The Silenced Tale

by J. M. Frey

  “That’s never not going to be funny,” Elgar says, chuckling drunkenly to himself.

  Pip rolls her eyes, and then we are on the top floor of the hotel, where a bit of judicious juggling from within the hotel’s booking system allowed me to ensure we had a two-bedroom suite with kitchenette reserved for our needs. Elgar seems pleased with it when we leave him in his bedroom to get settled. Pip goes immediately into the kitchenette for the bottle of wine she’s left on the counter.

  “A bit early in the day,” I chide.

  Pip grimaces, but applies the point of the corkscrew to the foil all the same. “If I’m going to put up with his ‘sense of humor’ for the next four days, I need it.”

  “Just a small one,” I allow. “We must remain on our guard.”

  Pip groans at my nobility. Having just worked the cork out, she jams it back into the mouth of the bottle. “Spoilsport,” she complains.

  “Here,” I say, leaning back against the counter and opening my arms, spreading my legs. “Let your husband soothe your ruffled feathers another way.”

  Pip accepts the invitation and steps in between my feet, throws her arms around my waist, and cradles her cheek on my sternum. I take advantage of our closeness and slide my hands under the back of her belt to hold her close. We remain locked together, just listening to one another breathe, for several long minutes.

  “I missed you,” Pip says, and if her voice is wobbly, then it is not my place to tease her for it. For my voice is just as wobbly when I reply: “And I you.”

  We only break apart when a deliberate cough echoes from the threshold of the kitchenette.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Pip says, and turns away from me to smirk at Elgar. “I know, we’re so gross.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Elgar protests, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. “Kinda romantic, actually.”

  The uncharacteristic compliment startles me, and I cannot help but study Elgar’s face. He has his eyes turned away, his hands folded behind his back. He looks more like a contrite little boy than an adult. But he is leaning heavily on the doorframe, clearly still affected by his medications.

  “Coffee?” Pip asks, and breaks away to try to dissolve the awkward moment with caffeine.

  “Yeah,” Elgar groans. “Yeah, that’d be great.” He lowers himself into the office chair beside what can be tentatively called ‘the living room,’ and tips his head back, closing his eyes with a hard sigh.

  The suite door opens into an open space with a sofa, a large chair and ottoman, and a sleek entertainment center right beside the floor-to-ceiling patio doors that lead to a balcony too windy to really enjoy. To the left are the bedrooms, with matching en suite washrooms, and to the right, against the wall, is the kitchenette, which is directly abutted by an office nook with a desk that looks out through the windows over downtown Toronto.

  As Pip putters with the hotel-room coffee machine, complaining when she realizes she failed to pack the good coffee sachets, I join my creator in looking out over the skyline. He sits up, wincing, and stares out the window.

  The coffee machine beeps, and I rise and fetch us three mug-fulls, each doctored to our preferred strength. Pip likes her coffee dark as night and sweet as sin. I prefer mine creamy, but sugarless. And Elgar drinks what Canadians call a “double-double”; two creams, two sugars. Juan had been trying to wean him onto black coffee to cut out some of the excess sweets, but now that he has left, Elgar has returned to all his bad nutritional habits. Perhaps I ought not to be enabling him.

  “Thanks,” he mumbles, but he presses the mug to the skin between his eyes instead of taking a sip. The heat helps to soothe away some of the worry lines that have etched themselves around his eyes, though it does nothing for the dark smudges under them.

  “So, are you guys cosplaying?” Elgar asks at length, when our silent communication has clearly become too unnerving for him.

  “Hmmm?” Pip asks, looking down at her attire. She is already dressed in her adventuring gear. My own is laid carefully along the back of the sofa, waiting for me to don it. “Oh. Yeah, I guess.”

  “As?”

  “Lordling Forsyth Turn and his Ladyling Wife,” I answer with a knowing grin. “We figured it was best to attire ourselves as if we were going into an adventure, just in case we are. Padded jerkins to absorb blows, you see here? And tough leather leggings that will not tear. Boots with sturdy soles that do not slip, and which lace up and give support to the ankle when running.”

  “Where’d you get the stuff?” Elgar asks, reaching out to touch the fabric of Pip’s sleeve. The sash laying on the arm of the sofa is the one I wear under my sword belt. I’d had it on when I returned to the Overrealm from our second adventure. Elgar picks up the end, examining the locks and keys picked out in gold thread in the fabric.

  “My mother embroidered that,” I offer.

  “Real Hainish embroidery,” he repeats, breathless with awe. “From the hand of Lady Alis Sheil Turn.”

  “That it is,” I say gently. Elgar carefully sets it back down, and I take the opportunity to head into our room and change. As I step back out, properly clad in clothing that now feels like it fits too tightly, my question about how I look is interrupted by Elgar’s smartphone ringing, blaring out that same fiddle-and-fife tune he told me was meant to be secret.

  For all his desire to be covert, Elgar is woefully bad at it. Setting the song as his ringtone; walking in the front door of the hotel; engaging in conversations with people he knows full well will go repeat them elsewhere. He would not have made a suitable candidate for Shadow Hand at all. But he does not desire to be stealthy, to be spy-like. He wishes to be loved. To the point of recklessness, sometimes.

  When he answers the phone, Pip and I listen, equally intently, to one side of it as Elgar has a conversation with someone who is obviously the convention organizer, based on the sorts of questions he’s answering. Elgar, as a guest of honor and a major financial draw in terms of star power, certainly has the ability to dictate his own terms and create his own leeways and rules that I assume the lesser guests do not have. All the same, his arriving early seems to have caused a tizzy which I wish we could have avoided. In the end, he soothes the organizer—though I must mime urgently that he not provide the number of the room we are staying in—by agreeing to meet with him tonight.

  “Why not?” he asks after he’s hung up.

  “What color are the organizer’s eyes?” Pip asks, and Elgar blanches so quickly that I jump up from the sofa to guide him back down into his seat.

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “What color were Ichiro’s?” Pip presses him.

  “I didn’t check,” he confesses in a small voice, hand pressed against his chest.

  “Exactly. We must be cautious,” I remind him.

  “Yeah,” he says shakily. He swallows hard, head clearly still a bit muzzy. “Yeah. I, uh . . . they usually do this thing before the con where all the guests get together in a suite with the organizers and have a few beers. They give us our honorarium, we stick around and talk for a bit, they usually feed us. I’ve been asked to go down this evening.”

  “I’m not sure I am comfortable with you going to—”

  “I wrangled invitations for you, too,” Elgar interrupts.

  Pip and I exchange another glance, but this time, her eyebrows are raised. She is thinking it over. “It may give us a chance to scope out everyone in positions of authority,” she says eventually. “And if no one besides the convention committee knows Elgar’s here yet, it might give us an advantage.”

  “What advantage?” Elgar asks.

  “Warning them,” Pip says, but she does so with that sideways, one-shouldered shrug that means she’s not certain that what she’s saying is really worth considering.

  Elgar snorts. “What, we’re going to waltz up to the ConComm and tell them that one of my own characters has slipped his pages and intends to kill me?”

  “That you have a maniacal fan w
ho is stalking you,” I correct.

  “Yeah. Yeah, they can warn security and . . . I don’t know. I usually have someone from convention security escort me everywhere. Maybe they can get a real cop?”

  “Possibly,” I allow. “But I doubt that even Toronto’s finest will be utterly immune to the Viceroy’s influence should he choose to exert it. I would rather it be just us two—more people added to your honor guard means more opportunity for treachery.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Elgar says on a whimper.

  “That is what I am here for, Elgar,” I reassure.“When must you go down to the room?”

  “Now, if we can,” he says. “Does that work?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Just let me fetch Smoke.”

  Elgar’s eyes bulge out. “You’re going to just walk around with a real sword?”

  Pip grins at him and punches his shoulder gently. “We’re cosplaying, remember?”

  “They’ll cable-tie it into the sheath. They’re serious about security.”

  “It is a risk I am willing to take,” I say. “I can break the tie with magic later.”

  “There’s no guarantee there’ll be magic,” Elgar protests.

  “If I need to draw my sword,” I say gravely. “There will be.”

  “This is Abby,” Elgar says, about twenty minutes later. He is smiling too widely, and his eyes are too bright—he is in what he calls “Convention Mode”: gregarious, energetic, his jokes flat and desperate, his smile false. As a fellow natural introvert, I can see how exhausting the performance is. He is trying too hard, and he is too over-the-top as a result.

  He slings his arm around a young woman with large dark eyes, and long dark hair. She is dressed in a great deal of bubblegum pink and misty mint, from her sneakers to her leggings, to her knee-length skirt, which is patterned with ice-cream cones, and the matching scarf over her long-sleeved shirt. She is terrifically pretty, too, very carefully made up with false lashes and the careful sort of artistically intense makeup that Pip has called “contouring,” and “a massive pain in the ass,” and “a waste of a perfectly good hour of my life.” Bless my wife, but she does reject the traditionally feminine with a vigor that nearly borders on insult to those that embrace it.

  However, the young lady before me seems to be the exact opposite of a simpering femme, wearing her pastels and makeup with a sort of warrior-like pride which I admire. She is clearly of Indian descent, not African, but I am reminded so intensely of Captain Isobin for a moment that the déjà vu fills my breast with a brief, intense stab of homesickness. Though, of course, this young woman is neither pirate, nor captain, and unlike Isobin, is not filled with the raucous self-confidence required to push my creator back on his arse for his presumption. She is clearly not comfortable with the way he has taken liberties with her personal space without asking, and he has just as clearly gotten her name wrong. Her badge, which marks her as a guest liaison, says, “Ahbni.”

  “Hi,” Pip says, holding her hand out for a shake, and Ahbni uses the excuse to duck out from under Elgar’s arm.

  “I’ll be able to tell her apart from the rest of the brown girls because she’s the hot one,” Elgar goes on, sticking his foot further down his throat.

  Pip pinches the bridge of her nose and groans. “I honestly can’t tell if it’s the meds talking, or the stress.”

  “Actually, I—” Ahbni begins, but Elgar talks over her.

  “You can get my friend a coffee or something, right, Abby?”

  “I’m the assistant guest liaison, Mr. Reed, and I need to talk to you about—”

  Elgar laughs. “Cute. No, no, grab your boss and send him my way, okay, sweetie?” And then he gives her a little shove. She steps away, off-balance, and Elgar’s eyes drop to . . . oh. They drop with the full intention of watching her walk away.

  Beside me, my wife makes a noise like a strangling cat.

  “Lucy?” Elgar asks, having heard the sound as well, bushy eyebrows knitted with confusion. “Are you okay? Abby, can you—?”

  “It’s Ahbni,” the liaison corrects.

  “Ahbni,” Elgar repeats, not entirely sure where he misstepped. “That’s a cute fantasy handle.”

  “Nope. It’s my name,” she corrects.

  “Oh!” Elgar laughs. “Were your parents fantasy fans, then?”

  “They’re Telugu,” Ahbni says, and I get the distinct impression that she is considering using her badge lanyard to garrote my creator. I am doing my best to control the urge to laugh.

  “I might use it, though, you know? It’s a good name. The beautiful Princess Ahbni, with skin like fresh-roasted cafe latte—”

  “No,” Pip snaps, smacking Elgar’s good arm like an errant puppy. “Bad writer. Women of color are not dessert products.”

  Elgar jams his hands into his pockets and scowls. “It’s supposed to be a compliment—”

  “I swear to fuck, one of these days, I’m going to throttle you myself,” Pip says, deadpan and staring straight at Elgar. She’s got her index finger stretched out and is tapping him right in the chest, fingernail clicking against his plastic button. “You know that being terrified out of your mind is no excuse to fall back into old habits, right?”

  Elgar immediately looks ashamed. “I . . . you’re right. I didn’t think—”

  “Try to,” Pip says. Then she blows out an annoyed breath, forces herself to flex her fist, runs her fingers through her hair, and pointedly turns away from him. “Ahbni, if you’d like to tell us where the coffee is, I can make sure that my husband fetches it for his own damn self. And then you and I can review where Mr. Neanderthal over there needs to be, and by when.”

  Chastened, Elgar scowls and jams his hands further into his pockets. “Sorry,” he mutters.

  “Are you his security, then?” Ahbni asks, clearly not convinced, even as she waves me toward the table at the back of the small conference room the ConComm has commandeered for this small shindig. I don’t blame her. Pip, in her leathers, looks nothing like a professional.

  “Close enough,” Pip says. “Believe me when I say that I’m mostly here for his own good.”

  Ahbni snorts and offers Pip a crooked smirk. “That must be a hell of a job,” she says.

  “You’re telling me,” my wife agrees. It seems as if she’s made a new friend.

  I take this opportunity to slink over to the aforementioned table, accepting the out that Pip and Elgar have proffered. Though only the former was, I think, aware that I had a desire to divide and conquer the crowd. Or, no, not conquer. Assess.

  While Pip charms Ahbni and corrals Elgar, I spend a few hours practicing my Canadian accent so as not to stand out too much in the memory of the people around me. I sip coffee that I have fetched for my own damn self, and drop subtle phrases and suggestions in the ears of a large black man who is the head of security; the skinny, overworked and underslept white man who is the convention organizer; and Ichiro. Though I have no Words to compel with, I am able to murmur, and plant suggestions, and pry in ways so subtle that the subjects of my machinations do not realize they are being manipulated at all. It is nice to don the persona of the Shadow Hand once more; it is a little like a homecoming, and I find my hand drifting to cradle the pommel of Smoke so often that I must fold my hands behind my back to keep from making the security-seeking gesture appear as if it is meant to be a threat.

  We leave the party shortly thereafter. Pip is assured that Ahbni will personally oversee Elgar’s schedule and safety, no matter that she is annoyed with his personality, and I am pleased with my progress with the rest of the staff.

  And no one, as far as I could see, has green eyes.

  A tension that I had only barely registered in Pip’s posture is more relaxed as we “batman” out of the party (Pip calls it this when we leave without calling attention to ourselves or announcing it), and head back to our suite. Pip and Elgar take the first elevator up, and I linger, pretending to read the newspaper left on the tall, thin table b
y the elevators, to take the next one. No one seems to be following us from the event, though I linger once again when I reach the penthouse floor before heading to our rooms.

  When I get there, Pip and Elgar are already a few sips into their plastic cups of wine, and, satisfied for now, I indulge in one myself before we bid each other goodnight and make for our separate bedrooms.

  “Should we sleep in shifts?” Pip asks me as I prop Smoke between the bed and the side table.

  “I have considered that,” I admit. “And far be it for me to say that I think we are fine for now—”

  “Don’t,” Pip says with laughing sternness. “You’ll call down trouble.”

  “I think we ought to indulge in sleeping as much as we are able. I’m not certain we’ll have the chance for the rest of the weekend.”

  Elgar

  Elgar wakes to a screech. For a second, sitting bolt upright on his bed with sweat on his face and his heart thundering in his throat, he mistakes it for the fire alarm. He blinks rapidly and swallows a few times, the noise ringing shrill and . . . penetratingly discordant between his ears.

  It’s not an alarm of any kind. It’s a scream.

  He scrambles out of bed, yanking on a pair of lounge pants to cover his crumpled boxers, and searches his room for a weapon. Lucy is screaming, and he can’t hear Forsyth, so he might be dead already, and oh god, that means the Viceroy is going to come in here next, and Elgar is armed with literally nothing, and what can he do anyway, with a sword or a gun or a dagger, against magic?

  Determined to not just stand in this room, a lone target, a stupid goose just waiting for the slaughter, Elgar grabs the bedside lamp, chucks the shade off it, and yanks the cord from the wall. The lamp is skinny enough that he can get his whole hand around it, and has enough heft that he can swing it like a baseball bat. If he’s lucky, the bulb might even shatter in the Viceroy’s face.