“Welcome, Elgar Reed!” the moderator crows, and the crowd shouts and claps and stamps their feet again. “How lucky are we to have you at the last minute, eh?”
“Th-thanks, y-yeah,” Elgar manages, and takes a sip from the bottle of water he realizes is still clutched in his left hand. He clears his throat and pastes on his “performing monkey” smile and says, “Thanks for having me.”
“Always a pleasure. So, we’re kicking off this con with a nice juicy Q&A panel,” the moderator plows on. “But before we get people lined up at the microphones on either side of the stage, let’s talk a bit about what you’ve been up to. I hear tell that there’s a new trilogy in the works?”
“Done, actually,” Elgar says, letting the smugness he’s feeling show on his face. He doesn’t add: “Has been done for years, but I’ve been stalled in the editing process by the terror I’ve felt about writing anything new. Oh, why, you ask? Because I learned that my characters are real and actually feel all the pain I put them through. Don’t believe me? Ask that guy sitting right there in the front row.”
“And what’s the series called? Actually, forget that, what we all really want to know is when can we expect to see it hit the shelves?”
“Book one of the Shuttleborn trilogy will drop next summer, and—” He is nominally prepared for the mechanical whine, but he can’t help the way he jumps and looks upward, wild-eyed and heart leaping up into his throat, when he hears it ring out from above him.
It’s only the sound of the mechanics in the fly lowering the massive projection screen, though, and Jesus fucking Christ, Elgar is almost starting to wish the Viceroy would just hurry up already. The waiting is going to give him a heart attack and kill him before his archvillain ever gets the chance.
“Hey, speaking of dropping . . .” the moderator says, looking up with faux-nervousness and playing along. “Guys? Hey, techies! What’s going on?”
No answer comes from the wings, though, except for the lights snapping off.
Elgar knows that this is part of the game, but he can’t help it. He is freaking frightened. He reaches behind himself in the semi-darkness of the hall and wraps his hand around the hilt of his dagger. Small blue lights flare to life among the crowd—phone screens, he realizes. None are green. Beyond that, only the red glow of the exit signs interrupt the miles of darkness he struggles to peer through.
And then, in the blackness, music. The crowd hushes instantly as the first plaintive notes of a wavering penny whistle warble like a sorrowful loon over the sound system. Elgar hasn’t seen the completed film yet. He’d wanted to be surprised, wanted to be genuinely affected by it when he spoke to the moderator and his fans after viewing it. He wanted to share the awe of seeing it for the first time with everyone else in this room.
And listening to the song now, feeling the way this particular gentle orchestration seems to reach out and snag on his heart, he’s glad he did.
All at once, the gentle music swings into the fiddle-and-fife tune that’s going to be the show’s opening theme song. But it’s been made brighter, brasher, more confident, bullying the tempo into keeping up with it.
With no title card or credits as a warning, the darkness on the screen surges bright and focuses on the image of a grand, three-storied manor house made of sandy-gold marble at the end of a long, wide, impeccably manicured white gravel drive. The trees on either side of it are landscaped within an inch of their lives. Then, all at once, with a dramatic flutter, two massive Turn-russet banners are unfurled from the roof. They’re easily as wide as a man’s outstretched arms, and long enough to brush the top of the house’s grand portico. Bordered in gold fringe and tassels, they’re embroidered with the massive image of a key lancing a lock, the sigil of House Turn.
The crowd goes bananas. People start screaming, “Oh my god!” and, “No way!” and, “I knew it!” and, “The rumors are true!” and all manner of expletives.
Elgar feels a surge of pride and excitement and, strangely, a bit of paternal affection. He knew that keeping the series a secret would be worth it.
“Oh,” he hears Lucy gasp from the front row, and Elgar can see just enough in the glow of the screen to catch the way she turns her head to watch her husband and nothing else. Between them, their hands are white-knuckled. Forsyth flexes his fingers, and brings the basket woven of their fingers to his lips to cover his expression.
The film isn’t long—ten minutes, give or take—and follows Kintyre Turn as he walks around the estate, overseeing and approving of the work being done on it in advance of his eighteenth birthday celebration. The exterior set of Turn Hall was already mostly completed when Elgar had been asked to write this, so it was nice to be able to show it off. Kintyre swiftly thereafter sneaks out of the stables dressed in Shiel-purple, with a horse, a full set of saddlebags, and enough food to get him to the Urlish border, where he can volunteer for the foot-soldiers brigade fighting in the war. Everyone knows that what happens next is his first meeting with Bevel Dom, seventh son of a seventh son, then just an illiterate blacksmith-in-training. It’s the first actual scene of the first book, that fateful meeting.
But this story doesn’t go that far. Instead, it focuses on the few hours after Kintyre escaped, when
