by J. M. Frey
“Yeah,” she sighs. “I’m also glad to see you. All your servants are so damned quiet. It’s unsettling. Neris is like . . . a creepy shadow.”
I smile at her theatrical shudder. “I am glad to see you, as well,” I reply, because it is the truth.
Perhaps it is odd for the Lordling of Lysse Chipping to spend so much time with a healing guest, but I am eager to talk to Lucy Piper; to learn about her, where she has come from, and why the Viceroy wanted her to speak so badly. And why, equally as badly, she wanted to remain silent. I need her to tell me, I need to know, if only to relieve that small knot of anxiety that still lives beneath my ribs. I hate knowing that I have not yet ferreted out all of Pip’s secrets, the story of who she is and why she behaves and speaks as she does.
“Besides that, is there anything more that can be done for you?”
“Not really. I’m pretty damn happy to be upright,” Pip says. The freckles on her cheeks are dark against the paleness of her skin, and I think that perhaps she has rather rushed this stage of healing. She should be lying down still, but I cannot deny that if I had spent what were probably months on my stomach while Bootknife carved his signature into my back, I would be eager to sit up under my own power as well.
I cross the room toward her, pausing at the fireplace to stir up the embers. The rain of the last few days has made the air damp and chill, and the crackle of the reawakened flames is welcome. “I am pleased to hear it,” I say, as I place a thick log of hardwood in the middle of the fire. There; it should burn all evening without needing to be fed again.
“I’m also utterly confused.” She points to the embroidery basket. “What the heck am I supposed to do with this stuff?”
“Pass the time?” I suggest, sinking into the chair opposite her chaise.
“Right,” Pip says, and shoves the basket off the side of her cushion. It bounces against the rug but stays closed, the latch holding. “I don’t do that useless lady stuff.”
I can’t help the smile that curls itself into the corner of my mouth at her indignant expression. “And what would you prefer to do, then?”
She sighs. “Usually, I go jogging.”
“Jogging?”
“Uh, I go for a run.”
“Where?”
“Sort of . . . around the block? Or around a park?”
“Whyever would you do that? Go running in circles?”
“To stay in shape? And for the sheer joy of the exercise. The mild endorphin high. How good it makes you feel. The way it makes the blood flow to my brain.”
Lucy Piper is absolutely baffling. I cannot imagine the appeal of running with no planned destination, to neither escape something nor to rush toward something else. For “just the sheer joy of the exercise.” Then, I consider that it is no different than sparring—moving for the joy of feeling the flex of muscle and the exhilaration of honestly earned sweat.
I am utterly without a bead on understanding who she is and from where she hails, and the more she speaks, the more deliciously confused I become. What an incredible mystery she is. And goodness me, does she run so in the heavy women’s chemise and skirts? Or in menswear, where she could walk much faster without the extra weight and swing of the longer robe?
The image of trousers stretched deliciously over the plump bottom I witnessed when Pip first woke sparks into my mind. I shift in my chair, glad for the pooling fabric of my own house robe on my lap. “A jog is, unfortunately, not a possibility at the moment.”
“You’re telling me. I guess I’d like something to read, then, if that’s possible? I know you have an impressive library.”
I leave the ever-present question of how she knows that I have an impressive library unspoken. She has kept her teeth closed on those secrets for such a long time that I think it pains her to even consider opening them. I am confident that she will tell me what she could not tell the Viceroy, as long as I am patient and allow her to do so in her own time.
Instead, I fold my hands under my chin and perch my elbows on the armrests. It has the double advantage of making me look scholarly, and of hiding the extra flesh under my chin. “You can read?”
“Yes. Obviously. Everyone in Turnshire can read, too, Lord Philanthropist.”
“I do fund a free school,” I admit. “I feel that it is important for the peasantry to have the agency to be able to manage their own affairs, especially when they venture away from our little Chipping. And it is less expensive to hire one teacher than to send a scribe with each man who looks to make a deal beyond our borders. But we both know that it is rare outside of Lysse for anyone who is not of the gentry to possess the skill.”
Pip grins at me, and I am surprised to find myself returning it. “Is this your oh-so-subtle way of encouraging me to talk about my home by comparison, and thus trying to figure out where I’m from?”
I start, surprised to have my secondary intentions so easily caught out. “Yes,” I admit. “Pip, you do baffle me.”
“Ooookay.”
Another odd word. “‘Okay’? You say this often, and I take it for an affirmative, or a confirmation of wellness, but what does it mean, exactly?”
Pip shakes her head slowly, amused. “This is weird. If ever I needed a blatant reminder of where I’m not . . .” She raises her hand and circles the thumb and forefinger, then extends the other three fingers. “O-K. It’s an idiom taken from military parlance. Zero Kills. All is well.”
“Okay,” I repeat again, raising my hand to mimic her gesture, and it makes her laugh until the pain causes her to gasp.
“More poppy milk?”
“I don’t want to sleep just yet,” she says, bent over slightly to relieve the pull of her healing skin.
“I’ll fetch a book for you, then.”
“No, stay and talk to me,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to just sit down and have a drink with you.”
“I am happy to oblige,” I say, and pour out the waiting tea. Neris has brought us matching earthenware cups, solid and hard to break, and I find myself pleased with her forethought. I don’t trust the strength of Pip’s hands to my delicate porcelain just yet. As I pass a cup to her, I add: “But what you hope to gain from conversation with a fat old man like me is beyond my comprehension.”
Pip snorts, amused, and takes a sip of the tea. “If you’re fat, then I’m a fairy,” she chuckles. “You’ve got about as much extra skin as a hummingbird.”
I drink to hide my discomfort. She assesses my expression carefully, and I curse my fair complexion, my inability to keep what I am thinking off my face. This is why I wear the mask as the Shadow Hand: to hide my thoughts as much as my identity.
“No, really, you’re not fat,” she says, and her voice is surprisingly earnest. Her expression has grown serious, as well, as if she has decided that she is going to try to convince me that this lie is truth. “You’re like a whip. You’ve got barely any wrinkles, except for when you get frowny.”
“It is kind of you to flatter me, Miss Pip, but there is no point in lying to me.” I try to make it come out straight, but the shame I hear in my own voice cannot be hidden. “I know what I am.”
She stares at me for a moment, eyes becoming rounder and rounder until she sputters, “You actually believe that, don’t you? I mean, you really believe that you are old and fat.”
Her seriousness has me stunned, trapped like a rodent under a basilisk’s gaze. One just simply does not talk about such things. But what can I do? How can I answer save with polite truth? The faster we get this conversation over with, the faster it will end, so instead of trying to turn the topic to other things, I simply answer: “Yes.”
“Jesus,” she says. I don’t know this word either, but I let her continue instead of asking for clarification, because it sounds like another of those expletives I am learning Pip likes so very much. “You’re not old, Forsyth. Not unless twenty-seven is ancient around here.”
“I am quite approaching the middle of my life. If I am careful
, I shall live to sixty. Perhaps sixty-five, if I am not too frail or too stout.”
She stares in silence again. “That sucks.” Her tone makes her sentiments clear, even if her actual choice of words do not. She is disappointed. Probably in me. If I were ever to take Pointe’s advice seriously, I am certain she would be revolted to have such a useless old man, past his prime of life, the skin around his eyes and mouth crinkled like paper, showing her romantic attention.
“It is a harsh life, farming the Chipping,” I agree. “The nobility has it better, of course. Easier lives, better homes, and no shortage of food. They live to seventy, if they are lucky.”
“I’m not noble. My parents would be merchants by your reckoning, I guess. I suppose my father is a landowner, technically, but it’s just a house and a vegetable patch, and they both work for someone else for a living. So do I.” Pip scrubs the heels of her hands over her eyes. “But wai po is eighty-four.”
“Wai . . . ?”
“My grandmother. Her sister turned ninety last month.”
“Incredible.” Now it is my turn to stare. “What . . . why do you call her that? ‘Wai po’?”
Pip’s high cheeks go faintly pinkish. “It’s . . . my mother’s language. I don’t know how to explain it to you. I’m a, uh, half . . . uhg, this is terrible. I don’t even have words to use for you to understand. I’m half of one nation and half of another. How’s that?”
“And one speaks one language, that one, and the other speaks . . . ?”
“English. Er. Hain-ish? Like we are right now.”
“Fascinating,” I admit. “Then, your mother emigrated, and your father wed her.”
She blinks at me. Then she chuffs a short laugh. “Right, I forgot how quickly you get things. Yes, nearly exactly that.”
“What did I get wrong?” I prod. I can’t help shifting a bit closer, nor the way my gaze narrows on her face. Information, at last!
“My parents met in my mother’s homeland, and they wed there. He was young, a teacher of, um, the language we’re speaking. They fell in love, and then they moved to, um, where I live now.”
“And what is the name of that kingdom?”
Pip hesitates again. “I . . . I’m sorry, Forsyth, I . . . I don’t think I should tell.”
I try very hard not to feel resentful. “Wise,” I admit, grudgingly. “Very well.” A change of topic is required, quickly, to mask my frustration, and I fall back upon our previous one. “You are fortunate that you come from a very long-lived family.”
“No,” she says, clearly glad for the return to safer conversational territory. “Just a . . . kingdom . . . with better access to the necessities of life. This is what I was trying to say about life-spans and stuff. My family is normal.”
“Twenty-seven is not old to you, then?” It feels like stating the obvious, but my curiosity has been piqued like the string of a harp, and I can feel the waves of interest resonating across my frame.
“Well, I’d be a hypocrite if I said it was. I’m twenty-five,” she says. “And I’ve barely begun thinking of settling down and doing the family thing. I just finished my education, and that only barely. I fast-tracked my Master’s.”
“Twenty-five?” I echo dumbly. She does not look so old. I had guessed that her life had been easy before, when she slept, because of the fullness of her form and the softness of her hands. But to look so unworn at twenty-five. “And, I don’t understand. Starting a family? Finishing an education? You have no husband, no children? At twenty-five?”
“Shocking, I know,” she says, but she says it with a chuckle and a little upward curl of her lip. “I chose not to.”
“So, you’re a vi-vir—”
“No,” she replies, cutting me off. Her smirk has gotten wider. “And I’m especially glad of that, because I know what that means around here.”
My panic deflates. There will be no issues with Hands-Right Challenges after all. And no unicorns. Good. Those beasts are always so messy. “But to be, um, as you a-a-are and no children?”
“Prophylactics,” she says, as if that word is in any sort of language I ought to comprehend. When I tilt my head quizzically, she adds: “Methods of preventing pregnancy. And not spells, either.”
“What a wondrous place you must come from,” I murmur, “to have produced a woman like you.” I am amazed. Utterly amazed.
“Many women like me,” Pip says softly. She flushes, probably insulted by my blatant admiration, and I curse my inability to hold my tongue. Kintyre would never have offended her so thoroughly; he always knows the right thing to say. And I am also terribly, terribly angry at myself. Because it is my duty to know things. Information is my reason for being, and I do not know this place Pip comes from. I know nothing about these merchants who live beyond the age spans of even our hardiest kings, where everyone reads and pleasure does not result in a surplus of children. Where women control their own lives. There is an entire kingdom somewhere beyond the borders of my own—two of them—and I know nothing of them.
And the Viceroy does.
✍
Pip seems amused that her introduction to the Sword of Turnshire was so brief when we share lunch the next day. “Pointe was charming,” she says. “Very charming.”
“And very married,” I counter. I have tried to keep my tone light, but I suspect the undercurrent of discontent is audible. It is ridiculous, to feel jealous of Pointe, especially when there is no understanding between Pip and I. At all.
And yet, her eyes have brightened and her face has assumed a more healthy glow, her cheeks filling with roses at the thought of her brief visitor. I want it to be me who has made her that content, that effortlessly happy. I am a ridiculous old man.
“Oh, that I know,” she says. “No power on earth would make me come between Sheriff and Mrs. Pointe. Not that they would let anyone, anyway.”
“Their marriage is quite strong, yes.”
Pip smirks at me, the curl of the side of her lip quite familiar and, damn me, something of which I fear I am growing quite fond. “That’s a pretty sterile way of saying they’re disgustingly in love.”
It is a rebuke. I try so hard, but I cannot seem to ever get it right. Every time I think I’ve mastered the arts of conversation, I realize that there is still so much I do not know, a language beneath the words that I cannot comprehend and do not speak, no matter how much practice I have. Oh, if only people were like spells and arithmetic—easy measures and countermeasures, where knowing the right formulae would fix everything.
I look down at the makings of my small meal (must watch my physique, of course, I run to fat so easily) and sullenly push a piece of cheese around the edge of the dish with my fork. My mother would be horrified, and I stop, hoping Pip hasn’t noticed my bad manners.
“I fear that you must find my language lacking,” I say softly. “Of course I mean to say that my friend Pointe and his wife are very much in love, but I . . . I am not very talented at . . . poetry.”
“Naw, it’s fine,” Pip dismisses. “Not everyone can speak like a flowery froufrou romantic, like Bevel writes in his scrolls. Not everyone needs to, either.”
Oh, to be compared to that hedgehog of a friend of my brother’s and to be found lacking. I spear the tangy orange cheese on my fork and shove it into my mouth to keep my tongue from stuttering through another ridiculous apology, or an attempt to prove her wrong that will only embarrass us both.
How woefully inadequate I must be to merit comparison with my brother’s sniveling little dogsbody.
There is an awkward silence, heavy as lead. Pip shifts in her backward house robe and, in an attempt to return to light conversation, asks: “What’s Pointe’s son’s name?”
“This is one of the things you don’t know?”
She nods.
“Lewko,” I answer. “After his late grandfather.”
Pip freezes on the spot and sighs. It is sad. She puts down the bread she was buttering and nods sagely. “Good name.”
>
“He was a good man,” I reply.
“Yes, he was.”
Lewko Pointe the elder was the man from whom I inherited my station as Shadow Hand. He trained me while I was a youth, quietly, on the sly, knowing that the best Shadow Hand would be one who was of the gentry, who could gain access to court more easily than a simple Chipping Sheriff, and I’d agreed. I just hadn’t expected to have to take over for him so soon. I was only twenty when Pointe’s father was murdered.
Unlike Pip, he had not been rescued from Bootknife in time for his cuts to be healed. Pip shifts in her seat, back arching in discomfort, and I know that she knows this, too. How she can is yet another part of the great mystery that both the Viceroy and I are so keen to uncover. Although, not for the same reasons, and certainly not through the same methods, I should hope.
It disgusts me to think that there is a thing the Viceroy and I both desire. That there is anything at all that we have in common. At least I know that, unlike that villain, I can gain it without harming my guest.
Another silence descends upon us, this time sorrowful.
“How are you feeling today?” I ask, resorting to the default question.
“Kinda getting sick of being asked that,” she says with a watery smile.
“Apologies.”
“Don’t apologize. I know you genuinely want to know. It’s just . . . I wish people didn’t have to ask. I can’t even see the damn thing, so how am I supposed to answer?”
“Honestly?”
“Fine,” she huffs. “I feel antsy, and my back feels tight and hot and horrible. I am sick of sitting around, and I am sick of sleeping. There is a whole incredible world outside of these walls, and I haven’t seen a single grain of it. I haven’t smelled the grass or watched the sun set, or stuck my toes in the river, or anything, and it’s driving me bonkers.”
“I wouldn’t advise the latter,” I say. “Kelpies nip.”
