Arrivals

by J. M. Frey

  Unless Kin and I fill the house with deliberate rowdiness, it will be . . . quiet. Eerie. Stuffed-full, but silent. That’s one of the reasons I never liked spending too much time here. Forssy liked things too tidy, too sedate, too . . . boring. Writer’s calluses, how am I going to put up with this quiet and boredom for the rest of my life?

  Be the Shadow Hand, says that seductive voice I’m still not convinced is mine. Lots to keep you occupied, then.

  Now is not the time for that, though. Our . . . Kin’s employees are waiting for an explanation.

  The lie we tell them is this: Forsyth succeeded in his quest to reunite Pip with her family. But having got there, he realized his love was too profound, and Forsyth couldn’t leave. He has given up his place as Lordling of Lysse to remain with Pip’s family and wed his lady love. Forsyth has thus charged Kintyre to do right by their people. Humbled by his brother’s loyalty to his maiden fair, Kintyre has vowed to give up the life of an adventurer and come home to serve his people and his lineage.

  The first lie is that Kintyre has, of course, never been humble about a Writer-be-damned thing in his whole blasted life. The second is that Kintyre has no intentions, whatsoever, of doing anything about his lineage. Or at least, none that he’s shared with me. (Though that does beg the question, then, of from where will—with Forsyth absent and Kintyre Paired with a man—the next Lordling Turn spring forth? Bugger and blast.)

  There are very few dry eyes when we’ve finished weaving our fib. I am, after all, a well-practiced master storyteller. And Kintyre is genuinely shook up about the fact that he has said his farewells to his little brother for the last time. That lends credence to the tale. He is dealing with it silently, and slowly, though, as is his way. Kintyre is a bit like an old cow—he chews and chews on things until they sit just right in his stomach.

  The serving staff thanks us, we shake hands and buss cheeks, and slowly they all file out, back to their duties and off to their celebrations or mourning, depending on their moods. Kintyre stops Velshi as the butler is closing the study door behind the staff, and suggests gently that perhaps he would like to select a few bottles of something fine to toast Forsyth’s happiness with downstairs.

  When my lover turns back to me, my surprise at his foresight and compassion must be on my face. He snorts and points at my expression. “Don’t need to look so surprised, Sir Dom,” he teases, dimpling cheekily. “I might have left this all behind, but I was trained up to it for eighteen years. The paperwork will take some study, but I do remember how to make sure the servants don’t poison your tea. Or quit by droves.”

  I snort in echo, crossing my arms and leaning back against Forsyth’s desk. Or is that Kintyre’s desk? Or . . . thinking of all the times I saw Forsyth in quiet conversation in this very room with men in black I assumed were merchants or scholars . . . perhaps this is my desk, now. The Shadow Hand’s desk.

  I circle the imposing hunk of glorified firewood and sit slowly in the plush velvet-and-leather chair. Forsyth was taller than me, that’s for sure. Though, annoyingly, most men are. I’ll need a footstool. Or to saw a few inches off the desk legs. I run my hands over the arms, rest my elbows in the worn patches on each, and place my hands, palm down, respectfully, on the forest green blotter.

  Dust hasn’t been allowed to settle in this room, though it seems like none of Forsyth’s things have been moved otherwise. There’s a partially written missive in the top corner of the desk: just a list of items to discuss with the mayor, it looks like. Beside that, in a shaky, uneven hand that I don’t recognize, is a list of items needed for going out on an adventure. Pip’s packing list? Yeah, probably. Handkerchiefs is written in large letters and underlined twice. To the side of that is a letter addressed simply to “Pointe.” It takes me a second to remember that this is the sheriff.

  “Oh, hells, Forsyth wrote a goodbye note,” I say, pointing to the letter. Kin picks it up. It’s already sealed with the rusty-red wax Forsyth preferred. “We’re going to have to deliver it.”

  Kintyre makes a face. “He’s making us say all his goodbyes for him. Lazy brat.”

  I’m going to have to tell King Carvel myself, in person, I realize. I can’t just send a letter off and let him know that the Shadow Hand is gone and that the new one is . . . is . . .

  I rattle a locked desk drawer, and wonder if this is where Forsyth kept his Spymaster letterhead, his Carvel-green bottle of ink, the purse of bribes and rewards for his spies. Or is that too obvious, the one locked drawer in the desk?

  Put on the mask, then you’ll know where he hid it. And where every Shadow Hand before him hid their supplies, too.

  The thought of all that knowledge, all those people’s memories, their intimate thoughts just . . . shoved into my head; to have them swirl in through the mask, like water down a drain, and be there, forever; to know that my own thoughts and memories and knowledge would be passed on to my own successor, that putting on the mask means that I’ll have no privacy in death, that I will be getting an intimate look into Forssy’s thoughts . . . it’s overwhelming. My head hurts suddenly, and I haven’t even put the mask on yet.

  If I even choose to.

  I have to. Don’t I? Do I?

  Forssy left it to me. He trusted me to do right by it, even though I’d never been kind to him a day in my life. Shame floods my guts, and I groan, slumping forehead-down on the desk. This lordling-and-Shadow-Hand lark is harder than it looks.

  I had noticed the stream of people in and out of this study and hadn’t known what it meant. I just thought Forssy was a fussy, overworked, overly diligent lordling. I thought he was overwrought with the minutia of running the Chipping and not engaged enough with the freedoms and entitled pleasures of his seat. Even I, Bevel Dom, chronicler of the hero Kintyre Turn and supposedly a bright, observant bloke, didn’t understand what was happening right under my nose. I saw it all, and saw nothing.

  Writer’s calluses, how am I supposed to do this? How could Forsyth possibly think I was equal to this? Writing, sure, I can do that. And bashing about with my sword. And firing arrows, and seducing maidens and warriors alike, fine. Adventuring, map reading, all of it. I can do that. Yeah.

  But politics? Subtlety? Presenting the right words at the right time, like even Kintyre manages to do here in Turn Hall? When he wants to, that is, even though it’s been decades since he has chosen to be subtle, and magnanimous, and anything but the demanding eldest son coming in, taking what he wants as his due, and leaving again. And oh, I can see how inadequate I’ve been all this time, how much better at it Kin is. How can I be equal to that?

  How can I . . . rise to the challenge that Forsyth Turn has laid at my feet? With his stupid knowing grin and his stupid clever brain and his . . . Forsyth-ness. Being Shadow Hand, that was what he had been Written for. But me? The rough-and-tumble, uncouth, blacksmith’s boy? The overeager lad who foolishly followed a hero into battle, and who was lucky to come out the other side of it alive? The man more at home under the stars than under a roof, with a bow in his fist, or a travel-work pencil instead of a fine quill and Carvel-green ink?

  What am I thinking, accepting this?

  All of it. Not just the mask.

  Worse still, what am I thinking, second-guessing it?

  My brain throbs against the sides of my skull, and I wish I could just stop thinking, like blowing out a candle or shutting a door. Just . . . put it away for a while. But I can’t seem to do that.

  Writer, is this what it’s like to be Forsyth all the time? Or Pip?

  Uhg. Exhausting.

  Kintyre doesn’t ask what’s plaguing me, just chivvies me up from the desk. With a mischievous grin, he hoists me up over his shoulder like a saddlebag.

  “Oi!” I snarl, kicking him dead in the sternum. He grunts and stumbles, but doesn’t let go. I wrap my hands around his belt, the dumb oaf, and he sneaks us to the back laundry room through a secret passage behind the bookshelf and some narrow, dusty servant’s hallway. I only bump
my head twice—that’s something, at least—but we’re both covered in cobwebs by the time we get to the laundry. And I’m laughing too hard by the time he puts me down, my stomach bouncing on Kin’s broad shoulder, to really be angry about the manhandling.

  We steal a hot bath in one of the soaking tubs instead of making the staff bring the copper one up to Kin’s apartments. After that is a quick hot meal that we fetch ourselves from the kitchen, much to Cook’s horror, and a visit out to the stables to make sure the Library Lion is behaving itself. It’s asleep in a stall piled with fresh hay. The groom’s lad is ecstatic with glee and utterly covered in sandy-golden fur and spittle. And then it’s to bed.

  For the first time in Turn Hall, though, I don’t bother with the pretense of needing my own room. Not that it was really pretense before—we always slept apart when we weren’t on the road or bedding some willing slattern. But now . . .

  At any rate, Keriens, the valet, has put my travel bag in the guest room a few doors down from Kintyre’s. He’s not wrong; that’s the one I usually use. Feeling bold and remembering Forsyth’s advice that a gentleman should begin how he means to continue (though, probably, he wasn’t talking about this), I grab the bag and the personals the staff have laid out for me, and hike them down the expanse of the family wing’s hallway. A footman watches with wide eyes from the top of the stair, clearly startled, and I offer him a smug nod as I shoulder into Kin’s room. Then I dump my kit right beside Kintyre’s bags.

  My lover is already seated by the fire in one of two massive wingback chairs, the spindly table between them laid with two glasses and a decanter of that Brystalian wine I like, even though Kin prefers ales. His hair is still damp, combed but left loose to stain the velvet of his Turn-russet house robe, which is just barely done up.

  The glorious tart. Expecting me. I like that.

  “You don’t have to try so hard,” I say, picking up the decanter and pouring for us. “I forgive you.”

  “Nope,” Kintyre says, grinning as I hand him one of the glasses and then crawl right into his lap. My knees are jammed against the sides of the chair, probably pinching his broad thighs. “Nope. This is something I’m never going to stop doing.”

  “What?”

  “Making you smile.”

  I lean forward and bite his earlobe.

  “Yow!”

  “Softie,” I say, and soothe the hurt with my tongue. Under me, Kintyre shudders from top to tail, and then glugs off the wine.

  “One of these days, Kin, I’m going to have to teach you to appreciate a fine drink in a way that doesn’t resemble a duck.”

  “I can appreciate a fine drink,” he protests, and sets his glass down. “I just wanted my hands free to do this.”

  This is enough to make me quaff off my wine, too, despite how jammy and lovely the vintage is, so that I can get my own hands free in return.

  ✍

  As much as I fantasized about sleeping for a week once we arrived in Turn Hall, there are duties too long left unattended by any Lord of Lysse to let that dream come true. Once it gets around that Kintyre is in and Forsyth is out, there’s all but an actual queue at the servant’s entrance. Kintyre and I only get one decent lie-in before we’re inundated with every merchant and scholar demanding their time in front of their lord, and gathering gossip about their former lordling to take home in the bargain.

  Our second morning, I wake to find the scullery standing at the foot of the bed, charcoal bucket in hand, staring at us with her mouth gaping open. Over a decade ago, on my first visit to Turn Hall, I traumatized the first maid I’d ever met. Well, what else was I meant to think, finding a strange girl in my bedroom, crouched in front of the hearth, where I’d also, consequently, left my gear? Of course, I accused her of being a thief. And loudly, too. She’d quit the very next morning, and I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about that. This time, I just flick a hand at the girl and croak, “Go on, s’fine. Lay the fire. Ignore us.”

  She drops a curtsey. “I was told you would already be up, Sir Dom . . . uh . . . m’lord . . . uh . . . consort?” she adds vaguely, head tilted with confusion like a dog’s.

  “No,” Kin grumbles and rolls over, half on top of me, flashing the lassie a goodly view of his naked chest, then his naked back, and finally his plush bottom liberally sprinkled with bruises left behind by my fingers and hips.

  She squeaks and turns her face away. “It’s only that there’s . . . uh, the schoolmaster’s here already, and so’s the marketers’ representative. And Cook’s had your tray warm for an hour.”

  “What time did Forsyth get up?” I mumble, more to myself than to the girl. I pull the blankets up to my chin, muffling Kin’s entire head in the process. My lover chuckles, and his breath is warm across my own bare skin.

  “Seven of the clock, every day, sir,” the scullery says, obediently.

  A glance out the window tells me it’s at least nine.

  “Blast,” I swear. “No way on the Writer’s good green backside am I getting up every day at seven, not when there’s no dawn to get in my eyes and no monsters trying to kill us.”

  “It’s a lord’s life,” Kin says, and he sounds almost cheery, the cruel bastard. He flings back the blanket, making the scullery squeak again and turn completely around, back to us. Kin covers up with a loosely tied house robe of Turn-russet, which he’d left on the foot of the bed the night before. My house robe is still in the wardrobe. In my old room. Hells.

  “Pop downstairs and tell Cook we’re ready for our trays,” Kintyre says, and the girl leaves the drop cloth, pan, broom, and bucket on the hearth and dashes out at a speed I would almost find insulting if I wasn’t so put out.

  “I’m not getting up at seven every morning,” I repeat, abandoning the warm softness of the bed for the wardrobe. In there, I find an old shirt in Dom-amethyst. It just barely covers my pride, but cover me it does. Our branch of the family might have been a little more hard-up than our distant cousins, but we were once noble enough to still have a House Color. All the same, I grimace at the tattery thing. It’s not even nice enough that the servants put it in my borrowed guest room down the hall—they just left it to rot in the back of Kin’s barely used wardrobe, where it couldn’t offend any of Forsyth’s other guests.

  I have nothing else to wear, though, so I put it on and sit in the chair that Kin and I so thoroughly despoiled the night before. Kintyre frowns at my shirt, too, and I can already see him plotting against it. Good. I want to be wearing Turn-russet.

  We’ve both wasted too many years in shades of purple.

  “So, what do you suppose the gossip is like in the servants’ hall this morning?” I grumble, wishing the tea was already here. Maybe I can convince this newly mindful Kintyre Turn to always ring the bell before he wakes me up in the morning, so I won’t have to wait so long for it to arrive?

  Or I could also just not be a pampered, lazy arse and walk down to the kitchen like I used to. The servants never liked it, but as a younger man with something to prove about his place at the Great Hero of Hain’s side, I’d wanted to make a point of not getting high and mighty. I’m not high and mighty now—at least, I don’t think I am. I’m just old. The thought of the trip through the narrow, stone servants’ passage down to the kitchens at this time of morning, in the early winter chill, without any tea in my belly, is horrid. It seems, at this exact moment, more an insurmountable obstacle than the white cliffs of the Astrolabe promontory.

  Writer’s hairy balls, I’ve really turned into my pa in my old age.

  At least some blessed servant left a blanket by the fire last night, folded neatly over a wooden stand to toast, and there’s just enough heat left in the fading embers when I yank the thing over my lap and burrow under it like, a disgruntled rabbit.

  Oh, Writer’s nutsack, I’m not going to turn into one of those gouty, cranky, creaky old adventurers who drones on about past battles and amorous conquests while muttering and shuffling and contending with stiff joints an
d always-creaking bones, am I? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in an eternal, unwinnable war against the cold.

  The mask, the voice comes to me again. Get out, see the country. Spy on it. Know it. Stay in the saddle in some small way. Stay in the business of saving the world.

  “The gossip is hysterical,” says a voice from the doorway, the same time as a knock. “And it seems to be entirely true, my lords.” A young man, maybe around twenty-three or -four, steps into the room bearing a tea service with a pot that is, blessedly, steaming.

  This is Keriens, Forsyth’s valet—I suppose he is now our valet, unless one of us wants to hire another of our own. But why in world would we want two people fussing and poking at us? Without permission, Keriens swaggers into the room as if it’s his due.

  “Do you normally deliver the trays?” Kintyre asks, frowning at the livery the valet is wearing.

  “No, sir,” the lad says with a grin. “I don’t. But your regular footman, Recce, has no head for details at all. That’s why the staff nominated me to deliver it this morning. I’m very good at reconstructing a scene.”

  I groan and cover my face with the blanket as Keriens sets the tray down on the spindly table. “I’m not looking forward to being the private entertainment of everyone who works at Turn Hall,” I moan.

  Keriens, the cheeky blighter, pals my shoulder consolingly. “You should have thought of that before you Paired with our lord,” he says, but there’s a warmth in his voice that surprises me into looking up at the young man. He is smiling puckishly, but his eyes hold a gladness I didn’t expect. “Though there’s a few of us who say it’s about time, sir.”

  “Mind your manners,” Kin says gruffly, dropping into his own seat, but he’s grinning, too, dimpling outrageously. Everyone is entirely too pleased about this whole thing for my pre-tea state, so I pour myself a cup and fix it to my liking. Dash Kin. He can fix his own.