by J. M. Frey
And yet. And yet.
The fire of the stars still burn, though they are few in number, and her son is still not returned to her. But soon . . . soon. There is, she feels, but one totem left. And it is nearby.
She leaves Swordshearth and the sea at a crawl. It takes her the remainder of the day to reach the Eyrie by cloud. But there, she seeks a totem unlike any other. It requires a spell that pulls at the very core of her being to find, as it is veiled beneath a layer of enchantment so strong that it feels like trying to claw through granite.
Already wearied from her failure at the Lost Library, it takes the full length of the night to unpick the magic woven over the totem. As the hours pass and the last constellation wheels overhead, Solinde finds herself slumped against the stone desk, her feet skidding in the grooves in the stone floor worn by the thousands upon thousands of pilgrims who have come to worship at the altar of the Great Writer.
When the sun rises, Solinde’s head pinches, her fingers are numb and stiff, and her body is a riot of aches she hasn’t had to suffer since her mortal life ended. The indignity of it enrages her, though she hasn’t the energy to do more than crackle and rumble about it. She sleeps on the granite and gravel floor, head pillowed on her hair, and calls down the rain to wash away the dust that cakes her lips from her hard work.
When she wakes, the totem has fully materialized. With the enchantment in place, one could have stood right at the Desk that Never Rots and never see the totem, never smell it, never touch it. But now, it is here. It is a jumbled, mechanical, clacking beast of a thing. The device embosses glyphs of power onto paper, vellum, skin, anything upon which its tiny hammers strike their blows. But these are a Creator’s runes, and Solinde cannot read them.
She feels her eyes become slits, her pupils elongate, and her tongue flicks between her teeth, black and long, licking her chops. It matters not that she cannot read the runes. She doesn’t need to understand this totem to destroy it.
She laughs, delighted that her quest is nearly at its end. And then she feels disgusted and guilty. How could she laugh when her son is not free, when it is possible that he is rotting away in the ground? How could she have done that? She holds on to her sobs until she has stumbled over to lean against the cavern wall. Then, with the stone supporting her, she sobs like she hasn’t done in months, until she is gagging and heaving.
She has no time for this weakness, this motherliness, and yet she must wait for the sensation to pass. She must purge herself of it.
When she has done that, she stands, and calls down fire.
The totem is resistant. It fights. It will not melt, or crack apart, no matter how many times she strikes it with lightning. But she will not lose to an inanimate hunk of metal. Raising her arms, head thrown back, power hooking into the deepest anchor of her magic, Solinde calls down a storm the likes of which this part of the world has never seen.
Fourteen
There is a thunder storm over the Cinch Mountains, right around where the Eyrie coves begin. Possibly even directly above the Rookery. It is so large that I can see it all the way from Gwillfifeshire, perched above the wheat plains as I am in the second story bedroom above the Pern.
Below me, Lanaea’s wake continues, music and laughter ringing long into the night. The relief that her ghost will stay on, that she is not lost before her father can come down from Sherwilde and bid her goodbye, is palatable and heady. Whether she’ll remain after that is unknown. Mandikin stays for the love of the children. Lanaea’s passions and unfinished business might not be so strong, so ever-existing. There will always be children in Gwillfifeshire. Lanaea’s business may last a shorter amount of time.
There are no ghosts in Turnshire, as far as I am aware, and I wonder idly, watching the storm from the window seat, if that is because I was a good lordling who made his people happy. Or if it was merely a convenient plot hole for Reed to exploit.
Behind me, Pip and Alis both sleep soundly. The storm seems to have woken only me. I cannot hear it from this distance, of course, but the lightning is bright enough, and I am wary enough, that it pulled me away from the brink of slumber. That the storm is so concentrated, that it is so large and yet does not drift or ebb, makes it clear that it is not of natural make, and I do not have to wonder if it is the work of our weather witch, the nameless Deal-Maker who has stolen Wyndam’s voice.
Thus it is that I am awake and watching the skies when the very last constellation flares, each star burning bright as a sun for a split second, and then bursting like a firework, trailing fairy dust down the solemn black velvet of the sky before fading into nothingness. My stomach lurches, and my whole body goes numb with horror. The hair on the back of my neck pricks up, and a shudder races underneath my skin.
On the other side of the windowpane, darkness—true and complete darkness—falls.
I stay up watching the storm die out, straining my gaze toward the east, back toward Turnshire, hoping, hoping for the first hints of dawn. After many silent, tense hours, my exhausting, strained vigil is rewarded. The sun rises.
I will admit that I had genuinely feared it would not. What is one more star to snuff out, after all?
I have never been one to pray to the Writer. I never really was certain I even believed in such an omnipotent creature, never sure I thought the stories true, never fell into the winding, grasping silks of belief. And now that I know him personally, I would still not pray to Elgar Reed.
Yet, in those few seemingly endless hours between the death of the last stars and the rising of the sun, I cannot help the tripping, stuttering, whispered mantra of pleas from tumbling from my lips. They are not prayers, not really. Maybe they are a negotiation, instead, but with whom, I cannot say. Maybe I just hope that if I say it aloud, if I make my wishes known, someone—something—will hear and make them truth.
What I want more than anything is reassurance that this is not my fault. That my leaving this world did not end it, and is, in all likelihood, not the reason it is crumbling. But during that cold and lonely vigil, the self-doubt comes creeping in. For half a night, I live in terror that the Final Chapter has come, just as the zealots had always predicted, and that it is all due to me. That the world will be Shelved because of me. Because of my desire for the love of a clever woman. I fear that because of my desperation for validation and the opportunity to be a hero in my own right, outside of my brother’s shadow, the world would suffer.
No, they are not prayers. But with the sunrise, they have been answered all the same.
And when the sky above Gwillfifeshire grows first silver, then indigo, and a sliver of the palest coral-orange leaks into the blue, when it gilds the thatch roofs and chimney stacks with warm spring light, I finally give in to my fatigue, end my vigil, and crawl into bed.
I sleep for several hours, and wake when Alis begins to fuss, kicking my hip in her unhappiness. Pip rolls over and grumbles against the side of my head, reaching out to rub Alis’s belly in a move that is automatic at this point. Alis only wails louder, and the faint tang of urine in the air tells me why. I am about to heave myself out of bed when Pip springs up and scoops our daughter off the bed, jostling her away for a fresh nappy and a wipe-down.
I sit up, trying to pull my wretched hair back into some semblance of order, and watch, silent. Something is not right. Perhaps it is that I am more tired than I think, after staying up as I did, but no . . . Pip is behaving strangely. She is being short with Alis, her movements jerky, her temper abrupt.
I wonder for a moment if she too had too little sleep, but then I catch her expression from behind the curtain of her hair: her mouth is a thin knife-slice, her eyes tight, her jaw clenched. She is angry.
“Pip?” I ask, sliding out of the bed. I was too tired to put on a nightshirt, so I am dressed in nothing but my Victoria-bought underwear. They are much preferable to the drawers I wore under my fencing trousers before leaving this world, and definitely more comfortable. But now, they make me feel uncovered and sc
rawny in the face of my wife’s bad mood. “Are you feeling—”
“I’m fine,” she bites off, securing Alis’s new nappy and sending our daughter off to toddle toward me. Alis, fresh and happy—and apparently oblivious to the tension in the room— careens into my knees, arms outstretched and fingers wiggling.
“Dahdah da! Hi!” she says joyfully, wishing me a good morning with another new word I didn’t realize she had absorbed. “‘Isses, ‘isses!” I kiss her hands, palms first, and then knuckles. Content with this greeting, Alis decides to explore the room, and I let her get on with it.
“You are not fine,” I say to Pip, careful to modulate my tone so that it is not accusatory. I watch Alis explore under the sideboard. The worst she will probably find under there is a dust bunny—the Goodwoman is an excellent innkeeper.
“Leave it,” Pip growls, pushing to her feet and beginning her own morning ablutions.
“And if I do not wish to?” I ask, rising to join her at the washstand.
Pip throws a wet cloth at my face, and it splats against my cheek with a comical noise loud enough to startle Alis. For a moment, I stare at Pip, shocked at this affront. Alis tumbles over and grabs Pip’s nightdress, a concerned litany of “ma ma ma ma no, no, ma no,” falling from her lips.
The tension between Pip and I crackles and snaps, a live electrical wire of disbelief and smug anger. I feel a bubble of something in my throat, and it could be a shout, or cruel words, or an exclamation of hurt, but instead, it comes out as a crooked, giggling guffaw. Pip’s pissiness also cracks. A giggle escapes out of the corner of her mouth, and before I know it, we are both doubled over, laughing like naughty children pulling a prank on their nanny.
“Sorry, sorry,” Pip says, picking up the washcloth from where it has fallen to the floor and dropping it back into the basin. “I’m an asshole, sorry.” She hefts Alis onto her hip, reassuring our daughter that we are not truly angry.
I wring out the cloth and finish the job she began of washing my face.
“Whew,” Pip says, still chuckling. “I think I needed that.” And she does indeed look as if she had needed the laugh—her shoulders are no longer hunched, her expression no longer pinched. She leans up on her tiptoes and kisses the damp scar on my cheek. “Sorry.”
“Happy to oblige,” I say with wry humor. “Now, would you like to talk about it?”
Pip sighs, offering me a crooked twist of her lips that isn’t really a smile. “If I say no?”
“Pip . . .”
“Fine.” She gusts out a sigh, hands off Alis, and takes her shirt and trousers down from the peg on the wall where she had hung them to air out overnight. For obvious reasons, the Goodwoman had not made her scullery do the guests’ laundry the evening before. Pip keeps her eyes on her clothing—an obvious avoidance tactic—and I accept it, as she is still talking as she does so. “I’m feeling . . . cranky,” she says. “No, not cranky. I’m . . . I don’t know what to call it.”
“Unhappy?” I venture.
“That,” she says. “Yeah, and angry. And grieving. I’m upset with myself for getting the Stations wrong. And I’m sad for Anne and Thoma, and Lanaea, and her father Jakko, who probably doesn’t even fucking know that his daughter is dead yet, and it’s just not fucking fair. She is dead because of us. Because of me.”
“Pip,” I say gently, deciding that now is as good a time as any to wrestle Alis into her own leather-bottomed baby socks and canvas frock. “You must be fair to yourself. It is because of this world. Lanaea would have died amid the Red Caps if we had not found her.”
“So, what, you’re saying it was her fate?” Pip snaps, jerking her belt closed with force enough to make her wince.
“Perhaps. Not so bluntly, but—”
“It’s my fault, Forsyth,” Pip says, and wrenches on the laces of her doublet hard enough that I anticipate she will have a time of it unpicking the knot again this evening. “I am supposed to be the clever one. And what have I done?” she says, throwing up her hands. “What good have I been? I’ve steered us wrong, I’ve screwed up the quest-order, I’ve ruined everything. We’re stalling. The narrative is building sideways instead of upward. We are spinning our wheels in the mud and wasting our time at—at—at Libraries! And funerals! We are doing nothing.”
“Pip, peace. We don’t have all the answers. We barely know the questions.”
“Exactly!” Pip says, swinging around to shake a finger in my face. “That’s what I mean! Exactly that!” She spreads her arms, fingers splayed, gesturing to the room. “Who is the villain here? What are we trying to achieve? What is our goal, our overarching want? Who is impeding our ability to get that? Where the fuck on the plot mountain are we? What part of the Hero’s Journey are we in the middle of? What are we questing for? Never mind knowing how to save the day, we don’t even goddamn know what’s going wrong or why! I don’t fucking know, Forsyth. I don’t know. And it’s driving me mental.”
“Bao bei,” I say gently, setting Alis back on her feet and going over to wrap my wife in my naked arms. The feel of her leather doublet and trousers against my bare chest and thighs is a unique and slightly arousing sensation, but I push that back in favor of comfort. “Bao bei.”
“I’m frustrated,” Pip admits, tucking her face against my neck. I kiss my favorite leaf scar, sweet and soft. “I feel . . . useless.”
“Oh?”
“Last time, when it was just you and me, I was . . . I don’t know, engaged? Useful? I feel like you and Kintyre make all the choices this time, and Bevel and Wyndam are doing all the fighting, and I am just . . . hauling around a baby. I’m useless.”
“Bao bei . . .”
“I am!” she protests. “I’m a liability even, because you’re all distracted with protecting us. And there isn’t even a trade-off. What good is a useless party member who offers nothing? God, I can’t even, I don’t know . . . I can’t even cook or anything.”
“Bevel would take it as a personal offense if you did,” I point out.
“And I suck at it.”
“That too,” I allow, seeing as she said it first.
Pip pinches my arse, hard, in punishment for agreeing with her. I jerk and yelp a little. She apologizes for the pinch with a kiss on my neck.
“The whole thing has just been, ‘here, stand in the back with the baby.’ And I just . . .” She trails off, pressing her forehead against my clavicle, annoyed with herself. “I’m more than just a glorified baby carrier. It’s just not me. Not at home. And I hate it. I had purpose there. Here, I’m just . . . uhg!” She snarls, leaning back and burying her fingers in her hair, clenching. “I hate how useless I’m being!”
“Perhaps it is because your role here in Hain has changed. Last time, you were the Damsel in Distress. And now, you are the Wife. The Mother. Possibly, the Mother to the New Hero.”
“No,” Pip says emphatically. “My daughter will not be the new Kintyre Turn. If this has to be a Family Legacy style series, then Wyndam can be the next hero.”
This was the very thing I had discussed with him, the very thing I’d warned him against. “And so you will wish the sorrows of the main character on my nephew instead?”
Pip looks up and glowers. “Forsyth, that’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
I sigh, giving a small nod, and she curls back into me. Behind me, I can hear Alis rifling through my pack, pulling out clothes and throwing them over her head, dragging them along the floor.
“‘S funny,” Pip says, and her voice is small, contemplative. “Here we are, parents, and both of us are desperately fighting what that means in Elgar Reed’s world.”
“Yes. We neither of us wish to be my parents,” I say, soothing. “And I chafe at what it means to be a father in this realm as much as you despise the way that Elgar wrote mothers. We wish simply to be ourselves, and this world does not allow for it.”
“Even Kintyre and Bevel hate it,” Pip says. “They told me last night. Kintyre’s so damn disappoin
ted that Wyndam chose to go to a Deal-Maker Spirit instead of talking to him. And Bevel’s working so hard to get Wyndam to see that he only wants what’s best for him. But they catch themselves shouting orders all the time, instead of treating Wyndam like the adult he thinks he is. We’re all turning into the rigid, opinionated assholes the hero flees at the start of the book.”
“Kintyre and Bevel have not had the fortune to be as self-aware as I have,” I agree. “Nor have they had the benefit of being outside this world. I would dearly wish for my brother to meet your parents, bao bei. I rather think they would have good advice for him.”
Pip chokes on another guffaw of laughter, chuckling and spluttering.
“Yeah, no,” she says. “That’s . . . no.”
“Then perhaps we can impress upon them to try to follow Rupin and Dorthi’s example. Lewko seems well adjusted.”
“That’s because he’s not the main character’s kid. The Writer doesn’t need him to have a miserable home life, or to hurt a woman he loves to give him enough man-pain to become a hero. Lewko’s home life will stay just peachy.”
“And you think Wyndam is being groomed to be a hero?”
Pip pulls back to meet my eyes, her own wary and wet. “I don’t know. Do you honestly think Elgar will write more, knowing us, now?”
“I cannot answer that,” I say. “Part of me says no, for he knows what pain he inflicts. But part of me says yes, for he also knows he can mine us for plot ideas. And The Tales of Kintyre Turn is a bestselling series. Perhaps the last bestselling fantasy series in existence, in your world.”
Pip sniffles. “That’s a terrifying thought.”
“Pip,” I whisper in her ear, squeezing her close again. “Pip, last night, the last of the stars went out. I watched them. There’s nothing left.”
“And you think that means there are no more books in my world?”