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All windows of the Red House of Trickfoot were wide open and letting a refreshing early spring breeze blow through. The accumulated dust of a few months of cozying up was at last being swept out, every nook and cranny of the cluttered home scrubbed squeaky clean. It was the first sunny day after a rather lazy winter had stubbornly refused to lift from Westruun for the better part of the past year. In the morning, Pike had declared she was reviving the old gnome tradition of spring cleaning which the frenzy of parenting two small children had made them forgo for a couple years too many. She, who truth be told occupied the kitchen far more than any other room in the house, had decided she would tackle tidying up the ground floor while keeping an eye on Grog, while Scanlan was watching over their flesh and blood and wrangling them into helping him with the upstairs a little if they could. He would not have dared to guess to whom befell the harder task — though he suspected that their goliath friend would prove slightly more compliant than the two gnomelings currently trampling all over him.
“Oh, not the face!” He protested, trying in vain to bat bare little feet off his face. “That’s the money maker, Juni!”
The toddler girl roared with laughter, all the more heartily when her brother began to pull on Scanlan’s hair, painfully loosening it from the tight bun in which he had tied it in the morning to keep it out of his eyes. He yelped at the sharp tug from an uncontrolled toddler unaware of his own strength. They were little tricksters, the pair of them, all the best and naughtiest traits of their mother and father fortified into adorable would-be fiends who had nothing better to do every day than make his life a complete mess. Scanlan would not have traded this new phase of his life for any damn thing. Somehow, it was a mightier adventure than saving the world a handful of times.
“Look, kids, we have to get some cleaning done or mama’s gonna be really sad and… Oh, for fu… for frick’s sake, Wax, not the ears! That shit hurts!”
In the old house where Pike had grown up in and shared with Grog since their youth, the house where Scanlan had met her and fallen for her, there she had brought him in as well. Within a year of one another, not long after they had wed, Pike had given birth to a daughter, then a son, the greatest gifts Scanlan had ever received. A lot of the time, Grog half visited, half lived with them. Equally as often, Kaylie stayed and spent time with her father and siblings. The house was never silent save for the odd hours at night when the beasties were wrangled and tucked lovingly into their little beds.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Scanlan grumbled as with much effort he got up to his feet again. From a pocket he grabbed his flute and played a few notes. “How about we put some fighting spirit into this? Whoever gathers the most toys by the end of the song gets double dessert tonight!”
He began to play a new tune, but Juniper had taken his words too literally and was picking up toys not just from the scattered mess across the floor but also from shelves and boxes, so that the total count for tidiness came at a net negative through her actions. Wilhand’ildan, who had celebrated his second birthday not a month earlier, turned out to be too young to really understand the instructions enough to follow them. Dancing to the melody his father played, he was more interested in clapping and laughing than cleaning up anything. It was adorable, but Pike would not be satisfied with adorableness if she later realized his half of the burden had not been carried out.
Downstairs, through the open doorways between them, Scanlan could hear her chatting with Grog, laughing at some travel anecdote he was sharing, and having an overall rather merry time of it. He lost a few chords as the thought of her smile distracted him. He knew that she had put on a loose white-ish apron around the waist earlier, the same she used at the bakery, and her hair was caught in two lopsided buns up above her head. Maybe he should have insisted on not dividing up the tasks, but rather the whole family going from room to room as they cleaned things up all together. He would have so enjoyed the sight of his wife so happily tackling the task at hand…
A boom came from just outside the door and startled the three of them.
One moment, she was downstairs with Grog, and the next their giant friend had launched her over the staircase banister, just past the baby gate, and she made a perfect albeit loud three point landing which made the old floorboards creak. Scanlan let out a little gasp of awed surprise at the sight of her. Even hard at work, she was lovely, especially a little bit disheveled by the impromptu quasi-flight − Grog was too big to walk upstairs and had punted her right up there. She barged into the room and Scanlan threw the flute aside.
“It was just to help them!” Scanlan said at once in a squeaky, guilty voice. “It’s just for inspiration, we’re actually working!”
Pike gave him a gentle scolding glance, but shook her head as though to tell him they would talk about it later. Instead, she crouched down to Juniper’s level to show her some piece of paper she was holding up.
“I’m helping daddy,” Juniper said proudly in her slurry little voice, showing off her armful of toys as evidence. She had picked up on Scanlan’s nervous energy, it seemed, and looked to overcompensate as quickly, she shoved everything into a big box and picked up a doll which had fallen off the side. “We’re doing all good.”
Pike chuckled and her fingers brushed against their daughter’s soft brown hair which was tousled from so much running around. She tucked a curl behind her little pointy ears.
“I can see that, sweetheart.” she said. With a tender smile, she gave Juniper what appeared to be a tiny painting, so accurately done Scanlan wondered if it wasn’t one of those pictures he had heard about, the ones that captured reality on paper in all details through magic ways he had yet to understand. “Look what I found, but be very careful with it. This is your great-great-great-grandfather Wilhand Trickfoot. I lived with him in this house when I was a little girl.”
Scanlan approached to have a look at the picture as well, Wax in his trail clutching his leg as he peeked over his sister’s arm. Wilhand had been rather young when this had been taken, for sure less than a hundred years old, perhaps not even half that. He had a bright smile and a mischievous glint in the eyes that was not at all unlike Pike when she pulled a successful prank. But it wasn’t in Pike’s gaze that Scanlan most often saw this look these days, but rather…
“You look just like him,” Pike told Juniper. “Don’t you think?”
Scanlan mussed his daughter’s hair, leaning over to kiss the crown of her head.
“She really does,” he said. “It’s uncanny.”
Juniper’s face snapped to him abruptly, her brows furrowed in confusion and more than a little note of fury.
“I’m not an old man,” she said. “I’m a girl.”
Scanlan and Pike laughed at her face scrunched up in offense. His heart was filled with fondness for the child. In truth, he had often thought that Wax looked just like Kaylie when he was laughing − and he often laughed − which had the very simple explanation that both of them looked a lot like his mother. He wished she had been there to enjoy seeing her grandchildren grow, but he supposed he did that in her stead now that she was gone. This was a thought he shared with Pike, however, and she gave him a sad smile he knew was tinted with the still relatively fresh grief of having lost Wilhand a few years prior. When someone was gone, they lived on in the memories you held of them and, they were both realizing, in the people that came after them.
“Well, this was a great find,” he said, looking fondly at the picture of the man he had barely known. He wished that he had, his son’s namesake, his daughter’s spitting image. He wondered too what Juniper Shorthalt might have thought of his wife.
Eventually, there came the sound of something shattering downstairs and the telltale outcry from their dear friend of a few words Scanlan hoped the kids would not pick on too soon. His fatherly instinct was instantly squashed by the gleeful high-pitched voice of his son.
“Fucking shit!” Wax sing-sang in the tune that Scanlan had played on the flute just a moment before. “Fucking shit!”
But a stern glance from Pike was enough for him to trail off and he clasped his hands behind his back obediently. She smiled at the promptness of his reaction. Standing up, she patted him on the head as she took a quick stride towards Scanlan to give him a kiss on the cheek.
“I’ll handle the goliath, you handle the gnomes,” she told him. She looked about the room, which would not have looked all that different if a sudden, highly targeted earthquake had ravaged it, and sighed. “Good luck, Scanlan. You look like you’ll need it.”
Scanlan gave her a big grin and lifted off an imaginary hat.
“My lady, with your blessing,” he said. “I shall tame the beasts and defeat the dragon.”
As Pike chuckled and left him to it, trotting energetically down the stairs, Scanlan looked at the mess about the room and let out a deep sigh. He put on his most charming smile and picked up his flute again. The children watched him expectantly.
“How about we resume our little bardic inspiration, huh?”
And in the joyful chaos that ensued the rest of the day, he did not lose faith he would make his wife proud yet.