by J. M. Frey
“Please!” Pip laughs. “Dragons don’t swoon!”
“How do you know?” Kintyre asks. And, oh, horrible, he is flirting with her.
“I just know.” Pip is using that cryptic tone of voice which means that she does know and isn’t comfortable admitting how.
I would have taken that for the warning it was and backed off, but Kintyre just leans closer, his shoulder jamming uncomfortably against my elbow, and makes some sort of ribald joke about being able to “get it out of her.”
Pip immediately stiffens all over, her face going glassy with terror. Her roll drops from her spasming fingers and disappears under the table. She is mere seconds away from another panic attack—Kintyre, the great insensitive lout, has done the one thing I specifically told him not to do in my letter. “Do not make any references to torture, forcing anything on or in her, and do not mention either home or your beloved scourge of the kingdom.”
“Pip,” I say, urgent, turning my face so that my nose is brushing her ear. “Pip, breathe.”
There is danger in behaving oddly among near strangers, especially those of a class who are more prone to superstition; if anyone thought Pip was fey-touched, our very pleasant evening could quite quickly turn into an attempt to put off a warlock-hunt. Or a Hands- Right Challenge, come to think of it. She is comely enough that someone might offer to “shelter and offer succor” to her at the price of her hand.
Oh, I am a fool. I am a stupid, old fool. The moment I realized Pip suffered the mental ailment of the returned soldier, I should have called off the event. Instead, I have given her grief the exact audience that we do not need. And all under the vain, thin excuse of wanting to satisfy the Chipping gossips and show off to Pip.
Selfish, stupid Forsyth!
“Miss Piper, I’m going to put my hand on your arm now,” Pointe says, on the other side of me, realizing at the same time I have that we cannot allow her to have an episode here. For both the sake of her reputation and her shame, of her safety, she must stay calm.
I am an idiot child! I wanted to cheer her with a dinner, and instead, I have put her into a precarious position. Why can I not have any forethought? What is wrong with me?
Pip nods, a slow up-and-down jerk. Pointe stands, moves around to the back of the table, and carefully lays both square hands on the tops of her shoulders, warm and comforting and stable. The heel of his left hand must brush one of the stitches, for she winces and flinches away, eyes blinking back into awareness.
“Ow,” she says under her breath.
“Are you stable now, Pip?” I ask, mouth still hidden in her hair so no one else at the tables—many of whom are now openly staring—will be able to read my lips.
“Yes,” she husks. “Yes, I think so.”
I press her wine goblet into her hand, and she takes a swallow large enough to set her coughing. Pointe rubs his hands over the back of her neck until she stops. Pip wipes her eyes; I cannot tell if the tears are from the pain, the memories, or the lack of air.
Kintyre has been silent this whole time, and when I finally lean back, I see that he is slouched in his seat, chatting with Bevel, completely unconcerned for Pip’s wellbeing.
Arrogant arse, I think. You caused this, and you didn’t even try to help!
He must notice my movements out of the corner of his eyes, because he turns back around, and, utterly ignoring me, asks Pip if she’s back with us. He says it with such disdain that Mrs. Pointe opens her mouth to give Kintyre the tongue-lashing of what surely will be his life. The Sheriff kisses her quickly to forestall it. There is no point in yelling at Kintyre Turn—scolding words do not seem to penetrate his ears. Much better to save one’s breath to blow away pixies.
Pip shoots Kintyre a confused glare, offended, but then takes another sip of wine to clear her throat and says, “I’m fine.”
“Oh, good. I was afraid you were going to be one of those boring sorts who gets lost in their own thoughts.” He guffaws and slaps my shoulder so hard my teeth rattle. “Forssy’s like that, and it’s dull as all get-out, isn’t it, Bev?”
“Yup,” his partner chirrups on cue.
“His face just goes slack, and his eyes stare into nothingness, and he just sits there. For hours. I could never get him to do anything fun at all when we were kids.”
“And what do you constitute as fun?” Pip asks, but there is a saccharine undertone to her words that I’ve never heard before. I think . . . I think she’s making fun of Kintyre. I hold my breath, wondering if Kintyre will notice.
“Oh, stuff. You know. Boy stuff,” Kintyre admits, and he is oblivious! I whip my gaze back to Pip, enthralled by her daring.
“Of course, boy stuff,” she echoes. “Running and hitting things with sticks. Crushing the skulls of baby foxes. Not sitting around thinking, surely—I can see that you’re the type that doesn’t spend too much time on something as boring as thinking.”
“Too right,” Kintyre agrees quickly.
Pip scoffs. “And certainly not reading either. No point in expanding a mind when there are so many things to chop at with a sword.”
“Exactly!”
“And why would anyone ever waste time in a library when the world can teach you so much! It’s not like anyone actually expects a Chipping lordling to, I don’t know, learn from the great leaders of ages past. Surely a lordling born to his role knows it instinctively.”
“Of course.”
Pip covers her mouth with her hand and makes a noise that sounds very much like stifled incredulity. “Oh my god,” she whispers. “Elgar Reed is a moron.”
Pointe and I share a startled glance over Pip’s head, and this confirms it for me. Pip is teasing Kintyre for being an illiterate goon.
“Who is this Elgar Reed you keep mentioning?” I whisper back, leaning in close to her.
Pip startles as if I had breathed fire in her face. She is up and out of the chair so quickly that it topples backward and smacks into the flagstones. Her muddy eyes are wide, white showing all around like a terrified horse.
The whole room stops to stare. Even the musicians fall silent. Kintyre looks vaguely amused; Pointe already has one hand on the hilt of his sword.
And Pip . . . Pip looks like she is about to weep.
“I . . . I need the . . . toilet,” she mutters, and then turns on her heel so fast her skirts whirl out in a near perfect circle. She is out the servants’ entrance before I have even pushed back my chair. I flick my wrist at the minstrels, and they launch into a jaunty air to cover the ringing awkwardness that echoes through the silent hall. Slowly, my guests go back to making the droning noises of conversation, though I’m certain I can guess the topic to which they’ve now turned their noses. I stand and turn to follow Pip, but a meaty paw lands on my arm, halting me.
“Oh, let her go, Forssy,” Kintyre drawls. “It’s probably just that time in her courses. You know how moody and unpredictable women get on their moon.”
I jerk out of his grip, incensed. “No, I do not, in point of fact, know how women get. Pip is distressed, and it has nothing to do with moons, so I will go to her.”
“She’ll just bite your head off,” Kintyre says. He makes it sound like it’s a warning, like he knows better than me, and I am furious. I hate him, suddenly. Hate him more than I ever have before in my entire life. Yes, he bullied and hurt me as a child, but you do not—you do not—harm a guest of Turn Hall. It is just not done.
“This is your fault!” I snarl and scurry away before my parting shot can wring any sort of revenge from my brother. It will come later, so I will worry about it later.
The sound of sobs is easy to follow, and I dash along the narrow passageway toward the kitchens, turning when the sound of skin hitting stone indicates that someone has fallen upon the stairs that lead up to my study. I find Pip halfway up the flight, her hands clutched before her and her palms scraped and bloody. She is curled on her side, one leg held out at an uncomfortable angle, and I guess that she slipped on the f
lags and slid down a few steps on her hands and knees. She probably knocked a kneecap on the way down, and an elbow, but I suspect that her pride is more wounded than her bones.
“Pip, let me help you up—” I begin, closing the gap between us.
“Don’t touch me!” she shrieks, and it’s so loud that I actually back down the steps, ears dazzled by the ringing echo her high-pitched invective makes as it bounces through the small stone hallway.
My hands hover in the air above her heaving back, and I am frozen with indecision. Her sobbing has become so wretched that almost all the noise is being choked out in great, gasping breaths. My own lungs constrict in burning sympathy. It sounds as if her whole soul is being wrung out into each tear, and that such wringing is agonizingly painful.
“Oh, Pip,” I say softly, and sink down onto the stone step directly behind her. The chill of it through my trousers sends goose bumps racing across my thigh and up my spine. “Please, please, what can I do?”
She turns, unfolding from her protective curl, and launches herself at me. I raise my arms, ready to impassively accept her angered blows—after all, it must have been something I did to make her rage so—and am startled to realize that instead of punching me, she has wrapped her arms around my waist and is weeping into my chest.
Oh, I think dazedly. A hug. She wants comfort. From me.
Terrified of provoking more screaming, I very, very slowly lower my arms and lay them across her shoulders, careful to keep to the right side where the injuries are more sparse. She hitches a breath, turns her face, and buries it against the soft flesh of my belly, and then she screams.
Screams, and screams, and screams, and all I can do is fold my body over hers, muffling her face with my robe and curling over her like a protective blanket, murmuring soothing nothings into the skin of her neck, the back of her ear, the strands of her fragrant hair. “Oh, Pip, oh my poor Pip,” I whisper, holding her, protecting her, offering stability, comfort, whatever she needs.
I close my own eyes against the urge to cry alongside her, cry for what was done to her, for the pain it has caused, for the way it has shattered her soul. But men, real men, Father said, do not cry. So I choke back the lump burning behind my larynx and keep my breathing even.
Finally, finally, the screams die away to coughs, and then back to soft, hitching sobs. When even these have stilled and the only trembling in Pip’s limbs is, I assume, from the exertion and the cold of our perch, I carefully tuck the back of one hand under her chin and coax her up.
Her face is blotched and red, her eyes swollen and shining. She is not beautiful like this, not like they describe crying women in the epics. She looks exactly as she is: wrecked, and heartbroken, and so exhausted with hurting that the pain has become a part of her.
I remove my handkerchief from my waistcoat pocket and mop at her face, slow and tender, cleaning away the tears, the running cosmetics, and the mucus. She turns her face into my touch, eyes fluttering closed, and I obligingly drop the hanky and cup her cheek in my palm. She is burning.
“Who are you, Forsyth Turn, that you can do this to me?” she whispers, smearing the words against the skin of my wrist. “I never told Bootknife. I never told the Viceroy. But when I’m around you, I can’t help it.”
“Everyone tells me their secrets,” I say, tone light and a forced chuckle in my voice, desperate to try to lift this dreadful, oppressive cold of misery that hangs over us both. “It is why I am such an effective Shadow Hand. I have a trusting face, and people don’t guard themselves.”
Pip looks up then, allows me to help her straighten, flinching and whimpering as her back stretches and pulls against the fabric of her chemise. It must be a riot of burning, and I dearly hope she has not split open any more of the cuts.
“You do, you really do. It’s inscribed in who you are. Everyone tells you their secrets because they have to, because that’s how you were designed.” She sighs. And then, as if making the choice to leap off a cliff, she adds, “Elgar Reed wrote you well.”
Then she sits back, putting an arm’s length between us, and watches my face with such expectant terror that I fear that I am about to spontaneously combust. I do not know how to react. She has told me something, something important in her eyes, but to me, it still makes no sense.
“This is your secret,” I say, trying to work it out, searching for the corner piece of the puzzle so that I may build the rest from there. “You are telling me, now, what you wouldn’t tell Bootknife.”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“Elgar Reed is a name?”
“Yes.”
Dread slips into my gut, and realization is right on its heels. “It’s true,” I hiss. “All the stories, they’re true.”
“I don’t know the stories. Tell me.”
My own hands shaking, suddenly, I reach out for hers, and Pip twines her fingers through mine. Her grip is strong and real and hot, and now it is I who needs comfort.
“You’re real,” I say, and it is a stupid, silly thing to say, because of course she is real. I am holding her hands. She is corporeal; she exists. And yet, she should not.
“I am. Tell me the stories?”
“Legend has it—and worldwide legend, mind, not just human legend—that when the world was created, it was done so out of the nib of a pen.”
Pip makes a distressed choking sound, but when I look to her, she simply shakes her head. “Go on,” she whispers, voice harsh from screaming and some great emotion that has clutched at her throat.
I feel it clutching at mine, as well, and wish I had something with which to wash it away. The oblivion of drink would be very welcome at the moment, because thinking has become terrifying.
For the first time in my life, I am scared of knowledge.
I go on: “They call the one who wielded the pen the Great Writer, and that he created our world, our very selves, with Authorial Intent. That he has a plan for us and our lives, and that our fates are unchangeable. Written down, as you would. And that our world, our lives, will continue along the Writer’s plotted arc until the Writer composes our ends in The Last Chapter.”
“Dear god,” Pip breathes. “It’s a genesis myth.”
“Yes,” I whisper back. Somehow, these confessions seem too important to pronounce at full volume.
She closes her eyes and presses her forehead against my clavicle, warm breath ghosting down the front of my shirt. “And it’s . . . it’s entirely right.”
I should feel more startled than I am. Perhaps I am detached with shock, my emotions so overwhelming that my body has shut them away. Instead of horror, or smug satisfaction that I had deduced her origins correctly, I merely feel the spread of warm acceptance. It makes my stomach untwist, and my limbs and eyelids become pleasantly warm and heavy.
“And you, then, must be a Reader. One of those thousands of pairs of eyes from the realm beyond our skies, who watch us and dream of us, who interprets and imposes.”
Pip makes that same wet, desperate, distressed sound again. “Like an angel?”
“I don’t know what an angel is,” I admit.
“Angels are . . . like Readers. From our version of the Writer.”
“You are from a created world, like mine?” I ask, and I am only mildly interested in the answer. Pip’s fingers have found the cuffs of my shirt under the sleeves of my robe, and are sweeping back and forth along my wrists, soothing and warm. My pulse-points seem to be directly connected to my nethers, for there is a stir of interest, and I am both relieved and sad that Pip is no longer smushed against my lap.
“According to legend,” she breathes.
“And this is what the Viceroy coveted,” I say. “He pulled you into our world. That much my Men have deciphered. And he did so, so that you could confirm that the stories of the Writer and the Readers are true?”
“Oh, no, no,” Pip says and lets go of my hands, suddenly. She struggles to regain her feet, and I rise quickly in order to help. Her knee, the one she
barked against the step, trembles and threatens to give out, and I pull Pip into my embrace, emboldened by her confession and this revelation. She allows it, resting her forehead against my chest, speaking to my waistcoat lapels. “The Viceroy pulled me into this world to kill Kintyre Turn.”
My interest shrinks in revulsion. I am sure she feels my fingers stiffen on her shoulders, and she clutches even harder at my waist, not allowing me to pull back and examine her expression.
“Ho-ho-how? Wh-why?” I am choking on the words, all my calm acceptance burning up in the freezing concern for my brother’s life. He is an ass, but he is my blood.
“I’m a Reader,” Pip whispers into the fabric, so softly that I nearly cannot make out the words. “Just like you said. In fact, I’m an avid reader. I’ve read the books a hundred times. I grew up with them, you see? The first one came out when I was just a kid, and I love the series. I reread them constantly, all the way up to university. Which means . . . I know the most. Maybe more than the Writer himself. I can predict Kintyre’s movements, his reactions. I know secrets about his weaknesses and his morals that nobody else has bothered to synthesize.”
“But how? Just by reading?”
“By analyzing,” Pip whispers. “I did my thesis on the books. I know more about the world that Reed wrote than probably Reed, or his editor, or anyone else, because I analyzed all the stuff under the words.”
“Bo-books? Plural?” I ask, though I can already guess the answer, and it fills me with dread.
“Eight books in all. Together, The Tales of Kintyre Turn,” she says. “By Elgar Reed.”
Six
Now it is my knees that are trembling. Pip pushes me back against the wall, using the stone to keep me upright.
“You’re dead pale,” she said. “Forsyth, don’t faint on me. Not here.”
“I . . . I am fi-fi-fine,” I lie. “A mo-mo-moment, p-p-please. Just-just a-a-a mo-moment.”
“Breathe deep, through your nose,” she commands, and, helpless against the rush of fear that has filled my gut, I obey. “Out through your mouth. Yes. Again. Again, keep going. Good boy.”