by J. M. Frey
“Da?” Alis asks when we are silent for more than a few paces. She has stopped beating her legs against the footrest, and she holds Library up toward me like a tithe.
“I’m fine, sweeting,” I tell her. “Though I thank you for the offer.”
“Ma, Ma, Ma?” Pip leans over and kisses the much-abused plush lion on the head. “Yah,” Alis approves, and returns to babbling contentedly to the toy, to the sidewalk, to the people passing by, and the small birds that flit between the trees that line the main avenue, searching the snow for crumbs.
“Oh,” Pip says, as we reach a corner crossing. “Actually, can we cut left? I just want to pop into the thrift shop to see if they’ve got a playpen in.”
“We have a playpen.”
“Yeah, but I thought it would be nice to leave one in my parents’ car.”
“They already have one, as well.”
“Well, yeah, but if there’s a spare in their trunk, then they don’t have to take down—”
“Bao bei,” I interrupt. The crossing signal comes on, and I start to cross, not turning where Pip has requested.
“Syth!” Pip protests, but follows Alis and I across the street.
“Pip,” I rejoinder. “We do not need a third playpen between us, any more than we need to keep a spare bag of Alis’s diapers and things in their trunk, as you suggested last week.”
“I just thought that—”
“That it would be prudent to turn your parents’ car into a bug-out-bag on wheels?”
Pip stops walking when we reach the far sidewalk and stares up at me, mouth agape. After a moment where I can see that she is thinking at a rapid pace, analyzing all that we have discussed, she blinks and says, “I didn’t know you knew that term.”
I level an unimpressed glance at my wife. “Honestly, Pip,” I say gently, scoffing a little to keep the conversation light, teasing.
“I . . . I just . . .” She shakes her head, hard, and takes my hand again, nudging us back into motion. Pip chews on her thoughts for another block, and I leave her to her silence, answering Alis whenever our daughter pauses in her banter long enough to indicate that she desires my input on her monologue.
Finally, Pip lets out a long sigh. “I guess I have been trying to build a bug-out-bag.”
“You have,” I say. “And what I would like to know is why. Why are we buying doubles of things Alis already possesses? What purpose is it to leave them with Martin and Mei Fan? Pip, you worry me. The training, the running, the long sessions with your therapist, and now this? You wish me to spar and retrain and . . . Pip, what has you so frightened that you would have us prepare for war?”
Pip looks up at my face, her expression morphing from introspective worry to stunned shock. “You mean, you don’t know?”
“Know what?” I ask, letting my wife choose her words, letting the line on which she dangles play out so that the hook buried in her logic does not tug and harm. If she comes to it on her own, perhaps we can discuss her behavior without any of the shouting I fear might otherwise accompany it.
Because I can well guess where the source of Pip’s unease lies. And if she knows that I have been aware of it since the start, and have said nothing, have done nothing about it—at least in her view—she may accuse me of being uncaring. I am not uncaring. I have been vigilant with my scans of the Internet, in assessing the world’s news, in playing out the scenarios in my mind.
But there is no proof that anything is going awry in the Overrealm, and as much as I respect my wife’s very understandable paranoia, I also do not want to feed it without irrefutable evidence. I had hoped that perhaps she would work herself through this period of frenzied activity and frenetic worry on her own, before we had to confront it head-on, but it seems I had hoped in vain.
“Well . . . that these things come in threes.” She does not clarify what she means by “these things.” She does not need to.
“I am not unaware,” I say slowly. “But I also refuse to live my life looking over my shoulder. I will admit that I am usually the first to believe in the worst, to prepare for it, to fear it. But . . . Pip, my darling, this is not a book. We are in the Overrealm, where endings do not tie up neatly and the story goes on beyond Happily Ever After.”
“But the—”
“I know,” I say, and kiss her knuckles again. “I know, and do not think that I am not preparing on my end. I have laid contingencies into every computer program I write. But it could also be nothing.”
“I just get this feeling that the . . . the thread holding up the sword is going to snap.”
“I understand. But shall we live all our lives in the shadow of a cramped shield?”
“And the trilogies,” Pip says, and there is a bit of desperation in her tone. She seizes my gloved hand tightly.
I don’t want to tell my wife that I worry she is overthinking things. After all, only a few months ago, it was I who was paranoid, and worried, and afraid that my spouse thought I was turning mad. I will not dismiss her fears lightly.
Instead, I kiss her hand a third time. “If I promise to resume my exercises with the sword, will that appease you?”
Pip nods tightly.
“Very well. I shall. And you must promise me that, until we are certain something big and awful is actually coming for us, that we will fill Alis’s life with joy and comfort, and try to keep a happiness between us?”
Pip puffs out another sigh, and nods again. But I am not appeased. She is agreeing too easily.
I am about to say as much when Pip stops dead on the street, eyes going wide and shoulders locking up. Hastily, I pull us off to the side, next to a large concrete planter box topped with gray slush. Pip stumbles, head rolling back on her neck, and I have just enough time to snap the locks on the wheels of Alis’s stroller before Pip falls and I catch her, keep her from striking her head on the concrete planter.
“Hey, man, is she having a seizure?” someone behind us asks. “Do you want some help?”
“I . . . I d-d-don’t . . .” I reply, sudden terror gripping the root of my tongue, fisting in my throat, making it hard to breathe. The suddenness of Pip’s fit has blindsided me, and I am frozen with shocked indecision.
“Hey, it’s okay,” the someone says, and a young black man, perhaps the age of Pip’s students, appears in my line of sight. “Here, lay her down here. You can use my hoodie.” He shoulders out of his down jacket, strips off the garment in question, slips his jacket back on, then bundles his hoodie up under Pip’s head. My wife gasps and jerks when he touches the middle of her back, cringing away from him, and I manage to croak:
“On h-her s-si-side.”
We bracket Pip between us on the dirty, puddly sidewalk, keeping her safe but—the young man advises me as he checks his watch—not holding her down. Melting snow seeps into the knees of my trousers, crawling chilly across my calves. “If this goes on for more than five minutes, we should call 911.”
“I . . . I d-d-don’t—” I manage to say again. Alis makes a sort of distressed noise and shouts, “Bu, da, bu!” An Asian woman, perhaps Mei Fan’s age, is standing by Alis’s stroller, keeping her body between it and the street. Guarding my baby, I realize.
“Nǐ hái hǎo,” the woman murmurs to Alis over and over again. My Mandarin is still new, but it sounds as if the woman is trying to soothe.
“No!” Alis shouts, having none of it, reaching out with grasping fingers toward her mother. She only uses the English word for no when she is really insistent. “Ma!”
“All w-wuh-will bewuh-well, swe-sweeting,” I reassure her, reaching up to grasp Alis’s hand in mine, keeping my other on Pip’s shoulder as she jerks and twitches on the sidewalk. I hope desperately that I am not lying.
All at once, Pip goes lax, a puppet whose strings have been cut suddenly. The young man sits back on his heels, nodding to himself as he checks his watch again.
“Two minutes forty seconds,” he says. “Average for a grand mal.”
“I . . . I b-beg par-pardon, I don’t kno-know what th-that—” I cut myself off when the young man looks up at me, eyebrows furrowed.
“Was this her first seizure?” he asks, deeply concerned. “You should take her to the hospital, or at least your family doctor, as soon as you can.”
“I . . . I wi-will do s-so, ye-yes,” I tell the man, shaken to the core by the thought that while Pip and I have spent the last two years fighting off magic and monsters and terrible archvillains, something like this, some secret horror, something I cannot fight, may have been lurking inside of her.
Between us, Pip groans and grabs my shoulder hard to lever herself up to sitting. Her whole side is wet with sandy snow, and it breaks my heart to have to release Alis’s hand to help Pip. Our daughter howls. Pip blinks around, clearly wondering how she got on the ground, her eyes hollow-looking and her lips pinched.
“Slowly, now,” the young man says. He wipes grit off his palms. “You’ve had a seizure. But you’re safe. You’re fine.”
“Alis?” Pip asks.
“Safe also,” I promise, glancing up at the woman pulling faces at Alis in a futile effort to distract her.
“Listen, let me get you guys a cab,” the young man says as he helps us to stand. Pip perches on the edge of the planter box, and curls down over the stroller so Alis can hug her head and babble reassurance in her English-Mandarin mash-up baby talk. “You should let her rest.”
“That isn’t necessary—” I begin, not because I am offended by his charity, but because I am wrong-footed by his gallantry. It is my duty to take care of my family, not a stranger on the street’s. The lad retrieves his hoodie and shakes it out. It’s sopping and filthy, but he just drapes it over his shoulder, unconcerned.
My mind is whirling, connections coming together, clues niggling at me. My head seems to be spinning as I grasp for the answer to a question I didn’t even realize I would have to puzzle out when I stepped out of the house an hour ago.
What has just happened? Why? And how could I let it? Is it something I could have prevented? Was there some sign I had missed?
Oh, stupid, foolish Forsyth. Blind and never enough.
“My brother gets seizures. It’s fine,” the young man offers. His dark eyes are wide and sincere, and I am struck with an intense, longing homesickness for my nephew, Wyndam. “It’s scary, I get it, but you’re okay now. I know she’s going to want to be somewhere alone and quiet for a while. Where are you headed?”
“Up by Beacon Hill Park,” I confess, brain whirling.
The young man nods and types something into his smartphone. “All right, the car will be here in about ten minutes.”
“Allow me to-to—” I try, fumbling for my pocket, and my wallet, but the young man shakes his head and pats my arm, brotherly, reassuring.
“Naw man, on me,” he says. “Just get home safe, okay?”
“I, yes. Thank you,” I mutter. And then the young man is on his way down the street, a gallant knight with an urban swagger.
“Do you want me to wait with you?” the woman by the stroller offers. She’s now standing to the side, just watching as Alis and Pip reassure one another.
Pip peeks up at me over her arm and shakes her head subtly.
“No,” I say, trusting her lead. “But thank you.”
“All right. Be safe,” the woman says, and then she too disappears into the foot traffic of the high street around us.
I place my hand gently on the small of Pip’s back, meaning to reassure, and she gasps and jerks again. I remove it immediately, concern swirling up.
“Pip?” I ask, but say nothing further, giving her space to decide when and how to answer me. What I can see of her face is ashen, pinched, and creased with the aftermath of pain.
“It wasn’t a seizure,” Pip eventually whispers.
“How do you know?” I ask, just as softly.
Pip turns wet eyes to me, and tries to grin, but she can’t. “I . . . I just . . . I just know,” she says with a finality that makes it clear that further prying into that particular topic would not be welcome just now.
“Pip,” I ask. “What are you not telling me? Now you’re having fits on the street alongside your preparations for war?”
“I . . .” Pip says, and then hesitates. I look down at her, and am surprised to see that her face is buried in her scarf, her lashes fanned against her cheeks. “I’ve been . . . I’ve been having dreams.” She says it softly, like a confession, like a fear.
“Dreams of what?” I slide my fingers between hers.
“Indistinct things. At first, I thought it was, you know, memories of . . . of then.”
Ah, things begin to make sense. “Hence the increased sessions with your therapist.”
“Yeah.”
“Yah, yah, yah!” Alis says, clearly determined to be a part of the conversation. Her head is thrown to the side, her little Sheil-purple toque scrunched against the back of the pushchair, her gray eyes watching us with careful intelligence.
“What are the dreams like?”
“Pain,” Pip says bluntly. “At first, the . . . you know, the cutting and the carving, but then the itch and pull of the healing, and now they’re . . . I don’t know. Not tingling. Not scratching. It’s under my skin, and in it, and on it, and . . . I can’t seem to get any relief from it. I wake up and want to go roll in a bath of ice. I work myself to death at the gym so I’m exhausted enough to sleep through it.”
I tug my wife close against my side, careful to keep my arm up on her shoulders, and she presses the side of her face into my coat to hear my heartbeat.
“I have not noticed.”
Pip peers up at me, suspicious. “You never ‘not notice’ anything.”
“What else?” I croak, my joints stiffening with the chill of the cement under us, the breeze around us, and the fear crawling up my spine.
“Green,” Pip says softly. “Green flame, or . . . or acid . . . or maybe . . . magic?”
I suck in a surprised breath, and Alis stills, watching us with fearful, wide eyes, sensing the unsettled feelings that have dropped over her parents like a cloak of morning fog.
“But it’s occurred to me,” Pip presses on. “What if they’re not memories?”
“What else would they be?” I ask, and this time, it is a real question instead of a leading one, because if they are not memories, I do not know what her dreams of blood and pain and green flame might otherwise be.
“Magic doesn’t exist in the Overrealm,” Pip says, but it is like a mantra.
“Correct,” I say. “We tried it all when I first arrived. Every Word in my mind, every spell I know, every rune and potion. Nothing worked.”
Pip twists our joined fingers, fidgeting. “I’ve been thinking . . . what would happen to creatures of magic, though?” she says. “What if, I don’t know, let’s say Capplederry or Bradri came into the Overrealm?”
“’derry!” Alis shouts, looking around her in delight. “’derry!”
The Library Lion does not appear, however, and Alis kicks her feet and howls, angry at us for bringing up her companion if the creature is not here. She shoves her plush lion toy into her mouth defiantly, mulishly. Her glare reminds me of Wyndam’s, dark and betrayed.
“Would they die?” Pip asks. “Would they fall apart, or crumble, or . . . ?”
“Or would they live?”
“Could a creature of magic bring magic to the Overrealm?” Pip asks, voice tremulous.
“Bao bei,” I say softly. “Reader though you may be, I do not think that you qualify as magical.”
“But there is magic carved on my bones.”
“They are just pictures now,” I say. “No more potent than the herb soups my spells become, or the Words that cannot be Spoken here. They are meaningless.”
“Are they? Are you sure?” Pip asks, pleading, folding my hands between hers.
I am not sure. How can I be? It is not as if my Writer knows for sure. He may be the inventor of
our systems of magic, but its evolution has clearly outstripped even his knowledge of its workings.
“We have tested everything—” I repeat, meaning to reassure her. To reassure us both.
“How recently?” Pip interrupts. Her dark eyes are wide, pleading.
“Shall I try now?”
“Yes!”
I take a moment to think, and then decide to attempt a Word. Not wanting to cause any kind of commotion on a busy Saturday afternoon sidewalk in downtown Victoria if it is successful—and I have my doubts that it will be—I decide upon a Word of Sleeping. Alis is over-stimulated, and would benefit from a nap, anyway.
I take a deep, calming breath, and Speak.
Though the fog of my breath rises in the evening air, the Word strangles in the open, as do all Words in this realm. It is dead before the breath used to form it has truly left me.
Except . . .
I gasp, a hand flying to my lips. For just before it puffed out of existence, the Word spluttered and sparked, and left a very mild tingling against my flesh.
Pip freezes. Below me, Alis yawns dramatically, showing off her few pearly teeth. She rubs her hands against her eyes. Then she blinks, and frowns up at me, as if she is entirely aware that her newfound sleepiness is my fault and that she does not approve of it in the least.
“No,” I breathe, and say the Word again, staring hard at Alis. My child just blinks back up at me, annoyed now.
“Da,” she says reproachfully, and then looks away, back down to Library to babble to the stuffie about how exasperating her parents are.
“That had to be a coincidence,” I say. “A coincidence and static shock.”
“The universe is rarely so lazy,” Pip says cautiously. She reaches out and touches my bottom lip, but no electricity arcs between our flesh.
When the cab arrives, we bundle Alis and ourselves into it slowly. We move like creaking, gouty old warriors who are in no fit condition for yet another war. Warriors who know that, despite that, we may very well be called upon again, very soon.
CHAPTER 3
