Well, that made me happier than anything I’d heard in a long, long time.

19

ME AND POP HIT THE road not too long after. I wanted to stay in the swamp, hang around with Tally and Marina, maybe visit the tiny cabin I grew up in, but Pop wouldn’t have it. He said I had to get back to Mom, and fast. That meant we were going inland, that we were taking an actual dirt road up, hitching rides on wagons, even slogging it miles on foot.

That was fine, I didn’t mind one bit. I was with my daddy.

And while we rode, and while we walked, we talked.

We talked about everything. I mean it, I got every last one of my questions answered. Pop told me all about the last five years, how at first he’d fled the swamp in terror after Mom begged Bobby Felix to let us free, how he was convinced there were assassins after him, how he was scared even to stay in an inn, lest some no-account murderer sneak in and strangle him in his sleep. Pop slept outside, he slept in haylofts, he slept with the horses out in the pastures. A lot of rambling, he did, covering all the Riverlands, even into the Hinterlands and beyond. Until one day he figured out wasn’t anybody chasing him, wasn’t anybody asking after him at the taverns he stopped in, at the inns where he stayed.

Eventually Pop found himself in Gentlesburg, closer to the Swamplands than he’d dared to go in a year. There was talk of a Boss Authority ruling downriver, but nobody seemed to pay him much mind. That surprised Pop, it did, but what surprised him even more were the Parsnit duels popping up in secret corridors and attic rooms and downstairs basements all over the city, and not just in the Skinny Yellow Dog either. Parsnit had followed Pop out of the swamp, and he dove back into the game with all his heart. See, Pop had missed Parsnit, even when he was out roaming, even when he was fleeing for his life. The cards are like that, he said, they whisper to you while you’re sleeping, they call out to you in the night. So Pop got busy playing, only winning sometimes, only winning when it finally counted. Pop was hustling, he was, and all the while he was gathering information.

“I was talking to witches, see?” said Pop. “I was learning all about hexes and how they work, the power of a witch’s bond, whether or not it was possible to have one broken. I was doing favors for folks, bad stuff, sordid business, whatever I could to break our witch’s bond, to set you and me and my friends free. I wound up in some pretty hairy situations, mind you, stuff I don’t dare tell you about. That’s just the fact of the matter. But every ounce of my time and energy and heart were spent figuring a way out of this jackpot I’d gotten us in.”