by J. M. Frey
Because before, she would never have given them to me.
All the things I have seen as Shadow Hand, through peepholes and around corners, from behind the arras and tapestries, all the things I have never had the privilege of having for myself. No matter how much I may have desired it, fantasized about having someone touch me like that, make me moan and tremble like that, someone that I could slowly pull to pieces the way I have seen other men do, I could not. Because it could never happen. I could not fantasize it; would not torture myself with that fantasy.
And now Pip says that I may. That I will have someone with whom to share all that I’ve learned about carnality through spy-holes and fantasy and the generous application of my hand to myself in dark, small moments. She will. She has promised. I may have the thing I desire most—the companionship of another person, the love of a good woman—if only I can give her that which she desires most: me. A truer, more honest, more brave me. I can earn her.
And this terrifies me. I have spent so much time building walls and shields around myself. How do I make them crumble? How do I let them go? How do I let myself be convinced of things that I am not certain are true?
What if I can’t? What if it’s all a lie? What if I’m not good enough for Pip? What if I try and try, and I cannot ever be confident, or smooth, or well-spoken and intelligent and kind and all the things she is pressing upon me? What if I just give up now, stay the Forsyth I know, remain in the shadows, remain the Shadow Hand, skulking and quiet? It’s easier, certainly; it’s easier that way. It is safer. And I will lose Pip, but it won’t hurt, will it? It won’t be hard work. I can stay as I am, and I will miss her terribly, but one cannot really miss what one has not really ever had, and it would be better, wouldn’t it? Pip could fall in love with a real man, and I will stay out of her way, and—
“Shut up,” Pip says softly.
I look up, my thoughts skidding off the road like a poorly constructed cart. “I . . . wasn’t speaking.”
“No, but I can tell what you’re thinking,” Pip answers. “You don’t get to chicken out of this. I’m not going to let you.”
“Pip, you’re asking so mu-mu-much of m-m-me.”
“Not anything you can’t do. I’ve seen it, Forsyth. I’m not asking you to change. I’m just asking you to start seeing yourself for who and what you really are. We’re not reconstructing you. We’re just ripping the distortion off the surface of the mirror, okay?”
“I don’t know h-ho-how,” I mutter. “How can you ch-ch-change how I see myself?”
“Easy,” Pip says. “We’re going to force you out of your comfort zone. Then, you’ll see how amazing you really are.”
“And how will you do that?”
Pip smiles, and it is one of the honest, dazzling ones that makes me feel like there is no evil in the world at all.
“Because you’re going to say yes, Forsyth Turn.”
Eight
Pip, as it turns out, is an extremely competent researcher.
She says this is because she possesses something called a Doctorate in English. I ask her what reading has to do with alchemy, and she laughs. We spend the most pleasantly fascinating evening while she tells me all about the education system in her world, where there are libraries that reach into the sky and are filled with more books than can possibly be read in a single lifetime; where it is illegal for children to not attend a school; that the most skilled and most celebrated of her people are called “Doctors,” no matter their healing knowledge, and that they are also, comically, often the most myopic when it comes to their subjects of discourse.
“This is why you are unmarried?” I ask. “Because you are devoted to your studies?”
“I guess,” she says, looking up from the enormous roll of blank parchment she fetched down from my cupboard. She blushes and looks away. “But I’m still really young, in my society. Twenty-five . . . that’s nothing. Also ‘cause, you know, most of the people at my school were jocks. Um, like Kintyre,” she adds, when I admit I do not know what a jock is.
“I see.”
What I do not see is why she is so keen to scour every book in my library. I think that, if we are to head out on an adventure, we would be better learning how to build a campfire, sew wounds, and practice outwitting elves. The thought of being ill prepared for our journey terrifies me, though I will not allow Pip to see my fear.
“Well, the aim of the quest is obvious,” Pip says to me, as I begin pulling the scrolls and books I feel may be helpful off my shelves and into a pile on my desk. Pip has cleared space on the floor and is now crouched over the long piece of parchment. She is methodically scoring it into a grid-work of squares, rather like an over-extended calendar.
“Obvious?” I ask, slipping two blue leather-bound tomes on the native fauna of the northerly Minchin Forest onto the top of the pile.
“We have to summon the same Deal-Maker spirit the Viceroy did to send me home. That part’s easy.”
“Ah, and we have that spirit’s sigil already,” I say, retrieving the note with the recreation my Men brought to me when they brought me Pip. I hand it to her, and she lays it to the side of her chart.
“And that’s Station One, taken care of. With this sigil comes the rules of summoning, so we also know that this is going to be a collection quest. We have to get stuff and bring it all together,” Pip explains, when my eyebrows wrinkle with my confusion.
“I see,” I say. “But what . . . stuff?”
“Well, that’s what research is for. Which Spirit Poem goes with this particular Deal-Maker? Where is it written down? What is its history? Who has summoned this spirit before?”
“The Viceroy has,” I say, grasping her line of reasoning. “Did you see anything?”
Pip stills, hands hovering over a quill and inkpot. “No,” she says softly. “No, I didn’t see anything in the room.”
I wait for another episode of shaking and screaming, but none comes. Pip breathes deep, in and out, for several minutes. When she feels calm enough, she resumes scoring the parchment.
“I’ll search the tomes and notes my Men extracted,” I say. “And compare them to the Spirit Poems on record. They are . . . ah! Here.” I pull them from the shelf.
Pip chuckles. “Only you would have a record of known Spirit Poems.”
“I am the Shadow Hand,” I say glibly.
“Yes, you are.”
✍
Over the next few days, I spend many an hour re-reading my Men’s letters, and the pages and scrolls they liberated from the Viceroy. When the information within them tangles in my mind, and I need a respite from clue-deciphering, I pick up the chronicles of my brother’s adventures, and those of the heroes that came before him. I make notes on the sorts of tools they seemed to find useful, the weapons and provisions they pack when they go on adventures, the clothing they cherish. I’m not certain where to procure all of these items, but thankfully, my Men do, as they often pack as if they’re questing when I send them to spy.
No one asks me why I’m having them bring me such items. They simply smile and nudge one another. Gossiping old grandmothers, the lot of them.
Neris floats in and out of whatever room we’re occupying, bringing in tea and wine, victuals and fruit and—something that Pip has taught Cook to make and which has quickly become a favorite staple of my afternoons—sandwiches.
In a fit of a punchy mood, brought on by perhaps too much tea and not enough sleep, Pip rearranges all the books on the south wall of my study so the colors of the spines create a comical, smiling visage. It is cheerful in the face of her frustration at being impotent when it comes to reading the books she rearranges.
When Pip and I are together, Pip bids me put down the tales of daring-do and instead insists on being talked through everything the Shadow’s Men have deciphered about her capture. She cannot read the alphabet of Hain, and so I must read each notation and squiggle to her, which she copies into a small leather-bound book of her own with chick
en-scratch markings that I, in turn, cannot read myself.
I am powerfully fascinated by the way she constructs her written language. Knowledge is the highest aphrodisiac for me, and to be offered an entire method of recording thoughts that sounds like my language but is not written the same is wondrous. Especially since I will be able to use it as a code for myself; no one else will know this method, so my deepest secrets and most important notes will remain safe.
In the evenings, she teaches me how to read them, the twenty-six letters with so many rules that I am certain I will never get it right.
“English,” she tells me, “is a thief language. We steal verbs and nouns from other languages, and so their rules must apply when conjugated. It’s terrible. There’s this great saying about English lurking in alleyways, knocking out other languages and rifling their pockets for spare vocabulary. I wish I could remember where I first heard that . . . I’m a bad academic. No citation.”
Her little notation book begins to live in her pocket. At any time of day or night, I can expect to find her scribbling, her letters messy with ink splotches, her fingers stained from little practice with a quill. Sometimes, she stops mid-sentence and, with a distant look in her eyes, ignores all that is happening around her until her thoughts are on paper.
I find it endearing. Sheriff Pointe, the first time it happened in his presence, found it insulting, for he had been telling a great tale of his father’s era as Shadow Hand. I had to explain to him that she wasn’t bored, she was working through a problem and something he had said had triggered a thought for her.
Eventually, when I have read every piece of the relevant correspondence to Pip, when she has pulled down every single book I own and demanded I read chapters to her based on the titles in the codex, when several weeks have passed and her little notation book must be nigh stuffed with words that I am only now learning to read easily, she sits back in my study with a glass of unwatered wine rolling between her hands and a smile playing over her lips. She is leaning fully back, reveling in the ability to do so. The ivy is completely healed and only occasionally does Pip wince when one of the still-tight scars pulls uncomfortably.
“You look satisfied,” I say, setting aside my bookkeeping for the night. In point of fact, she looks—near as I can tell from my necessarily covert research on the subject—like a woman who has just experienced a thoroughly satisfying orgasm. I shall never say so out loud, however.
“I am,” she says, and gestures at her enormous roll of parchment, the one she had been scoring when our research began. It is now tacked to the wall above my study fireplace. In each of the squares, she has scribbled some relevant word or two. “It’s done.”
“Impressive,” I murmur, while scanning the elaborate chart. “I cannot understand it, mind, but I assume it is meaningful?”
“I’m a whiz at Excel,” she says, taking a sip of her wine. She is getting drunk, celebrating her achievement, relaxing in a way I haven’t seen her do since that afternoon in the tub. “This took a bit longer, since I had to do it by hand, but this is how I charted the storytelling arcs in Reed’s books for my Doctorate.”
“Baffling,” I tell her again, and deny the urge to cross the room and fall to my knees before her, a supplicant to her strange ways and intellect, and kiss that beautiful rounded tummy I have glimpsed so briefly. “Utterly baffling.”
“Just a different way of organizing knowledge, my lord Shadow Hand. Here, let me show you.”
She stands, taking her wine with her, and with only the smallest of winces, reaches out to explain the process of cross-correlation to me. “And so I understand the exercise,” I say, when she is finished explaining how to read the chart. “But what is the purpose?”
Pip turns to face me, and we both startle to notice how closely I am standing behind her. She turns her face up to mine, and I take a small, significant step backward so as not to crowd her. It is difficult, as what I’d really like to do is take a step forward and twine that talented tongue around my own, drink its cleverness into myself. I am about to think something more disparaging about how Pip must not truly want me, as she hasn’t given me permission to kiss her yet, but then I recall my promise to try to be more generous to myself, more kind in my own mind, and so I only remind myself that she wants to kiss me. That fills my fingers with sparking tingles and brings a soft upward curl to my too-thin lips, and, for now, it is enough.
Pip covers the moment of awkwardness with a sip from her now quite depleted glass. “Most times, in a Quest Narrative, heroes go bashing about until they stumble on a clue or some elderly wise entity points them in the right direction, usually with an ominous half-prophecy,” she explains. “Forget that. You’ve got spies who’ve done most of the legwork for us. We know which prophecy he perverted, which sigil he used to summon the Deal-Maker spirit, though not which spirit it was. We know what the five objects are that go with the Deal-Maker, and the sigil to make the Seven Stations of the Quest. Reed always does Seven Stations,” she murmurs to herself more than to me. “Where’d you put the map?”
I steer her toward the pile of papers scattered on my desk, brushing aside scrolls and sketches that I will reorganize later, the detritus of academia. The discarded corpses of more than a few dry ink bottles and nubby quills flutter and shuffle as I move things aside. A map of the known world takes pride of place on my blotter, and Pip sets aside her cup for a fresh quill. She dips it into the virulently red ink she prefers when making notations and begins to scratch at the landmarks.
Kintyre—slew dragon—book 2; Bevel—sung siren to sleep—book 5; Viceroy—lair exploded—book 7; she writes. Note after note, and with the book numbers circled. I am pleased that I am able to read most of what she writes. My diligence in my study of her alphabet is being rewarded.
“There!” she crows. “Fetch me some other color of ink!”
I retrieve the bottle of Tarvers-green ink I reserve for my business as Shadow Hand from the desk drawer, and Pip starts connecting the red points. Everything that is labeled “book 1,” she connects with a solid line; “book 2,” with a dotted one; and ah, yes, I see what she is doing. She is laying out the path my brother took on each of his quests. Nearly all begin in Kingskeep, save for the first and fourth, which start here at Turn Hall.
“There, you see? You read the Seven Stations just like a book. From west to east where possible, and always starting north and heading south. Each and every time.”
“Astounding. I never noticed. Or, rather, I never thought to bother tracing Kintyre’s journey on a map.”
“Who would?” Pip asks, setting aside the quill and reaching once more for her wine. Her fingers are spotted with red and green, like she’s been dabbling in potions, and I wonder if the ink would taste bitter on her skin. “It’s not as if Bevel includes a map with his scrolls.”
“So, we shall begin here,” I say, pointing to Turn Hall. To date, it is the westernmost point on land that Kintyre’s adventures have ever come, so it makes sense. There is very little between my Chipping and the Sunsong Sea to the west; what little land does exist between the two is technically part of Lord Fimoger’s Chipping, but the isthmus of useless chalk cliffs and scrubby trees is no good for anything but drying fish upon, and so neither of us have much bothered with populating it. There are scrublands on the isthmus where round mountains of rock fracture away into sheer cliffs, and great folds of stone that are said to be the bones of a long-ago felled giant. In actuality, they are just bare patches where the swift and salty wind off the Sunsong has worn away the vegetation, where the gnarled trees grip desperately to the rock and blow back away from the sea.
It isn’t until the downward slope of the land exhales the sea salt and transforms into my lush little valley that the soil is of any use. “And then?”
Pip turns to study her Excel. “Kingskeep, would be my best guess. The first Station is complete; we have the sigil from when the Viceroy collected his own spell components and did his, uh, thing to p
ull down a Reader.” She fights down a shiver, biting her bottom lip for a moment. I have just enough time to wonder if we are going to have to endure another episode, and then the moment passes.
Pip shakes her head, shrugs her shoulders as if to brush away an ill omen, and retrieves her little notebook from her pocket. She flips through the cramped pages until she finds the one she wants. “Right, so,” she begins, “this one here talks about calling down a witness from the sky, and that’s the one your guys found with me? Hmmm. . . . The Sigil that Never Fades by the Quill that Never Dulls in salt of the Cup that Never Runs Dry upon the Parchment that Never Fills o’er, all with the Knife that Never Fails upon the Desk that Never Rots. Yadda yadda, more Tolkien-esque rip-off lyrics with clumsy scansion and then, this: The Witness shall game with the Spirit Who Never Lies to open the passageway to the sky. What’s a spirit that never lies? If the witness is me, what do I game with . . . like, chess?”
“Word games,” I say, grave all of a sudden. “It’s a Deal-Maker spirit. They don’t lie. But they don’t speak in what you and I would consider full truths, either. They are very dangerous to deal with, and they’re the only creatures dark enough and powerful enough to call down a Reader. That I know of.”
“And you know of everything.”
“I do. It’s in the job description.”
Pip smirks at me. “Well, it’s a pretty clear list; even the awkwardness of the way the sentences are put together shows us the order it has to be in—see, we have to get the knife and then the desk. And . . . it ought to be somewhere right around here.” She points at a valley in the Southlands.
