Chapter 2: Parenting Neither Party Qualified
Old Nanny opened the door and stopped.
The woman standing on the step had mud on her clothes, grass in her hair, and several marks on her that defied easy explanation. Head to toe, she looked like someone who had recently lost a fight with a stretch of open countryside and then sprinted the entire way back to civilization.
But her eyes were different.
Twenty-some years running an orphanage had given Old Nanny a comprehensive catalog of human faces. She had seen eyes with nothing left in them. She had seen eyes packed too full of the wrong things. What she rarely saw — what she was looking at right now — was this: a clarity that carried warmth in it, a steadiness that simply was — and Old Nanny found herself without words.
"...Can I help you?" she said, her voice coming out quieter than usual.
"I'm here to pick up a child." Galatina's voice was still slightly rough. She held her hand out at a certain height. "He lives here. I'm taking him."
Old Nanny studied her for a moment. Then she pulled the door open wider, turned, and went inside to find him.
Uriel was sitting in the hallway with an old coat draped across his knees, waiting.
He heard the footsteps and looked up.
She was standing at the far end of the corridor, backlit by the dim yellow glow from inside, hair still disheveled, mud still on her clothes.
But her eyes were different.
He looked at her for one second. Then he folded the coat, handed it back to Old Nanny, and stood up.
He walked over to her, stopped in front of her, tilted his head back to look at her properly, and held out one hand as high as he could.
She looked down at that small hand hovering in the air.
Half a second passed.
Then she bent, a little awkwardly, and folded it carefully inside her own.
"Let's go," he said.
"Okay," she answered, and straightened up, and led him toward the door.
"What's your name?"
"Galatina."
"I'm Uriel."
Old Nanny stood in the hallway and watched the two of them — tall and small — walk out through the gate. She stood there for a long time without saying anything.
---
The place they found was a small abandoned house at the edge of a village near the mountains.
It wasn't large. Two rooms, a stove, a half-plot of vegetable garden, and a well in the yard. The stone rim of the well had been worn smooth by years of use, which meant someone had lived here once and lived here properly.
Galatina pushed open the door, looked around, and nodded.
That expression means "acceptable," Uriel translated internally. Practical and satisfied.
He followed her in, did his own circuit of the place, and then settled onto a low stool beside the stove to observe what this woman he had called "mom" was planning to do next.
What she was planning to do next was cook.
Oh.
He hadn't expected that.
He'd assumed she would sweep first. Or check the surroundings. Or at least wipe the mud off her clothes.
Instead she walked directly to the stove, brought in two logs from outside, pushed them into the firebox, and crouched down to light them.
Uriel sat beside her, chin in his hand, and watched.
The fire-starting process was mostly normal, except that her hands were clearly unfamiliar with the work. She struck at it several times without catching. Eventually she nudged it with a thread of magic, and orange flame finally crawled up from the wood, filling the firebox with a warm, flickering glow.
Then she added water to the pot.
A lot of water.
Uriel opened his mouth, decided to keep observing.
Then she went outside and came back with a handful of wild greens he didn't recognize, rinsed them under the pump, and — without trimming, without cutting — dropped them directly into the pot.
She leaned over and looked in. Apparently decided the fire wasn't hot enough. Bent down, raised her hand, started to use magic again — paused — lowered her hand — and instead reached for more firewood.
Not two pieces.
An armful.
The flames surged up high, crackling against the pot. They climbed high, licking the bottom of the pot with enthusiastic crackling sounds. The water hit a rolling boil almost immediately and began throwing itself over the rim in small, aggressive waves.
Galatina looked at the pot.
Then she turned around, picked up the basin of vegetable rinse water sitting beside her, and poured it directly into the firebox.
The fire went out. A column of smoke rose from the stove and spread cheerfully across the entire kitchen. Uriel bent his head and coughed twice, pulling his sleeve up over his nose.
What remained in the pot was a quantity of half-cooked, vaguely disintegrated wild greens floating in murky liquid, with several black flecks drifting on top that were probably soot.
Galatina lifted the pot off the stove, set it on the table, and pushed it toward Uriel. She sat down across from him. Her expression was calm and carried the quiet satisfaction of someone who had completed a task.
"Eat," she said.
Uriel looked at the bowl.
...Is this edible?
But she worked hard on it.
...Fine.
He picked up the spoon, scooped one mouthful, put it in his mouth, chewed with full sincerity, and swallowed. He conducted a silent, objective, and rigorously fair evaluation.
Burnt. A little bitter. Greens not fully rinsed, faint taste of mud. But hot.
He took the second spoonful. Then he looked up and spoke in the most carefully neutral tone he owned:
"...It's good."
Galatina looked at him. She paused. Then she looked down, scooped a spoonful for herself, and swallowed it.
She looked up at Uriel. Said nothing.
Uriel, cradling his bowl, quietly supplied the sentence she had left unfinished:
...Yeah, it really isn't.
---
After that, life had a great many other things in it.
There was the afternoon Galatina was dealing with a pest in the vegetable garden. The insect had retreated under a root. She reached down and swatted at it.
Three neighboring households simultaneously concluded that there had been an earthquake and came running outside to assess the damage. One man asked if a dragon had landed somewhere nearby.
Uriel stood in the yard, looked at his neighbors assembled in the road with the color drained from their faces, then looked at the suspicious depression in the garden bed. He filed a mental note: Mom still needed work when it came to everyday strength control.
There was also the evening she went to draw water from the well, and the rope broke. She reached in without thinking, fished the bucket out from the bottom with a thread of magic, and lifted it to the surface. Then she registered what she'd done, lowered the bucket again, found a new rope, and drew the water again properly.
Uriel was sitting on the stone block in the yard and watched the entire sequence in silence.
There was the time a child from the village got their kite stuck in a tree, couldn't climb high enough to reach it, and started crying. Galatina was passing by. She stopped, considered the situation, and gave the tree a gentle push.
The branch bounced. The kite fell. The child caught it and ran off happy.
The tree, for its part, was now leaning at a noticeable, thoroughly unnatural angle. Galatina quietly nudged it back into place.
Uriel watched this with genuine puzzlement.
…Why not just jump up and grab it?
---
Over the following weeks, he added to his observation log every few days. The entries grew longer. More detailed.
Then one evening he sat on the front step, looked back over everything he'd written, thought about it for a moment, and arrived at a conclusion he felt was accurate and fair:
My mom, he thought, face perfectly composed, is not great at taking care of people.
Cooking: consistently scorched. Drawing water: rope casualty rate 1-in-3. Pest control: geological event. Fire-starting: explosion risk.
She wasn't good at buying groceries. She sometimes forgot salt entirely. Sometimes she put in twice the amount. She regularly left the house without money — and yet somehow always came back with something. The items varied. Last time it had been half a bag of wild fruit that neither of them could identify. The time before, a live fish she claimed to have found on the riverbank.
Uriel sat on the step and reviewed the full record from the beginning.
Then he rested his chin on his knee and looked out at her crouched by the vegetable garden, engaged in what appeared to be a serious one-sided negotiation with a plant that wasn't performing to expectations. He exhaled.
Since she's clearly terrible at taking care of people, he concluded with absolute tranquility, I guess I'll just have to take care of her.
First priority: teach her to calibrate her strength for normal situations. Second priority: secure a stable food supply that doesn't involve mystery ingredients.
He paused. Then added one final item:
Also: teach her how to take care of me.