by J. M. Frey
Some black magic shit, indeed.
“You’re quick,” Khouri says when they return to the office.
“I travel a lot,” Elgar replies, with an attempt at self-deprecating humor. “Hazard of the job, I’m afraid.” Then he crosses to his filing cabinet, retrieves his laptop, and drops it into his travel bag. He hesitates a moment, and then also pulls out the big fire-safe case and hands it to Jackson. It has a handle, and is about the size of a large briefcase, so it isn’t too cumbersome. Though, by the look on the officer’s face, he hadn’t expected it to be so heavy.
Nobody asks Elgar why he’s taking a fire-safe with him to the safe house, but the look on Juan’s face makes it clear that he hasn’t before considered that someone might come after the source of Elgar’s stories once they’ve stolen the tools.
“I’ll text you when I’m in,” Elgar says to Juan, and for a moment, he’s struck with a sort of clinging, molasses déjà vu. Elgar has stood in this office a hundred times before, bag in hand, Linux in his assistant’s arms, and said the exact same thing. And then the warm, sweet comfort of the moment’s familiarity freezes and shatters.
Because this isn’t a convention trip.
“Be safe, boss,” Juan says. His arms are full of cat, so he can’t shake Elgar’s hand. And yet, the solemnity of the moment begs for some sort of physical acknowledgment. So Elgar pats Juan’s shoulder and rubs Linux’s ears, and then lets the officers lead him out to their squad car.
“This is sort of like something in your stories,” Riletti says, casually, as Jackson drives. The fannish glint is back in her eyes.
“A little,” Elgar concedes, reminding himself that he’s only in the back of the squad car because he’s being chauffeured, not because he’s under arrest.
“Like something Bootknife would do.”
“Bootknife’s dead,” Elgar blurts, more firmly than he thought he would, and then immediately slaps his palm over his mouth.
Riletti’s eyes grow round. “Is he?” she breathes, turning around in her seat to read his face.
Elgar doesn’t know how to reply. Of course, to a reader, the sadistic half Night Elf with a love of fine blades and creating wood-block carvings in the skin of prisoners’ backs is still alive. He had lived through the final battle that had wiped out so many of the other named characters of The Tales of Kintyre Turn, simply because Elgar had had a vague thought of spinning him into the series’ main protagonist if he was ever asked to write more. He knew that if that were to be the case, he would need to kill the Viceroy to up the stakes, and Bootknife had seemed like the perfect villain to fill the void the Viceroy’s removal would have made.
But Lucy had told him that Forsyth Turn hadn’t only bested Bootknife in a duel, but had decided to offer no quarter. He’d stabbed the rogue through the heart rather than let him live to come back and harm them another day. And, narratively, that made sense. Elgar probably would have come to the conclusion that Bootknife wasn’t strong enough without the Viceroy protecting him, or clever enough without the Viceroy puppeteering him, to be a villain in his own right. He would have developed a new Big Bad. But to know that the decision had been wholly taken from his hands . . .
If he had never met Forsyth and Lucy, would he have ever thought of the Shadow Hand slaying Bootknife outright?
Well, actually, yes, he probably would have made that exact plot choice. Which creeps him out even more. That his characters had acted independently of his writing, but still perfectly within the bounds of what he would have conceived is . . . eerie.
Instead of telling her all that, though, Elgar says: “I mean . . . just, that, you know, he’s not real.”
“Shame,” Riletti says. “I mean, not a shame he’s not real, but a shame that it’s not as easy to solve as that. It would fall into his MO perfectly.”
Elgar feels his stomach sink through the seat. “Why . . . why do you say that?”
“Who else would put fillets of dead pigs and ivy in your pantry, Mr. Reed?” the officer asks.
“Ivy?” Elgar repeats. The dread falls over him so quickly that he actually gets cold. He has to suck on the air to get it into his lungs. “Are you sure it was ivy?”
Jackson and Riletti exchange a look, concern passing between them like a tennis ball.
“I thought you’d be more worried about the dead pigs, honestly,” Riletti says. “Why are you worried about the ivy?”
“The symbolism of it,” Elgar chokes. “The last victim he had, Bootknife carved ivy on her. Not a landscape.”
Riletti frowned. “I don’t remember that.”
“I never wrote it,” Elgar whispers, and the confession falls, hot and molten, from behind his teeth.
The threats, the maggots, the theft, the ivy . . . they aren’t meant to kill him. They’re meant to scare him. And it’s working.
Forsyth
We arrive at the Piper household a little after four o’clock, as planned. Mei Fan barely spares a hello for us as she swoops down to scoop her granddaughter out of the stroller and hie her away toward the kitchen, where, by the sound and smells wafting out into the living room and entryway, wai po is cooking something delicious.
Martin and I shake hands and wrestle the stroller into the front hall, half-obscuring a pile of his other guests’ boots and winter coats. Pip trails after her mother. The four women often congregate in the kitchen, teasing and sniping at each other in a jumbled raucous of Mandarin and English, poking with chopsticks at each other’s work and pausing to buzz Alis with kisses. They cover her hands in cool sauces and sticky jams to encourage her to experiment with solid foods, or put her on the floor with a wooden spoon and as many plastic containers to beat and crash as she likes.
Martin continually expresses his surprise at how clever Alis is growing, and Mei Fan often just beams at him and laughs. “What else is he to expect from our granddaughter?” she teases. “Geniuses beget geniuses.”
Martin has moved wai po’s little family shrine onto a side table in the living room, so the guests don’t have to traipse into her bedroom for the celebration, and it is into this room that I follow him. My father-in-law and I sit together on the sofa, where we have a clear view of the shrine, and the open floor in front of it. Martin said a friend of his is an amateur photographer and will be recording the event, so Pip and I are content to sit back and watch the ceremony around our daughter’s first birthday unmitigated by screens and phones.
Pip is unceremoniously booted from the kitchen mere moments later, and comes to sit on the floor by my feet, so she can lean her head on my knee. When we are settled, we are handed glasses of wine by one of Martin’s work colleagues from the high school. She is an older woman whose name I don’t think I have ever learned, though we have met before at other such events. Friends of the family fill the room already—some of Pip’s colleagues mingle amid Martin and Mei Fan’s, all of them educators of one level of schooling or another, so they have much in common.
“Congrats,” the woman says to us, settling in a nearby kitchen chair which has been pulled into the living room so there is enough seating for all. “One year. You must be ecstatic.”
“We are,” Pip says, and to anyone who doesn’t know her as well as I do, she would seem perfectly at ease. Outwardly, she appears to be enjoying herself. But I can see the tightness around her eyes, the way her faint smattering of freckles stands out against worry-paled skin; I can feel where her fingernails dig in next to my inseam, just a little, where she has her free hand resting on my ankle.
“Oh, I’m Nancy,” the woman says, belatedly offering me her hand. “I don’t think we’ve had the chance to meet yet.”
“Syth,” I say. “I don’t think we have.”
Nancy winks at Pip. “Well, if you’d had a monster wedding like you were supposed to, I probably would have met you there. But you kids just snuck off and did it on your own, eh?”
I don’t think Nancy means this as a slight, and Pip certainly doesn’t take it a
s one, but it does seem unnecessarily pointed. We hadn’t been entirely secure in our relationship when we’d wed—I had been new to this world, and we were still slowly trading in dragon’s tears for cash at various gold-buyers in order to secure our wealth, and I had yet to completely exist in the government’s eyes. So we had decided to keep the celebration small so as not to attract attention.
“The point of the ceremony was to bind our lives,” I say, trying for a lightness of tone that I’m not entirely certain I manage, if the way Pip glances at me out of the corner of her eyes means what I think it means. “Not to show off. We were very happy with how it was conducted.”
“Oh, of course,” Nancy says, and she sips her wine, blinking. “Right. But, ah, this is something else, isn’t it?” she adds, desperate to regain her footing. She gestures to the room.
“Wai po’s only gonna get the one grandchild,” Pip says, shrugging. “So we don’t mind her going as overboard or traditional as she wants. It makes her happy, and that makes us happy.”
“Oh, you’ll have another,” Nancy says, leaning in conspiratorially. “People always say they only want one, but the urge will be there again. And it’s good for kids to have siblings, you know? To grow up with someone?”
“Not always,” I counter, and while Nancy blinks and sips again to cover up that she is digesting what I could possibly mean by that statement, Pip pinches the top of my foot, hard. I jerk and squirm, and grin at my wife, who has mischief in her eyes, the teasing minx.
“We’re sure,” she says. “Just the one. I’m the only child of only children, and I turned out just fine. Besides, it’s too expensive to have more than one kid anymore. Curse of the millennials.”
I chuckle at that, for while Pip is certainly a millennial, I am most assuredly not. Though my preference toward Hainish waistcoats, neat grooming, formal shirts, and tailored trousers has led me to resemble a hipster, I cannot possibly be one, as I love nothing ironically and have no cultural experiences here to use as social cache.
Just then, Alis is paraded into the living room in her new birthday clothes—an adorable shirt-and-trousers suit called a tangzhuang. It is made of red silk embroidered with chrysanthemums for luck. Her wispy black curls have been pulled up into adorable twin puffs at the top of her head, which make her look like a chubby kitten. The crowd around us seems to agree that Alis is cute, for a chorus of “aaawwwws!” greet her arrival to the party on her great-grandmother’s hip.
Cameras click and flash. Nancy, apparently, hasn’t had enough of her own foot and opens her mouth to swallow down more.
“And where’s your family?” she asks me, filled with genuine curiosity and a complete lack of knowledge about my complicated relationship with my blood.
“Ah,” I say, and take a sip of wine to wash down the lump that has built in my throat. Normally, I am quite comfortable in repeating the old lie that Pip is my only living family besides an American cousin. But today, on the one year anniversary—by the Overrealm calendar, at least—of my daughter, the Ladyling Alis Mei Fan Turn Piper, it seems . . . bad luck to deny the existence of my loved ones and friends back in Hain.
Taking pity on me, Pip leans across my body and shakes her head a little. The woman sits back, and says, “I’m sorry.”
“I would have liked them to be here,” I say. “But wishes summon djinn, and no one ever gets what they really want when that happens.”
The woman squints at me, and Pip laughs. “I adore your esoteric and obscure idioms, husband-mine,” Pip says. I search for somewhere else to sit amid the crowd in the living room, but every seat is taken. We are stuck.
Pip catches me looking. She smiles comfortingly and pats my much-abused foot. I turn my attention back to wai po and Alis, who are now both kneeling before wai po’s shrine. The Chinese members of the gathering join in the traditional prayer, and Alis, engaged and fascinated, seems entranced by the curl of incense smoke as it drifts upward from the ember cones.
“What about the traditions of your culture?” Nancy asks after the prayer is concluded. Well, I suppose she must have some sense, at least, if she had enough to remain silent during that.
“Mine?”
“I can’t place your accent, exactly . . .” she fishes, leaving me a space in which to enlighten her as to the origins of it. But I do not answer. Perhaps that is cruel of me, but I am not feeling particularly warm toward this woman. I never feel particularly warm toward anyone who dares tell my wife that she has lived her life incorrectly, no matter how well-meaning their intentions may be. “But, uh, surely there’s something you want to do for your daughter today?”
“Many things,” I agree.
I want to hold a ball in Turn Hall. I want to summon the Chipping to marvel at the beauty and cleverness of my child. I want to dress her in a Turn-russet frock with thread-of-gold stitching, and dance with her and Pip to the accompaniment of the Turnshire minstrels. I want to invite hedge witches to bestow protective charms upon her, and centaurs to read her destiny in the stars, to feast on Cook’s rabbit pie and Dorthi Pointe’s unparalleled seed cakes. I want to laugh at Bevel Dom trying to teach my toddler the steps to a Bynnebakker jig, and feel nothing but pride as my brother Kintyre gives her a horrifically inappropriate gift, like a sword with a live edge; for while it would have been impractical, I know it would have come from a place of love and a desire to protect Alis. I want to watch Alis smear cake all over her cousin Wyndam’s doublet, and play with Lewko Pointe the Younger, and frolic with Capplederry and Bradri.
But these are things I cannot have. Things that I have said goodbye to twice over. Things that I am learning to yearn for less and less. Oh, I will never cease to wish that my family were with me, but I have also been in this realm long enough that I have learned to hold my memories of them with love in my heart, and to not let the bitterness of missing them poison me against this place and its people and customs. I made my choice. I do not regret it.
“Such as?” Nancy probes, and Pip snorts into her wine glass.
I shrug. “Things that can wait until it is just the three of us at home. We are very keen to have Alis steeped in the culture of her mother’s family, so that she may be a proficient bilingual, and today is all about the Chinese way of celebrating. I am happy to be patient. Oh, look, they are going to step on the turtle now.”
It’s probably the least subtle subject change I have engineered in my whole career as a spymaster, but it is effective, at least.
Nancy turns in her seat to watch as wai po and Mei Fan urge Alis up onto her feet. Mei Fan puts a paper plate by Alis’s bare foot. On the plate is a gong gui hao, a small red cake shaped like a turtle. There is some luck around turtles and longevity, I know, and a correlation between the written word “step.” So, it is tradition, I am told, for a child to “step” into life by stepping on a turtle—but as no one cares to harm a real one, a cake is substituted.
Alis—blood kin to Kintyre Turn that she is—stomps on the cake with mad glee in her eyes. Then she promptly lands herself on her well-padded rear, lifts her foot to her mouth, and pulls off a glob of cake with the few teeth she possesses.
“Bie chi, zang!” wai po laughs, and pulls Alis’s leg away from her face.
“Okay, time to swoop in,” Pip says, jumping to her feet and setting down her wine glass. “Alis, baby, don’t eat the cake off your feet. Yucky.”
“No!” Alis opines, and shoves her fingers into her mouth. There is some smashed cake on them, too. Pip scoops Alis up, and tosses her gently into the air. Around her fingers, Alis squeals with joy and adds: “Bu!”
“No?” Pip says, grinning, and rubs her nose against Alis’s miniature replica when she catches our daughter. “Who are you to tell me no, little girl?”
“Bu!” Alis giggles again, dimpling with delight.
“Ah, clever girl,” I tell her as I sit forward on the sofa. Alis turns to me and beams at the praise.
“No bu buu bu yao nooo!” she chants as the assembled
guests laugh and applaud her for defying us all in two languages. She applauds with them, clearly pleased to be the center of attention—again, showing that she is very well related to my brother—before Pip and Mei Fan sweep her off to the kitchen to clean up.
Mei Fan comes back out with a platter of small red turtle cakes for the rest of us.
“For eating, though,” she warns her adult guests as she sets it down on the coffee table. “Ruin my carpets, and I will end you.”
Chuckling, I snag up one of the cakes and indulge. As I promised Pip, I have returned to fencing, so I can allow myself this treat. Mei Fan’s baking is a wonder, anyway. Nobody will be Dorthi Pointe, it’s true, but then, Mei Fan was not Written to be only the plump, cookie-baking housewife. Dorthi has an unfair advantage on all other cooks in the Overrealm when it comes to the wellspring of her talent in the kitchen.
“Now what?” Nancy asks me when Pip and a cleaned-up Alis return with a bowl.
“Oh, the cháng shòu miàn,” I answer, doing my very best to mimic wai po’s accent. She beams at me from her chair across the open floor and winks. I feel myself flush under her silent praise.
“The what?”
“Long noodles for a long life,” I say. “I hope Alis isn’t terribly put out that she has noodles and we have sweets.”
“She ate another whole cake in there,” Pip says, dropping a kiss on the crown of my head as she settles Alis between my legs. Our daughter props herself up against my shins. She shoves her hands into the bowl of cold noodles, grinning manically, and lifts them to her face to gum and slurp.
I keep a careful eye on her to ensure she doesn’t choke herself, and dutifully slurp up one of the noodles when she holds it up to me. Alis giggles and claps her sticky hands together as I cross my eyes and theatrically suck the noodle up between my lips. I hear the click and whir, see the flash of a camera, but I ignore them in favor of entertaining my daughter. I am lordling no more, so may cavort and be as silly as I like, with no fear of how I will look to those around me.