The Silenced Tale

by J. M. Frey

  Forsyth sits up, intrigued. Alis jams her plushie further into her mouth, gagging a little, and without taking his eyes from the screen, Forsyth pulls it back out. Alis whimpers and kicks.

  “Permission for . . . ah.” His eyes go a little rounder. “You’ve been asked to write something.”

  “Yeah.”

  Forsyth ponders for a moment, gray eyes skipping over Elgar’s face, down to his clothes to root out whatever clues he seems to read there, then back up to meet his creator’s eyes. “You don’t want to.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know,” Elgar admits. “I don’t know if I should, and if I do say yes, I don’t know what I should write, story-wise. I don’t . . . I don’t want to change things. I mean, I don’t want to make things worse, you know? I don’t have any power here, no way to write something and make it happen in the real world—the Overrealm—” More’s the pity, he thinks, or else I could write this stalker away. “But whatever I write about there might . . . I don’t know, it can . . . you see where I’m coming from, right? I’m . . . it’s a legitimate worry?”

  “Certainly,” Forsyth says, petting Alis’s sweaty curls away from her forehead as he thinks. “But consider, Elgar, that you are a Writer. In the same way that I was created to be clever, and learn quickly, and to be addicted to spying and bettering the world, so too you are created to be a teller of tales. Do you follow?”

  Elgar nods dumbly, uncertain of what his heart is doing right now, or why his eyes are burning.

  Forsyth sits forward, as if he can arrest Elgar’s fidgeting with his gaze through the computer screen, his gray eyes pinning him in place. “Elgar, you cannot spend your whole life living in fear of your pen. Write respectfully, and thoughtfully, and there should be nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I . . . I don’t want to hurt people,” Elgar admits softly, and the confession costs him more than he thought it would. It tastes like ash and bile. “I don’t know how to write without hurting people. Conflict causes pain, but how do I make a story without conflict?”

  “I see.” Forsyth says. “Elgar, let me put your mind at ease. I have been watching you slide deeper and deeper into your misery. And I have been pondering. And it seems to me that it is only Hain and its denizens that are, well, ‘real.’ Your Shuttleborn trilogy contains no magic at all, and it is the magic of the Deal-Maker Spirits that has birthed our realm into reality, yes?”

  “. . . yes,” Elgar says, feeling the knot in his chest starting to loosen.

  “Then it is conceivable that, without the magic of the Deal-Makers, any other realm you invent will be just as dormant, just as imaginary as those of any other Writer.”

  “Maybe,” Elgar says.

  On screen, Alis seems to have calmed down enough to realize who her da is speaking to. She drops the plushie and reaches out her chubby hands to the monitor, chanting, “Gar, Gar, Gar, Gar, Gar.”

  “Hello, sweet girl,” Elgar says back, waving and pulling faces at her while he considers what Forsyth has said. Alis giggles, pain momentarily forgotten.

  “I think . . .” Elgar says softly, “I think it’ll take me a bit to get over the . . . I don’t know, the anxiety of it all, I guess. But . . . thank you, Forsyth. For, you know . . . just thanks.”

  Forsyth nods gravely, in that way that makes it look like it should have been a courtly bow. For all Elgar knows, maybe it is, of a sort. Forsyth had often given counsel to King Carvel Tarvers. It is possible that this is a gesture left over from that.

  “And now, the reason behind the permission you sought from me?”

  “Ah, yeah, see, there’s the problem . . .” Elgar says, and then recounts the evening to his creation. “I’m right back where I was. How can I say yes, knowing that I might change things there?”

  “Do they wish you to alter the story or the characters?” Forsyth asks, and his expression grows tight with what Elgar realizes, after a few seconds, is probably the closest thing to fear he’s ever seen on Forsyth’s face. “I . . . I wonder if changing the way the story is told in the television series will have any impact on the people I left behind. On me. Will my memories of events alter? Will I even know if they do? Will Pip one day tell me that I am misremembering something, for she will know the difference between the novel and the adaptation?”

  “That’s a terrifying thought,” Elgar mumbles, dread creeping up his spine. He wants this series. He wants it so badly, but what if Forsyth’s right? What if . . . ?

  “But no,” Forsyth goes on, musing. “If another Writer adapts the script, not my Writer, then surely the story as it is told in the books will remain intact. My memory, my character, my motivations and morals and preferences, my annoyances will remain the same. Adaptation cannot blemish what is originally set down on the page, correct? It cannot change it. Or me. Any more than the existing fan fiction has. I will remain as you Wrote me, and so will my world.”

  “You’re sure of that?” Elgar asks.

  “As sure as I can ever be, but . . .” Forsyth nods firmly, once. “Yes. I am sure.”

  Relieved, Elgar squirms on his uncomfortable seat. “So they . . . they want me to write a short film.”

  “Do you want to say yes?” Forsyth asks gently, earnestly. “Because you seem to be forgetting that you have the very real option to say no.”

  Elgar chews on his bottom lip for a moment. “I do,” he confesses quietly. “I thought I was done with the series, but this opportunity, the ability to write Kintyre one last time, I want . . . I want to be able to say goodbye to them. Like this.”

  “I see.”

  “It means I get to set the tone of the series, too,” he adds, twisting the cuffs of his velvet jacket between his fingers; Juan is going to yell at him for rumpling it. “The first thing the fans will see would be by me, a sort of bridge, you know? Between what I did and what the production team will do, and I . . . that means something to me.”

  Forsyth nods along, seriously considering his explanation, as Alis squirms and gets fussy again, now that neither adult is paying attention to her.

  “I just . . .” Elgar adds, after a thoughtful pause of his own. “I just don’t know what’s safe to write.”

  Forsyth presses his finger to his lower lip, thinking. “Please elaborate.”

  “They’ll want something that introduces the characters, something that starts in media res, you know? But something cool, something . . . engaging. Something with just Kintyre and Bevel.”

  Forsyth nods again, eyes narrowing, and then his whole face blossoms into a relaxed, happy smile, and he leans down to kiss his daughter’s head. She switches her litany from “Gar Gar” to “Da Da.”

  “Your solution seems obvious, then,” Forsyth says, letting his fingers substitute for the frozen teddy bear as Alis gets toothy again. He winces when she bites down, but doesn’t pull away.

  “And that is?”

  “Write a memory. Write something that has already happened, so it changes nothing in the timeline, only expands upon an event that has already occurred.”

  “And how will I pick one?” Elgar despairs. “If I make something up, how can I be sure it’s not . . . not something new? I don’t remember everything I was thinking when I wrote it all. It was decades ago.”

  “You can ask me.” Forsyth’s smile grows more mischievous. “After all, as both younger sibling to the Great Hero of Hain and former Shadow Hand, I do have quite a number of stories about my brother stored up. Many of them embarrassing, if you prefer.”

  And then, with glee, he starts to tell some.

  CHAPTER 7

  FORSYTH

  In the week that Elgar is in Los Angeles, Pip suffers three more fits. These leave her feeling weaker, needing more and more rest after each, more sleep and more recovery time. My fear must show on my face, for she tries to make a joke about how “it’s normal, it’s all fine, women are always hurt to give the male hero the impetus to act.” It falls horribly flat, and has the opposite result of what Pip is aimi
ng for, I think, for it only makes me more upset by her circumstances.

  “I am a failure,” I respond. And then surprise myself by promptly bursting into exhausted, heartbroken tears that I suspect resemble nothing so much as Alis’s own.

  Pip’s eyes widen, and she pulls me down onto the sofa where I had placed her after her most recent fit—where light began sparking out of her fingertips—moving over so that I may lay beside her. Alis has become quite competent at breaking herself out of her playpen, and she does so now to crawl up onto the sofa, lay herself down upon my chest, and pet my hair.

  “Shhhh, Da, shhh,” she says, in fantastic approximation of Pip’s soothing tone. It is such an accurate impression that Pip and I can’t help but laugh, though mine is a bit more blubbery.

  “I will figure this out,” I tell Pip, whispering it into her ear even as I pull Alis down between us. Our daughter wriggles contentedly, happy to be bracketed by our bodies, and only knees me in the ribs twice. “I promise. I will make it stop.”

  Pip does not offer a reply to that. I think, I hope, it is because she doesn’t want to set off another round of unexpected waterworks.

  But the truth of the matter is this: I am frustrated. I am angry. And I am scared. It has never taken me this long to roust a villain, or uncover a plot, or decipher a riddle. And I cannot determine if this lack of clarity is because whatever story we are now in is not, in fact, a fantasy hero’s quest, as Pip suggests, or if it is because lazy old Forsyth Turn is getting rusty. Worse, I dread that it is because I have been in the Overrealm so long that all the specialness I was imbued with as a fictional character has begun to fade. What is the use of being the know-it-all younger brother who was secretly the spymaster, if it gains me nothing here and now, when those very skills are what is needed most of me? What if I am becoming horrifically, impotently normal?

  Once Alis and Pip are safely tucked up in bed for the night, I return, as I have for every night this week, to Finnar and my desperate search. Following Elgar around LA has been fruitless—the back rooms and board offices of Flageolet are monitored by cameras, but from what I can see, nothing out of the ordinary has happened. The lobby and hall cameras of his hotel are equally without clue, and as there are no monitoring devices in his rooms, and the man makes a point of keeping his cell phone off and his computer closed when he doesn’t intend to use them, I cannot turn on his microphone or camera to catch what is being said and done.

  Sleepless, angry with myself as well as with the world, my ears strain for the sound of Finnar pinging a result. I am so desperately awaiting that sound that I nearly miss it when it actually does go off.

  I bring up the program immediately—it is an assault report filed by a Mr. Louis Garcia against the boyfriend of his daughter, Madeline. He spotted what is reported to be an electrical burn on her shoulder, hidden by a sweater that had slipped to the side. The time recorded for the incident matches that of Pip’s most recent fit, this morning.

  Electrical burn. Lightning.

  The culprit, it seems, is in Seattle still. And Miss Garcia is a waitress at Elgar’s favorite diner. At last, I am one step closer to Elgar’s tormentor. But there is no address given for his location, no arrest record, no indication that the police are even aware of the connection between Miss Garcia’s abuser and Elgar’s stalker. I dash off a hasty note to the police, taking care to make it appear as if it comes from a junior officer who noticed a similarity in the MOs, flagging it for the detective in charge of Elgar’s case. While I spin in my chair, fruitlessly, the bastard remains at large.

  I can do nothing else from here, and so, flush with this one small, if bittersweet, victory, and confident that Finnar is clever enough to use this incident to branch out and search for more reports that are similar, I retire to bed.

  Sometime around midnight, Pip wakes screaming.

  I am alert before I realize it, and rolling over to cover her body with mine in an instant. I tense, preparing for a blow to fall upon my back, or the sharp slice of a knife to pierce my skin, but none come. Pip jams her fists against my chest and screeches: “Off, off, oh god!”

  I roll away, and Pip sucks in a heaving, choking breath and moans.

  Pip’s screams echo in my ears when I flick on the light. She has moved onto all fours, her head buried under her arms as she writhes and groans.

  “Pip?” I ask, pitching my voice to carry over her cries. “Pip, what is wrong?”

  “Hurts,” Pip hisses out, and it is more syllable than vowel.

  I sit softly on the side of the bed, hands out and held over my wife, soothing, but not touching until I am certain that I won’t harm her further. After a very long moment, she flops onto her face, and then holds absolutely still.

  “Pip?”

  “It’s easing,” she sighs, but it is still between clenched teeth. She’s panting, her face flushed, her jaw clenched, the tendons and veins of her neck standing out as she fights back the pain.

  “May I touch you?”

  She grunts what sounds like an affirmative, and so, carefully, I lean over and peel her sweaty t-shirt up her back. I half expect to see the scars torn open anew, blood rolling down her sides to bloom like gunshot wounds against our white sheets. Or, failing that, for the scars to be red, or inflamed. What I do not expect—what I should have expected—is the faint, faint tinge of green. It looks like someone has dry-brushed green greasepaint along the very tops of each puffed ridge of hard white scar tissue. The suggestion of the color is so faint that I have to squint and turn my head to be sure of what I’m seeing.

  I stand, make my way back over to the door, and turn off the light.

  In the gloaming of the street-lamps outside our window, Pip’s scars glow, weak and watery.

  “By the Writer,” I breathe, and, horrified, turn the lights back on.

  Pip nods, and reaches out for me, and I go. She sobs again, tears soaking into my pajama shirt as she curls into my embrace as if I were the only thing in the world worth clinging to, and then suddenly unclenches. A whooshing sigh of relief escapes her lungs as she drops onto the mattress. She turns her head to the side, and regards me with red-rimmed eyes. “’M fine. It’s over.”

  But Pip is covering up the fear that still lingers in the echoing aftermath.

  When she lets go of my shirt, a smear of something vibrantly orange is left behind on the white fabric. “What is this?” I ask, touching it.

  It is tacky with blood. And in that blood are short, orange fibers, no longer than an inch, a great tuft of them, mixed with small, cream-colored hairs. Fur. By the Writer, it is cat fur.

  Pip is back on her knees now, staring at her own hands—smeared with more blood, more fur—like they are foreign, alien things.

  “This looks like . . . this is . . . oh, no. Linux,” Pip hiccoughs, and starts wiping the mess off in frantic swipes with the pillowcase.

  “Pip, come, we will rinse it off, and you—”

  She stands and bolts for the en suite.

  “It’s me,” Pip says, scrubbing her hands frantically in the sink. “It must be me.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, squirting soap on her hands when she fumbles with the dispenser.

  “What if it’s not . . . what if . . . ? I’m the only magical thing left in this world, aren’t I? Didn’t I bring a spell on my bones? What if this is the magic trying to get out? What if this is the magic reaching out to Elgar because he made it, and . . . ? What if this is my fault? All of it? What if I have to go back into the books to . . . what if I have to stay in the books—?”

  “No,” I say firmly. “No. If that is what this is, we will solve it another way.”

  Pip looks up at me with big, inky eyes, desperate and brimming with tears. “If it keeps us safe, if it keeps Elgar alive and keeps whatever is happening from lashing out at Alis, I could—I could stand it. I promise. I could—”

  “I don’t want you to stand Hain,” I tell her, gently pulling her hands away from the sink before
she scrubs them raw. I skim off my filthy shirt and throw it in the tub, then wrap her hands in a towel, tucking them up against my heart. “If we returned to Hain, I would want it to be because we chose to do so. Not because we were chased away from the Overrealm. This is my home now, too, Pip. I shall not give it up.”

  Pip sniffles and wipes her nose on my shoulder.

  “Delightful,” I deadpan. “How you fill me with such strident ardor, wife. I simply adore being used as a handkerchief.”

  This makes Pip laugh, as I hoped it would, and eventually her sobs subside.

  Curious, half hoping it will work for Pip’s sake, and half hoping it does not so that my fears will be allayed, I speak Words of Comfort. The Word leaves my mouth, thin, anemic, nearly breathless, but spreads like dandelion fluff in the air and settles in gossamer threads across Pip’s back. What little tension still remains in her posture vanishes and she goes all the way lax, even as her eyes blur and cross slightly, the way they always did when I Spoke Words in Hain.

  “Blast,” I curse softly to myself.

  “It worked,” Pip breathes, shaking her head and coming back to herself. “What does it mean?”

  “It means that whatever is happening, the magic is accumulating.”

  Pip shakes out of my grip and throws the wet towel into the tub after my soiled shirt.

  “This is ridiculous,” Pip says, and clutches the sides of her head. “If it’s not me, if you’re sure it’s not me, then it’s . . . it’s him. It has to be!”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation save for his, ah, following us.”

  Pip peers up at me, scowling. “Say his name.”

  “What?” I ask, startled by this sudden and bizarre demand. “Why would—?”

  “This is . . . he’s not some boogeyman!” Pip insists. “We’re not going to summon him to our doorstep by saying it. We’re both thinking it. We’ve both been thinking it. It’s the Viceroy. It’s the Viceroy. He’s here. Forsyth, he’s here! And he’s trying to get back inside my head.”