A/N: Part 3.
Disclaimer: Not mine, Tamora Pierce's.
17. A Family Outing
Numair looks at his wife and their children and wonders, not for the first time, just how all this has come to pass. He remembers things: how his teachers in Carthak laughed at the idea of wild magic; how he once thought Varice Kingsford would make him a good wife; how he fought, tooth and nail, to keep from Daine the knowledge that he loved her; all the times that one or the other of them died, or nearly died, or ought to have died.
"Truly, the Gods have smiled on me," he murmurs.
The others exchange glances; then three pairs of eyes (two smoky blue, one brown) regard him cautiously.
"We're stuck out here in the rain, Da," Sarralyn reminds him.
"Two hours' ride from the Tower, and without shelter," adds Rikash.
"And we aren't sure where we are," finishes Daine.
"I know," he replies, grinning. "Isn't it wonderful?."
18. Birthday
They don't celebrate birthdays much as a rule (Da doesn't like to be reminded how much older he is than the rest of them, and Ma says so much fuss embarrasses her), but this one is special, because he is going to be ten. Everyone has brought him little gifts, and Ma has asked the palace cooks to make all his favourite dishes. Rikash is torn between basking in all the attention and wishing there were not quite so much of it.
The best thing about a big party, he decides, is the feeling you get when all the guests have left and you are home again, sitting quietly in your favourite chair, with a purring cat in your lap who is also your sister.
19. Reflections
Daine and Numair stand side by side, each with an arm around the other, studying their reflection in the mirror. He sees the grey streaks in his coal-black hair, the crow's-feet round his eyes, the body no longer quite in its former fighting trim. She sees a woman older than her mother ever grew, a little plumper than she used to be, and never particularly beautiful.
He sees a young woman with blue-grey eyes framed by long, thick lashes, slender and beautifully curved, stronger than she looks and with lightning reflexes and astounding magic, who has borne him two beautiful and gifted children and saved his life more times than he cares to remember. He sees the woman he loves, more beautiful than the girl he fell in love with and more dear to him with each day they spend together.
She sees a man of enormous power and equally great goodwill, a man who would give his life to protect her and their children, the man whose kindness, patience, and laughter taught her almost everything she knows about her magic, about love, about loyalty. She sees the man she has loved since before she understood what love was.
And, on the whole, both are more than satisfied with what they see.
20. Flying
Perched astride his father's broad shoulders, Rikash can see practically forever, and he feels like the king of the Eastern Lands. He has already decided that one day he will learn to become a hawk (or maybe an eagle) the way Da does it. But until then, this is the closest he can come to flying.
21. Nose and Hippos
When Sarralyn (or whoever—whatever—she was at the time) was born, Tortall was still embroiled in the Scanran War, and her parents in the thick of it.
From time to time, when she is older, she meets total strangers who tell her they remember meeting her before, somewhere or other along the Scanran border, as a baby riding in a sling on her mother's back.
Raoul the Giantkiller never tires of telling about the time she pulled his hair and pinched his nose. Sarra doesn't much like this story, but at least it doesn't involve quills, or a baby river horse. Everybody in the realm seems to know that story, but this doesn't stop them telling it again and again and again until she wants to scream (or turn into a river horse, just to shut them up).
22. Ordinary?
Every so often, idly, they wonder (and sometimes discuss between themselves) what it might be like to have an ordinary family: parents who make their living as something other than the realm's most powerful mages; one home, perhaps a fairly humble one, instead of endless shuttling from one to another; no dragons or basilisks in the family; grandparents who can visit or be visited on the spur of the moment, instead of coming only at the turning of the seasons (or, in the other case, never at all). It would be so nice and peaceful, Rikash thinks. But they would miss Kitten dreadfully.
These two are perhaps less capable of accurately imagining the lives of "ordinary" children than any child before or since.
23. Portrait
A portrait of the four Salmalíns hangs in the common room in the Tower at Pirate's Swoop. It was painted by Volney Rain, an artist in Corus. Rikash is fascinated by it at first, then, when he begins not to recognize himself in the curly-headed seven-year-old memorialized on the canvas, annoyed.
It is only years later that he realizes he is not the only one who has changed.
24. Learning
Daine and Numair teach Sarralyn to read; Rikash, as far as they can determine, picks up this skill entirely on his own. The first they learn of it is the day when, at the age of four, he interrupts their reminiscences of the Battle of Pirate's Swoop, lugging into the sitting-room a dusty tome nearly as big as he is, to ask, "Da, what's a sim-ull-a-croom?"