by J. M. Frey
“Please, what?” she asks. She stops and turns to me, hands on her hips. “What do you want me to say, Forsyth?”
“I don’t know!” I admit. “Something. Anything! Talk to me at all.”
“About what? How I feel? How hurt and betrayed I am? How I’m dealing with the fact I have now joined the one-quarter of all women who have been raped?”
I flinch at the ugly word, and she laughs, but it too is ugly and low.
“Please,” I say again.
“And what are you begging for?”
“I don’t know. I just . . . I miss you, Pip.”
“I’m right here.” She spreads her arms, mocking.
“No, you’re not. You are silent, and you don’t let me touch you, and you don’t talk to me. We don’t laugh together anymore. I miss you.”
She turns away, guilt and what I can only hope is loneliness on her own face before she slams down on her expression, pinching off her feelings.
“Pip, please,” I say. “It wasn’t my fault.”
She scoffs. “So, what, you want me to stop punishing you by denying you and pretend things are back the way they were before?”
“No, never,” I say. “I would never want you to pretend. But I want you to let me apologize for my part in it, however unknowingly and unwillingly I participated.”
“You have.”
“Then let me repeat it until you believe me. I never wanted to hurt you. And all people have done to you since you arrived is hurt you. Tied up and laughed at you when you tried to hurt them back.”
Her gaze sharpens in my direction. “How do you know that?”
“You said—”
“No, I never did. Not once. I never told anyone I tried to hurt the Viceroy back. So, how did you . . .” Her eyes fall on the Chalice, hung upside down from the strap of my pack. A small dark spot of saltwater has collected on the dry clay of the riverbed under our feet, the earth sucking it up thirstily.
She rolls her eyes and throws up her hands. “Of course! Men! I wouldn’t tell you, and so you just had to pry into it!”
“Pip! Wait, I just wanted to—”
“Oh, you wanted to,” she sneers. “No. Don’t bother to think about what I wanted. What I requested! Pay no mind to me, I’m just a woman!”
“That’s unfair!” I yelp. “I would have done the same for anyone I care about.”
“Break your promise and pry in where you don’t belong, you mean?”
“Checked up on them in case something worse had happened. Prepared! Researched! Surely you have to appreciate that!” I bellow.
Above us on the slope, I can hear that Bevel and Kintyre have turned back. They are coming toward us, and I am rapidly running out of the privacy I need with her.
“Pip.” I reach forward, grab her by the elbows and clamp my fingers down, refusing to allow her to flinch away this time.
“Let go!”
“No, not until you listen to me,” I say, pulling her toward me, angling my lips against her ear. “I love you. Right now, I love you, despite everything, because of everything. You are strong, and you are brave, and you are clever, and I love you, no matter what you’ve been through and what has been done to you. To us.”
Pip stops struggling, stops pushing against my chest with her fists, and sags, eyes on the ground.
“And I suspect there is a part of you that loves me back,” I press on. “Kintyre figured it out—if the Viceroy had been in control back at the dinner at Turn Hall, he would have made you go with him. But he didn’t, because your will was stronger, and you chose me. You chose me that night.”
“But not like that. It was just to . . . you know, just to be near you. Maybe dance, if I could have.”
“And that was enough, don’t you see? That was you. The real you. It was you who nearly kissed me in the stairwell. So please, please, Pip; search inside yourself and find the place where you care for me. Please, let me help you. Let me care for you, let me protect you, and let me help you get well again.”
“There’s nothing you can do!” she spits, and tries to wrench her arms out of my grip.
I won’t let go; I refuse. Call this my heroic task, but I will not let Pip think she is alone in this.
“Then let me just be beside you,” I plead. And then I lean back, duck my chin, and slot my mouth over hers. It is not an elegant kiss, and it is not slow or sweet or playful, any of the things that Pip and I both prefer. Her lips are rough and taste like scabs, but the press and slide of flesh to moist flesh far outweighs the bitterness of the taste. This kiss is meaningful. It must signify, must stand in for all the things that I cannot seem to force my tongue to say as words, so I must curl it around the feelings and use it to press them onto her. I must kiss her until she understands.
When I pull back for a breath, intending to tilt my head the other way, to brush my nose along her cheek, to murmur against her lips, to inhale her air, she jerks back. My grip has loosened with the kiss, turning to a caress, and she breaks it easily.
My eyes have closed—I don’t know when that happened; I don’t remember consciously choosing that—so I ratchet the lids back up with aroused difficulty. They snap open the rest of the way when I take in Pip’s expression.
Her face is puce with fury, her whole body shaking, and her brown eyes are wide and wet. “Don’t,” Pip thunders. “Don’t you dare force your desires on me. Don’t you dare kiss me without my permission ever again.”
She runs up the hill so quickly that Bevel and Kintyre are startled apart. She darts between them, running around a river bend and out of sight.
“Forssy,” Kintyre sighs. “Now what did you do?”
“I don’t know!” I say, feeling impotent in my own inability to help Pip, to make her understand, to make myself understand what she needs. I run my hands through my hair, pulling at it, furious and frustrated and tired, Writer, so damn tired.
✍
We reach the apex of the mountain several hours after nightfall. Pip has neither spoken nor looked at me all day. We set up camp swiftly, deciding to forgo a fire in favor of just crawling into our bedrolls. The wind is colder at this altitude, and swifter, but we have found a bald crag in which to huddle, and the warmth of four bodies is enough to keep us comfortable for one night.
In the morning, we explore the roof of the world as best we are able with a spyglass. The Cinch Mountains as a whole form a massive round caldera around the acid-green remains of a volcano that blew off its top long before human memory. The caldera is formed of five distinct mountain ranges. We are in the Eyrie, home to many of the great legendary birds. The Rookery, that small part of the Eyrie which resembles a writing desk, is small and hard to spot, but we don’t want to begin scrambling across mountain peaks if we don’t know which direction we’re going.
The absolute swarms of birds look at us askance, but none of them talk when Pip tries to engage them in conversation. Whether they can’t, or they won’t is unclear. We pass a fruitless first day pouring over Bevel’s maps of this region and Pip’s Excel, and, in the end, decide to stay put for the second night. We don’t seem to be bothering any nests here, which is a blessing, a luck that is welcome and was unlooked for.
The second day sees us making no more progress than the first, though I have devised a grid system with which to study the other mountains through the glass, instead of wheeling it about willy nilly the way Kintyre was doing. On day three, Pip seems to have been able to coax a riddling raven close, but it is only staring at her with its glass eyes, blinking but not responding. It is possible that the creature has never heard human language before, living so high up and so far away from civilization. Maybe it only speaks Dwarvish or Goblinese. I try both languages, but it only croaks a laugh and flies off.
Day four comes, and we are all so frustrated at our lack of progress that we are at one another’s throats. Kintyre yells at Pip when she unfolds her Excel yet again, trying to decipher where we went wrong. “Adventuring is not schol
ar’s work!” he snarls.
And Pip blows back: “Well, one of us around here has to do the thinking, ‘cause it’s sure not ever you!”
Kintyre throws his arm to the west. “We should just start walking. We’ll come upon it!”
“That’s your big plan?” I sneer. “Just waste days and days scrambling over mountain peaks in the hopes that we’ll stumble upon the right one? What if it’s that way, instead?” I point south. “We’ll waste weeks going all the way around the range, and we still can’t guarantee that we’ll cover every chasm and peak.”
“Our rations are nearly gone,” Bevel adds. “We need to go back down, check on the horses, and gather more. We need more water. Kintyre, you need to hunt.”
He draws his sword. “I can do well enough here.”
Pip yelps. “Not the birds! You think they’ll help us if we start eating them? Idiot!”
“They’re serving no other purpose!” Kintyre bawls.
Pip runs her hands through her hair, frustrated. She’s got her jerkin off, and when her arms raise and shift, I can still see the puff of ivy on the nape of her neck. The scars remained, though why that surprised me when I realized it, I don’t know. I suppose I was hoping that, with Bootknife’s death, they would fade. But that is silly. Scars are scars; they don’t just vanish.
I can’t help but touch my own scar, a thin, angry red line that arcs from my temple across the apple of my cheek.
Pip huffs a sigh of frustration. “Okay, maybe I’m thinking about this wrong. If we’re not meant to find the location from the birds, then who else can tell us?”
“Why don’t we just ask?” Bevel suggests.
“Ask who,” Kintyre snaps. “There’s no one here!”
“Ask whom,” I can’t help but correct.
He turns a thunderous glare on me but doesn’t comment.
“There is something else here; there has to be. Come on, what else lives on mountains?”
“Goats?” Bevel suggests.
“Goblins live under them,” Kintyre says, “but I saw no passages or openings.”
“Dragons,” I say, our encounter with what Bevel is already calling the Desolate Drakeling of Debbinshire fresh in my mind.
“No dragons here,” Kintyre says. “No massive droppings or animals large enough to sustain it. There was barely anything bigger than a rabbit in that forest at the foot of the slopes.”
Everyone is silent, minds churning, when Pip lifts her face to the wind and smiles. Eyes closed, her hair flying back over her shoulders, she looks content and beautiful, framed against the mountain’s dark gray-and-white caps, the clear blue of the sky, and the haze of clouds.
I swallow hard and force myself to look away, to remember that Pip doesn’t want me anymore. That my regard is unwelcome.
“The wind,” she whispers.
“Oh!” Bevel says, latching on immediately. “Zephyrs!”
“The wind always blows you what you need. You’ve used it before,” Pip says softly, opening her eyes and turning to face us. “As long as you have something of equal import to give it in return. So, what do we have to give?”
Nineteen
As Bevel and Kintyre go about scratching the sigil necessary for summoning a zephyr into the stone of our little campsite, Pip and I huddle in the lee of the crag to discuss what we have with us that might be worth the price of being taken to the Rookery. Pip suggests that, instead of asking to be taken there on the back of the wind, we could ask for knowledge of where the Rookery is. I manage to convince her around to my way of thinking—we have wasted four days, and could waste more traveling there. Far better to ride directly to it than risk walking and being ambushed by the Viceroy or any number of creatures on the way.
“But what have any of us got that’s worth it?” she muses. “Kintyre’s sword?”
“Not ours to give,” I demure.
“The Shadow’s Mask?”
“I dare not, not with the Words of Knowledge on it, not with the enchantment. Who knows where the wind may drop it.”
“And we need the rest of the objects.” Pip squirms, trying not to look as if she’s keeping distance between us as she shifts on the uncomfortable ground.
“It doesn’t have to be a physical thing,” I say softly. “It could be a name. Or a future possibility.” Or a relationship, I think, but dare not say aloud.
An idea is beginning to germinate in my mind, but I don’t know what shape it will take just yet, so I remain silent. Before Pip and I have come to a consensus, Bevel calls us back out into the open air and directs us to stand at the cardinal points.
“You still remember this from when you were searching for the Iridium Crown of the Nightking?” Pip says, watching Bevel begin to make a series of very grave, very silly looking hand gestures.
“Shh,” Kintyre admonishes, and Pip does, watching Bevel’s every movement with rapt fascination.
She used to look at me like that. Bile burns against the hollow of my throat, and I swallow it back.
When Bevel finishes, he drops his hands to his sides, tilts his head back, and waits. The wind suddenly vanishes, the howl that has been hounding our ears for the last four days immediately ceasing. Silence drops over us like a blanket, and I resist the urge to scrub at my ears. Even the incessant cawing of the birds has been silenced.
Something sweet and soft suddenly perfumes the air, like the ghosts of a thousand summer-dappled meadows. It tickles my nose, and a warm breath trails like a finger across the back of my neck, over my cheek. I cannot help but lean into the sensation, and, around the circle, I see the others doing the same.
“Hello,” Bevel says.
“Hello,” the wind says back. Its voice is neither male nor female, but it is high and sweet as the scent it carries, an exhalation of breath that somehow, strangely, translates as words. “What can I do for you?”
“We need to be taken to the Rookery, please,” I say. “All four of us, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“Amount and distance are no trouble,” the zephyr agrees. “This I can do. And in return, what do you offer?”
The four of us exchange glances across the circle, but no one seems to have any idea what to propose. Can I do it? Do I have the bravery to suggest what has been growing in my mind?
“Take my scars,” Pip says suddenly. “The vines!”
If the thoughtful silence is anything go by, the zephyr seems to contemplate this. “No,” it says finally. “They aren’t yours to give.”
Pip pounds her fist against her thigh, frustrated.
“Forsyth’s stutter?” Kintyre asks, tentatively.
“Yes, I’ll accept that,” I agree.
“No,” the zephyr says. “That is not precious to you.”
Pip turns in a circle, hands jammed against her scalp. She is muttering, “Think, think, think! You’re supposed to be the clever one! C’mon, Lucy, c’mon!”
Her wrists are delicate and elegant ,and I remember kissing her there, over those little bones and tender veins. I remember those fingers twined with mine. I remember the burn of her touch, the slick drag of the heel of her hand against the base of my cock. I remember kissing her nail beds, licking the moisture from her own intimacy away, chasing the flavor of ink and sex in her cuticles.
I have grown to love her so much. It is real. I love her, and I never want to be without her. I want her in my life always. I want to watch her face, to try to guess what she is thinking. I want to care for her. But more than taking care of her, I want her to let me care for her. I want her to let me . . . just, let me. For as long as she is alive. I want to keep her, mine forever, to see her everyday, to share her secrets with her, and to have the privilege to share my own. I want her, in every selfish way a child could ever want a toy, and in bigger, nobler ways that mean sacrificing everything of my own just for the privilege of waking up beside her every morning. I love her.
I love her, and it’s real. It means something. It is real.
It is.
Isn’t it?
Can my love for her be real? Can my feelings be genuine when her own are not? Does that invalidate them? Is what I feel fake because it grew through false encouragement, because the physical affection we shared was coerced, even if I didn’t know it, because everything she said and did to make my feelings grow bigger, stronger, truer, were not her own words, her own actions?
Can I really love Pip when all she was, was a puppet?
And do I want to love her, now that she is leaving forever?
“Take it from me,” I say to the zephyr, suddenly, mind made up as soon as the thought, the idea that has been chasing its way around between my ears crystallizes. “Take it. You know what I’m thinking. Take it.”
The wind vanishes for the briefest of moments, and for the length of it, I fear I have offended the zephyr and it has left. And then, there is a gust of wind so strong that it blows me back. I fall, the wind clutching at me, and my back does not hit the ground. The zephyr is sucking the air from my lungs, caressing, grabbing, sliding down my throat until I am choking, choking. I burn. All over, I burn, flayed open by the wind, skin rubbed harsh and red.
I cannot scream because I do not have the air for it. I will not scream because this is what I asked for.
I try to keep my eyes open, but I cannot see past the way my own hair is whipped against my face—even my eyelashes are being tugged upon—and the grit the wind storm has swirled up. I cover my face with my hands, struggling to lift my limbs, to protect my eyes, my mouth from the dust. Nothing can keep out the wind, and I would not want it to.
And then it is over. I am lying on the ground, gasping, lungs screaming for air, limp and wrung out and done.
Pip slides onto her knees in the dirt beside me, her hands on my chest, as if to gauge whether my heart still beats. It does. It does. And I wish she’d stop touching me.
“What did the zephyr take?” Pip asks. “Forsyth, what did you offer?”
“Let me up,” I say instead of answering, and Pip backs up just enough for me to haul myself into a sitting position. Kintyre and Bevel hover nearby, giving Pip and I space that we don’t need.