Family secrets

As Lalli was about to return to the small boat he had taken to the market with the day's supplies, a short gold-haired man speaking strangely came to talk to him:
-Hi. You're the guy from the Hotakainen family, right?
Lalli didn't stop walking, hoping to get rid of him. People who went out of their way to talk to him meant trouble he couldn't deal with, more often than not.
-My friends and I are looking for two people who went missing twenty years ago.
Lalli had an easy answer at hand, for once:
-I'm only nineteen.
-I know, but we… want to talk to absolutely everyone who could have seen them, even if they were children at the time. I heard you have a cousin who's a little older than you.
He was about to tell him that Onni hadn't been to the market in twenty-one years in case whoever had told him about Onni's existence hadn't, when he realized who the man was looking for. Onni said that he wasn't supposed to talk about those people while he wasn't on their home island, otherwise the army would come and take all four of them away. After what grandma had did to them, Onni, Tuuri and the sheepherder couldn't leave the island without being a danger to those around them. Grandma had nonetheless discovered something that couldn't go forgotten, but was more dangerous than helpful on its own. However, combined with another discovery humanity was well-known to seek, it could potentially save lives. For this reason, they had to continue living, guarding the secret. A handful of mages had found out about their situation over the years and promised to tell them if they heard anything about the other necessary discovery being made, in addition to keeping their secret in the meantime. Each of them had also made sure that both local authorities and whichever outside authority had sent them knew that simply leaving them alone and letting them choose who could and could not disembark on their island was the best course of action for everyone. His boat was now in sight and he had been walking while thinking of his answer, so he had probably lost the gold-haired man. He stopped next to the boat, and decided to catch his breath for a few moments before loading the supplies.
-Murderer!
Lalli sensed the stone about to be thrown at him, and did his best to dodge it.
-Hey, what do you think you're doing?
Lalli turned his head, only for his eyes to meet the gold-haired man's back. The younger teen who had thrown the stone ran away, and the gold-haired man turned as to face Lalli:
-Are you okay?
-Yes?
The gold-haired man started ruffling his hair:
-I know it's not exactly the right time for this, but I just remembered the names of the people my friends and I are looking for. Could you at least ask your cousin if the names Árni Ragnarsson and Sigríður Jónsdóttir mean anything to him? What the…
Lalli and the gold-haired man noticed the red that had joined the gold at the same time. The stone intended for Lalli had landed on the side of his head, apparently. Without really thinking, Lalli touched the wound so he could help it heal with magic. This man had nice eyes, he thought. Blue, but less grey than those of most other people he ran into at the market.
-Uh… thanks?
Lalli suddenly realized he was touching him much longer then what was necessary to cast the healing spell, removed his hand, finished loading the supplies, and left without a single word.

Lalli usually hated it when that specific argument between Onni and Tuuri resurfaced, but this time, it let him check the sole remaining book that contained the names of any of those people without anyone else noticing. He found the names the gold-haired man had told him, quite close to the beginning. If they were in there, that meant the people bearing them had died as some of grandma's experimental subjects. He'd done this to satisfy his own curiosity. According to Onni's rules, he wasn't supposed to speak about those people while he was off the island anyway. He closed the book, put it back in the usual place, and re-arranged his tableware, having moved it aside to be able to lay the book flat on the table. Just as he had put his plate back in the right place, the book he had brought back from the market was slapped on it by Onni's hand:
-Keep this with you until next time you go to the market, and trade it for something you actually want.
There it was again. Onni wanted to thank him for all the work he was doing. Since the labor of Onni, Tuuri and the sheepherder was now turning up a small, but regular profit, they could afford a "treat" from time to time. Because of how much the three of them depended on Lalli going to the market on a regular basis, Onni had decided that Lalli should get to choose a "treat" for himself. According to Onni, a "treat" was something you brought to make yourself happy, not because you needed it. Lalli had never seen something that could be a "treat" for him at the market, despite Onni's conviction that all he needed to do was look a little harder. Meanwhile, Tuuri kept wanting more numerous and interesting books in the house. When Lalli brought books back home, she was happy, which, in turn, made Lalli happy. In principle, it was the perfect solution. In reality, because of the way both Tuuri and Lalli were, Onni assumed that Tuuri was convincing Lalli buy what she wanted, and refused to believe both of them when they told the truth, for different reasons. Lalli was paralyzed by Onni's gesture, with no idea what to do.

He got solace from the very person he usually saw as a disturbance as a hand removed the book from his plate and replaced it with a serving of food:
-Hey, what's that?
Tuuri answered:
-A Finnish-Icelandic dictionary that Onni doesn't want me to keep because he's persuaded that I forced Lalli to buy it for me.
The sheepherder immediately reminded Lalli of the reason he couldn't stand him:
-What's the difference with the dictionary we already have?
It was in the thing's name, idiot. Tuuri ended up being the one stating the obvious:
-It shows the words in Finnish side by side with the word in Icelandic.
The sheepherder opened the book, stared at the contents for a few moments, and closed it:
-Can I keep it?
If the sheepherder kept the book, it might as well be given back to Tuuri. But Onni also wanted to avoid doing anything that would make him feel mistreated, and because of this tended to credit him with much more ability to make his own choices than he actually had. That was how Onni ended up acting as if Lalli was less able to make decisions for himself than the young man who had been grandma's hidden ward up to the day of the fire. Even today, the sheepherder was the only one among the household's day-workers either willing or able to do certain tasks due to having been less damaged by grandma's experiments than Onni and Tuuri. Onni sighed:
-Fine, you can keep it. Now let's eat before dinner gets cold.
Onni came to sit next to Lalli, while the sheepherder and Tuuri sat next to each other at the other side of the table. Between bites, Tuuri started complaining to the one who was technically her husband about how Lalli never paid attention to what books he brought back and that the fact that it was never what she would have picked herself should be proof enough that getting the books had been Lalli's choice and not hers. Onni pointed out she had recently taken sudden interest in a book about Iceland that had belonged to their parents, so he refused to believe the Finnish-Icelandic dictionary to be a coincidence. It was the sheepherder's turn to be the less idiotic of the three others:
-Or maybe Lalli noticed she had been reading that book and picked the dictionary when the bookseller told him he had enough cloth to buy it.
Finally someone had figured that out. How had it taken so long?

Emil finally found a good arrangement for the scarf tied around his head. Magic healing or not, Mikkel had insisted on cutting the hair growing in the wound's vicinity, leaving a whole side of his head a mess that he was now trying to conceal. Mikkel was currently attempting to get Sigrun to back out of her plan, accounting both for the fact that Emil had possibly found another, less invasive way of finding out what the family knew and the fact that they could be dealing with up to three mages. Sigrun wouldn't hear any of it:
-He found a more peaceful way to ask the question. That will be worthless if we don't get the answer. If they have anything to tell us, I don't think they'll want to risk anyone else overhearing, so they may be more talkative if we come to them. We're still going there first thing in the morning.
Emil sighed, and hoped that taking the stone for the guy would earn him some kind of favor before he got a bullet in some part of his body for trespassing.

Lalli finished wrapping Onni's bandages and put the soiled ones in the cleaning basin. He glanced in the direction of the two-person bed in the other room, where the sheepherder was caring for Tuuri's bandages. She didn't always put her sleeping shirt on right away after this. On that subject, she and the sheepherder weren't losing their time in getting that started tonight. Or, as Onni called it, "As long as they don't do anything that risks producing a child". It was time for Lalli to start his nocturnal scouting round. He left the house, then the farmland, all while thinking of what had happened with the gold-haired man. The day after he had decided that going ahead with marrying Tuuri and the sheepherder to each other was the right way to deal with what the had been up to, Onni had asked Lalli if he'd ever seen someone at the market with whom he wanted to do that. At the time, Lalli had honestly answered that he hadn't. But that had been four, maybe five years ago. Since then, he had been more or less able to identify what Onni had been talking about. There was just one detail that kept things from completely fitting: the people stirring up that feeling had all been men. While Onni hadn't specifically asked if Lalli had been attracted to women that day, he had also admitted to having had no second thoughts in marrying Tuuri and the sheepherder in part because they didn't "have any kind of option besides each other anyway". For Tuuri, that had definitely been true. But the sheepherder would have technically had other options if it was okay for two people of same sex to do that as long as they weren't closely related. But Onni could have also meant it in a sense that the sheepherder hadn't shown any kind of interest in him or Lalli, meaning that he liked women. Lalli hesitated to ask Onni for a clarification on what he had meant that day. Onni kept claiming that various part of Lalli's behavior wouldn't "sit well" with "most people". Lalli had figured out long ago that if it weren't for how dependent the others were on him regularly going to the market, his behavior probably wouldn't be "sitting well" with Onni either. If liking men that way turned out to be something that "didn't sit well with most people", it would only make things worse.

xxxx

The sun was coming up, and it was soon time to go join the others for breakfast before going to sleep. As he came close to the island's small harbor, Lalli noticed there was already a boat out near the larger island on which the market was usually held. As he walked by, he noticed that the boat seemed to be heading in their own island's direction. Lalli decided to go under cover and linger a little, just to make sure. A few minutes later, there wasn't much of a reason to doubt left anymore. He saw the short gold-haired man among the boat's occupants. They seemed to have a cat with them, but all three of them were immune and none gave any sign of being with the army. Those two things alone meant that he didn't actually have to drive the group away on sight. Another detail made them good candidates for an exception to their policy of keeping visitors off the island: one of them had hair the same color as the sheepherder's.