The Silenced Tale, стр. 7
“I see,” I say, reaching out to take the wine from her hands so I may fold them between my own and kiss the tips. “And now you have thought your way into a small panic.”
“Just a small one,” Pip allows. “But I . . . I dunno. He’s concerned that it might not be over, and . . . to be honest? I’m not certain that it is.”
Ah, and here is the root of the problem. I draw my wife against me, resting her head against my heartbeat, and kiss her crown. It seems to soothe her, when she’s been thinking too long or too much about my origins, to have this reminder that I live, I breathe; that I am here.
“But I could also be spinning fantasies,” Pip admits quietly. She swirls her fingertip through my extremely sparse chest hair. “I don’t want to get anyone worked up if I can help it. But I thought I should at least mention it.”
“Just to see if I’ve noticed anything else . . . hinky?” I ask.
Pip grins up at me, that lovely, blinding smile of sheer girlish delight that she gifts to me whenever I master the phrasing of some new idiom or jargon from her world. “Yeah.”
“Nothing hinky,” I vow. “All has been quiet.”
Pip winces. “That’s nearly inviting hinkiness.” She reaches out and brushes a tender thumb over the thin white scar on my left cheek, the last signature that Bootknife ever left on someone’s flesh.
“Oh?” I tease, leaning down for a kiss, which she willingly offers up. When I move back, my wife curls her fingernails against my nape and fails to let me go.
“Mmm,” she says into our next kiss. “Almost as bad as ‘what’s the worst that could happen’? Or ‘I’ll be right back.’”
“Ghastly,” I agree, sipping at her lips. “But no worries. My story is not a horror thriller.”
“But it is a fantasy,” Pip says, and lets me go to sit up. Her expression, when I finally have the chance to study it, is the sort of blank calm she employs when she is trying to keep others from seeing her inner turmoil. I would resent that she is even now not telling me all that is worrying her, if it wasn’t for the fact that I can parse the language of her inward-rolled lips and the tightness of the lines around her eyes so well.
“And what does that mean, dearest?” I ask, sitting up as well. “What trope am I missing?”
Pip reaches across me to retrieve her wine glass. She takes a sip and, as she swallows, seems to come to a decision. “I . . . I think we might be in the eye of the storm here.”
“The eye of the storm?”
“The calm in the middle of the hurricane.”
I raise my own glass to her. “I know what this idiom means. I just don’t understand how—ah. Yes.” I sip, too, for now I have thoughts of my own to consider, to chew on.
Pip winds her hand around mine, threading my fingers with her own, squeezing as if, any moment, the proverbial hurricane will descend upon our house and rip us apart.
“You believe that there is some adventure yet to be had, some danger left to ford?” I ask softly, squeezing back.
“The thing is, bao bei,” Pip whispers. “Fantasy novels usually come in trilogies.”
Chapter 2 Elgar
The next week is a flurry of video-calls with LA, apologetic cat-cuddles with Linux, catch-up meetings with Juan, and daily chats with his agent, Kim. With the press and the fans both dying to see what’s next from the “fantastic imagination” of Elgar Reed, the danger that news of the TV series might leak is high.
The principal casting calls have started to go out, but the production company wants to keep a lid on the series for as long as possible. It’s unconventional, but the idea is to release all the news all at once, in a big sort of social media info-bomb that will, they hope, make the series the main topic of conversation for a few entertainment news cycles. Honestly, it’s all just a bit too modern and busy for Elgar, so he just does as he’s asked and keeps mum about the whole thing. After all, Elgar is a firm believer that spoilers, well, spoil things.
True to point, things were nearly ruined at the beginning of the week, when a casting agent’s assistant—a dumb millennial with a celebrity ladyboner—posted a photo of the call for Bootknife on her social media. It was caught quickly and yanked before any of the major outlets seemed to get ahold of it, but Elgar didn’t have one ounce of sympathy when he’d heard that she’d been fired the next day—confidentiality contracts exist for a reason.
The assistant’s flub means they have to consider throwing nosy fans and media types a bone in terms of Shuttleborn, though. So, to the already busy week, Elgar adds a back-and-forth with the publisher, who wants to keep a tightly clamped lid on the text of the book, and has no stake in whether or not Flageolet’s secret is spilled.
It takes three calls, and a “please, please?” wine basket sent to the whole marketing team, but the publisher is eventually persuaded to post the first chapter on a social reading site to kick off the marketing drive and keep fan attention on Shuttleborn. Hopefully, that will satisfy anyone poking around Elgar and draw them away from digging further. It sort of feels like he’s thrown Shuttleborn’s Tristan and Vana to the wolves to keep Kintyre and Bevel safe, and he tries not to think too hard about what it might mean that he’s now imagining the afterlives of characters he hasn’t yet met in person.
And so, once again, Elgar doesn’t spend any of his week actually writing. He barely has time to think, and spends more time eating sandwiches over his keyboard than Juan is really happy about.