“Do you like that dagger, Elgar?” I ask my creator. “Does it fit well in your hand?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. Why?” he asks, taking it back from Pip to test the heft and weight.
“We need to get you both armed,” I say, low enough that the young man—now trying to take a stealthy selfie with Elgar in the background, instead of just asking one of us to take a photo for him—cannot hear us. “With more than lamps.”
Elgar chuckles, allowing the gentle tease to cover the nerves we’re all suffering under.
“These are props,” Pip points out.
“My whetstone is here,” I whisper, patting the small pouch on my sword belt where I keep the items needed to maintain Smoke. “Though they will not be strong, they will at least be sharp.”
Pip nods thoughtfully, eyes skimming the wares, and selects a sword not unlike mine. It’s too long for her, though, and she keeps testing the swords until she finds something that I’m certain is meant to be a replica of a weapon used by one of the hobbits or the children who traveled to Narnia.
“We have katanas,” the young man says as he watches Pip. “Or a ninja star? Something more anime.”
Pip’s mouth twists and her eyebrows come together in a dark V, and I can see her biting back the tirade about Asian stereotypes. As much as I enjoyed watching her take to task the Schrödinger’s Rapists in the tavern, we both know that now is not the time and place to do the same with this lad.
“No, I think this sword will do,” she says, raising it to point the tip at his ear. The man takes a startled step back, suddenly realizing that perhaps condescending to an armed woman, even one armed with a blunted length of steel, is a bad idea.
Elgar distracts the man from his foolishness by waving his credit card under his nose.
“I wish you hadn’t picked that one,” Pip says to him as the young man wraps their purchases in bubble wrap, cardboard boxes, and mountains of packing tape to make them acceptable to carry in public. Little does he know his work is wasted.
“But it’s Kin’s knife,” Elgar says, eyes dancing with glee. “Seems appropriate!”
“And it was Bootknife’s before it was Kintyre’s,” I remind him gently, and Elgar’s face does something complicated when it’s clear he’s not certain how to feel about this reminder. “And it was at King Chailin’s tomb that—”
“I remember,” Elgar says sharply, the joy drained from his posture. He accepts the boxes from the young man, signs a battered copy of The Serpent of the Sleeping Vale that the vendor had under his table, and then we make our way down to the lower levels of the convention center. This area is easier to investigate, as there are fewer people setting up the various rooms for panel discussions. In the grand ballroom, technicians are running the final sound and light checks on the stage, while volunteers set out what, by my rough estimate, appears to be about five thousand chairs.
It is here that Ahbni catches up to us.
“Mr. Reed,” she says. “I thought I was meeting you in the hotel lobby?”
“Yeah,” he replies casually. “But I wanted to get a little shopping in first.”
Ahbni frowns at the boxes in his hands. “I wish you’d waited for me to escort you.”
“I had Syth and Lucy here.”
Ahbni turns to face us, her people-pleasing expression firmly back in place. “Morning.”
“Good morning,” I say. “Elgar, let me take those up to the room for you. Pip, you’ll be fine tagging along without me for a while?”
“’Course,” Pip says, grinning at how I make it sound like she’s only sticking with him to keep from being bored.
Ahbni frowns again, but doesn’t say that she can’t go with them. “There’s a hospitality suite on the second floor of the hotel,” Ahbni says. “I was thinking we could head up there, grab you some breakfast, and review your schedule for today?”
“We’ve eaten,” Elgar says. “But I could always do with more coffee.”
“Okay. Okay,” Ahbni says, mentally realigning her plans. “Coffee we can do.”
The four of us head toward the escalators, and Ahbni, I notice, falls into step with Pip.
“I like your outfit, by the way. I wanted to say it last night, but, well, you know,” Ahbni says.
“Oh, thanks,” Pip says, happy to take the offered conversation, and the leisure to get Ahbni warmed up to her. Any ally we can cultivate is worth the work of it.
“Is it homemade?”
“In a sense,” Pip allows. “I like your outfit, too.”
Ahbni grins, and it’s like a sunrise. We step onto the moving stairs, giving Ahbni the opportunity to turn a little circle and show off. Today, she is wearing a knee-length skirt patterned with glittery pink-and-lilac cherries, skulls, and tubes of lipstick. Her blouse is another long-sleeved, flowing one made of a creamy gauzy material, and topped with a violently pink muslin scarf whose tails hang gracefully to the hem of her skirt. She wears leggings in the same shade of pink, and sneakers in the same lilac that is on her skirt. And, like yesterday, her makeup is impeccable and intricate, and her long dark hair is pulled back into the most complicated braid I have ever seen.
“I’m in fashion design. I made this all myself.”
“Color me impressed,” Pip says.
“I really like your shirt. Did you sew it yourself?” Ahbni asks, touching Pip’s sleeve to investigate the fine stitching around her cuff. “This was done by hand. It’s excellent work.”
“Nah, not me. I don’t do that useless girly stuff,” Pip says, clearly thinking back to that afternoon in my mother’s rooms when she kicked the basket of sewing and embroidery supplies onto the floor, rejecting all the symbols and trappings of what it meant to be a woman in Elgar Reed’s world.
She levels a mischievous grin
