He told me about doing a run up north, dashing into a forest seeking bald-headed mushrooms so a witch could curse some governor somewhere. She was scared to go into the woods on account of this nasty hex that made spiders sprout up from the ground every time her feet touched soil. Problem was, the hex extended to folks out there on her behalf. Pop showed me all the scars he had on his legs, all the tiny poisonous bites covering himself.

“I barely got out of that one alive, I did,” he said. “And turns out that witch wasn’t helpful at all. All she did was say a bunch of witchy things and knock me out with a sleeper spell.”

“I got spider bit too,” I said. I showed Pop the half-healed wound on my arm, where Tally’s granddad had bit me.

“Good night!” he said. “You tangled with that old spider-folk and lived to tell the tale? That’s my boy.”

He seemed so proud of me then I could have cried. It was everything I ever wanted, having Pop back, traveling with him. It was everything I ever dreamed of.

“I got another question for you, Pop,” I said.

“Shoot.”

“When I first found you, you were sitting by the river, just thinking all sad-like. What were you doing? Why hadn’t you run away?”

“Well, Buddy boy,” said Pop, “I don’t rightly know how to tell you this, seeing as how it don’t sound too heroic, but by that time I’d given up.”

“You’d given up?”

“Yep,” he said. “I ain’t much proud of it, but that’s a fact. I’d traveled the whole Hinterlands, the Riverlands, the Swamplands, all searching for a way to break this witch’s bond. It simply could not be done. Best case, you could replace it with a new one, but how likely was that? Not very, I tell you. So I quit. I was going to cook myself a big crawfish dinner and eat it and smoke my pipe and wait for the durn reaper to come calling, metaphorically speaking. Then you showed up, and I figured, heck, maybe it ain’t all over yet. And I snuck out that very night to get us passage on this new ship they got, runs on steam. It don’t care which way the river flows. It could take us anywhere we wanted to go.” He shook his head. “Turns out I was a day too late.”

“Or right on time,” I said. “It seems like everything worked out okay, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, Buddy,” he said. “I surely do. Even if it was Drusilla Fey’s magic that called you to me, all that one-eyed stuff. That’s just how magic works, I suppose. No matter who casts the spell, it’s got a mind and a purpose of its own, and it wills whatever it wants.”

That night we slept under the stars, right out in the middle of somebody’s field. A couple of cows mooed and swished their tails. Pop snored hard and loud, same as he always had, same as I remembered from when I was a kid. I lay there and thought about everything, all I had gone through, all the folks I’d met and seen and fought against. I missed Tally, I did. I missed her a lot. I hoped I’d get to see her again. I hoped she would find her cure, or else be happy with who she was. I hoped nothing but good things for her, and that those good things came on her own terms.