by J. M. Frey
Good boy. Just as Mother Mouth calls me. I make a high, distressed whining sound that I am unable to muffle before it escapes, strange and scary even in my own ears. Pip runs her hands over my shoulders the way I had been doing not moments before to soothe her, saying my name softly, shushing me like a high-spirited dog.
“Shhh, Forsyth, shhh. Just breathe. Breathe. That’s it.”
“M-my who-who-whole world ex-exists f-f-for my bro-brother?” I manage to get out, and it sounds both petulant and wounded, everything I am.
It’s not fair.
It’s not fair!
Kintyre gets everything, everything, and now this, too? Pip has read his stories for most of her life, she adores the books, she adores him, and it’s so staggeringly unfair that I nearly do faint.
The whole world was created for my brother. To serve him. To exalt and glorify him.
“Oh, Forsyth, listen, please . . . he’s just the protagonist. There’s so much, so much that fills this world that is not in the books. Neris and Velshi, you and little Lewko, you’re all so much more, so much more real and passionate and filled with pain and love and depth. The books may follow Kintyre, but this world is not for him. I’ve been here months, and this is something I’ve realized, Forsyth Turn: you are all so much more than just background players in your brother’s tales. You are more, and . . .” She makes a wry sort of snuffling sound. “And you are better. You are kinder, you are gentler, you are intelligent and trustworthy and so, so deserving of wonderful things, Forsyth. And I am horrifically disappointed by my childhood hero, I can tell you that much. Elgar Reed must be a bigger misogynistic moron than I thought, if a jackass like Kintyre is his idea of the flawless hero.”
I cannot help it; the tears come now, and I press my face against Pip’s shoulder, my nose at the nape of her neck, and sob.
“I mean it! Kintyre Turn is not a desirable human being, and he’s a frankly poorly written character.”
Her words stun me, as much as a blow to the head might.
“Ooooh, fuck. I cannot believe I just said that. Forsyth, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says. She squeezes tighter, pressing every warm, delicious inch of her body against mine, from kneecaps to nose. “He’s your brother. I shouldn’t badmouth him in front of you.”
“Th-th-thank you,” I manage to stutter out. “Thank you!”
“Thank you?” she echoes, confused.
“Kintyre is a ja-ja-jackass, isn’t he!” I crow.
Pip is startled into laughter, and my sobs morph into something closer to the noises she is making than the ones I was before. It’s not quite a laugh, but it is nearly there, and it feels good. Oh, it feels so good.
Because the woman I admire does not admire my brother. And she thinks I am a better man than he. She thinks I am brilliant! I wrap my arms around her again, then, wanting to express my gratitude. She yelps and squirms in my grip. I have forgotten her injuries. I release her instantly and jerk back to press my arms against the wall, out of the way.
“Sorry, oh Pip, I am so-sorry!”
“It’s fine, it’s just . . . really sore, sorry, damn, really sore.” She presses her nose against my collarbone, panting heavily, eyes screwed shut against the pain. Tentatively, I lay my hands on the tops of her shoulders, and she sighs into my waistcoat.
“I will get you poppy m-milk.”
“No, just the ointment,” Pip says. “I don’t want to sleep.”
“It will only numb the pain for a short while.”
“It’ll be long enough to go back downstairs and save face,” Pip counters.
I realize what she is offering and shake my head. “My reputation will survive. I am more concerned for you. You don’t have to come back to the dinner.”
“I want to,” she says fiercely. “I don’t want to go back to that room and be alone with my thoughts. I couldn’t bear it. I want to be wherever you are.”
“Okay,” I whisper against her neck. “Okay. As you wish.”
She laughs against my chest and turns her face up to mine. Her eyes are still red-rimmed, but the mud has given way to such a brilliant green that my breath feels knocked from my chest. “That’s funny,” she says.
“What did I say? ‘Okay’?”
“No, ‘as you wish.’ It’s from . . . this other book.”
“Another world like this one?”
“I don’t know,” she admits, eyes roving my face, searching for something that I would gladly give, if only I knew what it was. “Maybe it’s real, too. Maybe it’s filled with people who are more than they are on the page.”
“Tell me?”
“It was about a girl and a boy, and whenever he said, ‘as you wish,’ he really meant . . . he meant that he . . .”
Her eyes land on my mouth, and I know what she’s trying to say, of a sudden. She licks her lips, and I cannot resist anymore. I dip my head, closing the space between us.
The sudden sound of a shoe scraping on stone above us startles us apart, and Pip jerks back in my embrace so quickly our noses bump. We have touched faces, but not lips. My mouth is dry with the kiss that will never come.
Neris appears at the top of the stair, descending tentatively toward us. “Begging your pardon, sir. But I was setting your brandy in your study, and I heard crying, sir,” she says. “Can I help?”
“Yes,” I say, taking Pip’s hands between mine and squeezing them once, hoping to telegraph my regret at the interruption. Then, I place them in Neris’s hands. “Take her back to Mother’s chambers, get her cleaned up, more ointment, and then escort her back to the dining hall, please. Pip, are you sure you want to return? There is no shame in retiring.”
“No, no,” she says. “I’ll come back. I won’t let your brother get to me.”
I nod and, feeling very bold indeed, lean forward to place a chaste kiss on her cheek. Pip turns away, but I can see the back of her neck flush red.
“Neris,” I say meaningfully, just as the maid is helping Pip limp down the steps past me. She pauses, and I lean in, making sure my words are only for her. “You only heard crying?”
“There was talking too, sir,” she says. “But I couldn’t make out what you were saying.”
“Very good. On your way.”
“Yes, sir.”
I lean back against the cold stone and put one hand to my forehead. I am so stunned, so amazed, my world so turned upon its ear that it feels as if my brains should be melting, sluicing out through the bone and dribbling down my face. But no, my skin is only wet with cold sweat and tears, clammy and unpleasant. No brains.
That my brother is the main character of the novel that is our lives is no surprise to me. He is exasperatingly outgoing. He can don a charming mask, and is a fairly decent marksman at high speed (though I am more precise and technically proficient at slow). He seems to have magic’s own luck.
If anyone was to have to pick which of the two of us to write a series of tales about, it would indubitably be him. This choice is not what bothers me.
What bothers me is that there is, definitively, a Writer.
And that I know his name is Elgar Reed.
✍
“You require cheering up,” Bevel ventures. He is talking to Pip, of course, who is settling back into her seat beside me. Her face is clean, and her eye makeup has been reapplied, her hair brushed smooth, and her stained chemise changed. If I wasn’t sitting directly beside her and able to witness the redness in the corners of her eyes and around her nostrils, I wouldn’t have known that she’d had her crying jag in the stairwell.
I have washed my own face, as well, but I am better at hiding my expressions than she. Pip snorts in reply to Bevel, a definitively unladylike gesture, and something inside me thrills with the way she throws convention back in their faces. Pip is no lady to be coddled or seduced; she is a woman, an equal for any man, as Mrs. Pointe is. A personality, forceful and competent and proud. A person to admire and respect.
Oh, how I want to be with her.
Bevel ignores the snort and comes to stand behind her chair. He holds out a hand, which has somehow materialized a pristine white glove. “Dinner will keep warm for us a little longer; will you dance?”
“Dance?” she asks. She exchanges a look with me. “I, uh, I already discussed this with Forsyth. I can’t.”
“Well, not with Forssy, no,” Bevel chuckles. “Nobody can dance with this stork. But I’m an excellent dancer.”
Pip’s expression clouds with anger, but she whisks it away just as quickly. “Sorry, I wasn’t clear. That whole walking around each other in lines thing, where the gentleman touches the lady’s hand and they move in the patterns prescribed by the song? I can’t do that. I never learned.”
Bevel exhales heavily. “I can teach you. It is very easy—”
“Right, I see,” Pip interrupts, holding up a palm to halt the flow of his words. Her hand is glistening with numbing ointment and scraped raw. “Being polite about it doesn’t work with you. I don’t want to dance with you. How’s that? I don’t want to dance.”
I can see that Bevel is trying very hard to hold on to his scandalized anger, but her sheer nerve seems to be too amusing to allow for the heated emotion to linger. He sighs, a puffing breath that I didn’t think stocky men in such tight waistcoats could achieve, and grins, that same open, rehearsed smile I have seen him give a hundred times while apologizing for my brother’s mistakes. He presents his hand again.
“Please. As the guest of honor, you must take the first dance with someone.” He shoots a look at me, which makes it clear in his mind that he is saving Pip from the embarrassment of said dance being with me.
“I was quite clear that Pip doesn’t have to take the floor if she doesn’t feel well enough,” I say, only just loud enough for Bevel to hear.
He makes no indication that he’s actually caught my words and flexes his fingers at Pip.
“Oh, for . . .” Pip rolls her eyes and lays her fingers across his, sparing her palm, and allows him to pull her to her feet.
Bevel shoots me the most disgustingly triumphant look, and I wish I had the wherewithal to punch it straight off his little hedgehoggy face. There is no true triumph in badgering a woman into accepting something she did not want in the first place.
Pip limps slightly alongside Bevel as they head out to the middle of the room. The numbing ointment on her back, and I assume her knee, will be enough for her to last out this set, but I worry what will happen if Bevel doesn’t return her to her chair quite soon. Pip is too polite to simply abandon him on the dance floor, I think, and I fear he is too oblivious to the tiny signals her body language is sending to read when she will be in too much pain to continue. I will have to watch closely and cut in at the appropriate time.
Pip wasn’t lying when she said she had no idea what to do. She is standing in the very center of the hall, and Bevel turns her to face him. Her eyes find mine amid our guests, and there is a sort of embarrassed desperation in them. I nod in what I hope is an encouraging manner. She flashes me a small smile and turns to face Bevel.
The minstrels strike up the first dancing tune. Bevel has requested something light but slow, one of the courting country dances. Pip won’t have to do much bouncing about, and that’s a relief. Bevel bows, and Pip has enough insight to curtsy. Then Bevel, very deliberately, takes her left hand firmly in his and, turning so they both face away from me, begins to promenade her up the floor toward the musicians. He takes it slow, at a half tempo, and the minstrels follow his lead. His face is toward Pip, and I can see his lips moving, though I cannot hear his words. I can read what he is saying, however, and I am gratified to see that he is talking her through the steps instead of just yanking her along.
When they execute the complicated whirl at the end of the hall and switch directions, promenading back toward me, I can see the bright flush on Pip’s cheeks. She is smiling—her genuine smile—and I think this means she is having fun. The blush may be from the pain, however, and her hand in Bevel’s is trembling. They execute another complicated over-under whirl at my end of the hall. The dance looks faintly silly with only one couple. However, Pointe plops little Lewko onto my lap and holds his hand out to his wife. They join the dance two beats behind Bevel and Pip, and another couple joins two beats behind them, and then suddenly, the dance has become a beautifully intricate weaving of bodies around and between one another, coursing up and down the floor like waves upon a beach.
It is a lovely dance. One day, I may even have the luck to perform it with someone. For now, I quite enjoy watching it, and I allow myself to relax into the back of my chair and observe, my arms a loose ring around Lewko’s waist to keep him from tipping into my plate.
Lewko has got himself occupied with a toy knight and a carved dragon, and both are too large for him to successfully swallow, so I allow my attention to drift across the assembled crowd. My guests are well on their way to being into their cups, and everyone looks pleased and relaxed. Whatever lingering tension there was from Pip’s outburst has vanished, and it seems that the danger is past. The music flows on, strangely mesmerizing at this slower tempo, and the dance plays out.
And then, of course, Kintyre stands and makes his way to the minstrels. With Lewko slowing me down, I do not have the ability to stop him before he gets to them, requests a song, and moves to the dance floor. Bevel’s choice ends, the dancers applaud the guest of honor and her escort, and as soon as Pip lets Bevel’s hand go, Kintyre has got his arm around her waist.
He hoists her into the air as the next song starts. I recognize both it and what my brother is doing. The jump is supposed to be made with the man’s hands on the woman’s elbows, and it’s only a small jump, but Kintyre is showing off. He’s got his hands on Pip’s plush, lovely arse, and is holding her up, above his head so everyone around can see how strong he is. Her pelvis is being ground into his chest, and my brother is, of course, leering at her breasts, which are now eye level.
“Hey, fucking hands off, buddy!” Pip snaps, wriggling her legs until Kintyre sets her back on her feet. He whirls her quickly to the side to catch up with the rest of the dancers around them. He tucks his hands against the small of her back, right where the worst of the scarring is. Pip actually staggers with the pain of it and howls.
The noise is more chilling than the dying scream of any werewolf, and I think she is just as shocked as the rest of the room that such a keening wail of pain was birthed from her own throat. Kintyre fumbles her to the floor and everyone in the entire room screeches into a halted silence.
Kintyre, suddenly the center of very unwelcome attention, does the one thing I have never seen him do: he freezes in panic.
As the wail dies in echoes along the rafters, Pip recovers from her white-faced swoon. Her forehead is clammy with pain, her eyes glassy, as if she is about to faint, but then she snaps, very suddenly, into a sea-foam wall of anger.
“Ow!” Pip snarls, and tries to push my brother away. But his fingers are digging in as he tries to hold her against her struggles. “Let go!”
Her invective startles me back into motion, for I too had been struck as dumb by her cry as the other onlookers. I shove Lewko at Velshi and make my way as quickly as I can to Pip; the crowd of dancers is milling about, unsure how to respond. I gesture the minstrels back into their music and, around us, the dance reluctantly resumes, people scuffling into motion at the request of the lordling. Perhaps it might even be because they respect that the fight I’m about to have is not going to be private, when we all desperately wish it was.
In the center of the floor, Kintyre has not yet relinquished Pip, and she is hauling back her fist and aiming at my brother’s oft-broken nose. I manage to catch her elbow just before she lets fly, and crowd up beside Kintyre.
“Kintyre, let go,” I snap. “You’re hurting her.”
“I wouldn’t hurt her if she’d stop squirming,” he huffs, a gleeful look on his face. I remember that look; it is his “I am hunting, and I
have just caught my game” look.
“Pip’s been cut!” I hiss. “Haven’t you been paying attention? Don’t touch her back!”
“Her back?” Bevel repeats, abandoning the partner he’d been dancing with nearby and coming to Kintyre’s side. He instinctively maneuvers his body to shield those around us from seeing our conversation, as I have. “So, you mean . . . Bootknife?”
Pip kicks out hard, her heel connecting with Kintyre’s knee. He winces and lets go. It would take a stronger person, with a more substantial boot, to inflict any real damage on my brother, but the sentiment behind the gesture is more than clear.
Pip takes a shaking step away from Kintyre and grabs the arm that I offer to help herself remain upright. Together, we turn back to the table, and I help her mince her way past our pretending-to-be-oblivious guests and to her chair. Lewko has got it pulled out for us, gray eyes glittering with pride as he struggles to push it back in for Pip as she sits.
“See, now that’s a gentleman,” Pip says, ruffling the boy’s ashy-blond hair. Lewko climbs back onto my lap, knight and dragon in his small fists, and I settle him against my hip to spare my legs from falling asleep under his weight.
“Your brother is a slimeball,” Pip says.
I resist the urge to say, And this surprises you? But only just. Instead, I pour us both more wine, cut both with water, and she drinks gratefully. Lewko reaches a hand for my cup, and I let him have a sip. He makes a face and shoves the cup away, and Pip laughs at his antics. The sound is strained, though, tight and high, more obligatory than honest.
The dance ends, and Pointe and his wife return to their seats. I pass off their son gratefully. Kintyre and Bevel both slouch back into their chairs. As they pass, every one of my guests gives them the evil-eye, and I am both honored and shocked that they would be so angry at my brother on Pip’s behalf. I think we have accidentally succeeded in ensuring that Pip will be well cared for in every and any house in the village she should deign to visit.