“Do you have any idea how hard it is to properly dispose of 55,000 liters of holy water!” Alsoomose really worked herself into a frenzy. The last two months were quite hard on her. Her little boy held someone else inside of him. She soared from anger to guilt to confusion to shame. She resisted settling herself to avoid the base question, is he still my son? Is he my child?

Ahanu stoically took his wife’s tirade, “I’m aware, dear. That’s why I—”

“Poor Father Frank nearly had an heart attack! You know how he takes his charge as the palace chaplin.”

“Yes, quite true. My plan is—”

“We need to take that scoundrel of an old man and hang him by his thumbs at the gates!”

“May I speak?”

“Yes, please speak. It’s all you ever do.”

“I remember our current dual record to be 12-7-18 in my favor. As—”

“YOU! You dirty, cheating, scoundrel could never win in a stand-up fight! All my—” Ahanu, fed up with the interruptions, decided to employ one of his most disarming and infuriating tricks. He cloned an illusion of himself with light magic then slipped into darkness. Next, he snuck up behind Alsoomose and spun her around into a deep kiss.

Alsoomose hated this. Well...she mostly hated it. It only worked when she became engrossed so deeply in an emotional argument that she forgot her surroundings.

“I assume I have your attention?”

Jackass, thought Alsoomose. She stomped on his foot, untangled herself from his arms, and turned her back to him with a huff. “You were saying?”

“The holy water that Brother Caloner made is actually quite valuable, if not for the sale of blessed items being somewhere between banned and highly regulated.”

“You wouldn’t dare. That’s sacrilege!”

“Woh there, my wild mare. I didn’t say I was selling it, I said it was valuable. As we can’t let it run into the sewers, I already had the bath pumps cut off. And if I’m going to have to bottle it anyway, I might as well put it to good use. As part of our ‘donation’ to the Bishop, we will be transporting barrels of the stuff to different parishes across the duchy.”

“Then how is that any different from what I said! The cost of disposing of that holy water will be immense.”

"True, but what we were going to pay His Eminence was going to be immense anyway. I actually think that we can save money by handling all the transportation in house. Plus we get the good PR of helping the Church in remote locations. I’ll be sure the transports are all clearly marked.”

Alsoomose flopped down onto a chaise. “I suppose you schemed your way into my heart...I don’t see why the Church and Kingdom should be any different.”

“Be mad at me, but please, don’t be mad at Brother Caloner. He did quite exactly what we asked him to do, and with much more effort than I think you’re crediting him. The holy water may have just saved Huritt.”

Ahanu sat and began to rub his wife’s feet. A dim golden glow could be seen wisping off his fingertips. “He provided the blessed bonemill himself. I don’t know where he got it, but he hasn’t asked for reimbursement yet. And right now, I think he’s the best person to really talk to our son.”

“Our son can’t talk to anyone, he’s in a coma!”

“One medically induced. Caloner and Powaw both agree that he should be ‘coming to’ in about 30 hours. In the meantime, the information Caloner extracted—just from vocabulary—seems immense. He’s working around the clock on a cross reference dictionary.”

“Which also means he’ll crash just in time for HurHur to wake up. LIOLA! Ahh, there you are. Inform the good monk that he will find time to rest before my son arises from his slumber, or I will have to find a new place for my sword to rest in his stead.” All the servants had been doing their best to be nonexistent while the couple argued. Liola actually thought it was a blessing to be given an excuse to flee the room, even if it was to deliver a death threat.

“You know, I do wish that you wouldn’t yell at the staff. It doesn’t help them. Anyway, Caloner doesn’t understand half of what he’s learned, and he’s trying his best to organize the words by topic to grasp all the information. This could be game changing for our Kingdom.”

“But I don’t care about the Kingdom. I care about our boy, my HurHur.”

“And there you’ve said it. The truth that I think you innately know. He’s still our son. He was tricked, abused, and cast out from his homeworld. The heavens blessed us with what I can only see as a holy adoption. Do not cast him out of your heart for fear, but embrace him in your bosom of love.”