by J. M. Frey
“Hullo, Master Pointe,” I say, hoisting Lewko onto my hip.
“Hello, Sir Dom,” the boy says, and he’s holding himself stiff. Ah, I guess he still remembers how I treated Forsyth at the last dinner we took together. Children can be very loyal for a stubbornly long time. I’ll have to earn Lewko’s respect if I want it. And I find, I think, that I do.
It’s not like there’s going to be any other children to dote on in Turn Hall, not unless one of my brothers comes to stay with their brood and . . . no, I shudder to think what Vulej’s twin hellions might do to the precious Turn Hall tapestries. Though, it can’t be much worse than what I’m holding now. Lewko is absolutely covered in Library Lion slobber.
“What is—?” Pointe asks, trying to whisk a glob of it out of his son’s hair. He’s interrupted by a rumbling purr deep enough to shake the snow off the eaves of the stables. He whirls around, draws his sword, steps between the Library Lion and me, and yells, “What is that?”
The great cat yawns and flops over onto its back in the snow, brushing its tail through a bank and sending flakes flying into our faces. Pointe splutters and wipes at his eyes. Lewko giggles, and Kintyre, the fool, bends over to scrub at the Library Lion’s tummy. The cat seizes Kintyre in its forepaws, claws sheathed, and tussles with him.
“Me too, me too!” Lewko shouts and wriggles down from my arms. I don’t think Kin will let anything happen to the kid, so I let him go. Lewko rushes past his father and throws himself into the fray, much to the Library Lion’s apparent delight.
“No, wait,” Pointe says, stepping forward, but then stops to watch the cat at play. “Well, I’ll be damned to all seven of the hells,” he says wonderingly.
At length, the groom appears with Pointe’s horse and a smaller pony which is clearly saddled for Lewko.
“C’mon, sprog!” Pointe says. “It’s cold out. Time to go home.”
“Awww, Da!” the boy protests.
“It’s fine. He can—” Kin starts to say, but stops when Pointe holds up his hand.
“Sprog,” he says warningly.
“But if Master Turn says that I can—”
“Nuh-uh,” Pointe interrupts his son. “Master Turn isn’t your father. And your father says it’s time to go. Come on. I’m freezing here, and your mum will have seed cakes cooling on the rack by now.”
Lewko scrambles off the Lion’s nose and onto the snow-covered flagstones of the stable courtyard, clearly torn between cat and cakes.
“You can come back another time to play with him,” I say to the boy. Though I don’t specify if I’m talking about the Lion or the big blond lunk still perched on the creature’s back.
“All right,” the boy says, and lets Pointe help him mount the pony. “Bye, Capplederry!”
As they ride off into the light dusting of snow, Kintyre looks down at me and asks, “Who’s Capplederry?”
✍
Cook wants to serve us a full dinner in the great hall that night, but Velshi comes to our rescue as soon as he sees the look of panic cross Kin’s face.
“Master Forsyth felt the same way,” he confides to us. “He set up small table in, ah, he called it the nook. Perhaps a more intimate setting would be appreciated?”
“It will, yes,” Kintyre says, blinking and following after the butler like a toy boat being pulled across a puddle by a string. “Forssy did this?”
The space is between the kitchen and the great hall, in a little pocket that I know in other great households is usually a sort of pantry where the serving staff keep things like seltzers and spare candelabras and extra fussy napkins. I know this because they are also usually marvelous curtained spaces where a little bit of harmless loveplay can happen between, say, a visiting knight of the realm and a particularly enthusiastic serving wench. Or two.
“Master Forsyth felt keenly the . . . solitude of his household,” Velshi says, and the hesitation is the closest thing to a criticism of Kintyre that I’ve ever heard from the normally staid and steady servant. “It suited him better to be close to the kitchen, so he could engage in conversation with the staff.”
“Why not just eat with you lot, then?”
The gaze Velshi turns on Kintyre as he pulls out his master’s chair for him is one I can only describe as withering. Kintyre winces.
“Hardly appropriate, wouldn’t you say, sir?” Velshi asks.
“Right. Yes. Entirely,” Kintyre mumbles to the tabletop. I drop into my own seat, before Velshi can hand me into it like a fainting maiden.
“I’ll inform Cook that you’re ready for the first course, then, sir?”
“Yes, Velshi. And, uh, from here on out, you can tell Cook that we don’t need, um, courses,” Kintyre adds lamely.
Velshi nods once, as if Kintyre has done something he approves of. “Master Forsyth had it the same way.” And then he’s vanished back behind the curtains and into the warm cave of good smells and fine edible things.
Kintyre slumps back in his plain wooden chair and crosses his arms. “I’m really starting to tire of everyone comparing me to my brother.”
“He held the reins for near on a decade, Kin,” I say, reaching out to squeeze his thigh. “It’ll take folks time to get used to you.”
“I thought I would be different from Forssy,” Kin admits. “He was so proper, you know? So upright, I thought. Forssy must have a full staff on hand, and he must eat off the good silver and the china trenchers in the great hall every night, and he must have a ball every season, and he must have his skinny old nose poked right into the curriculum of his Free School, and his fingers wrapped tight around the taxes, and . . .”
“And?” I prompt, sitting forward and resting my elbows on the table in a show of manners so abysmal that even my own mum would come after me with a wooden spoon if she caught me.
“I’m confused,” Kin admits. “Forsyth wasn’t like that at all. Bossy Forssy was . . . generous. D’you know he hasn’t raised taxes in three years? Says the Chipping’s doing well enough on what it makes, didn’t need more. And he just gave all of the neighboring estate over to the sheriff? Doesn’t charge them rent or anything. It’s in the name of the Sword of Turnshire in perpetuity. That means forever, Bev.”
“I know what ‘in perpetuity’ means,” I tease.
“Forsyth wasn’t . . . wasn’t what I thought,” Kin says again, musingly.
“I think we were both pretty surprised by him,” I admit. “Lordling and Shadow Hand, and no spouse to help him with either.”
Kintyre throws up his hands. “He had wealth and a title—he could have had any girl he wanted from the Chipping. Probably even could have had his pick of the nobles’ second daughters if he wanted. If he’d spent any time at all at court. I thought he would have been there as often as possible, fawning over Carvel, playing the fopping courtier, but he just . . . stayed home, and worked diligently in his study, and walked the farms once in a season in a ridiculous floppy hat that Keriens showed me. Can you imagine that? He walked every single farm on the estate. Once a quarter! Pointe went with him, and Healer Waylin. It took them a week to have tea or luncheon or supper with every single farming family. I just . . .” He trails off, helpless under his confusion.
“I know,” I say, reaching over to wrap my arm around his waist, pulling him close for a little kiss. “I know. My conversation with the sheriff knocked me flat, too. But we’ll adjust. And I believe that you can be as good a lord as he was.”
Kintyre snorts. “As good” he echoes. “I thought I would be better already.”
“Ah, there’s that famous Turn modesty I adore so well,” I laugh, and try to banish his sulk with another little peck.
Cook comes in then, bearing two platters covered with domes, but fragrant with the scent of rabbit pie. Excellent. We don’t spring apart like missish maidens caught making our gowns green, but we do separate enough for Cook to set the platters down. She gives Kintyre’s cheek a pinch.
“Happy to see you back, laddie,” she sa
ys indulgently. “I’ve got a batch of them ginger biscuits you love so dear in the ovens now. You just nip on in behind the curtains when you’re ready for them.”
Kintyre’s eyes grow wide with delight, and he grabs Cook’s hand and kisses her knuckles gallantly and earnestly.
“And you,” she says to me. “You tell me what you like, lad, and I’ll be sure to keep a tin of ‘em for you.”
No one’s called me lad since I was knighted. But I find that when a woman like Cook promises me biscuits and pinches Kin’s cheek, making him flush up with joy, I don’t half mind.
“I like the ones with raisins and oats in,” I say, and Kintyre groans, because he hates raisins, says they look like dried-up bugs.
“I’ll start on ‘em in the morning,” Cook promises. “Eat up, boys, while it’s warm.” And then she bustles off.
“Boys,” I echo with a snort, and then tuck in. For all that I haven’t walked for hours, or sparred, or beaten back monsters, or even bent my head over a scroll today, I am both exhausted and famished. Emotional turmoil is almost as good as a battle for the appetite, it seems.
When we’ve both licked our plates clean, Kintyre executes a perfect skirmish on the kitchen’s biscuit jar. While we’re munching away, I take better stock of the nook. The table and chairs are plain, wooden, the kind of thing I’ve seen before in peasant houses—sturdy, well-made and well-polished, but not ornate. The stone walls are unadorned, save for the twin swags of green velvet separating the nook from both the kitchen and the great hall. There’s one single skinny window, and under that a narrow credenza against one wall, like every other room in Turn Hall.
“Think I could stash some things in this sideboard?” I ask, reaching behind me to open it. It’s stocked on one side with those seltzers and napkins and things, as expected, but on the other with a small coin purse, an inkpot and some quills, and a ream of fresh parchment. Clearly Forsyth wasn’t above working over his breakfast. “It’d be nice to have my pipe here for after dinner.”
Kintyre scowls at me. “That window doesn’t open. I hope you don’t make the drapes stink of stale smoke.”
I roll my eyes. “How about I promise to take it into the back courtyard when the weather is fine?”
“Very well, then,” he grumps. Though we both know the weather is not fine, not right now. “S’funny.”
“What is?”
“You and me, sitting here, talking like . . . like we’re staying.” He scrubs at the furrow between his eyebrows, uncomfortable.
“Aren’t we?” I ask, sitting up and regarding him carefully. Kintyre can’t be regretting this great Lord Turn adventure already, can he?
“Well, yeah,” he says. “I just . . . with the meetings and . . . and the clothes, and all of it. We’re . . . planning. Planning ahead, you know? S’odd.”
“Sure is,” I agree. “But . . . I think I like it.”
Kintyre smiles at me, and I reach out to brush crumbs out of his late-evening stubble. “Yeah?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s nice to think that I’m going to wake up every morning in that ridiculous big bed of yours, beside you, for the rest of our lives.”
Kintyre’s eyes get wide, his pupils blowing open, and he grabs me by the hand. I laugh the whole way as he drags me up the back stairs to our room.
✍
Deciding that it’s an open secret that Kin and I are Paired and already sharing a bed, we go about rearranging the rooms after dinner (and after after-dinner). Maybe it’s our way of proving to ourselves that we really do mean to stay, that we’re really going to do this.
I’m not comfortable at all with someone else sleeping in a room adjoined to ours, so the valet’s room has to go. Luckily, Keriens is good-natured, and doesn’t mind moving into one of the private rooms up in the servants’ hall. Forsyth’s kept the staff so thin, each person’s got a room of their own already, with a few to spare even, so no one has to share yet.
Kintyre and I are grateful for the opportunity for some good old-fashioned physical labor after a day of just sitting around and talking. So we help Keriens pack up his bureau, and then shift both that and his bed up to his new room for him. We move the cot that was in the room originally up to the “lumber room” in the attic, and fetch down a simple desk, chair, and set of shelves to make the valet’s room into a study. (To think, the boy who once had to share a bed with three brothers now lives in a house grand enough to have a whole room dedicated to storing furniture no longer fashionable enough to use and call it lumber.)
Kintyre’s got it in his head that he’ll keep using the estate agent’s office as his own—apparently, Forsyth was his own agent as well. Maybe my vision of Forsyth as a micromanaging glutton for insanity and sleepless nights wasn’t all that far off the target after all. The agent’s office is out the back of the Hall, where the folk of the Chipping can access it without bothering the family, so this new study off our bedroom will be mine for . . . Shadow Business. By unspoken agreement, we have decided to keep Forsyth’s library study as . . . not a shrine, that’s not the right word. But that study is Forsyth’s, and it feels wrong to . . . well, it just feels wrong. Feels final in a way that is false, because Forsyth Turn isn’t dead.
I will only use the library study when I need to entertain spies I don’t want traipsing through my bedroom. It’s not like either Kin or I are going to spend much time in the library, anyway. Kintyre only reads books when they’re about him, and I prefer getting out for a ride or a spar over crumpling myself up into a chair and not moving for hours.
Although, I wonder if once—if—once I put on the mask, that will change. Will something of the scholars who came before me leak into my personality? Will I start craving solitude and lamplight and a tome? Or will reading become even more abhorrent because I’ll be able to recall every book the Shadow Hands who came before me read?
I know the knowledge of being Shadow Hand is passed on: the locations of secret passages, the rites of spells, the secret Words that aren’t freely taught, the rules of magic, the languages of the four kingdoms. But must the physical things, like sword fighting, be learned by each inheritor? To be sure, I’ll probably gain the memory of how to perform the flourishing moves of court fencing I’d never bothered with before, but I’ll have no muscle memory from practice, no automatic reaction based on them. I’d have to work at that if I wanted the skills. Not sure I’d need them, really, but if I wanted, I could.
But what else is transferred? Will I have to parse a hundred different men’s tastes in wine? Will I suddenly come to despise apples? Will I dream other men’s nightmares and experience another man’s heartbreak if I walk into a graveyard where his wife is a century dead and buried?
Not for the first time, I wish Forsyth had bloody well stuck around, at least long enough to explain.
Put on the mask, and you’ll know, that damnable seductive voice in my head says, and it’s overlaid with Kintyre calling from the next room: “You’re not going to spend all night in there shuffling things around, are you, Bev? I said we’d fetch your books up out of the library in the morning. What else are you—oh.”
I look up at him, and he’s in the doorway, staring at my hands. Why my hands? I look down at them and . . . oh. I’m holding the Shadow’s Mask again.
I don’t remember picking it up. I was unpacking my saddlebags, laying out my writing box, and then . . . right, yes, I picked up the black velvet bag and . . . and then . . .
The candle on the corner of my new desk is half the height I last remember it being.
Writer’s calluses.
I shake myself all over, fear like a cold splash up my spine, and jam the mask back into its bag. Then I bury it in the farthest corner of this room’s credenza.
“Shit, Kin,” I whisper softly. “That thing is . . .”
“Have you put it on?”
I shake my head. “But I think it wants me to.”
“Come to bed, dearest,” he says, and the pet name
startles me so much that I sway away from the mask and into his arms.
“I’m not a dragonet that needs soothing,” I scold him gently. “Dearest.”
Kintyre smooths his large hands down my back anyway. “You’re my dragon. Huff, huff, burn, burn. Little dragonet with such sharp teeth.”
I pinch his waist in revenge, and Kintyre squirms.
“I know you’re feeling full of flame, but it’s just magic. We know magic well enough. And this is good magic.”
“Is it?” I ask, and I’m shaking. I’m shaking, and it’s not because the fire in my new office hasn’t been lit and the world outside its windows is white with an evening blizzard. “I hope so.”
Kin kisses me then; sweet, and gentle, and reassuring. “I know it’s good. But there’s no rush, Bev. Take all the time you need.”
I nod, comforted by his rock-steady certainty, and let him take me off to bed. I lose myself in his body in order to drown my cowardice.
✍
Our fourth day of our new life in Turn Hall brings a messenger hawk, and a whole host of problems that Kintyre and I had never even remotely considered when we began planning our little domestic adventure here.
“Marriage?” I repeat, my pipe hanging off my bottom lip. True to my word, I’m indulging in a smoke in the kitchen garden after lunch. It’s here that Kintyre found me. He has the messenger hawk perched on one outstretched arm, a letter written in Gyre-blue thrust under my nose, and a look of panicked horror on his face.
“They’re offering me their daughter. Like . . . like she was a cask of wine!”
“Marriage?” I repeat, scanning the letter. “But if news that you’re back in the seat of the Chipping has already gotten all the way to Kingskeep, surely the news that we’re Paired must have—”
“Babies! The letter talks about how handsome our sons would be. Bev!” he wails.
“Well, you do need an heir,” I say musingly, taking the letter from his shaking hands so I can read it properly. The sky is an endless, cloudless blue, the same color as his eyes. The snow that fell in great drifts last night is already burning off in the warm sunshine; Kin’s shaking is not from cold.
