by J. M. Frey
Elgar
With only enough time to pack a suitcase of fresh clothing, Elgar is immediately packed into a nondescript town car and driven straight to the airport. They stop over briefly to secure his fire-safe in the Seattle PD’s labyrinthine evidence locker for safekeeping. Plans are made over the radio unit in the car, and by the time they’re at SeaTac, Elgar knows that he’s going to have to go and check-in alone. Or at least, it will look like he’s alone. Jackson and Riletti are already there, waiting for him in plainclothes so they can accompany him through the airport, and take the flight to LA with him and Juan. There, he’ll be handed off to counterparts within the LAPD who’ll monitor him and the people around him for the duration of his stay.
Everything is secretive and hush-hush, and if it wasn’t for his fear of the mysterious man in black, Elgar would be reveling in how important and cool he feels knowing he has an undercover police detail.
They’d decided that Juan would meet him on the other side of security, where someone without a ticket can’t follow, just in case someone might decide to follow his assistant in order to get to him. But as the flight time gets nearer and nearer, Elgar feels sweat starting to bead under his beard and cap. Juan isn’t here yet. He isn’t here. The longer Juan’s arrival takes, the more fidgety he gets. Riletti and Jackson don’t seem disturbed, but Elgar can’t help staring at his phone, his knuckles white around the casing, willing it to chime with a message from Juan saying that he’d arrived safely. He’s so intent on the screen, in fact, that when someone flops down into the seat beside him, Elgar jumps and makes a noise that he will never, in a million years, admit to being a yelp.
“Chill, boss!” Juan says, struggling to pull the smile off his face. “Just me.” He’s laughing, the jerk.
“I was worried . . . I thought you’d be here by now,” Elgar says.
“I don’t look at my phone or text while I drive,” Juan counters. “Bad for your health.”
Elgar narrows his eyes and sizes up his assistant. “Speaking of—you look like ass.”
Juan snorts, but doesn’t contradict him. “Up all night.”
Elgar decides now is a good time for some more of those gay-sex jokes. “In a good way?”
Juan’s strained smile collapses. “In the exact opposite way. Boyfriend lost the entirety of his chill when he learned I was taking this trip with you.”
Elgar sits back, concerned. He’s never cared about the love lives of any of his other assistants, but Juan is rapidly becoming a friend, too, and, well, Elgar isn’t a complete narcissistic asshole. He hopes. “Is he not cool with you going for two weeks? Or is it that it’s me? Or . . . ?”
Juan grimaces. “He figured out who you are, and he’s been seething to have me introduce you. He started to get really creepy about it, and honestly, I just . . .” Juan rubs the inside of his elbow, shifting and wincing. “He got, ah . . . he’s into some kinky shit that I’m not . . . he didn’t even ask first and . . .” He rolls up his sleeve to show Elgar a messily taped square of gauze about the size of his palm. “I ended it. Kicked him out.”
Elgar wants to reach out, to see the wound under the bandage, but he thinks that would be invasive. Juan will show him if he wants to. Instead, Elgar seizes on the one phrase that stands out. “Kicked him out?” he asks, thinking that Forsyth would be proud of him for catching it.
Juan rolls his sleeve back down and shakes his head, rueful. “I didn’t realize it until I snatched the keys out of his hand and booted his ass to the curb, my old duffle stuffed full of his shit, but the crazy bastard was living with me. He left the house every day, but he was there every night—or near enough. He’d taken one of my bags and was . . . I don’t know, stealing laundry from the neighbors’ lines, or something? Christ, I don’t know. And I don’t care now. He’s out. He’s gone.”
“But where did you meet him?” Elgar asks, and that icy prickle down his spine is back. “How could you not know he was . . . homeless, I guess?”
Juan swallows hard, his eyes getting wet, a faraway glaze stealing over his face. “I . . . I met him in . . . in a bar,” he says, his voice dropping down into a thin, reedy breath that concerns Elgar instantly. “He was . . . end of the bar . . . asked me to . . . buy him a drink.”
“Juan!” Elgar snaps, the shaking horror seeping into his own skin making him feel chill and clammy.
“Boss,” Juan says, voice small and sounding very much like a child expecting to be chastened. “I think my . . . I think he . . .”
“Shhh,” Elgar says softly. “You don’t have to say it.”
“I’m sorry. I should have—”
“No, you couldn’t have known,” Elgar says gently, forgivingly. He doesn’t say: and there is nothing you could have done, I suspect, if you had. “Juan, I need to ask you something. I need you to tell me: what is his name?”
Sitting in the seats behind him, dressed like a married couple on their way to California for some sightseeing, Jackson nods once. He’s preoccupied with his smartphone, while his “wife” looks at a map of wine tours in Sonoma Valley, and from his position, Elgar can see that Jackson’s making notes on their conversation.
“I don’t . . .” Juan says, voice crackling and eyes suddenly shining, a desperate frown pulling furrows between his eyebrows and along his chin. “I don’t know. I don’t remember his . . . oh god, boss, why don’t I . . . why don’t I remember?”
“It’s fine. It’s probably just stress,” Elgar lies, trying to be soothing. Juan buries his face in his hands, struggling hard to keep it together as his shoulders shake. Elgar has a pack of tissues in his carry-on, and he hands these to his assistant when Juan next looks up, red-eyed and white-cheeked.
“Yeah,” Juan says thickly. “Stress. God, I cannot wait to get on this plane.”
Forsyth
Several hours later, Alis is finally asleep and drooling on my shoulder. I have been typing away at Finnar all afternoon while Pip rested, searching for any clue that what happened to Pip earlier had happened in some way to Elgar as well. But according to all my sources—including the CCTV of the SeaTac waiting lounge—Elgar has simply been sitting in the security lounge of the airport, waiting to board his plane all afternoon.
Pip and I are both wretchedly exhausted, so dinner is order-in pizza, which Pip brings upstairs to my office when it arrives so we needn’t dislodge Alis. She is feeling a little flushed again, and spent a good few hours poking at her mouth with her hands, drooling all over my desk. I don’t doubt we’re in for another few nights of teething, so am determined to let her sleep now while she can.
Pip and I eat in silence for a few moments before she says, with the air of someone who has come to a hard decision: “We need to tell Elgar.”
My eyes snap open. “I agree. But I hesitate to do so, only because he—”
“You think his imagination will run away from him.”
“Perhaps? Pip, he is being sta-stalked,” I say, and then swallow hard, trying to helm my tongue long enough to explain my worry. Of course I would be stuttering now—I always do when I have something heartfelt or important to say, when I am heavily emotional. It’s hateful. “And w-w-we ha-have no def-def-in-initive proo-of that it is by a ma-ma-ah-dman of his own creation. If we put th-the idea in his he-hea-ad that his attacker-er-er is ma-magical, he may miss a ve-ver-very r-r-real non-magical th-threat.”
Pip kisses my tripping tongue calm. “None of that, bao bei.”
“I am fruh-frus-frustrated,” I complain.
“I know.” Another soft kiss. “We have to at least tell him we suspect it, though.”
I am torn. I agree that he should be fully armed, but I also don’t want to scare him with an unproven hypothesis. Finnar has yet to actually find Elgar’s stalker. “But if the attacks are magical, there is little he or the police can do to stop them.”
Pip rubs her face. “And is there anything we can do?”
“At the moment?” I say. “I doubt it very much. These f
its have you too weak to travel, let alone fight whatever or whomever we may find, and I am without both magic and Shadow’s Men, or an army. Finnar is my best bet now, and I cannot take this rig with me to Seattle. For now, we must wait.”
“Wait for what?” Pip groans. “For something worse to happen? To me? To Elgar? Jesus, how do you know we’re doing the right thing?”
“Elgar seems safe enough in Los Angeles,” I say softly. “Let him stay there, ignorant, until I find something concrete in Seattle.”
Pip nods, but I can tell that she is chewing on a thought. I wait, quiet and still, until she is ready to share it.
“Are we committing the cardinal sin of psychodrama novels?” she asks in a small voice. “Should we be communicating more? Should we be sharing information? I mean, is this . . . ?” She trails off and scrubs her hands through her hair. “I don’t know this genre. I don’t know spy thrillers. Are we making the right choices? Are we just talking ourselves around in circles? I don’t know.”
I stand, careful not to jostle Alis back into wakefulness, and walk over to Pip. She takes my extended hand and lets me pull her up into a hug. Pip slides her arms around my waist, and rests her cheek softly against Alis’s side.
“You needn’t be the expert at everything, bao bei,” I whisper into her ear.
Pip huffs a laugh. “But that’s my role in all this, right?” The way she says it recalls that morning in Gwillfifeshire, the smell of the fresh reeds on the floor and the trailing smoke from the embers in the hearth-grate of our room in the Pern.
“Perhaps you and Alis should go help sow a field and you will find your eureka moment,” I suggest, standing again
Pip pinches my rear in retaliation. “Cheeky,” she murmurs.
I stiffen up to avoid jumping and yelping and waking our child.
Eventually, when the pizza is eaten and Alis clearly out for the night, we make our way to bed. Finnar does not need me to babysit it. Neither of us have really attempted sleep, but as Alis has been put in her crib already, it felt strange not to curl into our own bed as well. We neither of us, I think, wanted to be as far away from her as the sofa downstairs. Pip sits up against the headboard with her PhD thesis open on her lap, muttering about having missed something, about having forgotten something important.
“Are these Stations?” Pip finally says. “Are we missing something? Is this a quest?”
Above our dresser, opposite the end of our bed, the Excel Sheet from our first quest in Hain is framed and hung upon the wall. Pip had it in her travel bag when we crossed into the Overrealm. And like the precious few items I still have left from my previous life, I treasure the large, creased, shakily written-upon piece of parchment. It is obvious that Pip’s new line of questioning, her new worries, have come of staring at it in the half-dark of our bedroom.
“It is nothing like Elgar’s plots, if it is,” I offer into the darkness.
“I don’t know where it would have started, what the First Station would have been, or the call to action, or . . . I mean, we’re at home, but it feels like we’ve already started the adventure, so how can we have left home if we haven’t ‘left home’? What the hell kind of bullshit quest is this?”
I roll onto my side, enjoying the quiet whisper of the duvet sliding against my pajamas as I do so, and take Pip’s face between my hands. My wife is beautiful in the orange gloaming of the streetlights outside our bedroom window. I kiss her softly, gently, taking the time to linger, to communicate that I wish her to be at ease, to feel safe, to know that she is loved. Pip folds up her thesis and lets it drop to the floor. On my bedside table, the baby monitor pushes the steady, sure white noise of Alis’s deep, undisturbed breaths as she sleeps.
“Do not get caught up in the Hero’s Journey,” I say, when our kiss has wound down to its natural conclusion. “It is entirely possible that this is no adventure at all, and it is only our natural worry coloring our perspective. Terrible things happen in the Overrealm all the time, after all, and none of that is connected by narrative.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I know. These fits, the horrible threats, of course they’re connected to one another. But we will not solve how if we do not sleep. And we neither of us can do anything more tonight toward finding . . . the stalker. Elgar is out of Seattle, and presumably safe and sound. Tonight, let us just sleep.”
“That’s not exactly a comfort,” Pip sighs, and snuggles against my chest, pulling my arm over her waist and holding on to my admittedly thin bicep as if she were Alis and I, Library.
“Well, I am sorry that your realm is not clever enough to operate on the same predictive narrative rules as mine,” I sniff theatrically. Pip giggles and buries her cold nose against my neck in revenge, giggling harder when I yelp.
Elgar
The flight down is uneventful, and by the time they’ve been collected by their shiny new California security shadow, and set up in a three-bedroom suite in Beverly Hills, Juan is feeling calmer. A shower, a good sit-down with a tea, and a walk around the block energizes him, and they spend the evening eating weird California sushi and compiling everything Juan remembers about his nameless ex-boyfriend with the author fetish into an email for the Seattle police. That is the most they can do to help from LA, and they get a reply a few minutes later, thanking them for the extra information and assuring them that they should enjoy their time away and not let this mar their trip.
Despite the frenzied schedule of flesh-pressing, brunch catch-ups with his agent, long lunch meetings, and the indeterminable hours always gluttonously gobbled up by having to drive through the incessant LA traffic, the first two days Elgar and Juan spend in the city are akin to an actual vacation. Knowing that their troubles are stuck in Seattle (hopefully, Elgar’s mind whispers traitorously), and that there are two LAPD officers shadowing them at every turn, helps Juan enjoy his first trip to La-La Land and reminds Elgar of just how damn cool it is that someone is turning his books into a TV series. He’d lost perspective on that with all the fear and worry.
It turns out that having his cheery, optimistic, stylish assistant along is a great way to pull him out of his funk and help him get excited about the storytelling process again.
In fact, Elgar is in such a good mood that he even concedes to Juan dragging him clothes shopping, letting his assistant treat him like some sort of runway dummy. Though, he has to admit that the red velvet smoking jacket really does make him look suave. Elgar’s almost sad that Forsyth isn’t here. Juan’s endless nattering about color would have been the perfect compliment for Forsyth’s never-ending nagging about the importance of tailoring.
Juan is also an interesting eye to have along when they tour the production design house—Flageolet is going with a more shabby-Victorian-chic mishmash than Elgar had really envisioned when he’d written the books (he’d been thinking more Errol Flynn and less Neil Gaiman, if he were honest). But with Juan along, Elgar can see the appeal of a consistent, stand-out visual style that will, god willing, be easy and fun for cosplayers to emulate.
The casting agents had been busy during Elgar’s safe-house exile, and the two-day marathon table read of all ten episodes of the first season is scheduled for the third day of their stay. On the morning of, Juan and Elgar shake hands with the principal cast—who all look uncannily similar to what Elgar’s had in his head this whole time, save for Forsyth.
They had gone with an eleven-year-old boy who’s gawkier and weedier than any son of Algar Turn really should be. Elgar can forgive that, though. It’s not like the showrunner knows the boy is meant to grow into the Shadow Hand of Hain, and an excellent swordsman. The books never explicitly say that.
The actors are all keen to meet Elgar, and he shares a breakfast in the studio canteen with the principals before the first episode’s reading is scheduled to begin. (And yeah, okay, he might have whispered into that skinny ginger kid’s ear that he might want to consider picking up a sword-training regime. What of it?)
/> It’s surreal to listen to dialogue he’d written two decades ago re-purposed into lines spoken by real people, with real emotion. But the joy of sitting at the giant square conference table, sipping coffee and listening to his story come to life sweeps the weirdness away. His only real moment of grimacing disconnect comes when the Forsyth actor speaks—it’s all wrong; his cadence, his emphasis . . . he sounds sneering and squirrelly instead of calm, collected, and well-spoken like the real Forsyth. Never has Bevel’s biased point of view as the narrator been so evident.
The readings go on for the full two days, and with lunch breaks, each day tops out at about twelve hours. Following the final day’s last reading, when everyone in the room is emotionally exhausted from the ups and downs of the narrative and the long hours sitting and listening alike, Flageolet’s lead executive producer pulls Elgar aside. Gil crowds Elgar into a shadowed corner of the hallway as people are filing out with their confidential boxes of scripts, empty water bottles, bags of partially used notebooks and complimentary pens, satchels of scarves and sweaters and cough drops, and all the other detritus of being a working actor.
“Listen,” Gil says. He’s a vibrant man with chicklet teeth and artfully graying hair, but the beginnings of the kind of pooch that comes from not enough time in the gym and too many cocktails at Hollywood parties. “If you’re free, I’d like to take you out for dinner tonight. You and your assistant; we’ll need him on board with this.”
“With what?” Elgar asks, trying not to take the secrecy the wrong way. A quick glance at Gil’s eyes confirms that they are brown, not green.
But Gil only grins, wide and gleeful, and says, “Come on, man. Eight tonight, Chateau Marmont. I’ve got us a booth.”
“Who’s us?” Elgar asks, and again, Gil doesn’t answer. He winks instead, cheeky and sure of himself, and moves to leave. Elgar shoots out a hand and grabs a fistful of Gil’s sleeve, the creepy chill back and climbing up his spine once more. “Gil. Who’s us?”
