It took longer than he thought to explain his intent to the trio, but once he did…

  “I like it. It’ll be fun. I am Tuesday the Mighty Magus, Mistress of all the Magic!” She proclaimed, thrust her hand skyward, then brought it down and rubbed her hands together with a mischievous smile on her face and her little fox tail swishing around.

  “I don’t like it.” Hannah said with a little frown, her cat tail bounced back and forth and her ears went down like the little frown on her face. “You’re kind of like a new papa, it’d be weird for you to pretend not to be.”

  “I don’t think it will work.” Lithia replied as she continued to watch the skeletal horse proceed at its same slow but inexorable walking pace. “Maybe you fool a handful of ignorant villagers, but I have to make a report to the guild. What am I supposed to tell them? That I found a couple of six or seven year old necromancers who could summon an ancient hero as an Elder Lich?”

  Varus twirled one finger around the strands of long white hair and stared at the long road that stretched endlessly behind them as the wagon rolled on. “Fair. But you don’t have to tell them who I am. Just that there were some young mages who accidentally summoned an Elder Lich, maybe by finding a lost spell crystal in the forest, and they commanded me to find them help.”

  “This isn’t a novel, Varus. This is real life, you can’t count on an organization like the Guild to just believe ‘whatever’ for plot convenience.” Lithia said, her tongue a little sharper than usual, she had a point, even if he didn’t like it.

  “The forest is filled with magic, a lost crystal wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. And all you have to do is be convincing. If you can do that, everything will be fine. Or… is that too much?” He asked, pricking slightly at her pride, she furrowed her brow and looked at the road ahead.

  “You… that’s not fair…” She mumbled, but Varus shrugged and waved one casual hand outward at his side and said…

  “Or, unless you have a better idea, like telling them that an ancient hero has come back as an uncontrolled undead, but it’s all absolutely fine and nothing could possibly go wrong with having me in a populated area…I’m sure convincing the guild of that could not possibly go wrong.”

  Lithia sucked air in between her teeth as she tried to imagine how that meeting might go.

  It did not look good…

  “Right. I guess you have a point, and, I suppose I can be convincing. Besides, what are they going to do, send an expedition into the forest looking for other lost spell crystals?” She laughed a little under her breath, and then looked behind her when she felt a slight tug on her cloak.

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  Tuesday was there looking up at her with wide, staring eyes and head canted slightly, she asked, “So, yes to Tuesday the Might Magus?”

  Lithia was hesitant for only a moment before she nodded and answered, “Yes to Tuesday the Mighty Magus. We’ll just make up some story about you using a found crystal… I guess that will be fine.”

  Hannah appeared for a moment as if she might object, her eyes were darting back and forth between her sister and the valkyrie, the gears turning in her head when Tuesday said, “We have summoned the mighty Papa Lich. Which means he can’t leave us anywhere and has to stay with us.”

  Hannah glanced at once in Varus’s direction, searching silently for confirmation that what her sister said was true. ‘Even if I wanted to, how could I say no to that face?’ He asked himself as her wide eyed, intense, catlike hopeful stare was paired with her tiny hands coming up in front of her, just beneath her chin in the manner of a pleading kitten fairly dared him to disappoint her.

  “She’s right.” Varus admitted, and the little nekoni girl dove onto his lap with an excited hug as if he’d given her a grandiose gift.

  Varus glanced at his stack of buried papers with the unrequited longing of someone whose lover was always just out of reach, but aside from the interruption of his departure, he knew very well that the gentle rocking of the wagon thanks to its less than perfectly round wheels a poor place to attempt to write anything even close to coherently.

  And so as the breeze blew and the sun shone down, they traded stories, songs, and Varus spoke of the adventures of his very distant life. While his own was recollected fondly, and Lithia’s was spoken of with much amusement…

  When it came to Tuesday and Hannah, the stories were not so pretty.

  “Father was angry a lot. Mama used to say that he would get angry at every step, and because we were nomads, he had lots of anger. He got mad a lot.” Tuesday said with a blinking of her eyes. “There were monsters out there, course. But Father was the monster at home.”

  “We ran away a lot.” Hannah said, “Because when Father got angry, Mama got angry…s’pecially when we’d break something.” Her tail drooped a little, and then she raised her head and with a voice more curious than sad she addressed Varus asking, “How come you don’t get mad?”

  “Magic?” Varus pretended to guess, but Tuesday was no more about to let him off the hook than Hannah was.

  “No. Really?” Tuesday asked and clambered into his lap, she tilted her head back against his chest to stare up at the skeletal face of the Elder Lich and waited with eyes brimming with silent expectation.

  “She actually does have a point, Varus. Both of them, really. When you were alive, you were a knight, those aren’t exactly known for having the patience of a monk. If they were, they’d be monks, not knights.” She paused and scratched her head, “No… wait, something about that is wrong…” She muttered, but Varus decided not to wait on her conclusion.

  “Patient warriors defeat impatient ones, calm warriors defeat angry ones, that is what I always learned so I just… learned to be both. If something won’t matter in five minutes, five years, or five centuries, it’s generally not worth getting upset about.” Varus said and absentmindedly began stroking the heads of the two young girls that settled firmly into his lap. “Once you understand that, you know how meaningless anger is.”

  “A regular philphosapher you are, Varus.” Lithia said with a chuckle.

  “Philosopher.” Varus corrected her with a casual nod.

  She accepted the correction without complaint, and then with that, Lithia began to sing a quiet traveling song to fill both the silence and the time, and did not object in the least when the rest of the wagon joined in, passing the hours without even noticing that they happened.