The Forgotten Tale

by J. M. Frey

  She is getting to be of the age where she prefers to transfer food into her mouth on her own, so instead of simply opening her lips, she takes the carrot from my hand, and then shoves it in her mouth.

  Our little group is silent as we polish off Cook’s offering, save for Alis, who seems to be narrating her adventure in pie-eating to Library. I had not thought the little plushie had come along for the ride, but Pip had pulled it from her pocket as soon as Alis had started to fuss.

  Tea and pie consumed, Wyndam makes to slink off, but Kintyre puts a hand on his shoulder and holds him in place.

  “We are about to have a very serious conversation, Wyndam, and you’re old enough to hear this, I think,” Kintyre says. He raises his eyes to Bevel, who nods. Wyndam looks eager and pleased, and sits up, attentive. “Except, I’m not sure where to start.”

  “Well,” Bevel says, shifting. “Uh. Well. You know about the Writer, and Readers, of course, Wyn.”

  The lad nods, confusion curling over his brows. He doesn’t see where this is leading, but I do. Pip and I also nod at each other, agreeing that we don’t mind if Wyndam knows the truth of our realm’s existence, so long as it won’t be disturbing to him. Wyndam is seventeen, Bevel said. And he was considered mature enough to be ejected from The Salty Queen. Kintyre seems to have taken that as a token that he can be present for what is going to be, most probably, a very long, very detailed, and potentially disturbing discussion.

  “Your Aunt Lucy here is . . .” Bevel swallows hard and seems to struggle with the truth of it for a moment. He has had two years to come to terms with the idea that our genesis myths are all true. But he does not know that Kintyre is the main character of the novels, for Pip and I felt that no one needed to have that knowledge. Nor, we decided, was it fair to tell anyone and risk them feeling secondary or lesser.

  Pitying Bevel, I decide to take the burden of revelation from him and say: “She is a Reader.”

  Wyndam’s eyes and mouth drop wide, and he snaps his head around to stare in wonder at my wife.

  “I know we said that your Uncle Forsyth had gone far away to marry a scholar’s daughter,” Kintyre says. “And that is, more or less, true. Just, the far away he went to was into the Writer’s realm, beyond the veil of the skies.”

  Wyndam’s look of awe-filled incredulity falls on me. It is . . . discomfiting. The lad looks as if he wishes to ask a question, but again changes his mind at the last moment, snapping his mouth closed. I wonder if I will ever hear my nephew’s voice. He looks to Bevel, clearly eager for Bevel to continue.

  “Well, now they’re back, because . . .” Bevel says, lamely, returning to storyteller mode. He stops and clears his throat, because he doesn’t actually know the reason. “I . . . I don’t know why.”

  Wyndam’s posture sinks, and he hides his face behind his hair again, so that I cannot parse the sudden mercurial shift in his expression. Is he disappointed?

  “At first, I thought it was due to bad luck,” I say, stepping in to take up our side of the story. “I turned away a guest on the Night of Light.”

  “It’s bad luck?” Pip asks, perking up. “You could have said. I didn’t want him there either, but—”

  “No,” I say, forestalling her. “No, it was the correct thing to do at the time. But part of the reason I invited him over today . . . yesterday? Today. It was . . . an attempt to rectify that. As well as the . . . erm, other reasons.”

  I don’t particularly want to have the argument about abandoning my wife and child again, especially not in front of my brother and his own small family.

  “But then, there are the books,” Pip says, and it is with a sort of forgiveness, an apology for not having believed me before, and an honest willingness to do so now.

  “Books?” Bevel asks. He taps his pipe against the tabletop thoughtfully, clearly longing for his tobacco now that tea is finished.

  Pip nods. “Stories are disappearing from my world, but apparently, Forsyth, Alis, and . . . uh . . . your Writer remember.”

  “You converse with the Writer?” Kintyre asks, agog.

  “Unfortunately,” is my rebuttal, and I cannot hold back a grimace. “He is too much like our father for my liking.”

  Kintyre makes a face, like he has eaten something foul, and it is so childish and ridiculous that I cannot help but chuckle. Wyndam looks intrigued, but I shake my head at him, guessing what he is thinking.

  “Algar Turn was neither a man to emulate, nor one to grant infamy,” I tell the lad. “He will get exactly what he deserves if we simply do not speak of the drunken, bitter, mean old bastard at all.”

  Wyndam’s hope melts into mulishness, but he does as I request and does not ask. For all that he is sullen and stubborn, he seems to be the sort reared to follow orders. Again, I am reminded that he grew up on the greatest pirate ship in Isobin’s water-borne kingdom—as a Prince of Pirates most likely. He will be used to following orders.

  I wonder how much different his life has become, and if my brother has had any care to help him adjust. The fall from prince to backwater country lord’s son is, I assume, a steep one.

  “Back to the books,” Pip says. “I feel like this all has to connect.”

  “I agree,” I say. “I would like to do an inventory of my study’s contents, to see if there are things there that have disappeared.”

  “I should help,” Pip says. “You told me about tons of books when I was here. You read to me from most of the ones you have. If I don’t remember missing books in my realm, you might not remember missing books in yours. But I might.”

  “An unsettling thought,” I say, “but a good idea. Very well.” We both stand.

  “If you want your hands free, you better give me the babe,” Bevel says, standing and putting out his arms for Alis. I hesitate. Only Martin, Mei Fan, and wai po have ever minded my child when neither Pip nor I were available. “Come on,” Bevel wheedles. “Give me my niece. I have three of them already. And ten nephews, to boot. I know what I’m doing.”

  I hand Alis over, and she seems to be fine with the transfer. She pets Bevel’s dishwater-blond hair, seeming to be entranced by the gray strands that catch in the sunlight. Well, that is a relief. It is good to know that there will be at least one other adult to help with Alis in this realm. I suppose I am meant to trust Kintyre with her, as well, but I am also aware that he’s never had to watch a baby before. Wyndam was never in his charge when he was young, and I know that Kintyre rarely stayed in Bynnbakker with Bevel when the latter went home for family visits.

  “But what have the books to do with anything?” Kintyre asks, standing as well. Wyndam stays in his seat, eyeing the remaining rabbit pie with clear plans. Ah, to be young and a bottomless pit again.

  “I do not know,” I confess. “But it is both too great a coincidence to really be one, and a place to start.”

  “Forsyth, I don’t know if you saw, but the light when you arrived, it looked like—” He cuts himself off with a glance toward Wyndam, clearly deciding not to finish his sentence. I nod, understanding that he is referring to the Deal-Maker Spirit, Neris, who called Pip down into this realm, and sent the two of us to hers.

  “I have no answer for that,” I confess. “But I hope to have it soon.”

  “Of course, the real question is, why?” Pip says. “However it was that we got here, we’re here now. The important part is what for?”

  Thimbles and Buttons

  The milkmaid that Solinde targets next is lush. She tastes of cream and strawberries, and smells of cow dung and straw. She is passive in a way that Solinde has missed, while wedded to a man. The maid lays back and spreads sweet, and says thank you in a trembling voice even as Solinde pulls the knowledge of the place where she has stored the totem from each kiss.

  Solinde leaves the milkmaid flushed, skirts rucked up, likely to be found in the hayloft by her master in such a state, and dismissed. Solinde travels west to Nevand, skirting the great citadel of Crownsnest, capital of Gadot
, and its silver and crystal palace. The town is exactly halfway between the Stoat Forest and the green belt of farmland that surrounds the kingdom’s shining capital. Nevand has grown at the same rate as the palace, though in comfort and entertainment rather than grandeur. The town is always full of festivals and special markets, filled with play and an immortal youthfulness, entertainments and theatres on every street corner.

  Nevand is a city of service—inns and taverns, blacksmiths and wagon repair shops, makers of traveling supplies, road-provisions, and fine clothing all lining the major thoroughfare. The broad way behind it is equally lined with every sort of entertainment establishment that the wholesome or the unwholesome could seek while resting from the road. Nevand is the last stop before the city, and their prices remain just low enough—and their entertainments just sensational enough—to entice caravans to tarry a few nights.

  Solinde finds the next totem in a tailor’s shop. She picks the thimble out of the old man’s pocket, distracting him with a kiss she leaves forever curled, forever unobtainable in the left corner of his mouth.

  She takes great delight that night in calling the sky flame into her hand, melting the thimble into a puddle of steel in her palm, letting it simmer and burn until all the liquid has evaporated, and all that is left is a fine powder of fairy-dust ash.

  Six

  Soft and sweet, my wife opens her eyes and meets mine. Her gaze is still hazy with sleep, and it takes several blinks for her to focus. When she does, her lips curl up in the corners and she croaks a sleep-dry “good morning.” I answer in kind, craning my neck to press a small kiss against the tip of her nose. It has been too long since we have had a slow awakening together. The last few days have been full of arguments and tensions that neither of us enjoyed.

  But to be here, now, in my mother’s old rooms in Turn Hall, in the place where we first spoke, the place I fell first in lust and then in love with my wife, makes all our strife seem easily managed.

  Together, we look down the length of the bed to the cradle pressed up against its foot. Alis is still asleep, sprawled on her back with her arms and legs akimbo. She sleeps the sleep of those with no worries, and the complete reassurance that she is utterly loved by everyone around her.

  I do not remember the cradle, of course, but Kintyre, seven years my elder, recalled that Father had had it returned to the attic for storage. Father had assumed that Mother would be hale enough to bear him a girl child he could use in a fortuitous marriage bargain, or a third son he could send into the military or priesthood. But instead, his branch of the family tree had withered after only producing the heir and the spare. The healers had said that Mother was not healthy enough for a third child, and shortly after my birth, she had begun a slow decline that ended when she perished of a fever that should have been beatable when I was four. No other woman would have my father after that, miserable old tyrant that he was.

  The cradle itself is old, older perhaps than the current incarnation of Turn Hall, which had been built by my great-grandfather, Generonius Turn, to replace the crumbling chalk-stone structure built generations before him. The cradle is solid, the wooden rails smoothed by hundreds of babes’ fat fingers as they gripped them and wailed for their mothers, the edges worn into shining waves of hand-grooves by the fathers before me who had leaned over and braced themselves to either lift or set down their children. The headboard bears the carved emblem of House Turn—a key lancing a lock—and the simple wooden apparatus that allows the cradle to swing gently on its stand still works.

  A content lethargy, sweet, and golden, and sticky as honey steals over me. Pip and I had stayed up quite late the night before, making an inventory of my library. There were no books missing that I could recall, save for my illustrated copy of The Siren of the Sunsong Sea, which was found easily enough in Wyndam’s chambers. Pip and I had assumed that Alis would be asleep in our bed when we finally retired to our room—Kintyre had ordered my mother’s rooms reopened and cleaned upon our arrival, much as I had done when Pip first came to Turn Hall. We also expected that Bevel might be reading—or sifting through the never-ending pile of reports that plague the Shadow’s Hand—by the fire.

  Instead, we found the cradle here, made up for our daughter, and Bevel asleep at the foot of the bed, one arm stuck between the wooden rails. Clearly, he had been trying to soothe Alis, but in the end, she had outlasted him. He was dead to the world, and Alis was using his fingers as a teething toy. She already had three and was obviously intent upon the advent of a fourth tooth, if the amount of drool drying on Bevel’s hand was any indication.

  “Da ma da ma madadaa!” she had said when we crept into the room, kicking her feet in an overjoyed dance. “‘Ook! ‘Ook!”

  Bevel had startled awake then, leaving his hand in Alis’s possession but rising up and laying his free one on the dagger I knew he kept secreted at the small of his back. When he blinked a few more times and woke enough to realize who we were, he let go of the dagger and my daughter both, and sat up. There was, indeed, a book of children’s rhymes squashed into the mattress where Bevel had been lying.

  Pip had laughed, and reached out to help Bevel flatten his ferocious bed head. It was very different from the last time they had been in this room together, when he had thrown me up against the wall by the door and tried to throttle me. A warmth settled behind my breastbone and for a moment, I felt that this, right here, was what it meant to be part of a family.

  I had learned the previous evening that the valet’s antechamber attached to the lord’s bedroom had been converted into the office in which the affairs of Lysse were now conducted, and that my former valet, Keriens, now slept in his own bedroom in the servant’s quarters. Traditionally, the lord’s spouse would have taken my mother’s room, which was accessible from the lord’s through a door hidden behind a tapestry, but the door had not been used in so long that the lock had rusted shut.

  Moreover, Bevel thought it ridiculous to have a whole other set of rooms to himself, when there was plenty of room to store his clothing in the wide wardrobes in the lord’s room, enough room on the chaise before the fire for two, and a bed more than large enough for two grown men. Especially when Bevel planned to sleep every night by my brother’s side, anyway - when I had called them Paired, Kintyre had primly corrected me. They were not merely Paired anymore, they were Trothed now. Bevel Dom was his husband, or at least the closest thing to a husband that Elgar Reed’s myopic worldbuilding allowed for.

  Bevel had slept beside Kintyre every night on the road. Now that they were a trothed Pair, he had no intention of noble propriety or upper-class customs keeping him a door’s width away. Lying now amid Sheil-purple blankets with my wife, our daughter nearby, I can hardly blame him. Family should be kept close.

  Loath as I am to admit it, my creator was right—no matter how angry and abusive my father was, I had no real danger of following in his footsteps. My temper has been frayed recently, but I would rather throw myself upon Smoke than harm any of the people under this roof.

  Pip inches across the valley of the pillow between us and, morning-stale breath taken into consideration, presses a closed-mouth kiss against my lips. “Hi, you,” she says.

  “Hi back,” I reply.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Everything is marvelous. You know,” I murmur conversationally in my wife’s ear, “we never did have sex in this bed. We became intimate on the road.”

  “Oh?” Pip replies, eyes half-lidded with aroused interest. “That sounds like you take the oversight personally.”

  “You know, I think I do,” I whisper against her mouth. Then I reach out and tickle my wife right above her hip, the spot that I know will make her giggle and squirm.

  “Forsyth!” she protests in a hiss.

  “Shhh!” I admonish through my own quiet chuckles. “Don’t wake the baby.”

  We tussle and kiss, until I have Pip right where I want her— stripped bare and on her stomach. I spend a few long, wond
erful moments kissing my way down the tendrils and branches of ivy that Bootknife carved into her skin, wounds I had helped Mother Mouth to tend right here, in this room. A horrible torture, to be sure, but beautiful in the art of them, and proof of Pip’s resilience, her strength, and her morals. They are what brought her to me, and I cannot hate the scars.

  With one last glance back at Alis to make certain she still sleeps, Pip rolls over. I settle between Pip’s parted thighs, pull the blanket over my head, and set about my morning’s task. Pip’s moans and jerking gasps are muffled in such a way that I know she has her face buried in her own pillow, biting it to stay silent. Her climax is swift in building and comes upon her like an earthquake.

  For all that I had been untested in the ways of love when we first lay together, the following two years have been filled with enough instruction that I am now confident in my skills. When Pip’s breathing settles, she takes her revenge by crawling under the covers and setting her mouth upon me. I last no longer than she did, and when she rises from the bed to ring the bell for a servant, she is licking her lips with all the smug satisfaction of a satyr who caught a dryad.

  We are both up and properly clad in house robes before the servant arrives, trailed by Keriens. My former valet is carrying a breakfast tray, which he places on the credenza. The youth has grown into a wide-shouldered, handsome young man, and I am very pleased to see him.

  “Well now, sir,” he says with a smirk, and I am also pleased to note that his cheeky sense of humor has not fled in the wake of a change of masters. “You are a sight for sore eyes.” He makes a bow and I insist, instead, that we shake hands. “And begging your pardon, Madam Turn,” he says, bowing to Pip, who has a puffy-eyed Alis struggling toward wakefulness on her hip, “but those of us downstairs would like to welcome you to Turn Hall properly, and thank you for the privilege of callin’ you our mistress, besides.”