The Silenced Tale, стр. 110
Pip takes a step toward the Viceroy, but I will not be moved.
“And you,” he snarls at her, eyes burning green. “I want you broken, so I may put you back together again in my image!”
The Viceroy’s feet leave the ground, his toes brushing the concrete as the wind carries him higher, higher, until he is hovering in midair like an anime villain.
“Oh, how stereotypically melodramatic,” Pip sighs, and I have to press down the ridiculous urge to giggle. Only my wife could sound so put out and annoyed in the midst of such deadly peril.
“And,” the Viceroy punctuates with another flare of acid-green flame crackling around his fist, “I needed him to lead me to you.”
“Leave off Pip!” Kintyre shouts, yanking the Viceroy’s attention back to him and Bevel. “I’m your archnemesis!”
“You?” the Viceroy says, and it is followed with a howling gale of hysterical, painfully shrill laughter that makes the Viceroy’s eyes pop, the tendons and veins on his hands and face strain and stand out against his flushed flesh. “You are nothing! You are an oaf with a sword and a swagger, and little else! You have never been a match for me! I am faster, cleverer, more powerful! You have only won because I have been Written to lose! You? Do not insult me. You are not my equal, Kintyre Turn.”
He swings his lizard-gaze around to stare me dead in the eye, licking his chops.
He stares, brutal and broken. And the last floating pieces, the last itching lack of understanding smoothes into place, soft and silky, whispering the truth. I know, now. I understand. I understand everything.
“It’s me,” I say, the revelation sweeping down my body like ice water had been poured over my head. “All this time, Elgar thought he was Writing the tale of a villain being rousted by a hero, and it wasn’t that at all, was it?” The Viceroy grins at me, eager for me to explain, eager to gloat. “It was never that. Kintyre’s adventures were the surface. But underneath it was a . . . a spy novel. The Shadow Hand and the former Right Hand of the King. You hate House Turn, but it was never Kintyre you plotted against.”
“No!” the Viceroy agrees. He licks his lips again, as if my revelation is the most succulent feast he’s ever consumed. “He got in my way, but it was never him I wanted.”
“It was me,” I gasp. I turn to my wife. “Pip. You came to me because I am the Shadow Hand. You were brought to Turn Hall because . . . he threw you at me because . . . not to get at Kintyre, but because it’s me.”
“It’s you, what?” Bevel asks through a clenched jaw.
My body shaking, the words ripped from the deepest, darkest part of my gut, the answer falls like lead from my dry mouth: “I’m the Main Character.”
The Viceroy throws back his head and howls, dancing a circle in the air. “Yes! Yes!” he screams. “And now I will kill you and end this story forever!”
“But you’ll die!” Pip says. “I don’t understand. If you end the story, if you destroy it all, doesn’t that mean that you’ll—”
“And what point is there to life in this stinking, horrible realm, anyway?” the Viceroy sneers. “Mother is not here! We are at an end, Main Character. For you are clever. You have outmaneuvered me at every twist. Every turn. Every turn, but one!”
“Which is?” I ask, stepping neatly into the pause the Viceroy leaves, because he so dearly wishes to tell us, and any hint of what he is planning is one extra advantage to our side.
The Viceroy’s palms start to crackle and swirl with a particular spell that I have dreaded seeing since the moment Pip began to suffer her nightmares. “I still have that which you value under my control.”
The magic flows toward Pip, and she barely has a moment to take a step back before it has her in its grasp for the third time.
“No, wait—” Kintyre shouts, bounding toward Pip, trying to get Foesmiter between the two of them. As if the magic from his sword will do any good. It is already too late.
For here is the thing I feared. Again.
Here is the thing that Pip and I never discussed a protection from, because there is none. Here is the thing that kept me awake every night, even as the pain of the magic runoff kept her. Because I am no warlock, no spell-caster, no witch. The Words I know have never worked in the past, and the spells I practice are small things of divination and warding.
The only protection, the only thing that has saved Pip from this in the past is her own will.
And that?
That I believe in strongly.
I grasp her hand hard, and together, we stare down the Viceroy. Her eyes are taking on that horrific, telltale tinge of green again, the acidic color swirling out like venomous ink from her pupils, but she is grimacing and blinking hard, forcing it to slow. The purple beats it back.
“I’m here for you,” I whisper in her ear. “Tell me what you need. I am the Main Character. I can make it happen.”
“A Word,” Pip says, trying to grin around the grimace that the war inside her own flesh causes. “A powerful Word. A Last Word.”
“Let me think,” I say. “The mask will have the right one, if I just had—” I plunge my free hand into my jerkin, but Pip suddenly stops struggling.
She sways back on her heels, wrenching my arm where our fingers are entwined. Her irises are entirely violet. The scars on her back shine so brightly that I can see the individual leaves glowing green through her clothing as they ripple and flutter, as if the ivy is growing in real time.