"You're just the one with the bad luck to be stuck with mother," Jesmind laughed.

Triana gave her daughter an ugly look, but Jesmind only winked at her playfully. "I'll contact them and order them to come give you a hand."

"Make sure they get here fast, mother. We're moving in two days."

"I'll do that," she assured him. "You can do something for me, too."

"Anything, mother."

"I want you to release Jula's bond," she told him steadily. "I want to take it from you, but I can't take it from you because you're not here. I need you to release it, so I can take it from her here."

Her request surprised him. "I thought you said that Jula was going to be alright," he said.

"She is, but I need her bond for another reason," she said calmly. "Me and Jula have a kind of idea, and I need her bond to make it work."

"What kind of idea?"

"Something you don't need to know, cub," Triana said sharply.

"Alright, alright," he said quickly. "I'll do anything you ask, you know that, mother."

"I know. So release her bond, and I'll have to release yours."

"Why?"

"Because we can only hold one bond at a time," Jesmind answered before her mother.

"Oh, alright. You never told me that."

"It didn't seem very important at the time, cub. We had other things to talk about then."

"True enough. How do I do it?"

"It's simple, actually. You just let it go. The bond will release as soon as it realizes that it's free, just like a caged animal."

"Sounds simple enough," he said, closing his eyes. He focused on that part inside him that was Jula, that was Jula's bond, felt where it had taken up residence inside of him. He willed it to be free, to be able to leave him, then kind of mentally shooed it away from him. It seemed to immediately react to that change of will, and fled out of him almost before he could urge it to leave. The sense of Jula that had been there faded away quickly, leaving behind a curiously empty hole. It had been there so long, he had become accustomed to it, almost like it was supposed to be there.

"I, I think he did it," Jula said uncertainly. "I felt something, something weird just now."

"He did it," Triana affirmed. "Alright then."

Tarrin felt a strange buzzing between his ears, almost as if something he never knew was lost suddenly found its way back to him. When it was over, he felt no different than before, making him uncertain as to what just happened.

He put a finger to his head. "I'll agree, that was weird," he said to Jula.

Triana chuckled quietly. "It never ceases to feel weird, cub," she told him. "I've passed, given, traded, and released bonds for a very long time now, and it never stops feeling like that."

"Well, I don't feel any different."

"You won't," Jesmind told him. "It's normal."

Triana nodded in agreement. "That's the main thing I wanted to talk to you about, cub." She glanced at Jesmind. "You two getting along?"

"We had an air-clearing this morning, mother," Jesmind said calmly. "We're alright."

"Good. If you two are going to fight, make it short and sweet. Jasana doesn't have the maturity to watch you two clawing at one another for very long."

"It was short, that was for sure," Jesmind laughed. "But it did what we needed it to do."

"Her doing that irritated me," Tarrin admitted. "I didn't know what she was doing until it was over."

"You gotta watch her, Tarrin," Triana said with a sudden smile. "Jesmind may not look it, but she's probably twice as underhanded as Jasana. Of all my cubs, she was the hardest to manage."

"I noticed," he said, giving Jesmind a look.

"Mother, stop warning him!" Jesmind objected.

"Warning me about what?" Tarrin asked bluntly.

"If you have to ask that, cub, you're not getting an answer," Triana said with a slightly amused look. "I'll call the others. They should be there in plenty of time."

"Alright," he said, giving Triana a suspicious look. What was she talking about? "I'll contact you after we take Torrian."

"We'll be waiting," Triana said.

"Bye, Tarrin. It was good to see you. Nice meeting you, Jesmind," Jula said politely.

"Take care of yourself, cub," Tarrin told her sincerely.

"Nice meeting you," Jesmind told her. "Jasana's going to be upset you didn't talk to her, mother."

"She'll get over it. I have to go now. Take care you two, and remember to settle things immediately. Jasana doesn't need to see you two tearing at each other all the time."

"We'll do that, mother," Jesmind said.

"Tarrin?"

"Alright," he told her, a bit petulantly. "Bye, mother. I love you."

"I love both of you," she said with uncharacteristic warmth, smiling at them gently just before the image of her faded into nothingness.

"Well, we have a garden to plant," Jesmind said crisply, smacking her paws together. "You're going to wear that?"

"It's all I have."

"I'll have to make you some new clothes," she said speculatively.

"I'll handle that."

"I know you can, but I'm going to make them for you anyway," she said. "I think you're getting soft for relying on magic like that. Mother doesn't do it, and you shouldn't either. If you stop doing for yourself, you're going to forget how. Besides, every time you do magic, it gets Jasana curious, and we don't want her getting curious."

She did have a point. He had to admit that. "Alright, no more cheating while I'm here," he said with a soft chuckle. "I'll do everything the old fashioned way."

"Good. Now let's go get the garden done before it rains."

It had been a long time since he had done that kind of manual labor.

Tarrin, Jesmind, and Jasana had spent the day planting her garden, and it turned out to be an all day affair. They had to plow the patch and prepare it, find the seeds that had gotten lost in her barn over the winter, Tarrin had had to fix a couple of tools-the honest way, since he'd promised that he wouldn't cheat-and then they planted seeds after a brief delay as a shower passed over them, a delay they utilized by having lunch. All of them got very dirty once they started planting, since the plowed dirt quickly melted into a thick, cohesive mud that clung to them as they carefully planted seeds and set up a low fence around the garden to protect the soon-to-be seedlings from the ravages of farm pests and grazing rabbits.

It felt… normal. Tarrin hadn't felt that way in a very long time, doing something simple, something that didn't have the fate of the entire world depending on his success. Simple things, things done long ago, back when he was human, a familiar pattern of labor that rekindled those old memories and feelings inside him. As the time passed, Jesmind and Jasana's newness seemed to fade away, yield to the sense of them, until by the end of the day, it felt like they had always been there, he had always been there, and this was nothing more than what they had done many times before. It was simply yet another day on the farm.

And Tarrin had been shocked at how good that felt to him. Despite everything that had happened, everything he'd seen and done and experience, maybe there still was the simple village farmboy inside him, a fellow that had been absolutely overjoyed to return to familiar surroundings and familiar chores. And return to a place which he identified as a place of happiness, surrounded by family.

Family. Maybe Jesmind and Jasana were family, the same way that his parents and sisters were. Jasana was for sure, but spending the day like that with Jesmind, talking with her about absolutely nothing of importance, working together with her on the garden, it caused even more of his animosity towards her to fade. The feeling of betrayal he had felt, a feeling that had provoked the feral nature in him to distrust her, was losing ground inside him. Jesmind was proving herself to him, and she was doing it by showing a side to herself that he had never seen before. She had always been a rather dichotomous figure in his mind, a being that both inspired fear and desire in him, someone he both loved and hated, liked and disliked, trusted and distrusted, wanted to both embrace and strangle at the same time. Those conflicting feelings had held within him for a very long time, but they were starting to die out now, as the positive feelings he held for her were slowly overwhelming the negative feelings.