There is a thunder storm over the Cinch Mountains, right around where the Eyrie coves begin. Possibly even directly above the Rookery. It is so large that I can see it all the way from Gwillfifeshire, perched above the wheat plains as I am in the second story bedroom above the Pern.
Below me, Lanaea’s wake continues, music and laughter ringing long into the night. The relief that her ghost will stay on, that she is not lost before her father can come down from Sherwilde and bid her goodbye, is palatable and heady. Whether she’ll remain after that is unknown. Mandikin stays for the love of the children. Lanaea’s passions and unfinished business might not be so strong, so ever-existing. There will always be children in Gwillfifeshire. Lanaea’s business may last a shorter amount of time.
There are no ghosts in Turnshire, as far as I am aware, and I wonder idly, watching the storm from the window seat, if that is because I was a good lordling who made his people happy. Or if it was merely a convenient plot hole for Reed to exploit.
Behind me, Pip and Alis both sleep soundly. The storm seems to have woken only me. I cannot hear it from this distance, of course, but the lightning is bright enough, and I am wary enough, that it pulled me away from the brink of slumber. That the storm is so concentrated, that it is so large and yet does not drift or ebb, makes it clear that it is not of natural make, and I do not have to wonder if it is the work of our weather witch, the nameless Deal-Maker who has stolen Wyndam’s voice.
Thus it is that I am awake and watching the skies when the very last constellation flares, each star burning bright as a sun for a split second, and then bursting like a firework, trailing fairy dust down the solemn black velvet of the sky before fading into nothingness. My stomach lurches, and my whole body goes numb with horror. The hair on the back of my neck pricks up, and a shudder races underneath my skin.
On the other side of the windowpane, darkness—true and complete darkness—falls.
I stay up watching the storm die out, straining my gaze toward the east, back toward Turnshire, hoping, hoping for the first hints of dawn. After many silent, tense hours, my exhausting, strained vigil is rewarded. The sun rises.
I will admit that I had genuinely feared it would not. What is one more star to snuff out, after all?
I have never been one to pray to the Writer. I never really was certain I even believed in such an omnipotent creature, never sure I thought the stories true, never fell into the winding, grasping silks of belief. And now that I know him personally, I would still not pray to Elgar Reed.
Yet, in those few seemingly endless hours between the death of the last stars and the rising of the sun, I cannot help the tripping, stuttering, whispered mantra of pleas from tumbling from my lips. They are not prayers, not really. Maybe they are a negotiation, instead, but with whom, I cannot say. Maybe I just hope that if I say it aloud, if I make my wishes known, someone—something—will hear and make them truth.
What I want more than anything is reassurance that this is not my fault. That my leaving this world did not end it, and is, in all likelihood, not the reason it is crumbling. But during that cold and lonely vigil, the self-doubt comes creeping in. For half a night, I live in terror that the Final Chapter has come, just as the zealots had always predicted, and that it is all due to me. That the world will be Shelved because of me. Because of my desire for the love of a clever woman. I fear that because of my desperation for validation and the opportunity to be a hero in my own right, outside of my brother’s shadow, the world would suffer.
No, they are not prayers. But with the sunrise, they have been answered all the same.
And when the sky above Gwillfifeshire grows first silver, then indigo, and a sliver of the palest coral-orange leaks into the blue, when it gilds the thatch roofs and chimney stacks with warm spring light, I finally give in to my fatigue, end my vigil, and crawl into bed.
I sleep for several hours, and wake when Alis begins to fuss, kicking my hip in her unhappiness. Pip rolls over and grumbles against the side of my head, reaching out to rub Alis’s belly in a move that is automatic at this point. Alis only wails louder, and the faint tang of urine in the air tells me why. I am about to heave myself out of bed when Pip springs up and scoops our daughter off the bed, jostling her away for a fresh nappy and a wipe-down.
I sit up, trying to pull my wretched hair back into some semblance of order, and watch, silent. Something is not right. Perhaps it is that I am more tired than I think, after staying up as I did, but no . . . Pip is behaving strangely. She is being short with Alis, her movements jerky, her temper abrupt.
I wonder for a moment if she too had too little sleep, but then I catch her expression from behind the curtain of her hair: her mouth is a thin knife-slice, her eyes tight, her jaw clenched. She is angry.
“Pip?” I ask, sliding out of the bed. I was too tired to put on a nightshirt, so I am dressed in nothing but my Victoria-bought underwear. They are much preferable to the drawers I wore under my fencing trousers before leaving this world, and definitely more comfortable. But now, they make me feel uncovered and scrawny in the face of my wife’s bad mood. “Are you feeling—”
“I’m fine,” she bites off, securing Alis’s new nappy and sending our daughter off to toddle toward me. Alis, fresh and happy—and apparently oblivious to the tension in the room— careens into my knees, arms outstretched and fingers wiggling.
“Dahdah da! Hi!” she says joyfully, wishing me a good morning with another new word I didn’t realize she had absorbed. “‘Isses, ‘isses!” I kiss her hands, palms first, and then knuckles. Content with this greeting, Alis decides to explore the room, and I let her get on with it.
“You are not fine,” I say to Pip, careful to modulate my tone so that it is not accusatory. I watch Alis explore under the sideboard. The worst she will probably find under there is a dust bunny—the Goodwoman is an excellent innkeeper.
“Leave it,” Pip growls, pushing to her feet and beginning her own morning ablutions.
“And if I do not wish to?” I ask, rising to join her at the washstand.
Pip throws a wet cloth at my face, and it splats against my cheek with a comical noise loud enough to startle Alis. For a moment, I stare at Pip, shocked at this affront. Alis tumbles over and grabs Pip’s nightdress, a concerned litany of “ma ma ma ma no, no, ma no,” falling from her lips.
The tension between Pip and I crackles and snaps, a live electrical wire of disbelief and smug anger. I feel a bubble of something in my throat, and it could be a shout, or cruel words, or an exclamation of hurt, but instead, it comes out as a crooked, giggling guffaw. Pip’s pissiness also cracks. A giggle escapes out of the corner of her mouth, and before I know it, we are both doubled over, laughing like naughty children pulling a prank on their nanny.
“Sorry, sorry,” Pip says, picking up the washcloth from where it has fallen to the floor and dropping it back into the basin. “I’m an asshole, sorry.” She hefts Alis onto her hip, reassuring our daughter that we are not truly angry.
I wring out the cloth and finish the job she began of washing my face.
“Whew,” Pip says, still chuckling. “I think I needed that.” And she does indeed look as if she had needed the laugh—her shoulders are no longer hunched, her expression no longer pinched. She leans up on her tiptoes and kisses the damp scar on my cheek. “Sorry.”
“Happy to oblige,” I say with wry humor. “Now, would you like to talk about it?”
Pip sighs, offering me a crooked twist of her lips that isn’t really a smile. “If I say no?”
“Pip . . .”
“Fine.” She gusts out a sigh, hands off Alis, and takes her shirt and trousers down from the peg on the wall where she had hung them to air out overnight. For obvious reasons, the Goodwoman had not made her scullery do the guests’ laundry the evening before. Pip keeps her eyes on her clothing—an obvious avoidance tactic—and I accept it, as she is still talking as she does so. “I’m feeling . . . cranky,” she says. “No, not cranky. I’m . . . I don’t know what to call it.”
“Unhappy?” I venture.
“That,” she says. “Yeah, and angry. And grieving. I’m upset with myself for getting the Stations wrong. And I’m sad for Anne and Thoma, and Lanaea, and her father Jakko, who probably doesn’t even fucking know that his daughter is dead yet, and it’s just not fucking fair. She is dead because of us. Because of me.”
“Pip,” I say gently, deciding that now is as good a time as any to wrestle Alis into her own leather-bottomed baby socks and canvas frock. “You must be fair to yourself. It is because of this world. Lanaea would have died amid the Red Caps if we had not found her.”
“So, what, you’re saying it was her fate?” Pip snaps, jerking her belt closed with force enough to make her wince.
“Perhaps. Not so bluntly, but—”
“It’s my fault, Forsyth,” Pip says, and wrenches on the laces of her doublet hard enough that I anticipate she will have a time of it unpicking the knot again this evening. “I am supposed to be the clever one. And what have I done?” she says, throwing up her hands. “What good have I been? I’ve steered us wrong, I’ve screwed up the quest-order, I’ve ruined everything. We’re stalling. The narrative is building sideways instead of upward. We are spinning our wheels in the mud and wasting our time at—at—at Libraries! And funerals! We are doing nothing.”
“Pip, peace. We don’t have all the answers. We barely know the questions.”
“Exactly!” Pip says, swinging around to shake a finger in my face. “That’s what I mean! Exactly that!” She spreads her arms, fingers splayed, gesturing to the room. “Who is the villain here? What are we trying to achieve? What is our goal, our overarching want? Who is impeding our ability to get that? Where the fuck on the plot mountain are we? What part of the Hero’s Journey are we in the middle of? What are we questing for? Never mind knowing how to save the day, we don’t even goddamn know what’s going wrong or why! I don’t fucking know, Forsyth. I don’t know. And it’s driving me mental.”
“Bao bei,” I say gently, setting Alis back on her feet and going over to wrap my wife in my naked arms. The feel of her leather doublet and trousers against my bare chest and thighs is a unique and slightly arousing sensation, but I push that back in favor of comfort. “Bao bei.”
“I’m frustrated,” Pip admits, tucking her face against my neck. I kiss my favorite leaf scar, sweet and soft. “I feel . . . useless.”
“Oh?”
“Last time, when it was just you and me, I was . . . I don’t know, engaged? Useful? I feel like you and Kintyre make all the choices this time, and Bevel and Wyndam are doing all the fighting, and I am just . . . hauling around a baby. I’m useless.”
“Bao bei . . .”
“I am!” she protests. “I’m a liability even, because you’re all distracted with protecting us. And there isn’t even a trade-off. What good is a useless party member who offers nothing? God, I can’t even, I don’t know . . . I can’t even cook or anything.”
“Bevel would take it as a personal offense if you did,” I point out.
“And I suck at it.”
“That too,” I allow, seeing as she said it first.
Pip pinches my arse, hard, in punishment for agreeing with her. I jerk and yelp a little. She apologizes for the pinch with a kiss on my neck.
“The whole thing has just been, ‘here, stand in the back with the baby.’ And I just . . .” She trails off, pressing her forehead against my clavicle, annoyed with herself. “I’m more than just a glorified baby carrier. It’s just not me. Not at home. And I hate it. I had purpose there. Here, I’m just . . . uhg!” She snarls, leaning back and burying her fingers in her hair, clenching. “I hate how useless I’m being!”
“Perhaps it is because your role here in Hain has changed. Last time, you were the Damsel in Distress. And now, you are the Wife. The Mother. Possibly, the Mother to the New Hero.”
“No,” Pip says emphatically. “My daughter will not be the new Kintyre Turn. If this has to be a Family Legacy style series, then Wyndam can be the next hero.”
This was the very thing I had discussed with him, the very thing I’d warned him against. “And so you will wish the sorrows of the main character on my nephew instead?”
Pip looks up and glowers. “Forsyth, that’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
I sigh, giving a small nod, and she curls back into me. Behind me, I can hear Alis rifling through my pack, pulling out clothes and throwing them over her head, dragging them along the floor.
“‘S funny,” Pip says, and her voice is small, contemplative. “Here we are, parents, and both of us are desperately fighting what that means in Elgar Reed’s world.”
“Yes. We neither of us wish to be my parents,” I say, soothing. “And I chafe at what it means to be a father in this realm as much as you despise the way that Elgar wrote mothers. We wish simply to be ourselves, and this world does not allow for it.”
“Even Kintyre and Bevel hate it,” Pip says. “They told me last night. Kintyre’s so damn disappointed that Wyndam chose to go to a Deal-Maker Spirit instead of talking to him. And Bevel’s working so hard to get Wyndam to see that he only wants what’s best for him. But they catch themselves shouting orders all the time, instead of treating Wyndam like the adult he thinks he is. We’re all turning into the rigid, opinionated assholes the hero flees at the start of the book.”
“Kintyre and Bevel have not had the fortune to be as self-aware as I have,” I agree. “Nor have they had the benefit of being outside this world. I would dearly wish for my brother to meet your parents, bao bei. I rather think they would have good advice for him.”
Pip chokes on another guffaw of laughter, chuckling and spluttering.
“Yeah, no,” she says. “That’s . . . no.”
“Then perhaps we can impress upon them to try to follow Rupin and Dorthi’s example. Lewko seems well adjusted.”
“That’s because he’s not the main character’s kid. The Writer doesn’t need him to have a miserable home life, or to hurt a woman he loves to give him enough man-pain to become a hero. Lewko’s home life will stay just peachy.”
“And you think Wyndam is being groomed to be a hero?”
Pip pulls back to meet my eyes, her own wary and wet. “I don’t know. Do you honestly think Elgar will write more, knowing us, now?”
“I cannot answer that,” I say. “Part of me says no, for he knows what pain he inflicts. But part of me says yes, for he also knows he can mine us for plot ideas. And The Tales of Kintyre Turn is a bestselling series. Perhaps the last bestselling fantasy series in existence, in your world.”
Pip sniffles. “That’s a terrifying thought.”
“Pip,” I whisper in her ear, squeezing her close again. “Pip, last night, the last of the stars went out. I watched them. There’s nothing left.”
“And you think that means there are no more books in my world?”
“I fear so, yes.”
“We’re the last ones,” she whispers, terror crawling into her voice. “What if—”
“I don’t know,” I say. “The sun still shines, though. As does the moon. Perhaps there is time, yet, to save this realm.”
“How?” Pip asks.
“The weather witch, the Deal-Maker, she is destroying treasures and precious items. And the stars are going out. Which is making the books vanish. I feel sure that they are connected.”
“But why?” Pip asks, and her voice crackles on the question. “That I do not know, bao bei.”
“I should,” she says, tears splashing against my bare shoulder. “I should. That’s my role, and I don’t know, Forsyth. I’m so scared. What if we all snuff out of existence, and it’s all my fault? Because I wasn’t clever enough?”
“Shhh, shush, darling,” I say softly, rocking her gently, petting her hair. “We’ll figure it out. We will.”
“I hate it here,” she whispers, voice hitching with the sobs she is trying to suppress. “I tried, Forsyth, I did. For you. You were so happy to be home, but I can’t . . . I can’t. I hate it here. I want to go home. Where it’s safe.”
Disappointment comes swift, my stomach dropping and my spine heavy, but it is not surprising, not really. As much as Pip had promised to give my world a fair chance, I knew she could never find peace and joy here. Not after so much evil had been done to her within my home realm. Not with the prospect of even more pain.
Not knowing that this world was always and forever one infinite cycle of the Hero’s Journey, over, and over, and over again. Unending. Not knowing that there is never any peace.
✍
Despite my offer to watch Alis for the day, Pip tells me that if her only role in this adventure is to care for our daughter, then she will play it to the hilt. There is no little bitterness in this proclamation, but she is also resolved. She takes Alis along with her when she joins some of the women from town in a morning of sowing summer wheat. We have agreed to remain in Gwillfifeshire to rest and attend Lanaea’s internment this evening, and the relocation of her ghost to join Mandikin’s in the town well.
Kintyre has left to aid Lord Gallvig in planning the rousting of the remaining Red Caps from the north field. Wyndam had been delighted to be invited along, his worship of his father having been restored back to full strength. Capplederry follows after him, licking its chops and flexing its claws, so it is obvious that the creature knows they intend to hunt, which leaves only Bevel and I to linger over our breakfast.
Several messenger hawks catch up with Bevel while we dawdle. It is good that we have stayed, as I wouldn’t have wanted to contend with all these letters on the road, were I he.
The hawks all bear the seal of the Shadow’s Men. Feeling the strain, Bevel welcomes my help in reading through the missives, his head still throbbing from the concussion whenever he tries to read.
The notes paint a picture of a world harassed and terrorized by this Deal-Maker, and we compile a list of all that she has destroyed, but it brings us no closer to understanding who she is or what she hopes to achieve from it.
Lunch returns Pip and Alis to us. Pip slides into the booth, eager, and Alis is very pleased to be able to sit between “Da Da” and “Bev,” crumpling scrap parchment in her fists and saying “‘Ook, ‘ook!” as she destroys it.
“Forsyth, I’ve been thinking,” Pip says, the glitter of academic interest back in her eyes, and the flush of high emotion and glee at her own cleverness back on her cheeks, which makes me incalculably pleased to see.
“Should I be afraid?” I tease, enjoying her high mood.
She swats my shoulder from across the table, grinning. “Shaddup. I’ve been thinking.”
“About?” Bevel asks, tidying our work into piles and gesturing for the barmaid who has replaced the Goodwoman today to bring us ales and lunches.
“Deal-Maker blood,” Pip says, leaning in, her voice low and confidential. “Neris said that the Viceroy had another Deal-Maker’s blood, and that was how he was able to compel her into calling down a Reader. Otherwise, the spell wouldn’t have been powerful enough.”
“Yes. And?”
“And so, how did someone have enough power to call down the three of us? What was bargained away? What could possibly be enough? And how could they have boosted the power?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Forsyth, you know how Elgar writes!” Pip said excitedly. “He’s lazy. He connects everything! We have a Deal-Maker Spirit who is ravishing the countryside destroying things, we have vanishing stars and vanishing books, and what else?” she asks, excitedly professorial. “Who else has had contact with that Deal-Maker?”
“Wyndam,” Bevel breathes. “Wyndam did.”
“And what did he Deal for?”
“Me. But we don’t know why,” I say. “But he traded his voice for it.”
“Did he?” Pip asks shrewdly. “Are we sure that was what he offered up? Or was it a result of being tricked? You know that people get fooled by Deal-Makers all the time. Why would it work out perfectly this time?”
“You think it didn’t?” I ask.
And then, behind me, I hear a footstep. It is Wyndam and Kintyre, back from their meeting, and Wyndam is shaking his head frantically.
“It did not go as planned?” I ask, and he nods. Then he grimaces and clutches his head, his pinky finger twitching.
“Wyn?” Kintyre asks, grasping his shoulders.
“He cannot communicate about the Deal,” I tell Kintyre, rising to lay a hand on his shoulder to soothe his worry. “The Deal-Maker is preventing it.”
Wyndam scrubs his hands through his hair and nods again, wincing and flinching at the pain it is causing. He holds his affected hand tight against his chest.
“Then stop!” Kintyre orders him, and Wyndam shakes his head again. He meets his father’s eyes, mulish and stubborn.
“We’re on a roll,” Pip says, also standing in her excitement. “Aren’t we, Wyndam? We’re on the right track?”
He nods, and his knees buckle. Only Kintyre’s grip on him keeps him upright. My brother hustles his son into a chair.
“Are you sure you want to keep going?” Bevel asks, and Wyndam nods, his face draining of color.
“Okay, okay,” Pip says, pacing in our private corner of the taproom. “Right, let’s think this through. Wyndam made a Deal. He called us down. On purpose?”
Wyndam nods.
“And did you offer your voice?”
He shakes his head. Then he gulps on air, looking as if he might vomit. Bevel hastily hands his ale to Kintyre, who presses it to Wyndam’s mouth. The boy swallows, and I hope the alcohol will help ease his pain.
“So she took it without you knowing she would.” Wyndam doesn’t bother to nod this time, saving himself the agony.
“Does us being here have anything to do with the things she’s destroying to make the stars go out?”
Wyndam looks up, stricken, mouth agape in horror. He shakes his head frantically.
“Then the Deal was something you wanted for yourself, then?” I ask.
He nods and sways in his seat. Kintyre pushes him back, snaps his fingers at the barmaid to get her attention, and demands a bowl of cool water and a cloth.
“What for?” I muse as Kintyre bathes Wyndam’s forehead and face, wiping away his pain-induced sweat and staring at his son’s face with genuine parental love and fear.
“My poor son,” Kintyre murmurs. “My poor beloved boy.”
Wyndam cracks an eye and stares up at his father, reaches up with his good hand and wraps it into the placket of Kintyre’s shirt, right above his heart. His eyes are filled with regret and apology.
“What good am I?” I ask Bevel. “What reason would Wyndam have for wanting me here?”
“I wish we had the Cup that Never Empties and a mirror right about now,” Pip says with an ironic snort. “We could use a good scry. And to think I lambasted you for using it to spy on me.”
“We could go,” Bevel ventures. “I mean, the Salt Crystal Caverns aren’t that far away from here.”
“I don’t think we’ll need it,” I murmur, watching the way Wyndam’s eyes never leave Kintyre’s face, the small curl to his lips when he is the center of my brother’s attention.
I crouch at my nephew’s side, so we are eye to eye, and put my hands on his knees, forcing myself into his line of vision. “Wyndam,” I say gently, my Shadow Hand voice low but present all the same. Insistent. “Wyndam, my lad, you brought me back here on purpose, didn’t you? Because you were unhappy.”
“Unhappy!” Bevel squawks behind me, even as Wyndam turns his eyes away from mine, ashamed that I have guessed correctly. “What could he possibly have to be unhappy about? He went from being a water rat to the respected Lordling of Lysse! He has books, clothes, a fine horse, hot meals! And a position with the Sword of Turnshire if he wanted to get off his lazy arse and take it! What’s to be unhappy over?”
Wyndam’s gaze snaps back around, filled with fire, and he jerks his chin in Bevel’s direction.
“Because those are things you want for him, Bevel Dom,” I say. “Not what he wants. Am I right, my lad?”
Wyndam nods again, jaw and fists clenched.
“I don’t understand,” Kintyre says slowly. I manfully refrain from making my usual jab about him understanding anything, for now is not the time for petty jibes or filial teasing. “You were unhappy in Turnshire? But what could bringing Forsyth back do about that?”
Wyndam, obviously, cannot answer, so I propose this to my brother instead: “What would you do, brother, if you did not need to be Lord of Lysse? If I was there to step into your place once more? What benefit does my return bring to you? To the Chipping?”
“We could . . . return to the road?” Kintyre says, but he sounds unsure.
“No,” Bevel cuts him off almost immediately. “I will not be giving up feather mattresses and fresh-baked bread ever again.”
“But this is not about you, nor your desires, Bevel,” I point out. “This is about Kintyre’s. Would you go, brother?”
“Well,” Kintyre says, shifting. “Not without Bevel, obviously.”
“But you would need someone to mind Turnshire in your stead?”
Another nod.
“Then this is what you asked for,” I say to Wyndam, and the lad nods, miserable. “You wanted to go on adventures with your father. But to do that, I had to be here. You knew Kintyre wouldn’t leave without the Chipping being cared for.”
Kintyre splutters. “But I wouldn’t—I’m retired. I like sleeping late!”
I sigh, shaking my head. “And this isn’t about you, Kintyre. It’s about what Wyndam wants.”
Kintyre blinks at me, then swings his gaze down to his son. “Well, why didn’t you just ask? Wyndam? Why didn’t you just tell me you want to . . . I don’t know, go sow some wild oats?”
Wyndam just shrugs, the non-answer of teenagers of every realm who desperately do not want to discuss their transgressions.
As Kintyre struggles to understand, I muse: “This has nothing to do with the vanishing books, the missing stars. All this time, I was searching for a connection, but there isn’t one. There is a Deal-Maker Spirit who, in the form of a weather witch, is roaming the world and destroying trinkets and treasures. And at the same time, stars are going out. And at the same time, stories are vanishing from the Realm of the Writer. Those are connected, yes, but not me, not my presence here in Hain,” I say, rising slowly, confident that I have guessed correctly when Wyndam jerks his startled gaze back to me.
It is a relief, a greater one than I thought, for I feel a weight I had not realized I was carrying lift from my chest. I feel like I can breathe for the first time in weeks. This, all of this, is not my fault. It is not because I escaped The Tales of Kintyre Turn. It is not because I know my creator and turned him away on Solsticetide. It is not because I am a character where I should not be, nor that the book of my life is shelved in the wrong realm.
It is because a Deal-Maker Spirit is tearing apart the world searching for someone, and because a selfish lad desperately sought his father’s attention and approval.
But it is not because of me.
“You and Wyndam would have been free to live the kind of adventure his mother no doubt told him Kintyre Turn lives, correct?” I hazard, and Wyndam nods. “Bevel, Wyndam had your scrolls in his chambers. He was teaching himself to read with your adventures. He was envious of them. And so, he decided to do something about it. Am I right, my lad?”
Wyndam, slumped miserably, nods again.
“We are mistaken. The Deal-Maker you called down was no weather witch. She is a sea spirit—her magic is in water. She is the preferred call of the pirates, am I right? You’ve had her tableau memorized for years.”
Wyndam nods again, the minutest of movements.
“And so, I am here, but it is not as you thought it would be, this adventuring.” Wyndam does not move, but it is clear he agrees all the same. “You offered her something in return for us, and it must have been great to make the Deal equal. But it was not equal enough, and so she took your voice along with it.”
Wyndam looks up and shakes his head. He opens his mouth, tries to mime the words, but is overtaken again by the pain and must sit back, wincing.
“So, whatever it is that the Deal-Maker wanted, she didn’t get it?” Pip asks, pushing forward, intrigued. Wyndam rocks his head back and forth on the back of the chair, panting and pale.
“But taking your voice was ancillary . . .” I muse, and Pip snaps her fingers.
“Got it! It wasn’t your voice, it was your Words!” she crows. “Deal-Makers can’t use human magic, so she must have needed it to . . . to, I don’t know, use Words of Finding for the items that snuff out the stars, or something! It’s just the kind of smarter-than-you double-speak bullshit that Reed likes to write! He would totally do that!”
Wyndam groans, curling in on his hand, forehead beading with sweat.
“We shouldn’t ask him any more questions,” Kintyre says, concerned. He flutters around Wyndam with the damp cloth like an agitated hen. “He may pass out soon.”
Wyndam glowers at him stubbornly and struggles back upright.
Pip reaches into her bra and retrieves our phial of Deal-Maker blood. She shakes the phial slightly, watching the viscous blue liquid slosh and ooze against the side of the glass. It is the color of cornflowers, and it swirls with sapphire and silver glitter, a galaxy in glass. It looks like it should be a tonic for making hair shinier, or helping a child sleep. It does not look like the most powerful potion ingredient in existence.
I know literally dozens of wizards, witches, and warlocks who would gleefully commit homicide to possess Deal-Maker blood. And it is rare, terribly rare, for Deal-Makers do not live in this plane and are rarely injured.
In fact . . .
A thought occurs to me, and I turn to face Pip. “How did the Viceroy obtain a phial of Deal-Maker’s blood?” I ask.
“Huh?” Pip asks, sidetracked from her own contemplation.
“It was the one thing we never questioned: Neris said that she was compelled to grant the Viceroy the Deal that brought you to Hain because he had in his possession a phial of Deal-Maker’s blood. But it is rare, and more than that, it is difficult to collect. So where and how did he obtain it?”
“He was the villain,” Pip ventures after pondering for a moment. “It’s possible that he just . . . had it.”
“No,” I say. “No. Elgar Reed thinks himself cleverer than that. If the Viceroy had such a powerful magical item, then there must have been a reason for it. There must have been a plan. But what?”
Pip’s eyes widen, and then swing around and narrow with laser precision on Wyndam. “She wanted to trade you a person for a person, didn’t she?”
Wyndam gulps and nods.
“Who?” Bevel asks.
“Who do you think?” Pip asks, straightening. “This is the sequel. It’s got to be the first story’s villain. If only for a cameo.”
“But he’s dead,” Bevel protests.
“Is he?” Pip asks, challenging, professor-ish. “Did we see a body?”
“Why?” Kintyre growls. “Why should a Deal-Maker want to free the Viceroy? Especially when it is simply another Deal-Maker who has him?”
“And is preferably torturing his ghost for the rest of eternity?” Bevel snarls.
Pip turns to look at Alis, who is still sitting happily at our table, crumpling paper and babbling to herself, then back to Wyndam.
“Don’t you think it’s a big coincidence that all this happened right after both Forsyth and Kintyre Turn had children?” she asks slowly, teasing the thesis out in her head, pulling at the idea like taffy with her words. “This is a narrative featuring kids, heirs, which means it’s about heirs. Legacies. Inheritance . . .” She is looking off into the middle distance, fingers curling and uncurling around the phial. Her fingernails tap against the glass, and the rest of us wait, breathless, silent, as she chews on the problem.
Then she gasps.
Her eyes and mouth drop wide, round with understanding and horror.
“Oh my god,” she whispers, and sits down hard, the phial gripped tight in her white-knuckled fist. “Oh my god.”
“What?” Bevel asks, gaze jumping between my wife and I.
And I understand it myself the moment Pip breathes it.
“Her son,” she hisses, pulling her attention back to us, looking up into my face with such horrified desperation that I must jam my hands into my pockets to keep from scrambling across the table to fold her in my arms like an undignified day laborer. “That’s what she’s after. She’s trying to figure out where he is, what realm he was pulled into. The stars, bao bei, the books! The Viceroy had a phial of Deal-Maker blood because the son of a bitch was her goddamn son!”
Elgar Reed wrote me to be uncomfortable when I am ignorant or wrong. And when I am right, when something clicks into place, when I understand, it is a relief and revelation so intense, so sweeping that it feels very much like a full-body, rolling orgasm. I gasp, feeling my face flushing, as soon as I understand what Pip means.
“Oh,” I breathe, and I am not even remotely ashamed to admit how sexy I found her line of reasoning. I feel the hairs on my arms and neck stand upright, my pupils blow wide, my mouth suddenly flood with saliva, and my britches grow uncomfortably tight. By the Writer, do I love my wife. “See, bao bei?” I ask, sweeping forward to give her a scorching kiss. “You are the clever one!”
“And that was Station Five,” Pip whispers into my mouth.