And Elgar is seeing them for the first time.
He’s entranced. He can’t look away. He can barely blink. And at the same time, horror roils in his gut. Horror of what was done to Lucy. Horror that it was done by someone spawned from his imagination. Horror that the next person tortured by the Viceroy might possibly be himself.
“So, what do we . . . do now?” Elgar asks. “With the, you know, the trap and the bait and stuff?” He gestures vaguely to himself.
“We wait until tomorrow,” Forsyth says.
“That’s it? Just wait?” Elgar asks, aghast. “But this has to change something, right?”
Lucy closes her eyes and shakes her head a little.
“No,” Forsyth says. “This is, unfortunately, meaningless.”
“But the Stations. What about that plot map you told me about?” Elgar asks. “The one you made for the other two adventures?”
“I’m not sure there’s a point this time,” Lucy says quietly, opening her pain-deep eyes to meet his. “Stories in the real world, do they follow your pattern? Not usually. Will this one? I think relying on the Excel to tell us what to expect will do us a disservice. We can . . . miss things. Like with Lanaea . . .” she finishes softly.
Lanaea. A woman Elgar has never known, has never written, and yet had lived in the land of Hain, had been born in Milliway Chipping, and raised in Sherwilde, and been murdered in the Lost Library. She had been loved, and mourned, and Elgar’d had no idea she’d even existed. Like so many people who populate his world, she had just been there for the convenience of plot, one in a crowd he would have killed to make the bad guy look badder, someone he would have thrown at Kintyre as a reward, would have endangered and threatened, or dismissed, just for the sake of conflict, of narrative tension.
It’s not like you knew, Elgar tells himself. It’s not like you were aware that these people were, well, people.
“Still not your fault,” Forsyth tells Lucy gently, wrapping an arm over her shoulders.
No, Elgar thinks grimly. It’s mine. But what he says out loud is: “So we just wait. Go back to bed, sweet dreams, all that bullshit?”
“All that bullshit,” Forsyth agrees lightly.
“I have to say, I’m not feeling all that confident here,” Elgar confesses. “Maybe I should have stayed in the safe house.”
“With personnel who have no idea what the Viceroy is capable of and no way of guarding against him?” Forsyth asks archly.
“Well, do you? Really?” Elgar challenges.
Lucy looks up at him, eyes wide, and a bit hurt, but mostly resigned.
“We all agree that the plan is limpid and relies too much on hoping that whatever the Viceroy does, we’ll be able to spot it coming and stop it,” Forsyth says slowly, trying to make this conversation cease to be anything but an acknowledgment of an utter losing situation. “I will be honest myself and admit that I highly dislike being on the back foot, as we are. But this is not like a quest, Elgar. We cannot formulate a plan, nor mark a map. This is a siege. The best we can do is eat well, sleep while we can, and prepare ourselves for whatever we think might come our way.”
Elgar’s mouth twists sourly. “While parading me around with a target on my back. He has magic,” Elgar blurts, all patience with this attempt at reason lost. “He’s the son of a Deal-Maker, you say. Maybe he doesn’t have all his magic, but he got here somehow! He can compel people! He put illusions in my house, and he . . . he killed . . .” Elgar chokes on the name of his cat, eyes welling.
Elgar turns his body away, angling so Forsyth and Lucy can’t see his face as he mops at his cheeks with the back of his hand, desperate to be a man in front of them.
“He has magic,” Elgar repeats at length, when he’s gotten himself back under control. “And we’ve got nothing.”
Forsyth sits straight upright, as if he’s been hit by lightning all of a sudden. “Maybe . . . maybe not. Pip, you bound the magic of his blood within him with your Deal, correct?”
“Yeah,” Lucy says. “But that left out the magic that he’d learned, the magic that doesn’t have anything to do with his heritage. And that’s where I made my mistake.”
Forsyth snaps his fingers and points straight at her nose, like Elgar’s seen Lucy do when she has a revelation. “The Viceroy punched a hole through the veil of the skies, and those magics he has learned came with him. Magic, I believe, sits upon him like a mantel. Perhaps even leaks through from the other world.”
Something inside Elgar, some half-remembered concept of world-building that he has filed away in the back of his brain, flares to life. Leaking, yes, leaking and flowing and—
“And magic is a fluid!” Elgar says suddenly, jolting up and turning so swiftly to face the bed that he forgets for a second that he’s still recovering from a neck injury. There’s a hot pop, a sear of pain crackles up his back, and the air punches out of him in a wincing gasp.
“It’s a what?” Lucy asks, startled. “That isn’t in your books.”
“No,” Elgar agrees, massaging his neck to try to get his body to relax and the seized muscles to cooperate. “Only in my head. I could never find a good place to put it. But the way I conceptualized it, it’s like . . . it flows, right? It lives in your cells and in your breath. Magic glows because it’s steam rising from a hand. Words are born in moisture, formed in
