Chapter 4: A Happy Little Valley

I got back to Cambridge in time to shower, change, and hop into the Oracle with Nicco. We made a quick run into Boston proper, where I stopped to pick up season passes for the Boston Pops from the McKesson Group offices there. One of the corporate interns had been my legs on that mission, and her surprise end of the deal was discovering that two of the four ticket were for her.

From Boston we took I-89 headed towards Manchester, New Hampshire, but we slipped into a Grav-car air corridor headed for Montreal within the first five miles. We ran along that corridor at top legal speed for fifteen minutes or so before we dropped out just west of Bethel, Vermont. We didn't drop back into the surface traffic until just past Whiting though, touching down on Richville road which we followed into Shoreham. From Shoreham we followed state highway 74 across lake Champlain into and through Ticonderoga, New York, connecting with route 9 North, which we followed straight into Crown Point.

Crown Point itself was probably the smallest town on Earth I'd ever been to. Chocowinity itself might be smaller, but I'd never actually been into Chocowinity proper, so I couldn't say. It was the prototypical one street town though, and the Caldwell's lived a few minutes slow driving away from that main street, on Ferry Road. I called Cor's Cell as soon as we had passed through Ticonderoga, and so she was waiting for us when we pulled up. The house seemed nice and cheery, and there was a large gravel driveway, triple wide, so there was plenty of room to park already. Another Oracle, only a few years older than ours sat on one side of the driveway, and on the other side sat a newer model Honda Insight, the new Fuel Cell version, not the old gas/electric hybrid. Nicco slid right in between the two of them.

I got kissed the minute I was out of the car. It was so nice, I kissed back! The smile on Cor's face, and the light in her eyes managed to wash all the grief and pain I still wore from my recent activities on Arbor away in an instant.

"It is so, so good to be back in your arms again, my little flower." I said, lost in her eyes.

"I am?" She said. I must've looked puzzled for a second. "Your little flower?"

I laughed. That started a little frown on her face, so I had to jump in quickly.

"Sorry, but I hadn't even realized I'd used that phrase, and it made me laugh, because when Dad is being warm and cuddly with Mom he calls her 'Blossom'. Like father like son, I guess."

"Good Story." She said, hugging me again.

"Good save you mean, right?"

"Yeah, that too." She said with a laugh. "And T.C.'s going to love it."

Nicco got a peck on the cheek and we were ushered inside.

Mr. and Mrs. Caldwell were the prototypical small town American couple. Ben Caldwell was a tall, thin wiry man with sun-dried, leathery skin and a full head of pure white hair. He, it was plain was the source of Cor's blue eyes, as they were a dead-on match.

Carlotta Caldwell was shorter and plumper than her husband, but she wasn't really short or plump. She was as tall as Cor, but she had round rosy cheeks that left you with the plump farm wife impression.

Thaleia 'call me T.C.' Caldwell was ten years older than Cor. Like Cor, she had found her own answer to dealing with the name her parent had given her. Thaleia had been named after one of the Nereids in Greek mythology, just as Corycia had been named for one of the Naiads.and my initial impression of her was that she was locked in an eternal struggle to make herself seem important and accomplished in her parent's eyes. The problem was, she was the only one competing. She was dazzlingly gorgeous too, in a completely different way than Cor was.

She brought her boyfriend, Reggie, 'prospective husband number three', as Cor referred to him. The impression he gave was one of those coiffed and manicured stock market types, though it turned out he was actually an executive for a public relations firm in Boston. But he was a dyed-in-the-wool member of that variety of businessman my Dad gnashed his teeth over, and which Great-Grandpa McKesson refused to have anything to do with.

"A man who is in the business of business is a thief." Great Grandpa A.J. said. "And a business whose only business is making money is a crime waiting to happen."

Dinner was going to be home cooked, and Mrs. Caldwell would accept no offers of help. It was still early in the afternoon, and Mr. Caldwell was content to sit on the couch and visit, which T.C. And Reggie seemed willing to do.

"Daddy, I'm going to take Andy for a walk down main street and back, okay? If you start worrying that we're running late, call my cell."

Downtown Crown Point, New York was not what you might call 'feature rich', but Cor had a little story to tell about almost every building and person we saw as we walked down that street and back. Most of them stopped to visit, and I was universally introduced as 'my boyfriend Andy'.

"That sure sounds nice when you say it." I said as we walked away from one couple.

"What?" Cor asked.

"When you say 'my boyfriend Andy'" I said.

That drew a rare giggle and a hug. Cor wasn't a giggly girl, and that was definitely one of the things I loved about her.

"Yeah, and I love being introduced as your friend Nick, too!" Came Nicco's voice from behind us.

"Shut Up Nicco!" All three of us said simultaneously.

We got back in plenty of time to get washed up for dinner, and we sat at the table with Mr. Caldwell at one end, Nicco at the other end, flanked by T.C. And Reggie on one side and Cor and me on the other side. Mrs. Caldwell insisted she was eating on the kitchen's island, as she needed to keep an eye on the dessert.

Mrs. Caldwell served us a green salad, made mostly with fresh greens and veggies from her own garden, a delicious beef roast, with baked potatoes and steamed baby carrots, and dessert she said was a surprise. The meal may have seemed plain to some, but Mrs. Caldwell was an excellent cook! I was particularly enjoying the fresh, crisp flavor of her spring sugar peas, which she had included, in their pods, in the salad.

"You sound like you know your sugar peas Andy." Mrs. Caldwell said in response to my compliment.

"Well, My grandmother on my Dad's side is an excellent cook, as you are Mrs. Caldwell, and she had a nice vegetable garden back in California where they live. She grew sugar peas and tomatoes and her own spices and herbs. But she wasn't able to give the garden the kind of time and attention its needed the last couple of years, so I've had to subsist on my mom's, who doesn't quite have the green thumb you and my Grandma Elizabeth do."

That more or less got the conversational ball rolling at the dinner table, and it took no time at all for the questions to start hitting areas we'd avoided up to now.

"Andy, I don't remember Cor saying. Are you an MIT student too?" T.C. Asked.

"No actually, I'm about two months away from my Master's in Science, Technology and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of government." I answered. Phew! Good so far.

"Oh!" Mrs. Caldwell said. "Where did you meet?"

"On the MIT campus. In front of the Forbes Family Café, if memory serves me." I answered.

I managed to direct the conversation in another direction when I asked Reggie about working in public relations. He was happy to go on at length about the wonderful world of public relations, and his wonderful place in it. I made a note to myself to apologize to Mr. And Mrs. Caldwell at the first opportunity for getting him started.

After dinner, there was cake with candles and we sang Happy Birthday. It was interesting to see the ritual still being played out for a woman in her thirties, and more interesting to see the way T.C. Seemed to eat the attention up. I kept the season passes in my pocket. After having met her, I felt it would raise too many questions in her mind to get that kind of gift from me.

I gave them to Cor on the ride home.

"I'm sorry Cor, but it just didn't feel right, after I met her, so I kept them in my pocket."

"Its okay, that was a good call. I'll keep them in my dresser and maybe you and I can go once in a while, and I can certainly loan them to Audra or Traci."

"I wanted to come clean with Mom and Dad about you too, but it just didn't seem right with T.C. and Reggie there. I think that the phone would never stop ringing at their house once Reggie knew."

We both had classes in the morning, and it was well past dark when we got back. I walked Cor to her room and kissed her at her door.

"Lets get together for lunch again tomorrow. I've got to go away again for a few more days starting tomorrow afternoon, but when I get back we can go back to visit your folks and tell them everything. Maybe even spend the weekend?"

The trip up to the valley I was planning to live in was slow and tedious, but this time I couldn't take any of my usual shortcuts. I had Trough Farelly and Hardy Jeddrek, Lord Esterhal's Chief Engineer with me, along with a couple of Lord Esterhal's ever-present Warriors. The slow going let me think back to my previous trip to Arbor.

The aftermath of the end of the Ur-Witch left me exhilarated and depressed at the same time. It took many minutes, however many it took for full daylight to dawn around us, with me kneeling on the ground in that demolished field, before I could focus my eyes. When I did I realized there were tears in them, and my cheeks were wet. I had been crying because of the memory a cruel and evil monster had of being an innocent little five year old named Peony.

Once I had the tears cleared and was able to stand up, there was Titan.

"Remind me never to make you mad." He said.

Later, after we had finished searching the cottage and the surrounding area, and I had collected the Ur-Witch's now clean skull, The proof I had been told I needed to provide, he reminded me that it had been life or death, and the monster I killed only remembered the little girl. That the little girl had already died years ago.

I felt like walking in the sun, so I jumped the two of us to the edge of the forest and we began walking up the long sloping hill to the overlook where I had started this. Lord Esterhal and his bodyguards met us halfway. Firetree wasn't with them. The bodyguards were just purely twitchy with Titan walking beside me, but they must've been given a talking to before they headed out to meet us, because they managed to keep their weapons sheathed.

"This is my friend Titan. Titan, this is Lord Esterhal." I said by way of introduction.

"Nice place you've got here. A little overrun with bad guys though, don't you think?" I saw Lord Esterton's mouth twitch as he suppressed a smile. Good, they'd get along.

As if my thinking of him had drawn him back to us, Titan came sliding down a brush-covered slope to our right, executing a nice jump-stop about 3 feet in front of me, and bringing me back to the present.

"There's a nice broad table at the top of this small rise here that looks to run towards the valley mouth you're headed for, but it hits a solid rock outcrop at the far end. Otherwise it might be perfect." Titan told us as soon as he stopped.

I let my senses go, and took a good overhead look at the table in question, and the general area of the river canyon we were following towards the valley. Titan was right. The table of land would have been much better an approach to the valley mouth if it wasn't for the solid wall of rock that it ended in. The southern end of it would have been easy to build a road up to, as the table sort of died in a series of shallow shelves of rock towards the South East.

I examined the rock outcrop from front, back top and bottom. It was good, stable rock, not likely to go anywhere for a long time. Once past it, the route to the part of the valley where I envisioned building was pretty straight forward.

"I think we can work with this. Good work Titan!" I said, as I turned Slider around and started heading for the southern end of the table. Trough and Hardy were used to my sudden changes of direction by now, so turned without protest to follow.

Slider saw where we were going from my thoughts, so I let him steer, and once again my thoughts returned to the morning of our return from the lair of the Ur-Witch.

Titan had just no end of fun scaring Lord Esterhal's retinue when we got back to camp. The warriors on horseback who lost their seats were the most fun. What made it funnier was that minus their panicky riders, the horses, like Slider and most other horses I"d seen, thought Titan was just a fine fellow, and they gathered around him, nuzzling and snuffling and doing little lets-be-friends prancing maneuvers around him.

In Lord Esterhal's tent, I finally found Firetree, who was waiting attentively on the green-haired elfin woman I had freed from the Ur-Witch's compulsion. She looked up as I walked into the tent and broke out in a huge smile!

"Her name is Plover. She doesn't remember her last name, as her Magic evoked itself while she was still very young." Firetree said.

"Hello Plover." I said to her. Her smile widened.

"She hasn't talked, and from what I gather she probably never has, but she is fairly adept at mind-talking."

<Hello Plover.> I repeated in her mind.

Whoa! I got barraged with thoughts and impressions and emotions all in one big jumble!

<Calm down, little one.> I thought to her.

"She seems a bit excitable." I said to Firetree, which got a laugh from him, and another big smile from Plover.

"Yes, she is very happy to be free of the Ur-Witch. She has been a mind-slave for almost twenty years now."

Plover was what the Arborians called a 'Wood Wife', a particularly potent and rare manifestation of Magic that gave the ability to control all plant life, and in many ways invested much of the nature of the plants in the Wood Wife. This alone was the reason that Plover had survived her captivity for so many years. When she stood still long enough, she just put down roots and fed like a plant! Because this was an unconscious act on her part, requiring no mental control, she survived.

Survival, I found out, was in the eye of the beholder. Plover had missed the benefits of normal food, and was busy reacquainting her palate with meat, and hot food, reacquainting her stomach with food in general, but it was slow going.

Firetree, it was obvious to me, was smitten. He was very attentive, waiting on her hand and foot. Her wide grins for me were nicely offset by much softer, demure smiles at him. I could only hope. Firetree could benefit by the influence of a woman in his life. Perhaps Plover could mellow him some.

Slider snorted when we reached our destination, breaking me out of my reverie. The southern edge of the table looked out over the southern end of the narrow river valley that led between the two Perdin foothills to my little valley. From here the valley widened and became more open country, meandering south and west from here until it joined the mouths of three other valleys to become the open plain where the Northern Trade Road ran past the Red Flag Inn and on to Pipertown to the East, then across the border into the neighboring kingdom of Lamin. I captured an image of the tabletop in my mind, and with the layout firmly fixed in my thoughts, I reached out and lifted the sod, peat and topsoil up from a strip 20 feet wide, leaving a perfectly rectangular 20 by 5 foot strip of exposed gravel.

"This is your goal Hardy." I said to the engineer. "I will build the road from the valley to here. You'll build from the trade road and meet mine here."

"You're keeping all the glory for yourself I see." Hardy commented.

"If you mean the hard part, you're right." I added.

Hardy didn't bother to mention, but I knew he understood, that the advantage to my doing the inside leg of the road was that whatever defensive surprises I might decide to add would be my little secret, and I wouldn't have to worry about Hardy or his crews sharing that kind of information with King Esterhal. A man's home being his castle and all...