Erik’s uncle appeared in the kitchen doorway, clutching the folded newspaper. He looked left, right and then down, and gave a sigh of relief. Erik was under the end table, wearing the daisy hat Euterpe had helped him make for Mischief Night, and lining up his soldiers on the tile.
“Oh, dear one, I’m glad you’re still here. I know I said you could go to the movies with John, but I think I’d like you to help me around the house today instead. He’ll understand.”
“Did Calliope mess up the brownies?” Erik said, frowning.
“Ah. No. No, I just… I thought the kitchen could use a cleaning. Maybe I’ll clean out the oven and you can laugh at me, how about that?”
“It’s not as fun as the movies. Did you guys have a fight?”
Mordecai sighed. If he didn’t tell Erik the truth, either someone else would or Erik would think it was something even worse. This wasn’t more drama in the house. This was something hundreds of miles away and it didn’t affect them.
Except it did.
“No, dear one. Calliope and I are fine. I don’t want us to go out today because there have been more casualties in the Potato War.”
Erik crawled out from under the table, removed the hat to be serious, and folded his arms. “There isn’t a Potato War. Are you sick?”
Mordecai slumped and looked at the ground. “Erik, I’m sorry. I know sometimes I tell you funny stories because it’s cute when you believe me, or when you pretend you believe me, but there is a Potato War and it’s not funny. A coloured woman with the Tuathan Separatist Movement blew herself up with magic and killed a lot of people in Elbany last night, and it’s all over the front page of the paper. I’ll explain the whole thing if you want, but we can’t go out. Not today. Not for a while.”
◈◈◈
It was just past breakfast time on a Sigurd’s Day morning and they had the kitchen to themselves. Mordecai was the only one in the house who did brunch, because he would be out late playing the violin. Ordinarily.
He was glad, because Hyacinth would think he was being stupid, Maggie probably knew more about Elban history than he did, and Calliope would divert the conversation as soon as she heard about the potatoes.
Anyway, this was a hard lesson for Erik about what it meant to be coloured and he didn’t want outside input.
Shamefully, when he saw the headline on the front page, his first thought was: Thank gods she waited until I got home from Ansalem. There were some things Hyacinth, competent though she might have been, just couldn’t do for Erik.
He put on some water for coffee and sat down at the table. Erik had the paper and was looking at the pictures — which weren’t too graphic, fortunately. The largest photo was of workers clearing up the property damage after the bodies had been collected. Then there was a hospital with bandaged people, a map of Elbany, and a photo of the woman herself from happier times. It didn’t seem like there was enough left of her to photograph now.
“There aren’t any potatoes,” Erik said gravely.
“There are, but they don’t move fast enough for the camera,” Mordecai said. “So they’re not as interesting. This is Tuatha.” He touched the map, but that got the informative animation going, so he had to rack it back and freeze it to keep Tuatha in view. “The map is trying to tell you about it, but it’s going to go fast because everyone already knows. You don’t know and you’re eight, so I want to explain. You can watch it when I’m done. Tuatha is a part of Elbany, but they used to be an island. A very long time ago, someone raised the sea bed to join them up. A lot of places have done that. Tuatha and Elbany did it so long ago we’re not sure who really did it, if they both decided or somebody invaded or just one person thought it was a good idea and called a god.”
Erik straightened the paper and goggled at the little map. He resisted touching where he thought they must’ve connected the island, tracing his finger just above it. “We can change a whole… country if we want?” he said.
“We can, but it is not a good idea. Moving land around like that kills things, sometimes people, sometimes lots of people. And then there’s the politics. Tuatha isn’t happy being joined with Elbany, a lot of people there want to be independent. Some of them just want their own government and some of them want to be an island again. Elbany isn’t very happy with Tuatha, either, and they don’t treat the people there well. A lot of those people do magic, and a lot of them are coloured.
“When the potatoes in Tuatha started dying, Elbany didn’t send them enough food to make up for it, and they stopped other people from sending food. Tuatha figured out how to fix the potatoes so they wouldn’t die anymore, but it took over three years and a lot of people starved to death.
“They open-sourced the new potato, that means they wrote down everything about how it works and what they did to it, so other people can make it and modify it more, and they gave everything to the Tuathan Separatist Movement.
“The Tuathan Separatist Movement did modify the potatoes more, but they didn’t tell anyone else how. They made a vine that grows fast and doesn’t produce anything you can eat, and they seeded it around Elbany. Now people in Elbany are having a hard time growing enough food to eat because of the potato.”
“That seems fair,” Erik said.
Mordecai shook his head. “It’s not, because the people who suffer and die aren’t the people making these decisions. The politicians do, and they’re usually well-off enough that this stuff doesn’t touch them. I’m not going to lie, sometimes the people back them up, sometimes the people are all for it. But you can’t start a war, even a Potato War, without the people in power approving it.
“The Tuathan Separatist Movement knows how to stop the potato, and they’ve kept it out of Tuatha, but they’re not sharing the information. Elbany is trying to blockade them and cut off their trade and supplies until they do. So poor farmers in Elbany are dying or going broke, and Tuatha is isolated and going broke too. It’s a hostage situation, and the poor on both sides are the hostages. This dumb misguided girl was trying to break up the fight so her family could eat, but she just made it worse. Not just for Tuatha, for all of us.”
Erik looked up from the map with a frown. “Who is Mad Peter?”
Mordecai pulled down the paper and scanned it without really seeing it. “Does it…?”
“No. It’s not in the paper. You’re thinking about it and you don’t want to… tell me. Is it a… story?”
Mordecai dropped his head into his hands and gazed at the table. “I don’t know what I should say, but I guess you can tell if I’m lying. I don’t know if it’s a story. I heard it as a story, but some stories are things that really happened that we forgot to write down. It’s one of those stories I don’t want to tell you because I don’t like the lessons it teaches. I don’t want to lie to you about it if it really happened, but I don’t know if it really happened. No one can prove it.”
“So what is it?” Erik said.
“I’m going to give you the condensed version. I don’t want to make it scarier than it is.” He considered for a moment. “Peter — or whatever his name was, we say ‘Peter’ in Marsellia — is supposed to be a coloured man from a village somewhere. We used to have villages all our own. Tuatha probably had lots, that’s why there are so many coloured people still there.
“Anyway, the kingdom nearby decided they didn’t want a coloured village on that land anymore. They threw everyone out and burned down the buildings and a lot of people died. Peter decided to call a god and kill everyone in the kingdom. He died doing it. All the other kingdoms around there saw what he did and they decided they didn’t want any coloured people around anymore. Period.
“So everyone from Peter’s village died and a lot more people in other villages died, and now no coloured people live there at all anymore. I heard it happened in Gundaland, but I don’t know where.”
He shook his head. “And what this is supposed to teach you, Erik, is we don’t stick our necks out, because not only will they chop our heads off, they will get all our friends and family. So if you don’t want the people you love to get hurt, you mind your own business.
“But I don’t agree with that at all. I think if we don’t help each other there’s no point in being on this stupid planet. It’s just that I also don’t agree with killing yourself and a lot more people trying to fix something. So when something like this happens, I wonder if this girl’s parents told her the story and I wonder if I should tell it to you. I wonder if I should scare you and maybe lie to you to keep you safe.
“So this is a compromise. I’m showing you the insides and how it works instead of just letting you be scared of who you are.”
Erik didn’t seem particularly scared. He looked disbelieving and irritated with the concept. “Could it happen?” he said. “Could one of us really… kill that many… people?”
Mordecai shook his head. “Erik, I don’t want you to get the idea that it’s special. The amount. People are forever killing each other. People wipe each other off the map for even stupider reasons. One person can start a process that kills even more people than Peter, they don’t have to be coloured and call a god.”
He sighed helplessly and admitted, “But it’s easier for us, because we are and we can. We don’t have to get an army together, we don’t have to build a bomb or buy a gun. We don’t even have to learn the magic. By the time an angry coloured person thinks, ‘Hey, maybe I shouldn’t kill all those people,’ they already have. It’s not a matter of… of personality. We’re not worse people. I think most of us are scared of the damage we could do and we’re less violent. But when one of us snaps, they can hurt a lot of people. That part isn’t a lie. It’s in the paper.”
“Her parents told her the dumb story but they said it happened in Scotia,” Erik said.
He indicated the picture of the woman in the paper. The photo was in full motion and the dead lady smiled for a camera that might’ve been pointed in her direction before she’d ever even considered killing herself. She was wearing a peaked hat and a coat with a cheap fur collar, her very best.
“They said that’s why the coloured people moved to Tuatha and they got rid of the ocean while they were running away. I don’t think it’s true and it doesn’t even work, Uncle.”
“Here, Erik, why don’t we look at the map?” Mordecai said urgently.
The map was better than the life and times of a suicide bomber, they didn’t put stuff like that in the paper. He tapped the picture and let the informative animation from the newspaper gloss over all the social implications for Erik. Maybe something even more distracting would come up.
“Who’s the little green guy throwing a potato?” Erik said. He paused the animation.
Thank gods, thought Mordecai. “That’s a leprechaun. He’s on the Tuathan Separatist flag. He’s a mascot. They have a sense of humour in Tuatha.”
“He’s coloured.”
“I don’t think he’s meant to be. But a lot of the time when people say fairies or leprechauns or elves, what they really mean is us. Just us from a long time ago, when we used to hide so no one would hurt us.”
“If we can change up a whole country and murder a kingdom, why did we have to hide so no one would…” Erik scowled and touched a hand to his head. “Uncle, someone keeps… trying to… tell me something but they won’t say what it is. I just see these buildings falling on fire and I know a lot of people died. It looks like a long time ago.
“I saw it the first time when you were telling Calliope how we don’t write things down about calling gods, then it was when you told me how Clever Jacques’s son got sold into slavery. Now it’s again and we’re talking about frigging potatoes. It’s like someone keeps starting to tell me and somebody else makes them lay off every time. I’m getting annoyed. Do you know what they’re fighting about?”
“I think I do, but it’s happened so many times I’m not sure which one they’re trying to show you.” Mordecai stood and began to put the coffee together. “What do the buildings look like?”
“White with gold domes.”
“Gold?” said Mordecai. He poured the water slowly into the top half of the coffee maker. “It sounds like Zanzamin. The Zanzamin Rebellion. It was a slave rebellion. It happened so long ago we’re not sure about a lot of it, but it was very successful and a lot of people did die. Erik, do you want chocolate syrup in this?”
Erik stood. “Yes, and I’ll get the milk, but I don’t want to be distracted. If you don’t tell me, they’re gonna drop it on my head later like all that stuff about poor people and I won’t like it.”
Mordecai turned with a pained expression. “If I start telling you, dear one, that might make them drop it on you anyway.”
“At least you’re here if I get scared,” Erik replied. He departed for the basement.
Thank gods she waited until I got home from Ansalem, Mordecai thought again with a cringe.
◈◈◈
Milo and Hyacinth were down there at the worktable with the radio on.
“You want me to make this?” Hyacinth was saying. “In metal? You want me to make the abstract concept of trust in metal, with working gears on it?”
Milo frowned at her and held up the sheet of paper he’d been drawing on. He pointed firmly to one part of it.
“Okay, okay. It’s for Calliope. I know. I know you wouldn’t come up with this craziness on your own. But you already told her I could? Erik, is that for cereal or coffee?”
Erik opened his mouth and then closed it. If he admitted the coffee, Milo and Hyacinth would come up and get some. He thought Hyacinth might give him a more honest recounting of the Zanzamin Rebellion, if she knew anything about it, but his uncle wouldn’t talk about it the same if she and Milo were there.
Oh, Milo, he thought. You’re my brother and you’d like to know this about our family and keep us safe, but you’re not coloured. It doesn’t mean the same to you.
“It’s just cereal, I’ll save some for coffee later,” Erik said. “I think you should help Milo and Calliope do art, Auntie Hyacinth. It sounds neat.”
Hyacinth groaned and turned back to the worktable. “Are you planning to sell this? Because if it stays around the house I’m going to take it apart and use it, and that’s just a waste, Milo!”
◈◈◈
Erik took a large helping of milk and syrup in his coffee, Mordecai found some stale cookies in the pantry, and then it was time to sit at the table and talk about human bondage and a brutal regime that died in flames.
At least it happened a long time ago, not like all that stuff about poor people.
Mordecai stared at the ceiling for a while with his hands laced behind his head. “Oh, gods, where do I even begin? You already know about slavery. Someone mentioned slavery at some point. I guess I did. I don’t know. There are different kinds, though. There are levels. You know that?” He sat forward, looking hopeful.
“I kinda know,” Erik said. He dunked a cookie and thought about it. “It was different in Italica. You could get free. It was legal to get free. In Suidas and the ILV you could only run away.”
Mordecai pointed at him. “You’ve got it exactly. Sometimes slavery means being a lower class of people with less rights. That’s not great, but people are willing to put up with it. People will put up with a lot when it seems like they can better their situation with hard work. Places that have slaves like that can go on that way for a long time. We used to have arguments about whether Marsellia has slaves like that, but we just call them workers.
“There is a worse kind of slavery where slaves are not people at all, they are things. We treat people bad when they are lower than us, but we treat them worse when they are things.
“And I hope like hell they’re not showing you the kinds of things we do, but I know I can’t stop them. Please try not to lose all your faith in humanity before the age of nine, dear one. That awful stuff doesn’t go on for very long, because everyone can learn to do magic, and when someone hurts them too much, they use it.”
“How do you mean ‘faith in humanity’?” Erik said. He was already trying to stay in balance and not lose hope. This was like he was juggling and somebody threw him another pin. Hey!
“I don’t know,” Mordecai admitted. “It’s a feeling. I’m not sure if it’s feeling like people are good and maybe someday they’ll be okay or if it’s just not feeling like they’re bad and they don’t deserve to be okay. Something like that. I still have a little, but I didn’t start learning about this stuff until I was an angry teenager.”
“I want them to be good,” Erik said. It wouldn’t make him so mad when they were bad if he didn’t.
“I do too. Try to hold on to that.”
Mordecai took a bite of a cookie, but he couldn’t stall forever. He didn’t want the gods to spring this on Erik at random. Best to prod it with a stick and set it off now.
“It is really tempting to make people into things, because you don’t have to pay them or take care of them and you can hurt them to force them to work for you. It is even more tempting to make coloured people into things, because you can force them to call gods and hurt them and their families if they don’t.
“When you record information about the gods, or even when you teach someone and they remember it, other people can get that information too. If someone who isn’t coloured hears about something they want, that gives them a reason to force a coloured person to get it for them.
“A book about calling gods is instructions for hurting us. That’s why I tell you about gods, but I don’t write it down and let you do drawings like our monster book. You can remember this stuff and use it, and I haven’t told you anything I don’t feel safe sharing with people in the house. But what we’re doing could still end up with a city on fire and a bunch of dead people like Zanzamin. Zanzamin stole people from Ifrana and the Ankora Empire — what’s left of it is Farsia now — to be slaves, and they stole coloured people too. Whole villages.”
Erik was shaking his head. Mordecai stopped to give him room to speak.
“Why would we… let them… steal us? Why would we let them… keep us? We could… kill them!”
“We did kill them, but it took time. There are things you can do to a person so they can’t fight back. Unforgivable things. I don’t want to talk about that, not unless you see something that scares you, but it bought them time. They had about a hundred years and they made lots of money. It’s said they roofed their cities with real gold.
“Then their slaves came together and took them apart. It was two people, a black man and a coloured man. They were both slaves. They united everyone and fought back. They took Zanzamin and they kept fighting into the Ankora Empire, and mainland Ifrana too.”
Erik put up his hand, asking for another pause. He shook his head. “It’s a girl. Their names are Ikram and Fadi and Ikram is a girl. She has a headscarf like Penny.”
“Penny?”
“From magic season. Tommy’s girlfriend. Fadi has hair like Tommy too. It’s wavy, not tight curls like Hayes and Maggie. He has a headscarf too. He’s purple. Fadi isn’t his real name, he doesn’t know his real name. Oh…” Erik cringed and put both hands over his face. “Oh… Oh…”
Mordecai knelt down beside Erik’s chair and held him. “Okay, dear one. That’s some of that stuff you can do to people so they can’t fight back. I know. It’s really bad stuff. I didn’t know Ikram was a girl. That makes a lot of sense. You’d make a really great historian if we could get people to believe you. They think she’s a boy and she and Fadi were just really good friends. Was it like that?”
Erik shook his head.
“See, that’s really interesting. It’s not necessarily that it couldn’t have been like that if they were both men, but people don’t think about it that way. But I guess they broke up. That’s why Fadi didn’t want to fight anymore.”
Erik shook his head. He put up his hand. “She wanted to free the world and he wanted to go home. He could still remember home. When they found it, it was all burned and there wasn’t anything left, but he wanted to stay and start over. She said, ‘Don’t you understand? You don’t have a home anymore, Tommy.’ I mean ‘Fadi.’ She named him because… because…”
(Uncle, he didn’t even know he was a person and he could have a name!)
“I’m trying to distract you so they’ll back off, but it’s not working,” Mordecai said, wincing. “It’s okay, dear one. Can you just tell me?” He tapped the side of his head. “Like you told me about the wishing well. Just tell me, then we can get past it and we don’t have to think about it.”
Erik hugged his own shoulders and turned his whole body away. “Don’t want… hurt you.”
“Erik, these things can’t be changed and these people have been dead for a thousand years. It’s not going to hurt me knowing about it as much as it’s hurting you seeing it. Please. Let’s just get past it so they stop hurting you with it.”
(I need you to hold me for it.) Erik said.
Mordecai sat in a chair and drew Erik into his lap. Erik put both arms around his neck and clung.
They were young. He didn’t know if they really were that young or if it was just like that because Erik thought they looked like Tommy and Penny. It was hard to think of two teenagers toppling an empire. They ought to be playing guitar in the front room.
The boy didn’t even have clothes. They thought he was all right to sleep in the same room with the girl because he didn’t do anything unless they told him to. He didn’t have a bed. They told him to go to sleep and he sat in the corner and did.
(They did it with magic. It was like he was sleepwalking and he couldn’t wake up. She figured out how to wake him up. The first thing he said…)
“I want to go home.”
Mordecai doubted a kid in ancient Zanzamin spoke Anglais. He sounded like Tommy too. But his voice was flat. Maybe he was awake, but there was still something seriously wrong with him.
The girl said, “I will take you home. But I need you to help me get out of here. Will you help me?”
He said, “Yeah.”
They didn’t chain him up at night. He found the key to her shackles. She had to explain what a key was. After two tries it seemed like he remembered. She dressed him. It was cold outside. They took knives from the kitchen and cut the sleeping family’s throats, then they freed the others and burned down the house. They took the knives, and any weapons they found. They set more fires. They hid in the caves on the beach.
“Where is your home?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What’s your name?”
“What’s a ‘name’?”
(She woke him up but he lost almost everything.)
“What do they call you?”
“Boy.”
“No, not like that. A word that’s just you.”
“Does that rock over there have a word that’s just it?”
She sighed and shook her head. Man, this was like when he didn’t get “keys.”
“Your name is Fadi. It means ‘saviour.’ You saved us. That’s who you are, okay?”
“Cool.” He smiled.
“You know smiling,” she said.
“So what about the rock?” he said.
(He remembered some stuff, but she had to help him. He remembered how to fight. They went south first because that’s where her home was. They kept letting people go. They found some more coloured people like Fadi and did the magic to wake them up. Then they had an army and gods.
(There were some people who couldn’t wake up, coloured people and black people. Fadi and the others said to kill them, that that was better, and they did that. That was how much it hurt being that way.
(They were like generals. They put some of the people they freed in charge of more troops, but they always fought together and they never split up. When he remembered enough to figure out where he lived, they went there together. It was north. It was all gone. Just the square places where the houses used to be.
(She wanted to keep going. She said he didn’t have a home anymore and they should just keep going. They could free everyone. They’d make a new home. He said he had a home already right there. He started picking up rocks and building and she didn’t understand.)
“Tommy, this isn’t a home. This is nothing. Don’t you get that?”
“There was nothing here before they built it,” he said. He shrugged. “I’ll build it again.”
“No you won’t! What are you doing? Don’t you understand what we have here? Don’t you understand what we can accomplish? Tommy, cut it out!” She kicked over the little wall he’d made.
“Pen, I told you I just wanted to go home. Thank you for taking me home.” He looked sad at her. “I guess you don’t have to stay if you don’t want. It’s kinda crummy. I get it.”
She drew her sword and swept one foot back behind her. “Tommy, I’m not letting you stay here, this is nuts. Don’t you want to be with me? Don’t you care about me?”
He smiled at her. “Hey, Pen, what’s up with the sword?”
“Tom, don’t make me take you home like this. I’ll do it. I swear I’ll do it. I’ll tie you up and stuff you in a sack.”
“Pen, I’m already home.”
She was crying. “I love you. You said you loved me. Don’t you love me?”
He said, “No, I just wanted to go home.”
(He knew she wouldn’t let him stay. He said that so she’d kill him and he could. He knew everyone else coloured would know what happened, no matter what she told them, and they would stop fighting and go home. Or make homes, if they couldn’t go home.
(She said someone shot him with an arrow and he asked her to bury him in the village where he grew up. All her coloured soldiers left, but she let them go. Then she had to stop. She just kept Zanzamin.
(She gave herself a new name and she was Queen for a long time. She spent the rest of her life blockading the Ankora Empire for fun, and Zanzamin never let any slavers get past them ever again. It was as close to freeing the world as she could get, and I think she would’ve done it for real if she’d put him in a sack and dragged him away like she said. She would’ve convinced him to help. They both knew that.
(Uncle, is that what you mean when you say white girls only date coloured boys when they want something?)
Mordecai jerked back in the chair and opened his eyes. He was already shaking his head. “Erik, I don’t say that anymore. I haven’t said that in years. Not seriously. I don’t say it because it’s not true. I was a stupid kid and I didn’t know any better. It’s a sad story, but I don’t think she meant to take advantage of him. And I certainly don’t think Tommy and Penny are like that!”
“She only woke him up so he could get the key. She would’ve left him if she could’ve done it herself. Then he didn’t want to fight anymore and she killed him. He made her a queen.”
“I know that’s what happened, but I don’t think it was on purpose. Erik, you can’t expect someone escaping from slavery to make moral decisions about how to do it. She could have left him behind after he got her out and she didn’t.”
“She knew he could call gods.”
Mordecai sighed. He set Erik back on the floor and knelt at eye level. “Dear one, please do not extrapolate dating advice from thousand-year-old dead people, okay? We can’t change what happened but we can decide what we learn from it and that is not a smart thing to learn.”
“Calliope had Chris help her do art. Now she has Milo and Hyacinth, and Chris isn’t her boyfriend anymore.”
“Erik, that is so warped I don’t even know where to start taking it apart. You are smarter than this!” He picked Erik up and sat him on the table. “I know the story hurt you. I know everything they tell you hurts you. Hurt people do not make good decisions. Please back off and sort yourself out before you decide what you think about mixed relationships!”
Erik narrowed his eye, the one he could. The other one whirred and adjusted. “What do you think about them?”
Mordecai groaned and clapped a hand to his head. “I would lie to you if I could, because I’m pretty sure what I think is stupid. I’m old. I’m old and it’s hard for me to change. I think a relationship like that isn’t equal. I think it’s impossible for a relationship like that to be equal, and that’s not fair. But I also think two people can really love each other. Any two people. Just sometimes they should try not to so nobody gets hurt. And I want so badly for you to be better than me, dear one!”
Erik was quiet for a long time, frowning.
“I think she wouldn’t have… killed him if she didn’t… love him,” he said at last. “It was bad strategy.”
“You’re probably right,” Mordecai said. He sat again with a thump. “Are you at all upset about slavers erasing people’s identities to keep them compliant, or is it mainly the mixed relationship thing?”
“I don’t like that either,” Erik muttered. He rubbed his grey eye with the heel of his palm. “I don’t like knowing people want to do all these things to hurt me just because I’m me. It feels like everyone hates me. Us. Even Maggie would if she grew up and wanted a kingdom. I didn’t do anything. It’s not fair.”
“Oh, oh, oh.” Mordecai wrapped arms around him and pulled him into his lap again. “I know. I know how it feels. I feel that way a lot too. Feelings are real, but everyone hating us is not real. It’s hard being who we are, that’s real. But we’re not alone. It’s not you and me against the world. We have everyone here at home who loves us, and that’s lots better.
“Hey.” He wiped Erik’s eye for him. “You know Maggie is not going to sell you out so she can be Queen. If she wants to be a queen she’s not even going to involve you. You have too much moral fibre to take over a country. She’ll just show up outside your window on a broomstick wearing a crown she stole and ask if you want a dukedom or you feel like more of an earl.”
“Duke of Earl,” Erik said. He sniffled and made a weak smile.
“I don’t know if that’s a real thing, but I suppose she’d do it for you. She’s a good person. A devious, sneaky good person. Maggie’s on our side, okay?”
Erik nodded.
“I’d be scared out of my mind if she weren’t.”
Erik curled against him and shut his eyes. “I’m scared of you not being here,” he said, muffled. “Not fun scary like the haunted house and the play. I want you to get a life like Auntie Hyacinth says and it was fun eating sugar and nothing bad happened, but I need you for stuff like this.”
Mordecai hugged him. “I’m scared of not being here, too, dear one. I’m sorry if you saw me thinking about it and you got scared too.”
Erik shook his head. “I can get scared by myself.”
“Okay.” He set the boy back gently — just so he could see him — and held him there. “I’m glad I was here for this, and maybe you like me best for stuff like this, but I’m not the only one. I can’t be the only one. Eventually you’re going to grow up, and you won’t need me the same way — you’re going to need other people to give you stuff I can’t.
“But even before that, you’ve got to give other people a chance to take care of you. They might not be perfect, but I’m not perfect either. I know you don’t have another coloured person in the house to talk to, but there’s always Seth, at the school, and Ted and Maria…”
Erik frowned at him. “Are you sure they’d tell me Mad Peter is just a story?”
“Well… Not one-hundred-percent…”
“They didn’t run over here to make sure I’d stay home and be safe when they saw the paper.”
Mordecai sighed. “It’s harder when you’re little. You’re learning and you don’t know enough to look after yourself yet — you just need more. I’m going to do my very best to be here for you now, or not so far away that you can’t reach me, but it can’t be like that forever. That’s why it’s really important we practice being apart, like when I went to Ansalem. I need to do that more often.”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure you wouldn’t be safe going to the movies anyway, dear one. I get paranoid.”
“Can I go to the movies, then?”
“No.” He shut his eyes. “Maybe tomorrow. Ask me tomorrow. I’ll think about it.”
“Hey,” Calliope said. She was in the doorway, holding Lucy.
“Heh,” Lucy said, and she lifted a casual hand too.
Erik brightened. “Hey, Coconut.”
Lucy grinned at him. “Ek!”
“Are you gonna stay and eat brownies with us, Erik?” Calliope asked with a smile.
“Calliope, no,” Mordecai said gently.
Erik frowned and shoved him with a hand. (If I have to think about all this stuff with a working brain and no drugs, you do too!)
Mordecai cleared his throat and touched a hand to his head. “Calliope, I don’t suppose you know how to make regular brownies, do you?”
She blinked at him. “Wow. I haven’t in a long time. That sounds like fun!”
Milo and Hyacinth wanted to help make brownies, too, or maybe just sample the raw batter.
At some point, the front page of the newspaper got soiled with chocolate, and they threw it in the trash.
