Setzer's landing was as much of a production as it had always been. We had to guide him away from the town square, where we had the preparations set up for the banquet and for music, and over to the landing spot Martin had volunteered, his grazing meadow - we ended up frightening his sheep, and his sheepdog, pretty badly.
"I suppose I should have foreseen that," Setzer said, after he'd greeted me.
"I should have warned you," I said, glancing out over the field. The sheep were all concentrated in one corner of the fence, compressed more tightly than seemed altogether healthy.
"In at least one of those letters, yes."
"Oh, you got a couple of them?"
"I got all of them. I do check, you know. I'm fairly mobile. I know it doesn't show."
"There's no need to be snide," I said, and then I blinked at the blond head emerging from belowdecks. "Edgar?"
"Ssh," he said, finger to his lips and his tone no lower than usual. "I'm incognito."
"Mm-hmm. Why?"
"I needed to escape," he said. "They've doubled my guard." He stood, dusting and straightening his clothes.
"Because of your escape attempts."
"No, because— you don't have a telegraph office, do you?"
"No..."
"The news wouldn't have reached you. You see, they're trying to kill me."
"They... what? Who?" He sounded like he was joking.
"He's paranoid," Setzer said. "Though there was an assassination attempt."
"Who was it?" I had a notion of Kefka's followers, holed up in the mountains where their tower had once been. Recognizing Locke. Then I dismissed the thought - the tower had started to fall when magic was eliminated, when Kefka was killed, and we'd thought then that almost all of them must have been killed in the collapse. Besides, any murderous-minded survivors would have had quite a ways to travel if they wanted to target Edgar, and he hardly seemed like the most obvious choice for them. If anything, I would have been. I was recognizable.
"A man named Lee - no ties to the Empire, no criminal record, nothing. He was out of work and angry about the amount we spend on foreign aid, as far as our investigation could determine."
"He wouldn't tell you?" This was bizarre. He didn't seem frightened or angry or even especially shaken.
"One of the guard killed him," Edgar said. "Maddening. I wanted to question him. Assasination attempts are a very definite form of negative feedback, but I need to know more about what I'm doing wrong."
"Edgar, can't you even take that seriously? Someone tried to kill you!"
"Isn't it surreal? He acts like they tried to kill someone else he doesn't much like."
"It is surreal," Edgar agreed. "That's why I'm acting like this. It feels like something in a play I watched when I was slightly drunk, not at all like something that happened to me. But now I'm stifled by guards, hedged about by advisors, I can't breathe without inhaling someone's epaulet."
"So you escaped. And they'll be perfectly fine with that."
"Oh, they'll reprimand me endlessly, but it's worth it for a few precious days' relief."
"Where's your luggage?" Setzer asked me abruptly.
"Back, um, at the house." In chests of drawers and wardrobes, not in my trunk and valise that I'd only dragged out to air on the porch yesterday. "We'll need to borrow a cart and a chocobo team - Duane was working on that when I left. We should be able to leave by sundown."
"You don't want to stay for this festival you're readying?" Edgar asked.
"Oh, you could see it from the air? It's all right. I didn't actually do any harvesting."
"Carrots," Martin said.
"Carrots and potatoes. Some apples. Not much of a harvest. It'll be a hard winter," I added with a dramatic sigh.
"Oh, that tree of yours finally gave fruit?" Martin asked.
"Finally, yes."
"It's not that this isn't riveting, but is that a cart off that way?" Setzer interjected.
I glanced where he was pointing. "Mirage," I decided. "Besides, the town is due north, and you're looking west-northwest."
"It was worth a try," he said. "Shall we go with you?"
"I only brought Chicken," I said. "Do you want to ride behind me?"
"Only if you'll buy me a replacement for my lost dignity," Setzer retorted.
"My lady, I on the other hand should be delighted," Edgar announced, sweeping his cape aside as he bowed low.
"I didn't mean you," I said.
In the end, I left them both there while I rode home. It was just as well. Setzer would have been disagreeable about it if he'd had to wait while I threw clothes in a trunk. While I knew Edgar would have liked to see the town, and while he could almost certainly, despite my jokes, have been trusted to keep his hands to himself, the tour would have just delayed our departure, something Setzer seemed keen to avoid. I didn't ask why; he didn't seem to be in a very good mood in the first place. Kat helped me pack while I fretted and dashed around looking for things - a sewing kit, a pair of gloves, a dressing gown - and accomplished very little. Eventually she ordered me to sit still and mind Rosie while she finished up, so I sat on my bed with the baby and worried out loud about how the older children would react when I hadn't broken my departure to them gently. It was really no wonder she wanted me ready to leave.
That afternoon, when the kids came home from school,they found the store closed, made for the house, and then Cassie was the first one to race upstairs and find us packing up my clothes. She didn't take it very well, though better than she would have a year ago.
"You're leaving?" she demanded, chin quivering, loudly enough to draw Charles from the hall where he'd been playing, and Henry came in next, followed by Margie, and I was finding it hard to keep up a soothing tone when I was having to raise my voice to talk over them. Finally I convinced them to come downstairs and out to the store, where I gave them some of the candy in a shameless bribe. It at least distracted them, long enough that I could explain I wasn't going anywhere to fight, that I knew when I'd be back, that everything was fine and we'd all be safe. They didn't seem to be convinced, but my tone and my persistence let them know I wouldn't be persuaded, and I took the calendar down off the wall and showed them when I might be back, and tried to avoid making solid promises about the exact day I'd return - after all, my travel plans were at Setzer's mercy.
Finally Kat was done with packing - she waved aside my attempts to apologize for not helping - and I shooed everyone out of the room so I could change into my travel clothes. Kat and I had been working on a pair of outfits off and on through the summer, from patterns in the latest batch, though it was probably already out of style in Jidoor. The skirt came down to my mid-calf, and was slimmer and more fitted than the old skirt I'd been wearing earlier. The blouse had a high neck that made me look like one of the ladies from the catalogs - of course, that was the point - and supposedly it was very becoming though I couldn't get used to the way I looked in it. When I emerged Isabella and Kat clapped and everyone else looked either bored or mutinous. Then Duane and I carried the trunk out to the cart in the gathering twilight while Cassie followed with my valise. She was bravely keeping herself from tears, and I hugged her and looked up at Kat and said "Maybe I should—"
"Take a shawl? Yes, you should."
"She'll think you're trying to be rid of her," Duane said.
"Nonsense," she retorted, and she ran inside for the shawl while I hugged everyone, repeatedly, and gave them directions on chores and schoolwork and minding Isabella and Duane and Katarin and maybe even Byram and Theo under certain circumstances, but certainly no circumstances involving frogs, snakes, animals of any kind for that matter, or jumping off of things. Or fire. "Absolutely not fire," I said.
"Aw, Ma!" Byram complained.
"Or alcohol!" I added. "Or money."
"Might as well just lock us up," Theo said, but he was grinning, and he hugged me around the waist, quickly and a bit sheepishly. I snagged Byram for a quick hug as well and ruffled his hair as he escaped. Isabella sort of sidled up to me and I hugged her from the side, because even though I didn't remember it, Kat had explained that nothing was more embarrassing at that age than having feelings, unless it was everything else in the world.
And then Kat enveloped me in a hug and whispered "You have to tell him this time!" in my ear, and I laughed as I pulled away and grabbed Duane's hand to climb up into the cart. Kat handed the shawl up to me, and then as Duane clucked to the birds, Isabella exclaimed, "That book you were working on!"
Duane pulled the birds to a halt. "The diary?" I said.
"Did you want to take it with you?"
I hesitated. "I... well... Yes! Do you know where it is?"
"Up on your writing desk," she said. Byram started into the house and she tore off after him, grabbing his flapping shirt tail and yelling something like "oh no you don't!"
"Hope it comes back in one piece," Duane said. I grinned, a bit uneasily now that he'd suggested that, and settled the shawl around my shoulders. They were back in remarkable time, with the diary in Bella's hands. She handed it up to me, bristling with my notes and transcriptions, and Byram handed me another messy sheaf of papers.
"Thanks, both of you," I said, beaming at them as I settled the papers in my lap. Duane flicked the reins again, and I twisted in my seat to look back and wave goodbye until darkness and distance took them completely out of sight.
After they'd faded out into dim shapes I was probably imagining, the glow from the porch light was entirely lost to me, I busied myself with wrapping the papers in my shawl. I was worried and excited at once and I didn't want to bore Duane senseless with my babbling - I'd done enough of that back at the house. So I fidgeted with the fringe of the shawl until he broke the silence.
"They'll be fine," he said at last. "It gets quiet with you gone, but they'll be okay. And it's going to be a lot easier than when you were fighting Kefka."
"I hope so."
"Think of it as a trade if you want," he added after a moment. "Katie and me... we never really got to take a honeymoon, so I was thinking I'd take some of the money I've saved and take her on a trip. Maybe go to Jidoor, let her get a look at that opera house and all the rest, those statues and galleries in that book she likes so much."
"Some of that got destroyed," I said, reluctantly. "I never had the heart to tell her."
He shrugged. "It can't be as great as she's built it up to be," he said. "It's just a place, after all. There'll be pigeon c— there'll be pigeons on all the statues. But I'd still like to take her there, show her the opera house and get her some godsawfully expensive dress to wear to it."
"Duane, that's so sweet! She'd love it." At least the dress and the glamor. I had no idea what she'd make of the opera.
"Hope so," he said, obviously a bit embarrassed. The silence stretched for a bit, broken only by the creaking of the wagon and the thud of the bird's feet. I considered gushing a bit more - it really was awfully sweet of him - but he forestalled me, blurting, "Look at the Northern Dragon up there."
"Where?"
He pointed out the constellation, waiting patiently until I could see it, and we let the talk turn to other topics until we got to the airship.
Once we got there, we unloaded my luggage and I hugged Duane goodbye, and with no further delay we took off, ponderously and loudly. I leaned on the rail and watched and waved as he shrank and dwindled out of sight, and I felt that strange mix of elation and sadness again as I watched the houses and fields I knew become tiny, dim toys beneath us. There was the faint glow of lamplight from some windows, a small burst of lights from the direction of town, but it was rapidly growing fully dark, and the windows weren't bright enough to light much of anything around them. Finally, chilled, I pulled away from the railing.