The Silenced Tale, стр. 122

“Or it may break their hearts,” I point out.

Pip bites her bottom lip and nods, looking away from me and back to Kin, where he is quiet and still. I rifle through my memories, but I cannot think of an instance when he hasn’t been rambunctious, fidgety, opinionated, or loud. He even grumbles and shifts in his sleep, and more than once when we were adventuring together, his restlessness would wake me.

“Will you do as Elgar asked? Will you write more stories? Of Wyndam and Caerdac?”

“No, I couldn’t. I . . . I’m the sole repository of magic in this world now,” Pip says softly. Her voice is reverent and sad. “You understand, right? I will never Write. Never. I couldn’t bear to hurt anyone we love. Even unknowingly. Even accidentally.”

“Very well,” I say softly, pulling her against me. “No one is forcing you to do it. However, as you are now the keeper of Elgar’s Authorial Intent, if the series is to happen, you should accompany Bevel into the meetings. If only to . . . ensure that nothing goes awry.”

Pip is quiet for a long, long moment. “You’re saying I should be the midwife?”

“It may help you,” I suggest, deciding to try another tack. “It may offer . . . closure.”

Pip chuckles at my poor attempt to replicate the cadence and tone of our therapist.

“It’s not . . . it’s not a bad thought. After all, according to the Viceroy’s summoning spell, I am the person who knows the most about the series,” Pip says. But she smiles thinly, still a little too hurt by the events of the past three years to really make light of it. “What’s your opinion of Newfoundland?”

“I hear they have a vibrant filmmaking community and many fascinating museums and award-winning restaurants for me to take Alis to while you’re on set,” I answer, as lightly as I am able. “I have experienced one coast of my adopted nation. I should rather like to experience the other.”

Pip scuffs her feet, chews on her bottom lip, looks at the floor, and says: “I’ll think about it.”

Kintyre is allowed to wake at the end of three weeks. It is a longer process than I thought it would be, for even after the medicines that held him in stasis have been lifted, he dozes in fits and starts. And when he is finally, properly wakeful, he is confused about where he is, and what’s happened. It takes him several days to be able to stand and walk unaided, and even then, they make him depart the hospital in a wheelchair. He is dour, and grumpy, and hates the clothing Pip has procured for him. He wants Turn Hall, and dislikes all the food just to be contrary.

But Alis greets him at the door to our suite, standing on her own and holding a ridiculous bouquet of Gerbera daisies so large it obscures her face. Kintyre smiles for the first time in my presence since he woke, and against the doctor’s explicit orders, he scoops my daughter up to smush kisses on her cheeks. Alis is startled, as she barely remembers Kintyre, and Martin laughs and steals her away, distracts her with Library before she can decide she wants to have a proper cry about what just happened.

Kintyre lets Bevel fuss him into a seat on the sofa, and takes the offered glass of wine—also against doctor’s orders, when Kintyre is on the pain medication he’s been prescribed. But old habits die hard, and Bevel is still mildly distrustful of the tap water.

“I’m never going to see him again, am I?” Kintyre asks softly, eyes on his lap as he wraps a careful fist around the stem of the glass. “Wyndam. My son.” He is looking at his niece. “I’ll never see him again. Or . . . or Caerdac, and Bradri, or Pointe, or . . . any of it. Will I?”

“No,” Pip says gently. “I’m sorry.”

“Can you . . . can I have some time with Bev?” Kintyre asks softly.

“Yeah,” Pip says. “C’mon, Mom, Dad, let’s go back to your room.”

“Come, sweeting,” I say, holding my arms out for my daughter. “Let’s go.”

“Bye bye bye!” Alis says over my shoulder when Martin passes her over. She opens and closes her fingers adorably, apparently forgetting that, just a moment ago, Kintyre was a man to be suspicious of.

I do not know what Bevel and Kintyre discuss, but they are in their room when Pip and I return several hours later, Alis flopped, dead asleep, over Pip’s shoulder. The next morning, Kintyre is more gracious, more patient, more generous, and I offer Bevel a thankful handshake when Kintyre isn’t looking.

“So this is how the adventure ends, yeah?” Bevel asks as we all pack up the following day. “How all our adventures end? The Happily Ever After, and all that?”

“Surely not all, Bev,” Kintyre says with a smirk, waggling his eyebrows at his trothed and pinching his bottom hard, and . . . uhg, yes, I am absolutely glad that we have settled that Bevel and Kintyre will be moving to Seattle. I definitely could not live with my brother making that face at his trothed in the same house. Not even in the same town. Yes, a whole different country is a very suitable distance between me and that, indeed.

I must be making my own face of disgust, because Pip laughs at me, free and joyful in a way that I haven’t heard in months. Alis takes the opportunity of her mother’s distraction to “help” us pack by pulling our pajamas out of the suitcases and throwing them on the floor.

I despise flying, so of course my brother simply adores it. It took some jigging within the airline’s system, but I managed to get us all on the same flight and seated together. Kintyre flirts shamelessly with the flight attendants, using his injury to procure a pencil and paper