by J. M. Frey
She lifts her hand, and her flesh is cool and damp as she palms my cheek. I cannot help leaning into it.
“Hey now!” Pip snarls, grabbing the sylph’s wrist and shoving her away. “Mind your grabby hands.”
“Oh, does he belong to you?” The sylph laughs, and there is music in her voice, a tinkling that I want to hear again. I try to move toward her, but Pip is in the way, trying to brace me bodily. “Is he a slave? A servant? Or . . . oh, I see, your lover?”
“Shut up,” Pip snarls.
“Pip,” I say, and my voice sounds funny, all far away and light. My head is yearning to follow it, to bob across the ceiling like a buoy and circle around and around the sylph. She’s so beautiful. “Be nice.”
“Oh, yes, Pip,” the sylph admonishes. “Do be nice.”
“Forsyth?” Pip says. “What the hell is wrong with you? What did you do to him?” she asks sharply.
“Nothing,” the sylph says, and the way her shoulders ripple in a shrug is like light dancing across the finest alabaster statue. I am filled with the urge to run my tongue across them. “Nothing that I do not do to any other man.”
“Please, don’t do this,” Pip pleads, and her words are low and harsh, and I cannot think for a second why I ever thought her laughter was lovely, why I ever thought I’d like to fill Turn Hall with such a crass, braying voice. “We don’t have to do it like this!”
“Like what?” the Sylph snaps, and oh, how my heart flutters. I reach for her, but Pip’s rough arm is in the way, shoving me back down with all the manners of a garden troll. “You’ve come to take something of mine from me. Why shouldn’t I take something of yours in payment?”
“We only need to borrow it,” Pip says. “Please!”
“Then I shall borrow him, until you return it.”
“I can’t finish this quest without him,” Pip snarls. “I need him. Let him go!”
The sylph opens her arms to me, and I push, oh how I push past Pip, shove her aside, shove her down, step over her, clearing the last hurdle before the bliss of falling into my sylph’s lovely, rounded arms.
“Let him go, let him go, let him go!” Pip commands from the floor.
My sylph’s beatific expression shifts to sharp-toothed fury so suddenly that even I am startled. A haze drops away from my mind abruptly, and I sway on the spot, darkness encroaching on the corners of my vision. Pip jumps up, and I grab on to her to stay upright.
With my other hand, I scrub at my eyes.
“How did you do that?” the sylph snarls, and her voice is now like rocks churning at the base of a waterfall, caught in the hollow of her throat.
Pip draws herself up to her full height and lays a hand on her sword.
“Three times,” I manage to grind out. Oh, how my head aches!
“Three times,” Pip confirms. “And now that we’ve bested you, give us the cup.”
The sylph snarls, baring a mouth full of fish-hook fangs at us. “Make me!” she sneers.
“Lend us the cup, and I swear I will return it to you, unharmed,” I say, and I infuse my speech with a secret layer of meaning, filling the silences between sounds with Words of Trust, Words of Honesty, Words of Compulsion. The latter is a bit underhanded. I don’t like using Words of Compulsion; it verges on dark magic. Luckily, there are so few who know how to Speak such powerful Words. “Give me the cup, give me the cup, give me the cup.”
Pip raises her hands and claps them against her ears, shaking her head and staring at me groggily.
The sylph shrieks in fury. But she does as I compel. Another bright flash of light that has Pip flinching backward, and there is a small, unassuming chalice in the sylph’s hand. It is short, the stem fat and barely there, and the bowl is rough-hewn on the outside and a boring, dusty gray. I’ll admit to some disappointment in seeing it—I had expected it to be grander.
The sylph hurls it at my head, and I just manage to catch the cup before it makes contact with my skull. The contents splash my face, and my eyes begin to sting, immediately.
“Salt water?” I ask, incredulous, licking my lips to confirm.
“Useless for your stupid quest!” the sylph snarls hatefully. “I hope you die of thirst!”
“If you can’t drink it, then what good is it?” Pip asks, lowering her hands.
The sylph sets her chin at a defiant angle.
“Please tell me,” Pip says. “We really don’t want to hurt you, I promise. Just make this easy for us and we’ll go away.”
“Easy?” the sylph howls. “You ask me to give up the prophetic powers of my soul, and you want me to make it easy for you?”
“Soul?” Pip asks, as I yelp: “Scrying!”
The sylph turns away, putting her back to us and shuddering with rage.
“Scrying?” Pip echoes.
“I can use the water to make a scrying mirror. How clever!” I say. “That is why people seek the Chalice.”
“Are you going to have to scry when we summon the Deal-Maker?”
“Possibly,” I admit. “I thought the pieces might fit together, and that the solution would become self-explanatory when we got to the final Station.”
“I hope so, too.” Pip looks at the cup in my hand, dubious. There are just a few drops of water in the bottom, but it appears that more water is sweating out of the stone interior, collecting in the curve of the bowl. I expect the cup will be completely filled again within hours.
I wonder how we’re meant to travel with a constantly full cup of water. We can’t put it in the saddlebags. I’ll have to tie it upside down from my stirrup, to make sure the droplets fall out onto the ground instead of all over our camping supplies and rations.
“You have what you came for,” the sylph growls. “Now leave.”
“Thank you,” Pip says, and she sounds suddenly sad. “And . . . I’m sorry.”
“Leave!”
“I will return the cup,” I assure her. “As soon as I’m able.”
“Even if you don’t keep your promise, it will come back to me,” the sylph says sadly. The tunnel around us is growing dark, the sylph fading back into the shadows. “It always comes back to me, one way or another.”
✍
Karl and Dauntless are pleased to be quit of the river, and I cannot say I blame them for the haste with which they make down the bank. Pip seems a bit stunned by their insistence that we move at nothing less than a canter, clinging to the rim of her saddle, her face white.
When we’re far enough away that I cannot hear the waterfall anymore, I reach out and give Karl’s reins enough of a tug to slow him down into an easy amble. Dauntless follows the unspoken command and keeps pace with him, allowing me to get close enough to bump knees with Pip.
“Are you well?” I ask.
Pip shakes her head, sucking on her lower lip.
“Pip.”
“I’m fine!” she lies. “I’m just . . . just leave it, okay?”
I reach out again, intent on pulling Karl to a stop, but she jerks to the side, making him dance out of range.
“Stop it with the pity face. I said I’m fine!”
“You are clearly not fine,” I shout back. “What is wrong, Pip? We won!”
“At her expense. Taking the cup hurts her.”
“It will return to her, she said so.”
“And until then? God, I can’t imagine the agony of being separated from a part of your soul. She needs it.”
“We need it.”
“That doesn’t make our need more important than hers!” Pip spits. “I feel like an asshole. It’s like we raped her, or something, and there was nothing we could do because we asked, we told her three times. Christ, you even used Words against her.”
There is nothing I can say to that, for now that Pip has said it out loud, I realize that perhaps I feel the same way. We ride in miserable silence for another mile. For most of that time, she looks thoughtful, as if she is trying to formulate the perfect phrasing for whatever it is she clearly wishes to admit. Finally,
she says:
“I wasn’t any help.”
It takes me a moment to realize what she is referring to, and another moment after that to comprehend what she is actually saying, because I simply cannot understand why she is even saying it. Surely she doesn’t expect me to agree.
“Had you not been there, I might have been lured in by her charms,” I say. “You saved my life.”
“You’re smart enough. You would have gotten away.”
“You prepared me for the verbal test—your Excel warned us in advance of the sort of trial this Station might provide, and I have learned my lesson of the riddling raven as well. Both are things I would not have known without you.”
Pip balls up her fists on her thighs, and I can see that her frustration is so overwhelming that it’s making her hands shake. “But I didn’t do anything.”
“You taught me how to survive it.”
“But you did it! I thought . . . fuck, never mind what I thought.”
“What did you think, Pip?”
“I thought I was supposed to be the hero!” she blurts.
“You?”
“It’s my quest, isn’t it?” she complains. “It’s my destiny! But that’s three Stations now where you’ve done all the work. Your Men found the sigil, you fenced for the quill, and you demanded the cup! And all I did was stand there like some . . . some dumbass princess in peril, and I hate it.”
“You tackled Gyre,” I correct. “You taught me the way of winning against the sylph. You are no damsel in distress.”
“So I’m the sidekick then,” she mutters. “Not much better. It’s not fair! I’ve wanted this my whole life, and I don’t even . . . I don’t even . . .”
She trails off and turns her head away, but I can tell by the way that her jaw is shuddering that she is sucking back tears. Pip hates for anyone to see her cry, so I simply wait her out, using the time to remove my gloves and try to rearrange my hair into a less lanky wet tangle. When she has calmed herself again, she turns her face back to mine.
“I can’t Speak Words,” she confesses. “That’s the problem. I can’t be the hero because I can’t Speak Words. I will never be the main character, and that’s what’s killing me, Forsyth. Because I want it so badly.”
“It’s a skill,” I say. “I can teach you.”
“It’s not like picking up a sword and learning how to stick the other guy,” she says sadly. “I can’t hear them.”
“But—”
“I can’t. And that will never change. And the more we quest, the more I realize that I can’t be here. That I don’t belong. That I ha-have to go . . .” Her eyes flash emerald for a moment, as she turns them forward, her gaze on Karl’s footing as the horses pick their way across the slate stone banks. “I have to go home.”
My heart breaks a little more. “I still don’t want you to,” I say softly. “But I understand. I just wish . . .” I reach out and grab her hand. She uncurls her fist enough to tangle our fingers together. It is awkward, but I try to make Dauntless keep pace. Eventually, the footing forces our horses onto different levels, and I have to let go.
“I love this world,” she explains. “I’ve played here, in my imagination. In the games of childhood, when other kids were being Hobbits or Harry Potter or Iron Man, I was here, wielding an enchanted bow and arrow beside Kintyre Turn and Bevel Dom! I was besting the Viceroy and throwing Bootknife off cliffs and having fencing practice with the queen! And it hurts, Forsyth, it cuts that I love this world so much, and it won’t open to me. It refuses to give up its deepest secrets. Your world doesn’t want me here.”
Fourteen
We spend a pleasant two days at a high-quality inn, playing at being newlyweds on their marriage tour and indulging in a large tub of bubbles and a good night’s rest on real mattresses.
In the afterglow of some particularly enthusiastic playing, I ask if Pip plans to get up in the morning for one of her horrendous “jogs.” We haven’t been in the same place two nights running since we left Lysse, and she hasn’t had the opportunity before. She shakes her head, buries her face against my neck, licks at the sweat under my jaw and says, “Riding horseback is enough of a core workout. I don’t think I’ve ever had such cut abs. And such sore thighs.”
I take the opening for what it is, and when the massage turns into something more, we both sigh and groan, and dig in nails. She tugs my hair as I kiss the place on her that I am very rapidly coming to count among my favorites.
Later that night, Pip and I sit on the inn’s flagstone terrace, sharing a bottle of excellent southern wine. Pip’s head is tilted back, the base of her skull cradled on the back of her chair, and her eyes are wide. “There’s so many stars,” she whispers. “It’s overwhelming.”
I think “overwhelming” is a bit of an understatement. The magnitude of the stars, and the unfamiliarity of their arrangements in the sky, makes her go quiet every time she makes the mistake of looking up at night. Her mouth always drops open, and her eyes go distant and watery, as if, for just one moment, she has forgotten that she is not where she was born, and the sky pierces her.
“Pip,” I say gently, bringing her attention back to the table between us.
Pip lowers her gaze and resumes frowning at her Excel. A half-eaten apple is partway to her mouth, the flesh slowly growing brown as it sits in her hand, suspended between the conception of action and completion.
She parts her lips and nibbles at the ragged edge left by her white teeth. She folds and unfolds herself on the chair, knees up, then down again, shifting, searching for physical comfort when it is something more cerebral I suspect she seeks, something that I’m not certain she even knows she can find. Her back might be sore, as well; I haven’t asked. The twinge of new scar tissue twisting in muscle is, I’ve heard, irritating. I will offer a back massage smoothed by Mother Mouth’s ointment later tonight.
“I think I’m missing something,” she says finally. “I don’t know what, but this has all seemed too—” She interrupts herself by slapping her hand over her mouth. “I can’t believe I was just going to say that out loud.”
“What? That this has all been too ea—?”
She lunges across the table and slaps her hand over my mouth.
“Don’t you say it either,” she says. When I nod, she withdraws and sits back down, but not before rapping her knuckles against the wooden planks of the table with a grin. “To avoid bad luck.” I copy her and pour us both a fresh cup of wine.
When she thinks I am otherwise engrossed with the task, she rubs her palm across her throat, an action she has been doing more and more often. I have tried to be discreet about my curiosity over the gesture, but I have not been able to decipher any reason why she does it. Her shirt is not too tight, and there is no jewelry around her neck; she does not even wear a scarf. She has not developed an ague, as far as I can tell, and her voice isn’t rough from irritation.
So what is it?
✍
It takes four days to ride to the next Station. We travel across a plain that was once home to a prosperous, ancient city-state, ruled by a warrior-king in the lost age before Hain became one land with one ruler. The outer bailey is fallen, the walls long ago broken apart by enemy siege machines and the resultant rubble hauled off by enterprising peasants to make barns and wells. The marks in the ground where they once were are still visible, however, as a low grassy knoll with the occasional naked stone bared to the world like bone through a wound.
Whatever buildings lay between the wall and the castle have long since been burned to ash or have decomposed into the ground, the wood returning to nature. The castle itself I know very little about, save that there are rumors that the tyrant still walks its crumbling, torn halls, having taken a vow never to die until he is revenged on those who broke his rule. Whether it is true or not, Pip and I decide not to test the tale, and camp under the stars far from the shadow of the crumbling ruin. Pip tells me a story of wraiths and rings that night, a fantasy in
her world and a cautionary tale in mine.
Once we arrive at the next Station, it takes another two days to figure out how to even approach the Lost Library. The vegetation is so thick around the sprawling complex that I doubt even a rabbit could get in.
“Let us go to the Shadow’s Gate,” I say, as Pip stomps around the campfire on the evening of the second day. “The growth of the plant life is especially tangled around the main entrances. Perhaps the spellcaster didn’t know of the Shadow Hand’s entrance, and we will be in luck.”
“Have you got your own secret door to every palace?” Pip asks, still pacing around the fire, footfalls growing less hard, sounding less like a tantrum on the approach.
“Essentially, yes.”
“How do you know about them?”
“The Shadow’s Mask,” I say. “The accumulated knowledge of Shadow Hands past sort of . . . sits in the mask. Not details, not facts, but . . . where the doors are. Where the knowledge depositories reside and how to get in them. Who is trustworthy and why. You don’t know the details, but you can look at a man and know yes or no. Not the meat of the job, but the mechanics, at least.”
“That’s . . . kinda creepy,” Pip says. “So, you just put on the mask and you know?”
“Yes.”
She stops beside me. In the firelight, her eyes are glinting emerald, and I run my tongue along my lower lip. I know what that means. “What if I put on the mask?”
“If I pass it to you, then yes, it would work.” I stand and move around behind Pip, stroking my thumbs along her shoulders.
“But if not?”
“You mean if you stole it or if you snuck around behind my back?” I tease.
She turns her face up, and, for an inscrutable second, it seems horrifically blank, devoid of all emotion. It is a trick of the firelight, because, in the next second, a winsome smile is curling into the side of her mouth. I chase it with my own.
“I wouldn’t steal it,” Pip says. “You don’t even have it with you.”
“I prefer not to travel with it,” I say. “Just in case my bags or home are searched. Unlike my predecessors, I am perfectly content with communicating with my Men without the mask. I’ve set up Forsyth Turn as the Shadow Hand’s intermediary. The Shadow’s Men don’t even know that they are speaking directly to the Hand when they speak to me. It seemed . . . more convenient.”