Episode 207: King Corn (Soren)

Soren hadn’t ever once in his life thought about listening to water before. It turned out to be a lot like listening to corn. Yep, that’s water, he thought.

It sounded like it, too, all sloshy and drippy and watery.

Water didn’t really sound wet though. In fact this much water sounded just massive and large and had a below-them-ness that made it sound just like it would if it were sloshing around a cornfield below them.

Soren got a lot of satisfaction from the fact that the water seemed to be damaging the cornstalks. He wasn’t a destructive person, except when someone accidentally gave him a sword to train with, but really…it was corn. Hours and days and years of corn, and he was making it disappear.

They were making it disappear. Him and his Nim.

“I hear rushing water,” Nim said out of the blue.

Soren didn’t, but he saw something. A floating something, in a little cornstalk basket. A floating baby something in a little cornstalk basket.

“Look!” he said.

Nim was down there faster than Soren could move. Whatever she thought about her parenting, she was secretly amazing and perfect.

She floated back up to him with Caden in her arms, looking small and vulnerable. They’d let him cry this whole time, alone in a drifting corn basket, because they’d thought it was a test.

“They had Caden?” he said. He was surprised by how angry that made him. Neither of them had said the trial could mess with their kids. That wasn’t part of the agreement.

Not that there was an agreement. Trials were more like a situation of “Please don’t kill us,” being answered with, “Try not to die, if you don’t want to be dead.”

But his son.

He was going to have words.

Probably not with the selkies, because they were oozy and scary. But with someone. Maybe Nim, next time they were busy never getting to sleep.

“Okay,” Nim agreed to that plan, like she could read his mind. “So we take him.” She looked at Soren. “Does this mean if we had followed the crying we would have been done hours ago?”

That was an annoying question. It turned out even perfect people like Nim could ask annoying questions sometimes.

He decided not to give an annoying answer like, “I don’t know,” or “Maybe.”

He dodged the question by leaning down to kiss Caden’s head, but then he froze. The nose bridge was wrong. Higher, and the nostrils were wider, and the baby smelled different…

So.

He was about to be really annoying. So annoying that Nim might not ever forgive him, ever. “This isn’t Caden,” he said.

She looked at the baby. “So?” she asked after a minute. “It’s almost Caden.”

“So,” he said, because he had a point. About how not-Caden that baby was. “So. So, does that mean we have four kids?”

They locked eyes.

One of them was going to die of panic soon. Really fatal panic, the kind that killed people when they were just innocently floating above a cornfield full of rushing water

“Or six,” Nim kind of squeaked. “Whatever, right?”

This was about tea.

“Six?” he asked, even though he knew the answer.

They were going to drown in babies. It was his fault, too.

“Or whatever,” she shrugged. “I was joking, but I haven’t had tea yet…we got sidetracked.”

Which was his fault. Okay so, as soon as they got home, they were finding tea.

“Never whatever our sleep again,” he joked.

She reached for his hand. “Maybe not-Caden will vanish,” she mused. Which would be great, except he thought that then she would be sad about not-Caden. “Or maybe Rhoda wanted a twin for Meldrey or a twin for not-Caden, so she gave us Meldrey.”

“Maybe,” he laughed. “Because Meldrey and not-Caden are just about exactly the same age,” just some years of gap between them. He kissed her temple. “That makes perfect sense,” he teased.

She looked down at the baby, who looked back up at her. “So, not-Caden, are you excited to dissipate into nothingness?”

The baby looked at her.

Babies did a lot of looking, in between the screaming and the diaper-filling and the way they could just out of nowhere be the most fascinating people you’d ever met.

“You have to kind of wonder,” Soren said. He started kind of tending in the direction of the rushing water, looking for the escape hole, “in a really vomitorious way, what would have happened to him if he’d been left behind.”

What if they hadn’t spotted the floating baby in the corn?

“Yeah,” she said. She kissed the baby’s forehead and hugged him closer against her. “Well, we won’t leave this one behind either. We can just start a reverse orphanage.”

And never sleep. And run a kingdom. And somehow not die from grief over whatever had happened to her family.

“We could call him Naden, for not-Caden,” he suggested. Or Gayden, because her family seemed prone to having gay men in it and it was statistically a probability. Her biological dad, her biological grandfather, her brother…probably others, too. There were her uncles, Mister Snoopsalot With Wings Who Is secretly Helpful, and Mister Soren Can’t Have a Sword Ever Again. But they weren’t actually related to Nim, so their gayness didn’t count in the same way.

“Naden?” she laughed. “Really? Maybe…”

“What about…” he’d just have to make Naden seem like a really reasonable name, by comparison. “What about Regenoid?”

Regenoid, king of hemorrhoids.

She’d have to pick Naden.

“Or Aiden,” she said, like it was obvious.

“Aiden?” Aiden and Caden and Tsura and Meldrey. That was an ouch set of names.

But they told a story, about who they were and where they came from. It was their story. “Okay,” he agreed. “But I’m calling him Regenoid when no one’s looking.”

She laughed. “Let’s just finish this.

They went toward the hole together. After the hemorrhoid joke, the last thing Soren wanted to do was go into a dark, mysterious hole in his trial.

It turned out he didn’t have to: The minute their feet touched the surface of the water, the trial disappeared around them and they found themselves standing on the shore by the selkie temple.

It was a different selkie. Older and wrinklier and somehow less oozy-seeming despite that.

“We did it,” Nim whispered. “If Zero is alive, I need energy.”

Zero or Spence or Mallory or…whoever could make it. He wholeheartedly agreed. Energy for everyone!

Except the babies.

The selkie stepped closer to them. “Congratulations, you have passed the trial. Be wise with your decisions once home.”

“We will,” Nim promised her. That was good, because Soren wasn’t promising anything as fancy as wisdom. He couldn’t even remember tea. “Is there anything we should know?” Nim asked. “Like…do we keep the…Aiden?”

“You should know that what you chose today may not seem useful, but it will matter soon,” the selkie told them. Her eyes fell to the form of Aiden in Nim’s arms. “Yes, the child is yours.”

“We didn’t really make any choices today,” Soren argued. He wasn’t about to be accused to deciding he should be king. There was sand, there was a line that needed to be drawn, and he was drawing it. Right between I am Soren and I chose to be king.

“You have,” the selkie stated. “Good luck, Queen Nim and King Soren.”

She vanished, like a creepy oozy person, and they were alone on the beach with Aiden.

Soren bumped his hip against Nim’s. “Queen Nim.” The selkie hadn’t even called her by her full name. Which reminded him that they had a tragedy to deal with at home. “Ready to deal with whatever?” he asked.

She took his hand. “Ready, King Soren.”

Ouch. That sounded as bad as it was.

He transported them, to the woods about a mile outside the palace gates just in case things in there were dangerous.

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