by J. M. Frey
“Can you talk?” she asks it.
The creature makes no sound, just cocks its head in the other direction and flips up its other ear.
“Non-magical animals only learn to talk when they spend a lot of time with humans,” I remind her. “I don’t think this, ah, fellow, has been around people in a very, very long time.”
“What’s he here for, then?” Pip asks. “Just to guard that?”
She gestures toward the plinth, and the creature barks. She quickly draws her hand back to her side. Thoughtful, Pip reaches out toward the creature. I clamp down on the urge to rush forward and yank her back.
The creature opens its jaws and a rolling pink tongue lolls out. Something sweeps the floor behind it, and I realize with a jolt of amusement that it is wagging its tail.
“Are you lonely?” Pip asks it. “You poor thing.”
“Poor thing?” I hiss.
Before I realize what she is planning, Pip walks right up to the creature—the fool! She only comes up to the bottom of its snout, and with a twist of its head, it could easily bite off hers.
We all freeze again, the three of us eyeing one another and trying to figure out which of us will break first. The creature is assessing her, nose wriggling as it breathes in the smell of her hair, her jerkin. I look around wildly, desperate to find something to use as a weapon, but there are only books within reach, and they are all precious.
More precious than Pip’s life?
I dither, and then am appalled by my indecision. Of course Pip’s life is more important than some old book!
But by the time I have made the split-second decision to fetch a book to hurl at the creature, Pip has got her hands in its ruff, giving it a good scratch.
“Who’s a good boy, then?” she asks it, and the creature’s eyes roll up into its head in bliss. The creature slumps down before Pip, holding her between its massive front paws and rumbling the whole balcony with the force of its purring. Pip laughs and digs into the fur beside one of its ears with both hands, making it twitch.
She is still focused on the ground, though, her eyes on something that I still cannot see from my vantage point.
“Forsyth?” she says, her voice still lilting and pitched as if she’s praising the creature. “Now’s a good time.” She jerks her head toward the podium.
“Oh!” I breathe. “Right! Clever.”
With the creature distracted, I sneak as quietly as I can over to the plinth. I barely touch the velvet swag, but it still crumbles dramatically, falling to threads and patches in the afternoon sunbeam. Thankfully, it also crumbles silently. This reveals a glass case, just as I suspected it might, and there does not seem to be any latch or keyhole on the plinth. I risk a look at Pip—the creature is lying on its back, wriggling happily. I cannot help rolling my eyes.
Of course the big scary monster is just an affection-starved puppy.
But then, would any other hero have discovered this? Would Kintyre and Bevel have taken the time to really look at the creature, see how it had been left alone, and guess that it might just need a good pet to bypass? Or would they have just slain it? An indignant rage curls in my gut. The creature is obviously sweet—it would not have deserved to die.
I try lifting the glass, and it comes away easily. Underneath another swag of red velvet, this one intact, I find a scroll of age-yellowed vellum. It is thick, and smooth, and it does not feel like it’s ever been shaved down to be written upon. It is not like a palimpsest, which has been used over and over again. “Is this the Parchment that Never Fills?” I ask. “It looks normal to me. If only there was some way to be certain!”
And of course, the moment I begin to despair, the scroll clutched in my hand, is the moment the creature looks up at me. It is on its feet in a flash, snarling and snapping, racing toward me, and I jump back behind the plinth, hoping it will offer at least a small modicum of protection.
There is a metallic rattle, and then a high-pitched yelp, and the creature jerks backward. Pip is screaming! No, no, it’s not Pip, it’s the creature! It lunges at me again, and then yelps a second time, yanked back once more.
There is something holding the creature back. A spell? I straighten behind the plinth, uncertain how to proceed.
Snapping and snarling in fury, the creature rounds on Pip. Silly Pip, who did not run when she had the chance.
“Forsyth!” Pip screams. The creature swipes at her with one massive paw and pins her to the ground. A meaty thock fills the air as Pip’s head smacks off the marble.
“No!” I cry. “No, I’ll leave the vellum, stop!”
The creature turns to me, narrowing its eyes, and I am struck with the realization that though it did not speak to us when Pip asked, I do believe it can understand what we’re saying. The creature sits back down on its haunches, Pip pinned, waiting.
I lay the scroll back onto the plinth. Blast! We are at an impasse.
And then Pip, with only the slightest of hesitations, reaches up and brushes aside the dusty fur along the wrist of the paw holding her down. I catch the shine of metal. This is what Pip had seen before. It is a cuff. A manacle.
The creature shifts slightly, and the metallic clank rings out again. Chains. Lost somewhere beneath the dust and the creature’s excessive fur, there are chains.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Pip says softly.
The creature makes a sound of indignant dismissal and lets her up. Pip gains her feet slowly, but instead of backing away, she reaches out and rubs its snout.
“Pip!” I say, and am dismayed by the actual crackle in my voice, brought on by both my shock and fear. “Please, please do take a careful step away!”
She turns to me, eyes wide with confusion. “Forsyth . . . you’re not actually scared of it, are you? It can’t hurt anyone. It’s chained.”
“It can still hurt you!” I say. “Come here, we’ll find another way down.”
“No,” Pip says, stubborn. “No, we’re going to free it.”
“Free it?” I echo. “Have you gone mad?”
“Have you ever been tied down against your will, Forsyth Turn?” she snarls, her voice almost as loud and filled with fury as the creature’s earlier roars, and I am so startled by her sudden temper that I cannot even get my tongue to form the word “no.” Instead, I just shake my head, shocked. “Then you can shut the fuck up. I’m letting it go.”
“And what if it eats us?”
“Look around,” she snaps. “It doesn’t eat. Obviously.”
“It’s a figure of speech!”
The creature seems amused by our back and forth. Pip firmly turns her back to me, making it clear that our argument is at an end, and reaches for the cuff. The creature lifts its paw obligingly, but its eyes are narrowed and still on me. I resist the urge to fidget like a child under a headmaster’s gaze. With the blasted thing watching me, there’s no way that I’ll be able to secret the scroll inside my travel robe and sweep the velvet back onto the plinth to disguise its disappearance.
“Listen,” Pip says conversationally. The creature’s ears twitch toward her, but it keeps its eyes on me. “There’s a screw on the manacle here, and my hands are small enough. I can get it undone, and then you can get out of here. I’m sure you’d like that. Go lay in the sun, take a bath in the fountain out in the courtyard, wash the dust off your fur, take a walk around the hedges.”
The creature’s whole hide shivers in desire.
“And I’m gonna free you whether you agree to this or not, because it’s not right to keep you a slave here, alone and unable to communicate to others that you’re not here by choice. I know how that fe—ahem. Shit.” She shakes her head once, and then continues. “So, I’m not going to make your freedom conditional on your cooperation, but . . . we really need the vellum. It’s for a quest. And Forsyth has already agreed to return the things we’ve collected elsewhere, so I’m sure he’d be just fine with returning the Parchment that Never Fills to the Lost Library as soon as we’re done. So,
what do you say? Will you let us take it?”
The creature cuts a look between me and its paw. Finally, slowly, it nods.
Pip grins up at it and sets to work, digging her fingers around a screw on the manacle that would be too small for the creature to manipulate, but is big enough for her to wrap her fist around. It takes an inordinate amount of grunting and cussing, but eventually, Pip loosens the thing and it rotates free. The manacle creaks open and drops away.
She drops it to the ground and backs up a step, waiting to see what the creature will do. It lifts its paw to its face, licking the fur that has grown thin and matted under the weight of the metal cuff, whining slightly. Then it stands, and, seeming to ignore us, makes its large way down the spiral staircase.
Slowly, in case it changes its mind, I wrap my hand around the scroll. The creature doesn’t roar or rush back up, so I take that for a sign that our bargain is struck, and that we are free to take the Parchment. I tuck it carefully into the pocket on the inside of my travel robe.
“You’re a mad bastard,” I tell Pip, and she turns her face up for a kiss that I am all too happy to give when I reach her side.
“But it worked.”
“It did,” I say, and follow her back out of the Library.
The creature is indeed in the courtyard fountain, as Pip suggested it might like, rolling and frolicking in the water.
“Aw,” Pip says, the corners of her eyes crinkling in delight.
“No,” I say immediately. “It’s not coming with us.”
“Spoilsport,” Pip pouts. Her tone and expression are victorious and joyful, but there is something tense about her posture, about the way she has her hands jammed firmly into her pockets and refuses to budge them.
As soon as the creature realizes we are outside, it bounds over, water flying everywhere, and butts its head against my shoulder, clearly seeking pets. I rub my hand between its massive ears, trying not to think about how its eye is the same size as my whole head. One good shove, and I would be on my arse. Dear Writer, what if this beast decides that it loves us and wants to follow us about? Never mind the quest, the thought of the kind of damage it could do to Turn Hall, to Lysse Chipping, is enough to give me spasms.
Content that it has been thoroughly scratched, the creature bounds toward the tall hedgerow that keeps the world out of the Lost Library. It rubs up against the vines, rushing back and forth, wriggling and panting. Great drifting clouds of shed fur tangle in the thorns, making it appear as if the vines have sprouted hairy sand-colored blossoms. I am half tempted to snatch some down and use it to stuff a mattress. I am sure it would be heavenly soft.
When the creature has finished grooming itself on the plant life, its fur now bright and smooth and glossy, it paces over to the place where the entryway should be and swipes at the foliage.
The vines part under its claws, and I am struck again with how close Pip and I came to being gutted on those razor-like blades. The plants try to fight back, to curl into the space that the creature’s paw cleared, but it yowls at them and they shiver and clump into an archway.
It turns to us, triumphant, and beyond the hedgerow, I can see Karl and Dauntless tied to their tree and dilating their nostrils at us expectantly.
“Good boy!” Pip coos at the creature and rubs its snout. “Thank you!”
The creature rumbles out another purr, and then head butts her out the door. I follow close after, wary still that it might try to renege on our deal. But the creature only licks the back of my head in passing.
It is hot and slimy and disgusting!
Pip turns to wave goodbye and bursts into full-bellied laughter, pointing at the no-doubt hilarious new configuration of my hair. Ugh!
Fifteen
We decide to make camp in the courtyard of the Lost Library. There is talk of doing so inside, but we both fear the effect of too much human interaction on the ancient books, and we don’t want to leave the horses alone outside with the creature, just in case. On top of that, we are both terrified of what might happen if we had to light a fire around all that paper. Accidents do happen.
The courtyard is sheltered from the wind, and we don’t mind sleeping outside again. Also, we seem to have acquired a guardian of our own. The creature is currently pacing the grounds, clearly searching for threats and reacclimatizing itself to its territory. That Pip and I, and the horses, are now apparently a part of said territory is only slightly discomforting. I do not fear its teeth any longer, but I do fear what might happen if it decides to sleep next to us and rolls over in the middle of the night.
The late afternoon sky above us is an endless ceiling of vaulted blue, and I cannot help but raise my face to the sunlight and smile at the scent of honest vegetation and book-dust. I stretch my shoulders back, and they make a pleasant pop as I work out the kinks of weeks in the saddle and an afternoon of sneaking about, slope-shouldered and cautious.
The water in the fountain is clean, still bubbling up from some underground well after all these centuries. We refill our drinking skins and the travel pot we use for campfire-tea, and then I decide to be the first to brave the brisk temperature to wash away the travel grime. The fountain is a far cry from the warm bath for which I have been yearning, though. I seem to be spending every blasted day of this quest lusting for a good shave and a hot bath. It’s starting to get farcical.
Pip is sitting on the edge of the fountain as I bathe, turning the vellum over and over in her hands.
Something has been niggling at me since our encounter in the Library, and instead of tumbling it about in my head, I finally ask: “What did you mean, that you know what it feels like to be tied down? To be a slave?”
Pip jerks back from me so quickly, eyes so wide, that I wonder if something has bitten her. Surely my words couldn’t have been that shocking?
“Nothing,” she lies, but it is a knee-jerk reflex. She catches herself in it and sighs, her whole posture deflating. “I mean, you know that I . . .”
I hadn’t wanted to bring it up, especially since it’s been so long since Pip has had a fit, but I desire clarification, and so I say, slowly, “The Viceroy?”
Pip goes stiff all over, eyes tight and the skin around them translucent with fatigue. “Yes,” she grinds out between clenched teeth.
Then she cries out. She drops the parchment and jams the heels of her hands against her temples, fingers balled into fists.
“No, no,” she moans, staggering back a step.
I am up and partway out of the fountain before she holds out her hands to halt me.
“I’m fine,” she wheezes. “I’m fine. Just . . . stay there. Over there. For a minute. Please.”
I stand in the fountain, my nudity forgotten, waiting, goose bumps crawling up my legs, clenching my thighs. Eventually, Pip seems to regain control of herself, shaking out her limbs and rolling her head back. There is a pop loud enough that even I can hear it, and then she sighs, long and drawn out and weary. I feel the tension flow out of her frame from within my own.
Like a slowly unfolding marionette, she reaches down and retrieves the scroll, then checks it over for damage. It’s fine. She turns it over a few more times, as if hoping that its fall has jostled some more information from it.
With a grunt of frustration, she goes to her saddlebags and withdraws a pot of ink and a travel quill. Decisively, she draws a stroke across the top of the scroll. She watches it for a long moment, and then draws back, eyes wide.
“Pip?” I call, galvanized into stepping out of the water. I pick up the towel I left on the ledge and scrub at my skin. “What’s wrong?”
“I figured out why it’s called the Parchment that Never Fills.” She holds it up to me. It is blank. She draws another line down the center of the scroll, deliberately showy. Slowly, the ink is absorbed into the vellum, like water being drawn up into a sponge.
“Friggin’ useless!” Pip says. “This quest makes no sense, Forsyth. All this stuff, and I don’t know what we’re supposed
to use it for. Maybe I didn’t do the chart right.”
She sits on her bedroll and digs out her Excel, spreading it out to its full length on the ground. I pull on my trousers and move to stand next to her, careful not to drip on the chart.
“I was so sure I had it all figured out,” she says, face in her hands.
I crouch down and lay a soft kiss on her cheek. “You are clever, Pip. We read Bevel’s scrolls together; we marked the map together. I don’t think we’re wrong.”
“Then why all this?” Pip says, throwing out her hands in frustration. “I can’t for the life of me figure out what we’re supposed to do with a bit of jewelry, a cup that’s always filled with useless water, and a piece of vellum that won’t hold on to any words!” She deliberately drops a spot of ink right into the center of the vellum, savage, and it too is sucked down into the page.
“That’s why they are riddles,” I say. “Besides, we don’t have all the objects yet. There’s one left to collect, the knife, and then we have to go to the Eyrie. Maybe it will become clear when we get there.”
“I hope so,” Pip mutters.
“It’s just not clear yet, that’s all. It is no reason to fret.” I sit beside her and pull her into my arms, trying to soothe, but she shoves me away, prickly and irritable.
“I always have it figured out by now!” she snaps. “I always guess the ending right after Station Four!”
“But it is different when you’re reading it, isn’t it? Different from being right in the middle?” I ask. “Does Reed give you hints? Does he foreshadow or give you the villain’s point of view?”
Pip deflates and curls into my chest, ear pressed against my heartbeat. The summer sun is comfortable, now that I am without a shirt and refreshed, and Pip is small and wonderful in my embrace. I press my knuckles into the small of her back, massaging the place where the worst of her tension sits, digging in around the curlicues of scar tissue.
