The Silenced Tale, стр. 43

“It’s fine. It’s probably just stress,” Elgar lies, trying to be soothing. Juan buries his face in his hands, struggling hard to keep it together as his shoulders shake. Elgar has a pack of tissues in his carry-on, and he hands these to his assistant when Juan next looks up, red-eyed and white-cheeked.

“Yeah,” Juan says thickly. “Stress. God, I cannot wait to get on this plane.”

Forsyth

Several hours later, Alis is finally asleep and drooling on my shoulder. I have been typing away at Finnar all afternoon while Pip rested, searching for any clue that what happened to Pip earlier had happened in some way to Elgar as well. But according to all my sources—including the CCTV of the SeaTac waiting lounge—Elgar has simply been sitting in the security lounge of the airport, waiting to board his plane all afternoon.

Pip and I are both wretchedly exhausted, so dinner is order-in pizza, which Pip brings upstairs to my office when it arrives so we needn’t dislodge Alis. She is feeling a little flushed again, and spent a good few hours poking at her mouth with her hands, drooling all over my desk. I don’t doubt we’re in for another few nights of teething, so am determined to let her sleep now while she can.

Pip and I eat in silence for a few moments before she says, with the air of someone who has come to a hard decision: “We need to tell Elgar.”

My eyes snap open. “I agree. But I hesitate to do so, only because he—”

“You think his imagination will run away from him.”

“Perhaps? Pip, he is being sta-stalked,” I say, and then swallow hard, trying to helm my tongue long enough to explain my worry. Of course I would be stuttering now—I always do when I have something heartfelt or important to say, when I am heavily emotional. It’s hateful. “And w-w-we ha-have no def-def-in-initive proo-of that it is by a ma-ma-ah-dman of his own creation. If we put th-the idea in his he-hea-ad that his attacker-er-er is ma-magical, he may miss a ve-ver-very r-r-real non-magical th-threat.”

Pip kisses my tripping tongue calm. “None of that, bao bei.”

“I am fruh-frus-frustrated,” I complain.

“I know.” Another soft kiss. “We have to at least tell him we suspect it, though.”

I am torn. I agree that he should be fully armed, but I also don’t want to scare him with an unproven hypothesis. Finnar has yet to actually find Elgar’s stalker. “But if the attacks are magical, there is little he or the police can do to stop them.”

Pip rubs her face. “And is there anything we can do?”

“At the moment?” I say. “I doubt it very much. These fits have you too weak to travel, let alone fight whatever or whomever we may find, and I am without both magic and Shadow’s Men, or an army. Finnar is my best bet now, and I cannot take this rig with me to Seattle. For now, we must wait.”

“Wait for what?” Pip groans. “For something worse to happen? To me? To Elgar? Jesus, how do you know we’re doing the right thing?”

“Elgar seems safe enough in Los Angeles,” I say softly. “Let him stay there, ignorant, until I find something concrete in Seattle.”

Pip nods, but I can tell that she is chewing on a thought. I wait, quiet and still, until she is ready to share it.

“Are we committing the cardinal sin of psychodrama novels?” she asks in a small voice. “Should we be communicating more? Should we be sharing information? I mean, is this . . . ?” She trails off and scrubs her hands through her hair. “I don’t know this genre. I don’t know spy thrillers. Are we making the right choices? Are we just talking ourselves around in circles? I don’t know.”

I stand, careful not to jostle Alis back into wakefulness, and walk over to Pip. She takes my extended hand and lets me pull her up into a hug. Pip slides her arms around my waist, and rests her cheek softly against Alis’s side.

“You needn’t be the expert at everything, bao bei,” I whisper into her ear.

Pip huffs a laugh. “But that’s my role in all this, right?” The way she says it recalls that morning in Gwillfifeshire, the smell of the fresh reeds on the floor and the trailing smoke from the embers in the hearth-grate of our room in the Pern.

“Perhaps you and Alis should go help sow a field and you will find your eureka moment,” I suggest, standing again

Pip pinches my rear in retaliation. “Cheeky,” she murmurs.

I stiffen up to avoid jumping and yelping and waking our child.

Eventually, when the pizza is eaten and Alis clearly out for the night, we make our way to bed. Finnar does not need me to babysit it. Neither of us have really attempted sleep, but as Alis has been put in her crib already, it felt strange not to curl into our own bed as well. We neither of us, I think, wanted to be as far away from her as the sofa downstairs. Pip sits up against the headboard with her PhD thesis open on her lap, muttering about having missed something, about having forgotten something important.

“Are these Stations?” Pip finally says. “Are we missing something? Is this a quest?”

Above our dresser, opposite the end of our bed, the Excel Sheet from our first quest in Hain is framed and hung upon the wall. Pip had it in her travel bag when we crossed into the Overrealm. And like the precious few items I still have left from my previous life, I treasure the large, creased, shakily written-upon piece of parchment. It is obvious that Pip’s new line of questioning, her new worries, have come of staring at it in the half-dark of our bedroom.

“It is nothing like Elgar’s plots, if it is,” I offer into the darkness.

“I don’t know where it would have started, what the First Station would have