by J. M. Frey
“I’m proud of you, too,” Pip says softly, voice a mere whisper in the shadow of cloth around her face. She reaches out and squeezes my fingers once before retreating again.
I long to follow them with my own, to kiss the tips, and I can’t, I can’t, and I almost wish she hadn’t touched me at all. The yearning is worse now, for having been granted a taste of her affection and having had it removed again so swiftly.
The back of my eyes burn, and so do my ears, my cheeks. I don’t know what to say in the face of this influx of compliments. I didn’t even know that Bevel and Kintyre paid attention to what I did as lordling. I didn’t even know they knew. I duck my head and resume my calm breathing, because I am tempted, so tempted, to deny, to turn back their words, to dissemble. But I promised Pip—a lifetime ago, it seems now—to accept compliments, and to believe them.
To believe that my brother is proud of me.
Bevel, trying to break through the heavy atmosphere, hands one of the leaf-wrapped packages to me, and the other to Kintyre. Wordlessly, Kintyre holds it out to Pip, and Pip, equally wordlessly, takes it. I take my own from Bevel, accepting the temporary truce, and it is still hot; it singes my fingertips a little. It steams as I unwrap it, and I am pleased to see that it is a sort of roll made up of meat wrapped around dried fruit. It is juicy and delicious, and I realize how hungry I am on the first bite.
“We’ve been doing this part of adventuring wrong,” Pip moans around her own mouthful.
Bevel pinks again. “I’ve had a long time to practice. Luckily, Kin was willing to put up with my experimentation.”
“And I’m lucky Bevel actually enjoys cooking and was willing to experiment,” Kin says around a mouthful. “We got sick of standard travel fare pretty quick.” He pats Bevel’s thigh in a companionable manner, but then he leaves his hand there, sausage fingers curling into that tender, intimate place behind Bevel’s knee. Bevel’s expression blooms into something that resembles quiet happiness.
I look away, throat suddenly tight. I am pleased for them, for both of them, because happiness is a rare thing to find, and rarer still is a love who compliments you without overwhelming you, or being overwhelmed. But I am also bitterly jealous of their happiness, solely because it is in such juxtaposition to my own.
And I hate them suddenly. Before, they annoyed me, vexed me, embarrassed and infuriated me, but suddenly I hate Kintyre Turn and Bevel Dom. Because here they are, again, with everything I want for myself, everything I can’t have, and they don’t even know it. They don’t even understand how much it makes me seethe to see them together, happy, in love; and I, I who have been the dutiful son, the excellent lordling, the proficient spymaster, I who finally managed to have an adventure of his own, and who, for such a short, beautiful time, was in love with a woman who loved me back, I have nothing.
And I am so horrifically jealous that they can have that and I cannot, that I stand. I am unable to look on them anymore, lest I say something that I’m going to regret, something that will destroy the tenuous truce between Kintyre and me; something which will hurt Bevel in ways that I don’t want to and that he doesn’t deserve.
“I need to clean up,” I say, instead. “I just . . . I feel grimy.”
“I felt that way after my first kill, too,” Kintyre says.
I stare at him, uncertain how to respond. How did he know it was my first? And did Kintyre just admit to feeling filthy guilt? Oh, Writer. Is he trying to bond with me? Desperate to just be away before something horrible spills out of my mouth, I grab my pack and rush down to the river.
Pip doesn’t follow me—of course she doesn’t—so I strip perfunctorily and splash around in the shallow water. It is chilled, but not freezing, and I scrub under my arms, across my face, and I soap and rinse my hands over, and over, and over. The blood is gone—it’s been gone for hours, since I wiped my sword and hands on Bootknife’s shirt—but it still feels like it’s there, digging in like shards of red glass between the whorls of my fingerprints.
When I am as clean as I am going to get without a proper bath, I pull out my shaving mirror. It is small, round, just enough for me to use to scrape at my sparse beard every few days. The water is colder than I’d like for a shave, and my cheeks still smooth enough that I am not annoyed by the prickle. I can wait. Besides, it’s not as if Pip is going to complain of stubble-burn anymore.
I am on the verge of replacing the mirror in my pack when I realize that I also, accidentally, brought along the Endless Chalice. It was tied upside down to one of my pack straps, so that the saltwater could bead out onto the grass.
I untie it and turn it rightside up before I consciously decide to follow through on the half-formed notion that has popped into my head.
Dare I?
There is so much that Pip hasn’t told me, so much she refuses to talk about, so much that she doesn’t say. I am consumed by an overwhelming urge to know.
I dart a look around, but nobody has come to the riverbank, no one’s eyes watch from the mist. Can I do it? Kintyre would, without a second thought, but in this instance, perhaps Kintyre is not the best role model for choice-making.
But then again, maybe he is. He wouldn’t allow anything to remain between him and information vital for his quest, and I don’t think I can allow it either. Even if Pip might hate me if she found out. And she was right; knowledge is my addiction, and I am desperate for a fix.
She hates me already, anyway. At least this way, it will be for something I’ve done, instead of something someone else has done to her through me.
And she is correct to call me a privileged asshole, because I have no right to do this after I have asked her and she has said no, but I need, I need to understand what she suffered at the hands of Bootknife and the Viceroy if I am to . . .
To win her back.
I can’t do it—I can’t send her back to her world hating mine, hating me. And I cannot stand to watch Bevel and Kintyre, knowing that Pip and I could have had that, might have had that for real, for ourselves, if the Viceroy hadn’t interfered.
I need this.
So, feeling vindicated, and trepidation, and like the worst kind of slime, I pour the accumulated water from the Cup that Never Runs Dry onto the surface of the mirror and say Words of Scrying.
“Show me,” I tell the mirror. “Show me the first moment Pip arrived in our world.”
In the mirror, there is a bright flash of light and the impression of shattering glass. Sounds are distorted in scrying glasses, muffled. Like the reflection of a sound, instead of the sound itself. Rather like, now that I think on it, what Words must sound like to Pip—the aural equivalent of an ink drawing left out in the rain to puddle and run.
When the bright light clears, there is a young woman on the floor, hunched ungainly forward on the flats of her forearms, wrists up at an awkward angle, as if to spare herself a possible break as she skidded out. Her waist is twisted, her right leg uncomfortably under the left, practically perpendicular to her spine. She pulls herself upright gingerly, getting her knees under her.
It is Pip.
Her hair is shorn already, short like a page’s, just kissing the nape of her neck and the bottom of her ears. She is clad like a boy, as well; knee high boots, tight canvas trousers not unlike my formal fencing-gear bottoms, a sort of v-necked chemise with buttons, and a jerkin with attached sleeves and a wide slit down the front like a house robe. In short, thrillingly indecent and entirely exotic.
My curious perusal of her clothing ends the minute she flicks her hair back from her face and I see the tear tracks on her cheeks. Mirror-Pip is shocked. She is terror-pale, and her lips are trembling. She is staring around at the dank, underground chamber with fear and confusion mixing like a storm across her features. The torchlight in the chamber is feeble, and I see her squint into the shadows.
One of the shadows obligingly detaches itself from the wall.
“Hello?” Mirror-Pip says. “Who’s there? I . . . I think there’s
been . . . I don’t know what happened.”
“You fell,” the shadow says, and goose bumps march up my spine. I’ve only heard the Viceroy’s voice once before, while he was fleeing my Men, but it is a distinctive baritone: smooth as custard, sticky as honey, and as poisonous as venom.
He steps forward, all lean lines and slim-fitting jacket, a wave of dark hair and a face that would otherwise be attractive if it wasn’t so void of humanity. His eyes flash gold in the lamplight, calculating, cataloging, ever moving, never stilling, eerie.
“I don’t remember,” Pip says.
“No, I expect not.” He crouches and puts himself within her eye line as she struggles to sit upright. His thighs are on either side of her shoulders, obscenely close, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
Her gaze catches on the gold of his jacket, on the spiking lapels that he favors, and sticks like a fly in amber on the glittering gold brooch at his throat. I can’t see it from this angle, his shoulders are blocking my view, but I can see Pip’s expression morph as she recognizes it.
Wonder. That same childlike awe. A small smile. A sudden relaxation of the shoulders, because she thinks she knows what is happening. What it all means.
My poor Pip!
She grins up at his face, logic clicking into place, only it’s wrong, it’s all wrong, and perhaps she knows it, but her mind is scrambling for the most realistic answer, because the easiest one can’t possibly be correct. Reality doesn’t work that way. “Sorry, sorry. Did I interrupt a cover shoot?”
The Viceroy shakes his head. “Why would you think that?”
“Well, you’re Drew Mayfair, aren’t you? And you’re all done up in your costume, so . . . oh, but I don’t remember walking into. . . . Dammit, what happened? How did I get here?”
“I brought you here. You fell.”
A slow blink, and confusion writing worry onto Pip’s brow. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Who am I?” the Viceroy asks. “Name me.”
“Drew Mayfair.”
He pulls her upright, off balance on her knees, and shakes her once. “No.”
“You’re Drew Mayfair, the cover model from all the books. I know you.”
He shakes her again. “No. Name me.”
The awe falls away, and Pip starts to look scared. Her gaze flickers from his brooch to his face, and suddenly, she curls her arms back, as if she could bat his grasp away and hold her wrists above her face to protect it. A dark stain cuts through the cuffs of her strange, too-open jerkin, and I realize with a start that her wrists are bleeding. She must have rubbed the skin off as she fell into the harsh dirt.
“No,” she says. “No, I won’t. This isn’t possible.”
He shakes her harder, and even in the scrying mirror, I hear the clack of her teeth slamming together. “I have called you down; you will do my bidding! Name me!”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “This is a photo shoot, you’re just in character, you’re trying to prank me. This isn’t real. Stop it, you’re scaring me!”
“Name me.”
“Let me go!”
“Name me!”
“Stop it, you’re hurting me!”
“Name me!”
“The Viceroy!” Pip screams.
He lets her go, and she sags backward, eyes round with horror, mouth a slack hole. She cradles her wrists over her heart and swallows hard, several times.
“Yes,” the Viceroy hisses. He snaps his fingers, and another shadow peels out of the darkness. I know this silhouette as well, and it appears that even back then, Pip did too, for she shrinks into herself the way a mouse does to avoid the gaze of a night time predator.
“And him?” The Viceroy asks.
“Bootknife?” Pip whispers.
“Very good. Bootknife, our new friend is hurt. Bind her wounds, please.”
The Viceroy turns his back and smiles. His face is even more hateful to me, then, because he looks content. He looks smug. His horrible knife-slice features, that mop of dirty black hair, all of it is more terrible because he looks pleased.
Behind him, Pip screams again as Bootknife shoves her onto her back, and, with the slim silver knife for which he was named, cuts away both her jacket and her shirt. Beneath is a strange contraption that hugs her breasts, like a small corset set too high up, and this Bootknife leaves. He rolls Pip from left to right, carefully shredding her clothing without cutting her skin, avoiding the blows she tries to rain onto his face and settling his full weight over her pelvis so she cannot throw him off.
Bootknife tips Pip onto her stomach, pressing her face into the dirt. She kicks—oh, how she kicks—but Bootknife is not a small man, and when he is settled on the small of her back, she lets out a grunt and goes still.
Bootknife rips strips from Pip’s destroyed chemise and wraps them around her wrists, first binding the wounds, and then binding her arms together before her like a captured lamb.
He rises, and Pip struggles back to her knees, panting heavily and crying as quietly as possible, teeth cutting white crescents into her lip. How my heart aches. How I long to reach through the mirror and wrap her in my arms, to shield her from this. My poor, abused, strong Pip.
The Viceroy turns to face her again, hands clasped casually behind his belt, and leans down to meet her eyes, bends double at the waist like an acrobat. Or a snake.
“You know about me. About all of us. I brought you here because I want to know what you know. Tell me.”
Pip sucks her lips in between her teeth and sets her chin at that defiant angle that I know so well and find so endearing. To see her make such a gesture here, before the Viceroy, is like a punch to the stomach. I find myself gasping in admiration.
“You’re a Reader,” he says. “Tell me about what you read.”
Pip bites her lips harder and shakes her head side to side. “No. If you’re really him, I won’t. I won’t help you. I can’t. Never.”
“Tell me the name of our book,” the Viceroy snarls.
Pip clenches her jaw and closes her eyes. The backhand across the face is not unexpected, at least from my end, but Pip looks startled. I wonder if she’d ever been hit before. She probes her cheek with her tongue and spits blood onto the dirt floor.
The Viceroy sneers and points to Bootknife. “If you know who he is, then you know what he likes to do to people who do not answer.”
Pip pales so suddenly it is as if she had been bitten by a fairy. Her whole face goes parchment white. She nods, once. Bootknife paces around the two of them like a hungry wolf pup, grinning and picking his teeth with his horrible blade.
“Tell me the name of our book,” the Viceroy demands.
Pip says nothing. In front of her, she wrings her hands, trying to free her wrists, but the binding doesn’t budge.
“Tell me!” the Viceroy shrieks.
Pip flinches back, and then ducks her head, contrite. She makes a gesture as if she wants him to lean close, to whisper, and I see what she is about to do a half second before it happens. She has loosened a strip of the fabric between her hands, and as soon as the Viceroy’s head is beside her own, she has it up around his neck in a flash and is pulling.
She spins around behind him, his shoulders between her legs, and she pulls. The Viceroy flops to the ground like a landed fish, face already going purple as he struggles for air, filthy fingers scrabbling at the fabric.
He is laughing. The lunatic is actually suffocating and laughing.
“And now . . . now what?” he hisses.
“I will throttle you,” Pip snarls. “I’ll save Kintyre the trouble!”
Then, of course, Bootknife’s blade is at her throat, the glinting tip pressed just enough into the soft spot below her chin to drag a pearl of blood to the surface.
“I’ll carve you a new smile if you don’t let go,” Bootknife whispers into her ear, his free hand coming up to steal around the bottom of her throat. It slides up to wrap into the short hair at the nape of her neck. He curls
his fingers in, and Pip winces.
“You’ll carve me anyway, even if I do,” she hisses back. “Might as well do your world a public service and take this son of a bitch with me.”
Bootknife laughs into her ear, and Pip screws her eyes shut and wrenches back harder on her improvised garrote. The Viceroy wheezes, and Pip’s arms begin to shake. I find myself rooting for her, but even as I am, I can see her resolve crumbling. Her expression of determination is slowly eroding away into moral agony, and I can see the question she is thinking as clear on her face as if it had been painted there.
“Can I do it?” she is asking herself.
The answer, it turns out, as I knew it must, is “no.”
She sags backward, into Bootknife’s waiting arms, and releases her hold on the Viceroy. He struggles to his feet, hissing and spitting, face dark with rage and lack of air.
“I hope you’re done trying to prove your little point!” He coughs, and he sounds as if a bullfrog has taken up residence in his throat. “Tell me the name of the book!”
Pip only relaxes more in Bootknife’s grip, as if leaning against a lover in a moment of stolen quietude. She glares up at the Viceroy, impassive and defiant in her determination to do and say nothing.
“Oh, so that is how it is going to be?” the Viceroy asks. “Very well. Your choice. Bootknife, darling . . . upstairs. The Rose Room, I think. Don’t you?” He turns in a dramatic swirl of glittering gold and black, and stalks out of the ring of light cast by the torches. The darkness swallows him back up.
“Oh, this is going to be fun!” Bootknife howls, redoubling his grip on Pip’s hair and dragging her by it, out of the view of the scrying mirror.
The vision fades, and I sit back away from the glass, the chill echo of fear and grief playing across my skin. Something hot and wet lands on my arm, and I let my burning eyes slide downward to catalog it.
It is a tear. I am crying.
Oh, my poor, strong, incredible, heroic Pip.
Eighteen
The first thing I hear as I near the campfire is Kintyre’s voice: “Eighteen days left?”