by J. M. Frey
“Invited over the one person we agreed we never wanted around our daughter, and then failed to tell me?” Pip snaps, and the fire twinkles briefly in her gaze, her cheeks flushing pink before she slams it all shut again. “Decided that the best idea was then to compound this by hiding it?”
I have nothing to say to excuse or explain what I have done, so I bow my head slightly in apology and answer to both.
“Lucy . . . Mrs. Turn—Piper.” Reed corrects himself hastily when Pip turns a narrow scowl in his direction. He adopts a paternal, condescending posture that I know will irritate Pip further. “Your husband was only trying to get to the bottom of this.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Reed,” Pip says back, echoing his condescending tone. “Stay the fuck out of it.” Reed splutters, and Pip swings her head to me. “And you. We’re supposed to be a team. You’re supposed to talk to me.”
“I tried, Pip!” I protest. “I tried, and you told me that what I thought was happening couldn’t possibly be true. You dismissed me when I told you that the books are vanishing. And then you told me that my anger when you did not listen was unfounded and misplaced! So what am I to do, but to choose to investigate it with the only other person who may know enough about my . . . existence . . . to believe me and discuss it rationally?”
“So you’d rather sneak around with Elgar Reed than try to convince me?” Pip says, and her face is so full of rich disbelief that I feel myself smothering under the blanket of it.
“You cannot speak of this as if I am philandering with him!” I say, aghast.
Pip snorts and shakes her head. “Don’t change the topic,” she says, stern. “The point is that, instead of trying to talk to me, you did exactly what we, together, decided never to do.”
“I tried, Pip, but you got it into your mind that I could not possibly be right, and by the Writer’s left nutsack, this is the bloody Rookery conversation all over again, you stubborn creature!”
Reed jumps at the combination of my profanity and my volume, and covers his groin with his hands, eyes round with shock. Pip continues to glare at me, and Alis waves her fists, gurgling angrily, upset that I am yelling at her mother.
“See, this?” Pip says calmly, once the ringing echo of my voice has dissipated from the cathedral ceilings of our living room. “This is exactly what I’m talking about.”
I throw my hands up, inviting the eyes beyond the veil of the skies to witness my exasperation. “And so you will focus on my anger instead of my words. It is no wonder that I am frustrated enough about these concerns that I seek assurance elsewhere, Pip!”
“Well, I can’t be rational with you when you’ve got yourself so wrapped up in this . . . this Turnish anger!”
Alis shakes her fists more vigorously, clearly siding with her mother, the little turncoat.
“Turnish anger?” Reed squawks.
Pip gestures at me with her empty wine glass in demonstration.
“I fear growing into my father,” I admit. “I fear desperately that I will grow loud, and boorish, and cruel.”
“Forsyth,” Reed whispers. “Never. You would . . . you would never. Kintyre is the one I wrote to inherit your father’s temper. Not you.”
“But his cruelty?” I press.
“Would you ever even consider harming your daughter?”
“Never!”
“Then there’s your answer. Forsyth, I deliberately wrote you to be kind to animals and children and women. You’re--”
“The sissy,” I finish for him, spitting the pejorative, and yet still thinking of my foxes in the covey forest.
“Well,” he says, shifting uncomfortably, squirming with guilt. “The beta male, I guess.”
“With Kintyre as the alpha?” I guess.
“Yes, but . . .” He rubs his arms as if to chase away goosebumps, and then runs his fat palm across his sparse pate. “You do know that, in real life, the alphas are the jerks?”
“Don’t generalize,” Pip warns Reed. “Don’t make this about how the douchebag dudebros shoved you in a locker when you were a baby geek. The truth of it is that Kintyre is your power-fantasy author-avatar. You’re a Nice Guy who always finished last, and you invented Kintyre to make yourself into what it is you think women actually want—the heroic bad boy. That’s why women chuck themselves at Kintyre the way they do. Because you’ve always wanted to be knee-deep in puss.”
Reed turns a vibrant, mortified red. “There’s nothing wrong with a little fantasizing,” he mumbles. Another heavy, damp silence settles over the room. Reed drains his sherry glass. Alis chews her fist, watching us fretfully.
I take a deep breath, willing my frustration into a box behind my ribs and jamming it shut. “Pip,” I say, as calmly as I can. “I apologize for breaking our rule about my creator. But I needed to see him. I needed confirmation that I was not losing my mind, as you feared. That I was not . . . vanishing.”
Reed nods vigorously, and though I do not need his support in this, it feels satisfying to be justified in it all the same.
“And are you?” Pip whispers. “Vanishing, I mean?”
“I know about the missing books, too,” Reed says, sparing me from having to answer. “And Forsyth thinks Alis does as well. She remembers The Wizard of Oz.”
“Toto,” Alis agrees miserably.
Pip sets her wine glass down on the coffee table, and I see for the first time that her hands are shaking. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.” She swallows hard and buries her face in Alis’s neck for a moment, breathing in her daughter and a sense of calm. When she raises her head again, the protective shutters are gone, and her deep brown eyes are filled only with worry and determination. “But you’re not vanishing?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Pip’s chin starts wobbling, and she sucks in a breath, blinking rapidly. Her lashes turn into wet spikes, but her cheeks remain dry. I can see her swallowing, clenching her teeth, trying to remain impartial, to be academic, to think this out. “So, books are vanishing,” she mumbles, holding her shocked sorrow in. “This Wizard of Oz. Any others?”
“Many,” I say, instead of listing them all.
“And we think the reason why can be found in my books,” Reed says. “Or, at least, it’s coming from in there.”
“But is it dangerous?” Pip asks. “So some books are missing, so what?”
“Alexandria,” I remind Pip gently, and her eyes grow wetter, though she still doesn’t cry. My brave, thoughtful wife.
“And there’s the possibility that my books might be the next to go, even if the issue is coming from inside them,” Reed says, his voice so low it is almost as if he dreads saying it out loud, lest his own creator hears it and mistakes it for a wish. “And if my books go . . .” He trails off, looking first at me, then at Alis with meaning.
“Right,” Pip croaks, cuddling Alis closer. “Of course. So, how would we find out?” Pip asks. “And how do we stop it?”
“There are no Deal-Maker Spirits on this side of the page,” I say. “If there were, I could bargain my return. Then I could track the problem to its source. Perhaps even sic my brother on it.”
“Your visit,” Pip corrects me. “You would be coming back.”
A lump appears in my throat, searing, and I must do some swallowing and teeth-clenching of my own in the face of Pip’s tightly controlled emotional breakdown. “Of course,” I swear, my voice a crackle. “Of course I would, bao bei. I would never . . . I would never . . .”
“Maybe I could write—” Reed begins, but he doesn’t get any further than that because, suddenly, the air shatters.
There is a flash of horrifyingly familiar light, which condenses into a pulsing sphere, dazzlingly white and oblong, hovering in the air. A breeze begins in my living room, and within seconds, it roars into a gale-force wind, as irresistible as the funnel of a tornado, pulling me toward the portal.
“Forsyth!” I hear Pip holler, and above that I hear Alis’s thin, high
scream.
“Wait, Lucy, don’t—” Reed shouts, but the rest of what he says is lost in the howl of the wind, and the dark that steals up over my consciousness.
Deals and Shadows
The Call comes in the middle of the night, while Solinde is searching a disreputable tavern for another mortal foolish enough to Deal with her. Drunk though they are, these rogues and bandits are shrewd, and will promise a woman seeking bargains alone nothing, though she offers them everything.
Solinde had not thought that records of the ritual for which to summon her—specifically her—still existed in mortal libraries. Her late husband claimed to have been in possession of the only scroll that specified which items were required to bring her forth, but as in all other things, he must have been lying. She feels them.
The Sigil is there, and yes, there is a Star-stone that Fell from the Sky, the Scale from the Siren’s Lover, and the Compass that Never Points Home, all speckled with the Blood of He Who Calls. And all on a Hearth that Warms the Shadow.
The Sigil could have been recorded elsewhere, and Star-stones fall from the sky every day. The great Nerved King sheds his scales every time he crawls up the side of a hull; they fleck the waves near a shipwreck like clouds of pollen. But the Compass that Never Points Home, there is only one of those. And the last Solinde saw of it, she had “accidentally” slipped it into the satchel of a sailor who had stopped at her husband’s farmhouse on his way down to the docks. That sailor’s ship was wrecked, last she heard. The Compass that Never Points Home should be at the bottom of the Icedance Sea. So who, now, was using it to summon her?
At first, Solinde resists the Call. She is on a quest, and she won’t be put off it. She will have all the totems, until none remain, until all the stars have gone out and there is nowhere left for her sisters to hide he for whom she searches. But then she intuits that if she allows herself to be summoned, she might possibly be able to work this Deal into something that will speed her search.
Delighted at the thought of befuddling her Summoner, Solinde closes her eyes and is summoned.
When she opens them again, she finds her tableau in perfect arrangement on the warm gray hearthstone of what is obviously some wealthy merchant or well-off lord’s study. Her Sigil has been traced into the ash. The scale is threaded onto an elaborately knotted rope necklace. And, oh, that is a bit clever—there is a compass, but not her compass. It is not the enchanted compass, but a compass all the same, and its needle has been irreparably bent and twisted out of alignment. It will never point home again.
Smart. Cheeky. Definitely a Summoner worth staying for.
And there is a young man with soot on his finger—though it is barely visible against the dark cast of his skin—a small cut on his palm, and a look of surprised horror on his face that is slowly melting into self-congratulatory awe. This could be useful.
Solinde waits for him to peel himself away from where he has stepped back against a wall of books, presumably when she appeared. She turns, putting her back to him, confident in the knowledge that he will not—cannot—harm her. There was only one portion of Deal-Maker Blood loose in this world, and she knows this lad does not have it. He can compel her to do nothing, just as he cannot force her to overtax her power, and he cannot hurt her. So she takes her time investigating the room, looking for any clues that might give her an advantage over her Summoner.
The room itself is warm, and cozy, and filled with the detritus of a scholarly life that has since been abandoned. There is no dust collected upon things, so the lord must have enough staff to clean even a room that has been forgotten. But the ink in its well has gone dry, the parchments on the table are curling and turning brittle, and the decanter from a set on the credenza is missing, though the two remaining glasses are clean; it was obviously taken away to be drunk in a room that sees more traffic. The air is stale, and the nearest window’s sill is adorned with the fine needlework of a spider, drooping under the weight of the accumulated dust, undisturbed. This window has not been opened in many months. Perhaps even years.
When she turns to face the lad again, he is standing straight, head held high, chin at a defiant angle. He is dressed well, but carelessly: his trousers are wrinkled, his fine linen shirt untucked, his waistcoat and neckcloth missing entirely. He wears no House Color that Solinde can see, only black trousers, black boots, and the white shirt. His equally black eyes are narrowed at her.
Solinde, wishing to have him at ease, wishing to have him malleable, dips a deliberately submissive and low curtsy which, incidentally, gives him the perfect opportunity to gaze into the valley of her cleavage. When she straightens, his eyes remain on her chest, and she allows herself a little smirk. Human men. Even the pups barely into their maturity are easy to befuddle.
And a befuddled Summoner means a better Deal for Solinde.
“I am summoned,” Solinde says, in as sweet and formal a tone as she can muster. She wills a blush to bloom on her cheeks.
“Uh,” the lad says, clearly uncertain if there is a ritual way for him to greet her. There is not, of course, but she will not tell him that. He clears his throat, shifts his weight from foot to foot, and scratches the back of his head. “Uh, to be honest, I didn’t actually think this would work.”
Solinde bites down hard on the impatient incredulity that presses against her tongue at his confession. Little fool. Playing with magic he does not understand. But then Solinde allows a joy to rise. This may be easier than she thought.
“It has,” she says. “Do you know what it is you wish to Deal for?”
The lad grunts, and shifts, and scratches again. “I think so,” he says at length. “But ‘m not sure how to say it.”
Solinde gives him an elegant shrug. “Say it however you wish. We Deal-Makers are bound to speak only the truth.” Though, not bound to clarity, she thinks smugly. There are some things the mortals need not know, especially young men who cannot keep their eyes on her own. The lad hesitates still, so Solinde decides the calculated risk is worth it, and adds: “Will you give me your name?” She asks it sweetly, head tilted coquettishly.
The lad—he cannot be more than sixteen, or perhaps a runty seventeen—clears his throat. “Wy—” he begins, and then immediately snaps his mouth shut, eyes narrowing. “No,” he finishes instead.
Solinde shrugs. “Ah, well,” she says, keeping her voice musical. “Tell me, then: what Deal can I make with you today, Master Summoner?”
“I want . . . I want my father back,” the lad says.
“Is he dead?” Solinde asks. She must know into which realm she will have to stretch her powers.
“No, he . . . he’s boring,” the lad complains. “He used to go out on adventures and things, but now he’s stuck being the stupid Lord of the Chipping, and he makes me study with tutors, and I hate it. He used to travel all over the place and fight monsters, and rut with wenches, and now all he does is ride some silly gelding around the Chipping and talk to farmers about the harvest. He invites the sheriff over for tea, and it is so boring. I hate it.”
Solinde knows better than to try to talk her quarry out of his foolish wish, but her own loss stings her quickly, unexpectedly, and before she can hold back her tongue, she says: “But surely it is better to have your father here, now, than gone from your life?”
“I want to go out with him,” the lad whines. “Mother said that when I was man, I would have to leave her ship, that I would go to land and live with my father, and that I would get to go on his adventures. I grew up on the stories! It’s all I wanted! But now I get here, and he’s a boring old fart. All he does is hold parties and write letters, and he doesn’t even wench around anymore. He just makes stupid gross eyes at his stupid old trothed. He tries to get me to call the twat my uncle, and I hate it.”
Solinde takes a moment to try to unravel the request behind the complaints. “So, you wish for your father to once more take up a life of roaming and adventure, and for you to be his squire?”
; “Yes! That!” the lad says, pointing at her, imperious. “Do that!”
Solinde could manipulate the father’s heart, that was easily enough done. She could plant a seed of desire to abandon his duties as a Chipping lord and return to this vagabond, migrant life the lad described. But if the man’s lover is persistent, and his sense of duty too great, it might not be as permanent as the lad clearly desires. And she must provide what he desires. She must.
Solinde needs to ensure that the lad is grateful to her, is convinced that she has done her utmost for him, so that he can then be manipulated into giving up a great boon in return. And she has just the very great boon she wants from him in mind.
“And if your father abandons the seat of his Chipping,” Solinde says softly, being certain to sound as if she is merely thinking out loud. “Who is next in line to inherit it? You, I should think. That would thwart your plans to go adventuring.”
“I don’t care!” the lad says, folding his arms and curving his shoulders miserably. “I’ll run away with him anyway!”
“I’m not suggesting you will not,” Solinde says. “But to prevent your father’s trothed from retrieving you both, or the monarch from ordering him back, perhaps you ought to wish instead for someone to replace your father, rather than for your father to abandon his post?”
The lad looks up at her through his thick black eyelashes. There are spots on his forehead, and Solinde thinks that he could do with attending to his own hygiene a little more stringently; he is obviously of an age where wenches and the attendant activities that come with them are on his mind. He will have to pay a pretty coin for one to lay with him when he reeks of unwashed socks.
The lad’s black eyes dart over her face, clearly searching for any sort of trickery, trying to decipher if he is being led into a trap.
He is, of course, but it has nothing to do with Solinde’s suggestion that he summon a replacement.
“Who oversaw the Chipping while your father traveled?” she presses him.