by J. M. Frey
Kintyre draws Foesmiter, and even in the red gloom, the enchanted sword seems to glow with a golden, pure light. It is eager, I think, to taste blood again. Bevel has forgone his bow and arrow for his own sword, and the rest of us draw with him. Then, swift and quiet, we race for the door.
It is Wyndam who sees them first. He is fleet of foot, being younger than us, and faster, and it is his sudden, startled leap that makes the rest of us skid to a stop. And I am glad I did, for right before me is the severed, mushy remains of a hand. Possibly human, but it is hard to tell with the flesh blackened and peeled away like the skin of a baked potato.
I gulp back a retch.
We pick our way through the field of scattered corpses, and I am fervently thankful that Saetesh was not among the scholars who were currently studying the Ivory Tower. And I mourn for the lives lost here, lives that had been dedicated to the pursuits of understanding and wisdom. A horrific shame, this, and a horrific loss.
The front door of the tower is unlocked, and I am not certain if I should take this as a sign of boasting confidence from the Deal-Maker, or thoughtless neglect. Either way, it inspires no confidence in me; she clearly did not think the front door was even worth checking. So what horrors and blocks await us, more terrible and difficult to pass than a locked door?
Kintyre goes first, checking around corners and in shadows, followed by Bevel, then me, and Isobin. Wyndam guards our backs. The Ivory Tower is not large. The whole footprint takes up no more space than, perhaps, our home in Victoria. The foyer is bare of any decoration or life, and contains only a single room to one side, and a spiral staircase that leads both upward, and down into the dank dungeon the Shadow’s Men had told me contained a summoning chamber and many torture devices. On the second landing, we pass by the room they had found Pip in, a luxurious prison that makes a mockery of comfort. By their reports, each story holds only one room—a library, a spell-work chamber, and what might have been small personal apartments.
Even so, there are too many rooms to search, and I hesitate to suggest that we split up, but with six of us, and seven stories . . . but then Bevel tugs on Kintyre’s sleeve and gestures upward with a jerk of his chin. At first, I think it is because he has a hunch, but then I hear it—the insubstantial, ringing echo of laughter.
“The roof,” Kintyre whispers, and Bevel nods.
And then we are racing for the stairs. We move as quickly as stealth allows, and I fear the ring of our boots on the stone is loud enough to warn the Deal-Maker of our approach. We encounter no monsters, though, no booby traps, no spells, and I am grateful to those dead scholars that our path is clear.
Kintyre hesitates at the top only long enough to poke his head up through the hatch, and then drops back down immediately, face bloodless and lips tight.
“The Viceroy,” he hisses.
Bevel scowls and holds up his hand, fingers splayed. We attack in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .
Kintyre roars—a startling, unexpected sound—as he bursts up through the hatch. Above my head, I hear Alis scream in fright. Kintyre leaps up onto the roof, Bevel at his heels. I am too slow, and press back against the wall to allow Isobin and Wyndam to jump into the fray before me. Then I scramble out of the hatch, sword clutched in my hand, and blink rapidly to adjust my eyes to the sudden brightness of daylight above the fog.
The roof is wide, circular, and cupped in a waist-high wall with jagged toothy battlements.
Near the center, Kintyre is already engaged in a hand-to-hand grapple with the Viceroy, and Bevel is nearby, waiting for the perfect moment to either spring in and aid Kintyre or run the villain through. Behind them, Alis is dangling by her arm from the Deal-Maker’s grip, writhing and wailing. Isobin has confronted the Spirit, sword bare and waiting.
And beside her, Pip stands frozen, emanating a green glow.
But alive.
I feel relief surge in my chest, and I sigh. I am not too late. Not yet. But alive does not mean free. The green glow, the writhing of the scars under her skin, it is all sickeningly familiar. The Viceroy’s compulsion spell, written on Pip’s bones and impossible to eradicate, has ensnared her once again. And more the fool I, for not realizing that even with the spell buried so far beneath her flesh, she was still vulnerable, still susceptible to it for as long as it exists.
You spectacular idiot, Forsyth, I scold myself. You should have insisted upon visiting a mage to have it lifted before we ever began this quest!
The Viceroy struggles away from Kintyre and lurches against the wall of the tower. He throws a spell at the ground below, and the smell of sulfur and rotting flesh bursts through the air. There is a roar from the pirates, the great annoyed screech of a dragon, and someone shouts, “The corpses! They’re coming to life! Use fire! Use fire!”
Kintyre grabs the Viceroy by the shoulder, sword lifted to run him through, but the monster slides free, the tatters of his clothing ripping in Kintyre’s fist, and makes an elaborate gesture at Pip. Pip jerks and snarls, but she cannot fight the compulsion of the vine-spell. She lifts her arm, and I see, just in time, that she holds a sword. I bring my own down on it hard, before it can stab my brother in the back, and it clatters away across the roof.
“Pip!” I implore my wife. “Please! Fight it!”
“She cannot!” Solinde snarls at me.
I reach out to grab Pip, but her hands raise as if to throttle me, and I dance back, horrified. Agony is etched in her expression, agony and sorrow. Tear stains track down her cheeks. How long has she been trapped inside her own unresponsive body? How long has she been screaming, silently? How awful. How horrific.
And then I realize why I have not seen Wyndam in the midst of the melee. He springs up over the edge of the wall, nimble as a cat, and comes down hard in a whirl around the Deal-Maker. His aim is to rescue Alis, I can tell, but Pip is compelled to twist around, grab him around the waist, and haul him away. He is reluctant, as I am, to harm her in order to get at the Deal-Maker, and backs off.
“Tut-tut!” the Deal-Marker snarls at him. “How rude!”
“Have pity!” Isobin pleads. “Let the child alone.”
“Pity!” the Deal-Maker spits. “And who had pity on my child? Who pitied me when he was stolen away?”
“Please, I understand what it’s like to be separated from your baby. So do you!” she says. “Don’t pass that pain onto another mother.”
“And what would you know? You were the one who abandoned your son,” the Deal-Maker sneers. Isobin startles. “Oh, yes! I know who you are, Pirate Queen! And I know now who this Turn whelp is. He is your Prince of the Seas! I know now that I was summoned to Deal on sailor’s lore, and I know what you did! Turning your son off your ship, stranding him away from life-giving water! It is you who is the monster, not I!”
Isobin’s face twists, and clearly the accusation has hit closer to the center of her own pain than she expected. “Being a mother means doing what’s best for your child, even if it breaks your heart. Especially if it breaks your heart!” Isobin snarls, blade flashing, and behind her, I see Wyndam’s usually smooth acrobatics hitch. He stumbles, surprised, I think, to hear his mother speak of a broken heart, when, all this time, I am sure he has been questioning whether she has one at all.
Solinde dances away, and cuts another arcane gesture into the air. Pip jerks violently, back arching, eyes and mouth opened wide in a silent scream.
“No!” I cry, hurtling myself at the Deal-Maker. “Not again!” A spell of some sort slams into my chest, and I am tossed through the sky, landing hard on my back at the very edge of the Tower. My stomach is driven against my spine, all the air punching out of my lungs. I do not even have enough to yelp.
When I finally manage to catch my breath and scrabble upright, stars dancing in my vision, it is to find Pip standing between the Deal-Maker and the Viceroy. Green-eyed and stiff, her terrible non-expression is tight with horror. In the Deal-Maker’s cruel hands, Alis dangles and kicks, squirming and
screaming.
Isobin, Wyndam, Kintyre, and Bevel are arrayed before me, a protective wall. Kintyre adjusts his stance, Foesmiter coming up, the tip pointed at the Spirit’s head. My breath catches in my throat, for if Kintyre is forced to defend himself against the Deal-Maker, I do not trust that his usual bashing, hacking swordplay style will spare my child.
“Well now,” the Viceroy pants, grinning in sharkish glee. “This is a tidy little conclusion, isn’t it? I have my freedom, I have my puppet back, and my mother is finally freed of her geis. And she has the grandchild she’s always wanted.”
He reaches out and rubs his hand gently, fatherly, through Alis’s hair. Alis howls, “Ma, maaaa!” She reaches for the comfort of Pip. She wants to be held close, to be soothed and protected, and Pip cannot do that for her. It is killing both of her parents that neither of us can provide what Alis so obviously and desperately wants.
“Why?” Wyndam croaks, overwrought and on edge.
I struggle to my feet, lurching toward my family. Bevel is suddenly in front of me, blocking my path, but it is unnecessary. I am numb with horror, my tongue fluttering in my mouth, trying to find the words, trying to find a way to talk us out of this, to fix it, and I can’t, I can’t. I have nothing. My mind is empty. There are no solutions. Only dead-end pathways.
We have lost.
“Why take Aunt Pip? Why steal Alis?” Wyndam demands again.
The Deal-Maker grins in triumph, pleased with our sorrow. Her black tongue lashes against teeth that grow ever more sharp the more pleased she becomes. Her black eyes flash with glee. “Enough people have taken that which my son deserves! He was stolen from me, but he persevered! He worked hard under the aegis of his master. He rose to a position of great power! But your King Carvel feared him, banished him, took away all that he had earned. And then sent this monster to execute him!”
She swings her arm toward Kintyre, and my brother is blown back hard. He crashes into the bone floor, skidding until he slams into the wall, shoulder-first. Kintyre grunts and curls in around his arm, and unlike me, he has the very good sense to stay down.
“This child should have been his!” the Deal-Maker snarls. “A Reader! A Reader. So powerful a creature and he did not claim her for his own! He should have.” She turns and gazes fondly at the Viceroy—dirty, mostly naked, wan and wild with anger and bloodlust. He hardly resembles the clever, smooth monster I knew from my days as Shadow Hand, or the wildly unpredictable yet charming madman in Bevel’s scrolls. But the Deal-Maker clearly only sees her sweet babe. “My dear, impulsive boy,” she says fondly, voice dripping with acid and affection. “He lacks the guidance of a mother, but now I have him, and we have you both.”
She looks up, eyes boring into my own, accusatory, like I, as Alis’s father, must therefore stand in for all failed fathers the world over.
“I’m . . . not a . . . trophy!” Pip snarls suddenly, every word a fight for her. “You . . . can’t just—”
“But I can!” the Viceroy coos into her ear. He makes a complicated gesture with his left hand and . . . Writer, no.
Pip stiffens with horror, arching her back as if trying to writhe away from her own flesh. She is too clothed for me to see her scars, all save one—the little leaf below her ear, my favorite place to kiss her. It has begun to flutter as if it is a real leaf, dancing in the wind of the Viceroy’s growing power, and glowing an ever stronger acidic green.
“Say your fare wells, Lucy Piper,” the Viceroy says, mouth right against her ear. I want to vomit. I want to punch the monster in the teeth. Not because he is infringing on what is mine, but because Pip is so very frightened. She has confessed to me, more than once, that she has had nightmares about this very scenario—that we had lost that first time, that the Viceroy had stolen her away, forced her to love him, and . . . and now, her nightmares are playing out. She has spent countless hours with her therapist on this very thing. My anger is for the terror Pip is experiencing, for the sure knowledge that she would kill herself before she let him steal her mind away from her. “For you will never again see these wretched Turns. I am going to kill them now. One by one.”
I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. We have lost; we have lost. My daughter will live and grow to be an evil thing, my wife will be a slave, or a corpse by her own hand, and I cannot, I am not good enough. I am not powerful enough. I am no hero; I am barely a scholar anymore. I am not the Shadow Hand. I have nothing. I am nothing.
And I cannot save them.
“No,” Pip moans. “No, no, no. No, I . . . am a . . . Reader! And I . . . I decide how this is interpreted! I have power here. I have . . . I have . . .”
The Viceroy laughs. “Power? If you had any power, Lucy Piper, you would have used it against me long ago. You have nothing.” He tucks his hand under her chin and turns her face to his, uncomfortable and intimate.
“No,” Pip disagrees, clenching her teeth. Though it is a straining effort, though it makes the tendons in her neck stand out, and sweat bead on her upper lip, she shakes her head.
“What?” the Viceroy snarls, taking a step back in his shock, raising his green-laced hand. “Stop.”
“No! No, I”—Pip looks at Alis with tears in her eyes, the desperate sorrow in them tearing my heart straight out of my chest, stealing all my breath—“I . . . am a . . . Reader! I am a Reader . . . and that is my power! I love . . . books. I love stories. I am a Reader, and I love passionately, with an open heart, and I know, I know, I know that this is not how they end!”
She is writhing now, and I resist the urge to shout and cheer my wife on, bite my tongue and watch her fight with hope growing in the hollow of my despair. My fists are clenched, my body straining toward her, thinking, projecting: Fight, fight, bao bei! Fight!
“I am—” Pip gasps, gags, twists. “I am . . . I am the little girl who loved The Wizard of Oz so much she painted herself green on the first day of school.” Pip sobs, her tears falling in rivers down her cheeks, eyes wide and darting, then latching onto mine, desperate and begging. “I am the child who grew up wanting to travel into other realms, to be the hero like the boys. I am the girl who cries when she thinks of the Library of Alexandria. I . . . Oh. Oh god . . . Forsyth!” she chokes. “I . . . remember! The books, I . . . I remember . . . the stories . . .” She clutches the sides of her head and groans, crumbling to her knees.
“No!” the Viceroy shrieks, hand flailing in that magical pattern that has no hold over Pip any longer. “No, no!”
“I am a hero!” Pip snarls, staring up at him from the bone floor, eyes brown. “I am the hero, and you are the villain, and you don’t get to win!”
The spell. The spell is broken. And she did it of her own will.
Pip has often said that she needs no prince charming to rescue her, that she can rescue herself. And now she has.
She snatches up my dropped sword and hacks at the Viceroy. He dances backward, a split appearing across his chest, an upward slash that immediately begins to bloom red.
“Bitch!” he howls.
Pip lunges again, pushing up off her knees, swinging wildly and screaming like a madwoman. “I am the damsel who rescues herself!”
“Varnet!” the Deal-Maker wails, and I see what she means to do a split second before she does it. I am too far away to do anything about it, though I push off and dash toward her as fast as I can.
The Deal-Maker drops Alis.
She tumbles to the ground, lands hard on her bottom, her head snapping against the floor. For a breathless second, I fear she is dead. But Alis immediately jerks and screams, and before she can make it to her feet, I have swooped in and gathered her up, turned on my heel, dashed back, and pressed myself as far back against the opposite wall as I can.
I want to fight.
But I want Alis away from the fight more. I turn back around and watch, ready to flee or kick or Speak what Words I can, if necessary. I run my hands over her head, her back, her arms, checking for breaks, for blood, and soothing Alis a
s best I can with my warmth, my scent, my nearness. She sobs and hiccoughs in my ear, shaken, terrified, but whole.
I spare a moment to look down at the battle raging below us. My attention is caught by the spurts of dragon-flame that are burning off the mist in ragged chunks.
“Bradri!” I scream, and another great gout of fire is followed by an acknowledging screech and the snap of leather against the wind. “The hatchling!”
It breaks my heart that I must let go of Alis so soon after getting her back, but Isobin was right. A parent does what’s best for their children. Not what they want.
In an instant, Bradri, with Caerdac on her back, has scaled the Tower, claws digging into the great bones of her own kind. Caerdac has his hands out, and I shove Alis at him the moment he is close enough. My baby screams again, exhausted and terrified. With another snap of leathery wings—and the whip of a razor-spined tail that I must duck to avoid—dragon, rogue, and child are sailing across the water toward the safe haven of The Salty Queen.
Of course, it will only remain safe if the Deal-Maker has no opportunity to raise a storm—or worse, a sea monster.
While I have been occupied with getting Alis to safety, Kintyre and Bevel have been engaged in a swordfight with the Deal-Maker. Wyndam and Isobin are squared off against the Viceroy, clearly hoping to distract him long enough for Pip to recover herself and flee. She is leaning now on Isobin, panting and wrecked, half shielded by the pirate queen’s body.
And Wyndam is doing his best to keep himself between them. The Viceroy smirks, just one small pull against the corner of his mouth, and then he is moving. He ducks around Wyndam, and snatches the dagger out of the sheath at the small of his back, skids around the women and turns sharp on his toes, the knife raised over his head.