by J. M. Frey
“Might,” he admits. “She’s been a good little spy; told us all sorts about the Shadow Hand, the secret passages in and out of Kingskeep, even the domestic problems between Kintyre and his little loyal boy-hole. Even about that healer, Mother Mouth; good hands on her. The master might offer her a job.”
“Mother Mouth would never work for you,” Pip sobs.
“Then she’ll die for declining, won’t she, lovie? Shut up.” Pip’s tears abruptly dry, her wails ceasing, though the full body shudders remain, wracking her frame. The skin around her eyes is red and raw, her shoulders slumped, knees slack, wrists holding her upright as if she’s been lashed to a whipping post. “Good at twisting my commands, this one is. Clever little lovie. Always says just a bit too much. Tell our hero what you really think of him, lovie.”
“As you wish,” she snarls through gritted teeth. My heart swoops into my stomach and lodges in my guts. I don’t know what she means by that. Is it a message? What does it mean? I can’t remember.
“Stop it,” I command, but Bootknife just sneers.
“You think you can tell me what to do, do you? But you ain’t so smart as you think, Shadow Hand. You took her for face value like the trusting, shallow idiot you are, yeah. And gave us everything we wanted in return. So much to work with. She’s been so good to us, this one. Might not even kill her; might reward her instead. You’ve had her, you have, so we have the knowledge to reward her proper, too. Now we know what she likes.”
“You will not! Release Pip from your compulsion at once!” I raise Smoke, not entirely certain that my skill would be enough to skewer Bootknife before he can do Pip irreparable harm. Worse, I don’t even know if his death will loose his hold on Pip—perhaps it will just transfer to the Viceroy. Perhaps it will kill her.
But what else can I do? I cannot reason with him. There is no blackmail on which to draw, nothing I can say, no words I can turn to weapons. Not against this man.
Forsyth, Pip mouths, her voice stolen from her and exhausted fury in her frank, muddy gaze. Do it.
“You gonna stick me, Shadow Hand? You don’t have the guts. Played you like a fiddle, didn’t I?” Bootknife sneers, and—ah ha!—he is watching Smoke instead of my shoulder, like a proper swordsman ought. The sword doesn’t telegraph the move; the torso does. I flick my blade back and forth, watching his gaze stick to it, trying to figure out how to use his lack of training and knowledge to my advantage.
“I will only ask one more time, Bootknife. Release Lucy Piper from your compulsion, please, and Unspeak your Words of Control.” I drop the point of my sword to the ground, as if in surrender, while raising my arm, steeling my elbow and shoulder, drawing back on the string of muscle so that my sword can jump forward like an arrow loosed from the bow at the right moment.
He just snickers, a high-pitched giggle worthy of the biggest hacks and hams to ever grace King Carvel’s playhouses. “Played you for the lonely, desperate, shriveled little rat you are. Played you a patsy, I did. Just like everyone else in your life.”
“Silence!” I snarl, rocking onto the balls of my feet, following the script he knows, he craves, giving him the dialogue that makes him think he is the director of our drama. Soon. Just give me an opening, you self-confident ass!
He feints, and I follow, slashing out. We both step left, I trying to jump around Pip to get at him, and he dancing around behind her, keeping her between us. A searing flares against the side of my face and I stagger back, startled, and gasp. The hand Bootknife was holding his dagger in is now empty. I resist the urge to raise my hand to my face to check the extent of the damage; I dare not take my attention away from him, even for a second. Liquid heat slithers down my cheek, and I realize belatedly that I am bleeding.
I am struck next with the nose-wrinkling thought that he had just been picking his teeth with that dagger. Disgusting.
“What, truth hurts? Ha!” He points at me, and, shadowed dramatically against the white mist, even I have to admit that his gleeful menace would have filled me with dread were I not already too full of fury and scheming. “You think Pointe is your friend? He’s just waiting for his turn at the Shadow’s Mask. And your brother thinks you’re so far beneath his contempt that he don’t even talk about you, does he? Bevel hardly writes about you in his braggart scrolls, and you can’t even tell when your servants are lyin’ to you, can you? No, you can’t!”
He cackles, head thrown back, confident that he will be able to counter any move I make, with my sword at so awkward an angle, hilt raised so high and wrist inverted. Instead of waiting for him to look at me again, as would be polite, as Kintyre would have done, I lunge.
Now!
Bootknife’s laughter escalates into a full-fledged scream as I twist the sword forward through the air, arcing it high in a circle and using the momentum of gravity to slam the sharp of my blade down hard against his spellcasting wrist. It crashes into bone, juddering my arm and nearly wrenching my sword from my grip. Bootknife screeches even as I jerk back out of his reach, taking my sword and half of his hand with me.
His wrist is half-cleaved, his thumb and first two fingers shorn off, and he is screaming, screaming. He stumbles to the ground, falls onto his back, face pale and other hand grasping at the ruin of his hand, tearing the already ragged edges wider in his disbelief and shock. Gore slicks my blade, my boots, soaks into the greedy dry earth of the tombs below us. I spare a moment of thought to hope there is no blood-magic spell waiting to awaken at a fresh lick in the graves underneath us. Then I put my foot on Bootknife’s chest and get his attention by tapping the point of my sword against the tip of his nose. It leaves a red smear.
“Bootknife,” I say. “Release Lucy Piper.”
“She is released. She is released from me!” he screeches.
I spare a glance to where she is now crumpled on the ground, her breath coming in pants so shallow and quick I fear she will asphyxiate herself. She is having another panic attack, most probably, but I cannot go to her side and soothe away the fear, not yet.
“I am going to let you live, Bootknife,” I intone. “Not because of any ill-conceived notion of mercy, nor because I fear taking another human life. You are less than human to me, you swine. But I am a hero on a quest, and it is the right thing to do. Because I am better than you. Do you understand me?”
He mewls and nods. I crouch, digging my knee into his solar plexus, the flat of Smoke still against his nose, point aimed at his eye. I grasp his ruined wrist with my free hand. He screams again, and it nearly drowns out my Words of Healing. The blood flow slows, and then stops, the open wound scabbing.
Then I wipe his blood off my glove and onto his coat, and stand. “Now go away, Bootknife, and know that if you ever harm me or mine again—and that includes my worthless brother and his equally worthless friend—I will come back for the rest of you.”
He scrambles to his feet, scratching in the dirt for his severed fingers.
“Leave those!” I hiss. “They’re mine, now!”
He lets them go and turns on his heel, running like a dragon is on his tail. I watch for a long time as his silhouette grows smaller, fainter, and then vanishes entirely into the mist of the graveyard.
Then, and only then, do I wipe down my sword and sheathe Smoke in the holster already attached to my hip. And then, I go to Pip.
She is lying on the ground, curled in on herself, and the moment I lay my hands on her shoulders, she flinches away. I let her go. Her skin must be one single long stretch of agony.
“Don’t touch me,” she snaps. She looks up at me, and I am startled to see that her eyes are brown. Plain, dark, boring brown, not a hint of green within the flecks of her iris.
“Your eyes,” I begin, but then don’t know how to continue, so don’t.
“I know,” she growls. “I goddamn know. They’re green.”
“No, not anymore.”
She blinks. “No? They’re . . . give me a mirror!”
I have no mirror handy,
but I have the mask. I retrieve it from the nest of glow-starved starflowers. She snatches at it before I am properly within reach, fumbling desperately to turn it toward herself and keep it from tumbling to the ground at the same time. When she finally has it stilled, she stares at her reflection with the sort of abject horror that one usually reserves for when one is confronted with a corpse. The horror breaks, suddenly, like the sun between rain clouds, and she releases a shuddering sigh, her expression transforming to one of careful, cautious joy.
“Oh god,” she says, voice all shivery. “It’s gone. The green is gone. I’m free.”
She hands the mask back, and I tuck it into its velvet bag, taking advantage of the time to reorder my thoughts. “So, every time you said that your eyes were not green . . .”
“I was trying to give you a hint.”
I let that sink into my skin, frowning, torn between the impulse toward self flagellation for missing such a clue and the odd thought that Pip wouldn’t want me to be so hard on myself. Only, was it Pip who scolded me for not gaining control of my self-confidence? Or was that Bootknife?
Am I now going to spend the rest of my journey with Pip second-guessing everything she has ever said to me? I turn to ask her, but realize she is in no mental condition to answer. She is curled up on herself, arms around her shins and chin buried behind her knees, still and small like a terrified rabbit.
I retrieve the Shadow’s Cloak from the chest and swing it over her shoulders, tucking it in carefully around her legs, being certain not to touch her. I do not think it would be welcome, for all that the cloak may ease at least some of her shivering. She nuzzles the fabric, and hope sparks in my heart that she is seeking out the comfort of my scent.
“Why do you have to be such a good guy, Forsyth?” she says softly. “Why did you have to fall for it?”
I don’t know if I have the words to explain it to her, but I try anyway. “It was inevitable, you see? You were . . . more. Different. Something . . . unknown. A damsel. In distress, even. It was . . . inevitable. You see that, right? It was . . . written. Everything you are calls to everything I am.”
“But I wasn’t me,” she insists, trying to shove some metaphorical space into a wedge between us, even as she pulls my cloak closer around her, digging her fingers into the diaphanous layers.
“Everything?” I ask. “Every gesture of affection? Every kiss? Every touch? It was all them?”
“This is dub-con in the worst way,” she whispers, fingers balling in the fabric of the cloak’s layers. “It’s dubious. I don’t even know how much of that was me. I can’t . . . I can’t touch you without thinking of them, of what they were saying in my head, of what they made me say, and do, and want.” She shakes her head hard. “I don’t even know how much of the want was mine. Was any of it? I don’t know.”
“We can find out.” I lay a soft kiss against her cheek, and she flinches, actually flinches away as if I struck her.
“No.” It is small, but it is firm. I sit back.
“Pip,” I whisper. “Pl-Please, look at me.”
“I’m not . . . don’t . . . you can’t kiss me like it means something. Please. Don’t look at me like you love me.”
“But-t I d-d-do.”
“You don’t. It was him you loved, him saying those things and making my h-hands move. None of it was me, and I didn’t get any say in it at all!” Her voice is wretched, absolutely ragged, torn from her throat like a scorched battle flag.
“Pip, I understand, I really do—” I begin, but then she is there, in my face, teeth bared like a harpy, all rage and pain so large, so beyond the scope of anything I have ever seen in another human being. My fat tongue stumbles into terrified silence. I take a deep breath. “Bao bei,” I whisper.
“Fuck you!” she snarls, poking one finger into the dip between my collarbones so hard that I nearly choke. “Don’t you try to comfort me, Forsyth Turn. I have been proved wrong! Do you know what that means? I have been proved an idiot by the world I love most.”
She arrows to her feet, stomping in a circle, somehow avoiding my outstretched arms, my attempts to reel her close and soothe her, without actually looking up at me.
“Please, Pi-Pip.”
“I have written essays, blog posts, sat on panels at conventions; I have devoted literally thousands of hours, millions of words to this kind of thing, and what happens? I spend my whole goddamn academic career championing female character agency, fighting against lazy writing that falls back on epic fantasy gender stereotypes and utilizes rape as a back story excuse, against the half-assed conflation of strong female character with violent female character, screaming myself hoarse about visible minorities in fiction and the normalization of queerness, and what does the world I love best go and fucking do the goddamn millisecond I get here? Slaps me in the face and ties me down! Calls me a useless, silly, vain little girl who has wasted everything! Money, time, thousands of sheets of paper, hundreds of ink cartridges, dozens of online flame wars, everything: tells me I have wasted my life trying to make everything better!”
She cuts the sky with a shaking fist, misery embodied. The air is thick with suffering and betrayal, salt water and drying blood, fog and fury.
“Pip, no—”
“I have been betrayed in the harshest, cruelest way possible. Bootknife, and the Viceroy, and Kintyre, and Bevel, and even you have literally stomped on my childhood dreams! On the very basis of what I’ve imagined for myself. So fuck you, Forsyth Turn! Fuck you, and fuck the Viceroy, and fuck Kintyre, and fuck Elgar fucking Reed! Don’t you tell me for a second that you understand! You—you white male privileged asshole!”
She jerks to her feet and swirls away into the darkness, the cloak shadowing her and the mist swallowing her up.
“Pip, please, stay close!” I plead.
“Like I have anywhere else to fucking go!” she screams back through the fog.
I stumble in her wake, unable to resist the lure of her, the magnet of her, and nearly bump into her back when the cloak suddenly resolves itself to my eyes. Her back is to me, spine a comma of defeat, and I reach out, desperate to comfort, to soothe, to connect, but she jumps like I have flayed her a second time, like the merest touch of my hand has laid open her wounds all over again.
“Don’t touch me! Just leave me alone!” Pip snaps.
I am torn between reaching for her and backing away, but her eyes suddenly spring wide and she screams again, shoving at me. We tumble to the wet grass, and I roll to get her under me, to pin her arms to keep her nails from my face. What is happening now? Were we wrong? Does Bootknife still control her?
“Behind you!” Pip shouts, and I roll us to the side again, all instinct, and it is a good thing I do. The blade of my sword—my Turnish sword, not Smoke—slams into the grass where we’d been, skewering the edge of the Shadow’s Cloak, pinning Pip down.
I roll off Pip and kick—my heel lands solidly in Bootknife’s ribs and he stumbles back, his blood-slicked grip on his stolen sword fumbling.
In the time it takes me to gain my feet, he manages to wrench it free of the turf. Pip scrambles away from us. Bootknife raises the sword again, and, just as I’m about to lunge forward, something big and metal bashes into the back of Bootknife’s head.
I assume it is Pip, and say, “Bravo! Thank you!” But the voice that answers back is deep, amused, and very much the last one I want to hear right now.
“You’re welcome, little brother,” Kintyre rumbles.
Bootknife flails around, trying to get his vision to focus and shaking his head.
“Two Turns!” he slurs. “No, four!”
Kintyre doesn’t wait for him to come to his senses enough to fight back; he swings Foesmiter at Bootknife again. In foolish instinct, Bootknife raises his good arm to protect himself, and Kintyre’s enchanted sword takes it off at the elbow. Following through, allowing his weight and momentum to pull him onto his front foot—a rather elegant move for my bash-about brother—he turns a
nd swings at the other arm, and Foesmiter severs what’s left of Bootknife’s spell-hand. There is a spurt of arterial blood that is almost beautiful in the moonlight, steaming ruby glitter on frost-laced grass.
Bootknife scrambles backward, falling to the ground upon his back, wailing and flailing his matching stumps.
“Oh, look, an artist with no hands,” Bevel says, with a snort. I risk a quick look over my shoulder and see him crouched on the ground next to Pip, his arms over her shoulders, his hand firmly on her head, keeping her face turned into his chest so she can’t see what’s about to happen next. “Useless sort of torturer now. And what is it that your master does to the useless, eh, Bootknife?”
“He won’t get the chance to find out,” I decide. It’s the work of half a step and a swift plunge of Smoke through flesh to end Bootknife and his reign of torture entirely.
My aim is true, though Smoke does brush against Bootknife’s ribcage, sending a jolt up my arms and through my own core. I hope Bootknife still has a heart to destroy, and it seems that my hopes are not futile. The monster’s eyes widen impossibly, and then simply go empty. There’s no spluttering or cursing or even bloody foamy gasps. He is simply present in his body one moment, and absent, eternally absent, the next.
I pull back my sword and wipe the gore off the blade with Bootknife’s clothing.
“Watch it, Forssy,” Kintyre says, cleaning blood off his own blade before sheathing it, not at all affected by the fact that I just killed a man. “That’s a bit bolder from you than I expected.”
“The Shadow Hand has the right to execute as he sees fit,” Pip says, and seems to relish the way that two sets of blue eyes pop at me.
“Shadow . . . wait, you?” Kintyre chokes.
“Do close your mouth, brother dear,” I say. “Now is hardly the time.”
Seventeen
It isn’t until several long hours later, when the sun is struggling to brighten the edges of this cotton-wrapped world, that I realize my cheek is bleeding. Or was bleeding, at any rate. And even then, it must be pointed out.
