The strained family of three sat at the bottom of Wyllam’s grave. Lauraline held Miralynn firmly in her lap, determined to keep the babbling baby from grabbing at any casket splinters or finishing the job of degloving one of her father’s decaying fingers.
“Don’t.” Lauraline warned Wyllam quietly. She wasn’t sure what she had expected Miralynn’s reaction to be; she guessed babies had no reason to instinctively fear the undead, and Lauraline certainly wasn’t afraid of him, so there was nothing to mirror there. “She’ll try and teeth on anything; she’s worse than a dog.”
Wyllam kept his offered hand just out of Miralynn’s reach and scowled at her mother. “This is sort of why you dug me up, though, isn’t it? I mean, it’s mine, isn’t it?”
Lauraline ground her teeth. Why was it still so hard to just say the damn thing? He’d just done half of it for her, and still the words choked her. “She. Miralynn. Yes.”
“Pretty.” Wyllam said absently; he’d distracted himself by watching Miralynn squirm and whatever his own thoughts on the matter were.
“That’s it?” Lauraline whispered, as much wanting to know what those thoughts might be as asking herself. She was supposed to be feeling better now, wasn’t she? She’d said it. He knew. And still she felt this cloying need for something.
Wyllam thought a moment longer before asking, “You should have said something.”
Lauraline scoffed. How many more times was she going to have to remind him? “You died.”
“Yeah. I got that part, Laur.” He continued to play at letting Miralynn grab ahold of his hand, while Lauraline continued to hold the baby back from lunging at him. “Why bring me back now? I mean, did you have to let me rot a couple of years first?”
Lauraline wrapped her hands over her daughter’s tiny fists. “You think if Selene weren’t missing, I’d be allowed to do all this? It wasn’t just digging you up, you know?”
“Thank you.” Wyllam looked up at her with too much sincerity in his yellowed, sunken eyes. It made Lauraline want to shudder. This had been a terrible idea.
“Do not thank me.” At least Lauraline managed not to snap, although Miralynn’s babbling did take on a rather stern tone to mirror her own.
Wyllam cocked his head. “Why not?”
“I can’t—I’m not keeping you.” Lauraline had never wanted to. They had never talked like that when Wyllam was alive. When he had died, there was no future to mourn. No real thought was put into his resurrection beyond just a current, finite need and the fact that he owed them. What came after that… Lauraline hadn’t thought that far ahead. She didn’t even know the limits of the spell. “I don’t think I can.”
Contrary to Lauraline’s fears, Wyllam grinned. “You said that a couple of times before, though, didn’t you?”
“Wyllam.” Lauraline warned, and again, Miralynn mimicked the sound.
It made Wyllam’s smile soften. Until another thought turned it all back to a scowl. “No, you can’t just dig me up, tell me I have a daughter, and then—and then what, Laur? She probably won’t even remember this. So what are you getting out of it?”
A whistled tune sounded at the other end of the cemetery.
Rather than answer Wyllam’s question, Lauraline stood to peek over the edge of the grave. No sight of the groundskeeper, but he would be looking to check on her, poor, presumably widowed, single mother that she was.
Lauraline grumbled wordlessly to herself as she sunk back down to the bottom of the grave. “We have to go.”
Wyllam looked more prepared to bolt than she, but asked, rightfully nervous and a little too hopeful for Lauraline’s taste, “All—all of us?”
“Yes.” Lauraline sighed as she stood. She lifted Miralynn up over the edge of the grave, setting her there before hauling herself out and leaning back over the edge to finish giving Wyllam instructions. “Meet me at the west way into town. Do you remember where that is?”
Wyllam nodded slowly as he stood. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Great.” Lauraline leaned in further to offer Wyllam a hand up, out of the grave. She couldn’t imagine a couple of years worth of decay had done his upper body strength any favors. “Go!”
----------------------------------------
Lauraline hadn’t expected to beat Wyllam to the west gate. She’d had to assure the groundskeeper that she was alright and leaving, then collect her horse from the inn’s stable and saddle it, all while entertaining an overtired and off her routine eighteen-month-old.
“I should have warned you, huh?” Lauraline swayed and bounced Miralynn as they waited by the road. “The funny, smelly man might never come back. No. Although that would be really stupid of him, because there’s really nobody else but us that’s going to be nice about how smelly and silly he is. They’re really not.”
Miralynn continued to fuss quietly.
“It’s okay, Mira. If the silly, smelly man doesn’t turn up soon, then momma is gonna go hunt him down and put him back in his box. Never mind all the work you and I did to get him out of it, huh?”
“Well, I didn’t know we had a dark arts prodigy on our hands.”
Lauraline startled, taking Miralynn and the horse with her. “You know better than to sneak up on me!”
“Well, I wasn’t going to go walking through town, was I?” Wyllam shuffled the rest of the way out of the shadows. It seemed a couple of years in a casket hadn’t done his legs any favors either. “I had to go all the way around.”
“No.” Lauraline juggled the skittish horse and her still bothered baby. “Can we just get going, please?”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“You want me up there?” Wyllam nodded to the saddle.
“Yes. Please.” Lauraline got a hand on the horse’s halter, preventing it from catching another look at the corpse swinging himself up into its saddle.
“And you’ll just be walking then?”
“For a bit.” Lauraline began to do exactly that, leading the horse behind her down the road she had come by. “You aren’t exactly easy to sneak into an inn, looking like that.”
“What about Miralynn?”
Lauraline frowned. She hadn’t expected Wyllam to remember Miralynn’s name. “What do you mean?”
“You’re leading a horse, you’re holding a baby…”
“And I shot a swarm of wyvlings out of the sky while six months pregnant.” Lauraline was still proud of that one. The only people to have really seen it were Uravas and Selene, of course. Wyllam should have been there.
Wyllam sighed. “Let me hold her?”
Lauraline thought about it for a moment. That was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? She was going to resurrect him and make him help. He owed her. But… Not yet. “You’ll scare her.”
Wyllam snorted. After sitting at the bottom of his own grave with her, it was a shoddy excuse. “And so again I have to ask, why did you bring our infant daughter to perform a necromancy ritual?”
“Our.” Lauraline repeated to herself. She really hadn’t expected him to get with it so quickly… It didn’t sit right with her now.
“You didn’t have to dig me up, you know?” Wyllam didn’t just sound indignant now. If Lauraline didn’t know better, he might have sounded hurt.
“Oh, believe me, I know.”
“Then if I’ve always been such an inconvenience to you, why’d you do it at all?”
Lauraline slowed to a stop. She didn’t want to answer that question. Wyllam needed a distraction.
“Here.” Lauraline stepped around the horse to offer Miralynn up to him. She’d have them stop for what was left of the night soon enough. This was—some of—what Lauraline had dug him up for anyway. “You have her?”
“I know how to hold a baby, Laur.” Wyllam couldn’t help but smile as he took the baby into his arms, and as odd as it looked, it still made Lauraline feel the littlest bit better. She didn’t hate Wyllam; she didn't want him to be unhappy; she certainly hadn’t wanted him to die.
“Hello there,” Wyllam cooed. As determined to touch him as Miralynn had been before, the change of hands displeased the baby. Miralynn whimpered and threatened to cry, sounding more and more confused the longer her mother didn’t answer.
It confused Lauraline too. Selene had often teased about how much Lauraline coddled the baby, but given the circumstances and the fact that Miralynn was just over a year old, Lauraline had felt justified in her clinginess.
“You should sing to her.” Lauraline said without thought. Her old wry smile had crept back in; that was the way things had been from the minute Wyllam had started to tail them; she couldn’t have just come out and told him she enjoyed his songs, or his company, or just him at all. It had to be a joke or a jab. It was all just having fun. Until it wasn’t.
“She likes that?” Wyllam sounded much too hopeful again.
Lauraline shrugged, then amended when she remembered he probably couldn’t see that. “She’s never heard you before.”
Neither she nor Selene had ever sung much to Miralynn: they hummed, they singsonged little phrases the way anyone did with an infant around, but there was an unspoken rule about song. That had been Wyllam’s thing, after all. He should have been there.
When Wyllam lifted his voice in song, Lauraline had planned to tune him out. She had heard them all before; they had been gone from her for years now, she didn’t want to grieve again. But this one she recognized for different reasons—it was about her, and Uravas, and Selene, and even Wyllam himself.
A long silence hung in the air after Wyllam had finished his song. It had worked, Lauraline assumed. She didn’t hear the sound of Miralynn fussing behind her, but she wouldn’t turn around to be certain.
“That’s a new one.” Lauraline whispered after another long, quiet moment. She had asked him not to when their relationship had taken a turn for the amorous. It didn’t feel right. She wasn’t someone to be sung about. They weren’t even in love.
“Had a lot of time to work on it,” Lauraline could hear the shrug in his voice, soft as it was. “Being dead and all.”
----------------------------------------
Lauraline pulled them off the road to make camp after the road took a sharp turn towards the west. If she had been determined, she could have walked through the night and gotten them to the next town over. A few more after that, they would return to the farmhouse that she and Selene had shared… But Lauraline wasn’t sure she was that determined. And it was like she’d told Wyllam; sneaking him into an inn with the way he looked now was more trouble than it was worth. Besides all of that, this was what she and Miralynn were used to.
Wyllam stayed out of Lauraline’s way; a first time for everything. He held the still sleeping Miralynn while Lauraline saw to the horse and set up her meager camp. It was nice having help again—it was what Lauraline had dug him up for—but she wouldn’t be admitting to that.
“She just sleeps out here, on the road with you?” Wyllam chanced the question while Lauraline unfurled her bedroll.
“We’re not homeless.” Lauraline grumbled. It would have been nice to be able to say that and not mean that they had really just lived with Selene until recently. “But yeah… I guess she’s done more sleeping out on the road with me than not.”
“How did it happen?” Wyllam sat himself down beside the bedroll. “When you all split?”
Lauraline huffed. It wouldn’t be worth it to start a fire. She had run out of busy work. “We didn’t split up. Uravas got hurt because we weren’t there, because I had just given birth.”
“Because I knocked you up.” Wyllam finished the chain of events, and Lauraline held back a cringe. He wasn’t wrong; he just didn’t have to say it.
“And you know—knew, Uravas… I think he lasted a month before convalescing with me, and a newborn got to be too much for him. Selene couldn’t—wouldn’t—go after him. So…” Lauraline shrugged.
“You went back to it though. Alone?”
“Well, what else am I going to do? What else are any of us?” Lauraline had never blamed Uravas; she blamed Wyllam. If she hadn’t been pregnant, she wouldn’t have had to leave Uravas alone; he wouldn’t have gotten injured. Or even still, Selene wouldn’t have had to choose between them. Wyllam should have been the one to stay with Lauraline. Wyllam should have been there.
Wyllam didn’t have an answer for her, or he knew it even still. It was why they had hazed him the way they all had; it wasn’t the type of life one picked up on a whim, nor was it set aside so easily.
“I guess you don’t have to sleep…” Lauraline said more as a thought out loud than anything else as she reached for Miralynn.
“Doesn’t feel like it.” But still, Wyllam chose to sit closer beside her. Lauraline couldn’t tell if the smell of him had finally worn off or she’d just gotten used to it. “Bet that would have been nice, huh?”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“What?”
Lauraline settled herself and Miralynn into the bedroll; against her better judgment, she chose not to lie with her back to Wyllam; she kept Miralynn between them instead. “I wish you wouldn’t act like you would have stuck around.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you. Knew you.”
“No, you didn’t.” He almost started to sound hurt again. “You made a very loud and angry point of that.”
“Alright then. Pretend you hadn’t died. What do you think would have happened?”
“Well, first, you’d have to tell me. Who knows when that would have been? And then I would guess you or I would have had to keep Uravas from killing me anyway. You probably would have let him get awfully close…”
Lauraline drifted to sleep while Wyllam rambled on about the life they’d never have.
----------------------------------------
“Laur…” Wyllam whispered and poked Lauraline in the shoulder. She swatted at him half-heartedly; in her sleep-laden mind, it was years prior, but she still wasn’t in the mood.
“Laur.” His tone became more urgent, as did the prodding of his bony finger. Because Wyllam was dead—undead now, and Miralynn wasn’t crying, but her silence could be just as concerning. “Uravas is—”
Lauraline launched herself up to a sit, searching for Miralynn first. When she caught a glimpse of her in Wyllam’s arms, she turned her focus to the living man crouched by her feet.
“Good morning, Lauraline.” Uravas smiled. As the most stoic person that Lauraline had ever known, it was never good when Uravas smiled. “Still determined to make poor decisions, I see.”