by J. M. Frey
Table of Contents
Dedication
Storms
Chapter One
Shoes
Chapter Two
Rings
Chapter Three
Furnishings
Chapter Four
Deals and Shadows
Chapter Five
Thimbles and Buttons
Chapter Six
Lamps
Chapter Seven
Caps
Chapter Eight
Mirrors
Chapter Nine
Swords
Chapter Ten
Water
Chapter Eleven
Silver and Soil
Chapter Twelve
Vows
Chapter Thirteen
Stories
Chapter Fourteen
Failure
Chapter Fifteen
Readers
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Sons
Chapter Eighteen
Deals
Chapter Nineteen
Play
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Blood
About The Author
Acknowledgements
Connect with J.M.
Copyright
The Forgotten Tale Copyright 2016 by J.M. Frey. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover design by Ashley Ruggirello
Cover art from Aramisdream/mercurycode/smashmethod on DeviantArt.com
Book design by Ashley Ruggirello
Map by Christopher Winkelaar
Edited by Kisa Whipkey
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-942111-44-3
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-942111-45-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locals is entirely coincidental.
REUTS Publications
www.REUTS.com
Also by J.M.
Other Books in this Series
The Untold Tale, book one of the Accidental Turn Series (2015)
Ivy
Home, an Accidental Short
Ghosts, an Accidental Novella
Forthcoming in the Accidental Turn Series
The Forgotten Tale, book two of the Accidental Turn Series
Happiness, an Accidental Short
Arrivals, an Accidental Novella
The Silenced Tale, book three of the Accidental Turn Series
Health, an Accidental Short
The Accidental Collection, Series Collection
Novels
Triptych (Dragon Moon Press, 2011)
Novellas
(Back) (SilverThought Press, 2008)
The Dark Side of the Glass (Double Dragon Press, 2012)
Short Stories
“The Once and Now-ish King” in When the Hero Comes Home
(Dragon Moon Press, 2011)
“On His Birthday, Reginald Got“ in Klien
(FutureCon Publications, 2011)
“Maddening Science” in When the Villain Comes Home
(Dragon Moon Press, 2012)
The Dark Lord and the Seamstress
(CS Independent Publishing, 2014)
“The Twenty Seven Club” in Expiration Date
(EDGE Publishing, 2015)
“The Moral of the Story” in Tesseracts 18: Wrestling With Gods
(EDGE Publishing, 2015)
“Zmeu” in Gods, Memes, and Monsters (Stone Skin Press, 2015)
“How Fanfiction Made Me Gay” in The Secret Loves of Geek Girls
(Bedside Press, 2015)
Anthologies
Hero Is a Four Letter Word (Short Fuse, 2013)
Academic
“Whose Doctor?” in Doctor Who In Time And Space
(McFarland Press, 2013)
Dedication
To Dr. Jennifer Brayton, my MA thesis adviser, who showed me that being an avid fan and being a passionate academic do not have to mean being a divided writer.
Sleep now, my baby, and hear my sweet rhyme:
The Writer will come to us all in his time.
The books, they all close,
Our tales all conclude,
We’re all for the shelf, asleep and sublime.
So dream now, my child, of adventures to come
Of laughter, of starlight; the moon and the sun.
Our children, our sequels
Spin out ‘cross the years,
To continue our stories when our chapter’s done.
Storms
The air above the barn rips apart, wind against wind, power thrust into the multitude of skies, raking through the void. Feet braced apart, bracketing the barn’s peak, a slight woman reaches into the sky and slices again.
The world shrieks.
Thunder rumbles around her head; clouds heavy with the woman’s sorrow sop up her tears and absorb them, gray as grief. Between her fists, lightning arcs.
“Where is he?” the woman howls, and her voice is the hurricane.
On the other side of the rip, the Readers’ eyes are closed, cast away. They do not see. They did not see. None answer. But the Readers have never answered.
“Where is he?” the woman—or rather, the woman-shaped thing—demands again.
Laughter dances through the void, shivering like silver bells.
“Sisters?” the woman-shaped thing calls. “I hear you! Fetch me back to our realm!”
“We cannot.” The silver laughter drips, words sliding like mercury through the rip, weeping down the pane of the sky and pooling in the woman-shaped thing’s ears. The words are clashing music, a hundred thousand voices singing at once in a chord that is just the uncomfortable side of atonal. “You are sullied.”
The woman-shaped thing tears her hands apart and the sky crackles and booms.
“By no fault of my own!” she howls.
“But sullied all the same.”
“Then aid me in my search!”
“We cannot.”
The storm swirls and bucks around the woman-shaped thing like a wild-born stallion, refusing to break to her bit.
“Tell me where he is, at least!”
“We cannot,” the many mouths say. Some sound gleeful; others are filled with despair. She is, after all, their sister. Her sorrow is their sorrow. Or their enjoyment.
“He has passed beyond the veil of the skies! I cannot see him. He has left this realm for another, and I will know which!”
“Sister, we cannot.”
“Tell me!” the woman-shaped thing snarls, and around her the clouds turn black, the sky bleeds to amber and green, the winds rotate around her body. Hair the color of the night sky, threaded with silver that winks and peeks between her locks like stars, is tossed and plastered to the side of her head by the force of her own displeasure. “In which realm does he now dwell?”
“Sister . . .”
The sky screams again.
“Then I will find him myself!” the woman-shaped thing screeches. The lightning crackles out from her hands, striking the thatch roof all around her, setting the decades-old straw alight in a showering spray of sparks. Fire jumps and hisses at her feet, but does not dare to lick at her skirts. “Even if I have to tear each and every realm out of the sky and crack it between my jaws, I
will find him!”
“Let him go, sister,” the voices cry, and now there is panic in their sound, the liquid words splashing against the clouds. “Sister, forget him!”
“No!” the woman-shaped thing says. “You banish me because a human man tricked me into binding myself into flesh against my will. You will not aid me, call me sullied because he raped me! And now you tell me that I must forget the only good thing to ever come from my imprisonment in flesh. Well, I will not! And if you will not aid me, then I will tear through you to get to him!”
“Sister, peace!”
“Sisters, war!”
“Sister—” the voices beg, but the woman-shaped thing is incensed. She claps her palms back together, and the rip in the world slams shut.
The storm, however, grows stronger. Clouds circle and churn. The woman-shaped thing’s eyes shine gold and fierce. Triumphant. Master of her own life. Of her own body. Finally. Free at last. After so many years, at last.
And at last: revenge.
The tornado comes down, landing in a precise crater, blotting out the old crumbling well she despised hauling water from every morning. The funnel chews across the hated, horrid potato field where the woman-shaped thing spent thirty years in backbreaking mortal labor. It throws tubers and tender green shoots into the air, tosses them like stones against the side of the tool shed, the barn. The funnel roars and growls, alive with the woman-shaped thing’s fury, crawling and raking gouges out of the earth. It snaps the laundry line, sucks the costume of a peasant woman and her farmer husband away, gone forever, destroyed as finally as the lie that was the woman-shaped thing’s life itself.
And then the tornado falls upon the rude stone cottage. It slaps away the roof, reaches inside, and sucks the hand-carved furniture, the rusting pots and pans, the linens, the lie down its gullet.
The last thing to fly into its stormy maw is the corpse of the woman-shaped thing’s husband.
Dead but ten minutes, the man’s flesh is barely cool when it is ripped away from bone.
One
“—and then the blue cable goes here, into this port.” I lean back so my daughter can make out what I am doing, should she decide that it is, indeed, fascinating. Apparently, it is not. Right now, she is more occupied with trying to stuff Library’s face into her mouth. The sodden lion plushie looks long-suffering—if a toy can have an expression—but otherwise content to be the source of her comfort.
And I am content to be second-best to a drool-encrusted collection of fake fur, stuffing, thread, and buttons. Let Library have her now. Soon enough she will want a bottle, and the coziness of her father’s embrace. I take satisfaction in the knowledge that she is the most fascinating part of my day.
Alis Mei Piper entered my life eight months and some two weeks after her mother and I defeated a crafty villain, outwitted a Deal-Maker Spirit, deciphered an ages-old riddle, and tore a hole in the veils separating our realities with a bit of parchment, a metal quill, and some salt water. Alis was heralded into the world not as a lordling’s daughter and heir ought. But she was well loved, and well come all the same. Gifts from colleges, neighbors, Pip’s students, and our mutual friends were abundant and generous.
Had we been in Turn Hall, my serving staff would have aided us in the early, sleep-deprived days of new parenthood. Here, Pip’s workmates brought us ready-made frozen meals to eat swiftly while the baby napped. Pip’s own parents gave us the rare ability to sleep and bathe alone in those first few weeks by coming over every other day to watch our newborn. My own parents are long dead, and though I wish Alis’s paternal grandmother could have known her namesake, I am glad that her paternal grandfather is not present.
Elgar Reed, unfortunately, is. He sent us a very large bouquet of flowers and some celebratory wine, along with a startlingly large painting of Turn Hall looking, well, exactly as it ought. It was signed in the bottom corner by one of those fellows who worked on the Lord of the Rings film designs, and was Reed’s first, but sadly not his last, foray into breaching the tight-knit tapestry of our family.
I wish he would just go away. He wishes I would call him father.
Since the Lady Alis’s grand and squalling entrance, it has been another ten months. I have been a resident of this realm for nearly two years, and Alis is now strong enough to hold herself upright if she can cling to something. Soon she will be making the first swaying, drunken motions toward walking, and then, if she is anything like my brother was, the Writer help us. Even though I am the younger son, I can still recall Kintyre bashing into the sides of tables and knocking over chairs, tumbling down small flights of stairs and coming back home with half the covey forest stuck in his hair, or a great portion of the fish pond leaking from his boots. Alis has my watery gray-blue eyes (not green, thank the Writer, not green), and my mother’s thick, curling auburn hair, though of a shade much closer to Pip’s black than that of the former Lady Turn. Alis also has my mother-in-law’s nose, and Pip’s Asian facial structure. But the look in her gaze when she is plotting mischief is all Kintyre Turn.
Right now, Alis is bouncing gleefully in a romper attached to the lintel of my office doorway, smashing a sodden Library against the edge of the harness each time her chubby little feet leave the carpet, and practicing three of the four words she has—book, Da, and no. Ma is the fourth word, but she’s clever enough to have attached it to Pip already, and Pip is downstairs. I can tell, with one look over my shoulder, that Alis is unhappy, and that she fully intends to throw Library at me the moment I stop talking to her.
Which—why on Earth would I ever cease to talk to my daughter? Silly, dear thing.
“And then we turn the drive back around, like this.” I demonstrate. “And this is the on button. Do you see, my dearest? Right here. Click! On it goes, and Da’s server is now online!”
“Aaa-aaah!” Alis compliments.
Downstairs, a pan rattles and the oven door slams. Alis startles. She looks down at Library, as if to ascertain that he too heard it. Library is silent on the matter, and so Alis chooses to follow suit.
The people of Hain celebrate the longest night of midwinter with feasts and light, for it is the turn of our calendar. And downstairs, my wife is trying to recreate it for me. I tried to help prepare the finger foods, and was instead banished to my office. Lucy Piper brooks no incapability in her kitchen, and I am a man who grew up with a cook and a wait staff.
In Lysse, it was my habit to invite the people of the Chipping—farmers, merchants, tradesmen, travelers, nobility, and all—to a feast at Turn Hall. The gathering brought my Chipping together for three days and two nights. Our little affair here will be smaller, only a single night, and starting in . . .
“Oh,” I say, glancing at the clock in the corner of my monitor. “I do think it is time for your dinner, my lady Alis.”
Alis kicks her feet in an uncoordinated jig, and I pull my bones up off the floor to give her a cuddle. Alis drops Library and reaches out for me, pleased that I’ve abandoned my boring old computer for her. I scoop up her compatriot and tuck him between our bodies, for, like his namesake, he doesn’t like being left behind.
“Hush, though, sweeting,” I caution Alis. “There is a dragon in the kitchen, making all sorts of smoke, and we daren’t anger it.”
“I heard that!” Pip calls, but there is humor in her voice. I cannot help the grin that curls over my lips in response.
“Perhaps if we sing to soothe the beast?” I ask Alis, and she pops her fist against my chin to indicate her assent. “Very well. Ready?
Ah! The fields are dappled over, my love,
And the spring sings high and sweet!
Ah! The fairies flit and spin, my love,
And so it’s time for us to meet!
The sun sinks ever lower, my love,
It marks an end to play,
So come straight to my side, my love,
Now at the close of day.”
Together we go down to the kitchen, where Pip has left b
reast milk in the fridge, and Alis smacks my shoulder in time with the children’s song. Pip herself is in the dining room, putting something onto platters out of our view.
“Come not through murky forest, my love
Where trolls and goblins bide,
Come not oe’er standing pools, my love
Where kelpies wait and hide.
Come not through vasty deserts, my love
Where sun and djinn are cruel,
Come not through the icy wastelands, my love
Where reflections baffle fools.”
It’s a song meant to teach children the dangers of the unknown world, though it is surprisingly catchy. I push the buttons on the microwave in time to the beat.
“Come not past cavern mouths, my love
When they issue smoke and steam,
For those are the homes of dragons, my love
Where they hoard things bright with gleam.
Heed not to the call of sirens, my love,
Nor any creature of deep,
For they long to sing away children, my love,
To hold, to drown, and to keep.
Go not through the lofty halls, my love,
Made of fir, or ash, or pine,
For those are the realms of the elves, my love,
And to trespassers they are not kind.”
The bottle sufficiently warmed, I pop the plastic nipple into Alis’s obliging mouth and with her tucked warm and sweet against my hip, we spin in the kitchen in a gentle waltz.
“When you come to me, my dear sweet love,