by J. M. Frey
In between all of that, Elgar has many doctor’s appointments—physiotherapy, cognitive tests, removal of the stitches, massages to have his lashed neck coerced back into mobility. I sit in the waiting rooms, looking around, watching, waiting for traps that are never sprung, attacks that never come. All in all, it is both one of the most mentally taxing and tense periods of my life.
And in all that time, Finnar is silent. The Viceroy has effectively vanished. The Overrealm is quiet—for a given value of such. The announcement that Reed will be appearing as a last-minute, surprise addition to the guest lineup at ConClusion causes the predictable online outpouring of joy and jubilation from his fans, but nothing out of the ordinary. Even the loathsome troll from Detroit seems to be taking a break from their vitriol.
My influence as a hacker for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has pull, but not as much as my role as Shadow Hand used to. While I can place the Viceroy on a no-fly list based on his appearance, and try to limit his travel and access to weaponry, the truth is that, if the Viceroy wanted to buy a gun, or hitch a ride, or take a taxi, or buy a bus ticket, none of the law enforcement agencies I could put digital pressure on are impervious. The wily villain has, for the time being, outfoxed me.
And oh, aren’t I galled to have to admit to it.
In my free time, I resume my sword-fighting practice in Elgar’s backyard, with a broom stick of comparable length and weight to Smoke. I confer with Pip about possible methods of trapping the Viceroy, and how he, in turn, may attempt to trap us.
In Victoria, Pip digs our adventuring clothes out of the back of the closet, the leathers we had both been wearing during our first foray through Hain. Through Elgar, I am able to obtain a permit to travel with Smoke. Pip ensures the sword as a prop for Flageolet Entertainment, which makes it permissible in her cabin baggage so long as it is in a case which is locked shut.
She reviews her thesis yet again, and consults the Excel hung in our bedroom for any ideas or revelations they might provide. But this adventure was not Written by Elgar, nor is it occurring within the realm of his imagination. If it is following his typical Seven-Station archetype, neither Pip nor I can decipher what they are, or where in the cycle we stand.
In the evenings, I compose a list of spells and Words that I remember, writing them in a small, cramped hand in a smaller notebook, which I intend to tuck into the knife pouch of my sword belt. I am out of practice with magic, but if the Viceroy is able to use it, then perhaps I will be, too.
Strangely, and against all of my previous desires, I find myself missing my brother fiercely. The Viceroy has always been his enemy, not mine. Not the Shadow Hand’s. While I kept tabs on the rascal, it was never my duty, nor within my purview, to take him down. One rogue warlock was never the Shadow Hand’s concern.
But now, I wish dearly that Kintyre was here, so that he could tell me if any of my preparations, my concerns, my predictions are anywhere near good enough.
“Forsyth!” Pip hisses at us as she crosses the expansive hotel lobby to where we stand, just inside the grand entryway. “This is not the side door.”
Elgar, clearly travel-fuddled, plane-rumpled, and hazy from pain medication, stands his wheelie suitcase up to balance on its own in the middle of the crowded hotel lobby, and says, quite eloquently: “What?”
“The side door,” Pip says again, crowding up next to him, trying to get her body between him and the open windows of the front wall. Of course, she will never be able to completely block him. Elgar is both taller and wider than my wife. “Remember how you were supposed to come to the exit near the—?”
“It was locked,” I interrupt. “We tried.”
Pip grimaces, then waves it away.
She tries to hustle us toward the elevator banks, but Elgar’s brain clearly hasn’t caught up with the rest of him. He tries to twist his head to follow her, but his feet stay planted and he stumbles. I catch his arm, and he winces and bites back a groan. He’s holding himself stiffly. He is not as well as he thinks he is, and he is overdoing it because he is vainglorious and ridiculous.
And I will admit, he is not the only one of us who is feeling fuddled and sore. Oh, how I hate airplanes. How Pip looks so energetic is beyond me, and so very unfair. Her plane only landed two hours before ours. She has checked into the hotel on our behalf, but she cannot have had the opportunity for a nap and a shower.
“Christ, you’ve lost weight,” Pip says, staring at where her hand landed on Elgar’s chest to keep him from falling.
“Yeah. Living in utter fear for three months does that to you,” he says, trying for a light, jocular tone and nearly getting there. Pip allows my creator the hug he is obviously angling for, though it’s more like he collapses around her shoulders than hugs her. They are not as awkward as they have been in the past, and that is something, at least. Though Pip does wince when his meaty hand lands between her shoulder blades. Elgar doesn’t notice, of course. It seems I am the least injured of the lot of us, which doesn’t fill me with confidence for the coming days.
“I’m pretty darn pleased to see you again,” he says softly. “Nearly thought I wouldn’t.”
“How’s Juan?” Pip asks, breaking away to grab the handle of his large wheeled suitcase. She is subtly trying to shove him toward the elevator again. He is still not catching the hint. I scan the crowd around us, checking to see how many people noticed him stumbling in through the front door.
Too many for my liking, is the answer.
“Another week in the cast,” Elgar says. He mimes a covering from shoulder to fingertips. “But they set his nose real nice.”
“Come, we’re attracting attention,” I point out, and indeed we are. Around us, fans wheeling their own suitcases and carrying their large costume props have paused in filtering toward the check-in counter. Elgar’s silhouette is distinctive. Before a gaggle of young ladies standing just to one side of us have managed to screw up their courage and set off a domino-chain of fans approaching us, I thread my arm through Elgar’s, as if he were a vaunted magisterial elder, and maneuver us toward the elevator banks. Pip is watching both of us, keeping his bag between us and the rest of the people in this tiny hallway.
Déjà vu settles hard between my eyes as we wait for the elevator to arrive. Two summers ago, when Pip was enormously pregnant, we traveled to this very city to meet Elgar for the very first time. And here Elgar and I now are, staring at each other via the reflective mirrored walls, pretending that we aren’t terrified of what’s to come.
I take a moment to really study Elgar, for his weight loss was not as startlingly apparent to me, as I have seen it happening bit by bit. Elgar’s face is a bit more gaunt than the first time I met him, his double chin turning to sagging jowls. He’s covered it well by letting his beard grow in a bit more, but the salt-and-pepper of his hair has given over entirely to salt now. He looks tired. His cheeks are flushed, and his eyes are slightly glazed. He is blinking unevenly, swaying a little on the spot as we wait. His clothes are just slightly too baggy. All in all, he’s probably lost about twenty pounds, but I cannot fault him if his appetite has been off since the stalking began, and that he hasn’t been eating much at all since the salad incident.
In short, he looks more like my life-worn, alcoholic father than ever, and I must forcibly remind myself that the man beside me is Elgar, not Algar. The dim, inadequate lighting and bronzy hue of the mirror does much to try to fool me of this fact, though, so I must look away to regard my creator’s profile instead of the reflection, to see the difference. A twist of fear that I had not realized had screwed itself into the place behind my sternum uncoils. The thrum of adrenaline is unexpected, as is the remnant of childhood terror that had kept me small and quiet around my father. In my own reflection, I see that my shoulders have rounded down, my face lowered; I am trying to be small and unobtrusive. In my mouth, my tongue flutters.
Blast and rubbish, and damn all that to all seven of the hells, anyway.
&
nbsp; I take a calming breath, force myself to stretch my spine, to raise my eyes to Elgar and smile as reassuringly as I can. He is Elgar Reed, and I am Syth Piper now, and this is not Turn Hall.
“Oh, hey, look! Kintyre and Bevel!” Elgar says suddenly, eyes pinned on something back in the hotel foyer.
“What? Where?” Pip asks, head whipping around to follow his line of sight. My heart squeezes in my chest, and I stumble after him, juggling the luggage and scanning the crowd for my brother. He is tall; he should stand out. Or above, at any rate.
“How did he get here?” I ask, unable to see what Elgar is pointing to. Kintyre is nowhere in sight.
“Cosplayers!” Elgar turns back to us, face filled with childish delight. “They look perfect!”
Pip and I look at each other, disappointed and self-conscious, and follow his pointing finger. We both realize at the same time that we have been hoping my brother and his trothed had somehow found a way to traverse the realms and join us here, found a way to help us with this fight.
Elgar’s delight shrivels, however, when the two women dressed as Kintyre and Bevel kiss at the urging of a crowd of fans with their cameras out. The crowd crows and squeals with delight, flashes snapping, as the Kintyre dips her companion.
“Wrong way around,” Pip mutters, grinning.
Elgar scoffs and turns away. Then he stares up at the numbers above the elevator doors, as if willing the car to come faster. It appears to be stopping at every single floor on it’s way down to us, however.
“What, it’s not like they’re wrong or anything,” Pip says. “This is Con-Inclusion, don’t forget. Kin and Bevel are a thing. Hashtag Binky lives.”
“Yeah, but, it’s not that it’s . . . it’s the way they’ve always done it,” Elgar mutters, pouting in his exhaustion. “Fans and the fetishization of male homoromantic and homosexual identities, and all that other stuff.”
Pip’s eyebrows jump. Pip, the woman I fell in love with, resurfaces from behind the mask of Lucy Piper, concerned and overstressed warrior-heroine. “I didn’t know you knew those terms,” Pip says, grinning at Elgar in parental approval. “Nice use of the ten-dollar jargon.”
“I did read your thesis, didn’t I?” Elgar says. “It’s up on the web and everything. I even understood it. Well, most of it.”
“Aw, you do care, Uncle Gar,” Pip says, grinning and perhaps even blushing a little. It is easy to forget that my wife once admired my creator, quite genuinely. Seeing her change in demeanor and energy is like a sharp slap to the face, and I realize all at once how very shut down Pip has been since our return to the Overrealm. How much her concern about the Damoclean sword, the proverbial other shoe, the hurricane outside of this artificial eye, has thrown a muffler over her naturally bright, energetic attitude.
“Yeah, just . . . not so much for that,” Elgar says with a huff. “It just feels like they’re . . . devaluing what I wrote.”
“I suppose it is fetishization in a way,” Pip admits. A small crowd of people are starting to appear around us, waiting for the elevator. More than one of them has their ears tuned into Elgar and Pip’s conversation. I wonder if I should put a stop to it. “But don’t forget that if fans want to make something with a romantic theme, then the audience-favorite characters are going to be overwhelmingly male, simply because a significant percentage of main characters in mainstream media texts are also male. The characters the audience identifies with or loves are mostly dudes, because overwhelmingly, the main characters are just dudes.”
“But my characters—”
“Elgar,” Pip interrupts gently, and around me, more than one eavesdroppers’ eyes pop wide. “Fan fiction has nothing to do with you. Sure, it’s about using your characters and worlds as building blocks, but it’s. . . . Fan fiction is a place where a lot of women of all ages learn about and experiment with their own sexuality, and using male characters not only gives them a sort of anonymizing distance, but frankly, it’s a bigger reflection of what it is women want in a relationship, rather than what they think a relationship between two dudes is actually like.”
“Okay, yeah, but—” Elgar grunts, and flings his good arm at the cosplayers, who are beginning to move on. “I mean, like, is that fair, to do that to someone? To just pretend they’re gay for fun? To impose on their identities like that?”
“But Bevel is gay,” I remind him. “And Kintyre is bi.”
Elgar makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat. “There’s a difference between knowing it and . . . I mean, knowing that they’re together, and Paired, and there’s a kid and everything, and . . . and, you know . . . seeing it.”
Pip’s eyebrows turn down. “Careful, Elgar. You’re skirting awfully close to sounding like a homophobe.”
“I don’t hate the gay stuff!” Elgar protests. “I just hate when people make stuff that isn’t gay into gay stuff because . . . because . . . I don’t know, like, what’s wrong with friendship, right? Why does every intense and close relationship have to be romantic and sexual? Why do people devalue male friendships so much? Why do fans? I mean, if I meant them to be gay together, I would have written it that way!”
“But you did,” Pip says. “They are.”
“Well, I know that now, but I just . . . I don’t know how to . . . my head hurts,” he complains. “I can’t . . . think right.”
“Sorry,” Pip says gently, patting his hand. “Sorry. I know you’re scared and just looking for something to lash out at. I get it, okay? It’s fine.”
We fall into silence then, everyone side-eyeing us, wondering if that’s the end of the dispute. I appreciate this bizarre respect for privacy that celebrities seem to engender in Canada—everyone looks, but nobody bothers. And when the elevator doors open, and all the other passengers are disgorged, only one man stops to stare.
This man is wearing an electric blue t-shirt, and a badge lanyard that marks him as staff.
“Mr. Reed?” the man says, his voice strangled with surprise. “What are you doing here?”
Elgar turns to look at him. The young man doesn’t move on, and ends up blocking the entrance for those around us. I would prefer if we were not the center of a crowd, so I pull us back against the opposite wall to allow the other people waiting their chance to board the elevator, and to try to block Elgar from view of the lobby.
“Uh, I’m Ichiro Eiji,” the young man says suddenly, when he realizes that Elgar has no good reason to answer him. He shoves his hand at Elgar so abruptly he nearly punches him in the gut.
“Ah, the guest coordinator,” Elgar says, brightening, accepting the handshake. I can tell that it’s all forced charm and smiles, but Ichiro can’t, apparently. He doesn’t seem to see that Elgar’s too wrung thin to want to do this now.
“You’re here early, Mr. Reed,” Ichiro says, and he’s thumbing the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt absently. He wants to tell someone that he’s seen Reed, inform his higher-ups, possibly. That would throw all our plans to keep Elgar under wraps straight into a pool of kelpies.
“Wanted an extra night to spend time with family,” Elgar says. It’s an elegant half-lie, and just true enough that it comes out as sincere. It’s the one we decided on, secretly, so that if someone had swindled the secret of his travel dates and itinerary out of the convention committee, they would be misinformed.
“Syth Piper,” I say, reaching out to shake Ichiro’s hand, as well. “Elgar’s cousin. And this is my wife, Lucy.”
“Oh,” Ichiro says, looking back and forth between us.
“It’s fine,” Elgar says.
Ichiro, on the other hand, looks like he’s trying to swallow a tack. “Mr. Reed—”
“It’s not a big deal. So I came a day early,” Elgar repeats, as if repetition could make Ichiro Eiji less anxious. He flops his hand in dismissal.
“But your room isn’t—”
“Don’t worry,” Pip jumps in, tamping down her ire. “We have a suite. We thought he could just stay with us? You kn
ow, save the con some money.” She smirks at that. If there is one thing ConClusion has, it’s an abundance of money. The attendees number in the hundreds of thousands—that is a lot of badge fees.
“But the insurance . . .” Ichiro says, dithering. “And you need to meet your handler for the weekend.”
“I got an email already,” Elgar says, dismissively. “We’ve talked.”
Pip smiles at Ichiro—her steamroller smile, the one she uses when she’s about to intellectually bludgeon acquiescence out of someone. She slings a friendly arm across his shoulders, and pulls him to the side, speaking softly enough that I cannot actually make out all that she is saying. It seems to work, though, for Ichiro nods miserably, and unclips his radio. He walks away, chattering into it, heading down the hallway partially blocked off from the lobby by a large easel with a sign that reads: “Convention Staff Only.”
“Lucy Piper, the miracle worker,” Elgar says, grinning. He puts a hand on the mirrored wall in a way he probably thinks is subtle.
“Not that big a miracle,” Pip says. “He’s still informing his boss.”
“At least they do not have the room number,” I say. “We hold that secret yet, do we not, bao bei?”
“As long as the concierge doesn’t give it to them,” Pip says in answer.
The elevator dings again, and this time, we manage to make it aboard.
A few others join us, and we are squeezed between the wall and a large luggage cart overflowing with suitcases, plastic grocery bags of chips and sodas and a tray of pre-cut vegetables, and a massive pile of board games in battered, well-loved boxes. There are four other occupants on this ride with us—two men, two women—and the tall, thin man on a cane elbows his shorter, larger companion in the ribs and jerks his chin toward Elgar. The car goes quiet as all four try, and fail, to not stare at my creator.
Elgar offers them a cheeky wave and a little lopsided smirk, and the youngest woman—dark skin, dyed red hair, glasses, clad in a fannish t-shirt—has nearly worked up enough gusto to say something when the elevator chimes and the door opens onto their floor. Bravery aborted, they trundle out, lugging the cart, all four pairs of eyes fused to Elgar’s face until the door closes again and cuts them off from view. Just before it snaps shut, Elgar waggles his fingers at them, grinning.
