by J. M. Frey
Time seems to slow to a molasses crawl, and then, suddenly, with the shattering tinkle of epiphany, the answer is there. I figure it out the same time she does, and we exchange an identical look of wonder and triumph.
“I got it!” Pip says. “I got it! Dear lord, I got it!”
I drop our bedding, where we were rolling it up, and rush to her side. “If you . . . if you just write,” I say. “Then it may happen!”
“I could. I could just . . . write that a way home for me opens.”
“And it ought to!” I crow.
We throw ourselves at one another, thrilled by our mutual cleverness and kissing through the happiness. It is Bevel who ruins it. His voice is like the knell of a gong through the Rookery, deep and somber: “So, you are leaving, then?”
Pip and I part, slowly, as if we are connected by spider webs of toffee, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes. Heart to heart.
“I . . . I guess I am,” she says. She looks up at me, confused, surprised, and then sad, so sad.
“You don’t have to,” Kintyre protests. “You can stay.”
I can see her hesitating, see her weighing it in her mind, balancing the life she could have here, with me, with us, at Turn Hall, in Hain, against the life that she had before, the one I know almost nothing about, but the one where she is a respected scholar and a beloved daughter. And I see it, the moment the balance tips out of my favor.
Forsyth Turn . . . still not good enough. She must see the pain of it in the way I squeeze my own eyes shut, my eyelashes clumping with moisture that I will not allow to fall. She must see the way it crushes me. The way the arrow and the target both turned to powdery ash. The way the fall from the cliff ceases to be a comfortable dance in the air and becomes a terrifying plummet.
She reaches up and cups my cheek in her palm. “Oh, bao bei,” she whispers. “I don’t belong here.”
Bevel makes a noise of protest, low in his throat. “You could.”
“No,” I say softly. I open my eyes and find myself looking into a mirror. We both know that she wants to stay. But we also both acknowledge that she cannot. “It’s too dangerous, isn’t it, Pip?”
She nods. “I know too much. I know everything. I could ruin it all.”
Bevel and Kintyre twine their fingers again and say nothing. They are proof, proof that all it would take is the right words at the right time . . . or the wrong words, at the wrong time.
“And you have a family,” I say. “Mother, Father. Grandparents?”
“Just wai po, Mu—Mum’s mum. She was crying at my graduation, she was so proud.”
“You have to go,” I say softly.
“I have to go,” she agrees.
It feels like there are magnets in my lips. I can’t not kiss her, and once we connect, I cannot stop kissing her. Bevel and Kintyre don’t interrupt, and Pip allows it because . . . because this is it.
This is our goodbye.
I knew this was coming. I knew it all along.
It does not make it hurt any less.
We finally part, and, Writer, how it aches. But it is a good ache, a happy ache, because it means I got my love back. That I love Lucy Piper, and I will for the rest of my life. And I would rather love her and miss her, than never have loved her at all.
Pip turns to the Desk that Never Rots. She picks up the Blade that Never Fails. She shaves the barest curl of silver off the point of the Quill that Never Dulls. She dips the raw quill in the Cup that Never Runs Dry. She shakes off the excess salt water and writes on the Parchment that Never Fills.
She writes:
And then the girl used the Writer’s tools,
and with them, wrote the Words that opened
the portal back to her own world.
The flash of light is exactly like the one from the scrying mirror—dazzlingly white and oblong, hovering in the air to the left of the desk. There is no wind from it, no sucking force, no breeze. Just the soundless impression of shattering. And then, it just . . . exists.
Light glimmers around the Rookery, turning everything silver-lined and bright.
Pip sets down the quill and takes a step toward it. Then she turns, startlingly fast, and slams herself against me—knees, chest, lips, nose.
“Thank you,” she says between increasingly desperate kisses that I am helpless to rebuff.
“I have so very much enjoyed being your hero, Lucy Piper,” I admit, breathing the words back into her mouth.
“And I hated every second of being a damsel in distress, Forsyth Turn,” she sobs back. “But I loved having an adventure with you.”
I run my hands across her temples, smoothing back the wild lay of her hair and wiping the tears from her cheeks with my thumbs. “Shh, no, Pip,” I say softly. “You were never just a damsel. You rescued me. We rescued each other. You were my partner. You were my Bevel. You were more, to me. You were my hero, too.”
She surges up and wraps her arms around my neck, as if, in not touching me, I will suddenly dissipate into smoke. I allow it, cling back, my long arms around her back, the tips of my fingers pressed to the bottom of her breasts, because I fear the same of her.
“Bao bei! I’m going to miss you so much!” she cries.
I turn my head so my nose is resting along the delicate shell of her ear. “And I you, my darling woman.”
Through the strands of Pip’s hair, standing behind her, I can see that Bevel is dabbing at his eyes with the cuff of his shirt. I turn my head the other way in an effort to keep the burn in my own eyes from growing in sympathy, only to have my gaze land on Kintyre. He is weeping unashamedly, the tears rolling in fat gobs down his rugged cheeks. It seems as though heroes do, in fact, cry.
I am powerfully affected by his blatant display, and my own resolve crumbles. I bury my face in Pip’s neck and weep.
“I don’t want you to go,” I say, smearing the words into her skin, wishing they could leave a mark there, a tattoo, for her to see in the mirror every morning. Here is the spot where Forsyth Turn told me he didn’t want me to go, and still I went. But I was loved, the spot proves it; and I am missed.
“I’ve gotta,” she whispers back, laying her own invocation into my skin.
“I know. It doesn’t make my want for you to remain lessen any.” I sniffle into her hair.
“Oh, by the Writer’s balls! This is stupid!” Kintyre blurts.
Pip and I both jerk apart from one another, and I turn to face my brother, affronted. I thought we were beyond this!
But before I can chastise him, he makes a shoving motion toward the split of light that hovers in the sky. When I only blink at him, he rolls his eyes and makes an exasperated hand gesture. “Go with her, you dumb mule!”
“I can’t—” I begin, but I do not know how to finish that sentence. I can’t go with her. Can I? Or is it that I fear it? “What about Turn Hall, and Lysse Chipping?”
Kintyre mops at his face and hooks his thumbs into his belt. “Reckon it’s about time I stepped up and did my duty as the eldest, eh?”
“Oh, sleeping in a bed!” Bevel moans, and the sound is nearly sexual. He claps a hand over his mouth, blushing furiously, and then lowers it to grin sheepishly at us. “I’ll make sure he does it right. Go on, Forsyth. We’ll even return all the objects to where they belong for you, like you promised you would.” Pip makes a sound somewhere between a hiccup of laughter and another wet sob. “Be kind to the Library Lion. He’s lonely.”
“Maybe he’ll like Turnshire,” Kintyre says.
“No! Think of the fur!” I protest, but my brother only laughs at me.
“You’ll have to appoint a new Shadow Hand,” Bevel says, voice soft, as if he fears bringing up administration logistics and interrupting our emotional moment.
“Sheriff Pointe?” Pip suggests.
“He’d be rubbish. He’s too kind,” I admit. “It must be someone sneaky, but moral.”
Bevel coughs deliberately and bounces on his toes, grinning like butter wouldn’t melt in h
is mouth. “Beds are all well and good, but Turnshire’s boring,” he points out, idly.
“I see,” I chuckle and nod. Because, yes, of course. That is the most sensible option, but, honestly, the Writer help King Carvel. Bevel is a stubborn bastard, and is also probably the first Shadow Hand of low birth Hain has ever seen. He will be perfect.
Bevel just grins impishly. I hand the Shadow’s Mask to Bevel, and he secrets it away in his Turn-russet jerkin. I cannot take it with me and strip Hain of all its power and knowledge. I lean forward and whisper the Words of Acceptance into his ear, and I can feel his smile stretching into something flattered and genuine.
Then I pull back to study Pip’s face, and she is smiling, even as she cries. She wipes her nose on her sleeve, and then cranes her neck up for a hot, salt-flavored kiss. We take our time over it, tongues curling around one another, lips slick with wanting and acceptance. We part slowly, with a dozen lingering touches mouth to mouth, less like kisses and more a mutual drawing out of breath, connecting each to the other.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I’ll go.”
“It’ll be weird,” she says.
“Weirder for me than this world was for you?”
“Maybe.” She steps toward the light, one hand curled in my belt to drag me along with her. I dig in my heels, though, uncertain. Pip nods to herself and lets me go, then takes another step back. Even though we are not touching now, I am dragged forward by the movement. How I fear having her out of the reach of my arms. “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, don’t be scared,” she says. Three times.
“I’m not,” I say. And not because she said it three times, either.
“So, bao bei?” Pip asks, holding out her hand for me to take. Her eyes are bright and so very brown in the late summer sun. Her lips are wet, and her smile wide. “What do you say, Forsyth Turn? Think it’s about time you had your own Happily Ever After?”
There is no hesitation in my reply.
I take her hand. And then, we step through.
Twenty-One
I am decided that, as much as I dislike questing, and horseback riding, and heroic pursuits, airplanes are by far the worst form of travel that mankind has ever inflicted upon itself.
True, it is a great wonder to be able to fly as a bird, or a fairy, or a dragon might, and higher up in the air than any of the three. But the wonder is quite polluted by the airports themselves, by the lines, the security checks, the screaming children, the ignorant fellow passengers, the terrible food, and the indignity of cramped seats and aisles. Just the serving woman’s hand upon my headrest each time she walks by is enough to jostle me closer and closer to annoyance with each subsequent pass.
All the modern conveniences, as Pip would say; and yet, none of the courtesy. Nobody is careful of one another’s personal space. It is as if concern for one another evaporates the moment the liminal space of the terminal is breached.
The indignities don’t end when our wheels touch the tarmac, either. Pip says I must not be so very upper-class and old-fashioned, but I really do wish there was a set of servants available to fetch our luggage from the carousels for us. Such a battle of shoulders and toes!
One of the things I like most in Pip’s world is the way that people are expected to do things for themselves, rather than relying on laborers and footmen to do the fetching and carrying, rather than relying on cooks and serving women to do the domestic chores; but it is also sometimes the thing I like least. I enjoy being independent, being free to do as I like when the desire or need strikes. But I do very much miss just ringing a bell and having a meal brought to me in the library without having to rise from my chair or my book. Pip calls me lazy when I sit in my home office and bemoan the lack of servants, and adorably hopeless when I ruin her cookware by trying to do it myself.
Contradictory woman. I find it more endearing than I should allow.
But even the gently reared must work for their suppers in Pip’s world, and, to that end, Pip has procured for me a daytime position stacking the shelves of the university at which she studied and to which she has returned to teach. Two mouths eat the food we buy, two bodies live in the condominium apartment that soars above the city in which we live, two people require clothing and money for transportation, and so, two pairs of hands must work to procure the currency required.
We are not too badly off, however. The condominium is purchased, not rented, because we made a very good trade on the golden dragonet tears I had been carrying in my purse when I crossed into Pip’s world.
And working at the library gives me something to do with my long days while Pip is in her office, preparing the coursework for her students. I steal the books sometimes, for everything within this world is recorded, every action set down for posterity, and I want there to be no electronic record of my self-imposed syllabus. No . . . trail.
I am still trapped within the patterns of the Shadow Hand. For years, I left no path through paperwork and government for anyone to follow—I cannot make myself give up that habit now. I always replace the books, of course, the next day. Or the day after. Whenever I am done reading them. They are books on government and finance, commerce and agriculture, books on the history of the world, on the wars, on the politics, on the religions. Oh, so many religions. And so many of the wars because of how people interpret a single god’s edicts.
I once told Pip I’d felt abandoned by Elgar Reed. Now, I feel lucky for it.
Once I have found our shared suitcase and plonked our travel bag on top of it, Pip leads me through the throngs of weary travelers to the outside. We get to bypass the security line, this time, because we are traveling within the same nation. I have no passport—the set of documents that are required to cross borders. Pip and I have signed a marriage license in order to begin the process of building a legal identity for me, but it is too new to allow me to have the passport of a “naturalized citizen” just yet. (Her parents were displeased with our lack of ceremony, done as it was in haste and at the city hall, but her wai po patted my cheek and called me, in her language, a “good boy.” I had felt such a pang of warmth and welcome that it had made me weep. I miss Mother Mouth terribly.)
All these rules and regulations, and so much tracking of and accounting for citizens, it is a wonder that I have not been found out as having no past, no papers. It is a wonder that I am not already in jail for daring to sneak into existence.
When we reach the outdoors, the air tastes of dust and fuel fumes. I search for any whiff of greenery and find none. There is a shuttle to the hotel, which is nowhere near as dignified as it sounds. It is a very large bus crammed with people and the added joy of large suitcases, which makes it doubly claustrophobic and difficult to navigate.
Triply so when Pip’s generous stomach must be taken into account.
Lust makes us do irrational things; Pip and I had been making love in my world for near on a month without prophylactics or medicines of prevention. I had no thought for such things, and Pip says they fell straight out of her head when we were together in my world.
So, when Pip first showed me the little blue cross on the white plastic stick seven months ago, it had been with an eye-roll directed at herself. “The heroines in the stories never get knocked up on quests,” she had said.
“And so, it never occurred to you that you would?” I had asked. “Pip, I thought you smarter than that. We were having sex. An excessive amount of it. That is how one gets a baby into a woman.”
“Shut up,” she’d said, with a soft punch to my shoulder and a snarling grin. “We’re not naming it after your brother.”
“No,” I’d agreed, kissing my favorite spot, the little scarred leaf at the back of her neck. “Certainly not.”
“What’s Sheriff Pointe’s first name?”
“Rupin.”
She’d made a face and said nothing else.
On the shuttle bus, people stare at my pregnant wife as if they are blaming me for her discomfort. They are, in a basely biol
ogical way, correct. Perhaps in a cultural way, as well.
Because, if we were home, she would be in her confinement by now. She would be in our bed, feet up and comfortable, being waited upon. I would be fetching dinner from Cook myself, feeding her with my fingers as she lay back in our marital bed, hair an ebony fan on the pillows, face aglow with our child. Pip despises laziness, thinks it’s preposterous the way women about to give birth are coddled in my world, but I miss it. Women creating life are to be celebrated, pampered. Here, women are expected to work until their feet tire out and they can no longer stand, the weight of their soon-to-be-children sending them groaning to the floor.
It’s barbaric.
Is it so wrong to want to cosset my wife? To keep her comfortable? To make the experience of bearing my child a pleasurable one?
At home, creating a child is magic, and is treated as such.
Here, they seem to think that creating a child is an inconvenience. And treat it as such.
For the journey, Pip and I had enough foresight to amalgamate our luggage into one wheeled case. We are only going to be away from home for six days, there is no need for a lot of clothing, and so there is relatively little space I need to carve out for my family on the bus. All the same, I wish there was a more pleasant way to go to the hotel. The sedate pace and the gentle civility of a coach and four would be ideal. Though, perhaps one fitted with an automobile’s shock absorbers.
“You off to the con?” a woman seated beside Pip asks. She has a case nearly the same size as she is pinched between her knees and is holding an oversized paper mask delicately in her hands.
“Yeah,” Pip says. “How did you . . . ?”
The woman jerks her chin up at me. “Great costume,” she says. “Is it a sort of modern variant? Turn-russet jacket and everything, I love it. His hair is just perfect.”
“Oh,” I say, patting at my thinning fringe, and then running my palms down the chest of my coat. It is cashmere, and very finely tailored, and it was the first luxury I bought for myself with my first paycheck. It is Turn-russet, as I’d wanted to wrap myself in familiarity. My silk scarf is Sheil-purple. “Yes? I do thank you.”
