by J. M. Frey
“Yes, that too,” I say. “And the death of Bootknife and the Viceroy.”
Pip opens her mouth to challenge us, and then snaps it closed. For a long second, she glares hatefully at each of us in turn, but then I see it, the moment it happens in her brown eyes, the exact second when she gets it.
“Oh my god,” she breathes, realization rolling up her face like a cloud of steam. “That’s how Reed works. You’re right. That’s what he would have done. If I’d agreed, it would have all gone back to the way it was. Cosmic reset. A retcon! ‘And then they woke up!’ God, that’s just his style,” Pip whispers. She sucks her lips inward, biting on them, torn and hurting and surprised, too shocked to really process what she’s saying, I think. “How would that have been bad, though? I mucked up everything in this world. Surely a reset—”
“No,” Kintyre interrupts. “No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to go back to that man who . . . doesn’t love Bevel. And isn’t kind to his brother. Who sees no merit in emotional attachments. I don’t want to, and you can’t make me.”
Kintyre’s proclamation is so sincere that Pip is startled into tears. Her chin wobbles. “I nearly ruined everything.”
“But you didn’t,” I say softly. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine!” Pip says. “I nearly ruined everything. How can you all just stand there and forgive me?”
“We’re heroes.” Bevel shrugs. “It’s what we do.”
“Oh, god,” Pip whispers, covering her face with her hands. “Oh, god, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, Pip,” I say, and gather her carefully into my embrace, petting her hair with one hand, the other cupped gently over the vulnerable flesh at the nape of her neck. “It’s okay.”
✍
It is too late in the day to climb out and make it back to the base of the mountains, so we make camp against a wall of the Rookery, each of us wanting to be as far away from the desk and the red-stained stones around it as possible. There is a bit of forest around the lip of the chasm, which explains where Bevel got the branch he brained the Viceroy with. It is from there that Kintyre returns with an armload of firewood and a brace of birds for eating. I don’t look too closely at what kind they are before they are defeathered.
Pip is curled up once again under the Shadow’s Cloak, small and thoughtful. She isn’t as miserable this time, but she doesn’t seem happy, either. I sit down near her, in case she needs me, and she scoots over, wrapping both of her arms around one of mine, resting her head against my shoulder. She is warm, and it is comfortable, so I don’t shake her off. Besides, I think we could both use the comfort of human touch just now.
Bevel and Kintyre busy themselves with dinner preparations, whispering to one another and stealing impertinent kisses when they think we’re not looking. Pip sighs, and it’s not one of longing, but I can’t tell what kind it is, either.
“I’m sorry,” Pip says.
“You don’t have to keep apologizing,” I say.
“No, I mean . . . for what you said earlier. About . . .” She fidgets. “About being an emotional bully.”
“Oh.”
“I just . . . I thought I knew everything about these books, about how Reed writes, about his . . . failings. And I thought, I can fix this! I can bludgeon fairness into this world! Only, I didn’t realize I was bludgeoning you, too.”
“I wouldn’t call it bludgeoning, per se.”
Pip chuckles a little, low and not entirely genuine. “But I wasn’t kind. I wasn’t . . . I didn’t treat you like a person. I treated you all the same, when I should have listened, and watched, treated you like a human being in and of yourself. Instead of as an extension of Reed’s issues.”
I turn my face down to meet her gaze. “I did learn from you. Things I wouldn’t have considered otherwise.”
“But I was an asshole about it. That’s what I’m apologizing for.”
“I learned from you,” I repeat. “And I will never regret that. No more than Kintyre will ever regret it, or Bevel. It just . . . it broke my heart that your pain was so great that you missed what I was trying to say.”
“If I had the chance, I would do better. I can,” Pip says. “I can do it better.”
“But we don’t have the chance.”
She grimaces. “Who knows? I might be stuck here forever now.”
“I don’t love you,” I say again, but it seems rather more like a knee-jerk denial this time.
Pip looks startled that I would even say it, and, immediately, the hurt flits across her expression, then is gathered up and tucked away behind a cracking mask of indifference.
“I know that,” she says, and it is just this side of too polite, too cool to be truly indifferent. Something that had started swelling in my chest, at her concern, heats and grows. I try to tamp it back down, but it won’t go. “But we seemed to work, you can’t deny that. I mean, we’re the same. You loved me, and I . . . could learn to love you on my own. Maybe even do, a little.” She grimaces again. “This isn’t fair. Him using me like a prize in a cereal box like that. It’s just so the way Elgar Reed uses women. I would have liked to . . . to have decided if I loved you on my own merit.”
I say nothing. I don’t want to push, but if Pip goes away now, if she leaves me now, I will spend the rest of my life wondering if we could have been something, something just our own, without the Viceroy, something . . . marvelous.
But then, another, uncharitable part of me immediately thinks, Well, do not expect an invitation back to Turn Hall! Which is unfair, because, though I may no longer care for Pip as a lover, she is yet my friend, and I will not see her abandoned. It is just me feeling a bit mean and ill-used, her apology dredging up the feelings of inadequacy and anger that the original offense created.
Another, smaller part of me, some breath of smoky ember buried under the ash of my disappointments and weariness, flares a little closer to true heat. For Pip has apologized, and she is my friend, and with more time together . . . with more time . . .
We could both do better. If we had the chance. But better at . . . ? At what, precisely, are we both so cautiously aiming that we daren’t name the target? Our arrows are knocked, our strings pulled tight, but what is the intent?
I am silent in my contemplation, and for apparently long enough to discomfit Pip. She pokes my side gently to regain my attention and asks: “So, what do we do now?”
I think about the long descent into the Stoat Forest, of the remaining twelve days, of how long it will take us to make it home, and to my library. “Go back down, go back to Turn Hall, I guess, and start researching again,” I say. “Or back to Kingskeep to beg a preservationist from the king and return to the Lost Library?”
Bevel and Kintyre, each carrying two trenchers of roasted bird and some sort of wild leaf salad, come to sit beside us against the wall. They hand a platter to each of us. Obviously, they have been eavesdropping and are choosing now, once the emotional mire of our conversation has been rerouted to the more practical course of planning, to join us.
“Do you really want to go back?” Bevel asks Pip as he juggles the hot meat between his fingers. “You don’t have to. And with Bootknife and the Viceroy gone . . . I mean, the king will probably give you a title and some money. You could set yourself up here. Stay.”
I say nothing, because, if I say anything, I have decided that it will be begging for her to agree. Pip, like Pointe, has grown to be one of my best friends. I do not wish to be parted from her, even knowing how selfish a wish that is. Pip has family back home—a grandmother, parents, a little dog—and she misses them. She will be missed.
But she will be missed here, too.
“Will you take a title and wealth for murdering two men?” Pip asks Bevel, eyes narrowed, thoughtful.
“Reckon I might,” he says, licking grease from his fingers. “I grew up with nothing, and for those two, I regret nothing. I consider it a service, and, frankly, I’m sort of ready to, well . . .
stop.”
He looks up at Kintyre and squeezes his hand. Kintyre continues licking supper from between his teeth and shrugs, seeming to ignore Bevel’s hand in his, except for where he curls his fingers around Bevel’s. “Already got a title, don’t I?” he says. “Could always use the wealth, though.”
“The living is still quite well off, despite how much of my whiskey you drink when you’re home,” I point out.
“Then I’ll give it to your free school,” Kintyre says.
For a moment, all I can do is blink in surprise. “I . . . I thought, perhaps, that you . . . would have forgotten,” I admit.
“Why would I?” he asks. Kintyre seems genuinely confused.
Bevel grins and pats Kintyre’s thigh, amused. “You’re all they talk about to me when I’m in town. Forssy this, Forssy that; ‘Oh, Kintyre’s brother, the lordling.’ ‘And did you hear what Master Turn did for that old poor widow? What a thoughtful soul!’”
Kintyre snorts, and bumps his lover with his shoulder. “Shaming, sometimes, to think all I do for Lysse is slay monsters.”
Your people love you, Pip had told me once. I think I might finally believe her.
“As if slaying monsters is such a small service,” I point out.
“It’s one anyone with the right tools could do.” Kintyre touches the hilt of Foesmiter in demonstration.
Bevel elbows Kintyre gently. “Sure, we take some evil out of the world, but, Forsyth, you fill it with good.”
I do not know what to say to that, and my tongue flutters against my teeth, useless. I simply nod my thanks, feeling the blush creeping up my ears, and focus on my dinner.
When our trenchers are empty and Bevel has collected them up, we lay out our bedrolls. Kintyre and Bevel share, of course, and as Pip lays out her own bedroll and blankets, she gestures for me to lay mine directly beside her.
“It’s cold up here in the mountains,” she says, and I accept the excuse for the invitation it is.
Neither of us wants to admit that we are lonely, that we are missing one another, that we are trembling with the effort of holding our arrows back.
✍
We sleep wrapped around each other, content to just have another person in our arms; just us and the world. Bevel and Kintyre do the same, and it feels strangely wonderful to wake up in mirrored positions of contentment. Kintyre flashes a genuine smile at me over Bevel’s shoulder—the kind I never thought I’d receive from my brother—when he catches Pip and me whispering to one another in the dawn.
For once, I do not covet what he has with Bevel, for I have it for myself, and I understand, suddenly, how much better it is to be happy for my brother than it is to be jealous of him.
Oh. No. Wait.
I sit up slowly, carefully untangling myself from Pip so as not to wake her, and run a hand through my dirty hair.
No. No, that’s wrong. I do not love Pip.
The target at which yesterday’s contemplations were aiming suddenly becomes clear. The topic that Pip and I are both avoiding, the thing for which we are shooting but dare not loose our bolts too soon toward, is love.
By the Writer.
Pip and I are falling in love.
Again?
No, for the first time. For she was not herself last time, and did not pick me; and the woman I thought she was was a ploy, so it was not the real Pip for whom I held my deep affection. But here, this, right now, this is Lucy Piper and Forsyth Turn, with no barriers between us but ourselves. A new love is growing. It is fresh, and new, and mine again.
I reach out, slow, bold, and brush the back of my fingers across the soft swell of her cheek, recalling the daring with which I had fallen asleep in her bed that first night, the way she had looked in the dawn’s sunlight, the scent of her hair on the pillow. The arrow trembles.
My heart begins to rattle against my rib cage, and suddenly, my tongue is jumping in my mouth, my breath stoppered up behind my larynx. Oh, Writer, it feels. . . . It is a river at high swell, rushing over me, a river of warmth and golden light, and I cannot breathe, I cannot breathe.
My harsh pants must wake Pip, for she makes a soft little moaning sound, and it is intimate, Writer, so sweet, for I remember it so fondly from other mornings. My heart surges, the bullseye comes closer, and I feel like I should be shouting a warning to the world, that I should be pushing Pip away or gathering her close, or screaming, or something, but all I can do is stay still, frozen, powerless and happily so, as she stretches and turns a little so her face is to the sky.
Her eyes are closed, and I’m somehow at the edge of a cliff I didn’t even know was there, toes already out over open air—and I am going to fall. The moment she opens them, I will fall, the arrow will fly, and I will be lost again. And found.
Pip turns her face up, automatic and comfortable. She reaches her arms up, curls them around my shoulders, finds my neck, and pulls my head down before I realize what is about to happen. She pecks a short, distracted kiss on my lips.
I dare not move. I dare not breathe. The edge of the cliff crumbles out from under me. The string of the bow fights me.
Pip’s eyes slit contentedly, like the Library Lion while receiving scratches, and then blow wide with shock as she realizes what she has just done. What habit has made her do.
“Oh,” she breathes. “I . . .”
“Pip.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and tries to squirm away, but I’ll not let her.
No, I will not be a coward about this, and I will not let her be a coward either. I roll just enough to pin Pip beneath me, watching her face for any sign that she wants to be let up. She twines her arms around my neck instead, pulling me down on top of her so that we are touching from nose to knee cap.
I lean down, slow enough to give her time to protest, and cover her mouth with mine. It is warm, slick, and I kiss first her bottom lip, then her upper. Her tongue dances out to lick, and I open, obliging, welcoming. And it is like waking up after an eternity of being asleep.
Something fizzes against my mouth, and I swipe my tongue into hers, warm and wonderful and perfect. She moans against me, reaches up and tangles her fingers in the hair at the base of my neck. I am in desperate need of a haircut. There is something warm against my palms, and I realize that I have lifted my own hands, am cradling her face, pulling her closer. Pip rises to her knees, presses her breasts against my arm, half crawls into my lap in an effort to consume me with her kiss.
We part for breath, and stare in wonder at one another.
The arrow flies, swift and sure, and twangs into the bullseye.
Oh, I think. Oh, well then. That was . . . quick.
Pip breaks first, giggling, and I follow after her, letting her settle into my lap. I lay my hands over her bottom, and she lays her cheek against my collarbone.
“Do you believe in love at first sight?” I whisper into her ear. “Bao bei?”
Pip laughs, just a little, a soft, sweet sound that puffs against the bottom of my ear and makes me shiver. I tighten my arms around her shoulders, and she nuzzles closer.
“At first sight?”
“Or True Love’s Kiss, then?”
“Yes,” Pip says. “Yes. All of it. Now, I do. And you?” Her eyes are anxious, searching, darting across my face, as if trying to seek out any answers I would hide in the wrinkles beside my eyes or the hairs of the sparse beard that I have not had the opportunity to shave in a week. “You said you loved me. That you gave up your love because you loved me.”
“That is a contradiction, an impossibility,” I point out, and I cannot wait for her answer, for her kisses call to me like a siren I am helpless to disobey. I cannot seem to separate my mouth from her skin.
When I move down to press my mouth to her neck, to that little place under her ear that makes her gasp and squirm, the place where I like to leave my mark, Pip throws back her head and gasps: “Impossibility or not, you’re the one who—Christ!—who said it. God, don’t stop.” She writhes and press
es up against me, hands scrabbling to hold on, curling into my hair, into my collar, along my back, gripping, grasping, holding on for dear life. “Oh, Forsyth. Do you only love me because this is how these stories work? I am the female protagonist; I am the trophy. I am the quest within the quest, and you only want me—wanted me—because you were supposed to?”
“No,” I smear against her throat, kissing down to the ‘v’ that the laces of her shirt leaves bare between her collarbones. “No, never, Pip. Never. I want you, only you, Lucy Piper. Writer, Pip. I lo—”
On the other side of the growing fire, Kintyre and Bevel whistle and hoot and applaud, surprising me so badly that the rest of what I was going to say splutters and takes off like a startled pack of grouse.
I jerk back, falling into the wall of the Rookery, and Pip topples to the side, surprised at first, and then filled with unrestrained, joy-filled, full-belly giggles.
We break camp after that, and pack up. It is slow going because Pip and I must stop to touch, to reaffirm, to kiss and smile and giggle as much as possible, to be certain that the other one hasn’t wandered too far away. Bevel takes our dawdling as permission to do some dawdling and canoodling of his own, and twines himself around my brother, leaning up for kisses when he can reach them, kisses which Kintyre suffers gamely and with much eye-rolling.
Pip takes charge of the desk, packing away the objects. She picks up the cup and turns it around and around, watching the salt water slosh along the rim.
“What I don’t understand,” she says out loud, “is why these objects? Why the desk, and the cup, and all that?”
“Deal-Maker spirits are vain,” Kintyre says.
“She probably saw herself as some sort of Writer,” Bevel elaborates. “Wanted the set-up.”
“But it’s . . . it’s nearly too perfect,” Pip says. “And we never really used any of it.”
“We never do,” Bevel says, coming over to stand beside her and fiddle with the knife. “It’s always just a pretty tableau.”
“Still . . .” Pip says. “It’s a bit convenient, isn’t it? I mean, a desk, a quill, a parchment . . . a cup of water—that’s like ink—and a knife to sharpen the quill. It’s as if . . . as if . . .”