by J. M. Frey
And never settled.
Yet here they are, leaning into each other’s warmth, Kintyre’s hand on Bevel’s shoulder, comfortable and sweet like an old married couple. It strikes Elgar that they are an old married couple now, and the realization churns in his gut. Kintyre is looking at Elgar expectantly, waiting for him to decide whether or not to join them. Elgar nuts up and walks closer.
“Hi,” he says, low.
“Hello,” Kintyre replies.
Bevel says nothing. He just narrows his eyes at Elgar, and Elgar is struck, again, by how something he’d written as a throwaway has had so much impact on someone else. Bevel’s eyes are a deep sapphire, and just below his left one, there is a thin white scar.
I did that, Elgar thinks. I did that to him. That’s where Bootknife nearly cut his eyes out to give them to the Viceroy as a gift.
Kintyre finally turns to Elgar. “Have you quenched your thirst enough?” Elgar nods, eyes wide and watering, not expecting to be caught out the way he is. “Good. Because I have a question for you. Why do you look like my father?”
“I’m, uh . . . I’m not sure how to answer that one,” Elgar admits. “I mean, Forsyth told me I looked like him, too, but I can’t honestly say that I did it intentionally. I guess that it’s just that . . . well, as the father of the hero, I guess I always just sort of conflated myself with him? And, um, my world had just . . . run with that. That assumption. This is so confusing.”
“Very much,” Kintyre agrees. Beside him, Bevel scoffs.
“You don’t approve of us,” Bevel blurts, suddenly.
“What?” Elgar splutters.
“You keep staring.”
“No, I mean . . . I created you, and you came out of the books, and . . . it’s not—”
“You don’t stare at Forssy like that,” Kintyre says, reasonably.
Elgar bristles. “Well, I’m used to him. Besides, Forsyth’s not . . . I mean, he’s not like I predicted, there’s a bunch about him that I never fleshed out, but you guys . . . I know you so well, and I didn’t, I never knew that you . . .”
Bevel jerks back, his expression open and wounded. Oh, how Bevel’s expressions were always easy to read, easy to write, but Elgar never wanted to see this look on his face.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” Bevel breathes.
“Do what?” Kintyre asks, hand tightening on Bevel’s shoulder.
“Make me love Kin,” Bevel says, and Elgar feels shame, strangely, curl around his lungs.
“No, I . . . I didn’t. I—”
Kintyre scowls. “I almost see why the Viceroy is so vengeful.”
Elgar chokes on his own teeth. “You can’t mean that you want me to—”
“I mean, he’s a madman. A complete nutter,” Kintyre dismisses. “I don’t want to kill you. But Bevel is the most important person in my life and you never thought so. You didn’t even know.”
Wrongfooted, Elgar blusters. “It never occurred to me!”
“That we would fall in love?” Bevel asks, aghast.
“That it’s something you would want!” Elgar blurts back. “That . . . that domesticity, a house, a family, a kid is what you—” Bevel takes a step back, abruptly. He stalks away, and prowls directly into one of the shadowed corners of the suite.
Bevel makes a slow circuit of the massive suite, making a show of searching for . . . oh, for booby traps, maybe? Elgar thinks. “What’s he—?”
“He’s angry,” Kintyre says. “He does this now, goes for long walks instead of shouting. For Wyndam’s sake. And Bradri doesn’t know better—she’s so young. You can’t yell at a dragonet.”
“Why would he be angry?” Elgar asks. “I’m only being honest.”
“Being honest is not the same as being deliberately cruel,” Kintyre corrects, and Elgar goggles at him.
Is he being talked down to by his own creation? If anyone should agree with him on every opinion he holds, it ought to be Kintyre Turn. Right? “Was I wrong, then? Is that something he wants?”
“He’s a bit baby-hungry, if I can be forgiven for spilling his darkest secrets,” Kintyre says. He is answering Elgar, but watching Bevel pace from corner to corner of the room, peering up and around, disguising his fury by making it look like he’s searching the unknown spaces for unseen dangers. “It’s a bit womanish,” Kintyre adds. “But it’s what he wants, and I wouldn’t say no, if we were able. Are two human men of the Overrealm able to have children together?”
“No,” Elgar answers, stunned.
Kintyre sniffs and shrugs. “Shame.”
“But he . . . really?”
“He is Written with a massive family. A whole gaggle of nieces and nephews. Are you surprised that he misses children? That he wants a large family of his own?”
“Not when you put it like that, I guess. I just . . . I never imagined domesticity for you because it’s not . . . it’s not something I have.”
Now it’s Kintyre who goggles at Elgar. “What, no wife?”
“None.”
Kintyre looks baffled, his dimples drawing down. “But you’re a Writer.”
Elgar chuckles, and rubs the back of his neck, feeling self-depreciative and anxious. “Surprisingly, that isn’t much of a draw here.”
Kintyre snorts and crosses his arms over his chest. “You must be doing something wrong, then.”
“I do everything wrong,” Elgar agrees, sadly. “I see what you have, and I . . . I’m not jealous. I don’t want to take it from you, and hoard it for myself. I just . . . I’m loved,” Elgar says, thinking of the fans who always look at him with quiet adoration. “But not . . . not like you. Not like you have. I wish I could have . . . the difference between us is that someone thinks that you’re worth loving. You came from me—if you’re worthy, shouldn’t I be, too? What am I doing wrong?”
“Perhaps refrain from saying things like that,” Kintyre says, and gestures to where Bevel is returning, his face a study in deliberate blankness.
Elgar chuckles, hollow and angry at himself. “’S funny. That’s exactly what your brother says.”
“Listen to Forssy,” Kintyre says, but it’s kind. He pats Elgar’s back, and the strength behind the affectionate gesture makes Elgar rock on his feet. “He’s the smart one, after all.”
Elgar means to say something more to that, maybe something pithy, but before he can decide what it will be, there’s a resounding, hissing crack.
CHAPTER 12
FORSYTH
The room around us shakes.
“Earthquake!” Ahbni shouts as she jumps to her feet.
“No,” I correct, for beside me, Pip’s eyes are glowing faintly green. Blast and damn it. I move to help her, but Pip bats me away, already seeming to find her focus again. Why so quick a recovery this time? Was the magic only minor? Or is it because the Viceroy is closer?
“How much time was that bastard going to need to recover?” Kintyre sneers at me, an accusation, and I shout back: “Well, I am no master warlock myself, am I, brother mine? I couldn’t possibly know—”
Another crunching boom makes the building rock. The floor, where Pip’s feet touch it, begins to crumble away. So, too, the sofa under her hands. She jumps up, takes a step away, but each step leaves a flaking crater in it’s wake.
“Get her up!” Bevel shouts. “Get her off the ground!”
“Don’t touch me!” Pip says, even as Kintyre lunges for her and scoops her up like a sack of flour, his wide shoulder under her stomach, her feet by his face.
“You don’t touch me,” Kintyre says, and I can see the logic in his choice of carry, even if it is undignified.
“Elgar, move!” I shout at our creator, and the man lurches into motion, following along beside Ahbni as we all make for the door. Bevel swings it open, and then halts so abruptly on the threshold that Kintyre has to twist to keep Pip’s knees from hitting the back of his head.
“What’s—?” I begin, as I cannot see around the height of my brother and
the width of our creator.
“The hall’s gone!” Bevel says.
“What do you mean, gone?” Ahbni asks, straining to see around everyone. “You can’t just make a hall not exist!”
Bevel and Kintyre both move out of the way, and around Elgar and Ahbni, I see what they mean. There’s just a blank, black void beyond the jamb. A sucking wind screeches in my ears now that they are not blocking it. It is cold, and endless, and frightening. Ahbni reaches out and slams the door shut on the horrifying, howling nothingness.
“Right, the window, then,” Kintyre says. “Bev, rope.”
Bevel nods and pulls a coil of rope from the bottom of his quiver. I didn’t know Bevel carried rope there, but Elgar had Written it so that they were both fully outfitted for war.
“Wait, the window?” Pip wails, as Kintyre carries her over to it. “You’ve been in the Overrealm for five goddamn minutes and you’re making me crawl out a window?”
Kintyre laughs and pinches Pip’s bottom. Pip boots him in the rib, but it is quick and sharp to keep from dissolving any part of him.
“You deserved that,” Ahbni says when Kintyre makes a small, pained noise.
In revenge, my brother grabs Pip’s ankle and presses the sole of her boot against the glass. It begins to crumble and dissolve at once, and I must commend Kintyre for thinking of it. The glass in these rooms is always double-glazed, and thick enough to prevent all but the most deliberate destruction. The crumbling, while effective, stops spreading almost immediately, however, and the resulting hole is only big enough for one to put an arm through, not a whole person.
“Wait, let me try my hands,” Pip says, craning over Kintyre’s head to see. He obligingly turns her around. Placing her hands on either side of the hole widens it, but only barely. “Shit, outta juice,” she says, and Kintyre drops her back to her feet. The carpet remains intact. Her eyes are no longer glowing.
“Stand back,” Bevel says, and everyone jumps out of the way when he hefts one of the chairs over his head.
“Okay, then,” Elgar says, looking bemused as Bevel knocks out the loose glass around the crumbled edges, until the hole is big enough for even him. “And now what?”
Bevel drops the chair, and with a quick and practiced motion, he ties one end of the rope coil to the shaft of an arrow. Wordlessly, like the well-practiced team they are, Kintyre grabs the buckle of Bevel’s belt, steadies him as his trothed leans backward out of the hole and chooses a target above him. Bevel looses the arrow, and it catches.
On what, I’m not sure, but I decide that when trading on the narrative convenience of being “rescued” by a Main Character, one ought not question the logistics.
Kintyre pulls Bevel back inside and to his feet, and then my brother-in-law grins cheekily at me and gestures grandly for me to go first. “After you, my lord Shadow Hand,” he says, and I shoot him a dirty glower as I wrap a hand in the rope.
“Wait, what?” Ahbni asks. “Shadow Hand?”
Pip jerks her thumb at me, smirk widening into a high-wattage grin.
Ahbni blinks, looking back and forth between us, and then sits back, mouth a perfect O.
“No,” she gasps.
“Yes,” I say.
“I put it in the books!” Elgar grumbles. “I don’t know why everyone’s so surprised. I put in the clues!”
“But Forsyth Turn.” Ahbni frowns.
I wonder when she realized that I was not, in fact, merely Syth Piper. Probably right around when she saw Kintyre Turn and Bevel Dom appear in a flash of light in a hotel bedroom.
“Forsyth is so much more than his tropes,” Elgar defends, a bit shamefaced. “He was supposed to be—you’ll forgive me, my boy, for being brutally honest—the craven, envious sibling. The, ah, the one who might betray the hero out of greed or guilt. The Edmunds and Wormtongues. I even thought, for a time, that you might secretly be Bootknife,” he says with an introspective chuckle, while I grab the rope and wrap it around my foot the way Rupin Pointe the Elder taught me.
“Bootknife?” I echo with horror, and touch the thin scar on my left cheek, covering it with my fingertips as if afraid that it will suddenly sprout limbs and give birth to the villain if I say his name too loudly.
“Turns out, you’re a Hufflepuff hero instead,” Elgar chuckles. “You talk people down instead of hurting them.”
“Oh goody. Lucky us,” Ahbni says, and sends a glare out toward the rope, where it’s clear she wishes I had been more a man of action.
“Stop stalling, Forssy,” Kintyre says, and slaps my back hard enough to send me swinging out into the open air.
“Elfcock!” I yelp back at him over my shoulder as I scramble to grip the rope tight.
Luckily, the con suite was only three floors up, and it is not so far a drop. All the same, I hand myself down the rope as swiftly and surely as I may. When I reach the cobbled inner courtyard and drop free, my palms are burning and my fingers stiff, my shoulders aching. This was not something I learned to do from either of the Pointes I used to duel with.
I check the building, but the rest of it seems intact. Our destruction was localized, then. Focused. That means the Viceroy must know exactly where we are. We are now targets. Blast.
Above me, Bevel has Ahbni on his back, and is scaling down swiftly and expertly. Pip must be doing some rope climbing in her gym sessions, for she is quick and efficient in scaling down on her own after him. Next, Kintyre wraps Elgar in the rope, then mounts it directly after him, clinging with only one hand. Together, they inch downward in small jerks as Kintyre presses his feet against the glass wall of the building, and rappels down one-handed, the other wrapped in Elgar’s cardigan. Elgar’s hand never leaves his ankle, and Bevel reaches up to let Elgar stand on his shoulders when he gets close to the ground, before Elgar stumbles down and onto his feet and Kintyre hops lightly down after him.
“Holy shit,” Elgar pants, chest heaving as he wipes his forehead on his sleeve. “Oh my god. I’ve never done anything like that before. That was crazy.”
“It was three floors,” Bevel says, eyebrow raised skeptically.
“Yeah, dangling outside a building,” Elgar answers. “Oh my god.”
“This is our Writer?” Kintyre asks me, hands on his hips and head cocked.
I wish to say something glib, like, “unfortunately,” or “if you can believe it.” But Elgar is looking up at me with big, scared eyes, and I know too well the danger of an ill-thought word or a playful insult taken the wrong way.
Instead, I say: “Come, let’s head back inside.”
“Why?” Ahbni asks, but she’s already following us as we all make for the entrance to the convention center foyer.
“Because the Viceroy is here,” Pip says, “and clearly, he’s hiding in plain sight.”
I tap the pouch with my tablet in it. “Most of the men matching the Viceroy’s physical description are down in the gaming area. We shall start there. I have a feeling that the Viceroy will not be able to resist flying at us if he were to spot his archnemesis among the throng.”
“Oh, well, doesn’t that make me feel loved,” Kintyre snorts.
I cannot help throwing a cheeky grin over my shoulder at him as I lead our party toward the escalators. “Well, brother mine, you are good for something, you know.”
When we reach the bottom—after much wonderment and vocal amazement at the magic of moving stairs from Kintyre and Bevel—I say to Elgar: “Pull down your cap and hunch your posture. Pretend that you are . . . not you. We do not have time for you to be mobbed right now.”
Thankfully, my creator does as he’s told. He puts his head down, and bulls through the crowd in my wake. I have no real plan, which irks me to no end, save to parade Kintyre through the convention and hope that the Viceroy takes the bait. We cannot fight what we cannot see, and if Elgar and I are not temptation enough for the mad villain, then I hope Kintyre and Bevel may tip the scales in our favor.
For our part, I hold Pip’s hand in one o
f my own, muttering Words of Invisibility, and Slipping, and everything that I have learned as Shadow Hand that may help us pass unseen, and in the other, I grip Elgar’s, so that the slipping spell might include him, too, and spare us the possibility of being impeded or delayed by eager fans. I hope this allows the Viceroy to see Kintyre and Bevel, and miss us.
Of course, I must also hope that the Viceroy doesn’t have the ability to sense where the magic is being siphoned off to, that he cannot pinpoint us because I am leeching power from Pip. I wish I had a third hand, so I could have Smoke freed, and bared, if need be.
We emerge into the gaming area, a wide swath of round tables surrounded by seated folks of every possible description. Fortunately, most of the people are too focused on the cards in their hands, or the elaborate dioramas of battle on their tables, or colorful board games, to note our passage. Kintyre and Bevel weave around the massive clusters of gamers, walking back and forth, back and forth like inane, meandering shuttles amid the loom of people, spooling out their path temptingly.
Pip, Elgar, and I follow more slowly behind them, in a more or less straight line, dodging around the folding chairs, hopping lightly over satchels and the glossy plastic bags of purchases littering the walkway, trying to keep our presence as minimal as possible. Elgar follows as best he can, less agile, but motivated by urgency and the pull of my grip to move quickly. The feel of someone’s intense, hateful gaze prickles on the back of my neck, but the only other person behind me is Ahbni. For everyone else, the Words seem to be working. Damn Elgar Reed for Writing me to be so paranoid.
It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you, I think, recalling the clever poster I had once seen hanging in Pip’s office back in Vancouver. At the time, I’d thought it a terrifying warning, before I understood that it was intended to be humorous. Now, I find it wryly appropriate.
When Kintyre and Bevel have finished wandering the warp of the area, they slowly, looking utterly natural, begin to walk the weft. They stick out, literally head and shoulders above the crowd, easily seen. The rest of us pause on the edge of the floor, where the gaming gives way to the open space of a food court populated with snack trolleys. I cannot help but imagine that we look like a troop of meerkats, waiting for any indication that our bait has proved to be temptation enough. Elgar, at least, welcomes the chance to catch his breath.
