Before She Returns as Ours
"Then I'll go and have a wonderful time!"
Bariya leaned halfway out the carriage window and waved to those left behind at the manor. It looked precarious, but no one worried for the child. Baden's steady hand held her fast, making certain she could not fall.
"She wouldn't fall even without all that, you know."
A leopard-cat beastkin who had long since mastered her balance was hardly about to tumble out of a mere carriage. Baden knew it as well as anyone, and still he did not let go until Bariya had drawn herself back inside.
"So if she leaned out, you'd just leave her like that?"
"I'd be sticking my head out right beside her."
Shirca answered as if Sabrina had asked something painfully obvious. She snorted. Honestly, the pair of them. She did not mention that she would have done exactly the same.
"It feels strange. When the little one comes back, she'll officially be our youngest daughter."
Sabrina had believed there would be no more children in her life. The shock of losing Rabin had kept her from giving her second son, Shirca, the affection he was owed. Steady and mature, he had never strayed; he had understood his parents' pain and grown up well on his own. Even so, she had always been sorry. She had sworn she would never have a third, and Baden had respected her wish. She had thought the three of them would simply live out their days that way.
Then an unexpected youngest daughter had come tumbling in, vine and all.
Wasn't it astonishing? A child capable of saving the Caliphs from the depths of their suffering had walked up and presented herself. How could a fate like that exist?
"I'm sorry, Shirca."
She said it once the departing carriage had vanished from sight. At words he had never expected, Shirca's eyes went wide.
"All of a sudden?"
"It isn't sudden. I've been thinking about it all along."
Sabrina looked up at her second son, the boy who was her very image. Unlike Rabin, who had taken more after Baden, Shirca was her double from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. And yet she could not remember how he had grown into the man before her. She had simply come back to herself one day and found that he already stood taller than she did. The knowledge ached.
"I'm sorry I couldn't stay beside you when you were small."
After Rabin was murdered, Sabrina had lived in terror that the hyenas would kill her second son as well. The moment she recovered her strength after the birth and Shirca was weaned, she had taken to roaming beyond the manor, slaughtering every hyena that set foot in tiger territory. Now and then she returned to make sure he was safe, but after only a few days the fear that they might come crashing in would seize her again, and she would wander back out.
She had known that Baden, forever missing his wife, was grieving, and that Shirca, still in need of his mother's arms, was grieving too. She simply could not endure the anxiety. On the day it reached its peak and she first fell into Madness, she understood that her mind had come completely undone, and that there was no cure for it. How did one heal the heart of a parent who had lost a child?
Even so, I should have pulled myself together.
By the time she realized she had been so blinded by her own pain that she had failed the child still living, Shirca's eyes already looked down on her from above.
"Honestly, you have every reason to be sorry."
Shirca, who had been watching her steadily, nodded.
"I wanted to see you, and you weren't there. Father did play with me, but the family's affairs kept him busy, so we weren't together often. When I was little, it was a bit sad."
"Shirca..."
"But I've never resented you. It wasn't your fault."
At the words that followed, Sabrina's eyes widened. For the first time, Shirca offered a bitter smile to the mother who now seemed smaller than he was.
"None of it would have happened if those hyena bastards hadn't killed my brother. The fault was theirs. You were only a victim."
"..."
"And every time you came back to the manor, you held me and slept beside me. Just because I didn't see you often doesn't mean I never felt your love."
It was true. Whenever Sabrina returned, Shirca's heart leapt. She would stay pressed to his side all day, holding him, feeding him, sleeping beside him, whispering over and over that she loved him. On those days he was the happiest person in the world. And when he learned that she roamed beyond the manor in order to protect him, her son, he felt as though the whole world were his. She had always loved him like that. How could he resent her?
"So I'm all right."
Smiling, Shirca drew her into his arms and patted her shoulder. Frozen for a moment by an answer she had never expected, Sabrina let out a soft, incredulous laugh.
"You've grown up well, my son."
"Well, of course. I'm a son who grew up soaked in love from both of you."
Shirca grinned.
I thought he took after me alone.
Looking at him now, she saw that the smile was Baden's through and through: soft and mild, the kind that knew how to soothe a person. The tender smile Baden granted only to family lived in Shirca as well. Did Baden know?
"So don't worry about me. Just love the little one who's become your youngest the way you love me."
"Of course I will."
Sabrina nodded and, for the first time, leaned into her son's embrace. She had always thought of him as someone she must protect, and somewhere along the way he had grown into a man who knew how to hold her up. Baden had raised him truly well. Now it was her turn to raise Bariya, the newest of their family, just as carefully.
"Though she's so clever, I suspect she'd grow up perfectly well on her own."
"I think so too."
Shirca nodded, perfectly serious. She was a leopard cat, and yet he was certain she would grow into a predator fiercer than any tiger.
"My lady! Sir Jake, who is escorting the criminals, should arrive shortly."
At the butler's report, Sabrina's eyes went sharp.
"If we're to be a family our youngest won't be ashamed of, we'll have to deal with these bastards properly, won't we?"
"Of course. Call on me whenever you need my help. I have work of my own, so I'll go and prepare."
"You know yours is the heaviest responsibility of all, don't you? I trust you'll do it well."
"Of course. I'll make it perfect."
There were things that had to be finished before Bariya Bell returned as Bariya Bell Caliph. Sabrina and Shirca nodded to each other, faces set, and went at once to their own posts.
All the way along, Bariya could not take her eyes from the world beyond the window. Even a trip into the city of Caliph territory had delighted her, and now that they were going farther still, she was fairly glowing with excitement.
"You like it that much?"
"Yes! I rode in plenty of carriages while I was on the run, but I was always stowing away, so I had to hide in a corner. I never once got to look outside."
Come to think of it, she said that when she ran away this time, she slipped onto a carriage in secret and got much farther than anyone expected.
Baden had been truly startled when he learned of it after the fact. If Bariya had not been the one to tell them where she was, he might have spent the rest of his life searching and never found her, just as the Mariners had. The thought alone chilled him.
"...When you fled the Mariners. Was it very dangerous?"
He worried the question might drag up something painful, but he could not leave it unasked.
"Hmm. I nearly got caught a few times, but that was only at the beginning. After about a year I'd gotten so good at running that I even toyed with them!"
Fortunately, she announced it with enormous pride. Baden vowed once more that he would do everything right, so the child would never have reason to leave the Caliphs.
"And from a certain point on, only animals came after me, not hyena beastkin, which made things easier. Even animals trained to obey no one but the Mariners couldn't bring themselves to harm me. I'm too close to a Divine Beast for that."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. The places where beastkin chased me and the places where only animals did were clearly separate. Once I realized that, I stayed where only the animals followed. I didn't understand it then, but looking back, I think it was because that was Caliph territory."
"..."
He already knew from Shirca that hyena animals had been pursuing Bariya. At the time he had simply assumed they were wary of Sabrina, who showed hyenas no mercy.
Now that I think about it, those Mariner bastards would never watch their step around the Caliphs. So why did they?
Surely not. Had someone deliberately guided the child toward the Caliphs?