“What did you do without asking us along?” asked Wheeler.
“Nothing,” said Danny. “I’m on Lieder’s team, why is he bothering me?”
“Want company?” asked Hal.
“Looking for an excuse to ditch P.E.?” asked Danny.
“Always.”
“Don’t worry. Lieder’s in a better mood. His daughter’s all better and she’s even back in school.”
“I didn’t know he had a daughter,” said Hal.
“Or that she was sick,” said Wheeler.
“Somebody mated with Lieder?” asked Hal.
“He has a job,” said Danny. “There’s always some woman who wants a man with a job.”
“Really?” asked Wheeler. “That’s the first time anybody ever gave me a reason why I should graduate from high school. So I can get the kind of job that will make a woman want to mate with me.”
“Naw,” said Hal. “No way. You’re going to have to swim upstream and spawn.”
With that Danny left them and jogged to the office.
Mama and Baba were sitting on chairs across from the principal’s desk. Baba at once rose to his feet. “Danny,” he said, “we’re your Uncle Alf and Auntie Gerd. I know you haven’t seen us in a long time, but when we heard you were living here with your Aunt Veevee gone half the time, well, we had to look in on you.”
“We had no idea his guardian was absentee.”
“She’s not,” said Danny. “We see each other nearly every day. It’s these people that I don’t know. Did you ask them for I.D.?”
Baba chuckled. “We just want a chance to talk to you, Danny.”
“We didn’t know how else to do it,” said Mama. “You don’t answer your phone.”
“I don’t have a phone,” said Danny.
“You see our problem,” said Baba. “But Principal Massey kindly offered us the use of his office for our conversation.”
“No,” said Danny, walking back out of the office.
“Come back here, young man!” demanded Massey.
Mama followed him. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, I beg you. If you have any feeling for me at all.”
“I spent most of my life with feeling for you,” whispered Danny. “It almost led to Hammernip Hill. Should I tell the principal to ask the sheriff to do some excavating there?”
“Please,” she said.
Principal Massey had followed them out into the corridor by then. “Danny North, that was the rudest thing I’ve seen you do-and that takes some doing.”
“I don’t remember a single act of kindness from these people,” said Danny. “I’m settled in here now and I don’t know what they want from me. Don’t you have rules about letting strangers have access to the children in this school?”
“But…” Principal Massey reached his hands out helplessly, one toward Danny, one toward his parents. “It didn’t occur to me that they might be strangers. I still don’t believe they are. They look so much like you.”
Danny had no answer to that. It had never crossed his mind that he could not deny being his father’s son, let alone his nephew. He looked just like Baba. Except for the fact that he also had a strong resemblance to Mama. Both resemblances in the same face, at the same time. If Principal Massey had half a brain in his head, he’d wonder why anybody looked so much like both his aunt and his uncle, one of whom, presumably, was not his blood relative.
“We’ll talk out in the parking lot,” said Danny. “We’ll talk where I can walk away if I feel like it.” And where nobody can listen through a door. And nobody can sneak up unobserved.
“Well, that’s all right then,” said Massey.
“In fact, we’ll talk out on the street, which isn’t school property. Then you won’t get in trouble, Principal Massey.”
“Very … thoughtful of you.”
They left him behind and walked in virtual silence until they were beyond the parking lot and across the street. Virtual silence, because Mama kept trying to talk and Danny gave her a sharp sh! and walked faster. Finally they were so out of breath from keeping up with a young man who was, after all, a sprinter that they couldn’t have spoken if they tried.
“I told you the terms,” said Danny. “I told you that I’d come for your answer. I told you not to come for me. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no Great Gate for you. You’d have been too dangerous, anyway. The two of you.”
“We aren’t the ones the Family chose,” said Baba. “I’m not Odin anymore.”
“They took back Gyish? Or was it Zog?”
“It was Mook,” said Baba. “They couldn’t trust me to make an unbiased decision because I was your father and because they all know now how we plotted to keep you even after we knew you were a gatemage. We’re lucky we aren’t in Hammernip, for putting the family at such a risk.”
Danny wanted to say, Boo-hoo. But he realized that Baba was telling the truth. He and Mama had taken a risk, knowing about him but not killing him. They had risked everything.
“So Mook will have an answer for you. We’re not invited to the councils,” said Mama.
“Why are you here, then? To ask for a private passage through the Great Gate? Here’s news for you-it hasn’t been built yet, and I meant what I said. No special favors for anyone, no extras.”
“It’s not about the Great Gate,” said Baba impatiently. “It’s about us. As your parents. What did you expect us to do? We hoped you’d be a gatemage. All right? We didn’t hope for any baby at all, we hoped for you, very specifically. A tricky, mouthy, linguistically brilliant brat with no loyalty to anyone, because that’s what gatemages are. We hoped you’d open a passage to Westil, yes. Of course we did. Before we knew you, we expected to be able to use you.”
“And you still do,” said Danny.
“Because we’re not insane,” said Baba. “You exist. Everybody wants to pass through a Great Gate. What do you expect, that we alone, of all the Westilians in Mittlegard, would care only about our beloved boy, with not a thought about the gates that we created you to make?”
“I don’t expect anything from you,” said Danny, “which is a good thing, because ‘anything’ was what I never got.”
“Danny, we gave you all we could,” said Mama. She came closer. “And I don’t just mean life itself. We had Mook and Lummy look after you. Feed you when you stayed late. Listen to your questions and answer them. Watch out for you to give you warning if you did something dangerous. We made sure that Thor was in charge of the watchers, so that if you needed to get away, you wouldn’t be caught.”
“If we stayed close to you,” said Baba, “then the Family would never trust us to be impartial when it came time for decisions about you. We could either have the power to protect you, or we could be your loving affectionate parents. Not both.”
Danny knew that this was true. He had always known it.
Mama interpreted his silence as a kind of victory, and she pressed the advantage. She placed her hand on his upper arm, not gripping it, exactly. Just holding him.
But he had been touched by enough women in the past twenty-four hours. He was done with being betrayed by his natural reaction to physical touch. A bit of physical affection from his long-absent mother? It sent a thrill of relief through him. He wasn’t having any of it. He shrugged away and backed up a step.
“Touch me again and you’re out of here,” Danny said.
Mama gave something like a sob and stepped away, holding the hand that had held him in her other hand, as if she had been devastatingly wounded, as if the hand were pumping out blood and the injury could not be healed.
“We were proud of you,” said Baba, not even glancing at his wife’s reaction. “You were so clever. You understood your danger-not gatemage danger, but drekka danger. You kept your head down. You kept trying to find ways to survive. We saw it and admired you and respected you. I don’t know if I would have had the self-control to handle myself as you did. The trickster boy you were as a child disappeared completely, swallowed up in the careful, careful young man who finally found his power and used it to run away and save his life.”