“I missed you,” Pip says, and if her voice is wobbly, then it is not my place to tease her for it. For my voice is just as wobbly when I reply: “And I you.”
We only break apart when a deliberate cough echoes from the threshold of the kitchenette.
“Yeah, yeah,” Pip says, and turns away from me to smirk at Elgar. “I know, we’re so gross.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Elgar protests, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. “Kinda romantic, actually.”
The uncharacteristic compliment startles me, and I cannot help but study Elgar’s face. He has his eyes turned away, his hands folded behind his back. He looks more like a contrite little boy than an adult. But he is leaning heavily on the doorframe, clearly still affected by his medications.
“Coffee?” Pip asks, and breaks away to try to dissolve the awkward moment with caffeine.
“Yeah,” Elgar groans. “Yeah, that’d be great.” He lowers himself into the office chair beside what can be tentatively called ‘the living room,’ and tips his head back, closing his eyes with a hard sigh.
The suite door opens into an open space with a sofa, a large chair and ottoman, and a sleek entertainment center right beside the floor-to-ceiling patio doors that lead to a balcony too windy to really enjoy. To the left are the bedrooms, with matching en suite washrooms, and to the right, against the wall, is the kitchenette, which is directly abutted by an office nook with a desk that looks out through the windows over downtown Toronto.
As Pip putters with the hotel-room coffee machine, complaining when she realizes she failed to pack the good coffee sachets, I join my creator in looking out over the skyline. He sits up, wincing, and stares out the window.
The coffee machine beeps, and I rise and fetch us three mug-fulls, each doctored to our preferred strength. Pip likes her coffee dark as night and sweet as sin. I prefer mine creamy, but sugarless. And Elgar drinks what Canadians call a “double-double”; two creams, two sugars. Juan had been trying to wean him onto black coffee to cut out some of the excess sweets, but now that he has left, Elgar has returned to all his bad nutritional habits. Perhaps I ought not to be enabling him.
“Thanks,” he mumbles, but he presses the mug to the skin between his eyes instead of taking a sip. The heat helps to soothe away some of the worry lines that have etched themselves around his eyes, though it does nothing for the dark smudges under them.
“So, are you guys cosplaying?” Elgar asks at length, when our silent communication has clearly become too unnerving for him.
“Hmmm?” Pip asks, looking down at her attire. She is already dressed in her adventuring gear. My own is laid carefully along the back of the sofa, waiting for me to don it. “Oh. Yeah, I guess.”
“As?”
“Lordling Forsyth Turn and his Ladyling Wife,” I answer with a knowing grin. “We figured it was best to attire ourselves as if we were going into an adventure, just in case we are. Padded jerkins to absorb blows, you see here? And tough leather leggings that will not tear. Boots with sturdy soles that do not slip, and which lace up and give support to the ankle when running.”
“Where’d you get the stuff?” Elgar asks, reaching out to touch the fabric of Pip’s sleeve. The sash laying on the arm of the sofa is the one I wear under my sword belt. I’d had it on when I returned to the Overrealm from our second adventure. Elgar picks up the end, examining the locks and keys picked out in gold thread in the fabric.
“My mother embroidered that,” I offer.
“Real Hainish embroidery,” he repeats, breathless with awe. “From the hand of Lady Alis Sheil Turn.”
“That it is,” I say gently. Elgar carefully sets it back down, and I take the opportunity to head into our room and change. As I step back out, properly clad in clothing that now feels like it fits too tightly, my question about how I look is interrupted by Elgar’s smartphone ringing, blaring out that same fiddle-and-fife tune he told me was meant to be secret.
For all his desire to be covert, Elgar is woefully bad at it. Setting the song as his ringtone; walking in the front door of the hotel; engaging in conversations with people he knows full well will go repeat them elsewhere. He would not have made a suitable candidate for Shadow Hand at all. But he does not desire to be stealthy, to be spy-like. He wishes to be loved. To the point of recklessness, sometimes.
When he answers the phone, Pip and I listen, equally intently, to one side of it as Elgar has a conversation with someone who is obviously the convention organizer, based on the sorts of questions he’s answering. Elgar, as a guest of honor and a major financial draw in terms of star power, certainly has the ability to dictate his own terms and create his own leeways and rules that I assume the lesser guests do not have. All the same, his arriving early seems to have caused a tizzy which I wish we could have avoided. In the end, he soothes the organizer—though I must mime urgently that he not provide the number of the room we are staying in—by agreeing to meet with him tonight.
“Why not?” he asks after he’s hung up.
“What color are the organizer’s eyes?” Pip asks, and Elgar blanches so quickly that I jump up from the sofa to guide him back down into his seat.
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“What color were Ichiro’s?” Pip presses him.
“I didn’t check,” he confesses in a small voice, hand pressed against his chest.
“Exactly. We must be cautious,” I remind him.
“Yeah,” he says shakily. He swallows hard, head clearly still a bit muzzy. “Yeah. I, uh . . . they usually do this thing before the con
