[The story so far: Simon Kettridge, fantasy author, has been transported to the setting of his novels, the Phaeland Empire. Once there, he accidentally derails the plot of the book he's dropped into, dooming the world to destruction at the hands of an evil necromancer. With his heroes eliminated by Simon's unintentional intrusion, the only thing standing between Phaeland and the hordes of Necromanata is Simon, who has just his pen and his knowledge of the world as tools. Simon takes up letter-writing in an attempt to undo the damage he's instigated. But letters are slow and expensive in the fantasy universe, forcing Simon to find ways to meet his expenses. At the encouragement of the inn's serving maid and resident courtesan, he dabbles at being a gigolo, with some success - until a poisonous snake-woman bites him in mid-coitus and sends him into a hallucinatory catatonia. He wakes a week later, and struggles to recover ...]
*****
On the plus side, I felt better and better over the course of the next day, and even better the day after that. But on the minus side, once he learned I was out of danger, Burgham the innkeeper started pushing Leyna really hard to stick to her duties.
"He has a point, you know, Simon," she insisted when I said it was unfair. "I earn my room and roof and meals doing the inn's chores and waiting tables. Truth told, Burgham's had a pretty loose hand on my reins this past week while I've tended you. He's gruff, but he means well - and I owe him for, well, for a lot."
I reminded myself that I really didn't know that much about Leyna's situation with regard to her employer, but that wasn't enough for me to drop it. "Whatever you owe him, does he always have to imply that you're ... moonlighting, when he yells for you to get back to work?"
She laughed and picked up the meal tray she'd brought me shortly after noon. "In case it's escaped you, Simon, I
do
occasionally sneak off and earn a few extra coins when I ought to be about my duties. You'll notice he never yells at me for being a slackard. We have an arrangement - and for all his grousing, I get away with quite a bit. And he's never once asked me to make up the difference in his bed. Not before I came of age nor since."
"You've been here since before -"
"
Leyna!
"
With a roll of her eyes toward the open door, she said, "The master calls. I'll tell you the whole story some other time - I hope
after
you've finished the next play and we can chat about Elterawisse!
But we barely ended up with a breath of time to talk the rest of that day or the next. Burgham kept her busy straight through working hours, and her evening clients hogged her time after the dinner rush fell off. She only peeked in to apologize and explain.
"I'm down to the scraps of my rainy-day coin jar, and you said you've another letter to mail soon. So there's a couple of horny ones in the common room and I need to get to it while business is good. You understand, don't you?"
"Of course," I insisted, though I was recovering to the point that sex without premature ejaculation or aching after-pangs might be a possibility. I could hardly ask her to screw me for free when I'd depleted her savings with my infirmity.
So Elterawisse it was, with a side-order of writing my next letter to Kleburn Mandermorte.
Luckily, the plays of Phaeland's greatest author made the hours fly by. Although I've never considered myself much of a poet, I think my prose is pretty good - but Elterawisse put me to shame on all counts. I'd sweated for hours over the half-dozen or so quotes I'd written into
The Stage Grievous
to make it clear the guy was this world's answer to Shakespeare. Every scrap of lyricism I could manage, I pulled together, squeezed into the most condensed and pure form possible, and then bled onto the page and worked and reworked and threw out and rewrote and re-rewrote until the absolute limits of my talents had been reached.
And now, reading the actual plays, I found that
every single line
matched or beat mine in beauty and wit and ingenuity.
A Gadabout in Disarray
, the first one I read, knocked the shit out of the very best of my Juliette Ravendark novels - on dialogue, on plot, on wordsmithing, on characterization. Even his quick, razor-succinct stage directions left my best-described action sequences in the dust. And
Gadabout
was supposedly one of his lesser works.
I didn't know whether to feel like a genius for dreaming the guy up or a hack for being so far out of his league.
Fortunately, reading the four plays in Leyna's book absorbed my attention so thoroughly I didn't need to think about it - or to think about how normal it somehow felt for this girl I was crazy about to be fucking strangers half the night without me being the least bit put off. I basically saw her when she brought my food and hardly anytime else. Elterawisse made it tolerable and gave me something to gush about to her in the few minutes each day she had to spare.
Then, sometime late in the evening on the second day after I woke up, she knocked on my door as I sat in bed with the book on my lap and my mind reeling from finishing the last page.
"Simon?" her voice came softly through the door. "Are you still up?"
"Yeah," I said, blinking. The key turned in the lock and she came in.
"Oh, good. I didn't know if you'd just fallen asleep with the lamp on or were still reading." She had a rumpled look to her, hair tousled and the bodice of her dress half unlaced. She shut the door behind her, but I noticed she didn't lock it. "How are you feeling? You look a bit ... gaffed."
With a squeeze to the book on my lap, I said, "Well, I just finished binge-reading four of the best stories I've ever come across. I mean, they're not really just stories at all, are they? They're ..."
Leyna beamed and shook lightlly, and I swear a hint of tears even swelled in her eyes. "I know, aren't they? Which one did you like best?
Gadabout
?
The Wan Cottager
?
Pavaziel
?
Sanavar's History
? I can never choose. One day it's one, the next day another, the next day two or three all in a dead tie.
Pavaziel
is so ... but then, I laugh so hard at Mistress Thimbleblister in
Gadabout ...
and doesn't the dead princess in
History
make your heart just about burst?"
"I'd need to read them over and over to have any chance at picking a favorite," I said.
"It doesn't help!" A magnetic joy lifted her and washed the end-of-day weariness from her. The transformation made me marvel. "The more I read them, the harder it gets. Every time, you find something different, something he's hidden away between the beats, painted over with fire and laughter and wit and ... there's so much treasure under every line! Did you recognize the young minstrel from
Cottager
come back as the greybeard mendicant who tells us Sanavar's tale?"
"The -"
Holy shit, she's right!
The instant she said it, a half-dozen clues leapt into my head, each one ringing with the poetry of Elterawisse's dialogue. "Oh my god, how did I miss that?"
She laughed. "Don't fret - it must have taken me two or three years of reading them as my bedtime stories before I saw it."
I just sat for a minute and watched her and breathed.
"What?" she asked. "You think I'm a ninny, don't you? You probably saw more in one trip through the book than I have in a hundred."
"No," I said. "I think you're perfect."
Her eyes landed on mine as if trying to see whether I was joking. Then she ran a hand through her hair, glanced down, and self-consciously tightened up her bodice strings. "You're playing. I'm a right mess, full of one man's cum and on my way to wash up and take some more from another fellow waiting at the bar. You read through that whole book in a day and a half - it takes me twice that long to get through just one of the plays."
Under the covers, my still-Eesia-poisoned cock throbbed and lurched upward at the thought of Leyna having guys lined up to screw her. Somehow, it made her even more beautiful.
Why? Shouldn't I be jealous?
And I was, of course. But the fact that she would tell me about it so openly crushed my envy to paste. I felt privileged to know what she did, to know that she enjoyed it and wasn't lessened by it. And ...
"A fast reader isn't always the best one, Leyna," I told her. "I'm sure you're acquainted with a few things where slow turns out a better result than speed does. What's really important is," and here I gently circled my hand across the cover of the book, "not only is this the most amazing thing I've read in my life, and not only did
you
give it to me - but you've got a mind that can appreciate it. I feel like an absolute ass, sucked in by how beautiful you are, and how funny and sweet and kind and sexy, and somehow I completely failed to suspect that you're also brilliant."
Her blue eyes rolled and her face colored. "Oh, Simon,
please
. It's not like I wrote it or anything."
"No. But you
know
it. It's part of you, in and out - the way the excitement just exploded out of you when you started talking about all the plays - I've seen that before, plenty of times. But usually when people do it, they don't actually have anything to say. They just gush and blather. You
get
it. I could hear it in every word you said. This is deep stuff, and you're all the way down in it, and I never even guessed."
"It's just one book," she said, as if trying to excuse herself. "And I've had an awfully long time to figure bits of it out."
"And how many people would have taken that time? Burgham? Healer Sylva? The guy waiting at the bar downstairs?"
She laughed and covered her mouth, wide-eyed. "Hramda's heavens, no! But - now that you've reminded me he's there, I'd best get to it, hadn't I?" The 'I' trailed off into a sigh. "I so wish I could just spend all night sitting and talking plays with you instead."
"Me too," I said.
Except that we'd have to take an occasional break or my balls would burst.
I didn't say that out loud though - just lay still and watched her eyes.
