The farmstead thrived on rhythm—dawn milking, midday harvests, twilight stories by the fire. By age four, Liam could predict the day’s cadence like a song: Mama Mara’s oatmeal steaming on the stove as Papa Elric chopped firewood, Auntie Lilia’s (she insisted on the title, claiming “Mama Lilia” made her feel ancient) laughter ringing out as she chased hens from the vegetable patch.

  Mara was the quiet pulse of their home. Each morning, she lit a candle at the hearthside shrine, murmuring prayers to the Harvest Goddess. Villagers arrived at sunrise with ailments—a blacksmith’s burned hand, a woodcutter’s feverish child—and Mara met them all with the same serene focus. Liam watched her grind comfrey into poultices, her voice a gentle murmur: “Press this to the wound, Jorin. Change it at sunset, and no lifting anvils for a week.”

  “But the town needs horseshoes!” the blacksmith protested.

  Mara fixed him with a look that could tame wolves. “What your town needs is a blacksmith who doesn’t faint from infection. Rest.”

  Liam adored these moments. Perched on a stool, legs swinging, he’d mimic her movements—mashing herbs in a clay bowl, wrapping pretend bandages around his stuffed wolf toy.

  “My little apprentice,” Mara would chuckle, kissing his brow. “One day, you’ll heal the whole valley.”

  If Mara was the roots, Lilia was the wind. She taught Liam to climb apple trees (“Grip the branch like you’re strangling a goblin!”), tickled him mercilessly during baths, and “accidentally” let frogs loose in the house. Yet beneath her mischief lay razor-sharp intuition. One afternoon, while they collected eggs, Liam mentioned offhandedly, “The miller’s daughter looks sad lately.”

  Lilia stilled. “Why do you say that, sprout?”

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  He shrugged, uneasy. In truth, he’d noticed the girl’s hollow cheeks, the way she flinched when her father drank. But how to explain that without revealing his adult memories? “Just…her eyes are quiet.”

  Lilia studied him, then swept him into a hug that smelled of hay and honey. “You’ve got a keen heart, little one. Let’s bring them some blackberry pie tomorrow, eh? Cheer her up.”

  The next day, Lilia didn’t just deliver pie. She stayed for tea, drawing the miller into boisterous tales until the man’s gruffness melted. By week’s end, the daughter was apprenticing at the weaver’s shop, her smiles returning.

  “How’d you know?” Liam asked as they walked home.

  Lilia winked. “Same way you did. Noticed what others ignore.”

  Elric, meanwhile, was a force of nature. His hands could snap a rotted fencepost in two yet mend a sparrow’s broken wing with feather-light precision. Every market day, he’d hoist Liam onto his shoulders, parading him through the village like a trophy. “Meet my boy! Sharp as a wolf’s tooth, this one!”

  The villagers played along, bowing exaggeratedly. “Lord Liam! Will you bless our turnips today?”

  Liam’s face would burn, but he relished these outings—the smithy’s clangor, the baker’s cinnamon-dusted rolls, the way Elric’s chest puffed when folks praised his son. At the pasture’s edge, Elric taught him to whistle through a blade of grass. “Call the sheep, lad! They’ll come running for their prince.”

  But Liam saw the softer side too—Elric massaging Mara’s shoulders after long healing sessions, his teasing deflections when Lilia caught him knitting mismatched socks for winter. “What? A man can’t appreciate cozy toes?”

  Their polyamorous household raised eyebrows in the village, but Elric shrugged off gossip. “Love’s not a pie, to be sliced into pieces. The more you give, the more it grows.”

  Liam’s past-life memories stirred bittersweet reflections. This was what he’d missed before—the messy, loud, alive joy of belonging. One night, as a comet streaked across the sky, he whispered to the stars: “Thank you. However this happened…thank you.”

  By his fifth birthday, Liam’s duality felt natural—the wisdom of a man who’d lived and died woven into a child’s boundless wonder. When he gifted Mara a painstakingly braided herb bracelet, her tears dampened his hair. “My thoughtful boy. How’d I get so lucky?”

  Lilia, ever the instigator, tossed him into the air. “Luck had nothing to do with it! You were meant for us.”

  And as Elric’s laughter shook the rafters, Liam believed it.