, sitting beside her, let out a short laugh. She looked toward Juhwan's family, a little way off, and muttered.
"Hard to find, I'd say. I've never seen a man like that, anyway. Fathers, brothers—men are rotten, every last one of them."
"But maybe they're out there somewhere. Maybe we've just been walking around too small a world."
Karin, who always wore a fierce look on purpose, shot a glance at Juhwan and grumbled.
"Wouldn't it be faster if you became the husband, Marie?"
That bad? Is it really that hopeless?
"Damn it! If that's what it takes, then fine. I'll be the husband. I just have to get myself a wife like him."
Marie clenched her fist, and her companions burst out laughing. She laughed with them. It felt like the first time in a very long while that they had laughed with their hearts unguarded.
The caravan escort had put a little money in their hands, but Red Sword was still poor. They were still the poorest and weakest party of women. That had not changed.
Even so, when she touched the nail stuck at her belt, her heart steadied. From here on, something would be different. That was the feeling she had.
"Let's wrap a little leather around the nails. We'll handle them better."
Karin said it abruptly.
"True enough. You can use them bare, but they slip."
"Yeah. I think that's a good idea."
Jessie and Marie nodded, and Karin dug through the wagon until she came up with a scrap of old leather. Cheap pigskin. When the wrap on a sword hilt wore out, they cut it thin and wound it on again; when a shoe split, they mended it. The pigskin had been put to every use they could think of.
While she cut a little of it and wound it round and round over the head of a nail, Marie glanced at Karin and Jessie. Both of them were smiling, just a little.
Thank goodness.
Other people might laugh if they saw. Nails wrapped in leather and used for weapons—yes, it would look ridiculous beyond words.
Once, looks like that had bothered her. All three of them wore old swords, and they had not even had the money to have them all seen to at once, so they took turns leaving them with a smith. She had been ashamed of it. Maybe that was why they had clung so hard to men's swords and to the way men moved. Despised for being women, they had wanted at least their weapons to be a man's.
Now a little of the stiffness seemed to have left her waist. So what if people laughed? Ridiculous or not, Marie and her companions were planted on their own two feet, and they were walking. That was enough. If the three of them could keep going together like this, that was good. This was who they were.
Karin and Jessie had already finished wrapping theirs. Marie looked at them and spoke.
"Hey, Karin. Jessie. Will the two of you be my brides?"
They stared at her, blank.
"What are you on about?"
"Marie, it's enough if you're the bride. Why are we brides?"
Saying foolish things like that, the three of them laughed for a while.
Ah. This was good. Marie closed her eyes in the cool air. Soft sunlight touched her face. Really good.
"Marie, quit playing and wrap it. How long are you going to sit there clutching one nail?"
Karin's scolding flew at her. She opened her eyes, and Jessie was looking at her as if she were hopeless.