by J. M. Frey
The last of my words ring like the crash of a gong around the Eyrie.
My traveling companions are silent, agog.
And as the echoes die, a slow and trickling revelation creeps into the wake.
“It . . . huh?” Kintyre asks, voice strangled with the kind of existential terror that I think even meeting a Reader had not yet produced in him.
“It is . . .” I say softly, a whisper in the evaporating echo. “That’s it. That is exactly it. This wish, this Deal would not have worked if it were connected to anyone but you. It is all about you. It’s all about you!” I shout, pointing at Kintyre, gleeful in the fulfilling and satisfying completion of understanding. That wash of orgasmic bliss splashes over me, tickles my scalp and toes and everything in between and I know, I know that I am right.
“What are you—”
“The whole of this tragedy is due to your lack of responsibility, Kintyre.” The words are hard, but I cannot manage to wipe the grin from my face as I say them, pleased beyond measure at my own cleverness. “You refuse to grow up, and the whole of the world suffers for it! This is always the way, is it not? My brother, the legendary hero, the man for whom the world was created! Throw a tantrum or desire a thing, and the whole damn realm accommodates you because it must! The way the under-roads work, the fact that Wyndam’s Deal should not have been struck with so imbalanced a payment, but was. Even what just happened here—how did we accidentally come across the exact sort of cave we needed? Because that is the nature of our reality! Everything is always about you. Because you, Kintyre Turn, are the main character!”
Kintyre goggles at me, all rage suddenly evaporating as he sways on the spot, the high color on his cheeks draining away as he blinks. “I’m the what?”
Seventeen
“Wait—” Bevel tries to interrupt, his own face going pale and his eyes dropping wide. I’ve known neither man to ever swoon, but I wonder now if I will witness it. They grasp each other’s arms and gulp in tandem, and it would be funny if I wasn’t so angry. “Kintyre is—”
“The main character, yes! The Tales of Kintyre Turn, by Elgar Reed,” I spit. “And how horrifying is that, Bevel Dom? Our whole world, our whole existence, our whole meaning is to support that!” I cut my hand at Kintyre, and he puffs up with wounded indignation.
“Aye, and why not?” Kintyre snarls. “I’m the only one of the two of us who has ever accomplished anything!”
“Accomplished!” I repeat, aghast. “Accomplished! After everything I have read, I am more inclined to believe that it was Foesmiter and Bevel who did all the hard work. You were just there, rewarded for simply existing! The ultimate power fantasy—strong, desired by beautiful women, and hated by powerful villains that you nonetheless were able to easily overcome, and how? By simply being special! Pah!” I spit. “The rest of us are heroes as well, brother mine! But we have earned it.”
“It’s simple to be a hero when you’ve had every advantage handed to you,” Bevel says softly.
Kintyre’s answer is throttled immediately. He goes silent, and stares at Bevel with wide eyes. The anger and defensiveness in his posture slackens, as if melted away by the rain and our words combined, and he slumps.
Then he turns to Wyndam, places a large hand on his son’s shoulder, and says: “I’m an arse. I am a complete arse, and I’m sorry I haven’t done better by you.”
Wyndam tentatively reaches up and lays his hand over his father’s. But his face is still tight, his jaw clenched, the skin around his eyes pinched. He is listening, but he doesn’t, I think, trust Kintyre’s contrition just yet. My poor nephew. What sort of life has he led on that ship, what sort of hurts has he endured, that he does not trust an earnest apology?
And Kintyre does sound earnest, in a way I’ve rarely heard from him before.
“We’ll get your voice back. I vow it,” Kintyre goes on. “And when you have it back, I promise to actually listen to you when you use it.”
“And if I don’t get it back?” Wyndam asks.
But his mouth never moves. The voice is clear and strong though, rising above the wind, and as one, we each duck out of the cave and lift our faces upward.
Above us, standing on a cloud, is the Deal-Maker.
And in her arms is my daughter.
“Alis!” I cry, and she pops her head up from where it had been pillowed on the Spirit’s shoulder to peer down at me. She is completely dry, unlike the rest of us, the water simply not falling on her, nor the Deal-Maker.
“Dah!” she cries in complete delight, reaching down toward me, kicking her feet in her little habitual dance of joy. They thump against the Deal-Maker’s hip, and the Spirit winces. “Dah dah!”
A relief so profound surges up out of my guts that I actually hiccup out a sob. My daughter is alive. Alive and hale, it seems.
“No, sweeting,” the Deal-Maker says with Wyndam’s voice, gently pushing Alis’s face around, cutting me off from her view. “He is not your da now.”
“What?” I shout, part surprise, part demand for an explanation. “You cannot—”
“Oh, but I can,” the Spirit sneers, this time in her own voice. “I already have. I will rob you both of that which you took from me! I have already taken something from Kintyre’s son. And I fully intend to finish the job and destroy the rest.”
Kintyre draws Foesmiter and puts himself between Wyndam and the Deal-Maker, teeth bared. He is bristling with protective fury. “You will not!”
The Spirit sniffs at him, as if he were no more concern than an irate squirrel.
“And it is only fair that I take something of yours as well, Forsyth Turn,” she says. “I would not want you to feel left out. According to your disagreement just now, that has been a sore part of your childhood. Do not worry; you will have your equal share. Your daughter is now mine, Forsyth Turn. And I shall raise her myself, make of her the strong, powerful woman you men would never allow her to be!”
“Daaaaa!” Alis screams, going stiff in the Deal-Maker’s arms, her face turning dangerously red as she howls. It is a temper tantrum the likes of which I have never before seen Alis throw, and for an absurd moment, I am proud of her. Then I fear how easy it would be for the Deal-Maker to just change her mind and drop my child.
“Alis, sweeting, stop!” I call up.
“Daaaaa! Daaaaa! No!”
“Give her to me!” I beg the Deal-Maker, arms up to catch Alis in case the Spirit takes my plea literally. “Please!”
The Deal-Maker is grimacing at the shrieking going on right beside her ear, but otherwise seems calm in the face of Alis’s kicking, flailing misery. She slings Alis down, carrying her around the waist like nothing so much as a football.
“No,” the Deal-Maker says. “The child will be mine, now.”
“You cannot—” I sob. “You can’t fathom—”
“What, her power? As the half-breed brat of a Reader? I can guess! And I think I can rear her to their glories better than you, you small man.”
“No, I—Re-Readers have n-no magic!” I shout, knowing that I am betraying a secret that Pip and I agreed to keep close, in order to preserve the small advantage that fear of her power might cause in our enemies. But I am without any other option. “The legends are false!”
“Are they?” the Deal-Maker asks, smirking at me as if she knows that I am lying. Only I am not.
“She can’t pos-possibly be of any ad-advantage. Pl-please!”
“No magic, my girl?” the Deal-Maker asks, holding Alis away from her to inspect her. The arm’s reach puts Alis into the rain, and my daughter gasps and stops screaming immediately, curling up into a miserable, snuffling ball, waving at her head to get the water away. Then the Deal-Maker glances down at something behind her. “That explains much, if it is true.”
She pulls the soaking Alis back against her side, freeing one hand to make a cutting gesture behind her. The cloud drifts further up the mountain, and half-blinded by rain, I chase after them.
“
Forssy, watch out!” Kintyre shouts.
His warning is just in time. I slip and skid to a halt just a few lengths shy of the rim of the Rookery, and its fatal drop. The Deal-Maker’s cloud sails unimpeded into the open air above it.
The Deal-Maker moves her hand in an elaborate twisting motion, My stomach plummets at the thought that she has just done something to Pip. Something final now that she knows the last secret of the Readers. Below us, over the lip of the precipice, a pained cry floats up through the eye of the storm. A pained cry that means my wife is alive.
I want to shout again, to bring the Spirit’s attention back to us, off of Pip and the awful things she may be commanding. But as soon as I take a breath, I see Kintyre’s head shake, very subtly, in my periphery.
Behind me, through the continual hiss of the rain, I hear Bevel sweep his bow over his head, pulling it from where he was wearing it across his body. Silently, carefully, he fetches an arrow from his quiver. Wyndam’s hands remain empty, and very cautiously, very slowly, he winds his feet into Capplederry’s harness straps, ensuring that he will remain in place without his hands to grip.
And then, before I can blink, Bevel’s arrow is nocked and loosed. At the same moment, Capplederry has sprung into motion, leaping and darting silently sideways, out of the Deal-Maker’s field of vision, but ever closer, making no noise so as not to startle or alert the Deal-Maker to their movement and ruining Bevel’s shot.
I expect the Deal-Maker to howl and drop, but instead, without turning her head away, she flings her free hand toward the arrow, and a bolt of lightning incinerates it mid-sky. The Spirit laughs, her attention back on us in an instant. She is gleeful.
“Adorable!” she sneers. “Did you think I would allow myself to be shot agai—augh!”
One of Capplederry’s large paws rakes across her back, opening four deep gashes. The momentum of it spins her forward and down, and Alis is flung from her grip.
I think, perhaps, that I am going to faint. I have never done so before, but it seems like a viable alternative to watching as my only child is dashed upon the gray granite of the Rookery’s lip.
But Wyndam and Capplederry are there, the great cat leaping upward a second time. Alis slams into her cousin’s chest. He folds over her, protecting her from the jolt of Capplederry’s landing, and both of them rock dangerously as the great cat bounds back toward us.
“Inside!” I shout to Wyndam. “Back into the cave!”
They are already more than halfway back when the Deal-Maker regains her feet with a screech. Bevel, ready for the opportunity to take another shot, looses three more arrows in quick succession. The Deal-Maker destroys the first, and narrowly dodges the second. The third she ducks, falling to her hands and knees on her cloud.
“Not again!” she snarls. “You shall not best me again!” And then she raises her hands.
At first, nothing happens.
And then, from inside the cavern, Capplederry’s roar rolls back toward us over the noise of the storm. The Deal-Maker yanks on something I cannot see, fingers clenched around an invisible string, and Wyndam sails back across the sky, legs flailing against nothing as he is dragged backward by his left pinkie finger. He has Alis tucked close against his chest, protecting her as best as he is able, and when he slams against the rock under the Deal-Maker’s cloud, a loud grunt of pain is punched out of him. He mouths a silent shout.
“It is not so easy as that!” the Deal-Maker snarls, and the cloud drops to envelop Wyndam and Alis in its fog.
Kintyre, Foesmiter bared, rushes forward, swinging and chopping at the Deal-Maker, but she is too quick. Before he can land a blow, she is back in the sky and sailing first up, then over the lip of the Rookery’s chasm. The rock where Wyndam had landed is bare.
The storm around us sucks toward her, imploding on her vanishing figure. The ever-contracting kernel of cloud dives down into the Rookery.
“Follow!” Bevel shouts to me. “Forsyth, come on!”
But I am frozen. I am still where I stand, horror and fear rooting me to the spot. Kintyre dashes ahead, but Bevel doubles back, grabs my sleeve, and yanks at me.
“Forsyth Turn, now is not the time to suffer a fit of the Soldier’s Ailment. Snap out of it! Your daughter needs you!”
“I . . . I c-can’t . . .” I choke, trying to make him see, trying to make him understand the depth of my despair, the utter terror that if I follow, I will have to watch my child die. And I will be powerless to stop it.
“I don’t have the strength to waste on carrying you!” Bevel shouts. He rears back and lays a slap across my face. The pain doesn’t register so much as the insult of it, and I blink and goggle at him, profoundly stunned that my brother-in-law has struck me so.
“Yell at me later, idiot!” Bevel snarls. “Move!”
From below us, I hear the sharp, high scream of my daughter, and it is enough to urge my feet into action.
I will not have to watch my baby die if I can save her.
Bevel turns to run as fast as we are able, up the mountain. Kintyre and Bevel are nimble as billy goats, and I grind my teeth, draw my sword, keep my head down, and do my best to spring from rock to rock in their wake. After what feels simultaneously like an eon and just a few seconds, we are at the top of the stairs hewn in the rock that lead down to the Rookery. I follow Bevel down the steep stairs as swiftly as I can. We both jump the last five, landing in a skidding run on the rain-slick loose gravel of the Rookery, and speed toward the Desk that Never Rots.
The Deal-Maker Spirit stands upon it, straddling a largish lump of twisted, blasted metal. Laid out across the rest of the Desk is Wyndam, his legs and throat dangling across the short ends of it, his neck arched and bare like a sacrificial virgin upon an altar. On his stomach, Alis is wriggling and screaming, “Ma ma ma! No ma no!” She is reaching down toward the ground.
And sitting exactly where we had once lashed the Viceroy, Pip is bound, tied identically to the leg of the Desk that Never Rots. She is slumped over, her eyes closed, her skin a dangerously sallow gray. Through the tight coils of the water-logged vines holding her up, I cannot tell if her chest is rising and falling or not. She is gagged with what looks like her own sash.
The Deal-Maker has the flat of Foesmiter between two palms, and Kintyre is struggling to bring the blade down on her chest. His face is covered with sweat, the muscles in his shoulders and biceps rippling with his effort to skewer her, his jaw clenched and jumping.
She is significantly stronger than I had anticipated, for she seems to be holding her own. Bevel skids to a halt and lets fly another arrow, and the Deal-Maker twists to the side, gouging her own palms but ducking in time to avoid being pierced. Kintyre yanks his sword back and out, away from where our children lay, and loses his balance as a consequence, going down hard on Pip’s legs.
She gasps and jerks upright, eyes suddenly wide and rolling.
“Enough!” I shout. “Enough fighting! Let us end this a cleaner way!”
The Deal-Maker looks up at me and laughs. Blue blood runs in rivulets down her palms, down every curve of her sodden skirts, and pools around the charred metal.
“Oh, I agree, Forsyth Turn, useless second son and failed Shadow Hand,” the Deal-Maker sneers. “Let us end this.”
She raises her hands to me, palms out and sparking at the tips with electricity, and I hastily drop my offensive stance and raise my own hands in a placating gesture, my sword dangling from the heel of my thumb. “Now, now!” I say, shrill in my desperation. “Have we all not perpetrated enough violence?”
The Deal-Maker laughs, and the night-black cloud boiling and rolling, filling the whole ceiling of the Rookery, churns with her amusement. It swells and heaves and blocks out the sun. The only source of illumination is the near continual flash of lightning dancing in the cloud’s depths. It throws harsh shadows against us all, making faces look stark and extreme, and hard to read.
“Give us our children,” I say quickly, “and we may yet come to a
n understanding.”
“There is no understanding we can come to,” the Deal-Maker spits. “For you cannot give me my child in return. No! My child was stolen first!” The Deal-Maker screams, and a flash of lightning crackles above her head, punctuating her anger.
“The Viceroy needed to be—”
“My son!” she wails. “My son, my Varnet, who has never had the opportunity to show the world that of which he is capable! The capacity for power and love that was in his heart!”
“He had plenty,” I counter. “Carvel Tarvers forgave him too many transgressions in my opinion! Had I been Shadow Hand instead of my predecessor, I can tell you that Varnet Magicborn would never have been given the post of First Vizier!”
“He should have been king!” she howls. “He was special. He was powerful!”
“He was barking mad!” Bevel shouts back, another arrow prepared and waiting for the right moment. His arm shakes with the effort of keeping it drawn and at the ready, and he scowls, but he does not lessen the pull. He is half lost in the dark and shadow, the cloud that spins around us like ragged cotton floss revealing and obscuring in uneven, unpredictable patches that make it impossible to predict an attack or keep everyone in sight.
The Deal-Maker’s eyes roll in her head, white showing all around like a spooked and rabid dog. “And who made him so, Bevel Dom? Hmm? Who thwarted him in every endeavor? Who spoiled everything for him?” The Deal-Maker points at him, her bleeding hand contorted like a harpy’s talon.