"I rather like Dad," Victor said. The hand holding the cup finally reached Frost. "You can call me that when I'm behind the cart, too. There's no rule about where a fellow has to stand to hear his own boy."
Frost took a long drink. Felicity could almost see him working out whether that invitation would still be good once the scarf came off and everybody started walking again. He gave it a try. "Dad, there's a dead lady's tooth on your shoe."
Victor looked down. "So there is. Would you believe that's still the nicest thing anybody's said to me all week?" Frost grinned, delighted to have given his father such good news. Voss took the empty cup from him and handed Felicity half a piece of bread without asking if her hands would hold it yet. She ate it between bites of his apple while they got the carts moving.
Luna waited until the tooth had been scraped off on the curb before she offered Victor her hand. "Does that mean you're my dad, too? I don't have anything to tell you about your shoes."
"Your brother didn't have to pay me a tooth for the privilege," Victor said. He drew her up alongside him so she could touch the soft ends of his feathers without getting them in his face. "I was rather hoping I'd get you both."
Felicity had once sat outside an office listening to grown-ups decide where there was room for one more child. Watching her husband take two of them by the hand without so much as checking where he had room made it hard to get the last bite of apple down. Voss held out his palm for the core. He even let her take a minute to blow her nose before he asked if she wanted to ride again.
By late afternoon they'd reached a stretch of pavement cleared right up to the fence on either side. Beyond the wire, someone had painted a distance to Vineyard on the wall of an old factory. The carts could make the gate by morning. While Finch and the horsemen checked the empty loading bays for a place to sleep, Victor walked up beside Damien.
"In the fog you waited until the dead got close enough to trip. You had Fel on one side and a cart on the other. Would you have done it differently if you'd had more room?"
"I could've put half of them on their backs with venom. Your wife was at my shoulder and you kept stepping between me and the dead. If I caught you by mistake, I'd be the one explaining to her why you couldn't move your legs."
"That's what I'd like to find out," Victor said. He indicated a clean patch of concrete well away from the carts. "You and me, while there's time to learn it without a real set of teeth coming at my back."
Felicity had been waiting for some version of this since the warehouse. She'd had plenty of time to think of a fine speech about two grown men settling things for themselves. She discovered she'd much rather poke one of them in the ribs. "Victor, if you need to know how to fight alongside him, that's a fair question. If you want to punch the man because I held his hand, I'd like you to say which hand offends you. I've got plans for both."
A little color came into Damien's face. Victor turned her wrist over and kissed her palm. "I liked knowing whose hands were on you in that place a whole lot less than I like knowing whose hands are on you now. I can live with that. I won't take him into another fight until I know how to come out beside him."
Damien put his coat down. "I could use some practice doing that myself," he told her, and that settled it. The cubs went to help stack blankets. Felicity stood with Voss where she could watch. For a man who claimed he was perfectly happy to let them get it out of their systems, he had a firm enough grip on her waist to lift her clean out of her shoes.
At the first scrape of claw on pavement Felicity put her hands over her eyes. Kai was standing near enough to see the gap she left between two fingers. "Would you like me to describe the bits you're missing?" he asked.
"Thank you, but if my husband gets punched in the mouth, I'd much rather he told me how he managed to improve his looks." She shifted her fingers anyway. It was easy enough to say they had every right to do this. She still wanted the hand that had brought her a cup of water and the mouth that had just kissed her palm to be in working order at supper.
Victor let frost creep across the ground before he came in low. Damien had to turn on dry concrete or lose the weight behind his tail. He turned just where Victor expected, caught his wrist instead of his throat and left two thin lines of venom burning on the skin. Victor's last two fingers went slack. Felicity felt Voss's hold tighten. With his good hand Victor sent heat over the lines, and by the time Damien reached for him again he could close his fist.
Damien caught his sleeve, let him pull past and had a clear shot at the back of his neck. He struck with the flat of his hand. Victor spun and stopped with his knuckles an inch from Damien's throat. A bead of venom fell from one claw and hissed on the pavement beside Victor's boot.
Neither man backed off until Damien had wiped the claw clean on a scrap of cloth. Felicity could see what wouldn't have shown from further out on the road. Victor's fingers had started working again, but he still couldn't bring those last two together hard enough to hold anything between them. If he'd been holding one of their cubs with that hand, it wouldn't have mattered a damn how little venom he'd taken. It was the difference between getting a child back over the side of the cart and losing his grip.
"Try coming in past him again," she called. "If the cart's on your left, let's see if you can use that hand to hang on to the side."
Sarge obligingly found them a metal rail from the loading bay. They took one more pass at walking around each other with the rail for a guide. This time Victor called his side first. His wing cleared Damien's shoulder, Damien kept his claws away from it, and a fox cub hanging on at the back would have been well out of reach. Felicity put her hands down. She could see why her husband had asked for this now.
"I see what you mean about crossing in front of you," Victor said, working the feeling back into his fingertips. "Next time, call me left and I'll give you the right."
Felicity let out the breath she'd been holding. "Voss, darling, you can give me back the use of my feet now." He looked down, apparently surprised to find her toes an inch off the concrete. She kissed the corner of his mouth as he set her down. When she kissed Victor's scraped jaw, she felt him smile against her cheek. Damien retrieved his coat and came back to stand beside her without waiting to be called.
That evening Victor produced a mango from his space. There was just the one, and she'd had enough bites of other people's apples that day to appreciate how hard he'd worked to get it to her whole. She cut it into slices and gave Damien the first. She offered the next to Victor with her fingers and got a slow lick across her thumb for her trouble. Voss handed her a cloth for the juice on her wrist. She drew a sticky little heart on his forearm before she wiped herself clean. He kept it there the rest of the evening.
There was enough mango left on the stone for her to scrape some off with her front teeth. Victor watched her do it, his thumb rubbing the sticky little mark she'd missed along her jaw. That look had gotten them in trouble before. Now they had children within earshot who'd developed a habit of asking why Mummy had turned that particular shade of red.
"Take the stone off me before you start something we've got nowhere to finish," she muttered. He took it, wrapped it in the piece of cloth Voss held out and rubbed his thumb across her mouth on the way back. Across the loading bay, Damien had the grace to pretend he had found something fascinating on the tip of his tail. The bastard was smiling.
She fell asleep in the loading bay between her husbands, holding on to the cuff of Damien's coat. Once, while she was drifting off, she heard Victor ask him why he wanted to stay. "When we came through that gate at the warehouse, she turned back to see if I'd made it," Damien answered. "I'd like to be there the next time she looks."
"She may well ask you to sleep somewhere with room for the rest of us first," Voss said. "Your coat's under her cheek. If you're planning to get up, you'll have to take your arm out of it."
"I'm comfortable," Damien said. From where Felicity lay, she could feel the cold concrete under his elbow. Voss tucked his rolled map under it without another word. In the morning the three men denied having heard her snore, but none of them could account for the damp patch on Damien's sleeve.
At Vineyard in the morning, the women from the gatehouse chose the reception house where beds stood ready for people off the road. The woman with the bandaged hand squeezed Felicity's fingers on her way in. Beyond the house lay a courtyard where somebody was teaching children the names of colors. Frost knew the answer to the one they were doing. She heard him whisper it while he waited for his sister to catch up.
An attendant showed Felicity and Rose the gate to the women's courtyard. Victor and Voss stayed with the cubs while Felicity went to look. Her hand found the latch and stopped. Nobody took it out of her fingers or pushed from the other side. After the way it had felt to hear a bolt slide back in Tidehaven, did she want to be the one to open this one?