The Silenced Tale, стр. 27

Pip is unceremoniously booted from the kitchen mere moments later, and comes to sit on the floor by my feet, so she can lean her head on my knee. When we are settled, we are handed glasses of wine by one of Martin’s work colleagues from the high school. She is an older woman whose name I don’t think I have ever learned, though we have met before at other such events. Friends of the family fill the room already—some of Pip’s colleagues mingle amid Martin and Mei Fan’s, all of them educators of one level of schooling or another, so they have much in common.

“Congrats,” the woman says to us, settling in a nearby kitchen chair which has been pulled into the living room so there is enough seating for all. “One year. You must be ecstatic.”

“We are,” Pip says, and to anyone who doesn’t know her as well as I do, she would seem perfectly at ease. Outwardly, she appears to be enjoying herself. But I can see the tightness around her eyes, the way her faint smattering of freckles stands out against worry-paled skin; I can feel where her fingernails dig in next to my inseam, just a little, where she has her free hand resting on my ankle.

“Oh, I’m Nancy,” the woman says, belatedly offering me her hand. “I don’t think we’ve had the chance to meet yet.”

“Syth,” I say. “I don’t think we have.”

Nancy winks at Pip. “Well, if you’d had a monster wedding like you were supposed to, I probably would have met you there. But you kids just snuck off and did it on your own, eh?”

I don’t think Nancy means this as a slight, and Pip certainly doesn’t take it as one, but it does seem unnecessarily pointed. We hadn’t been entirely secure in our relationship when we’d wed—I had been new to this world, and we were still slowly trading in dragon’s tears for cash at various gold-buyers in order to secure our wealth, and I had yet to completely exist in the government’s eyes. So we had decided to keep the celebration small so as not to attract attention.

“The point of the ceremony was to bind our lives,” I say, trying for a lightness of tone that I’m not entirely certain I manage, if the way Pip glances at me out of the corner of her eyes means what I think it means. “Not to show off. We were very happy with how it was conducted.”

“Oh, of course,” Nancy says, and she sips her wine, blinking. “Right. But, ah, this is something else, isn’t it?” she adds, desperate to regain her footing. She gestures to the room.

“Wai po’s only gonna get the one grandchild,” Pip says, shrugging. “So we don’t mind her going as overboard or traditional as she wants. It makes her happy, and that makes us happy.”

“Oh, you’ll have another,” Nancy says, leaning in conspiratorially. “People always say they only want one, but the urge will be there again. And it’s good for kids to have siblings, you know? To grow up with someone?”

“Not always,” I counter, and while Nancy blinks and sips again to cover up that she is digesting what I could possibly mean by that statement, Pip pinches the top of my foot, hard. I jerk and squirm, and grin at my wife, who has mischief in her eyes, the teasing minx.

“We’re sure,” she says. “Just the one. I’m the only child of only children, and I turned out just fine. Besides, it’s too expensive to have more than one kid anymore. Curse of the millennials.”

I chuckle at that, for while Pip is certainly a millennial, I am most assuredly not. Though my preference toward Hainish waistcoats, neat grooming, formal shirts, and tailored trousers has led me to resemble a hipster, I cannot possibly be one, as I love nothing ironically and have no cultural experiences here to use as social cache.

Just then, Alis is paraded into the living room in her new birthday clothes—an adorable shirt-and-trousers suit called a tangzhuang. It is made of red silk embroidered with chrysanthemums for luck. Her wispy black curls have been pulled up into adorable twin puffs at the top of her head, which make her look like a chubby kitten. The crowd around us seems to agree that Alis is cute, for a chorus of “aaawwwws!” greet her arrival to the party on her great-grandmother’s hip.

Cameras click and flash. Nancy, apparently, hasn’t had enough of her own foot and opens her mouth to swallow down more.

“And where’s your family?” she asks me, filled with genuine curiosity and a complete lack of knowledge about my complicated relationship with my blood.

“Ah,” I say, and take a sip of wine to wash down the lump that has built in my throat. Normally, I am quite comfortable in repeating the old lie that Pip is my only living family besides an American cousin. But today, on the one year anniversary—by the Overrealm calendar, at least—of my daughter, the Ladyling Alis Mei Fan Turn Piper, it seems . . . bad luck to deny the existence of my loved ones and friends back in Hain.

Taking pity on me, Pip leans across my body and shakes her head a little. The woman sits back, and says, “I’m sorry.”

“I would have liked them to be here,” I say. “But wishes summon djinn, and no one ever gets what they really want when that happens.”

The woman squints at me, and Pip laughs. “I adore your esoteric and obscure idioms, husband-mine,” Pip says. I search for somewhere else to sit amid the crowd in the living room, but every seat is taken. We are stuck.

Pip catches me looking. She smiles comfortingly and pats my much-abused foot. I turn my attention back to wai po and Alis, who are now both kneeling before wai po’s shrine. The Chinese members of the gathering join in the