Arrivals

by J. M. Frey

  He does, chuckling at my pettiness, and Keriens watches us both carefully, no doubt memorizing how we prefer to take our tea for the future. Eerie.

  “If there’s nothing else, sirs, I’ll hie myself to the wardrobe and see what I can scrounge up for today? There’s plenty around, between what you’ve left here, your father’s old clothes, and what Master Forsyth abandoned. Though I daresay I’ll have to take up a few things,” he adds with a wink at me. I scowl back, but wink as well, letting him know that I don’t mind his teasing. Much better than the bowing and scraping I had feared.

  If I have to share a house with dozens of folks I’m not related to and don’t know well, I would much rather be teased and laughed with, than mocked behind my back and treated with stony proprietary to my face.

  ✍

  Kintyre is spirited away as soon as he’s properly dressed, still cramming sweet rolls into his mouth.

  I have a more leisurely breakfast, then wave off Keriens when he tries to help me dress, because I’m bloody well an adult and can dress myself. The clothes he’s unearthed are from some mothball-strewn trunk, judging by the smell that clings to the trousers and the house shoes, and it occurs to me that at some point, if I’m going to live with Kin as the lord’s . . . what was the word that scullery used? Consort. Then I’m going to have to get house-clothes. Waistcoats, and lawn shirts, and neckcloths, and soft-soled slippers, and those weird sort of knee-length house-robes Forsyth preferred to the boxy, structured dinner coats. I won’t be able to wear my jerkins and leather trousers and knee-high boots in the house anymore. Will I?

  Writer spare me. I hate being fussed over by tailors and valets. That’s why I only have one good shirt, and I keep it in the bottom of my travel pack.

  With nothing better to do, I spend the day reacquainting myself with Turn Hall. It’s funny to realize that I know the secret back ways better than I know the halls a lord might travel. Kintyre hates being accosted and rerouted and ordered about, so we always used the secret passages to move between his room, the stables, the kitchens, and the wine cellar, as much to avoid the attention of Algar Turn as to avoid the staff. I suppose I can’t keep doing that anymore. Well, at least not as often.

  One of the places I do remember how to get to easily is the ballroom. Forssy’d turned the space into a sparring gymnasium, and for once, I have to agree with his choice. With the centuries-old great hall for feasting and dancing, why did some daft Turn ancestor or another decide to append a second, wooden spring-floor ballroom as well? Sure, it’s the fashion in old stone houses to put in solariums and terraces and rooms so porous with doors and windows that they’re really little more than roofs held up on ornamental toothpicks. But at what expense, fashion? I could have built my parents a new house twice over with the material that went into this superfluous ballroom.

  Though I suppose the windows make it cool during summer fetes, the room is useless otherwise. My guess is that it was Kintyre’s grandfather who put this room in—from what Kin’s said, he was the foppish, dandyish type who cared very much about showing off the wealth of Turn Hall to the other noble Houses, and to the Chipping. Some aunt or other of Kintyre’s had been married high into the Houses of Kingskeep, but I’d never known which one; Kin’d never introduced me to her while we were visiting the court. At any rate, his grandfather’d had ambition. And an ornamental but useless space like this is the perfect example of that kind of conspicuous spending, no matter how sensible it would have been to spend the money on the tenant cottages instead.

  I push back the door to the ballroom-gymnasium, thinking about the last time I was here. Kintyre said it’d be funny to interrupt the sparring match with a well-aimed dagger. And it had been—the look of startled fear on Forssy’s face had been hilarious.

  And there had been a pretty maiden reclining on a daybed, watching the two men flash their steel at one another with wide, round eyes, parted lips, and an enchanted expression that had immediately stirred up all the competitive ego I possess. There was just something so aggravating and funny about Forsyth being the center of attention for a girl that I’d had to get between them. Even if I didn’t actually want her.

  The memory of that curdles in my guts. Shameful. What an elfcock I was. And for what? Because I’d thought Forssy a bossy, limp rag. And I was wrong about that. But even if I hadn’t been, even if he was a bossy, limp rag, I shouldn’t have deliberately sabotaged his chances for romance. I knew well enough what it felt like to want and never get.

  The room is barren of those ghosts, though, when I enter. The smell of floor polish is ripe in my nose, and the winter sun is watery, filtered through a light drifting of snow that has been falling steadily, like pollen fluff, since we woke. Frost flowers have already started to grow along the edges of the windows, rimming the glass with tendrils of ice that resemble ferns and blossoms. Beautiful, yeah. But, uhg, shoddy insulation; that’s what that means. I might have to pull apart one of the sills and see what kind of work was done on the installation. Or . . . hire someone to do it? Is that what a lord does? Or a lord’s . . . whatever I am?

  As I step around the overlarge door and let it fall closed behind me, I realize that the ballroom isn’t entirely devoid of ghosts. In the middle of the room, standing in a puddle of sunlight, shaking the snow off the shoulders of his riding cloak, is a man dressed entirely in gray.

  “Forsyth,” he says happily, as he turns at the sound of the door closing behind me. He has straight white teeth in a tanned face, with a kind of charming male beauty that I can admire in the abstract. He’s handsome, but he’s not Kin. There are comely laughter lines around his mouth and eyes that lend him character, scruff peppering his jaw in shades of gray rapidly falling into silver, and a thick head of hair to match. He is robust with good exercise and good purpose, for this is Sheriff Rupin Pointe, the Sword of Turnshire.

  “Oh!” he says, startled when he realizes that I’m not the Lordling Turn. He sweeps a quick bow, rough in form but honest, and then resumes his grin when he straightens. “Well come, Sir Dom. When did you arrive?”

  “Kin and I returned two nights ago,” I say, twisting my hands behind my back because, oh Writer’s balls, Pointe hasn’t heard. He doesn’t know. And I’m going to have to tell him. Now.

  I’m not ready for this.

  “With Forsyth?” Pointe asks. “I heard the lord was returned—the grandmothers of Turnshire will gossip. I should have waited for an invitation,” he says, hands out, sheepish, “but you know Forsyth. He gets his head buried in things and forgets social niceties, like invitations, and replying to letters, and, uh, sleeping. Where is the blighter?”

  I groan, I can’t help it, and rub my forehead. It seems like all I’ve done for the past seventeen years is be the deliverer of bad news to good and kind people.

  “You’d better come into the study with me, Sheriff,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “That’s where the whiskey is.”

  The man’s face falls so fast, grows ashen so quick, that I wonder for a moment if I’m going to have to have Mother Mouth sent for. He nods abruptly, just once, ducks his head as if he’s preparing to shoulder through a mass of cutting brambles, and follows me out the door.

  We’re both silent as we cross the foyer to the formal library and into the private study beyond it. Sometime since Kin and I were last here to deliver this same bad news, someone has come in and cleaned off the desk, reshelved the haphazard pile of books that had been left by the reading chair, and refilled the decanter on the sideboard. I pour a measure for both of us, and wish fervently that I had my pipe with me, so I’d have something to fiddle with.

  Pointe, when I turn to give him the glass, looks ghastly.

  “He’s alive,” I say gently. No use prolonging the torture.

  Pointe crumples into the reading chair and sucks back his drink. He coughs hard when it’s gone, his face flushing and a curl of black smoke escaping one nostril. Ah, the Drebbinshire Whiskey, then. I take
a sip of my own to confirm it, and then cross the room to pour Pointe another measure. He nods his thanks, otherwise silent. Waiting.

  I’m tempted to just hand over the letter addressed to him—where did . . . ah, there it is, propped against the inkwell—but I don’t know what Forsyth might have put in it. For all I know, he had assumed he would die on his quest, and it’s a goodbye. No, I’ll let Pointe read the letter, but not until after I’ve told him what actually happened. I wish Kintyre were here. He’s blunt, and he can sometimes be a bit mean when he explains these things, but at least he gets it over with quickly.

  Pointe takes another sip, and then clears his throat. “So, when the village said that the lord had returned, they meant . . . ?”

  “Kin, yeah,” I say, leaning back against the desk.

  “They really meant the lord,” Pointe mutters. “I had thought I’d just misheard. And Sir Turn is . . . here to stay?” He looks up at me then, silver eyes narrowed, taking in my clothing shrewdly.

  I’m wearing soft black trousers and house shoes instead of my normal leathers, though I’d found the fine cream lawn shirt Keriens had set out for me too tickly. I’m wearing one of my normal sturdy cotton shirts, with the short-robe of Turn-russet that Kin had commissioned shortly after our Pairing to replace the ragged, faded one of Dom-amethyst that I used to wear around Turn Hall. I hate waistcoats, so I don’t have any. The same with neckcloths, which had filled Keriens with theatrical despair. In short, I look nothing like myself.

  “Paired up then, are you?” Pointe asks, jerking his chin at my chest.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Soldiers’ Pairing, or . . . ?” He lets the question linger, and it’s the first time someone’s asked us outright if Kin and I are sharing our bodies. I can’t believe it, but I feel myself flush up like a milkmaid. I never thought I’d find the direct question so . . . embarrassing. “S’pose that’s answer enough,” Pointe grunts. “Trothed?”

  “No,” I say, and take a burning gulp of my own whiskey to drown anything that might try to follow that confession.

  Pointe wisely doesn’t ask anything else about that, and I’m starting to understand what Forsyth saw in him as a friend. Aw, hells. I reach around behind me and fetch the letter, holding it up for him to see. “He left this for you, but I want to tell you what happened before you read it. Forssy’s melodramatic, yeah?”

  Pointe nods again, the flush from the whiskey draining away. He sips and settles back into the chair, waiting. But his jaw is clenched, and his fingers are laced together, hard, around the glass, his shoulders tense. He looks like he’s waiting for me to punch him in the face.

  And the Writer knows I don’t know how much better this kind of a blow is going to be. I might be doing the poor sod a kindness by simply knocking out a few of his teeth and bloodying his lip.

  I take a deep breath and, both of us braced and primed with whiskey, tell him. All of it. Even the Shadow Hand parts. The only thing I leave out is the stuff about Readers and Writers. As far as I know, Pointe thinks Pip was just kidnapped and used against Forsyth because the Viceroy thought she’d make a biddable puppet, an intriguing mystery for Forsyth because of her, even now, mysterious parentage.

  “And . . . what was her parentage?” Pointe asks, when my voice is hoarse and my throat is dry, the decanter half-empty, and I have run out of things to say.

  I refill our glasses again, and the room sways a bit under my feet as I do so. Oh well, it’s just in keeping with the picture of a wastrel lordling, isn’t it? To be knackered in the middle of the afternoon? Might as well own to it.

  “All human,” I lie. “S’all I know. Just a unique blend of bloodlines, I guess.”

  “Those green eyes,” Pointe muses.

  “Yeah, no, brown actually,” I correct. “That was the Viceroy.”

  Pointe looks down into his tumbler, glassy-eyed and despondent. Finally, I hold out the letter for him. I’m curious about what’s in it, and I actually hope he’ll open it now, let me read it too, but he just tucks it into the pocket on the inside of his jerkin. Of course. Yes. He has every right to read it in private.

  “So,” I say, after the silence has begun to grow heavy, like a thick humidity warning of an oncoming summer storm. “What had you rushing over here in the first place?”

  “Oh,” Pointe says, blinking hard and looking up at me, looking me in the face for the first time since I began my story. “I . . . I had good news,” he says, absolutely forlorn.

  “You can share it with me,” I say, squirming at how earnest that sounds. Writer, I sound like a . . . like a schoolmaster. “I mean, if you want.”

  “Oh, I . . . I found an apprentice. While Forsyth was . . . while you were all away. Good lad. Menkin’s his name. Strong arm, and a good heart. Absolutely a—I . . . I’m sorry, S-Sir Dom, I need to—” He stands abruptly, and paces over to the fire, knuckles white around his tumbler. He drinks it off and puts the glass on the mantle, then scrubs his hands through his hair. He turns to me, eyes wide and dry, but growing redder. “You’re not lying to me, are you?”

  “About what?”

  Pointe looks me in the eye and scowls. “Is Forsyth Turn dead?”

  “What?” I squawk, and stand up, setting my own glass on the desk. “Absolutely not! Do you think I’d lie to you, of all people, about that?”

  Pointe rubs his eyes and puffs out his cheeks, groaning. “I don’t know. I don’t know! He loved being Shadow Hand! He loved Lysse! I just . . . I can’t believe Forsyth would just . . . just . . . leave.”

  “He would have made time for his farewells, if he’d had it,” I say.

  “But why didn’t he have it? Why did he have to stay with Miss Piper? Why not come back, and then go? I don’t understand!” He points a finger at me, and it’s not a sword, but it’s still a threat. “There’s something you’re not telling me about this whole business, and I don’t like it.”

  I hold up my hands, empty. “There is, I’ll admit it. There is. But Forsyth wouldn’t have wanted you to worry.”

  “I’m worrying now,” he snarls. “The lordling vanishes with a strange damsel, and his arrogant, oafish brother returns, claiming that Forsyth has found his Happily Ever After elsewhere. The greatest villain Hain has ever known is defeated, and now the useless lunk is going to take up the position he has derided and avoided for decades? And conveniently, it also plays out that my best mate has just turned over the Shadow’s Mask to you? The hedgehoggy, lolloping strumpet pimp whom Forsyth resented hugely for his place as his brother’s best friend? You? Yes! I’m worried!”

  “Oi!” I shout, the accusations landing hard. “Hold up now—”

  “I can’t fathom it!” Pointe snarls. “Why you?”

  “Because I was there!” I snarl back, advancing on Pointe. He stumbles backward, shocked by my rocking anger, tripping on the hearth. He catches himself on the mantle. “You think I’m not asking myself the exact same thing? Why me? Why pick Bevel Dom, when there are a thousand more worthy men in Hain? And the only answer I can come up with is that it was because he was leaving, and there was no one else.”

  Pointe glares, face hard. “You really expect me to believe that, in a series of fortuitous events precipitating from the bizarre arrival of one maiden, you and Kintyre became a Romantic Pair, Forsyth found his Happily Ever After, the brothers Turn reconciled, Bootknife was killed, the Viceroy vanquished, Kintyre was convinced that resuming his place as Lord of Lysse was a good idea, and you inherited the mantle of Shadow Hand?”

  “Yes,” I say, mulishly.

  Pointe puffs out a noise which I realize is meant to be a chuckle. He’s trying very hard to have a sense of humor about this.“That’s a hells of a lot of coincidence in one place,” he snorts.

  I throw out my arms, exasperated. “Just like the rest of my life! Well come!”

  “And you’re bringing all that coincidence here to Lysse,” Pointe says again, huffing another chuckle. “I’m suddenly worried that I’m g
oing to have a lot more teachable opportunities for Menkin than I thought I would.”

  “Trouble does seem to follow Kintyre Turn,” I admit, ire cooling. I feel a kinship with Pointe, now that we’ve finished our shouting.

  We’re both exasperated by my Paired. We both miss Forsyth. We are both wary of luck and coincidence. Surely this can be the start of at least a neighborly truce? The lord and the sheriff have to work in such close tandem, it would be good to make a friend of Pointe. Even if only in honor of Forsyth.

  “I just . . . it’s just a lot to swallow, all at once,” Pointe says eventually, voice low. “Forsyth gone, and Hain safe from that madman, and . . . oh. Oh, Writer’s calluses,” Pointe groans, and the color drains from his face so fast I think he’s actually swooning. He has to hold on to the mantle to keep from crumpling onto the rugs. He looks up at me with pleading, watery eyes. “It wasn’t Forsyth this whole time, was it? He wasn’t the Viceroy, was he?”

  “Hells no!” I say. “No, don’t you worry about that. Forsyth was a good man—is a good man,” I stubbornly correct myself. He’s not dead. He’s just . . . gone.

  Pointe rights himself, smoothes down his clothes and corrects his hair, takes a few deep breaths, and composes himself. “Yes,” he agrees at length, patting the inner pocket of his jerkin, where his letter waits for him. “Yes, he was.”

  Part Four

  Kintyre looks in on us soon after that, having finally been released by Velshi and the endless stream of gossipmongers from the village. Together, we walk Pointe back to the stables, where he’s left his horse and, it turns out, his son.

  Lewko Pointe is an absolute picture of childish adorableness, and like all children, he gloms immediately onto Kintyre. Kin grimaces, peels the mucky toddler off his boots, and hands him to me. I give Kin my best “we talked about this” glare, and I’m satisfied with my Pair’s wince when he realizes what he’s done.