by J. M. Frey
“My uncle. My real uncle, that is.”
“And where is your uncle now?”
The lad makes a face. “He went to another kingdom and married a scholar’s daughter. At least, that’s what my father says.”
“And if he is brought back here, will he take up the mantel of lordling, do you think?”
The lad considers. “Father says that he was very duty-bound. He probably would.”
“Well then,” Solinde says gently. “That is easily done. I shall summon this uncle, your father’s brother, for you.”
“Might as well bring his wife, too,” the lad mutters. “Or he’ll probably just go away again to look for her. They’re in love, Father says.”
“And you feel love is abhorrent?”
The lad shrugs with a studied nonchalance. His face is easy to read, however, and the pain that swims across it tells a clear tale. He has loved in the past, deeply, and it has hurt him. Solinde recalls that he said his mother had abandoned him to the care of his father, and wonders how any mother could do such a horrid thing.
She has not been asked to do it, but if she ever learns this mother’s name, she might choose to seek the woman out and concoct a Deal that will see her shredded, just as she has shredded her son’s affection.
“I will do this,” Solinde says. “But now, we must agree to our terms.”
The lad looks up, straightens again, and frowns. “Well, what do you want?”
Solinde laughs, her flirtatious tinkly-bell laugh, and the lad blinks, momentarily dazed. Good. “My dear sweeting, I cannot demand. The rules say you must offer something of equal value. I may only say yes, or no.”
“Equal value?” the lad muses.
“I am bringing two people into this house. That is no small feat of magic,” Solinde whispers.
“Two lives . . .” the lad says. “Oh, got it! Will you take away my father’s trothed?” His eyes glimmer with a sudden blood thirst, and the corner of his lip curls. “Could you kill him?”
“I cannot kill for a Deal,” Solinde says with complete honesty. If Deal-Maker Spirits could kill as a component of a Deal, she would have been free of her mortal husband decades ago, and he whom she seeks would never have been sent away to begin with. Worse still, her husband had made it part of her bound condition to safeguard his life. She’d been forced to nurse him when he’d gouged his leg with a scythe and the wound had turned putrid. Oh, how she wished to break the laws of the Deal-Makers then.
“Bugger,” the lad swears. “Then, um . . . two lives, huh . . .” He scratches his head again. “I don’t really . . . um, is there someone you want?”
Solinde feels a thrill tremble up her spine. “Yes,” she says, her voice rumbling full of honesty and desire.
“And . . . um, are they within my power to give to you?” the lad asks, his own excitement making him eager to please.
“You have the power to send me where he is, yes.”
The lad thrusts out his hand. “Then that’s my deal. You bring my uncle and his wife here, and I’ll wish for you to go to him? Is that fair? Two for one, I mean?”
“If you will do me this, I will call it fair,” Solinde says, raising her hand for the shake.
“But it isn’t, really,” the lad says, recoiling. “Hold on, will that backfire on me?”
Solinde grits her teeth and tries to maintain her smile. She wishes to give him no answer, but the lad presses. “Will it?”
Between clenched teeth, she says, “I promise that he will bring no harm upon you.”
The lad’s eyes widen. “But, wait, he might harm others?”
“No one you care for, I swear to it. Now—take my hand!”
The lad clearly wants his life of adventure with his father badly enough that he is willing to trust her. Fool. He reaches out and, before he can change his mind any further, Solinde snatches his hand. Their flesh tingles and sparks where it touches, the heat of the Deal-Magic pouring down her spine like warm honey.
“Oh, yes!” she cries, the pleasure of the magic running in orgasmic rivers under her skin. Around her, the previously stale air begins to churn. The parchment on the desk flutters to the floor, though the breeze is not strong enough to wipe out her Sigil in the hearth ash. “I reach out and summon to you the brother of your father and his wife!”
Solinde closes her eyes, watches behind the lids as the tendrils of Deal-Magic begin to churn and writhe, reaching out, across Hain, across Urland and Brystal and Gadot, out over the seas, out into the skies and . . . touches nothing. Nothing!
“Another kingdom!” Solinde spits, eyes snapping open. “You little liar! They are in another realm. They are beyond the veil of the skies!”
“They are?” the lad cries, and tries to tug his hand away. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know! Let me go!”
“Though it will weaken me near unto death, I will do it!” Solinde shouts over his pleas. “For he whom I want resides in another realm as well. It will be equal. All you must do is say his name.”
“I will!” the lad says. “I will. Just let me go! It burns!”
“Say that you gift to me Varnet, son of Edvane, first high priest of Kingskeep!”
“I gift to you Varn—hey, no! Wait a minute!” the lad yelps. “I know who that is!”
“Say it!”
“No!” the boy says. “No, I won’t!”
“Say it!” Solinde screeches, squeezing his hand so hard that the lad’s knees go out from under him, and he is dangling from her grasp. “We have a Deal! Bring him to me!”
“No!”
“Then you forfeit!” Solinde shrieks. “You are a liar, and I will take my prize!”
“What?” the lad sobs. “No, no, let me go!”
“You have shaken hands with a Deal-Maker, boy!” Solinde bows low over him, pinching either side of his mouth in a taloned grip. “I will keep my side of the Deal, as I am bound to do, but you have perjured yourself to me.”
“I didn’t know!”
“And in recompense for your lies, in exchange for the promise you will not keep, I shall have your tongue. You will tell no more falsehoods. And I shall consume every Word you know. I shall possess your magic!”
The lad struggles and squirms, but he is only mortal. Solinde’s kiss is harsh, and bloody, and deep. She scrapes the flesh from his tongue with her teeth, and scrapes with it every word and Word he kept there. She swallows his blood, his voice, his speech, his lies.
As the wind around them begins to calm, a pounding comes from the other side of the door.
“Wyndam!” a voice bellows on the other side. “Unlock this door! What is all that ruckus? Wyndam!”
Solinde’s lips spread into a bloody smile. “You shall have what you wanted, Wyndam, but know that you will never be favored above your father’s trothed now. Not incomplete. Not as a mute.”
Then she tosses the lad away from her. He falls back against the hearth, and even as he reaches up to verify that he still has his tongue, his other arm sprawls back into the ash, severing Solinde’s Sigil.
What happens next does so nearly simultaneously.
Deep behind her breastbone, Solinde feels the Call rupture.
The lad scrambles to his feet and pockets the broken compass, every line of his body filled with terror. He reaches around, knocks a book out of its place, and then pulls on a hidden ring on the wall that was behind it. A door opens, and the lad slips through like an eel.
Behind her, a man whom Solinde assumes is Wyndam’s father smashes open the main door.
Solinde, quickly losing solidity, turns. She has only enough time to see his gray-streaked queue of blond hair, the straight white teeth, the cleft jaw and powerful build. She has only enough time to realize that she has been summoned by the son of the one mortal she would happily, happily, for the sake of her family, break the rules of the Deal-Maker Spirits and murder.
“No!” she screeches, infuriated, as the lad’s accidental dismissal turns her to mist, sends her hur
tling out of the room, back to far-away Gadot and away from Kintyre Turn.
In a heartbeat, she is across the world from the wretch.
Fury fills Solinde, and in turn, the skies above the hundred isles and canals above the water-surrounded Ertse scream. Solinde walks on waterspouts across the Skipping Lakes. It is a reckless waste of the last of her strength, but she is too angry to care. She is fatigued, drained, half-dead. Her power is stretched thin, as dry as dust from the sheer magnitude of the task, from pulling two adult humans through the realms of the skies and into Hain. She thinks that were she not sent back to an island nation when the Call was broken, she might have perished immediately. As it is, Luck decided to roll up a decent score on her dice, instead.
She drinks in the seawater around her, gluts herself on the replenishing power of it, punishing all around her for her lost opportunity to snuff out Kintyre Turn forever.
The blood on her tongue tells the tale of the lad’s upbringing. He had all the kinds of Words the son of a sailor ought—Words of Navigation, Words of Finding, Words of Direction. Words to keep vermin out of supplies, and Words to keep a blade sharp. Words of Persuasion, and Words of Cunning. Words enough for the son of that despicable, hateful man who dared call himself hero.
Words that belong to Solinde now; Words that will not melt away after their use, for she named them as her forfeit. And to steal the magic of another creature, to wield that which her kind was not born to wield, is more than recompense enough for two worthless, short-lived humans.
She uses the Words that are hers now. In Ertse, she finds the totem in the errant shadow that will not stay attached to its mortal, and blows it out like a candle.
It is daylight when she does so. When night comes and the survivors of Ertse regard the sky from their rafts of splintered timbers, whole constellations have been snuffed out of existence.
Five
The first thing that returns to me is the unbearable sensation of vertigo and nausea. Voluntarily stepping from my world into Pip’s was significantly less hard on my stomach and head than being yanked into this one, whichever and wherever it is. I hope, as I lay on the ground, praying that the swirling and heaving of the land will quickly settle. That I have come alone.
Beside me, Alis’s sharp, startled whimper dashes all hopes of my being solitary. “Daaaa!” she screams once she has her breath back, hiccupping when she’s used it all up, sucking desperately to refill her lungs around her shock. I curl onto my side, and my daughter, sprawled out on the ground and stiff with terror, shrieks.
I grope out, missing her little hand on the first go because of the heaving, but get my fingers around her wrist on the second. With my arm as a tether, she crawls up onto my chest and buries into my neck within seconds. “Daaaa—” she wails, and I weave my fingers into her hair, my breath soft on her ear as I make soothing noises, low and gentle. She gulps and gasps, and there is no misery, none at all, so sharp as that of your child being unable to breathe.
“Da’s here,” I whisper against her downy, auburn-black curls, rubbing her back. “Deep breaths, now. You’re well, my sweeting. You’re well.”
“Dah-Daaaa . . .” she moans, and then goes limp against my chest, miserable and exhausted from her tantrum.
“Forsyth?” comes another groan, and Pip finds the bundle of our bodies before I can turn my head to seek her out. She collapses against my other shoulder, and I feel crushed to the floor by the blanket of my family. It is a welcome and grounding weight, for it means that while I do not know where we are, I do know that we are together, and whole.
“And Reed?” I ask, unable to lift my head to check. The edges of my vision are still dim and blurry. I clench my eyes shut again.
Pip shakes her own head against my chest. Well, that is a blessing at least. The last person I want here is that be-damned Writer of ours. Only the heavens know what he would do if he were to visit his own world—and only the heavens know what this world might do to him in return.
I would wager a large sum on the possibility that there would be more people like the Viceroy, who, upon learning of Reed’s identity, would blame him for all their misfortunes and sorrows. And, in the most esoteric sense, they would not be incorrect. For all that we have a tentative ceasefire, my creator and I, I have no desire to spend the entirety of our time here—however long that may be (oh, Writer, are we stuck here now, forever? Is there any going back at all?)—protecting that fat, self-important lout from the products of his own shallow, misogynistic imagination.
And Pip would make me protect him, despite their enmity.
If, of course, it is into his world that we even have been pulled. With books vanishing as they have been, it is entirely possible that we have been catapulted into another realm entirely. Perhaps my realm has vanished, which is why we are here. Perhaps Pip’s realm is the one that dissolved, and we were shunted sideways into another.
When my dizziness has passed enough for me to open my eyes without the fear of vomiting, I do so.
“Oh,” I say, focusing on the rich, wooden ceiling above me—and the concerned face that sticks itself into my eyeline. “Well then. No need to fear. I know exactly where we are.”
“I should hope so, brother,” Kintyre says from above me. He then reaches down a hand to help me up off the rug in my old study.
Attaining an upright position is more of a challenge than I care to admit. Kintyre levers me upward, and I lean back against the desk, cradling Alis against my hip. Bevel, who came into the room just as I was standing, helps Pip. He pats her arm gently and says, “Well come, Lucy Piper. Or is it Turn, now?”
Pip grimaces. “Hereabouts? Better make it Turn.”
Kintyre thuds one big, meaty palm square against my back, jolting me a little, and laughs at my sideways glare. “Congratulations are in order then, little brother!”
“Thank you,” I say, deciding that if his roughhousing hasn’t decreased, at least his manners have improved in the two years I have been absent.
“And who is this wee lass?” Bevel asks, peering at Alis, looking both enchanted and besotted. Bevel always did adore children. He longs, I think, for at least one of his own. The object of his study promptly reaches out and grabs his nose; my daughter has never been shy of strangers. Bevel laughs and detaches her gently, then places kisses in each of her palms.
Alis grunts, startled, and then holds her hands up to me as if to show me what Bevel has done, and to ask why.
“Kisses, sweeting,” I say, “From your Uncle Bevel.”
“‘Isses, Da,” Alis says gravely.
Bevel straightens, and his cheeks take on a pleased flush at the honorific. “Oh, well then. Aye, thank you.”
“My niece?” Kintyre asks, a little stupidly, I think, for what other babe in arms would I have brought to Lysse? And then pointedly told that his Paired is her uncle?
“Alis Mei Piper Turn,” Pip says.
“Alis,” Kintyre echoes, and swallows hard. He blinks a few times, and then reaches out, slowly, gently, to run the back of his knuckles over Alis’s cheek. “Mother would have been very pleased.”
“Aye,” I say. “That she would.”
“‘Isses!” Alis demands imperiously, holding out her hands to her other uncle, and Kintyre obliges with a roguish smile and a courtly bow.
As Kintyre and Bevel fuss over my daughter, I take a quick moment to take in the room. It looks virtually untouched, except for the smashed handle on the door and the way one of the panels is hanging askew in its jamb. On the hearth is a pile of ash and soot—most probably knocked onto the stone by an errant animal attempting to climb down the chimney—and the decanter of Drebbinshire Whiskey I’d kept on the credenza has vanished.
Otherwise, my study is still my study, untouched and unused by my brother. And so it is that there, at that moment, in my study - while still uncertain on my feet, my wife plastered to my side, her own head undoubtedly swimming - that I am introduced to the other new member of House Turn.<
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The soft click of a boot-step on the wooden floor beyond the study doors attracts my attention, and I look up from where Bevel is making ridiculous hedgehoggy faces at Alis. A young lad’s head pokes around the door, and for a moment, I think perhaps he might be a new scullery boy my brother has hired, for there is a smudge on his cheek, as if he has been blacking the kitchen stove. But when he straightens and stands fully in the doorway, I can see that his clothing is of too fine a make for him to be hired help. He is doing up a hastily donned jacquard waistcoat of Turn-russet, his shirt tails are untucked, and his neckcloth still hangs limp across his shoulders. Lazy. Beneath his shirt is a braided-hemp necklace, from which dangles a large scale that must have come from a kraken, or a big mer-drake.
“Wyndam!” Kintyre says, following my eyeline to the door. “I thought you were in the study.”
The lad shakes his head, sullen, and comes in when Kintyre waves him forward. He fiddles a bit with his neckcloth, but never makes an actual attempt to tie it. There is a spot of blood on his palm, and more soot on his fingertips, and I wonder if he’s been sitting against a hearth, playing in the ashes as if they were finger paints, the way Kintyre used to do. The lad seems too old for that sort of childish distraction, however.
I would have chastised him for his slovenly appearance before guests were I lordling, but I see that neither Kintyre nor Bevel are wearing their own neckcloths. Instead, both wear well-tailored day trousers, house slippers, and shirts. Neither have waistcoats. Bevel wears a short house-robe of Dom-amethy, dewy and bright, unlike the dusty, ratty travel short-robe he used to wear, with Turn-russet embroidery along the hems that puts me in mind of autumn leaves. And my brother is wearing a Turn-russet slashed doublet, left open, like the ridiculously out of fashion and romantic hero he clearly still sees himself as embodying.
I feel instantly underdressed in my own chinos and purple-gingham cotton button-down. Pip is attired for school, at least, though her pencil skirt is perilously form-fitting and short, according to Hainish fashion. Of the six of us, only Alis is properly dressed, wearing a flouncy dress that covers her toes.