The Untold Tale (The Accidental Turn Series Book 1)

by J. M. Frey

  Neris and I have a long conversation after Pip has been reinstalled in her room and calmed with poppy milk. The serving girl, however, has seen and heard nothing amiss. Pip, it seems, says very little beyond “please”, “thank you,” or “could you fetch this for me?” to her maid. Neris says that it’s likely because Pip has never had a maid before and does not know what she is allowed to request. I ask her how she knows this, and Neris smiles, slyly. “I’ve been a lady’s maid since I was fourteen, Master Turn, sir,” she says. “I can always tell when a woman was raised with one. They’re the ones who don’t bother with their ‘pleases.’ And you’re the only one she smiles around, sir. That genuine smile, if you take my meaning, sir.”

  “Careful, Neris,” I reply, my tone light but my rebuke serious. “That smacks of impertinence.”

  Neris grins cheekily and apologizes, though she does not mean it at all.

  Drat! Has the whole of Lysse Chipping decided to team up and force me to confess that Pip intrigues me? Or worse, that she attracts me in a way very few women have done simply because I am intrigued by her mysteries? I cannot allow them to tease me into embarrassing myself. Or worse, Pip.

  Of course, Neris must be mistaken. Pip is not attracted to me in return. She must only smile when I enter the room because she is so very bored with sleeping all the time.

  I send Neris off for the night, and remind her that we should pay closer attention to Pip’s mannerisms. I do not tell her that I suspect Pip to be a Reader. Only that she is perhaps not what she seems, and that we should watch her very carefully without seeming to watch.

  As Pip sleeps, arrangements are made for the dinner and dancing I promised her. For all that she is suffering from the memory of her captivity, she did seem genuinely pleased to have been included in these plans. And a bit of merrymaking can only help heal her spirit.

  ✍

  In the morning, the toll the panic attack took on Pip becomes worryingly clear. There are bruises under her eyes. It looks as if she has not slept for a fortnight, despite the rest the poppy milk has forced upon her, and the skin that brackets her eyes and mouth is tight and white. Her lip curls miserably, and one of the larger gashes on her back has split open, the delicate membrane of scabbing dried and half scraped off by what must have been her fall yesterday afternoon.

  “Oh, Forsyth!” Mother Mouth scolds as she prepares a long, curved steel needle, sterilizing it in a candle flame as Pip watches warily from her bed. “You know that Miss Piper should not have been rolling around on the floor. Now I shall have to stitch it.”

  “I wasn’t rolling, Mother Mouth,” Pip protests sullenly.

  “It’s all the same, for the damage is done,” Mother Mouth scolds. “You should not have been out of bed, young lady.”

  Pip colors, and then Mother Mouth rounds on me. “And you shouldn’t be digging into her head when she’s barely healed in the flesh. You know as well as me, Forsyth Turn, that you don’t poke at a soldier until he’s well, and ready to talk about the war himself.”

  “But Pip wasn’t in battle—” I begin to protest, but Mother Mouth silences me with one of her furious, blunt glares.

  “And you tell me how being tied down to a bed and carved on by Bootknife is any kind of different.”

  “I . . . well . . . fair point,” I allow. “Pip, I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

  Pip tries to shrug, attempting vainly to remain nonchalant while her gaze is riveted to the preparation of catgut and hot water for the process of sewing her up. She winces instead, and seems to shrink further into herself.

  “Many and mysterious are the ways of PTSD,” she says, and it is so soft that I wonder if it was meant for our ears at all.

  “‘PTSD’?”

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” Pip says, a little louder. “And damned if I never thought I would ever use that phrase to describe myself. Well, in any way except about my thesis defense.”

  I’ve never heard of it before, but I can guess what it is by the name.

  I am torn between the juxtaposing desires to go to Pip and offer her comfort, and to leave the room so I cannot possibly say something that will make the forthcoming experience worse. Instead, I move to the other side of the bed, so Mother Mouth and I bracket Pip in, and sit by Pip’s head. I am careful not to loom; I do not wish her to feel trapped. I mean to comfort, not confine.

  I touch her gently, making sure that she sees my hand moving before I lay it on her arm, not wanting to startle her back into another shivering fit. “I am sorry,” I say, my voice as low as hers. “I’m sorry that this had to happen to you.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she breathes. “But, I’ll admit, I’m luckier than most.”

  “How so?”

  “Most people die when Bootknife is done with them.”

  “All of ‘em, actually,” Mother Mouth corrects. “Never met a victim of his that hasn’t died of it.”

  Pip goes paler, shivering once all over and so strongly that I fear our talk has pushed her into another “PTSD” episode. She squeezes her eyes shut and breathes heavily, deliberately through her nose, fingers digging into the sheets around her. I pull back and ball up my fists on my thighs, impotent with the fear of my touch inadvertently starting off a shake. And more frustrated still by my wanting nothing more than to cover her with my own body, cradle her against my lap, curl her into a ball and protect her from the whole world. I wish I had the Words to shrink her down, so I could put her in my pocket, keep her safe.

  It is a bizarre, possibly unhealthily possessive compulsion, and I choose, probably wisely, not to voice it.

  Instead, I offer up Words of Calming, the sort of nonsense murmurings a parent might use for a small child woken from a nightmare. Mother Mouth shoots me an approving look. Pip’s trembling eventually abates. I risk a gentle touch on the crown of her head, and Pip turns into it, seeking further contact. I allow my fingers to slip through the warm silk of her hair and down to the nape of her neck, where the first curling tendril of scarred ivy begins, and then back up. Pip relaxes into the pillows like a contented cat.

  “I’m starting now, my girl,” Mother Mouth warns.

  “Ointment first?” Pip requests. “You are going to numb it, aren’t you, Mother?”

  “It makes the needle too slippery,” I answer her. “Believe me, I have experience. Dry hurts more, but with the ointment, it takes twice as long.”

  “Then the poppy milk?”

  Mother Mouth shakes her head. “You need to be awake, just in case I need you to move for me.”

  Pip grabs my hand so hard the bones grind together, and I wince. “Pip!” I complain. “Please, I need to write with that hand.”

  “You are not moving, Forsyth Turn,” she growls. “You are staying right where you are, and you are going to distract me.”

  “Let me fetch you wine, first,” I beg.

  She relents and releases me. I am sore tempted to make a dash for the door, but Mother Mouth glares at me with such reprisal that I merely slink over to the credenza by the fireplace and pour out three earthenware cups of wine. I water Mother Mouth’s and my own habitually, but hesitate with Pip’s. It’s a bit barbaric to leave her wine unwatered, but she could use the buzz of the alcohol.

  Once I return to my side of the bed, meting out the drinks and helping Pip to raise her head enough to slurp off half of it in one go, Pip resumes her grip on me. This time, she digs her nails into my thigh, and I allow it. The pain she is about to suffer is significantly more than what she is causing.

  Mother Mouth suppresses a smile at the intimacy of the gesture, and I barely manage to clamp down on the irritated, Oh, not you too! that tries to tumble out of my mouth. Instead, I say, “Well, I am here, Pip. How can I distract you?”

  “Tell me,” she begins, and then she yelps at the first prick of the needle into her skin. Her nails bite down, scratching at the fabric of my trousers, and I cringe.

  “Tell you wh-what?”

  “Tell me a
bout you and Kintyre,” she grits out between clenched teeth. Sweat appears on her forehead, her face going white and clammy, and I find myself hoping she’ll pass out soon to spare herself from the pain.

  “Oh, one of my brother’s adventures?” I ask. “You know, then, that my elder brother is a great questing hero?”

  “No, no, not that,” Pip grunts. Mother Mouth ties off the first stitch and re-threads the needle. Pip pants, back heaving, and then Mother’s guiding and restraining hand is again on her spine.

  Pip’s muscles shiver and bunch, like a horse shaking off a fly. I place my free hand on a bare patch of her skin by her shoulder to keep her from bucking when Mother Mouth pushes the needle back into her flesh for the second stitch.

  “Then what?” I ask, hoping to keep Pip engaged in the conversation.

  “Tell, tell me—oh, goddammit! Tell me a story about the two of you, when you were kids.”

  “Oh,” I say, taking a moment to think. “I didn’t think you’d find that interesting.”

  “If it’s about you, I—Christ!—I would.”

  I sort through those few childhood memories that fill me with pleasure, turning a few of them over in my mental hands, watching the light of nostalgia glint off their facets, before Pip’s nails dig in harder, forcing me to choose one.

  “There were foxes,” I blurt, my gasp of pain in harmony with one of Pip’s own. “In the covey forest in the bottom of the gardens. The forest is cultivated for hares and pheasants, and the sorts of birds that like to nest in trees and make for good eating. We kept a man back then to hunt game, but father preferred to do the killing for the table himself, where he could. Small animals attract more predators than just drunk old men with crossbows, though, and generations of Turn Hall masters had hunted out foxes and coyotes before. But they always came back.”

  Mother Mouth tied off the second stitch and took a moment to take a sip of her wine. I used the opportunity to pour the rest of Pip’s into her, as well, while I spoke:

  “When I was, oh, seven, I think, and Kintyre ten, a mother fox became clever and dug her den under the rosebushes on the west side of the manor. This was directly below my bedroom window, so on the night she whelped, I could hear the kits crying. I didn’t tell Father, because I couldn’t stand the thought of him bashing in their little skulls.”

  “See?” Pip slurs, eyes glazed with wine and pain, “You’re good to the people in your care.” She pats my thigh, right over the nail gashes, and I hold back my wince.

  Mother Mouth threads the needle, and I quickly resume.

  “In the morning, when I had completed my school-room hours, the nanny let me go outside to play. Kintyre was a slower reader than I, so he was still upstairs in the nursery. I went to the kitchen and begged cookies from Cook, and asked for a glass of milk to go with them. She gave me a small cup, and out I went to the rosebush. I left the cookies and the milk by the mouth of the den, for you see, I thought baby foxes would be like baby humans and want sweets.”

  “Adorable.”

  “I left milk and some sort of food for ten days. At first, they were barely touched, but then the milk would be vanished and the meat I began to bring entirely devoured. On the eleventh day, while I was laying out some leftover kidney pie and the milk, the fox mother stuck her snout out of the den just far enough for me to see the red of her fur and the glint of her eyes. ‘Human kit,’ she said, ‘why do you bring me such gifts?’”

  “She spoke?” Pip asks.

  “Oh yes,” Mother Mouth said. “Animals can do that, if they want to. Use human speech. If they’ve lived around humans enough, you know, or we pay one of them enough attention. Master Forsyth’s attention gave her the ability. The milk, y’see.”

  “Amazing,” Pip mutters. I can see that the prick of the needle has become lost in the rush of wine and the chemicals the body produces to combat pain. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing!” I chuckle. “I’d never heard an animal speak before. I screamed and ran away. It was horribly unmanly of me.”

  “You were seven.”

  “My father said it was no excuse. He came out and asked about the noise, and I managed to lie enough to keep him from suspecting there was a den there, but not well enough to keep myself from a thrashing for disturbing him. I went back the next day, and the den was empty. The fox must have moved her litter elsewhere. That’s lucky, though, because while I was trying to shove my face down the hole to look at the den, Kintyre came out with a shovel and dug it all up. I guess he had come to see why I screamed. He found the den. He would have killed the kits if they’d still been there, so in a way, my weakness saved them.”

  Pip’s fingers alternate between stroking my leg and digging in. “S’not weakness. You’re a . . . a good guy, Forsyth.” Her voice is choked and heavy. When I look more closely, I see that she has soaked the pillow under her with tears. Whether they are from the needle or my story, I am unsure. Perhaps just the wine and the pain.

  “I suppose,” I allow, ignoring whatever kind of look it was that Mother Mouth was pounding upon my bent head just now. I decide not to find out, watching Pip’s eyelids grow droopy instead.

  Mother Mouth ties off the fourth stitch, and then sits back to clean the needle and her hands.

  “You did quite well,” Mother Mouth assures Pip. “Didn’t cry half so much as most of the Shadow’s Men when their turn under my needle comes.”

  Pip sobs a wet gust of laughter, and I feel everything under my sternum untwist with relief. When Mother Mouth hands me the jar of ointment, I apply it to Pip’s back with hands shivering in the aftermath of unused adrenaline. Mother Mouth drops a few pearls of poppy milk onto Pip’s tongue, and the young woman falls off into a well-deserved sleep almost immediately.

  “Now for your leg, my boy,” Mother Mouth says and points to the small red splotches that have risen up through the fabric of my trousers.

  “Oh,” I admit. “I’d forgotten all about it.”

  ✍

  Two days later, Pip is protesting that she won’t be well enough to dance, not with the fresh stitches. This has her disconcerted, on top of fearing that she will not know the steps. I assure her that I will make it known she does not wish to be asked to take the floor.

  “Did you . . . want to learn to dance?” I venture. “You are not disappointed?”

  “Another time,” she says. “If you’re willing to teach me.”

  I laugh at her joke, but stop when I realize that she isn’t laughing, too. “You mean it? You actually want me to teach you? I’m rubbish.”

  She quirks a crooked eyebrow at me. “So am I,” she says. “We’ll make a good pair.”

  A good pair. No, she doesn’t mean it like that. I duck my head to hide my blush and bite the inside of my cheek to keep from saying something ridiculous.

  On the bedside table is the book I’d brought up from my library for her several days ago, and it makes an ample distraction.

  “Did you like that book? Shall I fetch you another?” I ask, seizing on the opportunity to escape her smiles. The light scent of menthol and lemon rises from where the ointment is warmed by her skin, and I need a moment to catch a gasp of fresh air to clear my head.

  “Well, no. I couldn’t read it. I sort of . . . expected it to be in English. I mean, we’re speaking in English, but that’s not what’s on the page.”

  “Oh, dear. That is . . . is something I didn’t anticipate. Perhaps something with many pictures? A children’s book?”

  “Sure, yes, fine,” she says, and I duck out of the room without saying anything further. I relish the opportunity to take a break.

  I return with several scrolls of my brother’s adventures, as set down by Sir Bevel. They are hand copied en masse nowadays, and the monks who make the scrolls also make hand-carved copies of the original wood-stamp illustrations. Mine are, of course, originals. I also bring another book on the history of Hain, with many reproductions of the royal family. She chooses the latter. It sur
prises me, but she just grins and tells me that she’s read enough about Kintyre to last her a lifetime.

  She doesn’t realize how profoundly her casual admission affects me. I stagger where I stand, and clutch the spindle at the foot of her bed to stay upright.

  Did she just admit it? I wonder, boggled once more by her easy trust in me. Is she truly a Reader? By the Great Writer, perhaps she has! Or perhaps, no, perhaps I am reading too much into this, finding too much meaning in words carelessly tossed out. Wherever she is from, the Tales of Kintyre Turn may have traveled there, as well. Bevel’s stories are always copied down by bards when they hear them in taverns. My brother is famous. It’s just that. It’s only that.

  “Yes, I suppose you would have,” I say, in answer to her probable admission. I don’t know what else I could add, and besides, my throat feels too tight to squeeze out any more words.

  Instead, I go to the chair I left by her bedside and retrieve my portable desk from the floor next to the bed stand. We have both agreed that she ought to stay in bed today, to try to heal as much as possible before tomorrow’s entertainment.

  By the time I’m settled in, Pip is watching me sharply. “What did you mean by that?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I say, wondering from where this sudden defensiveness has arrived. “Just that . . . well, you must know the stories. Everyone does. Someone must have told you, or sold your father a scroll. Everyone knows of Kintyre Turn and Bevel Dom.”

  Pip’s eyes narrow, and then she huffs a slight puff of laughter. “Right, yes. Of course. That, yes, exactly.”

  Her words aren’t convincing, but it is clearly a topic she fears to discuss, and I’m not about to just blurt out my concerns over her true nature. I may be wrong, and I wouldn’t want to look a fool in front of her. And if she is a Reader, I fear how she would react if she felt trapped or confronted, especially while injured. No, this conversation, if it ever has to come, will come later, when she is well enough to defend herself or flee, well enough to feel safe. Or, I think uncharitably, until my hospitality has lured her into trusting me.