by J. M. Frey
“Oh, Bevel,” the Viceroy says, voice dropping to a seductive register, and it is close, intimate. “Hello.”
In an instant, he’s abandoned his perch over Ahbni, and is pressed right up against Bevel’s body like a lover. Bevel tries to flip the gun around, to aim it at the Viceroy’s head, and a tendril of green magic wraps itself around Bevel’s wrist and wrenches his hand behind his back, jamming it upward so hard I can hear Bevel’s shoulder pop. A flare of green flame consumes the ray-gun, and the prop melts right out of Bevel’s hand, pooling in a puddle of hot plastic on the floor and filling the room with the acrid stench of burning chemicals.
My brother-in-law only grimaces and grunts, grinding his molars together, not giving the Viceroy the satisfaction of voicing his pain.
“I’ve missed you,” the Viceroy whispers. His hand on Bevel’s cheek is tender, and light, but also strong; his fingers brush the lower lid of Bevel’s left eye, seeking out the scar that Bootknife had left in the furrow under his eye two decades prior, when Bevel had been young, and strong, and handsome. “You’ve gotten older, but your eyes . . . your fine, blue eyes are the same. Oh, Bevel, what a cruel mistress Time is. Look at you and Kintyre—old men. White hair and wrinkles and sagging faces. I should pluck out your eyes now, before they are lost behind cataracts. Would you thank me for it, preserving your one true beauty? I think you would.”
“Get off him!” Kintyre snarls.
“Tut tut, Great Hero of Hain,” the Viceroy teases. “So jealous. You’ve shared him often enough before. Surely you can’t object to letting me have a taste?”
The Viceroy, golden eyes on Kintyre, slowly and deliberately leans forward and bites Bevel’s bottom lip.
“Aren’t you sick of playing second to this brainless barbarian?” the Viceroy smears against Bevel’s grimace. The rest of us dare not try to attack now, lest he use Bevel as a shield, or decide to kill him immediately and toss him aside. “Join me, Bevel. I’ll cast off the girl. I’d rather have you instead.”
“Rot in all seven of the hells,” Bevel sneers, turning his head as far away as he is able.
The Viceroy sighs dramatically and pushes Bevel back hard. Kintyre is there, though, keeping him from breaking his arm in his fall, getting his trothed immediately back on his feet. The Viceroy paces back to Ahbni, daringly presenting his back to us.
“So, I am stuck with this one, aye? Well, as Mrs. Turn rightly pointed out, I have invested so much time in her. It would be a waste to just toss her and her delightful, delicious hatred aside quite so callously. She needs a more appropriate name, though, don’t you think? Something really Hainish. What do you think of Whisperblade? She did slide your dagger into our creator so quietly, so very neatly. And it was so very appropriate that she killed him with the knife you stole from my dear Bootknife.”
“It was never his blade to begin with!” Kintyre snarls. “It wasn’t mine, either.”
“Details, details,” the Viceroy dismisses.
“Or you could just not,” Pip offers. “Come on, Vicey-wiessy. There are so many other raging lunatics in the world. MRAs, internet trolls, people who don’t believe in feminism, alt-right Nazis. Why use her?”
“Why?” the Viceroy laughs. “Because she asked me to. Because dear sweet Maddie knew her from an online forum, and I could taste the anger in her words. Because she gave me refuge from your police in Detroit. Because I knew she could make you love her. Because she reminded me of you.” He pauses, cocking his head in a theatrical show of thoughtfulness, one finger pressed to his lips. “You know, Reader, I think she reminds me entirely too much of you. And do you know what I’ve always wanted to do to you?”
Pip takes a shaking step backward, hands up to cover her face, to fend him off. “No,” she grunts, guttural, primeval.
Ahbni is, as far as I can tell, still unconscious from the blow I delivered to her head. It’s been so long now that it’s possible her brain is even swelling, that I dealt her irreparable damage. At the time, it didn’t seem like a concern, but seeing her limp and gray-faced now, her chest rising jerkily, with the Viceroy’s blade poised by her jugular, a flash of guilt pierces my heart, swift and deep.
Oh, Writer’s balls, what have I done? She cannot get up and run. She cannot even protect herself.
A flash of something slim and metallic green and small in the Viceroy’s hand catches my attention—the glint off a blade. An arc of motion too fast to really see, and far too fast to stop. A splatter of red on the concrete.
“No!” Pip screams, lunging for Ahbni, hands out to stopper up the gaping smile ripped in her throat. But the Viceroy’s blade is raised again, and I tackle Pip to the side, out of the way. The blade comes down on the back of my boot, nicks the heel, and I roll Pip and I over and over until we are far enough away, out of the reach of the blade, before yanking us both upright.
“Come back here!” the Viceroy shouts. “Do as I say! Obey me!”
“Never,” Pip snarls.
“You are mine,” the Viceroy roars. “You never stopped being mine. And I will turn everything you touch to ash. I will take it all from you until the only person you can rely on is me. You and I will be the only ones who know what really happened, who know the truth!”
Dread punches me like an icy fist in the solar plexus, and I gasp for air as Pip’s face drains of all color. I want to tell her to run, to flee, but where would she go, that the Viceroy would not follow? Where could I send her that he could not find? The only way to protect Pip and Alis now is to end the Viceroy.
“I’m not . . . but I’m not important to the narrative!” Pip shouts. Her eyes are glued to Ahbni, though, sucking on air, eyes open and rolling wildly, blood frothing on her lips.
“Don’t look, bao bei,” I urge her. “Don’t watch.”
“We need to—”
“There’s not enough—”
Before I can even say it, Ahbni’s convulsions cease. Her body drops flat against the cement, limbs flopping. Her eyes stare upward, blank.
Dead.
“Oh god,” Pip sobs, her voice a harsh and rasping thing. “Oh god, no. Why would you—you didn’t need—I thought . . . I thought you just wanted Elgar,” Pip says, and her whole body is shaking now. She swallows, heavily, over and over again, and I am too filled with grief for her sorrow to feel much else.
“I wanted my revenge on him, yes, but I had that the moment I first had you in my grasp. The woman who knows more than he? The woman with power? Ha!” The Viceroy laughs, gleeful at her horror.
“I thought . . . I don’t . . .” Pip whines.
“What use have I for a fat old man? You think I couldn’t have killed him the moment I found him?” the Viceroy sneers. “For months, I knew where he was! He slept safe and unaware, oblivious as a pig to the slaughter knife above his head. He lazed about in ignorant luxury like the fat king he was. And I watched, and I knew.”
“Then . . . I don’t . . .” Pip gasps. She is inching away from him, and I step between them, between her and this man who wants to steal my wife, my best friend, the mother of my daughter, this man who wants to rip her away from us. This man who wants to steal Bevel from my brother, who seeks to take Kintyre’s power and fame, who hates the House of Turn with all he has. “Why wait?”
“It was not enough to simply kill him,” the Viceroy says. His eyes have begun to take on a hint of acid green, his hair and clothing lifting in the beginnings of a cyclone of air that swirls around him alone. His mother was a weather witch, and in his manic fury, the elements struggle to bend to his whiplash will. “Not enough to kill you all! I want you humiliated. Defeated in the way that you forced on me! Unmanned and frustrated at every turn. Cornered! I wanted him running scared, and I want you all helpless. And now, here he is! Dead before his audience, broken on the floor, nothing, and you failed to save him!”
Pip takes a step toward the Viceroy, but I will not be moved.
“And you,” he snarls at her, eyes burning green. “I wan
t you broken, so I may put you back together again in my image!”
The Viceroy’s feet leave the ground, his toes brushing the concrete as the wind carries him higher, higher, until he is hovering in midair like an anime villain.
“Oh, how stereotypically melodramatic,” Pip sighs, and I have to press down the ridiculous urge to giggle. Only my wife could sound so put out and annoyed in the midst of such deadly peril.
“And,” the Viceroy punctuates with another flare of acid-green flame crackling around his fist, “I needed him to lead me to you.”
“Leave off Pip!” Kintyre shouts, yanking the Viceroy’s attention back to him and Bevel. “I’m your archnemesis!”
“You?” the Viceroy says, and it is followed with a howling gale of hysterical, painfully shrill laughter that makes the Viceroy’s eyes pop, the tendons and veins on his hands and face strain and stand out against his flushed flesh. “You are nothing! You are an oaf with a sword and a swagger, and little else! You have never been a match for me! I am faster, cleverer, more powerful! You have only won because I have been Written to lose! You? Do not insult me. You are not my equal, Kintyre Turn.”
He swings his lizard-gaze around to stare me dead in the eye, licking his chops.
He stares, brutal and broken. And the last floating pieces, the last itching lack of understanding smoothes into place, soft and silky, whispering the truth. I know, now. I understand. I understand everything.
“It’s me,” I say, the revelation sweeping down my body like ice water had been poured over my head. “All this time, Elgar thought he was Writing the tale of a villain being rousted by a hero, and it wasn’t that at all, was it?” The Viceroy grins at me, eager for me to explain, eager to gloat. “It was never that. Kintyre’s adventures were the surface. But underneath it was a . . . a spy novel. The Shadow Hand and the former Right Hand of the King. You hate House Turn, but it was never Kintyre you plotted against.”
“No!” the Viceroy agrees. He licks his lips again, as if my revelation is the most succulent feast he’s ever consumed. “He got in my way, but it was never him I wanted.”
“It was me,” I gasp. I turn to my wife. “Pip. You came to me because I am the Shadow Hand. You were brought to Turn Hall because . . . he threw you at me because . . . not to get at Kintyre, but because it’s me.”
“It’s you, what?” Bevel asks through a clenched jaw.
My body shaking, the words ripped from the deepest, darkest part of my gut, the answer falls like lead from my dry mouth: “I’m the Main Character.”
The Viceroy throws back his head and howls, dancing a circle in the air. “Yes! Yes!” he screams. “And now I will kill you and end this story forever!”
“But you’ll die!” Pip says. “I don’t understand. If you end the story, if you destroy it all, doesn’t that mean that you’ll—”
“And what point is there to life in this stinking, horrible realm, anyway?” the Viceroy sneers. “Mother is not here! We are at an end, Main Character. For you are clever. You have outmaneuvered me at every twist. Every turn. Every turn, but one!”
“Which is?” I ask, stepping neatly into the pause the Viceroy leaves, because he so dearly wishes to tell us, and any hint of what he is planning is one extra advantage to our side.
The Viceroy’s palms start to crackle and swirl with a particular spell that I have dreaded seeing since the moment Pip began to suffer her nightmares. “I still have that which you value under my control.”
The magic flows toward Pip, and she barely has a moment to take a step back before it has her in its grasp for the third time.
“No, wait—” Kintyre shouts, bounding toward Pip, trying to get Foesmiter between the two of them. As if the magic from his sword will do any good. It is already too late.
For here is the thing I feared. Again.
Here is the thing that Pip and I never discussed a protection from, because there is none. Here is the thing that kept me awake every night, even as the pain of the magic runoff kept her. Because I am no warlock, no spell-caster, no witch. The Words I know have never worked in the past, and the spells I practice are small things of divination and warding.
The only protection, the only thing that has saved Pip from this in the past is her own will.
And that?
That I believe in strongly.
I grasp her hand hard, and together, we stare down the Viceroy. Her eyes are taking on that horrific, telltale tinge of green again, the acidic color swirling out like venomous ink from her pupils, but she is grimacing and blinking hard, forcing it to slow. The purple beats it back.
“I’m here for you,” I whisper in her ear. “Tell me what you need. I am the Main Character. I can make it happen.”
“A Word,” Pip says, trying to grin around the grimace that the war inside her own flesh causes. “A powerful Word. A Last Word.”
“Let me think,” I say. “The mask will have the right one, if I just had—” I plunge my free hand into my jerkin, but Pip suddenly stops struggling.
She sways back on her heels, wrenching my arm where our fingers are entwined. Her irises are entirely violet. The scars on her back shine so brightly that I can see the individual leaves glowing green through her clothing as they ripple and flutter, as if the ivy is growing in real time. It spills over her flesh, down her shoulders, twining around her arms, curling under her wrists. But she doesn’t look blank, or stunned, or forcefully stilled, or any of the things she is when she is under the control of the Viceroy.
No, Pip is relaxed, loose-limbed, and grinning.
The Viceroy lands on the concrete with an audible thunk, his short hair whipping around his head and a grimace on his face. He shakes his hands out, flexing his fingers, cracking his knuckles, and glares at Pip from under his eyebrows.
“Yield!” he commands, and Pip actually snorts at him.
“You know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” Pip says with a malicious grin. “Not quite the appropriate idiom for this situation, but close. I won’t let you puppeteer me a third time. You see, in this world, with the rules that Elgar wrote into it? Third time really is the charm.”
The Viceroy slings a bolt of magic at Kintyre, desperate and wild-eyed, but Kintyre deflects it with Foesmiter. Bevel, his ray-gun gone, draws his own sword. He is grinning, too.
“You don’t understand, do you?” Pip tries again, for she is my wife, no matter how much magic writhes under her skin, and she will always prefer to talk her way out. “ You see a damsel, you put her in distress, I defy your expectations, and you don’t understand why.”
“It does work!” the Viceroy snarls, but he sounds unsure now.
“You’re stupid,” Pip says, but her tone is almost gentle. “Don’t look at me like that. In the end, you’re still just a character. He never fleshed you out, did he? Gave you just enough will to want, but not enough freedom to evolve.”
“I killed him!” the Viceroy seethes. “I am free from the story!”
“No. The one person who could have given you more, given you what you wanted, set you free, Written you love and a family—you had him fucking murdered.”
The Viceroy’s golden eyes widen, horror creeping in at the edges. “You’re wrong!” he howls. “This . . . this isn’t . . . this wasn’t supposed to . . .” The Viceroy casts around, eyes wild and darting, hands clenched in his hair as the revelation that Pip is no longer his to control makes him stumble and stutter. “This is not how it ends!”
He slings exploding spells around, but before I can do much more than duck them, a lasso of bright golden magic whips over his head and pins his arms to his sides.
“This is exactly how it ends, you unbelievable asshole,” says someone with a faint French accent from behind the Viceroy, and from the doors of the ballroom, the man with the cane leads the magic-wielding cosplayers out onto the floor. Among the gathered are all The Tales of Kintyre Turn cosplayers.
“Ichiro was my friend,” the video game cosplayer with the fire-gun sobs, her face splotchy and swollen.
“You yield, Viceroy,” Bevel—our Bevel—challenges, and a worried murmur ripples through the assembled fans, echoes of the villain’s name on the air. The Bootknife cosplayer looks absolutely disgusted.
“Never,” the Viceroy snarls. “I’ll die first!”
“We can arrange that,” Kintyre says with a sharkish, dimpled grin, and the three Kintyres behind the Viceroy step closer, brandish their props-made-real with echoed “Yeah!”s and fist pumps.
“Not easily!” the Viceroy snarls, and with a flex of his arms, he breaks the loop of glittering gold and throws the lad back hard. The Frenchman dives for the boy, and they tumble to the cement floor together in a wheel of limbs and cane; both sit up unharmed at the end of their spin.
Only one of the Kintyre cosplayers has the gumption to lunge at the Viceroy, and the young man certainly has the muscle to pull off my brother’s physique. He whacks the Viceroy hard on the shoulder, amateurish and, unfortunately, with the flat of his blade. Incensed, the Viceroy turns and with another hot pulse of magic, flings the man across the room to land, groaning, amid a jumble of furniture.
“They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re going to get themselves killed,” Bevel says, and then, roaring to pull the Viceroy’s attention off the fans, attacks.
Steel blades flash, the magic-users call spells, and Bevel and Kintyre bob and weave, dodging friendly and malicious fire alike in order to get at their archnemesis. But the Viceroy is swift, his footing fleet, and where he stays on the ground, he leaves acid burns behind. The fans score some hits—with such overwhelming numbers they must be lucky at least some of the time—but not enough to do any real damage. The Viceroy bleeds from a cut on his cheek and another on his forearm, both wounds defensive, and his jeans are charred on one leg.
