by J. M. Frey
Next to our string of coins, the spices are our most precious commodity—not for the wealth they represent, but because of how dire road-food can be without them. They go everywhere with me, even into battle. You never know when you’ll need cinnamon or turmeric.
Once the stew is reasonably thick, I clamp the lid on the pot, hang it from Karl’s saddle where it won’t burn the horse, and break camp. It’s noon by the time we’re back on the road, and with our bellies full, we have time to contemplate other things.
“It’s strange to think he won’t be there,” Kin says as we trot toward the Valley of the Tombs. I don’t have to ask who, or where, because I was thinking the same thing.
His thoughts are on Forssy, and Turn Hall. Mine are on Forssy, too—not on the legacy he’s left behind for me to uphold, but a task. A position. A promise, maybe. Maybe a threat, too.
The Shadow’s Mask is back in my hand (the one not holding the reins), and I can’t help but run my thumb along the inside of it, stroking back and forth over metal made smooth by the brows and cheeks of a hundred men who have had the same choice thrust upon them as me.
“Yeah,” I say.
“No fussy Bossy Forssy to yelp and cringe about his whiskey. No dire looks over the state of our boots in his grand foyer . . . our grand foyer,” Kintyre corrects himself. And then, quietly, he adds in a crumbly voice: “My grand foyer. Blast.”
“Kin,” I say softly, just loud enough to be heard over hooves, but I don’t know what to add to it, so I just look back down at the mask.
“Put that thing away,” he says. “Stop panicking.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You are.” He levels a knowing look at me—the one that says, very clearly: I know you. You can’t fool me.
I put the mask away.
✍
It takes several days longer than it could to reach the tomb of King Chailin, because Kin and I are reluctant to speed our journey. We both know we are headed toward . . . something. The end of something. The start of something else. A change. And so little has changed between us in seventeen years—even when we became lovers, admitted our feelings for one another and pledged our Pairing, nothing really changed.
We shared one bedroll instead of using two. We bought each other new jerkins in Turn-russet, putting away our purples. We kissed, and swived, and didn’t need a woman between us to touch each other, didn’t need the lie anymore. But we traveled, and ate, and bickered, and fought villainy all the same. Things got simpler in a way I never thought they would, actually. That change was a good one. There’s no telling that the next one will be. And so, we’re reluctant to race toward it.
A thought’s been tumbling over and over in my brain these last few days, jolted with every step of the horses, scrabbling when I try to sleep: we’re fiction.
I didn’t remember right away, what with the battle finished and the joy over the Viceroy’s final defeat, the unexpected and surprising grief over the loss of Forssy. I’d never liked the pompous, self-important arse, but these last few weeks of questing with him had shown me a side I think I could have befriended properly if he’d stuck around.
And all of this because Writer and Readers are real. We’re all fictional characters in a story-scroll. Takes a bit to get your head around it. And if we’re Written, then in this world devoid of the Viceroy, who are Kintyre Turn and Bevel Dom? What do they strive for? How do they spend their time? What awaits them at Turn Hall, and all that it houses, all that it represents?
I’ll be the first person to admit that I’m not the most profound of blokes. I don’t overthink things much, though I know I’ve got the better head for strategy and planning between my lover and me. But dwelling on the idea that, in some strange way, I’m not real? Nah. That makes me nauseous.
So, what’s waiting for us at Turn Hall, then? Concrete things. Real things. Real beds, and fresh bread daily, and meals I don’t have to cook if I don’t want to, and a steady stream of clean clothing, and warmth and comfort. A life—new and different, and safe.
But also responsibility, and permanency, and being tied to a place and a people. How are we ever going to live up to Forsyth Turn, beloved by his tenants, patron of a Free School and friend of the Sheriff?
I fight the temptation, daily, to suggest we just . . . run away. Run off into the wilds, like we always do when the battle is over and the damsel safe at home, when we’ve been feasted and fattened and tupped and thanked. Run off before we can be pressed, or tricked, or cornered into titles, or marriages, or duties. Run off to where responsibility can’t catch us.
Run off so that it’s just the two of us.
It’s only a small temptation, though, because we promised Forssy. And a Writer-be-damned last promise means something. If a man isn’t good to his promises, what good is he to the world, anyway? That’s what my Pa used to say.
The chill of the Valley is a welcome distraction from our wordless worries. We make camp on Chailin’s front porch, in the same place we had less than a fortnight ago, when our pursuit of Bootknife had led us to the unlikeliest of adventurers and changed everything about how we saw Forsyth Turn. And his damsel. And the world we inhabit.
While Kintyre builds the night’s fire, I pay a visit to the unmarked, still-fresh grave of that bastard Bootknife. Just to be sure, you see, that the monster is still underground, where he belongs. Kintyre didn’t bury him deep, so it only takes a few minutes to uncover his face and chest. They’ve both begun to sink, and a gruesome pleasure fills me to see that the worms have already eaten through one of his cheeks and out an eyeball. I take great joy in driving one of my arrows through his heart before I close up the grave again. Petty, yeah. But a stake through the heart is a cure for more than just vampire troubles, and it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
When I come back, I stop to wash my hands in the cold stream that bisects the valley, and Kintyre doesn’t ask why they were dirty in the first place. He doesn’t need to.
Once the sun has set, and we’re both wrapped up warm against the chill of the night, we take the time to clean and hone the dagger Kintyre’s been carrying at his waist for over a decade. When the blade is sparkling and sharp, the few remaining gems shining once more in the firelight, we take a torch into Chailin’s tomb and return the fallen king’s dagger to him. I say a few Words of Peace, and Gratitude, and Good Rest as Kintyre slips the blade back into its moldering leather-and-gold sheath. We carefully push the lid of the sarcophagus closed, and reseal the edges with the pot of pitch we usually save for kindling fires.
We sleep poorly and light that night, starting at every sound and shivering with every gust of wind. You never know what might accidentally wake the dead. If it wasn’t stealing a beloved symbolic dagger, then it might be returning it.
All the corpses stay where they should, though, and our luck holds for at least one more night.
In the misty, watery-weak light of day, we decide to cross the Cinch Mountains to the west via some of the dwarvish tunnels we know, and take the opportunity to resupply in Chasmshine. From there, we can cut through North Urland to the Salt Crystal Caverns to give back the Cup that Never Runs Dry, and then double back into fertile Miliway and head to the Lost Library to return the Parchment that Never Fills. Winter is nearly upon us, and crossing the Cinch even a few weeks later than we are now would be foolhardy. There are no dwarf cities in North Urland, and we would have to go over the mountains there, instead of under them. No, better to cross now, and head back south to Miliway Chipping later, save the easier road for the harsher weather.
Chasmshine is another two day’s ride. Queen Andvari Stoneborn welcomes us to her halls, as I knew she would, and promises us a quiet night to recuperate and bathe, a day’s restocking and catching up with her—her way of saying “gossip about the world of the humanfolk”—tomorrow, followed by a feast to see us off. It takes a day, at least, to put together a proper dwarvish feast, but we don’t mind the wait, really. It’s always worth i
t.
As soon as we’re in our rooms (human-sized, for those out-sized guests who need to visit the dwarf kingdom occasionally), Kintyre strips to his skin and streaks with unashamed eagerness to the attached bathing chamber. The stone basin is sunk into the floor and filled with steaming hot spring water from the heart of the mountains. Massive prismatic diamond windows line the chamber and look out onto the underground portion of the Northwash River that eventually flows over the waterfall of the Crystal Caverns much further north of us. Kintyre flops into the water like an ungraceful selkie toddler and, as I’m hot on his heels, splashes the mineral water in my face.
“Oh, that’s the way of it, is it?” I shout with a grin, and jump on his shoulders.
What follows is probably the most ridiculous battle in the history of heroics. In the interest of never sullying our good reputation as questing adventurers and knights, I vow never to write it down, even as I yank on my lover’s hair and spit water in his face. Once we’ve had our rumpus, I steal back into the sleeping chamber in naught but my towel. I’m looking for the wine the dwarves always keep by their bedsides and, finding that, come across a tray of broken cold cheeses, rolls, and pickled root vegetables that some poor chambermaid must have delivered while we were carousing. I wonder what sort of tales are already circulating among the serving staff about the clumsy, oafish, too-large and too-loud humans. Doesn’t matter, really. We are too-large and too-loud for dwarvish tastes. And Andvari will squash any whispers that get too prejudiced or hateful.
While I’ve been gone, Kintyre’s mopped up the worst of the splashes, and created a rolled pile of towels around one end of the basin so we can lay our heads back on the edge and just turn to soup. I put the tray on the floor beside this, and Kintyre cuddles close as soon as I’ve slipped back into the water. For my kisses, I had hoped, but he just snatches the wine bottle out of my hand, the magpie, and swigs off the first swallow.
“Brute,” I complain, but he holds the bottle out for me, and tips it against my lips sweetly, so I suppose I forgive him.
“I’m the brute?” he asks, after taking another swig and turning onto his stomach to pick at the tray of savories. “Look at this. No meat.”
I smack one of the plump arse cheeks bobbing out of the water, and he yelps. “You know dwarves eat no meat. Don’t be an elfcock,” I say, and smack his other cheek for symmetry.
“Wouldn’t hurt them to be hospitable,” Kintyre mutters with a scowl, and then grabs my wrist before I can land another playful blow on his rump and starts another scuffle which sends splashes of water flying from our elbows and feet.
“Elfcock,” I repeat, and then use his distraction to snatch the wine bottle out of his hand.
“This is nice,” Kin says, when he’s got me pinned to the side of the tub so he can monopolize the wine. “I feel so weightless.”
“I like big baths like this, too.” I wrap my legs around his waist to demonstrate.
“No, I mean . . . yeah, the bath, too. But . . . no Viceroy. I never realized how much I . . . I worried about him. And Bootknife. Never realized how much I thought about them, all the time, in the back of my mind, you know?” he says, eyes going squinty as he tries to figure out how to say what he means. “It was like a mosquito in my ear. I used to think about him a few times a day, wonder where he was, what he was up to, what he was plotting next. I would check on you, when that happened. Wake up from sleep or look over on the road. Make sure you were still there.”
“You would?” I ask, pleasantly startled by this revelation. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Kin says, and kisses my neck, and each of my eyelids, and the tiny scar under my eye from Bootknife’s blade.
“And now?”
“Now I just look at you because I like what I see,” Kin says with a wicked grin, and grinds closer against my hips. “And every time I think about the Viceroy, it’s like a . . . a surprise, you know? But a good one. Because I get to remember all over again that he’s gone. And it’s like my whole body relaxes, and I get giddy because . . . because I don’t have to worry anymore. I never have to fear . . .” He doesn’t admit what he feared, but he kisses the scar under my eye again, and I can guess. He feared having to face me across the battlefield the same way Forsyth was forced to face a green-glowing Pip across the lavender-gray expanse of the Rookery.
We nibble and roll about in the water for another hour, until a messenger knocks on the door and politely informs us that if we’re quite finished ruining the floors, Queen Andvari would like us to join her in her private parlor for a nightcap. Kin and I each quickly scrub soap through our hair and make ourselves as presentable as we can with the clothes from our packs. They’re wrinkled, but they don’t reek of the road and horses, so that’s something at least. What we were wearing when we arrived has already been carted away to the royal laundry, thank the Writer.
Hair still damp and sheepish grins on our faces, we make our way to the queen’s suite. We are greeted at the door by the queen’s second spouse, Nyrath. The Princess Consort is plump-cheeked and glowing, her tightly curled black beard adorned with Rose Quartz and Malachite.
“Writer’s balls, you’re pregnant!” I hear myself saying before I can shut down my stupid mouth when I parse what the stone-language message means.
Nyrath giggles coyly and ducks her head, and from behind her, Andvari’s distinctive braying laughter rings across the stone ceiling. “And you, Bevel Dom, have changed not a bit.”
“Well, maybe a bit,” I call back as Nyrath leads us over to her wife. I hold my hands out, showing off my Turn-russet short robe.
The queen’s eyes widen, then narrow shrewdly and jump between Kintyre—who is also wearing Turn-russet—and me.
“Writer’s balls,” she echoes, jumping up from her wingback chair by the fire. “Finally.”
Dwarves, as a rule, are about four feet tall, but Andvari stands at nearly five. There’s mixed blood in the Stoneborn line, some say, while others whisper that the Stoneborns are larger than most because they are filled with the destiny of their people. Andvari once confessed to me that it was just a family trait, and meant nothing whatsoever. Andvari is also thick with muscle, where her wife is plump and her husband slender.
Sviur was a bard and poet who charmed the crown princess while he toured the dwarvish courts, and she had asked for his hand as her first spouse just before we first met her. I’ll never forget the headache of trying to help her unravel the political bellyaching that occurred because she’d chosen a commoner as First Spouse while also trying to keep Kintyre from rushing off to the Urlish wars with no idea of what being a common soldier was really like.
Wars that caused the death of Andvari’s father and her ascent to the throne. In retrospect, it’s a good thing we did stay, because if Sviur had never got an eyeful of Foesmiter, Kin would never have known that his weapon was one of the Ten Magical Swords of Legend, nor how to work in harmony with the blade’s magics.
To appease the courts, Andvari had next married Nyrath, the daughter of a neighboring kingdom—a shy, sweet girl raised to be some other ruler’s wife and knowing from a very young age that she would be sent away from her homeland and all she loved dear for political gain. Instead of growing petulant and resentful at her lot, Nyrath had determined to chart her own destiny, hold her own power in her future spouse’s court. She had studied the art of treaties and warfare, bargaining and trading, politics and backroom deals. On the surface, sweet-faced and sunny Nyrath was nothing more than a pretty, biddable girl. But under that, she was a shrewd and sneaky chess-master. Andvari was luckier than she had ever thought she would be in her choice. Andvari’s genuine admiration for Nyath’s political prowess had made the marriage smoother and, eventually, a love worth treasuring had grown between them.
As soon as I get close enough, Andvari grabs my hand and pumps it energetically, her grin sharkish behind her fire-red beard. Her hair is down for the night, the braids of rulership now loose, waist-length waves that
swing around when she turns to punch Kintyre in the kidneys.
“About time, you clueless granite-skull!” she bawls joyfully.
Kintyre doubles over, not expecting the blow, and Sviur rises from where he and their son Virfur—by the Writer, how he’s grown!—were practice-strumming his lute. Sviur’s lost none of the grace his dancing days instilled in him, and he offers both of us a polite greeting. We shake hands, clasping at the elbows to check for concealed daggers in the dwarvish way. Sviur’s golden fall of hair is loose, too, as it must be because of his common birth, but now it’s threaded with white. The braid at his chin is almost entirely colorless. Much more so than I was expecting. Virfur comes to stand beside Sviur, shy in the way young children are. He’s probably just on the brink of ten years old, but that’s still young for a dwarf—closer to our two or three. When we saw him last, though, he was still a babe in arms.
Some small secret part of me pangs with hurt. I was hoping to hold the baby again. How silly of me to have forgotten that the world below the Cinch wouldn’t just freeze like winter ice and wait for us to come back. Ridiculous.
“Sit, sit,” Nyrath admonishes. She bustles us onto cushions on the floor, which is what we prefer in order to be eye-level with the dwarves when we’re in casual company. Sviur passes us both cut-crystal glasses of the clear root-vegetable liquor the dwarves specialize in. Kintyre downs his immediately, in one gulp. I shoot Sviur a look of apology, but the dwarf shakes his head. He’s used to Kintyre’s manners by now, and just refills the glass without comment. Kintyre sips this second one, at least.
Virfur, curiosity overcoming his shyness, crawls immediately into Kintyre’s legs and stretches up to stroke his naked chin with wonder. Kintyre clamps down on his grimace, picks the toddler up from under the armpits, and deposits him on my lap. I hastily set aside my glass, putting it up on a side table and out of the child’s reach. His parents laugh.