Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The thing was, Nott remembered brewing it. That was the horrible part. She remembered because the bed of the cart was swaying as it rattled over pebbles and ruts in the road, and Nott was balancing the beaker delicately between her toes while she coaxed its contents to just the right temperature. The instant it was right, she shoved her hand inside her pack for a suitable container. Claws clicked around buttons, dried meat, even a brass candle holder. Finally, with the seconds ticking down before the batch was ruined, she felt the cool, unyielding surface of glass.

It was an empty bottle, not a vial, one that had once held a ruby-red healing potion. It was dirty from tumbling around at the bottom of her bag, but the glass was thick and non-corrosive. Perfect, really. Nott hastily emptied the acid into the container and examined it closely. A bit off-color, but probably okay. She let a tiny drop fall onto the wooden bed of the cart. It sizzled. ‘One, two, three,’ she counted, timing it in her head. A little slow, but not so much as to call it a waste. She heaved a sigh of relief, her muscles relaxing.

From the back of the cart, Caleb's eyes crinkled with fondness. “Were you successful?”

Nott presented the acid, which sloshed against the sides of the potion bottle. “It’s fine, although it was a close thing with all this bouncing around.”

"This is actually a fairly smooth road," Caduceus commented from the driver's seat, and it was true they'd driven over plenty of worse roads during their travels. At the very least, the surface was hard-packed and baked under the sun. Even so, the wagon still rocked and rattled.

“Perhaps a moving cart is not the best place for working with chemicals," Caleb suggested.

It would’ve been better to wait for camp, of course, but Nott’s brain had been buzzing with boredom. She'd done everything she could think of to do: oiled her crossbow and checked the fletching on each bolt, polished her lockpicks, counted and sorted her growing collection of buckles (she had a bet with Jester about how long it would take Fjord to grow suspicious about the number of repairs his pack and armor required), and even braided Caleb's hair while he was engrossed in his latest novel. Soon, though, even hanging off the back of the cart throwing pebbles at squirrels had stopped being entertaining, and she’d decided cooking up a new batch of acid would pass the time. Caleb was right, though. She could easily have ended up wasting materials.

Caleb's knee bumped against her back. “I meant no judgement. I just do not want you to lose a finger or suffer a burn. I should not worry, though. You are a professional.”

A cozy feeling nestled in Nott’s chest as it did whenever Caleb told her she was clever. It made her think of Yeza, who had also complimented her quick, dexterous fingers. ‘Hold this steady for me,’ he would say, or, ‘This requires extra precision; only the tiniest drop. Do you mind, darling?’ Yeza had made her feel smart and useful, too.

As they spoke, there was a groan from Beau, who was curled around a bedroll in the corner. She’d taken a few hard hits during a skirmish – a pair of mountain trolls with bad attitudes – and for the last few hours, Nott had mostly heard a kind of deep, nasally breathing as she slept it off. Now, though, she joined them in the land of the living. "Could you two keep it down? I'm trying to sleep here." Squinting at Caleb, she stretched out her hands and wiggled her fingers. "You, come nap with me. Somehow your boney ribcage makes a decent pillow.”

Stubbornness stitched Caleb's eyebrows together. "I’m reading, Beauregard."

“Come on. I know you’re still sore from being thrown against that tree.”

Nott had been tucked between two rocky outcroppings when she heard a familiar, foreshortened cry, followed by Caleb slamming into an elm and collapsing into a pile of broken wood and branches. A crossbow bolt had pierced the troll's eye a half-second later. Fingers beating a rhythm against his thigh, Caleb said, “Caduceus healed my injuries.”

“Just because your insides are intact doesn’t mean the outsides don’t hurt," Beau retorted. "Have pity, man. I’m exhausted.”

Nott nudged him. "You do look tired, Caleb. There are these bruised-looking pockets under your eyes, and your left lid is twitching..."

"My eyelids do not do that," Caleb said. His protest was precursory at best, however, because he scooted over to Beau and allowed her to prod him into place like an oversized pillow. "Do not drool down my neck, Beauregard."

Arms locked around his stomach, a sharp chin digging into his shoulder. Beau muttered, "Yeah, yeah.”

They dropped off almost immediately, and as the shadows lengthened and the afternoon began to cool, Nott fetched Caleb's coat and tucked it around them. Jester giggled as she leaned over the seat. “That’s nice," Caduceus said. "They could use the rest. Magical healing doesn’t restore reserves, at least not as well as good old-fashioned sleep.”

"Plus it's sweet," Jester agreed. "You know, how they like to cuddle when they're bleeding."

Yasha, who’d been walking beside the cart, chuckled. “If by 'cuddle' you mean collapse against the same wall. Which does seem to happen a lot."

“Sure, sure,” Fjord said. “It’s like our enemies take one look at their tiny, armor-less bodies and just can't help themselves.”

Nott challenged him. “I dare you to call Beau ‘tiny’ when she’s awake.”

“Not a for a sack of gold pieces. I like my teeth,” he said, and everyone had to deliberately muffle their laughter. Afterward, it was more of the open road, the sun approaching the horizon line. Nott folded away her alchemy equipment. The bottle of acid caught the fading light, and Nott rubbed her thumb over it with satisfaction. A decent batch. She shoved it into her bag.

A fortnight passed, and Nott had mostly forgotten about the bottle of acid. The road had been quiet, so quiet she'd barely had a reason to notch her bow, much less evoke the corrosive power of deadly chemicals. That all changed when, as they sat around a fire, Caduceus's ears twitched and Frumpkin sat tall on Caleb's shoulders and gave a fretful cry. The first arrow skittered against a tree, barely missing Fjord, and then the night was filled with sound.

Their attackers were goblins. Nott hissed through her teeth, blood boiling at the sight of them. They were more grey than green, not so tall or intelligent, but they were still vicious with their crude, biting weapons and flashing claws and poison-tipped arrows. One of those arrows scraped Nott's cheek, and she felt it burn – poison. After that, she fought like a barbarian, as reckless and enraged as Yasha. Goblins did that to her. The others thought it came from self-hatred, but they didn't understand. Every time she saw them, a thousand types of suffering poured through her, humiliations and indignities, the cry of her hungry child. It was too much, and it left her desperate to drive off or kill every single goblin on the face of Exandria. When one got in her face, she put her dagger into its throat and felt no compunction, no regret at all, not even when blood misted over her face.

Nott panted. The battle was ebbing. She could see their attackers retreating, their screeching voices high with fear. The forest floor was a mess of bodies in nasty leather jerkins. She kicked one, just for good measure. Then she scanned the trees. Caleb was sitting against a rock, cursing under his breath as Beau put pressure on his leg. Yasha was picking through fallen enemies, occasionally jabbing one with her sword. The two clerics weren't in sight, but Nott could hear Caduceus’s deep voice mixing with Jester's sing-songy one as they spoke to a groggy-sounding Fjord, so they were probably okay. Her shoulders drooped with relief.

Beau said, “Hey, Nott. I’m grabbing a healing potion out of your bag. Caleb’s gouged pretty bad.”

“It can wait,” Caleb protested, his voice too strained to be convincing.

"I dropped my bag by that tree," Nott answered, distracted by the goblin beyond the length of her toes. She was trying to discern its origin by the shape of its nose, the quality of the metal and bone fixtures on its clothing, but aside from recognizing her own – ugh – she’d never been very good at discerning the differences between goblin kind. Giving it up as a bad job, she knelt by the creature's quiver to take a sniff of whatever noxious substance was on the arrow tips.

Beau, meanwhile, continued to argue with Caleb behind her back. “Stop being stubborn and drink the potion.”

"If we bandage it tightly, it should be fine, Beauregard. The bleeding is already – argh, slowing."

"It’s not slowing, idiot." Beau’s barbed words weren’t enough to hide her underlying concern. "Stop squirming or you're going to make things worse. I can't believe you pulled the arrow out. Didn't anyone ever teach you about puncture wounds? The pointy end stays inside until you're ready to plug the hole."

Caleb sounded suspiciously sullen. "I did not like the way it felt."

"Well, duh. What did you expect, satin rose petals?"

"Caduceus will be done with Fjord in a moment. Healing potions are expensive, and I don't want –"

Beau's teeth could almost be heard grinding together. "Caleb. I'm going to say this once, so shut up and listen. Your scrawny wizard ass is worth more to us than a handful of gold pieces. You not sitting on the forest floor, grimacing in pain is worth more than a handful of gold pieces. So quit acting like a moron and drink the damn potion."

Her appeal was apparently enough to break through Caleb's reluctance. "Very well, Beauregard."

"Let me help. With the way your hands are shaking, you're going to drop it, and that really would be a waste."

Nott had found an unused arrow and was debating whether to lick it when a trickle of awareness made it through the fading adrenaline. A chilling thought seeped into her brain, as sudden and clear as a cry in the dark: ‘I don’t have a healing potion.’ Her hair lashed against her neck as she whipped around, just in time to see the glass edge of the bottle touch Caleb’s lips. Her hand jerked out. "Beau, don't!"

It was too late. Caleb’s throat was already bobbing.

There was a paralytic pause in which nothing happened, and then his whole body jackknifed. By the time Nott reached him, he was convulsing. She knew what was happening. The acid sizzling away at the tender lining of his mouth and throat. Getting lower, into his digestive tract, tearing him up, breaking down soft membranes where corrosive elements were never meant to go. Blood foamed on his teeth.

Nott screamed for help as he bucked in her arms, his pulse rabbiting under her fingers. A high, hoarse wail poured out of him, even though the blood, and it was like no sound Nott had ever heard, worse than pig slaughtering in the fall, worse than the scream a rat made before you snapped its neck. It was agony, crawling its way out of her boy's blistered throat, past the heat of cooking flesh, twisting into the air to meet her ears and wrench them with the suffering she’d caused.

She was barely aware when Caduceus arrived, pushing them out of the way and placing his hand on Caleb's sweat-soaked forehead. "What happened?”

“I don’t know!" Beau shouted. Her hands were shaking with emotion. "I just gave him a healing potion!”

Nott’s voice stuck, able to articulate only one word: "Acid.”

“Shit, shit, shit!" Beau wailed. "I didn’t know!”

Jester was praying frantically, hands clasped before her. Caduceus had pulled Caleb's stiff, resisting body onto his lap, one of his huge hands pressed firmly to his abdomen, the other over his neck. They were glowing, but Caleb's eyes were sealed shut, his breathing mere compulsive gasps that came farther and farther apart as Nott ticked down the seconds, just as she had that day on the back of the cart, timing the acid's effectiveness.

“Oh, Wildmother," Caduceus whispered. "Help me.”

The wagon creaked down the road, swaying from side to side. At the back, Nott sat with her legs dangling. It had rained recently, and sometimes the wheels stuck. When they came free, bits of mud flecked the bottoms of her feet. She didn't care. She wanted to lie down in that mud and let it smother her. She flexed claw-tipped fingers. Traitor hands, dexterous and clever, which had made the acid Caleb swallowed. Careless hands, which had not bothered to mark the potion bottle. She didn't deserve to be called an alchemist. Yeza had been wrong.

Behind her, on a makeshift pallet made of every blanket and bedroll they possessed, laid Caleb. His hair was a matted mess despite Jester’s care to clean him up, and there were none of the little twitching movements Nott was accustomed to seeing. He might have been a corpse were it not for the wispy breaths he was taking, each one edged with a wheezing note that set Nott’s hair on end.

'I've done what I can,' Caduceus told them. His voice had been strained, his fur damp with sweat from the exertion of drawing Caleb back from the brink. One only had to look at him to know how close it had been. ‘But I don't know how deep the damage was before I reached him, and regenerating parts of the body isn’t something I can do. He'll need time and probably more healing once Jester and I have a chance to rest. In the meantime, the best we can do is get him somewhere safe and look after him.'

Beau was curled beside the pallet in a twisted parody of the nap she and Caleb had taken on the day Nott brewed that hateful concoction. This time, the only contact she allowed herself was her hand, which was clenched around Caleb's shirt. Nott wondered if she was monitored his heart, beating uncertainly beneath her knuckles.

When they reached town, they got directions to the nearest inn, and Caduceus whispered a few words about visiting an apothecary. He turned the reins over to Jester, who took them with reluctance. It was probably Fjord who secured them a room. It was definitely Yasha who came around the back of the cart and spoke in that quiet way which carried so much weight. "Has he moved at all?"

Beau laid still, fixated on Caleb. "No."

"Caduceus said he isn't likely to wake tonight. We'll have to watch for fever. Something about infection if the acid got far enough into his intestines."

Nott’s stomach revolted. She jumped down from the cart.

Beau jerked upright. "Hey, where are you going?"

Nott felt insubstantial, the lights of the town moving before her like a minor illusion. Her fingers itched. "I have to – to go. Look after him."

“Nott, you can't just –”

But by the time Beau's voice registered, Nott had already disappeared around the corner, slipping into the gathering shadows.

There was only one moon above the horizon by the time Nott returned to the inn. The coals lay cooling in a banked and abandoned hearth as Nott slipped into their room. With clumsiness born of exhaustion, she crawled onto the bed. Caleb had been placed on his side, and Nott resisted the urge to push his bangs from his eyes, to draw the blanket closer around his shoulders, which always looked so much narrower without his layers of protective covering, his harness of books.

Instead of touching him, Nott laid out her offerings on the pillow, making a halo around his head. A brass bell, tiny sewing scissors shaped like a bird, a spool of crimson thread, fresh-smelling cloves, two sticks of beeswax, a toy soldier, and a gold ring. It had taken her hours to gather them all, and her last mark nearly caught her. She'd felt the crownsguard shift as she thrust his ring into her pocket, but she’d slipped away even as suspicion bloomed on his face. Stupid. Stupid of her. There was no magic in trinkets, no penance in gifts. But what else could she do?

"Is that where you've been? Scratching an itch?"

Nott's shoulders stiffened. She glanced backward, and there in the corner of the room was Beau. She had her arms draped over her knees, and her eyes had the heavy, hollow look of one who needed sleep but could find no rest. When Nott said nothing, she wandered over. They sat there together.

Beau asked, "Are you angry with me?”

“Yes," Nott said, because it was true. Her hands ached to scratch and claw at Beau because she was the one who’d put that poison down Caleb's throat. "But not angrier than I am with myself. Are you angry with me?”

“Yeah. I want to just – why was that damn stuff in the potion bottle, Nott?”

“I’d broken all my vials. It was...convenient.”

Beau snorted, but it wasn't the kind of snort that followed a joke. It was all bitterness, and when Nott glanced in her direction, she could see Beau's eyes shining in the moonlight. She scrubbed the back of her hand across her face. “I want to go back in time and punch myself before I pour that stuff down his throat.”

The image took hold like wildfire, lighting up Nott's brain. “I want you to go back and punch me before I put that bottle in my bag.”

Only after a long moment of contemplation did Beau bite back another humorless laugh, her lips twisting. “You know who we sound like.”

Nott gave up and let her instincts win over, tenderly stroking Caleb's bangs. “No, there’s no one like him.”

The universe apparently had an ounce of mercy, because Caleb was able to sit up the next day, albeit with glassy, haunted eyes, and listen to what had happened to him. The task had been allotted to Caduceus, who leaned in and warmed Caleb’s limp hands in an attempt to mitigate the shock. Caleb's expression didn't change during the telling, and at the end he merely nodded. Nott felt a surge of terror that this apparent mental retreat was the one he wouldn’t come back from. Then Beau moved, displacing Caduceus with a shove.

"Caleb," she said.

Her Caleb, who did so poorly with people, who was so easily overwhelmed by the intensity of other people's emotions, looked at Beau – her heavy breathing, her pale complexion – and reached out to take her hand. "Beauregard."

She clutched him like a lifeline. "I’m sorry.”

He swallowed. It seemed difficult, like his tongue was swollen, or his mouth was filled with sores. Caduceus had healed everything, but maybe Caleb still felt them. One way or another, his words seemed slow-pulled, like taffy. However, the apparent effort only made them that much weightier. "Beauregard, you are an accident waiting to happen…ah, I mean, 'accidents happen'."

Beau bowed over. This was absolution, and it was as though she couldn't decide whether to laugh or sob. Caleb patted her face with his free hand. It was awkward. So awkward that Beau let out a strangled giggle and punched him very gently on the arm. "Just stop. I don't think either of us can handle any terrible hugs right now. You're too brittle, and I feel like I haven't slept in a week."

"It's been two days," Caduceus said, helpful as always. "You really ought to lie down."

"I can sleep when I'm dead."

Caleb shook his head. He weakly flapped the blankets beside him. "Nap?"

An unusually vulnerable expression appeared on Beau's face. Uncertain, she made a fist, tapped it against her palm. But she couldn’t long resist what she truly wanted. She crawled onto the bed and collapsed onto the mattress, eyes already closed. "Just because you’re an invalid doesn’t mean you get to hog the pillow."

Nott was watching from the foot of the bed, so she saw Caleb's expression. He wasn't one to smile with his mouth, like most people did. For Caleb, it was all in the eyes. The way they scrunched and softened, or sparked with good humor. He glanced her way and started to do that almost-smile again, and her tears welled. His expression faded to alarm. "Nott?"

It was too much. She pivoted, angling for the door, but before she could dart through it and escape, a steely hand closed around her wrist. Beau glared at her. "Don't," she said.

Nott quivered. She bore her teeth into her lip, drawing blood.

“Nott,” Caleb said again.

She slipped out into the corridor and fled.

Nott and Caleb didn't talk about the acid. Caleb was wearing the ring she'd stolen when Nott came back. It sat on his middle finger, gleaming in the candlelight, and this time when he opened his arms to her, she went to them. He grunted when she constricted her arms around his waist, but held tight when she flinched and started to pull away. "Just a little tender," he said in a voice that was raspier than she remembered. She wondered if that was permeant or if it would fade in time.

She hoped it would fade.

Within a few days, he was out of bed, moving without much pain. The Nein were already talking about their next stop. It was a conversation that continued after dinner as a round of drinks went around. Nott and Caleb left them to their own devices. Upstairs, they shut the door behind them, built a warm fire, and got out Nott's alchemy kit. This time, Nott laid out the equipment carefully; the beaker, the pot, the components. Caleb also took his time, cutting narrow strips of paper with a knife he usually used to neaten his quills. They worked mostly in silence while the bones cooked down and the glue simmered.

Every once in a while, Nott would nudge Caleb's hand toward a cup of broth. Caleb gazed at the mug with distrust. All the muscles in his mouth and throat were tight and sensitive. It made simple things like eating a chore, and Caleb had not been one to relish his vittles in the first place. Which made his recovery Nott's responsibility. He would not waste away on her watch.

After an hour or so, Caleb finished the final label, then handed it to her so she could coat the back and lay it aside to dry. She nodded with satisfaction. "I made it so if we wet it, it will go sticky again. I could lick it, maybe, then press it straight onto the bottle."

"It's a useful invention. You are very clever, my friend," Caleb said.

Nott wanted to tell him that if she’d really been clever, she wouldn't have kept unmarked bottles in her bag in the first place. In the end, though, she didn't. It wouldn’t help anything. Least of all Caleb. Instead, she picked up his hand, rubbing her thumb over the ring on his finger. Wearing it was his way of telling her he knew she was sorry, that he forgave her. She pattered the back of his hand.

'Never again,' she thought, and picked up another label.

Chapter Text

At the time it happened, it was such a small pain amidst all the others, it barely registered. Not that the experience itself had been without trauma –

but Caleb had already endured far worse at the hands of his captors, would endure worse in the days to come. So what did such an insignificant wound matter?

The hoops themselves were heavy and gold. Their placement was one of the first commands his master made regarding him. Caleb had had a master before, one crueler than these gnolls –

but his new master, who was covered with fur like a dog, possessed a brutal and demanding nature his old teacher would have approved of. Racca, they called him. It was a harsh sound, like teeth gnashing together. Which was exactly what he’d done the night he claimed Caleb, snarling and snapping until foam ran down his muzzle and there were no more gnolls willing to challenge him. Caleb watched, fear clinging to his neck as the earth turned to clay with spilt blood, and when Racca turned to collect him, he was ashamed to say he cowered.

A gnoll with dark streaks in its fur hissed, “It shrinks. It shakes. Why take it, Racca? It cannot born pups, cannot bear hard labor.”

Racca was not dissuaded. His thumb traced Caleb’s cheek, eyes filled with a wrath that seemed both sourceless and insatiable. “I like its color,” Racca grunted, and that was that.

The earrings were a symbol, Caleb discovered. Both his body and the gold were trophies. The hoops had the added benefit of being convenient to yank, and in those early days when the piercings were new and sensitive, a sudden, vicious pull was almost enough to make him pass out. Nor were the earrings the only way Racca marked his slavery. Caleb’s hair had been cut, it’s comforting length shorn until it lay around his temples. His clothing had been burned in front of him (but not his coat; had he not been wearing it as he slept?) and replaced with garments less suited to travel or protection from the elements. The slightest resistance was met with claws, with teeth that tore and left him searing with fever –

and fearful of a beating.

And Racca did beat him. Once, while he was minding a pot of stew, his mind had drifted. He wasn’t aware the heat had grown too high until the meal’s greasy contents took on an acrid smell and began to smoke. Racca responded with such violence the pot had spilled over, first with fists and feet, then more deliberately, with a cane used for that purpose. Afterward, Caleb had been sure he could not move, that he would be slaughtered to replace the meat he’d spoiled. But he was wrong. Racca put him on his feet, demanded he stand and work and obey, and Caleb, who already knew that people could be pressed far beyond what they imagined possible –

found new depths to his ability to endure. He served Racca when he was too ill to see straight, on bones that felt pulverized, with his skin shredded and weeping. The alternative was worse. Another slave in the camp had not endured so well, and she had been torn apart in front of him. It was a moment he relived often in his nightmares.

Not that he slept much. The days were long. Despite not being deemed suitable for hard labor, camp work was grueling. Hauling wood, cooking, curing, milling, washing. Then, after the sun set, there were the shadowy hours of socialization as the pack postured and fought and worshiped their brutal god through paroxysms of violence and – if it were available – heavy drinking. These were the times Racca most wanted Caleb to be visible. In these times, the other gnolls were allowed to press close and breathe on his face and stroke his hair. They would slaver with their hot tongues over his skin like they were sampling his taste for a meal to come, pinch him, laugh at him.

By the time the ordeal was over, moons low in the sky, Caleb was wrung out with the press of bodies and noise, sometimes literally shaking with overstimulation, but there was no respite for him even then. He slept beside his master, with no space to draw together his shredded senses. Rarely did Caleb sleep until exhaustion stole his senses and he passed out, limp and unconscious until, scant hours later, he was awoken to start the cycle all over again.

He was not the only human in the gnoll camp, nor the only slave. There were others, though he saw them only intermittently. Still he knew because of the children. Gnoll children grew as they did everything else – violently – reaching independence at only a few years of age and, as far as he could tell, were lethal almost from the womb. Once he came across a pair of babies wrestling in the dirt, the two of them a mess of blood. Alarmed, he’d tried to intervene. For his trouble, he’d nearly lost an finger to tiny, gnashing teeth. Yet not all the gnollish children were that way. There was a boy with a half-grown, hungry look who stared at him sometimes. His eyes were blue, almond-shaped, and nearly human. That, in addition to his smaller size and the way the others degraded him, gave Caleb a clear idea of the boy’s heritage, and he was grateful, deeply grateful, that no innocent would be born of him to these brutes.

He didn’t know precisely when he gave up. Perhaps after he stole the spell component. Magic was a forgotten dream by then, locked inside his throat along with –

any words. He was too closely watched, and the stakes were too high. He was punished every time he opened his mouth, struck for every syllable, and once, notably, when he had muttered a word in Sylvan, his tongue had been laid against the cold line of a blade. Racca scrapped a line in the flesh, letting coppery blood flood his mouth. “The taste of tongue is sweet,” he said into Caleb’s ear. “Do not tempt me by wagging it.”

But, by that point, desperation had begun to seep in, and when Caleb saw the little snaggle of wire amidst the prizes brought in by a party of raiders, his caution had been overcome by recklessness. Feigning a desire to greet his master, he moved into Racca’s shadow, endured the surprised but approving rake of claws through his hair, and so put himself close to the sharing of loot. Lean pickings, it seemed, but Caleb’s eyes were pinned on the wire, twisted and useless to any but him, a means to send a message, a chance –

and before he had time to think better of it, he’d contrived to stumble onto his knees and snatched the copper wire from the dirt. For a moment, his heart hammered, certain punishment would descend at any moment. It didn’t. Not then, and not after. For hours, he floated beyond his body, transported by that most dangerous of emotions: hope. It allowed him to endure the long evening; Racca was always prideful and eager to boast after a hunt. He would grow almost manic with it at times, and Caleb was not surprised when eventually Racca tugged on his earring and told him, “Go to the tent. Wait for me.” And for once this didn’t fill Caleb with dread because the wire was pressed into his palm, coiled like a snake, and all he needed was an unobserved moment, a moment he now had.

His face was sloppy with tears as he forced himself to make slow, deliberate movements, sick with fear that the brittle metal would snap in two and take his hope with it. Yet somehow he felt the magic take. Then it was only his voice that was missing, and he fought for long, tense seconds he did not have before he was able to rasp, “Nott?”

By rights, it shouldn’t have worked. Gnolls were nomadic, and even if his friends were still searching, they wouldn’t – couldn’t be in range of the spell. Yet still he clung to the wire and reiterated his plea. “Nott.”

“C-caleb –?!”

It was more a thread of sound than an answer. He imagined her running wildly in different directions, trying to find one that tightened the cord between their petty magics, this little cantrip that meant so much to both of them. Caleb sobbed.

“Caleb, Caleb.” He could barely hear her. “Caleb, where are you? Oh, please, we’re coming, we must be so close – Caleb!”

“Nott,” he rasped. “Stream. There’s a –”

An iron grip crushed his fingers. The wire disintegrated, pieces of it embedded in his palm, but Caleb was unaware of those pinprick pains because his master was there, and Caleb had never seen him so enraged. Briefly, he wondered if death would be kind enough to take him this time, though he knew it would not. He knew that Racca was too cruel by half to let it happen, but still he closed his eyes and wished...

Racca flogged him with a horsewhip until he could not stand. Heated metal and burned his fingers until he couldn’t hold delicate things like copper wires. When Caleb woke again, the pack was leaving, moving to a place not potentially compromised by a recalcitrant slave. Caleb saw how thoroughly they’d packed their belongings and knew they weren’t simply shifting to the next valley. They were going far, too far for anyone to ever find him, and that was the moment. The moment when Caleb truly gave up.

Traveling, he found, was worse even than life in camp. At the very least, there had been a settled quality to the firepits and dueling children. Domesticity was harder to define among gnolls, but it did exist. Now they moved like wolves, eating through the miles day after day, and at times through the night, for gnolls were not limited as humans were –

in the dark.

The weak did not survive. Two slaves died during the trip and filled the bellies of others. Other causalities included a gnoll elder and the blue-eyed half-breed boy. Yet Caleb lived. Racca made sure of it. He pinched Caleb’s nose to force down teas and potions. He slapped and punched him to consciousness and doused him in a stream to bring down fever. He demanded Caleb live, by force if by no other reasonable means, and Caleb endured. But he no longer hoped.

It was with the first bud of spring that the camp finally came together with something like permanency. Cured leather tents and fire smoke and rotting meat once again filled Caleb’s nostrils. The piercings in his ears had healed completely by that point, leaving nothing but a small twinge when Racca hooked his finger through one and drew him near. He brushed tears from Caleb’s face, and spoke to him in almost a croon, as Caleb had once spoken to Frumpkin. “Don’t weep. Don’t shrink. Good, be good. Yes?”

It was here the Mighty Nein found him.

It was early morning, and the fire pits were cold. Most of the gnolls were asleep. Caleb would find out later that many never made it out of their beds. The air rent with screams. A cloying smell, thick with viscera and death, became overpowering. Caleb woke to it, pressed under his master’s heavy arm. Racca came up with a snarl, a weapon already in his hand. He grabbed Caleb and dragged him along, too.

Outside the tent flap, Caleb caught sight of a roaring figure, and his heart stuttered. Yasha turned, and he saw the rage in her eyes flare into wild recognition. “There,” she bellowed.

Racca was no fool. He raised his sword, but also his slave. Caleb struggled, but the gnoll dug his claws in, and each movement only made them burrow deeper. Racca snarled, “Halt, filth, or pierce him yourself.”

Yasha held herself back with apparent effort, saliva hissing though her teeth. She looked terrible. Her hair, usually an elegant tangle, was disheveled and neglected. Her armor was splattered with layers of mud, like one who had gone days without stopping for rest. Her gaze soaked Caleb in, and he found himself wanting to hide. If her eyes saw even a fraction of what he saw, it was too much.

But while Racca wasn’t a fool, he also wasn’t aware of who his opponents were and what they were capable of. He didn’t know how lucky he and his kin had been that night –

but those advantages were gone, and Racca didn’t know that it wasn’t merely a sword coming against him. And so when a crossbow bolt struck him at the same time two swift fists knuckled the pressure points in his back, he had no defense. Fighting through the creeping paralysis, he looked down at Caleb with an almost confused expression, his grip coiling into an embrace. “Why?” he asked, and then his knees buckled as two more cross bolts buried themselves to the fletching in his throat, and black blood ran from his eyes, and green eldritch energy raced up his spine. He fell on Caleb with the full weight of his body, and that was all Caleb knew for a long time.

When he woke, he was on horseback, and someone had their arm around him, but this arm wasn’t covered in wiry fur, wasn’t squeezing until it put pressure on his insides. Caleb touched the velvety sleeve, fascinated by it, and its owner snapped to attention. “Caleb!”

There was a clamor. “Is he awake? Really?”

“Caleb, are you with us?”

Caleb clung to the velvet sleeve like a lifeline as the fuzzy strains of reality tried to weave themselves together. A hand touched his hair, the tips of nails gently scratching his scalp, the hoop in his ear. Caleb gagged. There was too much noise, and his stomach was roiling as he fought terror –

His next waking was kinder. There was a softness beneath him, and the light filtering through the barn door was clear and distinct. It turned the straw to gold, and everything was luxuriously quiet. He looked down to the warm spot at his side and found a calico cat nestled there. It wasn’t Frumpkin. There had been no Frumpkin, not for ages, and yet the familiar shape made something in his chest loosen. He touched the cat’s ears gently with his fingers. Velvet.

The sensation jolted something free in his memory. However, he didn’t have time to work out what it meant because a shadow darkened the door, and a figure stepped in carrying a steaming mug and an extra blanket. She nearly dropped both when she saw him squinting at her. “Caleb!”

It helped that Nott was small. When she threw herself at him, she was nothing like his captors. Her sturdy weight did knock him back into the straw, but she was weeping. “I was so sure you were dead. We found so many bones, and you’re so fragile, and even though I wouldn’t let them give up, deep down, Caleb, I was so scared –”

He put his hand on her back, felt the resistance of living flesh. This wasn’t a memory, dissociation, or dream. This was real. “Nott,” he said.

Their voices had drawn attention. Faces were gathered at the doorway, though someone was shushing them: ‘Don’t crowd him. Be calm. We’re not going to overwhelm him, not again.’ Caleb peered at these faces, which were circling like globes of dancing light. These. These were…

“Caleb.”

It was Molly, kneeling beside him. When had he gotten so close? He smiled with his mouth while worried eyes made happy crescents. Wet crescents. He dashed his hand across his face. “Dammit. Sorry. It’s just, we’ve been terrified for you. It’s still hard to believe you’re here.”

Words came slow. “I am –”

“You’re safe,” Nott insisted. “This is Boulder. It’s a village in the mountains. The gnolls have been causing a lot of problems whenever they pass through, and some of villagers went with us to ambush the pack and rescue you. We’re back now, surrounded by walls and houses and even a few militiamen. We can rest.”

“Finally,” said Fjord, who had ventured inside. “It’s been, well, too long to say the least.”

Despite his talent for marking the passage of time, Caleb didn’t know how many days it had been. Too many hours had passed in a daze, or unconscious, or wandering a mental wasteland where only fear and fire existed. He felt his hands start to shake, but blue fingers enveloped them, squeezing gently. “It’s okay, Caleb,” Jester said. Her face had the dewy look of recent tears, but still she smiled. “Can you tell me how you feel? I tried to get rid of the nastiest injuries, but there was a lot of infection, and if I missed something, I can try –”

“Jester,” Molly said.

Caleb considered. His body felt tight and empty. He was thirsty, and the cottony sensation in his head was swiftly becoming a headache. But there was, for the first time in many weeks, no acute pain. The aches were all mundane, echoes or remnants. When he leaned forward, the skin on his back pulled but didn’t sear. When he flexed his fingers, they responded with the dexterity he remembered rather than the slow, sluggish movements of late. Out of curiosity, he drew a symbol in the air, and his vision shifted. He spotted the glow on Jester’s finger, the beacon that was Nott’s flask, and the burn of the red stone on Molly’s periapt, hanging against his chest. Something began to thaw inside him.

He patted Molly’s arm. “There you are,” he said. “My magic friends.”

A low, relieved laugh erupted from his companions, and they shuffled closer, creating a ring around him that felt like protection rather than suffocation. They kept touching him. It was like they couldn’t help themselves; like they, too, needed to know he was real. He didn’t stop them. Mostly because he knew, if he asked, they would.

“What’s with the earrings?”

It was Beau who asked, later. He’d eaten. Vegetable broth. Bread. The woman who gave it to him apologized that there was no meat. He didn’t express to her how much it affected him to hold warm bread, to look at a meal whose contents he didn’t question –

so he simply thanked her and made his way slowly through his meal. Bad habits reared up, and he hid some in his pockets. He had pockets. He had his coat and his components. They’d walked the world to come back him, in the hands of his friends. The bread, though. He put that in his pockets, and Beau had seen him, but she didn’t say anything about that. Instead she asked, “What’s with the earrings?”

He touched them. They were still there, of course, thick and heavy in his ear lobes.

“You look like a pirate, Cay-leb,” Jester said in an attempt at levity, which was answered with uneasy laughter. They were making light of what they didn’t understand because how else where they supposed to process what had happened to him?

Caleb attempted to respond in kind. “Ja, they are very like a pirate’s, aren’t they?” Yet even as the words passed numbly over his lips, this playful fantasy of brigands on the high seas fell away and instead –

what they had really been rattled in his brain, and before he fully understood what he was doing, he’d reached up, curled his fingers through the hoops, and yanked with all his might. Even in his weakened state, the tissue tore. He flung the earrings away from him, into the fire.

“Caleb!” Jester cried in alarm. “You’re bleeding!”

Was he? He was. It was getting on his coat. Likewise, his ears burned, but this was not the burn of before, the one others had put there for him. This, he had done himself.

Jester was fussing. She had a handkerchief with a lacey edge and was tilting his face for a better look. “Oh, Caleb,” she said. “They’re torn all to pieces. Why did you do that? We could have gotten them out.”

He didn’t know if he had words to explain, but thankfully he didn’t have to. “Leave him alone,” Yasha said. “He did what he had to.”

Caleb wanted to thank her. It was just that his throat was so thick right now. He blinked instead, and Yasha inclined her head in acknowledgement. It was a relief. Why was it so hard to be understood by other people? Yasha always understood.

Molly put a hand on his shoulder, pressing down with a grounding weight. “We’re glad your back, Mister Caleb. I’m so sorry that – that it took so –”

“It’s alright,” Caleb interrupted. For too many nights, he’d dreamed of everything that went wrong. He was done with that now. “You came.”

“We never stopped looking,” Nott told him. “Never.”

“Though we were starting to lose hope when we got your message,” Fjord admitted. “Don’t know rightly how. We were well out of range of that spell.”

Nott nestled her hand in his, letting him answer. “Mages have been studying the boundaries of magic for centuries and have never found them. Perhaps, in that moment, will and need were enough to press into the territory of something new.”

“Or maybe the Traveler was there,” Jester said. “He teaches me new things all the time. Are you a cleric now, Caleb? Because, you know, I’m already the party’s healer, and while I wouldn’t mind more worshipers for the Traveler, I don’t think –”

“I am not a cleric,” Caleb said.

Jester sighed. “Oh, good. Not that it wouldn’t, technically, be really cool, having another cleric.”

“I think we’re all glad to have our wizard back,” Molly said, and for a moment the strain on all their faces could not be hidden. It was born of hours on borrowed horses, nights of screaming at each other, of breaking down only to come together again, and false leads, and the way they found him now, with blood on his neck.

“Thank you for bringing me my coat,” he told them.

Nott’s arms wrapped around him. Too tight. But she was still small. It was okay for her to do that. He patted her back.

“My brave friends,” he murmured.

And they were. They’d saved him, and now he could get up in the morning and put on new clothes. And they would go down long roads together looking for work, and they would camp around fires with a watch that was very, very careful, and if something attacked them they would kill those things. And in a month’s time, this hardship would fade into the background of other hardships, and Caleb would not be so quiet and abstracted anymore, and things would return to normal.

But sometimes, in idle moments –

Caleb would find himself touching his ears, tracing the scars.

Chapter Text

As he pressed his trembling hand to Caleb’s fever-hot belly, Caduceus had one thought: This is wrong. He wasn’t supposed to take things apart; he was supposed to keep them together.

Beneath the pads of his fingers, he could feel the first pellet, not an inch deep. However, the signs left by the cartridge of smoke and metal discharged into Caleb’s stomach – once ragged holes, now patches of pale skin – were still visible, and he knew there were many more. By his unsteady count, there might be as many as fifty. Fifty metal balls that had chewed through his friend and were now sealed inside him, shifting around where they did not belong.

And yet, he wasn’t the right person to do this. The only blades Caduceus regularly handled were for pruning plants and slicing vegetables. But if not him, who? Jester was racked with guilt and in no state for an operation. Beau had no experience with either knifework or medicine, and while Nott was deft with a dagger, asking her to use one on Caleb would be cruel. As for Fjord…there was an expression he wore when looking at Caleb’s abdomen, something dark and ready. It reminded Caduceus of Dashilla’s lair, how plumes of blood had filled the water, and of Fjord’s hectic eyes as he stood among it, gripping Caleb’s hand. The idea of him peeling back skin and pressing his fingers into soft tissue made Caduceus uncomfortable for reasons he couldn’t explain.

Which just left him, three days too late.

Because it had been three full days since their disastrous encounter with the soldiers, the ones who carried those strange gunpowder weapons which held such shocking and destructive power. Three days since Jester closed the wounds over, not understanding that – like a porcupine’s quills – the greater danger lay in what remained behind. Three days of Caleb walking around with a look of abstraction, taking slower strides, eating little, talking less, and holding himself in an awkward, hunched position that should have had their instincts screaming with alarm.

Caduceus had assumed it was residual stiffness. He’d offered a massage to develop pliancy in the new tissue, but Caleb had turned him down. “It’s sore,” he’d admitted, “and strange-looking still.” He almost sounded embarrassed, as though feeling tender and self-conscious after a healing of that magnitude was something to be embarrassed about.

Caduceus was quick to reassure. “Of course. It’s your decision.”

Now he wished he’d insisted. If he’d put hands on Caleb even once before today, he’d have felt the malignancy. As it was, he’d been oblivious until only hours ago, when, as they stopped to make evening camp, Caleb dismounted from the wagon and began to sway. “Mister Caleb? Is everything alright?”

There was a sheen over Caleb’s forehead. His hand fluttered, touching his stomach. “Caduceus. There is...something here. I don’t like it. Can you...”

His knees buckled before he could finish explaining, and only Caduceus’s proximity kept him from collapsing. He pulled the man’s tunic from his belt and up over his hip bones, expecting to see bruising from falling off one of the horses or perhaps some sort of rash. Instead he found Caleb’s belly rigid and swollen, and, forking out like the branches of an tree, vivid red streaking.

When Beau saw, her eyes widened with bleak understanding. “Blood poisoning?”

“I can heal him,” Caduceus insisted.

Which was how he found himself with a fallen tree as an impromptu operating table, searching for the courage to make the first cut. Beneath him, Caleb moaned. His hairline was already sweat-soaked, his eyelids so bleached of color they appeared translucent. They’d attempted to mute the inevitable pain with alcohol, but he remained pathetically, acutely awake.

“You’ll have to hold him,” Caduceus said. “He’ll fight you, but you can’t let go. This will be hard enough without him moving.”

Jaw flexing, Beau positioned herself near Caleb’s head while Yasha braced his hips. Some way off, Jester was with Nott, who was likely to need some restraining of her own. Overhead, the driftglobe hovered. Fjord had attempted to activate the Daylight spell, but he wasn’t using the command word right, and a dim light was the best he could do.

Beau wet her lips. “Ready?”

Caduceus had never been less ready in his life. He murmured the words for Calm Emotions and felt his nerves settle into a quivering knot. Then he palpitated Caleb’s abdomen, placed the knife edge, and breathed. “I’m going to start now,” he murmured.

The blade punched through like a fingernail into overripe fruit, with a kind of force and suddenness that surprised Caduceus. Blood spilled out, and Caleb jerked, a breathy sound in his mouth. “Wa –”

“Stay still, Caleb,” Beau said though gritted teeth.

As the knife carved deeper, Caleb began writhing in earnest. Caduceus forced himself to focus on the closed wound tracks. If he couldn’t find them, if they’d healed too completely, they risked having to take Caleb apart. But if the scars were still there, if they could trace them back to their source... Just as he began to feel desperate, a knot of tissue, like a tangled vine, came under his knife. Caleb jerked so hard he caught Beau in the mouth with his elbow.

Yasha asked, “Alright?”

Beau turned her head, spat, but kept her grip. “Fine. Cad?”

Caduceus took a shaky breath. “Don’t let go, no matter what happens.”

With a squelch that tore a sharp, desperate sound from Caleb’s throat, Caduceus sunk his fingers into an abscess, and one blunt nail touched a perfectly smooth, metallic object. “Found one,” he grunted, scissoring his fingers. They slipped. He pressed down, working in the wound until his fur turned stiff with blood. It ran into the waistline of Caleb’s pants, soaked into the wood. Finally, a million moments later, the bit of lead scrapped free from the screaming wound – screaming like his friend was screaming. Caduceus dropped the pellet onto the ground, where it left a stamp of crimson. Caleb sobbed.

Caduceus was breathing like he’d been running for miles. His back was achy, his eyes tight and close to tears. He swallowed thickly. “That was one.”

“Oh, gods,” Beau said like she was fighting not to throw up.

“Get him something to bite on,” Yasha said. “None of us are going to make it through at this rate.”

It took hours.

With agonizing slowness, the pile of pellets grew. Caduceus was near the end of his strength by the time his probing yielded no more. Needing to be certain, he cast the spell he’d held for exactly that moment – Locate Object – and confirmed his desperate hope. They were done. Forty-two iron pellets. Forty-two fragments of death and misery. But they’d gotten them out, and Caleb was alive. Stark-white, quivering with agony, but alive.

“Is that it?” Beau asked.

“I need a moment,” Yasha said. She was already moving off into the trees.

Caduceus made no move to stop her. “I’m going to heal him now.”

It was the most thorough healing of his life. At long last, he was able to take the ploughed up flesh, raw and red-ribboned, and knit it back together. Afterward he slumped, and only Fjord’s steadying hand kept him upright. “You okay?”

Weariness made Caduceus’ words come slow. “He’s not out of danger. I can’t restore blood loss. He’ll need fluids and warmth to help with the shock.”

“We can do that,” said Jester. Nott had already moved past her and was stroking Caleb’s face. “He looks...”

“He’s going to live,” Caduceus said. He knew it was foolhardy to sound so certain; after all, death sometimes came no matter how hard anyone fought.

“We’ll take care of him,” Jester repeated, matching him for stubbornness. “He’ll be just fine.”

Caduceus asked, “Where’s Beau?” Yet, even as he spoke, he heard the not-so-distant sound of fists, grunts, and angry sounds.

“Blowing off some steam,” Fjord said. “What about you, ‘Deucey? We’ve got things here, if you need to clean up or…something.”

“That would be nice,” Caduceus said.

He walked to a nearby stream. Alone there, he knelt, scrubbing his forearms until he could no longer feel them. Afterward, he leaned against a tree. A flood of emotion poured over him, setting his heart hammering. What had he done? Though the blood was gone from his skin and fur, he could still detect drops of it on his clothes, feel it under his fingernails. He pressed a hand over his mouth, waiting out a wave of nausea. “You did what you had to,” he murmured. “You preserved life.”

And he had. He did. But in that moment, he felt more like a butcher than a healer.

Caleb slept for twelve hours, and when he woke, his eyes were ringed white. For an entire day, he remained non-verbal, curled up in the bed of the wagon. Nott was the only one able to creep up beside him – to ply him with dribbles of tea, to press small bits of bread into his mouth, and to sooth the panic that rose and ebbed. “He’s been tearing at his arms,” she told Caduceus after one of these episodes. “I think he’s remembering that bastard Ikithon.”

“Try this,” Caduceus suggested, giving Nott a tiny ampule. “It’s an oil made with peppermint. Our sense of smell is closely tied to our memories. If you rub it on his skin, maybe it will bring him to a kinder place.”

Nott did as he suggested, and the very next morning, Caleb surprised them all by getting up, putting on his layers and layers of clothing, and easing himself down from the wagon to join them for breakfast. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning, Mister Caleb,” Caduceus spoke quickly, before anyone could make a scene. Everyone dealt with trauma differently, and if Caleb preferred denial, it was best not to poke the stitches while they were still fresh. He handed Nott a bowl, gratified when Caleb took it from her hands without protest. “It’s porridge with nutmeg.”

Caleb sniffed with interest. “My mother would make something like this for Winter’s Crest.”

“Porridge?” Jester blurted. “For Winter’s Crest?”

Caleb’s response was a wistful almost-smile. “A simple dish, perhaps, but we did not have much, and the cinnamon and nutmeg were exotic treats.”

“At the orphanage,” Fjord volunteered, “we were given these crackers for Winter’s Crest that popped when you twisted them. They had a toy inside. A tiny carved horse, or a marble, or a button on a string.”

Nott perked up. “A button? What for?”

“It was a game, see? You hold the end of the string, and if you flick it just right, the button will land in your fingers.”

“I know that game,” said Beau. “The lady who did our laundry taught me. She, uh, watched me sometimes, when I was between minders.”

“Xhorhas as a similar pastime,” Yasha said. “Only you play it with a dagger.”

Beau snorted. “No way that’s a real thing.”

Sweetly, Jester sing-songed, “Ya-sha are you pulling our leg?”

The big woman’s smile was an even rarer expression than Caleb’s. “Maybe.”

The flow of conversation turned to remembrances, some warmed by time, others bittersweet. Caleb, while not an active participant, appeared to be listening and engaged. Then Caduceus noticed his hand had drifted to his midsection. It was probably nothing, but the last time they assumed, things hadn’t gone well. Caduceus leaned closer to speak into Caleb’s ear.

“Mister Caleb, are you still sore?” he asked, and as he spoke – not for any reason, but just to show in this small, silent way that he cared – he placed his hand on the man’s shoulder.

Caleb flinched so hard he almost dropped his bowl.

The spoon did fumble. “Oh. I am so clumsy,” Caleb said, standing with haste. “I’m sure I have another in my pack. One moment.”

He was gone before Caduceus had a chance to understand what happened. When he did, coldness spread through him. ‘It was instinct,’ he told himself. ‘Just the body remembering.’ Yet when Caleb came back with another spoon, Caduceus couldn’t help but notice he found reason to remove himself to the other side of the encampment, out of Caduceus’s reach.

Over the next several days, an unwelcome pattern settled in. Touch became a barrier, and that was something Caduceus wasn't familiar with. He’d always touched freely, both among his family and the Nein; for him, it was a way to calm and comfort, to warn and play. It was nothing for him to lean into Jester as they rode side-by-side on the cart, or press his thumbs into Fjord’s neck when he grew tense, or pick leaf litter out of Yasha’s hair. Despite his solitary nature, Caleb had never been an exception.

Yet now whenever Caduceus approached, Caleb shied away. ‘Be patient,’ he told himself. After all that had happened, some jumpiness was to be expected.

Then one night as he made his way down a tavern hallway, he overheard Nott speaking his name. “Why didn’t you ask Caduceus to heal it? I know he has some spells left.”

Caduceus paused outside the door. Had he missed something? Since their encounter with the firearms, he’d been so careful. In fact, he was sure he’d asked Caleb if he was well after their most recent skirmish and had gotten a short, affirmative nod. That had not been the entire truth, it seemed.

“It’s just a small sprain. Nothing worth bothering him about. If it’s still hurting in the morning, I will ask Jester.”

“Caleb...”

“Truly, it’s fine. See? I can rotate it – ugh, fully.”

“It looks nasty and purple. Why would you keep it like that if it could be fixed?”

In the silence that followed, Caduceus leaned closer. “I just,” said Caleb. “I would rather go to bed. My stomach is upset.”

“Still?”

“It’s only a bit of nausea. Perhaps I’m coming down with something.”

“For a week?”

There was a sigh. “Will you not let it go, my friend?”

“I’m worried. You’re not eating right, and you’ve been so quiet. I can tell when you’re anxious.”

“I’m always anxious.”

“More anxious. Maybe Caduceus could make you tea. Or give you a massage. I watched him give Beau one just last week, and it really seemed to –”

“Nott!”

The answer, spoken more sharply than Caleb was won’t to speak, especially to his goblin friend, split the conversation in two. For a moment, there was breathy quiet, heavy hanging and hurt. Then Caleb spoke again, smaller this time.

“I am – I am sorry, Nott. Truly. I’ll ask Mister Clay to heal my wrist in the morning.”

“Promise?”

Caduceus pulled himself away, making a slow trek to his room. He’d been aware things weren’t right between Caleb and himself, but he hadn’t known it extended to avoiding wound-care. His distress chased him into his dreams, in which figures fled before him, and when he finally cornered one, it turned out to be Caleb, who wailed like he had that night before disintegrating into a pile of lead pellets. Caduceus woke up sweat soaked, his fur matted and sticking to his bedsheets.

He hoped Caleb would come to him for the promised healing so he could pull the man aside for a quiet word, but before he even made it to breakfast, Beau stuck her head in the door, full of energy, and told him and Fjord about a message she’d gotten from her mentor. If they wanted it, there was a job waiting. She kept them talking for another fifteen minutes, and by the time Caduceus got downstairs, he found Jester already tucked into the table beside Caleb, looking with disapprobation at his swollen wrist.

“Oh, Caleb. That was stupid. Look at how much worse it is now.”

“It is nothing you cannot fix,” Caleb said. “You are a very talented healer.”

“Well, I am the best. No offense, ‘Deuces.”

“None taken,” he said, squeezing into the bench. He watched as Jester rubbed her fingers gently over Caleb’s arm – bare now without his customary bandages – so that the coolness of her healing energy made the bruises fade and the inflammation reduce.

When she was done, her eyes narrowed. “Cay-leb, that was broken.”

The man shushed her, his eyes darting across the room to where Nott was returning with another plate of bacon. “Not so loud, please.”

“It will ache now,” Caduceus said regretfully, only to watch Caleb’s pulse jump in his neck. Was even his voice a catalyst for anxiety?

Beau chose that moment to reappear, thumping her hands on the table. “Hey, losers. Time to hit the road. We’ve got a full day’s travel to reach the rendezvous, and daylight’s a’wasting.”

It effectively cut their conversation short, and Caduceus could do nothing but make his way out of the common room with the others, ears drooping an and unsettled feeling twisting in his stomach.

Things escalated.

On the surface of things, Caleb had recovered completely. He walked without impediment, there were no more fevers, and if there was any residual pain, he kept it to himself. There was evidence, however, that a subtler malignance lingered, something beyond the physical. Meals, for example, became an issue.

Caduceus was the proprietor of most of the Nein’s meals, especially on the road. He took great pleasure in collecting, preparing, and serving food. It was almost a religious experience; a time when people came together to be nourished in body and spirit. Which is why it disheartened him when, more and more often, Caleb failed to join them. This was especially concerning because Caleb didn’t have any extra weight to lose, and it didn’t take long before his cheekbones were knife-sharp and his eyes became set in deep, tired pockets.

“Is he sleeping?”

He kept his voice pitched low, but Nott appeared to hear him just fine. “He’s having a hard time falling asleep,” she said. “Too jittery, even with the silver thread. All the little noises. If we’re at an inn, he gets up and paces.”

Caduceus’s frowned. “Is it normal for him?”

“He hasn’t been this paranoid in a long time. But it will get better, right? As time passes?”

This was Caduceus’s hope, but it was a belief that was stretched thin, especially under the strain of his own exhaustion. Because if Caduceus was being honest, he wasn’t doing so well himself. He dreamed often, and those dreams were full of fear. It fed his insecurities, building them until they sat like a choking mass at the back of his throat. Even waking, these feelings sometimes intruded.

One lazy afternoon, Caduceus was shelling peas. He was looking forward to using the tavern’s kitchen to prepare something nice, maybe even something that would entice Caleb into taking more than a few mouthfuls. Thinking of Caleb brought his work to a slow halt. A shadow fell across him as the sun passed behind a cloud, and the peas suddenly seemed cold and hard as he pressed them from their pods. Under his fingers, they became an eerie echo, like pellets.

Stomach churning, he set the bowl aside.

The next time also revolved around food preparation. He was handing the knife with care as he sliced. Eggplant was a special treat, and he wanted the vibrant color to be visible on each slice. Footsteps coming around the corner drew his attention, and he raised his chin to welcome Jester back from her errand. “Hey, did they have any garlic –”

A dish fell, shattering on the floor. Caleb stood stock still. “Oh,” he said, clearly mortified. “I apologize. My elbow must have… I will replace it, Mister Clay. I am very –”

“It’s fine,” Caduceus said. The bowl had been purchased from a local market, and he had been fond of it, but it wasn’t a treasure. “Are you hurt?” He stepped forward, hand extended.

Caleb stepped back, directly onto the shards of pottery. His voice peaked with heightened emotion. “No, no. I am. I am fine. I was just looking for Jester, and Fjord told me she was in here. I will, I will find a broom.”

“Mister Caleb,” Caduceus said, a touch desperately, but it was too late. The man had already fled.

A sigh escaped, like liquid out of a wine sack. Caduceus picked up the knife again, but his mind was preoccupied with the stark white of Caleb’s cheeks, his stuttering speech. Was he imagining the rough bark under his back? Could he feel the blood running down, clumping and clotting? Did he feel the knife, punching through the skin, cutting…

“Caduceus!”

Jester came running up to his side, the remains of the bowl crackling under her heels. She drew his hand into her own, and Caduceus realized with a slow blink that he was bleeding. A fairly deep gash, into the meat between his thumb and his palm. It throbbed sharply. He wondered, “How did that happen?”

“Oh, Caduceus,” Jester repeated, sadly this time. Her magic washed over him, and the cut sealed with barely more than a thin line and a tuft of blood-smeared fur. Somehow, though, his hand – though fully healed – was shaking. He glanced at the cutting board. “Would you mind finishing?”

Jester took the knife.

It came to a head in the aftermath of their next battle. There’d been a few dicey moments, especially when the marauder raised his voice, filling the forest with a cloud of stinking gas. By the time they delivered the final blow, Caduceus didn’t have a visual on all of his friends. “Anyone down?”

Tired and somewhat rasping voices answered. He counted accents: one, two, three, four, five. One was missing. A quiet, northern accent that reminded Caduceus of thick, Zemnian forests and fields upon fields of wheat. Caleb.

The last place he’d seen the man was near a lightning-stuck oak. Rounding the trunk, he found Caleb wedged between the roots, conscious but wheezing. It also seemed he’d taken a slashing wound, the evidence of which was painted over the front of his tunic. Caduceus mouthed an incantation, but when he made contact, Caleb threw up his arms.

“Stay back!” he snapped.

Caduceus withdrew, stricken. His spell fizzled, falling away without a willing target. His mouth fumbled around a response. “I’m sorry, I –”

“Cay-leb!”

A blue blur streaked past him. Jester’s hands fluttered over the injured wizard. “Oh, oh. Caleb, why do you keep doing this? Don’t you know how upset it makes us when you get squished?”

Caduceus saw the way Caleb’s eyes flickered over her shoulder, settling on him before darting away. “I am not a fan of it myself. But somehow –”

“Somehow,” Jester agreed. The symbol of the traveler jingled, and healing energy suffused her hands, which – Caduceus could not help but notice – Caleb did not flinch from. In only a moment, his breathing grew less labored, the grip on the front of his coat less urgent, as though more than just the lapels of his jacket were holding his insides together.

He let out a gusty breath. “Thank you.”

Jester, who had scars of her own from their encounter with the firearms, hovered a bit longer; pressing her palm to his forehead, checking his teeth, asking him to inhale deeply. He humored her in all these things, resisting nothing. Caduceus hovered, too, unable to detach himself. Finally, when he could no longer bare the way Caleb kept his eyes averted, Caduceus turned and forced himself to walk away.

Caduceus left the group that evening. If he knew his friends (and he did), the next several hours would be filled with drinking and outrageous stories crafted from real feelings and tissue-paper lies. There might even be dancing if that bard tuning her fiddle in the corner decided to strike up a tune. Tonight, though, Caduceus longed for solitude; to meditate, pray, and process the abiding unhappiness building up inside him.

His feet lead him to a public garden. It had a neglected, overgrown look, thatched with ivy and crowded with dandelions. Perfect, really. He settled himself under a weathered arbor. A vine hung down, tickling his nose, and he brushed it gently to one side. His mind had just begun to drift toward the Wildmother when the sound of footfalls interrupted. He cracked open one eye.

“Ah,” said Caleb. “I always forget how good your senses are. Forgive me if I’m intruding.”

“No.” The words almost jammed in their eagerness to leave Caduceus’s mouth, not wanting the opportunity for a private conversation to slip between his fingers. “You’re always welcome, Mister Caleb. I’m just surprised to see you.”

Caleb inched closer. His movements were regular and deliberate to the untrained eye, but Caduceus saw the way his foot caught on a stone, the way he kept his hands tucked into his armpits. Caleb sunk into a crossed-legged posture. It was the closest they’d been in days, and the effort diffused the air with tension. Caduceus waited while Caleb plucked a loose string. Eventually, he said, “I owe you an apology.”

Caduceus was caught off guard. “I don’t understand. I was the one who –” The words stuck as his throat thickened, and he swallowed around his guilt.

Caleb shook his head. “This is what I mean. There has been a misunderstanding, and it is my fault.”

“I don’t know that ‘fault’ has anything to do with it,” Caduceus admitted. “What happened that night, it was a lot.”

For a moment, the webs of those agonizing minutes entangled them both. Caduceus felt the blood-heat on his hands, knew that Caleb felt it, too. They breathed together, waiting for it to pass. Then Caleb wiped his mouth and said, “That is true, but you are a good person, Caduceus. You do not deserve my...hesitation.”

“It’s understandable. I hurt you.”

Caleb disagreed. “If you had not taken decisive action, I would be dead. It’s just that my body, or perhaps my mind…there are fractures. Weakness. I should control it, I know that, but when I get close…” He held out his shaking hands.

Caduceus longed to reach out, but held himself back by inches. “It’s not weakness,” he said. “What you went through, it was beyond endurance. No one is judging you for being affected.”

“When I think of that night,” Caleb admitted, “some things seem so clear – the pain, this horrible sensation of raking nails – but others are distorted. When Nott is close by, I feel nothing, but when your shadow falls over my face, or when your hands come near me…”

“I get it,” said Caduceus, though it brought him no pleasure. “It creeps up on me sometimes, too.” Like when he slept, or when Caleb flinched.

Caleb muttered, “What a mess.”

“Yeah,” Caduceus agreed.

“Well, it’s no good, this thing between us.”

“No?” Caduceus’s ears perked up, hopeful. He was always so quick to hope.

“You are our healer,” Caleb said. “I cannot be forever shying away from you like a skittish colt. I’m just not sure how to proceed.”

Something sparked in Caduceus’s memory. “I might have a suggestion, if you’re willing. It’s something my dad taught me. I used to be frightened of bees.”

Eyebrows raised. “I’m surprised. Jester told me the story of your adventure on Bisaft Isle. I took it that you were quite expert with the insects, as you are with your beetles.”

“Well,” Caduceus drawled, “a bee is not a beetle, but I take your point. The thing is, I wasn’t always so calm around them. When I was a little thing, I got stung by a bee. More out of surprise than anything, I fell out of the tree I was climbing and broke my arm. After that, whenever I heard buzzing, my instincts went haywire. Then one day, my dad led me to a hive in the woods. I was afraid, of course, but he told me that, to overcome my fear, I needed to get to know the bees again.”

As he always was when knowledge was up for grabs, Caleb was intent. “And did you?”

“Oh, yeah,” Caduceus said, smiling. “First just standing nearby and listening to the sound of them. Then getting closer, inch by inch, watching them fly around. Eventually one stung me, and that was the real turning point.”

“Oh?”

“It hurt, but not like I remembered. The situation had amplified everything, you see: the sting, the fall, the broken bone. But bees and just bees. When I got stung again, I realized it wasn’t so bad. I rubbed a little mud on it, I think. And, after that, I wasn’t scared anymore.”

Caleb appeared to turn this over in his mind; brow creased, lips compressed, fingers fluttering. “You are suggesting we do this,” he said finally. “That we wear down my fear?”

Caduceus lifted a shoulder, let it fall. A phantom brush with a perfectly round ball made him press his nails into his palm until he felt a dull pain. “I don’t know. What happened, it’s not the same as the bees.”

“No, but,” Caleb said. He let out a shuddering sigh. “Let’s try it.”

Eager now that they had a course of action in mind, Caduceus wiggled closer. One of his knees bumped Caleb’s. “How should we start?”

Caleb vacillated. His hands went to his arms, vulnerable targets of much restless scratching. “I am not,” he managed before his words were choked into silence.

‘Help him,’ Caduceus thought. He didn’t entirely know the way forward, but this felt right, and if Caleb needed him to lead the way, he would.

He held out his hands, palm up. “Why don’t you just hold my hands.”

Vulnerability streaked through his friend’s expression, but it was soon overtaken by determination. Though still racked by tremors, he lifted his hands from his lap. Their fingers wove together. Caduceus smiled. “Okay?”

Caleb breathed out. “Okay.”

Alongside his own, Caleb’s hands were dwarfed, almost child-sized, though, of course, they were longer and thinner than any firbolg child’s would be. They were unusual hands, calloused and so dark at the fingertips they appeared black. The backs, in contrast, where smooth; furless of course, and freckled. This close, the freckles stood out like a constellation, as did the many tiny scars from decades of reckless living. He was missing three fingernails. What was the story behind those? Moved by tenderness, Caduceus pressed his thumbs into Caleb’s palms.

It was a apparently too much. Before he properly knew what happened, Caleb was on his feet.

Caduceus’s eyebrows flew up. “Are you alright?”

Caleb was holding onto his coat for dear life, but though he was visibly ill at ease, he wasn’t panicking. His breathing was steady, and though he kept his eyes averted, they weren’t wild. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. It just became...”

“I understand,” Caduceus said.

“I must go.” Caleb inched backward a few more feet, but before the evening could wrap him up in dark wings, he turned around and faced Caduceus. “This – this was good.”

As he watched the man disappear, probably to hole himself up with a book until the worst of his anxiety faded, Caduceus considered their attempt at mending. It wasn’t much, he decided. But it was a beginning, and beginnings mattered.

They started small, with deliberate and measured contact. At first, Caleb could only endure these sessions for a matter of minutes, but the time lengthened once Caduceus realized it was easier if he didn’t engage Caleb in conversation. Instead, he took to closing his eyes and cycling through all the types of fungus he knew.

They started preparing dinner together. Caleb was meticulous, mincing, slicing, and cubing with the same single-minded focus he devoted to his other pursuits. Sometimes, on bad days, he would sit with a table or stove or an entire room between them. But he was still present, still near enough to matter.

Traveling came next. Caleb usually preferred the bed of the cart where he could sit and read. This time, though, he climbed onto the driver’s seat. Caduceus’s hands stilled on the reigns, but he made no comment except to cluck at the horses. Tension was high, and Caduceus could feel the rest of the party staring. Caleb’s shoulders hunched higher and higher, until finally Caduceus said, “You know, I’ve been wondering – which is better, do you suppose? Magic? Or physical types of fighting?”

As he’d hoped, his innocuous comment sparked a debate. Beau was staunchly on the physical side, of course. Jester was on the other, and Nott played mediator – until Fjord said something disparaging about the unreliability of mechanical weaponry. After that, she started waving around her crossbow, and things grew heated.

Attention thoroughly averted, Caleb relaxed. His shoulder bumped against Caduceus. “Thank you,” he murmured.

Caduceus smiled. “No problem.”

Like coins in a bucket, such moments accumulated. A group bathing session in a stream with Caleb hiding behind Caduceus to avoid a splashing contest. Caleb untangling the snarls in Caduceus’s hair after he got caught in a monstrous spider’s web. Finally, and most happily for Caduceus, the night when Caleb – thoroughly tapped and utterly exhausted – had fallen asleep at his back in their magical bubble. There were still moments when Caleb’s nerves got the better of him, and he still seemed to gravitate toward Jester to care for his injuries, but Caduceus tried not to mind that. He knew it was important, not just to Caleb, but also to Jester, who still blamed herself for how wrong her healing had gone.

Then one night, Caduceus overheard Jester weeping. When he went to check, he found her clinging to Caleb’s neck while he patted her back. “It’s okay, schatz,” Caduceus heard him say.

The scene tended a hurt festering in Caduceus. It gave him hope that he, too, might mend things with Caleb in time. Even so, he was still surprised to hear a soft cough at the entrance to his tent. Outside, he found Caleb, fidgeting on the balls of bare feet. “Do you – have a moment?”

Caduceus moved aside, making space amidst his pack, bedroll, a pot of steeping tea, a tiny patch of fungi he’d grown while he prayed, and a half-patched shirt with the needle still in. Caleb looked around the cluttered interior and chuffed in a way that was charmingly close to a laugh. “It shouldn’t surprise me,” he said, “that you make home wherever you are.”

Caduceus chuckled. “It’s hard to defy your nature, I suppose. And it does feel comfier.”

“Before the Nein, I rarely even took off my coat at night,” Caleb said with some melancholy. “Everything always seemed so impermanent.”

“Maybe so, but imagine if we never planted anything because it’s impermanent.”

Caleb stared at him long enough that Caduceus started to wonder if he’d offended. Before he could decide whether or not to apologize, Caleb cleared his throat and admitted, “I was burned during the scuffle today. I didn’t tell anyone. I wanted to wait until we had more time.”

“More time?”

“For you to heal it.”

Oh. Oh! “Of course! Absolutely. Where were you hurt?”

Caleb gestured to the thin shirt he was wearing. “Ribs.” And at Caduceus’s look of disapprobation, “It’s not serious. I am familiar with burns. It does hurt, however.”

No doubt it did. Burns were sinister wounds, often superficial at a glance but penetrating, hard to keep clean, and acutely painful. “Let me take a look, then.”

Caduceus hissed when he saw the blistered wounds. He didn’t know what Caleb considered ’serious’, but these were not minor. He couldn’t smell infection yet, but there was already a great deal of yellow fluid, and left untended, it was only a matter of time. His fingertips itched with repressed magic.

“May I touch you?”

Caleb hitched his shirt higher. “Yes.”

Caduceus pressed the edges of the wound. He could feel the tendrils of pain, the trauma in the tissue, and the building heat as Caleb’s body rallied to fight the bacteria which had no doubt found a foothold in the weeping wound. “I’m going to start now.”

He knew from experience that his healing felt cool, like loam after you broke ground to ready it for spring planting. A smell like soil and rain filled his nostrils, and Caduceus wondered if Caleb could smell it too. The green glow rippled over Caleb’s side, repairing and restoring. Then it was done. He pulled away with a grunt of satisfaction.

“How does that feel?”

Caleb stretches his torso, bent, moved. “Much better, I think.”

“And…the rest?”

Because it was Caleb, he had to think about it. Caduceus watched, warm with fondness. Even more so when he offered Caduceus a smile, small but unquestionably there. “Good.”

“Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for.”

“And you, Herr Clay?”

The question surprised him. “Me?”

Caleb’s deep-set eyes, intuitive in their own right, bore into Caduceus. “Are you recovering?”

Caduceus thought of cold metal pellets. Of the way it had torn his spirit to wield that knife. Yet though he could recall each moment with clarity, the immediacy of his distress had faded. “I think I’ll be okay now,” he decided. “It’s good, not being alone, isn’t it?”

Caleb reached for his hand. “Yes.”

Chapter Text

"Caleb."

The pads of his fingers were resting, feather-light, against Nott's throat. Her pulse was fluttering, nothing like the quick, steady beat he felt on nights she slept curled against his hip. It troubled him on more than one level. Nott’s vitality had always been reliable. Her tough goblin body held up where his own – meager and human and stretched by years of deprivation – did not. He’d always been the one coughing into his hands on winter nights, whose injuries grew puffy with infection, whose stomach revolted over moldering bread or unripe berries. Yet here he was, crouched beside his friend, who was scarcely breathing. And not her alone. The others, just as ill. He touched Jester’s hand.

"Caleb," Fjord said, more forcefully this time.

Fjord was dripping onto the mossy grotto floor. Ancient trees pressed around him, blocking out natural light, but the shadows didn’t hide the anxiety on his face. After the Iron Shepherds, they’d vowed not to let their people be stolen again, and yet this sickness couldn’t be fought with fire, eldritch energy, or a sword. Not even a divine sword like the one rising over Yasha’s shoulder.

The druid crone, the one they’d come to find, tsked. “Gets lost in his own head, does he?”

“He’s fine,” Fjord snapped. However, his heat dissipated just as swiftly. They needed this woman, and he dared not provoke her. “Apologies. It’s just…been a long journey.”

It had indeed been long. From despair to despair – healers who could not heal this thing determined to pry their friends from the shell of their weakened bodies, temples who offered hope, only to dash it with wagging heads and puzzled expressions – until they heard the rumor of a druid woman sequestered in the mountains, one knowledgeable in powders and medicines, who could sometimes draw out sickness others could not. They’d been warned about the forest – “Bark like bronze. And the trees seem to move” – but that was where the druid healer was said to live.

Caleb and the others had found the grotto, nestled into deep and dark and ancient places that seemed to hum with magic. Found her, too, an elderly satyr whose legs were covered in matted fur. She wore a simple shift and a necklace of crystal fragments. Cobwebs grew in the spiral of her horns, and the wrinkles on her face surrounded deep set, gimlet eyes which watched without commentary as they laid their friends before her.

She had agreed to help them. For a price.

Caleb stood, his back twinging as he did so. The path leading here had been too dense for a cart or horses, so they’d carried their friends on their shoulders. It had been hard to relinquish Nott. He’d cradled her, paralyzed with indecision, until Fjord, gently but firmly, pried her away and placed his hands on Jester. “This is the only way, Caleb. Yasha can carry two, but only if they’re small. I’ll take Caduceus, and you need to carry Jester. Alright?”

Caleb loved Jester. Not so much or in the same way as Nott, but deeply and abidingly. So he’d pulled her onto his back and carried her up the mountain.

He asked Fjord, “Was she lying?”

The druid scoffed, but Fjord ignored her. “It’s down there, near as I can tell. I could feel the gap between my fingers, but I could barely wedge my head and shoulders inside before I got stuck. It’s just too narrow for me.”

“And me,” said Yasha. Her eyes were fixed on their friends. Beau gave a low moan. How Caleb wished she were awake. He looked down at his hands. Beau’s, sinuous and strong, would have been so much better, or Nott’s, clever and dexterous, or Caduceus’s, reliable and ready to fold with care over any task from kneading dough to healing a wound. But Caleb’s were the hands that they had.

He looked beyond, to the well. It hunched like an iron cauldron, knotted and black with age. The stones that made up its base seemed to be held in place by unknown, scissor-leaved vines as much as by mortar. If the story the sage had told them was true, this well had been here since the dawn of her people – since a time when druids walked these woods like gods, cultivators of rare plants and keepers of secrets. One of which might be at the bottom of this well, wedged into a crevice too eroded by the passage of water and time to admit any but the puniest, most scrawny of persons.

He turned to the druid. “You are sure it’s still down there, the plant you need?”

She whistled through yellowed teeth, a temporizing sound. “Nothing on the planes are sure. It’s been a thousand years since anyone passed that way. But I remember the stories, and this is where the plant was grown. One of Melora’s treasures.“

“And you’ll use it to help our friends if we bring it to you?” Fjord asked. “We have your word on that?”

“You bring me,” the woman said, “and I shall give them the elixir. There’s no telling if their will to live is strong enough to fight. I do not know your people.”

Yasha grew tense with anger; it was visible in her fists and in her narrowed, anguished eyes. And no wonder. It was hardly a guarantee. Yet there was no time to argue. Every moment wasted was a moment their friends sunk farther from them. Caleb asked, “Where is the rope?”

The rope was sodden and slimy with mildew. Fjord tied it securely, forming a knot he swore would hold. Nonetheless, a sense of vertigo overcame Caleb as he was lowered into the well. Fjord’s voice already held an echo after only a few feet. “You alright?”

Caleb swallowed. “Yes.”

A green hand stretched out, squeezed his shoulder. “I can’t bless,” Fjord mumbled apologetically as magic sizzled through Caleb, “but I can let you breath underwater. It’s my last spell, though.”

Yasha reached down, too. He didn’t know what she was doing until her fingers slipped past the collar of his shirt and drew out his amulet. His heart gave a stutter of panic – ‘why was she, did she know’ – before the pendant began to glow. She let it fall back against his chest. “In case you need to concentrate,” she said, and he realized, as she had, that his dancing lights would limit his casting. Hers would last longer and leave him free to maneuver.

“Thank you, my friends,” he said.

“Be careful, Caleb. We’re depending on you.”

And they were. All of them. Jester and Beau, Caduceus and Nott. Caleb forced himself to nod.

The journey downward was like passing into another plane of existence. The green light quickly faltered as light failed to wrap around the contours of the spiraling aperture, leaving him in near darkness. The air grew close and wet, and the sound of water filled his ears; the glide of beading condensation as it swelled and bled, a near constant dripping, and – deep below – the hollow sound of a waiting body of water.

When he finally reached it, he found himself hovering over a surface as smooth as a black coin. He could not see below the waterline, not even the length of his fingers. ‘Don’t be a coward,’ he told himself. ‘Fjord has been down here already. There is nothing to fear.’

Yet even as those thoughts passed through his mind, there was a harsh sound from above. He looked up just as the rope lost tension, and he dropped, plunging into the water. He hung there for a moment, upside down and weightless, suspended in a world without sound. Then his breath came out in a rush of bubbles, and he thrashed to the surface. “I’m alright,” he called, and the voices above grew silent.

“Sorry about that,” Fjord called. “The rope had a thin section, and we lost our grip. You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Cold and panicky, surrounded by walls that pressed in, black and glistening as beetles, while the unknown stretched out below his feet. But fine.

“Good, good.” Fjord sounded relieved. “You see anything?”

Treading water, Caleb searched. The amulet, which was usually hidden beneath his shirt, floated on the surface, shedding a ghostly light. All he could see were the sloping sides of the well. “Nothing,” he said. “How far down was the passage?”

“Six feet, maybe a bit more. Northeast.”

Caleb turned his body and slipped beneath the surface. Without the light, it would have been impossible, but, by its silvery illumination, his eye caught a sharply-cut shadow embedded in the stone. He pressed closer, examining it with his fingers. Runes, though not in any language he recognized. He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, allowing the not-air to fill his lungs. Fjord’s spell held.

Comprehend Languages was so familiar it came almost as easily as a cantrip. The runes untwisted, but they were so smooth that only parts remained legible: ‘Pass’...‘vault’...and finally the word ‘wish.’ He understood none of it.

Caleb pressed inside the space beneath. The stone brushed his belly and the top of his head. After a few feet, he reached an especially tight spot and knew this was where his friend had been forced to turn back. Despite their teasing, Fjord was broad shouldered and angular. He would never have been able to fit through this gap. Caleb wiggled his own shoulders, which slipped through.

Then he felt a tug at his waist.

He lifted the copper wire to his lips. “Fjord, don’t panic, but I’m going to cut the rope.”

He heard a startled, “What? No, don’t” but by then, he’d already drawn his knife. The blade was better suited to sharpening quills than cutting through an enemy, but it slipped through the hemp without issue. Kicking off the encumbrance, Caleb scrapped resolutely forward.

He emerged into a muddy pool. Coughing, he expelled water as his lungs transitioned back to oxygen. A single rune was sketched into the stone above his head. It said, ‘Barkskin.’ Caleb knew the spell as one whose power came from nature, and it wasn’t in his personal repertoire. Unsure, he cast Detect Magic. Nothing. If there was a trap here, it wasn’t arcane. He took a shuddering breath and levered himself out of the pool.

The tunnel remained moist and soft to the touch. His hands sunk into loamy soil, which smelled like mycelium, or trees burrowing deep, or like woods after rain. Threads hung down from the ceiling – a thousand, thousand miles of twisted roots reaching to curl against his face. The passage grew progressively thinner, like the blade of a knife, until finally he could go forward only on his stomach. Anxiously, he peered ahead, but all he saw was a tunnel that seemed to go on forever. There was the sensation of pressure, of being trapped...

He stopped, drawing stifling air in through his nose, forcing himself to count instead of gulp. His heart throbbed against his ribs, and, for a moment, he gave into the temptation to simply lay down his head and press his cheek to the cool dirt, to let himself believe he could remain exactly where he was. Then he thought of Nott’s hand, leathery and tiny, curled around two of his fingers. Of her wild smile that was all teeth. Of her gravelly voice, promising to look after him. It allowed him to calm down, and when he lifted his head, he whispered, “They are...counting on you,” and his fingernails, already ragged from his journey, scrapped forward another inch.

He didn’t see the pustules. They were the same color as the walls, like seed pods or – no, more like air bladders on mats of seaweed. When Caleb placed his hand on one, it burst, and a spray of sticky liquid made his palm and fingers burn intensely. “Ahh!” He scrubbed his skin against the dirt. It helped, but when he held his shaking palm to his face, the damage was already done. Raw skin, mushy at the edges, reeking of putrefaction. He gagged at the sight, bile creeping into his throat. It was as though he’d spent a month with this wound, until gangrene had set in. He could draw only one conclusion. The plants were necrotic.

He looked down the passage, and this time he saw them. Dozens and dozens of tiny brown clusters, growing on every surfaces. He attempted to burn them away, but the fire barely smoldered in the damp, and when Caleb dared poke a blackened pustule, it burst all the same. Caleb drew back as far as he could, until dirt crumbled onto his back. ‘You cannot,’ he argued, holding his ruined hand close to his chest. ‘You will never survive it.’

‘Do you know who will not survive?’ another voice countered. ‘Nott will not survive. Jester will not survive. Beau, who calls you her friend. Caduceus, who you owe a great debt, who has some deluded notion that you are important. Those good people, they will not survive.’

A sound, low, almost a whine crouched in Caleb’s throat. His bit his lip until it bled. His hand throbbed against his chest, so much useless meat. The rest of him, still whole, had broken into a cold sweat.

“Go,” he hissed at himself.

The pustules burst at the slightest pressure. Time and again he brushed against them; his hip, his arms, the crown of his head. Where the substance touched his clothes, he had some protection, but where they touched his bare skin, the pain seared. At one point his elbow gave way, causing several pustules to burst at once. It hissed across his face and over his eye. He cried out as he collapsed, unable to move as the poison raked him in a dozen places. His body shook with the shock of it.

He searched within for his training, training he tried to deny or ignore but needed all too often in the life he led. He reminded himself that anything could be endured, anything could be ignored, overcome, accepted. Anything, if it meant one could press forward.

Every inch was a nightmare. Every lurch a study in suffering. Caleb held onto stoicism for as long as he could, but soon tears were streaking down his face, cutting through the pain without doing anything to relieve it. Before the end, he came to feel like a construct, held together only by will and directive of another. And when the pain surged up over even that threshold, he began to hallucinate.

He saw Beau, laughing at him in an inn while Caduceus moved the bones of his thumb back into alignment. The firbolg was unfailingly gentle, and soon his hand was nearly as good as new. Jester and Nott returned, placing the recovered clay cat’s paw on the table. Caleb had been turning it over in his hands when some drunken scoundrel snatched it from him.

“Ta-da!” said Jester. “That jerk will definitely think again the next time he decides to bully someone.”

Beau asked, “You give him the axe?”

Caduceus craned his neck to see whether anyone needed reviving. “That seems a little much.”

“I don’t know about that,” Nott said darkly. “Although – and this is not a criticism, Caleb, because I’m sure you had a good reason – why you punched him instead of whammying him with a spell, I have no idea.”

Caleb’s spells were not kind ones, not the sort used in non-lethal combat, but Caleb didn’t want to have that conversation. Instead, he answered by saying, “It was foolish of me.”

“Well, don’t worry,” Jester said, smiling at him. She was always smiling. “Me and Nott took care of him.”

“You are too good to me,” he said as Nott squeezed onto the bench beside him.

“Don’t be silly. It’s my job to take care of you.”

“And we’ll help, of course,” Caduceus added, lending his own grin as well as his large hand, which settled heavily on Caleb’s shoulder. Beau snorted, but the kink in her brow as she gave his hand one final evaluative glance wasn’t even subtle. Caleb picked up the cat’s paw and placed it back in his pocket, where he could touch it and remember. His strange, overprotective friends.

That was before the sickness came. The sickness which had twisted his friend’s smiles, stolen the strength from their muscles, and turned their cheeks into sunken, pale imitations. He could almost feel Nott’s body as he rocked her, whispering for her to stay awake as she murmured, “Am I dying? I can’t die yet. Yeza…and Luke…” That was before she stopped talking altogether. And Jester, tears running down her face as she silently suffered, and Beau, whom they had to fight to keep in bed. Even deeply ill, she had tried to fight the thing that was hurting her. Caduceus was the last to go down. He tried so hard, using every scrap of magic he had.

“I don’t know why it isn’t working.” His ears had been pressed flat against his head, and Caleb was so worried by his despairing look he’d insisted Caduceus drink a cup of his own fortifying tea and lie down. Caduceus had not woken the next morning, lapsing instead unto the same half-waking and half-sleeping state as the others. That was when Caleb, Fjord, and Yasha had grown desperate enough to follow a rumor. A rumor that lead them here.

Here.

At long last, the pustules came to an end. Caleb lay on his stomach. He rubbed dirt into his wounds, waiting out the pain. It didn’t leave him entirely, but the intensity dropped to manageable levels. Eventually, he pushed himself into his elbows, his knees, and finally his feet.

An archway of stone stretched overhead. Again, there was one rune: ‘Answer,’ it said. Limping, Caleb stepped inside a small chamber. There was water on the floor, as deep as his ankles, and one entire side had buckled as the stones reinforcing the wall had given way to the weight of the earth above. Nature would reclaim this place in another generation, and for a moment Caleb despaired at finding what he’d come for. Then the light from his pendant touched something organic.

He sloshed forward. Built into a wall was a kind of nursery. Most of the pots had fallen, no longer home to soil or plants beyond a thin layer of slime that seemed to grow on everything, but in those that remained, a few small, jewel-colored leaves fanned out. He covered the necklace and, as he’s been told they would, the plants glowed, bioluminescent. Melora’s treasure. Very gently, using his fingers to comb the soil, Caleb unearthed the fragile plants. It was hard to do without damaging the roots, but he controlled his tremors, sinking once more into a time and place where self-control had been the only alternative to severe punishment. His fingers abided until his precious cargo was as safe as he could make them, wrapped in strips of his own tunic and tucked into his belt pouch.

Now all he had to do was get them to the surface.

He turned in a slow circle, and that is when he saw the chest. Warily, Caleb approached it. There were no noticeable latches or locks. The stone lid appeared heavy, but it appeared to be just resting on the chest. With an effort, he could push it aside. Exhaustion almost made Caleb leave the chest untouched. He was hurting, and he had no means to know if this was a trap or a treasure. However, curiosity, as it often had before, pushed him onward. He pressed his hand over the faded chiseled runes, his brow creasing as the words formed in his head:

The lid laid there, seeming to wait. A poem? riddle? Almost before Caleb formed an understand of what it meant, the answer came to him. It slipped from his lips: “A promise.”

Magic buzzed across the surface of his fingers, and though he withdrew them quickly, the lid had already shifted, leaving a dark, slitted opening. Inside, the light of his necklace caught on the surface of an single engraved coin.

It took time to get back, even more time than it had to go forward. Yasha’s light eventually went out, and Caleb didn’t have the energy to summon his own. But that was fine. More than fine. He didn’t need light to crawl.

The man that Fjord and Yasha pulled from the well was so limp and bedraggled, Fjord thought he was dead. His head hung, his eyes sealed shut as streamers of water plastered his hair to his face and neck. His shirt – the thin cotton one he wore under his tunic – was torn to shreds, and wherever skin was visible, there were horrible, stinking patches of dying flesh. When he saw the damage, he almost dropped Caleb back down the well, and only Yasha’s steadfast grip saved him. They hauled his unresisting body up and out, dumping him on the ground. Water leaked out from under him, and Fjord was sure Caleb had done that thing where his mind went elsewhere, because when he jostled the man’s shoulders, he got no response.

“Caleb.” He didn’t register how his voice shook. “Caleb.”

A pair of cloven hooves appeared. The druid crone asked, “Did you find them?”

Caleb looked up, a pale eye melting into hers. For a moment, Fjord expected him to cast a firebolt. He could do it. He’d killed Lorenzo like that, with a cantrip on the verge of death. Instead, Caleb fumbled for his belt pouch. Yasha helped when it became apparent he was struggling. She pulled out the little bundles and, with a glare that promised death for betrayal, handed them to the satyr. The woman examined them with care.

“Because of what you’ve done, I can cultivate these plants, and the old cures can be made again.” She almost looked pleased, and it did things to her face, made it less hard and lacking in compassion. Then it sharpened again. “Did you find anything else?”

Caleb was quiet for a long time. Fjord looked at the intensity of the crone’s expression and wondered what she thought Caleb might have found. He prepared himself to intervene. But then Caleb’s hand stretched out, his palm opening. There was a coin in it, very old and engraved with markings.

The woman zeroed in on it, her hand twitching, though it remained at her side. “Did you steal it?”

“I answered,” Caleb said in a gravely tone that sounded nothing like him. He cleared his throat. “The riddle. I answered it.”

The druid snatched the coin from his hand. “Good for you that you gave this to me. People like you, they shouldn’t have such things. Very bad. Very bad for you, and for the world.”

Caleb just closed his eyes.

“Are you going to help them now?” Fjord demanded. In the hours they’d waited for Caleb, he’d had time to despair, but everyone was alive, at least for now.

The druid agreed. “It will take eight hours.”

It was hard, harder than anything Fjord had ever done to let her walk away and disappear into the forested edge of the grotto. Yasha, likewise, grew tense. “Can we trust her?”

Fjord felt Caleb’s head sink into the crux of his neck, going lax as he gave up on whatever was holding him together. He adjusted his grip. “Whether we can or not, we don’t have any choice.”

“He’s cold,” Yasha said. She was pressing her palm to Caleb’s forehead.

“Shock. Let’s get him dry and warm.”

They waited.

The elixir worked. Once administered, whatever influence held sway over their friends was broken, and with help from Yasha’s divine magic, they were able to nurse Caduceus back to health, at least until he could take over for himself. His magic flowed out, gentle and strong, and soon the pall of death hanging over their party was gone. In its wake was a band of seven tired, weak, but happy people coming back to life.

Jester was the one who tended Caleb’s wounds. She cried when she saw them. “Well, don’t worry, Caleb, because now that I’m not sick, I can fix you.”

Caleb did not beg, though the pain was terrible. He kept his mouth pinched shut while her healing took hold. It vibrated. Pulled. Eventually, he had to pinch his eyes shut. Afterward, Jester rubbed his tears away with wet fingertips. Kissed his cheek for good measure. Drew back.

And her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh!”

Caduceus meandered over. “What’s wrong?”

“Caduceus, I’m sure I did it right. So why… Caleb, does it hurt?”

Caleb shook his head. The skin felt a little tight and sensitive, but there was no pain.

“Let me try,” Caduceus said. He took Caleb’s face between his hands, and Caleb smelled tea leaves and cloves. Nothing seemed to change except the crestfallen look on both cleric’s faces.

Fjord, who’d been watching, frowned. “Is that, like, permanent then?”

Caleb imagined terrible things. His teeth showing through his cheek. His sinus cavities open and gruesome. Gingerly, he touched his face, seeking evidence this might be the case. As he did, he saw his hand. “Oh.”

It was bleached of color wherever the ichor had touched him. It left his arm and hand patchy with blighted skin. He pulled up the hem of his shirt. His belly had a similar mottled pattern. And his face...

Jester looked upset. She grasped Caduceus’s arm. “I don’t understand. I healed him. Why would it stay like that?”

“Necrotic damage is nasty stuff,” Caduceus said. He sounded thoughtful. “Plus, not all damage can be waved away by magic, you know?”

They had learned that clearly enough. “Then this may be...simply how I am now.”

“Oh, Caleb,” said Jester. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s...fine.” He searched himself for a reaction, but aside from a general concern that he would be more noticeable now, he found none. He could always rub more dirt in. He reached for a handful, scrubbed it experimentally into his hand.

Jester stopped him. “Don’t. I’ll knit you a nice pair of gloves if you want, but...don’t do that, okay?”

“I think it’s a nice look on you,” Caduceus said. “Unusual, you know?”

Nott jumped on this immediately. “He’s right. It makes you even more handsome.”

“Striking,” Fjord threw in.

Beau punched his arm. “Well, it’s not like you could get more ugly.”

Nott hissed at her, but Caleb blocked it out. He was gazing at one of his hands when an almost equally pale one reached out and wove their fingers together. Caleb looked up at Yasha in surprise.

She squeezed gently. “Thank you.”

Caleb looked at their friends, weak and unsteady, bickering and complicated, but alive. Once, he would have walked away from them. Once he would have taken his chance – the phantom weight of that coin, pulsing with magic – and run. And now? He looked at Yasha, searching for words. “I would have given much more.”

She nodded, an acknowledgement of what he said and all the things he didn’t. “Yes,” she said.

They sat, their hands plaited together, and watched their friends live.

Chapter Text

The trinket shop was a glorious junk heap. There were shelves piled high with all kinds of knickknacks: jars of colorful powders, rusted old weapons, boxes of gnarled yarn, candles, moldering fabric, and piles of unlaced boots. There was also an odor. Musky, like the whole place was thick with dust in places that couldn’t be reached. Mollymauk looked with interest at a velvet, broad-brimmed hat perched on top of a pickling jar that seemed to be home to…what? Ginger root? A disembodied hand?

Gods, this place was great.

A faint rustle reminded him of his duty, and he waved two fingers at the shop owner. “Hey there. Anybody home?”

A liver-spotted head shot up from behind the counter, surrounded by a cloud of white hair that seemed to grow everywhere – bristling from his eyebrows, curling around (and out of) his pointed ears – everywhere but the top of his bald pate. He looked at Molly through glasses like the bottom of two bottles and grinned with all three-and-a-half of his teeth.

“Hello, sonny. Can I help you?”

“I was just having a look around your fine establishment,” said Molly, “but I found it a bit overwhelming. So much quality one hardly knows were to begin. So I was wondering if you had any suggestions for a discerning customer.”

“Well, now, that depends on what you’re looking for.” The shopkeeper gestured at Molly’s horns. “You like jewelry? I got jewelry. Swords? I got swords.”

“I’m not so much interested in hardware as in experiences,” Molly admitted. “I’m always on the lookout for something new, and I have a little coin.”

The shopkeeper tapped his chin. “Experiences, eh?”

Molly leaned a bit closer. He’d really only intended to keep the shopkeeper on the hook while Jester did her thing, but he couldn’t help but be intrigued by that reaction. “You say that like you have something in mind.”

“Weeell,” the shopkeeper drew out the word. “A man in my line of business, we do come across peculiarities from time to time, and I keep a few here behind the counter.”

That sounded like a con if he’d ever heard one, but Molly could afford to play the sucker. He propped his chin against his palm and prompted, “Do tell.”

With a twinkle of his eye and a twiddle of his fingers, the shopkeeper produced a silver key, which he fitted into a small chest beside the till. From it, he lifted three objects: a spool of crimson thread, a finger-sized vial, and a knotty stick. Molly scrutinized each in turn before raising a skeptical eyebrow.

The shopkeeper waggled a finger at him. “You aren’t the kind of person who judges by appearances, are you? A tiefling should know better.”

Gamely, Molly poked the spool of red thread. “Alright, alright. So, what’s the story with this one?”

“Came from a witch’s cottage, or at least she claimed she was a witch. Before she died, lovers would buy the threads she enchanted to stitch together their destinies. Bit tricky, to muck around with fate, but all’s fair in love and war, am I right?”

“Uh huh,” said Molly. “And this?” The vial rolled into his hand, and it was so cold he almost dropped it. He squinted to see inside, but the glass was foggy, nearly opaque.

“Oh, very rare, that. It’s nepenthe, a painkiller reportedly made from the waters of a river flowing through the lower planes. After all, can’t be in pain if there’s nothing to feel.”

Weirder and weirder. Molly set down the vial and picked up the twig, which he turned in the light. “Next you’re going to tell me this thing will grant me wishes.”

“Wishes?” A chortling laugh from the man’s thin chest. “Ridiculous. If I had something like that, do you think I’d keep it in a box? No, that I found in the bottom of a haversack, almost used up. Had it appraised. It, eh…it lets you, shall we say, nudge people into doing things you’d like them to do?”

“That doesn’t sound so powerful.”

The shop owner waggled his eyebrows. “Suggestions can be very powerful things, given the right circumstances.”

“Sure, old timer.”

Still, as Molly flicked the stick – wand? – he couldn’t help but feel a sort of fascination. He thought of Jester’s wand of smiles and the delightful mischief she caused with it. A wand that could nudge people? Probably just a scam. No doubt as soon as something got purchased from the shopkeeper’s “special box”, he shuffled over to a shelf and pulled out another piece of junk to replace it. Still…

Mollymauk laid the wand down on the counter and fished into his belt pouch. “How much?”

Ten minutes later, Mollymauk was strolling down the street, twirling the wand in his hand and keeping an eye out for his partner in crime. He hadn’t been walking long before she appeared, practically skipping. “Success, my dear?”

Jester gushed. “Molly, you should have seen it. I stacked up all these bottles in a huge, teetering pile, and I tied a little thread around the bottom one, and then I put the other end around a chair leg, and I put the chair –”

Molly was laughing. “I’m sure it will cause a delightful mess.”

“Well,” Jester said, fanning herself with transparently false modesty. “I am pretty great at that. But I couldn’t have done it without you!”

He bowed. “Always happy to help an agent of chaos such as yourself.”

She bumped him with her thigh, warm comradery filling up the spaces between them, and then she grabbed his arm. “Oh, look!”

Jester was pointing at a poster advertising a troupe of traveling performers. Apparently, they were setting up outside of town, with entertainment and music at dusk. A wave of nostalgia hit, causing a bit of tightness in Molly’s chest at the same time it drew an automatic smile. “Well,” he said. “That brings back memories. You interested?”

Jester pouted. “I totally would, but Beau is taking us to that club, the one where people hit each other for money.”

Of course. Beau had been yammering about it for days, ever since she’d gotten wind of the place. The experience had been declared a “girl’s night”, and the men of the group were strictly forbidden from taking part. Molly had made some noise about it, but he didn’t really mind. Not after watching Nott’s face grow open and wondering when she realized she was invited, and seeing Yasha smile.

Speaking of which, here came a batch of familiar faces. They were a colorful lot, though today the warmer end of the spectrum was looking pretty glum. Molly watched Caleb, hunched into the folds of his overlarge coat, wander past without so much as acknowleding Jester’s cheerful greeting. Nott followed him, wearing an anxious expression.

“Something happen?” Molly wagered.

Fjord shrugged. “We passed a school, and the teacher was being pretty firm with a student. I don’t know why, but Caleb got that stare he gets. Bad thoughts, I guess.”

Bad thoughts seemed to hover over their resident wizard like a cloud, but some days were worse than others. Molly thought of the mines outside of Alfield, the first time he’d really seen into the depths of Caleb’s brokenness. He hadn’t gotten a good look at Caleb’s expression today, but if it was anything like that, then yeah, it probably wasn’t good.

“I don’t like it when he gets like that,” Jester said sadly. “Nothing I do makes him feel better.”

“That ain’t your job, Jes,” Fjord said.

“I think he needs to lighten up,” Molly said. “Poor guy’s wound tighter than a hobgoblin with its hoard.”

Fjord looked skeptical. “You can’t always walk away from your past, Molly.”

“The past is imaginary, my friend. The person who wallows in it steals happiness from the only thing that really matters: the present.”

Jester grinned. “That’s kind of nice.”

Molly smiled, too. “It’s how I live.”

“It certainly is a philosophy,” said Fjord, not sounding convinced in the least.

Molly’s hand twitched around the wand as something fluttery and colorful flapped its wings in his imagination. It was just a passing thought – a possibility, if you will – but it was interesting, and Molly had always had a hard time letting go of ‘interesting’ once it had his attention.

Nott almost didn’t participate in the long-awaited girl’s night. In fact, she waited until the very last moment before emerging, preoccupied but quietly excited, from the room she and Caleb shared. The ladies left shortly afterward in a cloud of laughter. After they were gone, Molly asked, “You up for a little adventure? There’s a carnival in town.”

“Ordinarily, I would,” said Fjord, “but I already have plans.”

Molly waggled his eyebrows. “Oh?”

Fjord’s complexion darkened. “Not those kinds of plans. I ran into an old sailor at the market. He’s, uh, from the Menagerie Coast. Resettled, you know. Picked up on my accent and invited me to trade a few yarns. I’d invite you along, but –”

“No need to explain,” Molly said, waving him off. “It’s a rare thing, finding familiar faces in a strange place, and I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

“You gonna be okay on your own?”

Molly offered a grin that had a lot of fang to it. “I’m only ever as alone as I want to be.”

Fjord’s eyelid twitched, as though he had only just stopped himself from rolling his eyes. “Right. Well, I’m gonna to head off, then. Try to stay out of trouble.”

“Right, right. Have fun with grandpa.”

Afterward, standing alone in the tavern common room, Molly put his hands on his hips and considered his options. He still wanted to check out the festivities outside of town, but, despite what he’d said to Fjord, he didn’t feel like picking up a stranger. Problem was, everyone was otherwise occupied. Well, almost everyone. Because, of course, there was one other member of the Mighty Nein still here, although he was currently holed up in his room. Should Molly even bother?

Figuring it wouldn’t hurt to ask, he made his way upstairs. “Caleb?”

At first there was no answer, but then Caleb said, “Mollymauk,” in a quiet voice that barely carried through the heavy oak door.

Molly took that as an invitation and pushed inside. “Good evening to you! And how are we feeling?”

His answer was a dark glower from the bed, where Caleb was doing a fine imitation of a disheveled, grumpy tomcat. He had a book in his arms, but it was held against his chest. Molly could see the whiteness of his knuckles from here. For all that, though, his voice sounded more tired than cross when he said, “What do you want, Mollymauk?”

“Just checking in. You seemed a bit poorly earlier, and I was concerned.”

Molly could almost see the man’s metaphorical feathers go down. His iron grip on his book eased. “Something brought back a few memories, and this,” he tapped his temple, “doesn’t always take those reminders well.”

Molly risked approaching, slumping onto the far end of the bed. “You want to talk about it?”

Caleb stroked the feathered end of a quill against his knuckles. “It was nothing. We passed a schoolyard, and the master was disciplining one of his charges. A very young boy who…was fidgeting during instruction. Sucking on his fingers, eyes wandering.”

“Not very attentive.”

Caleb let out a long exhale. “So it would seem.”

“The, ah, master got upset with him?”

“It was a typical scolding. A rap on the knuckles, nothing more.”

Despite his words, the bitterness of self-incrimination hung around Caleb, and Molly asked, “You sound like you’re upset you didn’t say anything.”

“I had no right to do so. I don’t know the child. Perhaps he was being inattentive. He just reminded me…” Caleb trailed off without finishing, his expression abstracted, and merely shook his head. “Anyway, I’m afraid I upset Jester. I did not mean to ignore her.”

Molly stretched out long legs. “I wouldn’t worry about that. Jester’s quick to forgive. A regular bundle of joy.”

“She is that,” Caleb said, melancholic. The ‘unlike me’ was implied.

“Maybe your problem is you spend too much time in your head,” Molly said. “You should be more like yours truly; carefree, unconcerned with the tides of the wider world.”

“It isn’t so easy as you say. There are things…”

But whatever things Caleb had in mind, they didn’t trespass his lips. Most of the time, Molly didn’t mind this. But the fonder he grew of Caleb, the more frustrating it was to watch him pace the metaphorical floor, tied up over invisible faults and fractures. Molly didn’t claim to be good, but he knew dysfunction when he saw it. Which is why he suggested, “Forget the things. Come out with me tonight.”

From the way his eyebrows raised, the invitation took Caleb by surprise. Then they lowered into a fine, brooding line. “While the offer is appreciated, I’m afraid I would be poor company tonight.”

“It’s not like I’m asking you to strip naked and have an orgy in the moonlight. It would be a few hours of drinking and entertainment.”

“As I said, while I appreciate –”

“Yeah, you said,” Molly interrupted, unable to keep the frustration out of his voice.

Caleb seemed to come to a conclusion because he cleared his throat. “Mollymauk, I know I can be a bit...low. It is no one’s fault or responsibility, and I apologize if I am difficult to deal with in those times. But I would appreciate it if you would allow me space and time to deal with these things in my own way.”

Dealing with it, for Caleb, seemed to be more akin to stuffing his feelings into a hole, refusing to eat, and brooding messily in a dark corner. ‘Completely different than your own method of laughing at the top of your voice, imbibing whatever seems interesting, and seeking the wildest, most adrenaline-pumping distractions possible,’ whispered an inner voice, but Molly shoved those thoughts aside with the ease of long practice. He stood.

“Look, I’m not asking you to be ‘happy’. Just – humor me, alright?”

His insistence was apparently getting under Caleb’s skin because, for the first time, there was a spark of temper in his eyes. “You’re not listening to me. I do not want to go.”

“Why the hell not? What are you going to do, sit here and pour obsessively over the books you’ve already read a dozen times?

“I enjoy books.”

“You know what I think? I think you’re scared. You’ve been huddled into a ball, hiding from the big scary world to avoid having to go forward, and you’re so bound and determined not to get run down by whatever nasty thing is hiding in your past that you’re willing to throw today right out the window.”

Caleb rose from the bed. He raised his chin. “You know nothing about me, Mollymauk Tealeaf.”

But beneath the indignation, Molly could see he was upset and stressed and unhappy. It pushed him to make a decision. A stupid decision, one he would probably regret when nothing happened and he had to back down with his tail between his legs. Still, he put his hand into his coat pocket and felt the tip of the wand. His knuckles curled around it.

“You know what I think?” Molly said, stepping chest to chest with Caleb. “I think you ought to ‘go with the flow’ for once. It just might do you some good.”

Molly thought he felt a tingle of magic going through the wand, into his throat and words before exiting with a little extra pressure, but he might have been imagining it. He waited for Caleb to show some sign that the spell had taken effect, but there was nothing. Then…

Like mist over the water, something changed in Caleb’s face. Before, his jaw had been hard-lined and unyielding, his eyes glittering with anger. Now he looked around the room like a man in a dream. When his gaze settled on Molly, his lips twitched upward. It was hesitant, confused, but it was still the most guileless expression Molly had ever seen on his face, and it sort of took his breath away.

“Mollymauk,” Caleb said. “Were you saying something to me?”

“Ah. Yes, I was. I was telling you there's a troupe of performers outside of town, and I think we ought to go. It would do us both some good to get out and have some fun, don’t you think?”

Molly still expected reluctance of some kind, but Caleb never dropped his bemused smile. “Yes,” he said, just a half a beat off, and Molly felt a surge of excitement. The old shopkeeper was right. Power in suggestion, indeed.

“Great! Shall we get going, then?” Caleb turned obediently toward the door, but Molly snagged the cuff of his sleeve. “Wait. On second thought, a wardrobe change might be in order.”

Caleb picked at his brown tunic. It was coarse, stiff with dirt, and darker in places where sweat or blood had left stains in the material. There were several lines of stitches where a clumsy hand had attempted to keep weft and warp together. “Wardrobe?”

“You know what? Never mind. Come with me. I think I can kit you out with something from my pack.”

In the end, Molly dressed Caleb in one of his own shirts, a flowy garment that matched his eyes. It didn't quite fit, but with the addition of a colorful sash around his waist, it suited rather nicely. He let Caleb keep his scarf, though Molly did take the time to drape it artfully.

Mollymauk took a step back. “What do you think?”

Caleb gazed passively at his new ensemble. “Yes.”

They headed toward the outskirts of town as twilight backlit the first, rising moon. The smell hit Molly first. It was roasting peanuts and fire, chalk powder and caramel apples, pipe smoke and animal dung. It transported him back to the days of the Fletching and Moondrop Traveling Carnival, and he smiled gleefully into the night, which was cool and bursting with possibility. Anything could happen.

The atmosphere was boisterous. There were a handful of villagers who’d ventured out to buy a trinket or two, but these were shy creatures, outsiders. They cleared out before the big bonfire really got popping. Molly was different. He was a vagabond by trade and inclination, and the performers could sense it. They welcomed him like a long-lost cousin. Not familiar perhaps – not same-nose, same-hands, same-language – but still kin, still People. Soon enough, he was swept up the back slapping, the jokes, and the strong, dark ale.

Caleb, too, fit in easily enough. It was a shock, actually. The Caleb Molly knew would have been clawing out of his skin in a situation like this, surrounded by so many loud, tactile strangers. He'd have been anxious and shrinking, like a long-tailed cat in a room of rocking chairs. Tonight though, under the soporific effect of the wand, he drifted, smiling blithely when the carnies – mostly a swarthy, dark-haired set of varying elvish decent – carded their fingers through his hair or tugged good-naturedly at his ears or asked him to speak so they could chuckle at his accent. In fact, if anything, he was heavily reciprocal. When someone leaned into him, he leaned back. When someone touched his arm or held his hand, he faced them, giving them his full attention. When someone put a tankard in his hand, he drank.

It was an amazing evening. Full of crisp nighttime air, carrying cricket songs and the voices of friends. Soon music kicked up in earnest, and Molly learned yet another fact about Caleb. The man could dance. And not just in the passable but inelegant manner of most people, but with a confidence and poise that made it apparent he’d been trained to do so. Even when he didn't immediately recognize the steps, those sharp eyes of his would key in on his dance partner, and within a beat or two, he was moving as though he was born to do it. The reels were the best. During those, Caleb actually looked happy.

Then an unknown tempo came into the music, one Molly wasn’t familiar with. “This is different.”

One of the men rested his pipe on his knee. “It’s a folkdance from up north. Zemnian tune. Someone must be trying to make an impression on that friend of yours. Probably Briony, the charmer.”

The folkdance was certainly unlike anything Molly had heard before, though there were strains of it that seemed to pluck at the deepest, most inaccessible parts of his memory. Caleb certainly seemed to recognize it. He swayed, his eyes distant, but before Molly could make up his mind to go check on him, Caleb moved in a slow circle, and then he was leading the others in what must have been a dance from his birthplace.

Molly remained at the sidelines while Caleb shared this part of himself with strangers. Given the man’s penchant for closely guarding his privacy, there was a part of Molly that felt guilty for witnessing it. But like a rare astral phenomenon – like a star shower or an eclipse – he couldn't look away. It lured him in the same way the unknown lured him. And so he watched.

After the folkdance ended, there was more socializing. Storytelling, juggling, tricks both mundane and arcane. It was getting toward the long hours, and Molly was listening with keen interest as some of the troupe discussed the road they'd just passed down – a road the Nein would be traveling in the next week or so. There was some interesting news about missing livestock. “Townies thought we’d done it,” said a woman whose gently pointed ears had lobes that hung almost to her shoulders.

“Aye-a,” agreed a man with a face as wrinkled as puckered leather. “Nonsense of course. The animals were disemboweled. No one in this troupe’d waste good meat that way.”

“Papi, please,” said a bearded man Molly judged to be around his own age.

“I’m sorry they gave you trouble,” Molly said. He was limp as a rag and pleasantly tipsy. “Still, if it meant you passed this way, I'm grateful.”

“Long road?”

Molly popped a fang, which rested against his lower lip. “You could say that. I'm traveling with good people, but there's just some parts of me they don’t understand.”

“Your friend seems to fit in all right. I wonder if Briony has gotten him into a corner yet.”

“Someone did mention that,” Molly said. “Maybe I should go and take a look.”

Mollymauk sauntered through the crowd, keeping his eyes peeled for a head of red hair. It was actually the raggedy scarf that got his attention, because someone was tugging on it, drawing Caleb to the edge of the crowd and taking his face in hand. The first kiss was sweet, on the bridge of his nose. The young woman paused, saying something unheard, and Caleb didn't move. His suiter seemed to take this as an invitation, because the next kiss was much more heated. Molly edged closer, half-smiling, willing to back off if needed. However, the more he saw, the more concerned he became. For one thing, it was clear Caleb was a willing participant only in the passive sense. He didn’t tug away or make a sound. In fact, he didn't so much was twitch under the deepening kiss. But that was the problem. Briony had fingers threaded in his hair, was pressed flush to his body, but Caleb’s hands hung at his sides, mannequin-like, and something about the situation made Molly’s stomach churn.

Not wanting to cause a fuss, he tapped Briony’s shoulder. “Hey, now. Sorry to cut in, but my friend there looks like he could use a bit of space.”

Briony seemed reluctant to let go of Caleb. “We were getting along fine. Right?

Caleb, whose breathing was labored, muttered a hoarse, “Yes.”

Yeah, no. Molly extracted his friend, offering a wink to smooth ruffled feathers. “Ask him again in the morning, if you'd like. For now, though, it's time to say goodnight.”

The thwarted youngster stomped off in something of a temper, but infatuations burned hot and fast, and Molly had a feeling Caleb wouldn’t hold the same appeal once he was back to his normal self. That is, more prone to fits of melancholy than dancing and making out under the oak branches.

The camp was finally winding down. Molly extended his hand, drawing Caleb along as they moved closer to the bonfire. “That one was a bit overeager. No harm done, though, right?”

Caleb’s chin was tucked into his chest. His breathing was still a bit sharp. Then again, he'd been cavorting for hours. He was probably tired.

“Caleb?”

“Yes,” the man gasped.

They stood alongside others. People chatted. The fire was spicy in everyone’s hair and the folds of their clothing, and it was so damn comfortable Molly sighed aloud. “This was fun, right? I told you you'd like it if you just relaxed.”

Caleb’s face was dark in the shadows.

“We should do it more often, though I'm not sure how I'll convince you. The spell was a one-time deal as far as I could tell. I guess you might be able to do something with it, but you're probably going to be annoyed with me tomorrow. Not too much, I hope.”

Again, Caleb didn't respond.

“I hope you know I did this because I care. I worry you're going to tear yourself apart chasing after those ghosts in your closet. I just wanted to give you a chance to let that all go for a night. You understand, don’t you?”

Nothing.

Unnerved by the silence, Molly asked, “Caleb?”

Caleb lifted his head, and in the mix of firelight and moonlight, Mollymauk could just make out a silvery line trailing down the crease between his nose and cheek. This close, it was impossible to ignore the mute desperation in his eyes, and Molly suddenly realized Caleb was trembling. His mouth fell open, and a creeping sensation of dread filled him. Suddenly, he worried he’d made a very grave mistake.

“Hey,” he said carefully. “Are you okay?”

Caleb smiled, although his lips seemed to struggle to hold their shape. His eyes shone with unnatural brightness. “Yes.”

But despite his words – the ones he'd spoken with sobering regularity that night, Molly realized – it was clear that Caleb was a far cry from okay. ‘There is power in suggestion’ – that’s what the shopkeeper had insinuated. But suggestions implied choice, and Molly was beginning to suspect that, far from freeing Caleb of his inner demons, what he’d really done was make him a captive in his own skin, helpless to trespass against Molly’s command: Go with the flow.

And that’s exactly what Caleb had been doing.

“Oh, bad,” Molly muttered. His hand migrated to his hairline, scraping against his scalp. “Oh, bad, bad, bad." He looked earnestly into Caleb’s face. “I didn't think this through. Let’s, let’s go back to the inn. We don't have to stay here anymore. Is that what you want?”

Caleb shivered in the moonlight before choking out his meaningless reply: “Yes.”

Caleb seemed to grow more lost with every step. The tranquility from before was gone, as though the inner Caleb, the one trapped within the bonds of the spell, was fighting to get free. Molly had already tried dispelling the magic – “End. Stop! Be normal. Ugh. Why isn't it working?” – but it didn’t seem to work that way. Despite having cast it, the magic itself didn't originate with him, and Molly had no way of calling back what he’d let loose. So he settled for leading Caleb by the hand.

If Molly slept that night, it was fitfully. He heard the others come in sometime before dawn, smothering laughter before their respective doors shut and a surreal quiet set in until the tavern itself woke and the halls were filled with the sounds of early-rising patrons, the scrapping of chairs in the common room, and the smells of breakfast. Giving up on his efforts to rest, Molly slipped past a still snoring Fjord and dragged himself downstairs.

He was nursing a strong cup of coffee when he spotted a hesitant but familiar figure at the foot of the staircase. His voice caught in his throat. For the past several hours, he'd had time to consider the ramifications of what he’d done, and he was sick over it. It went against everything he believed in, and that he’d done it out of carelessness (‘And anger,’ he thought. ‘You were angry.’)… Well, if Caleb didn't want to even be in the same room with him, he would understand.

But an apology was owed. Molly stood. “Caleb.”

Caleb’s expression was a far cry from the night before. He looked drawn in, his cheekbones sharp against a face so pale his freckles came out like livid knife points. Red-rimmed eyes that were still a little wild gazed back at him, and Molly knew that whatever power the wand had possessed, it was no longer in effect. Caleb drew a sharp breath. He edged backward.

Molly held out his hand. “Wait,” he said desperately. “I know I sound like a fool, but I swear I didn't know what I was doing.”

It was unnerving, the weight of Caleb’s gaze. “How did you do it?”

“It was a wand. I found it at a shop. It looked like a piece of junk, and, honestly, I didn’t expect it to work.” He swallowed. “Not that that’s any excuse. Caleb, I'm so sorry for doing that to you. Are...we okay?

Caleb blinked very heavily, as though some great emotion was being held at bay, if only just. Molly thought back to their argument, the one where Caleb confessed that the tempest of pain he dealt with was never far from the surface. “Sometimes we make misjudgments,” Caleb said finally. “But, Mollymauk –” His voice cracked. “Please don't do that to me again.”

Bile rose in Molly’s throat. He wanted to say he could never, that he would never. But he already had, and neither of them could turn back time. “Caleb,” Molly said.

But Caleb had already begun shuffling back up the stairs to his room, and Molly did the only thing he could do to preserve the man’s dignity and his choices.

He let him go.

Chapter Text

It started when Caduceus spotted the faintest tendril of smoke against the darkening evening sky, a tendril which, upon investigation, lead to a camp so recently abandoned, the ashes of the firepit had yet to grow cold. Yasha was examining them with the toe of her boot while the others returned. “We’re alone, as near as I can tell,” Fjord reported. “Whoever these people were, they’re gone now.”

“Caleb and I found pegs and some wire,” Nott said. “The kind you use in snares.”

“Hunters, maybe? If so, they cleared out pretty quick.”

Beau shrugged. “Their loss is our gain, right? There’s a stream close by, and nobody has to collect the firewood.”

Fjord frowned. “It doesn’t bother you, not knowing why they felt the need to get out of dodge?”

“What’s to worry about? We’ll set a watch like we always do, and Caleb can put up his bubble thing if you’re feeling paranoid. But it’s already nearly dark, Fjord. You really want to stumble around looking for a better place to camp in these woods? There are wolves. Bears, too, if we read those tracks right.”

Fjord turned to Yasha. “What do you think?”

Yasha looked at the boughs of the trees, which were swaying. Dampness stirred in the earth, and the leaves had flipped over, showing pale undersides. “It’s going to rain,” she said.

Nott shivered, shoulders around her ears. “I don’t like rain. It’s cold. And wet.”

“Well, that settles it,” said Beau. “Come on, Fjord. Don’t be a wuss.”

Fjord rolled his eyes, but relented. Evening chores were organized, the fire was remade, and everyone settled in to rest after a day of arduous travel. Felderwin, their destination, was still a ways off, but Nott had been growing increasing edgy about arriving as soon as possible, and so they’d set a punishing pace. Why it was so urgent, Yasha wasn’t certain, but in a group so thick with secrets, no one could afford to throw stones.

While camp life carried on around her, Yasha found a place near the fire to whet her blade. It soothed her, the rhythm of stone and steel, and, as the smell of rain began to sharpen, she could feel restless movement all around her: squirrels retreating to their nests, birds fluffing up their wings, and worms squirming as the earth prepared to drink. A whisper in the wind spoke to her, and in some way she couldn’t understand, it felt more present than the voices of the people around her.

She rested her sword on her knees. Molly had been the only one whose voice was louder than the storm. With him, she’d felt the confusion and sense of failure recede, and for a time, she’d resisted the call to flex the black pinions of her wings. Then he died, and Yasha had returned to the Stormlord. Yet when she wanted to hear him, he was silent. Frustrating weeks had passed. She’d tried praying. She prayed as she’d seen Jester pray, with her hands clasped before her. She’d fasted as the acolytes of the Empire’s gods did. She’d even cut herself and let the blood run down her arms as her own tribe had once done in the paroxysms of their worship. Nothing.

Then, on a storm-swept sea, she met them again. The Mighty Nein.

Weeks later, she still didn’t know how she felt about it. On the one hand, Yasha felt drawn to Jester's smiles. To Beau's fierce pride. To Fjord, whose deity seemed as demanding and unknowable as her own. To Nott, whose smallness was insignificant alongside the largeness of her personality. And Caleb, of course, who looked at her with eyes she recognized. She liked them. Molly had liked them. Yet while she was gone, this wild, clumsy group of strangers had become something more. And she, more than ever before, was an outsider. On nights like this, with ozone on the air and isolation sinking into her bones, it made her wonder. What was holding her to this place, these people?

“Yasha?”

Caleb was standing nearby in his shabby coat. Yasha’s eyebrows raised at the sight of the jerky in his hands. “Where did that come from?”

“Beau found it in her bag. We didn’t want to tell Caduceus, but all of us were feeling a little empty after dinner.”

Yasha set the meat between her teeth. It was leathery and tasteless, but welcome nonetheless. They’d all had to tighten their belt loops recently. Hopefully they’d have the opportunity to stock up soon, especially if they were resorting to digging ancient jerky out of the bottom of their packs.

Caleb said, “Some of us are a bit apprehensive about our hosts, so I’m going to set up the hut tonight.”

Yasha considered the restricted quarters of the magic bubble with its press of warm bodies, wrapped in the smell and sound of breathing. “I don’t know if I’ll join you,” she admitted.

“Of course. You simply looked as though you were far away, and I wanted to check on you.”

The gesture was kind, even if Yasha preferred her own company, and for a hushed moment they took in the flames together. It was comfortable. Caleb could be awkward at conversing – as awkward as Yasha herself – but he excelled in silences. The branches creaked as another gust of wind cut through, and, for some reason, a question found its way to Yasha’s mouth.

“Caleb, do you believe in destiny?”

The man looked at her, wearing an odd expression. “You are not the first person to ask me that.” When Yasha merely waited, he took a breath. “I do not know. Once, I would not have. My…once I was told only the unwashed masses would allow a deific power to determine their future. And yet, there are certain things – Nott, the Nein – that I would like to believe are the product of divine appointment. But if that is so, I must also believe that other, more painful events were also fated. Injustices, cruelties –”

“Deaths,” Yasha said.

“Yes. And so,” Caleb said, trailing off.

Yasha sat back. “That makes sense.”

“If I may, why do you ask?”

Yasha gripped the pommel of her sword. It lay in her lap, a cool, familiar anchor for her wayward thoughts. “Just thinking. About the future. And the past.”

“Mollymauk,” Caleb said.

Yasha had no intention of taking this conversation into that place. “I didn’t say that,” she said.

Caleb withdrew immediately. “Of course not. I’ll – just go set up the hut now.”

Yasha regretted her sharpness. It was unfair. And yet… She closed her eyes, listened to the wind. Though it spoke in words she didn’t understand, her skin still itched. Frustrated, she picked up her whetstone, drove it along the blade’s edge. Why did she have to make a mess of absolutely everything?

The village appeared so close to the edge of the map they almost missed it. Beau had to squint to make out the name. "I think it's called Toadstuck Gulch. Who the hell names their town 'Toadstuck Gulch'?"

Caleb scrutinized the marker under Beau’s finger. "The type of town with highly provincial naming practices. Still, if all we require are supplies, I imagine it will serve very well. After all, a small town isn’t likely to turn down trade.”

Fjord scarped his fingernails through his scalp, which was beginning to look stiff with trail dust. "As long as we can get a roof over our head and a hot meal. I don't know about the rest of you, but I’d rather not spend another night with pine needles for a pillow.”

Caduceus, engrossed in a peculiar growth of mushrooms on the side of a shady tree, glanced in their direction. "We had a hot meal last night.”

Fjord’s expression did a complicated kind of gymnastics. “‘Deucey,” he said finally. “I'm going to level with you. Your field rations are leagues above the usual, but a man can’t live on watercress and root vegetables alone. Besides which, the dandelions we've been eating are giving me cramps."

Hands braced on his hips, Caduceus admonished, "I think you should show a little more gratitude for the Wildmother's provision. Still, I wouldn’t say no to cooking on a stove instead of a campfire."

Jester exclaimed, "Could you make pastries? Because I'm totally out, and Sprinkle is getting very grouchy about it." Barely visible inside the fringes of her cloak, two beady eyes peaked out, and they did look malevolent.

“Well,” Caduceus drawled. “I don’t have much, as you might say, expertise with that kind of thing, but I could certainly –”

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Beau interrupted. "Baking and stuff. Roofs. Hopefully ale. What do you guys say? You up for a little civilization?"

Yasha was ambivalent. Her own framework for civilization was a windswept plain, tents reinforced with turf, a firepit. A roof made no difference to her. Regardless, she ambled alongside, though she listened with only half an ear to her companion’s speculation about the possibility of beds or bookshops (“Really, Caleb?”).

Her attention was drawn back when Caduceus suddenly stopped. He sniffed the air. "I think there might be something wrong."

By this time, they were close to the outskirts of Toadstuck Gulch, where forest began to thin into pig trails and beds of potatoes. Nothing alerted Yasha’s senses, but Caduceus was rarely wrong. She edged her hand toward the pommel of her sword.

The others had also tensed. "Someone approaching?"

"No," Caduceus said. "The wind is from the west, and I can smell – well, I can smell sage burning."

He didn’t have to explain. There was only one reason for a settlement to burn that particular herb in such a large quantity that it could be smelt on the wind. Caleb buried his fingers in Frumpkin's fur. "Disease.”

An atavistic fear encroached on them all. Disease was the killer no weapon could resist; it could wipe entire tribes out of memory. "Should we check it out?” Nott asked uneasily. Perhaps she was thinking of sicknesses that had swept through her own clan. Were goblins even affected by such things?

“I’m certainly going,” Caduceus said. “They might need help.”

Fjord’s head fell forward with a groan. "So much for a hot meal.”

Beau punched his shoulder. “A hero’s work is never done.”

"Let's just hope it’s not the plague,” said Fjord. “That might take the hero right out of me."

A more mundane trouble had come to Toadstuck Gulch than the plague, though it was no less dangerous for being common. The Mighty Nein arrived to a village made of a dozen homesteads, banded together by a small temple, an alehouse, and a market. Windows hung open, and the fragrance of burning herbs was heavy in the air. Yasha flanked the clerics as they inquired about the symptoms.

Fever. Stomachache. Dehydration. And loose, bloody stools.

“It’s dysentery, if I had to wager a guess,” said Caduceus. He glanced around. “But that doesn’t make sense. I don’t smell sewage here. Everything seems well managed, clean.”

In the center of the village, Yasha saw a community well. She placed her hands on the stones. There was a cover, solidly fitted and fixed in place to keep out everything from chicken feathers to road dust. Yet as she rubbed her fingers along the edge, the seal flaked away. "This is just clay."

"That can't be," said one of the villagers. "We resealed it just last spring. I helped mix the mortar." Yasha exerted her strength, and the wood gave, shifting from its seat. "Cor," said the man. "You think someone's tampered with it?"

"There is one way to find out," Yasha said.

As soon as the cover came away, a stink filled the air. A short time later, they pulled a rotting deer from the well. An angry murmur rippled through the crowd. It was a despicable act, poisoning a well. A reliable water source was lifeblood to a town. Some wells lasted generations, touchstones for all of village life. To ruin one was reprehensible.

Fjord asked, "You had any unwanted guests recently?"

A bearded man who’d introduced himself as John Cloven pressed his mouth into a straight line. "We had a group of hunters came through. Thought they paid too much attention to the young people, so we hurried them on their way. I never woulda thought they'd take things this far."

Yasha watched a parent draw a sickly-looking child close. "What will we do now?"

"Lucky you,” Beau declared. “These two are clerics.”

Hope traveled through the crowd in a series of murmurs and exclamations. Someone asked, "Will you help us, then?"

Caduceus smiled gamely while Jester swished her shirt. "Oh, yes. We can totally do that."

Fjord scuffed the dirt. "We might be able to help with the well, too. I can probably feel out the water table, find another place to dig. And we've got some muscle to us. To close up the old, start on the new."

"Unnecessary," said Caleb, pulling out his cat’s paw. "Find us a spot, Fjord, and I will take care of the rest."

Yasha watched her friends mobilize, taking on jobs suited to their talents. Beau directed the efforts to close up the old well. Nott was joined by the town’s healthy adolescents, who went in search of stones. Fjord and Caleb put their magic to work, and so did Caduceus and Jester. And what was Yasha to do? The Magician’s Judge rose over her shoulder, but what use was a weapon at a time like this? Letting out a sigh, Yasha joined those forming a loose circle around Beau and picked up a shovel.

They made steady progress. Caleb’s monstrous cat paw broke ground on the new well. It clawed its way out of the earth, reducing much of the need for heavy excavation. Reinforcing the inside took longer, and as for filling the old well, it was simply a labor of time. Yasha took a break around noon on the second day to watch as blue, freckled fingers danced over an upturned face.

"That's a good baby," Jester cooed. Her holy symbol rattled, and the baby made grabby hands as it began to glow. Within moments, the flushed cheeks softened to a more natural, ruddy pink and Jester declared, "There! All better."

"Oh, thank you," said the child's mother as her little one began to squirm. "I’ve forced as many sips of broth and water as I could, but she was just so weak."

"Dehydration may not kill as fast as a sword," Caduceus agreed from where he was kneeling beside another child, who was staring fixedly at the beetle flexing its leg on Caduceus’s staff. "But it's just as deadly."

The toddler pointed. "Bug."

Caduceus patted his curls, and the beetle took off, fluttering in lame, loopy patterns. "I think that's the last of them."

Jester stood, cracking her back. "Whoo! I’m really worn out, you guys. I hope they give us a super big 'thank you' dinner at the alehouse tonight."

“You’ve certainly earned it,” Yasha said. She was fascinated, as always, by the magic the clerics wielded with the deftest stoke of a furred or freckled knuckle. She, too, could heal, but by comparison, Yasha seemed unsuited to such gentle magic.

Jester preened. "It's sweet of you to say that, Yasha, but we had to do something. Did you see that mama's face? Imagine losing your baby to something like a tummy ache."

Yasha had, in fact, seen many babies succumb to diseases that drained their little bodies until the spirit left them. Caduceus caught her eye knowingly. Because, of course, working at a cemetery in the backwoods of the Empire, he would have experienced how close death lingered to every door. She fell in step beside him as the three of them walked across town. People smiled and waved at Jester and Caduceus, calling out their thanks. It made Yasha think again of her own meager gifting.

"Jester,” she asked. “When you heal people, what is it like?"

The bridge of Jester's nose curled. "Well, I guess it feels kind of like water tickling your toes. What about you, Caduceus?"

"Hm." He stroked his chin. "For me, it’s more like earth turned up from quiet places were the sun hasn't reached in a long time. And there's a nice smell, like things growing low to the ground, or leaf litter."

"Oh! There is a nice smell, isn't there?" Jester agreed. "For me it’s rosewater, the kind my mama uses when she sings. I've never smelled your leaf litter, Caduceus."

"Maybe it's only the healer who can smell it," he suggested. "I've never tried to smell other people's healing before." Caduceus leaned toward Jester (who held her hands up helpfully) and sniffed. "Nope. Just wet dog."

Jester giggled. "Nugget was licking my hands during breakfast."

When Yasha used her own healing, it wasn’t like water or overturned earth. It started as an almost painful tingle that grew in intensity until it leapt into the nearest body. There was an odor, but it was like the sky after a lightning strike. 'Healing comes from divinity,' she reminded herself, and the Stormlord was no deity of bending grass or colorful paints. But did the limits of her healing lie there, in his nature? Or was it related to her uncertain devotion, which she still – even now – rarely understood?

At that moment, the little boy who’d chased after Caduceus’s beetle came running past, and Yasha was so distracted she ran directly into another person. “Oh, Caleb. I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

He brushed the dirt from his backside. “No worries. I’m well.”

“Are you bleeding?”

Caleb looked at his knuckles, which were oozing sluggishly. “Ah. It is nothing. A minor injury. I’m sure Jester or Caduceus will bandage it for me when they have the time.”

Yasha looked at her hands; blunt, boxy, and brutish. And yet… “That looks painful. Perhaps, if you don’t mind, I could try healing you?”

Caleb’s mouth quirked with good humor. “Might I remind you, I allowed you to shave me with a great sword.”

Indeed he had. Yasha still wasn’t sure what to make of that, though the memory was a fond one. She took his hand and concentrated on the energy beneath her skin until – with a sizzle of discharge – it entered Caleb’s body. The cut sealed, leaving behind a raised, jagged scar.

Yasha stared. “Oh. That isn’t quite –”

Caleb examined the mark, but dismissed it just as quickly. “What is life without a few scars?” he asked. “Thank you, Yasha.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. However, the uneasy feeling had not faded. In fact, it had grown worse.

Yasha didn’t stay at the alehouse. Once the celebratory dinner had been eaten, she took the opportunity to slip away, into the more familiar terrain of the deep woods.

The forest was hushed as she ducked under trees old enough to have been planted before the memory of her tribe. Her boots, sturdy enough for a harsher wilderness than this one, had no trouble passing through a terrain of thickets and underbrush. It was cool and green and quiet, a far cry from the noisy tavern she’d left behind, and her shoulders began, finally, to loosen. She needed this. Just the smell of wildflowers and moss and water, and the sound of her own feet underneath her as she strode without destination or thought.

She reached a large stone where a tree had wedged in its roots. A good place to sit, but even as she considered it, the hair on the back of her neck prickled. She drew her sword in one seamless movement and made a slow circle. Eyes like slashes, koal-dark and whetted, she hissed, "Show yourself."

There was a pause.

"Ah." With an awkward misstep, Caleb pushed through an intervening patch of weedy plants and waved at her sheepishly. "I’m sorry if I startled you."

Yasha lowered her weapon. "Caleb. What are you doing here?"

"I was concerned you might be leaving us," he admitted, “so I followed."

"To stop me?"

"I suppose," he said, though not with much conviction, and Yasha’s hackles lowered. Especially when he followed up his statement by adding, "I didn't want you to go without one of us saying goodbye. You aren't – you do not go unmissed. When you are gone."

Yasha regarded him. Caleb’s face had broken out in even denser freckles over the last few days of direct sunlight, and his blue eyes were soft and transparent, making subtle shapes that were like smiles but quieter. A surge of fondness went through her at almost the same time a whisper from within warned, 'Don't get attached.'

She wet her lips. “I wasn’t leaving. It just got loud.”

“It was,” Caleb agreed. “Our friends, bless them, are boisterous at the best of times. Not the best companions for thinking.”

He left the door open, but exerted no pressure. Yasha chose to walk through it. “My mind has been on...things lately.”

“What sort of things?”

“I keep thinking I’m not...sure about anything. Not like Caduceus or Jester. Or any of you.”

Caleb laughed. Not a happy laugh, but one edged with wry amusement. “If you think I’m sure about what I’m doing here, with these people, then I have done a very good job of hiding from you.”

“You have Nott,” Yasha said, because the dedication between those two shown through everything, just as hers had once shown with Molly.

“You have us all,” Caleb said. “Truly, when you are not here there is a…wholeness that is missing.”

“We haven’t been whole for some time.” Yasha heard the bitterness in her voice, but she couldn’t help it. It would have been easier if Caleb had argued with her, but of course he didn’t. “I’m jealous of their certainty,” she admitted. Jester and Caduceus.

“Most people would be,” Caleb agreed. “They are very good, those two.”

“Maybe I’m just not good enough.”

“I think you are good,” said Caleb.

“Then why can’t I understand the Stormlord? I don’t know what he wants.”

Caleb rubbed his hands together. “Ah. There, you are asking the wrong person. I have no insight into gods and worshipers, and as for meeting expectations – let us just say I am a professional failure.”

She huffed. “Caleb.”

He held up his hands. “No, really. I am very good at it. Nott believes I cannot even fed myself, and Beauregard has told me flatly that, were I ever to attempt punching someone, I would break my ‘pathetic’ wrists. Caduceus no longer allows me to go to sleep without washing my face, and Jester has taken to tying bells onto the hem of my coat because ‘you might walk into a ditch and die, Cay-leb’.”

Yasha smiled despite herself. “They love you,” she said.

A flush traveled up Caleb’s neck. He coughed into his hand. “The point is, we’re all screwups. You are not unique in feeling confused.”

Despite her desire to guard herself, Yasha felt warmth pool in her stomach. “Thank you, Caleb.”

He shuffled in place. “Ah. Of course.”

There was a long pause, and then Yasha said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.”

“Of course,” Caleb said. “Forgive me for intruding.”

“No. I’m just uncomfortable, and I don’t know what else to do to make you leave.”

The man grinned. “I’m also uncomfortable. I’ll just be heading back.”

“Goodbye, Caleb,” she said and watched until his back disappeared between the trees.

Caleb left Yasha without knowing whether he would see her again. When he’d found her backlit by falling leaves and an orange-red sun, he’d thought to himself, ’She’s leaving us.’ However, the words they’d exchanged gave him hope he might wake in the morning and not find Beau sulking over her breakfast or Caduceus casting thoughtful looks at the horizon. At the very least, if Yasha had to go, Caleb hoped she might find her way back to them whenever her heart or her god allowed.

He was passing a stream when he heard the cry. It was high-pitched and throaty; the sound of an animal in distress. Caleb’s steps faltered. On one hand, it was stupid to approach an unknown creature. However, the pitiful sound had gone straight to his heart.

He followed the stream until it emptied into a basin, where it formed a large pool. There were tracks pressed into the soft mud, of which Caleb recognized a few: muskrat, squirrel, possum, fox. He ticked them off until one print – much larger and deeper – made his muscles go rigid. They’d seen something like this a few days before, and it had given even Yasha pause.

Taking care to make no sudden movements, Caleb searched the spaces between the trees. At first, he saw nothing. Then, from the reeds growing thickly around the water, there was another bleating cry. As the creature struggled, the grass parted enough for Caleb to get a look.

“Oh,” he said breathily.

Chestnut brown feathers. A flat, disk-like face and a tiny, curled beak. Two impossibly large golden eyes, and, in place of the wings one might expect, the paws of a very different kind of animal. An owlbear. Very young, no bigger than a dog, and it was caught in a snare – no doubt laid by the same hunters who’d poisoned the well and abandoning their camp in the woods.

Caleb’s first reaction was awe. It was a rare, beautiful animal. His second was more instinctual; every hair on his body stood up, because babies were rarely apart from their mothers. Yet as he crouched, he still could sense no other creatures besides the owlbear cub and himself. ‘Get out of here, you fool,’ said a sensible inner voice, but instead he approached the pool.

“Hush, now, little one,” he said. “I’m going to help, so let us remain very calm about this.”

Despite his efforts, the cub’s thrashing grew more desperate. The snare had taken the little fellow around the forepaw, and Caleb’s lips went white with anger. Hunting didn’t bother him when it was for eating, but this served no purpose. Even freed, the cub might walk with a limp the rest of its life, or be taken by another predator before it could heal. Part of the balance of nature, perhaps, but it still grieved him. As for loosing it, the wire made things more difficult. Caleb couldn’t even see the loop itself, it was embedded so deeply.

Resignation passed through him, knowing he would certainly pay in blood for this kindness. And he wasn’t wrong. In the end, the snare came free at the cost of several punctures and a line of claw marks which penetrated even through his sleeve. “Scheisse,” he muttered through gritted teeth, but finally the wire parted. Both of their blood mixed into the steam as the owlbear cub rolled to its feet and wobbled for the tree line.

Caleb straightened, holding his injured arm. “That’s right. Go find your people. And avoid snares in the future, if you can.”

He was already imagining what Nott would say about his blood-soaked sleeve when he saw that the owlbear cub had reappeared at the edge of the clearing. It trumpeted, shriller this time and almost joyful. An awful thought occurred to Caleb, and, like a rabbit caught in the shadow of a hawk, his neck rotated until, at the periphery of his vision, he saw the source of the cub’s jubilation.

Huge. Brown. A wicked, curved beak, and eyes like black beads, dilated with fury. It’s claws kneaded the ground, and when it opened its mouth, it was like a brass horn, avian and alien and keen to take his life. Caleb’s heart stammered, a gasp of shock and terror spilling over his lips. He had no time to defend himself before she charged, and as his body flew apart, he became aware of several things, which his brain – snapped from rational thought – faithfully recorded with a distance born of trauma:

Bones made a sound like a dozen small branches snapping at once. One could feel, actually feel, the slide of horny claws as they sunk into your belly. The abdomen, when penetrated, had a bursting quality, and he was very pink inside, though the dirt and mud made it difficult to see the true color.

Then pain came screaming to the surface, and after that, there was nothing to feel except the sensation of pressure, violent tearing, and hooks.

Yasha heard the beast roar. It pierced her solitude, sending roosting birds shrieking into the sky. The pure concussive force of it took her breath. She had her hand on her sword even before a second voice, cut with desperation, split the heavens, and this voice was one Yasha recognized.

Caleb.

She tore through the forest, headless of obstacles. A rage was already on her, teeth barred as she plunged into cold, running water. As she trudged upstream, a bed of reeds drew her eye. It was parted, shredded. And there was an arm dangling into the water.

Her shout bounced off the trees. “Caleb!”

Pulling herself onto the bank, Yasha tore apart the stalks. Caleb was sprawled in the mud, and from the base of his ribs to the top of his hip bones, all was scarlet. It was as though he’d been raked by a dozen blunt knives, leaving the body cavity exposed. It must have disrupted the abdominal wall because Yasha could see shiny coils, bluish amidst the gore cooling against his belly. He held them in one hand, though it was doing little to support his dislocated bowels or to prevent the blood from pumping out with every erratic beat of his heart.

Yasha forced herself to swallow. She had to – had to what?

“Caleb, can you hear me?”

His lips were red. Teeth were red. Pink bubbles hissed between them as he breathed, and the whites of his eyes were sharp as bone as he scraped her with desperate, agonizing need. “Ya – shh –”

“Hush now,” she said, unable to watch him struggle over the syllables of her name.

Yasha knew some field medicine. One had to, living on the moors of Xhorhas. She remembered being taken on a hunt when she was very young. The hare had squealed when she strangled it, and afterward, striding back to the encampment with her field-dressed catch, her hands had been sticky with blood. And maybe it had been that – the smell of fresh blood – that attracted the wild cat, but, one way or another, it ambushed them, pinning down one of the other apprentice hunters.

The boy fought back, piercing the animal’s hide with a dagger, but it rabbit-kicked him before it died. Afterward, the boy remained on the ground, moaning. Their mentor assessed his condition.

“He won’t make it,” she said, “but you should see this anyway.”

She showed them how to clean the dirt from flesh, to fold the entrails back inside, how to the stitch and cauterize. Yasha could still smell the scorched flesh.

“There,” her mentor said of the shiny wound, livid across the boy’s stomach. He was pale and panting. “That’s what it should look like, done properly. Next time you’ll know.”

They’d killed that boy, before leaving. A swift death, better than the lingering one of sepsis he would have suffered. Still. Still.

Caleb’s face was twisted as Yasha washed the ropy bowls and tenderly, carefully, pressed them inside. She caught herself babbling, praying that only muscle had been perforated. If the slashing went into the organs, she might as well twist his neck right now, just as they had that boy’s.

The window of opportunity was closing. Caleb’s breathing was coming in compulsive gasps, and Yasha saw it in his eyes: the sheen – the death look of an animal close to expiring. His fingers, curled loosely, lifted from the streambed and pressed weakly against her thigh. Not wanting to be alone.

Yasha gripped her hair. She could not lose him, not in this senseless way. But what alternative did she have? They were miles away from the village. She had no healing potions. Was she really able to do nothing but watch him take his final breath?

In that moment, something primal snapped inside her. Her heart beat like a tribal drum, and her skin felt electric, hairs standing on end. Moved by instinct, she shoved her hands into Caleb’s body. Her voice went harsh, almost guttural as she called upon her god. Caleb seized, but Yasha perused him, refusing to let go as light surged through her hands. She felt the magic take hold, the seams of flesh twisting and coming together again. It was like splicing two ends of a rope – knotty, forceful, even violent – but it was working. For the first time, Yasha was aware of another body as she healed; the places where it leaked, the bright clusters of pain, screaming alarm. The wrongness of the wounds was an offense to her, and she hunted them, strangled them.

But despite her fervor, when she came to the end of her powers, the blood had not stopped running. Despair flooded her. ‘Weak, defective, fallen,’ the old admonitions snarled, putting their teeth in. But this time she snapped back.

“I’m not done,” she shouted. This one time, she would spare life instead of taking it.

Her hair flew around her as though in a wind. Her vision went white... And healing power surged once more. She nearly cried with it as the last of Caleb’s wounds shut. Afterward, she collapsed, her trembling arms barely enough to hold her. Beneath her, Caleb breathed, and Yasha laughed, ragged with joy.

Eager to speak with him, she shook his arm. “Caleb.”

His eyelids were closed and pale. Flecks of crimson were laid over his freckles, slowly drying. He lay in the reeds, still except for his chest, which slowly rose and fell.

Concerned she’d missed part of his injury, Yasha pulled aside what remained of his tunic. What she saw made her stop breathing. She reached out, touched. Felt the unevenness, the ragged, raised ridges.

Yasha sat back on her heels and wondered what she’d done.

As long as she lived, Yasha would never forget the faces of the others when she arrived back in the village, a limp and bloodied Caleb in her arms. Their relief at finding him alive swiftly turned to alarm when they saw her white face and heard her muttered statement: “I think…I did it wrong.”

Caduceus took Caleb from her, laying him in the barn where they’d been invited to say. After a tense moment, he asked, “Could someone fetch water? I want to get this off him so I can examine him more closely. Nott, will you help me with his clothes?”

Unable to watch, Yasha stepped outside. The dawn lights were coming out. They were coral and blue, like entrails. A songbird’s first cry was abruptly cut off. Owl, her mind supplied. She watched the stars fade as though in a trance.

At some point, she became too restless to stand still and wandered the town. No one approached her. Anyway she barely noticed them. Eventually she came to stand beside the new well. The plaster still felt cool under her hand. Had they really only finished it the day before?

Beau found her there some time later. “Hey. You okay?”

Instead of an answer, a confession came to her lips. “He was out there because he thought I was going to leave.” The thought had paced Yasha’s brain for hours, circling back and forth.

Beau blew out a stream of breath. “You’re not responsible for an act of nature, Yasha. Or an act of Caleb, for that matter.”

“Why are you here?” It wasn’t the question Yasha really wanted to ask. That question was for both of the humans in their party: Why do you keep following me when I don’t want to be followed?

“Caleb’s up. I thought you’d want to know.”

“He’s awake?”

“Yeah. Kind of dopey, like he hasn’t slept in a week, and sort of shaky, too, but given that he apparently had his guts hanging out earlier, I think he’s doing pretty damn well. You coming?”

When they returned to the barn, Caleb was indeed awake, although his head was still propped on a bedroll. When he saw Yasha, he lifted his arm. “It seems you saved me.”

The tight knot of anxiety inside began to ease, and Yasha stepped closer. “You could have walked it off.”

Beau snorted. “Caleb? Not a chan – Ow! Nott, did you bite me?”

“It was my poor judgement,” Caleb said, speaking to Yasha. “Sticking my nose where it didn’t belong.”

“Are you okay, then?”

Caleb patted his stomach. It was still difficult to look at, with its dense crosshatching of ropy scars, but they seemed pinker, cleaner, more harmless in the morning light, with their friends around them and the blood washed away. Seeing her stare, Caleb said, “I won’t be able to forget my blunder easily, it seems.”

“Serves you right for walking around in those woods by yourself,” Nott scolded. She pressed a strand of hair behind his ear. “You’re too weak not to have a minder.”

Caleb rolled his eyes. “I did survive for quite some time before I met you.”

“Barely,” Nott hissed. “You were half-dead, and you were sick, and you were so sad –”

“I could have punted both of you across a courtyard without breaking a sweat,” Beau said. “You were skin and bones.”

Jester giggled and pinched one of Caleb’s ribs. “You still are, practically. I’m totally going to feed you more pastries, although I still need to find some. Did you know the only kind of bread they have here is rye? Yuck!”

It was comforting, the familiar banter. Yasha allowed it to reassure her that, despite all that had happened, somehow – miraculously – things were back to normal.

“Weak or not, I think it’s time I took another, more personal walk in the woods,” Caleb said. “And before you protest, Nott, yes, I will be taking this one alone as well. Would someone help me up, please?”

Fjord grasped his arm to haul him to his feet, but he never got that far. As Caleb came up from his reclined position, he barked sharply and curled around his stomach. Caduceus tried to draw his knees back, but Caleb was locked up.

“What’s wrong?”

“Hurts,” Caleb panted.

“Hold on.” Caduceus got his hand on Caleb’s abdomen, eyes fluttering shut. When he opened them, his face was colored with confusion. “There’s nothing to heal.”

“What do you mean ‘there’s nothing to heal’?” Beau demanded. “Look at him.”

Perspiration still beaded Caleb’s forehead. “Perhaps I…moved too abruptly.”

He tried again to stand, but as soon as he straightened, pain flared in his eyes. Panicking, he struggled to get his feet underneath him, only to find himself once again bent over and wheezing. Tears ran down his nose, sputtering around his lips as he demanded, “What’s wrong with me?”

“I don’t know,” Caduceus said. “Everyone should leave, please.”

“What? Why?” Beau demanded.

“There are a lot of upset people in this room, and it’s not making things any easier.”

“I’m not leaving,” Nott said, circling behind Caleb. Her eyes were bright, and no one tried to stop her.

Everyone else headed for the door. At the threshold, Yasha looked over her shoulder. Caleb was still bent over under Caduceus’s shadow, while Nott hunched like a gargoyle. Yasha turned her back and pulled the door closed.

News came an hour later. Yasha could hear Nott crooning, singing a lullaby that sounded strange in her crackling goblin voice. As Caduceus shut the door, the sound cut off. “I’ve taken a closer look,” he said, “and I’m convinced he’s completely healed.”

“But how can that be?” Jester asked. “He was hurting so much.”

“Sometimes, even after an injury heals, it leaves behind scar tissue. When I heal magically, I can sometimes guide the process, leave less trauma behind. It takes practice, control.”

“I don’t have those things,” said Yasha.

“You reached very deep,” Caduceus confirmed. “It saved his life, but it also knitted the flesh together rather, ah, forcefully? It’s called an adhesion. Imagine your body as layers of muscle and soft tissue. These parts are able to flex and shift, moving smoothly over one another. Like your clothing can move freely over your skin, or the way you move comfortably between the covers of your bedroll. An adhesion is like taking thread and sewing those layers together so they no longer move effortlessly. That’s where the pain is coming from.”

This explanation was followed by cold silence, broken only when Fjord asked, “Can you fix it? Now that he’s here, with a proper healer?”

“I told you before. There’s nothing to heal. It’s like, instead of guiding the healing process, Yasha sped it up exponentially. The wounds are at least six months old.”

“But he can’t stay like this,” Jester protested. “He could barely move, Caduceus.”

“Perhaps if we took him to a temple, they would understand more than I do. In the meantime, we can help him be more comfortable. Warm baths. Tinctures. Massaging the tissue to build elasticity. He could improve. Have a better quality of life.”

Those were the kinds of words you used to describe someone with a terminal illness or a debilitating head injury: their quality of life could improve. Fjord thumped down. “I need to sit.”

Beau, true to form, wasted no time with sorrowing. She kicked a stone so hard it rattled the barn door. “So we take him to a temple. Simple.”

“He’s very upset,” Caduceus said. Because of course he was. He would be helpless, totally dependent on them with his mobility so reduced, and Caleb did not relish being out of control. Caduceus turned to Yasha. “I think you should speak with him.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Why would he want to speak with me?”

“He’s scared. He needs to know he isn’t alone.”

“You just said I hurt him,” Yasha said, taking a step back. She could feel the sky at her back. A voice, unheard by any but her, murmured indistinguishably.

“No, I said you saved him,” Caduceus said. “And now he needs you again. Please?”

Nott was hunched just inside the barn door, knees around her ears. She’d obviously been crying. “Nott,” Yasha said.

She peered out between the gaps of her fingers. “Caleb says he wants to be alone.”

It was a bad sign of what was to come. Even in his worst moments, when the fire flared up and he looked as though he wanted to crawl out of his skin, Caleb had never turned Nott away. “I’m sorry,” Yasha said. She didn’t know what she was apologizing for; the grief Nott was experiencing now, or the pain of the moment itself, which she had caused.

Nott rubbed her nose, inhaling snottily. “Did Caduceus tell you?”

“Yes. He – wants me to talk to him.”

Nott stilled. “Caleb really likes you,” she said after a moment. “He thinks you understand.”

“I don’t know about that,” Yasha murmured.

“Try, maybe? If he asks, tell him I’m here.”

Yasha’s chest was tight. She was no stranger to unfairness, but the unkindness of this moment was strong. To see it reflected in Nott’s eyes, to know it would be amplified in the space where Caleb laid... she did not want to go in.

In the barn’s uncertain light, the world was swathed in shadows. As she stepped between two support beams, Yasha could just make out Caleb’s shape. He was on his side, facing away from her as she approached. “Caleb?”

His shoulders tightened.

“I know you probably don’t want to see me right now,” she began, but before she could figure out what else to say, Caleb spoke.

“There was a man in my village when I was a boy,” he told her. “A veteran, wounded during service. I remember his scars. They frightened me. He shouted at people, snarled profanities. My father told me I was to be respectful, to pay no mind to his crossness; that pain changed people, and we should have compassion and pity for all he’d suffered. When he died, there was no funeral. The village just buried him with a prayer and a poppy and a sigh of relief.” He paused. “Yasha, it hurts to sit upright. How can I travel, how can I fight, how can I even survive if I’m a cripple?”

“You’re not a cripple,” Yasha snarled, unable to bear the word. “Caduceus says a temple cleric can help you.”

Caleb drew further inward. “And what if they cannot?” An unsteady waver came to his words. “I do not want to be that man.”

“You won’t be,” Yasha promised.

“I yelled at Nott,” he admitted.

“She understands. And she’ll forgive you.”

There was a long moment in which Yasha could see Caleb was struggling with something. She waited, letting him know by her patience that she would listen and support him. Finally, he broke. “I –”

She didn’t make him struggle. “What do you need?”

His voice cracked with surrender. When he blinked, she could see his eyelashes were wet. “I need to relieve myself, but –”

Yasha reached out. “Let me help you.”

Word of the accident spread through the village, about how the quiet foreign gentleman who made a cat’s paw emerge from the earth to dig them a new well had been hurt, forcing their visitors to leave sooner than expected. They showed their gratitude by providing foodstuffs; with dried meats and barley and late summer apples, until the Mighty Nein had enough supplies to last until they exited the foothills and made it to more substantial help.

“Those damn trappers,” Cloven said with venom in his voice. “Would that we had done more than run their arses out of town that day.”

“John,” his wife admonished.

Cloven quieted, but his jaw was steely, and Yasha doubted he’d changed his mind.

A modest crowd had gathered when Caleb appeared, leaning heavily on Nott. He paused to catch his breath, and Yasha saw him freeze, felt his mortification to be seen by these strangers in such a state of vulnerability. “You should move along,” she said to those nearest her. They dispersed with final words of thankfulness, of claps on the shoulders, and ‘bless you’s’. The Nein were left alone with their horses, their supplies, and their map – the same map which had led them here in the first place.

Beau let out a slow breath. “Cloven marked the quickest route. It’s a temple in Reinoss to Pelor. If we make good time, it should take us four days.”

It took them two weeks.

Caleb tired easily, his stamina eaten up by managing the pain that seemed to only intensify as time went by. By the time they stopped at night, he was limp as a ragdoll and soaked with sweat. He all but fell from the horse, and would shake so hard as he tried to rise that his knees wouldn’t hold him. Most evenings ended with him curled up next to the campfire, out cold. The first time, they’d tried rousing him to set up the bubble, but he’d been so groggy and mush-mouthed that he hadn’t been able to do it. It was a blow so tangled in Caleb’s insecurities he’d cried with the frustration of it – not out loud, but with red-rimmed eyes and a throat that bobbed up and down. No one had asked him to try since.

A few nights into their journey, Frumpkin laid curled under Caleb’s chin. He looked at them with imploring eyes and gave a soft, unhappy, “Mrrp.”

The Nein exchanged unhappy looks of their own, but it was Beau who said what they were all thinking. “He’s getting worse.”

Caduceus was intent on stirring something soupy and strong-smelling over the fire, but he paused to say, “Riding horseback is hard even when you’re in good physical shape.”

“We could walk,” Jester suggested.

Beau snorted. “And how would that help? He can barely get around camp. He’ll never make it over this terrain on foot.”

Nott put her arms around herself. “I wish I were bigger. If I were bigger, I could carry him.”

Yasha said, “That’s kind, Nott, but you know Caleb wouldn’t want you to carry him, even if you could.”

Her eyes flashed. “He lets you carry him.” But, just as quickly as the burst of heat flared, it died away. Nott buried her face in her palms. “I’m sorry. I’m glad he lets you help him. I just don’t understand why he won’t let me –”

It was, Yasha suspected, a matter of love. Caleb was frustrated and embarrassed. Despite trying hard to maintain stoic, those emotions sometimes spilled over into bitter words, and the last person Caleb wanted to boil over onto was Nott. It hadn’t become a matter of outright avoidance yet, but it was still hard for Nott, who would have borne the barbs and snarls bravely if it meant remaining at Caleb’s side.

“He cares about you,” Yasha told her, voicing what was most important. “Don’t doubt that.”

Nott sniffed. “It’s not his fault. He’s just hurting.”

“Patience is the best gift we can give right now,” Caduceus agreed. “And maybe this will help.”

He offered Yasha a ceramic bowl. It was warm against her cupped hands. She sniffed. “An ointment?”

He nodded. “It should help, if massaged into the skin. I’m hoping it will give him some relief. We can try it in the morning.”

After five days of travel through the mountainous wilds, they reached the main thoroughfare, and there they bought a cart. The farmer who sold it to them flushed with awe at the gold they placed in his hands. “This be more than its worth. Ten times more,” he murmured, because he was an honest man.

Yasha looked at his rocky plot of land, his tiny homestead. Two small barefoot boys stared at them from behind a fence. She took another gold from her pouch, laid it on the pile. “It’s worth it to us,” she said, and closed his fingers around the coin.

The farmer closed his mouth, his gaze passing over her people as she had gazed at his. She saw understanding dawn. “Just let me fill the bed with straw for ye,” he said, “and we’ll get you hitched up.”

The cart wasn’t better, exactly. The rutted roads made the bed sway with every rotation of the wheels. Still, with the straw and their bedrolls wedged around him, and Yasha and Nott on either side, Caleb did travel a little easier. Jester had taken to reading from one of the romance novels she enjoyed so much, and when she did, Caleb would fix his eyes on her and listen until his eyes slipped closed or her voice went hoarse from overuse.

The others also made gestures, each with their own branding. Fjord didn’t cluck or cuddle, but he did take to setting up camp in the evening, laying out bedding and assembling tents if rain seemed to threaten. It wasn’t as comfortable as their magic bubble, but Yasha knew it eased Caleb’s mind to have that responsibility taken from him.

Caduceus provided a steady supply of poultices and ointments. They required a great deal of preparing and minding, and Beau became his willing assistant, pounding or mashing the ingredients as though the root or bark had done her some personal wrong. Afterward, if Caleb turned up his nose, Beau would demand to know who he thought he was, spurning her hard work, and Caleb would go quiet and still and glare at her while Caduceus applied the medicine. Beau scowled right back, and occasionally she hugged him. Or pinned him. With Beau, it was hard to tell.

Yasha, meanwhile, had become Caleb’s hands, the one he turned to when he refused to turn anywhere else. Like the morning after a night of rain when he struggled to even sit up, and she knew he wouldn’t be able to get his clothes on by himself. Or when he moaned in the night, and Yasha rubbed his back until the spasms passed, bringing him some bark to chew on a mug from Nott’s flask.

In a short amount of time, they settled into a routine. It wasn’t good, and they all felt the strain of it, but they adjusted. Yasha even began to feel a tentative hope, a sense that – no matter what happened – the Nein would be strong enough to handle it. They would protect Caleb. He would be fine.

Then something happened.

It happened on the road, the cart rattling on as usual. They were only a few days out from Reinoss. Caduceus was humming in the driver’s seat, and Jester was halfway through a chapter in her book so saucy Nott had her shirt around her nose, eyes bulging with horror. Caleb chuckled at her embarrassment, but his eyes were half-lidded already. He’d passed a bad night, and even after copious amounts of willowbark tea, he’d already been exhausted when Yasha helped him into the wagon bed.

Fjord and Beau were on horseback, and their bantering was steady background noise. Then, over the hoofbeats, there came a noise like distant thunder, and Yasha raised her head just as an arrow passed so close to her nose it took a strip of skin with it. Fjord cried out, and Yasha heard the high whinnying of horses along with Caduceus’s voice as he tried to control them. The wagon jerked to a stop, and Yasha pressed herself back as another shower of bolts sprayed the outside.

Then Caleb swung onto his knees, extending his arms to fire two firebolts. The stench of singed hair and fabric filled the air, and Caleb caught Yasha’s eye, urging her silently. She seized the opportunity, springing from the cart while he provided cover.

Nott was already there, her back pressed to the baseboard. She fired her crossbow, smirking in satisfaction when a strangled shout was cut off in gurgling. “Highwaymen,” she hissed. “The dirty thieves. At least a score of them.”

Unlike the petty brigands they’d encountered outside of Zadash, these highwaymen were well-armed, well-armored, and fought like professional warriors. Individually, they would have been no match for any of the Mighty Nein, but their numbers evened the playing field, and Yasha found herself panting as four separate fighters exchanged blows with her and another fired from a distance. A crossbow bolt clipped her calf, and she went down on one knee with a bark of pain, but before any blow could reach for her lifeblood, two of the highwayman erupted in flames. Yasha was blown onto her back, the heat of the fireball singing her eyebrows and cheeks. Her ears rang with the shrieks of her would-be killers as they thrashed out their final moments in a red-orange blaze of searing salamander tongues. Yasha saw Caleb staring at the writing bodies and willed him to see her, but before she could be sure, one of the remaining highwayman swarmed over the side of the cart.

Frumpkin yowled, leaping from the driver’s seat onto the man’s neck. It was enough to give Caleb the advantage, but instead of turning to face his opponent, he folded. The highwayman grabbed Frumpkin by the scruff and casts the familiar away with brutal efficiency. He extended his hand for Caleb, who was swaying on his knees, unresponsive. The blade in his hand caught the sun.

Yasha’s vision went red.

After that, sensations came in flashes. The heat of blood. The tension of muscle. The snap of bone. When Yasha came to, the battle was in its aftermath. Her friends were alive. Fjord leaned against his falchion while Jester pet him with a glowing hand. Caduceus seemed to be putting Beau’s knee back together. Yasha blinked, eyes on the light filtering through the canopy of tree leaves, and tried to remember where she was…

Nott shrieked, and Yasha remembered. In the bed of the cart, Nott held Caleb’s head in her lap. “Caduceus!”

Hearing the urgency in her voice, he pulled himself into the cart while the others gathered in an anxious circle. He pulled Caleb out of Nott’s arms and into his own, feeling with his hands. His shoulders relaxed. “He’s okay,” he reassured them. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Then why is he like this?” Nott fretted, hanging onto Caleb’s limp hand.

Caduceus frowned. “The pain must have been too bad. He may have passed out. Hit his head.”

“He can’t fight like this,” Beau bit out. “He can’t just pass out when we need him.”

“He saved me,” Yasha snapped, regretting it when Beau flinched. “He was there. He fought.”

“And then he tapped out,” Fjord said tiredly.

Nott snarled, “What are you saying? That this is his fault?”

Fjord put his fingers through his hair. “I’m saying Beau ain’t wrong, that’s all.”

A silence descended. No one knew what to say. Finally, Jester murmured, “What if we get attacked again? He could get hurt.”

“We’re going to be at the temple tomorrow,” Yasha said. “After that, it won’t matter.”

The temple was dark.

“Of course it is,” said a peddler they met at the side of the road. “It’s the temple of Pelor. Come back when the sun shines if you want to see them sort.”

Which meant finding accommodations for the night, and despite how tired they all were, it was discouraging to have come so far only to be held back by something so arbitrary as moonrise. “Let’s take it as an opportunity to clean up,” suggested Fjord. “We’ve been living mighty rough, and we look it. It might be best if we come over less like vagabonds and more like we have a little coin rattling in our pockets.”

“Sounds good to me,” Beau agreed, and the others gave similar murmurs of assent.

Yasha looked to Caleb to see how he was taking their delay, but he was abstracted, sunk into his own mind in a way that seemed more and more common since their encounter with the highwaymen. “Caleb,” she said, touching his arm. “Did you hear what Fjord said? We’re coming back tomorrow.”

His eyelids rose and fell. “Mm.”

At the tavern, a meal was eaten (or, in Caleb’s case, picked over). Inquiries were made about a bath house in town, someplace that offered laundering services. Yasha declined, knowing Caleb would be uncomfortable with public bathing. “I’d like a bath brought up to our rooms instead,” she said. Nott gave her an aching look, and Yasha returned it with a small smile. “Go ahead with the others,” she whispered, “and try to relax. We’ll be alright.”

The temperature of the water was warm but not scalding as Yasha helped Caleb out of his clothes. His spine was a ridge of protruding bone, and the scars were much more visible like this. Not wanting to dwell on them, Yasha picked up a rag. Caleb didn’t comment when she asked if he would like her to scrub his back, which she knew he had difficulty reaching. His chin, which was resting on his breastbone, hitched. She took that as a ‘yes’.

Yasha walked a line between gentleness and firmness, never entirely sure which Caleb needed. At times, he seemed close to breaking, at others angry at being treated with kid gloves. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she requested.

He shook his head.

It was eerie. Not the lack of words, which was normal, but the stillness, the passivity. “Please speak to me, Caleb.”

As though with great effort, Caleb drew in a breath. “I’m tired,” he said.

Tired of hurting. Tired of how difficult each day had become. “It’s almost over,” Yasha said, eager to state this truth. “We saw the temple. It’s just a matter of asking for help.”

“And what if they cannot?”

It was the same question he’d asked her before, in the barn. She wanted to reject the very notion, but she understood his wariness. Until an object was in hand, it was mere conjecture. Some called that pessimism, but Yasha had seen too much of life not to treat it with caution. She knew Caleb was plagued by the same insecurities, the same doubts. And the stakes were especially high.

“Let us believe they will,” she said simply.

Caleb dipped deeper in the water.

There was quiet expect for soap bubbles popping and water lapping against the sides of the tub. Yasha stroked the rag through Caleb’s hair, wrung it out. “Caleb?”

“Hm.”

“Are you angry with me?”

He lifted his head from the water, met her eyes for the first time. “Angry with you.”

“If you hadn’t followed me. If I had reached you sooner. If I had – had not healed you this way, you wouldn’t be like this.” It was the first time she’d had the guts to say it out loud to him, but now that she’d unleashed it, it hissed between her teeth, and she felt rage like she did on the battlefield. Rage directed at herself.

Caleb pulled himself higher. “If you had not healed me, I would be dead. Perhaps it would have been better, but I don’t blame you.”

“How can you not blame me? If I wasn’t so incompetent, if I had been a better follower of the Stormlord –”

He gripped her hand. “I’m not a man of faith. I don’t claim to understand the stipulations of your service, but you are not incompetent. Please do not define yourself by your service to another, Yasha. I have walked that road, and it leads no place you want to go. ”

“I’m supposed to be his champion,” she said, experiencing anew the old desperation she’d carried with her since Molly died. “I don’t even know what that means. I try to submit, but –”

“Perhaps,” Caleb said, “submission isn’t what he wants.”

The suggestion struck her, though it made no sense. What did a god want, if not submission? The interruption had broken through her escalating emotions, however, and now she found enough humor in the situation to sigh. Exasperation warred on her face, came out in a weak smile. “How did we end up talking about me?” she asked. He winked, and she splashed him with water. “Cheeky.”

“You missed a spot on my left flank,” he retaliated.

“I think you should go back to staring blankly at the bathwater.”

“Yasha,” he said. “Thank you. You have made this –” He gestured at himself. “Manageable.”

She smiled fondly, and seeing his jaw, which could use a shave, a cherished memory floated up. She said, “This means we are friends.”

He laughed, sending ripples through the water, and for just that moment in time, with hope as close as the next dawn, everything was clean and bright and full of promise.

The temple of Pelor was unlike anything Yasha had ever seen. Pelor was the deity of the sun, light, and healing, and so his people had created his temple to reflect those attributes. Every surface shone with plated gold. A massive disk with rays like extended hands hung above the huge double doors, themselves inlaid with shining plate, which blazed almost as brightly as the sun itself in the full light of day. It was blinding, awe-inspiring, and even when they were ushered inside, the attendant who greeted them was dressed in a tunic so white she appeared hazy at the edges. The golden haired girl, barely out of childhood, asked, “Why have you come to supplicate before the Sun Father?”

The group exchanged looks. Then Fjord took an uncertain step forward. “Well, ah. Our friend here was badly hurt, and now he can barely move.”

“It’s beyond our skill, this healing,” Caduceus added.

The attendant’s gaze rested on Caleb, who was doing his best to stand unaided, though he couldn’t hide his stoop or the pain that made his whole body tense. The girl’s eyes softened. “Come this way.”

They were lead through a grand atrium, resplendent with golden stained glass windows, which made dazzling patterns on the white marble surfaces. Soon, though, they reached a quieter, less ostentatious part of the temple, one which more closely resembled a hospital wing than a sanctuary. Here, well-tended people were lying on immaculate beds. In a smaller, private room, the girl asked Caleb to take off his outer clothing. One of their chief healers would see them shortly.

“So this is it,” Beau said. She scowled around at the room, which, like the others, was filled with an almost painful amount of light.

“They seem nice,” muttered Nott, but she had her hood pulled very close around her ears. In a place that was so polished, she looked out of place.

Jester nudged a golden disk hanging on the wall, engraved with the likeness of Pelor. It shifted on its chain, threatening to fall, and she clumsily righted it. She flashed them an abashed smile. “Oopsy.”

Caleb was also beginning to look uneasy. Like Nott, he was unused to such places, and he’d drawn himself very close, holding onto the dingy bandages over his arms and bearing in with his fingernails. Yasha told him, “Everything is going to be alright.”

He leaned gratefully into her shoulder.

They weren’t kept waiting long. A shadow eclipsed the door, and an elegant woman in golden robes stepped inside. She had silvery hair cut very short, which stood in strong contrast to her dark skin, and she looked at them with a calm dignity. “Welcome, friends of the Shining One,” she said. “I am his Radiant Servant, Chief Healer Oleeda Maleficent. My attendant tells me you have come to us to heal a suffering that defies regular care. Which of you is the invalid?”

Caleb seemed to shrink three sizes in the woman’s presence, so Yasha spoke for him. “This is Caleb.”

The healer pressed back his shirt. “Yes,” she said when she had examined the scars. “I imagine these do cause you pain. How long ago was the injury?”

“Two weeks,” said Caduceus.

Healer Oleeda looked at him sharply. “These scars are much older than that.”

“He got healed,” Jester spoke up. “But something went wrong.”

“And what backwoods practitioner did you get to commit this atrocity, which left your companion in such a state?”

The words pierced Yasha, this malediction against what she had done, but Fjord said, “Hey, now. It was a matter of life and death.”

Caleb, who’d been mostly pale and silent under this woman’s hands, drew back. “Yes,” he said firmly.

Oleeda gazed at him. “One way or another, the damage has been done. Allow me to take a closer look, and we will see what the Shining One and his servants might do to ease your suffering.”

Caleb allowed her to place her hands once more, though when she frowned and pressed hard on his stomach, he hissed through his teeth. Healer Oleeda’s golden eyes snapped open. “Who did this?” she demanded.

Startled, Yasha didn’t think of subterfuge. “I did.”

Oleeda looked her up and down, and her expression held more than disapproval. There was judgement, even hatred. “And which abomination is your god?” she asked. “For the truth is plain in the residue it left; this is no work of any sanctioned deity of the Empire. It is steeped with sacrilege.”

The party went rigid. The Empire recognized only six deities, yet among the Nein the only one who could possibly (possibly) be considered a follower of any of them was Beau, whose order was affiliated with the Ioun, the Knowing Mistress. The rest of them were pagans. Yasha felt a creeping dread come over her. “I’m not from here,” she stammered, and Fjord winced behind Oleeda’s back, because, no, that information would not help them.

Oleeda took a step back. “Followers of the Shining One will have no part in the rituals of heathens and infidels. You have desecrated his body. I will not dirty my hands.”

“What the hell?” Beau flared up. “What do you mean, ‘you won’t dirty your hands’?”

The woman appeared impossibly tall and aloof. Her folded hands were like white doves, too clean and delicate to be real. “I regret your suffering, but it is a natural consequence of wickedness.”

Anger flared in Fjord’s eyes. “Now wait just a minute –”

“You must leave. And you should be thankful that I don’t have you brought to trial for your illicit practices.” With that very real threat hanging over them, Oleeda Maleficent turned to leave, showing them her back.

“Wait,” Caduceus pleaded. “You’re a healer. He needs healing.”

Oleeda paused at the threshold. The tautness of her back had lessened, and her voice, when she answered, was soft. “Listen to me now, for I speak the truth; even if a restoration were attempted, I don’t know if this could be undone, at least not by mortal hands. For your companion is already healed. And as for miracles? They are for the faithful. There is nothing I can do.”

Her shadow passed over the door, carving an outline from the sun, and then she was gone. The Mighty Nein were left in the sterile room, alone.

Beau’s fists clenched. “That absolute –”

Metal rattled as Nott unearthed her crossbow from her belt. Her hands shook around the grip, but Caduceus put his hand over hers. “No. If they don’t want to help, it would be foolhardy to try and force them. And,” he paused. “I don’t think she’s lying about this being beyond her.”

“That can’t be true,” Nott said. Her voice was all over the scale. “Caleb has to get better.”

Caleb. Yasha turned to him. He was sitting on the cot, hands curled in his lap. His eyes were fixed on the empty space where the healer had disappeared. Yasha stepped closer, stooping so she could see into his face. It was blank.

“Caleb?”

Very tenderly, he pulled himself off the cot and onto his feet. He picked up his tunic and coat, but didn’t attempt to put them on. When he took a step toward the door, his ankle turned. Yasha reached to help him, but he turned his shoulder.

They left the temple of Pelor without healing, but worse, they left it without hope.

Caleb went to bed as soon as they returned to the inn. He’d barely responded to anyone on the way back, though Nott and Jester both attempted to reassure him. Beau and Fjord had not said anything, and – most telling of all – neither had Caduceus. They ate dinner in near silence, until finally the tension broke and Beau slammed her palms against the table so hard the cutlery rattled. She stalked off into the street.

Jester, who’d been wavering near tears since they left the temple, buried her face in her hands, and, afflicted by her example, Nott let out a wavering wail before starting to cry herself. Caduceus wrapped his arms around them both.

Fjord placed down his flagon. “Maybe you should get them to bed, Caduceus,” he said. “I’ll go see if Beau needs someone to punch. Maybe it will help.”

He didn’t tell Yasha what to do. He already knew where she was going.

She left the door cracked so the room was illuminated by a narrow strip of light from the corridor. Yasha didn’t need it, but Caleb would, and she didn’t want him to be in the dark. In her hands was a bowl of ointment and a steaming mug. She sat on the edge of the bed. “Caleb.”

He turned his face into the pillow. Frumpkin, who was hunched in a corner of the mattress, made a wretched sound which seemed as much Caleb as cat.

Yasha took a deep breath. “It’s been a long day,” she said, “and I know you’re tried, but if you take off your shirt, I can apply the medicine Caduceus made. He said it’s extra strong. It smells awful, so he must be telling the truth.” When Caleb didn’t respond, she tried again. “Maybe I could light a candle? Then, after I put this on, if you’re feeling better we can get you something to eat.”

“Stop,” Caleb said.

The thickness in Yasha’s throat made her feel choked. “We have to keep trying, Caleb. Just because these people didn’t help us, doesn’t mean there’s isn’t anything we can do.”

“You heard that woman. Nothing short of a miracle, she said. A miracle.”

Until now, Yasha had not entertained the possibility of permanency. Now she was forced to. She thought of a Caleb who couldn’t dance when he got drunk, who didn’t stand suddenly and strangely tall in battle while embers hung like a halo around his head, who didn’t carry Frumpkin on his shoulders, or wander the streets of every new town looking for bookshops, or mummer arcane words while he marched in a circle around their evening camp, setting a safe place for them to put down their heads. Instead, she tried to imagine a world with this diminished Caleb, who snapped and didn’t eat, and barely spoke to anyone but her. Who needed someone to button his tunic and lace his boots. He wouldn’t last, she knew. He’d be like a ghost.

Caleb confirmed her thoughts. “I cannot be useless,” he said. “If that is all there is for me, it would be better if I were dead.”

“Don’t say that,” Yasha hissed.

His head hung to one side.

“Caleb, your life is worth more to us than the magic in your fingers or the words you use to call up huts and comprehend languages. You are… Nott loves you. Jester loves you. Beau loves you, though she won’t admit it. The others, you are very dear to them, too.” She did not say he was dear to her. The people she cared about were cursed.

“Jester loves easily. She’s had the benefit of being loved easily herself. But the others are more practical. I am a means to an end, and if I can’t be that…” He did not finish.

“Do you think so? Even about Nott?”

“Nott... She cares, but there’s something else. I thought it was because she wanted me to change her, but now… I don’t know what it is, but she’s ashamed of it.”

“What about Beau? Fjord? Caduceus?”

He sighed. “Caduceus and Fjord have already aligned me with their goals. And Beau has assigned herself protector of this group. She won’t put it at risk, not for any one of us individually. Not for me. Perhaps not even for you, though she favors you.”

“I think you’re wrong,” Yasha said.

He shrugged, but it was a gesture full of pain. Because this, Yasha knew, was the fear at the center of all that Caleb did, all that he was. He was certain that abandonment, deserved abandonment, was always near.

She took his hand. “Caleb, if this really is it. If this is how things are going to be, I’ll stay.”

He turned over. She saw the surprise in his eyes. “Yasha.”

“I promise,” she said. “Do you believe me?”

He tugged at their joined hands, as though testing the grip. Yasha tightened it. He blinked, and his eyelashes came away wet. Trust. It was something neither of them extended or received easily, yet here they were. “Yes,” he said in a voice that cracked.

She squeezed his fingers. It was enough.

It was late, and Caleb had finally drifted off to sleep. It was an uneasy sleep, and Yasha wished he’d swallowed more than a few mouthfuls of tea. Quietly as she could, she made her way downstairs, intent on returning the bowl and mug to the kitchen, but as she reached the bottom of the stairs, two voices gave her pause.

“We can’t go on like this,” Beau said.

Yasha peaked around the corner. Beau and Fjord sat at one of the tables. The only light came from the coals in the fire, which were almost burnt down, and a single candle, low in its cradle.

Fjord sighed. “What choice have we got, Beau?”

“We’ve got to face the facts. We could barely keep him alive just to get him here.”

“What are you suggesting, then?” Fjord demanded. “Shake his hand, give him a pensioner’s pouch, and wish him well?”

“Don’t snarl at me like that. I’m just saying. He can’t fight. He can’t work. Can’t defend himself or ride a horse or, hell, put on his own shirt without help. This work we do, it’s dangerous, and it was bound to happen to one of us eventually. At some point, we’re all going to be too messed up to keep going, or else we’re going to be dead.”

She wasn’t wrong, yet hearing it – especially from Beau, who treated Caleb like an annoying but beloved younger brother – was like the thrust of a dagger. Yasha leaned heavily against the wall.

“I can’t believe you’re talking like this,” Fjord said, echoing Yasha’s thoughts. “I’ve seen how you are with him. I know you give a damn.”

“Of course I give a damn. Why do you think I nearly broke my hand earlier? You think I want to talk about this? But I also gotta think of us. All of us. The Nein.”

“Nein,” Fjord murmured. “We wouldn’t even be the Nein if it weren’t for him.”

“So we get a new name.”

Fjord growled, “Beau.”

“Look, we can help him settle somewhere safe. In Alfield, maybe. But if we keep going like this, he’s going to get killed. Or one of us will, looking after him.”

Quiet skittered like spiders, filling the room with cobwebs.

“Fjord, try to imagine a future where this works out,” Beau said. “Just try it.”

The man’s head fell. He scrubbed his jaw with his hand. “Maybe you’re right.”

Yasha left.

The sky was full of thunderheads. Yasha flung her head back, and her hair, soaked with the torrent of water that had begun cascading as soon as she reached open sky, was flung against her shoulders. Rain peeled from her face in place of tears. She screamed at the heavens.

“I prayed to you! I begged for your help!”

A crack of thunder split the air. It was as voiceless as ever, utterly without answers.

“I’ve done everything to figure out what you want. I’ve fought, I’ve searched, I’ve traveled. What do you want from me?”

Hail hit her face like icy slaps.

“From the moment I met you, everything’s been twisted. Why did you even give me these powers?” She threw up her hands. “And what use are they, if even in healing, all I’m able to do is harm?”

A flash illuminated the clouds, which boiled, face-like but faceless. It felt like a stern father, gazing down on her with disapproval. She could almost see the shaking head, the demand that she try harder. But Yasha had already tried as hard as she could. She’d given everything. Everything, and he’d still ignored her. Never had there been reciprocation: no teasing chuckle in the wake of pranks. No gentle words whispered in the fluttering of leaves or the growing of plants. Not even the blinding certainty of Pelor’s priests. She was left in the storm, to fight for herself.

Fury boiled in her stomach, and suddenly she had no more interest in begging. Rage filled her entirely, cascading over her helplessness and her confusion and her fear. She shook her fisted hands at the firmament, screaming at the injustice of everything that had happened to her.

“You’ve taken everything from me,” she bellowed. “Why can’t you give one thing back?”

The sky tore open with a roar of sound, and as black rent from black, a bolt of lightning streaked to the earth, striking the ground. It blew her back. Her eardrums felt as though they had ruptured. Yet when she sat up, instead of the burning crater she expected, instead there was an electric blue flower. It’s curled leaves seemed to sizzle, and Yasha saw that one of them was filled with water. Bubbles fizzed at the top, hissing on the surface as though the lightning itself inhabited the water.

Realization gripped Yasha, and she fumbled for her belt. There was a moment when she feared she had nothing, but then her hand touched glass, and she drew out a vial. She didn’t know how it had gotten there, didn’t care. With tremendous care, she siphoned the liquid into the vial. Held it in her hand.

Yasha looked at the clouds, grey and fast-moving, and her chest squeezed. ‘Fight,’ a voice seemed to say within. ‘Rage.’

Yasha sprinted back to the inn.

The halls were silent but for the wind outside and the rain pelting on the roof. Yasha paused outside of Caleb’s door, gathered herself, and stepped inside. She was surprised to find two figures on the bed. Caleb was there, but also Nott. She was curled into his side, squashed between him and Frumpkin. She didn’t stir when Yasha shook Caleb’s shoulder.

He blinked sleepily. “Yasha.”

“Caleb,” she said.

He shifted around, careful of Nott. “She came in to yell at me,” he told her. “For not talking to her and pushing her away. When I said I was sorry, she started crying.”

“I’m glad you spoke about it.”

He shook his head. “I was stupid not to trust her, but I am a stupid man.” A wavery slice of moon appeared in the window, casting silvery light over them both, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re wet. Have you been outside?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was praying. Yelling. Praying.” With shaking fingers, she pulled out the vial. It put off a phosphorous, living glow in the near darkness. It looked dangerous. There were no guarantees. She pulled out the stopper. “Do you trust me, Caleb?”

He looked at her, his pale eyes like two river stones. He held out his hand, and she placed the vial in it, curled his fingers around it, and held them in both of her own.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Do you remember, telling me the Stormlord didn’t want me to submit?”

“I remember everything, Yasha,” he said.

“Drink,” she said.

He put the vial to his lips.

The late afternoon sun was passing in and out of white tufts in a blue sky, and a gentle breeze was tugging at the grass. Yasha breathed in, smelling the baked heat of the earth. There was no hint of rain. She picked up the hare she’d just skinned. The fire was already crackling when she returned, and Nott looked up, showing all her teeth.

“Meat,” she cackled happily, then looked over her shoulder. “Hurry and give it to me. If we’re quick, we won’t have to share.”

“You’re not eating that without me,” Beau said.

“Go ahead, both of you,” Yasha told them. She had something else on her mind.

She heard his voice before she saw him – “You are a good boy, Frumpkin. Yes, you are,” – and put her foot on a twig, deliberately snapping it. Caleb looked up. “Is it time to eat already?”

“Not quite, but I caught a rabbit, if you’re interested. If not, I think Caduceus is making some kind of stew with beans.”

“Well, we cannot miss that, can we?”

“Do you need a hand?”

The book was placed in his pack, and Caleb stood fluidly. It was one long, limber movement, with nothing like the stiffness of before. He stretched his torso. “No, I’m good. There is still some soreness, but it is – ah, much better.”

Miraculously better, is what he meant, for that was the only explanation any of them could come to when the deleterious scar tissue inside his belly had untwisted and softened, almost overnight. There were still surface scars, and they still impeded normal movement to some degree, but he could walk, and he could run, and he could breath. The morning after, when Caleb put on his boots by himself for the first time since his accident, they had all of them – Yasha, Caleb, and Nott – wept.

Yasha said, “You know it’s still okay to depend on us, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered. “But there is much joy in not needing to, at least for something as simple as standing on my own feet.”

“We all need help standing sometimes,” Yasha said.

He gave her a half grin, and she was glad to see it reach his eyes. “You’re right. And we have good friends, when that need is there.”

“We do have good friends,” Yasha agreed. She put her arm around him, drawing Caleb toward the fire and the smells of home, hope, and family. It wasn’t what they’d expected, Yasha knew. It certainly wasn’t what she had planned. But for two lonely people who struggled to trust, it was more than they could have hoped, and for now, at least, it was enough.

Chapter Text

The Traveler didn’t like to admit he played favorites among Jester’s little band of followers, but naturally he did. They were all amusing in their own way. Like the half-orc with the extraplanar smell to him, reckless to the point of self-destruction. He was an amusing one, even if his sense of humor left something to be desired. Or the goblin who was not a goblin, the one who risked her neck for buttons. She was a prize, always ready to jump in and aid his Jester in heights of chaotic revelry! And the fallen aasimar, bespoken by the god of torrents, the rebel monk whose own faction did not understand her, and the firbolg cleric who lived in a graveyard! It was wonderful, really. Could there be a more elegant collection of twist-fates to make up the entourage of his priestess?

But his favorite, without a doubt, was the wizard.

Such a study in contrasts. Such a wild card. Would he condemn the world or save it? Assume existential power beyond the current understanding of mortals? Or burn out, unmourned and unremembered, except by his rabble of unlikely friends?

It helped that he was already connected to the fey. His little familiar glared whenever The Traveler checked in, wearing a look of disapprobation that was hardly respectful. But then, minor fey weren’t known for their respect.

He remembered one night around a driftwood fire. The wizard was taking a watch, and the light from the emerald flames tangled in the man’s hair. His eyes as he poured over his spellbook were dancing like flickers of fate and starlight, and the Traveler hadn’t been able to stop himself from drifting near. The familiar, curled in his master’s lap, narrowed his eyes.

The Traveler booped the cat-shaped being on the nose. “No need to get upset. I’m just admiring.”

The creature called Frumpkin lifted his lips and hissed. Caleb stroked his neck. “Is everything alright, kätzchen?”

Frumpkin butted against his palm, then rotated his tiny head to resume glaring. The Traveler chuckled. “Well, such bravery must be respected, I suppose. Another time?”

Since then, there had been many twists and turns in the path the Mighty Nein had taken. They’d even gone so far as Xhorhas, an entire land of chaos. They were somewhere outside of Asarius when The Traveler caught up with them. It appeared they’d had a bit of trouble. Nothing too serious – all limbs were intact, and there were still as many heads to count as formerly – but they did look a bit worse for wear as they set up a hasty camp under the shelter of dark-leafed trees.

Beauregard was attempting to keep watch, though if her bobbing head was any indication, she was finding it difficult. At one point her chin touched her chest, and she jolted awake, gaze bleary and goggles askew. “Caleb,” she complained. “I’m beat. Aren’t you done with that dome yet?”

The man in question didn’t look up from where he was sitting, cross-legged, a glass bead pinched between his fingers. It was a simple bit of magic, even for a mortal, but his concentration kept wavering. As The Traveler watched, his hand hung for such a long time the thread of his spell was imperiled. Feeling helpful, The Traveler gave him a poke. Frumpkin roiled at him like a little tea pot. The Traveler rolled his eyes.

The rest of the party was in a similar state. Yasha was picking through the haversack for more bandages, while Fjord held a cloth saturated with blood against his forehead. Jester was spread-eagled in the dirt, side-by-side with Nott, who moaned, “I think my bones are broken.”

Caduceus was picking his way back from a stream. It seemed he’d gone there to fill his teapot, though heating it would have to wait. His staff was propped nearby, but the crystal which acted as a conduit to the Wildmother was inert for the moment, as was her cleric, who was cheerful but pale as he lowered himself onto a log. “Which ones?”

“All of them,” Nott responded. “My ribs, my legs, my hair. Everything.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with it. I’ve done all the healing I can for today.”

Dissatisfied with his answer, Nott rolled onto her side. “Jester! Reclaim your title as the party cleric and heal me!”

Jester obliged, flopping her hand onto Nott’s forehead. “Bam! You’re healed.”

The goblin shifted. “That did nothing! I’m just as sore as before!”

“Oh. Oopsy. I must be a little tired, too, Nott.”

Nott made angry, theatrical noises, declaring, “Worthless! Both of you!”

Yet, despite the dramatics, it was clear the group had made it through whatever had befallen them well enough. Boorish though they might be, Jester’s companions were combat adepts, and though bruised and bloodied, none were so hurt that a night’s rest wouldn’t enable them to continue their journey.

Caduceus’s ears twitched, and he looked up in mild alarm. “Caleb! Oh. Never mind. Nice catch, Beau.”

Well, that was a complication. The wizard had fallen unconscious, and only Beauregard’s quick intervention kept him from faceplanting into the dirt. She dragged him upright, arms around his stomach. “Idiot. Can’t you even keep it together long enough to put up the stupid bubble?”

Caleb murmured inaudibly as Caduceus touched his forehead. “Ah. That nasty fever is back.”

It was a common enough side effect after a serious healing, and Caleb was in no real danger, but if his flickering eyelashes and limp hands were any indication, there would be no more magic from him that night, not even in ritual form. A pity. It was always more difficult without the dome in place. Mortals were so fragile.

Nott sat up, gazing at her former traveling companion with concern. Well, not truly former, but The Traveler wasn’t blind to the fact that the strange couple of man and goblin was no longer quite so close, not since Felderwin. “Will he be okay?”

Caduceus said, “He just needs rest. Beau, too.”

Beauregard chose that moment to breathe out a nasally snore, still wrapped around her fellow human like a living pillow. A feeling of fondness passed over the group, so intense it could be seen and felt – at least to those with the senses to recognize it. Fjord chuckled. “Time to put the humies to bed, eh?”

Caduceus pressed his hands under Caleb’s armpits. “Up we go,” he rumbled, ignoring Beau, who grumbled as she stirred. He maneuvered them both to their pile of belongings, propped them against a bedroll, and spread a blanket over them. “There now,” Caduceus said, brushing off his hands. “They’ve had a tough day, but they’ll feel better in the morning. We all will.”

Fjord cracked his neck. “I guess that means we’re circling the wagons around, old school, huh? I call first watch.”

“No, no, no. No watch for you, Fjord,” Jester sing-songed. Her deft fingers prodded the gash on his forehead, which was still refusing to clot. The Traveler felt her frustration as she reached for another ounce of healing and did not find it. Alas, what power he could grant her was limited to her own stamina, and it would be dangerous to funnel any more through her today.

The Nein bedded down for the night. There was an uneasiness to them, bereft as they were of walls or even the silver string to act as a ring of protection around them. Nott slept with one hand on her dagger, the other around her flask. Fjord very deliberately put himself at Beauregard’s back, though when they slept, their snores were so discordant it made the crickets fall silent.

The last of the light faded. The second moon of Exandria peeked out. In the distance, a toad began croaking a nighttime song.

“Sleep well,” The Traveler murmured as Jester curled up under her green cloak and drifted into the realm of dreams. He gave their impromptu camp one last glance, whispered a blessing, and then he went Walking.

‘Traveler!’

He was far away when he heard Jester’s cry. It was hoarse, laced with desperation, and he responded instantly, phasing back into the wastes of Xhorhaus. He expected battle, perhaps a rampaging animal or a wayward giant. He found an abandoned camp, blackened with streaks of scorched earth and a tree splintered as through from the force of a magic blast.

Jester was running. Once again, she tugged on the connection between them, but a cantrip was all she could manage. The Traveler pressed as much radiant heat into it as he could, but the energy flow remained choked, overused.

Wanting a firmer grasp of the situation, The Traveler cast his senses wide. He found Jester and Caduceus to the west, firing divine flame at their encroaching opponents, mostly bugbears and goblinoids wearing studded leathers and carrying an assortment of simple weapons – swords, axes, and arrows. In short, nothing to worry about. He could see Jester’s stubborn lip as she made clever use of her duplicate and another jet of flame. A crossbow bolt streaked out of the branches overhead, taking another ambusher in the throat, and The Traveler glimpsed a determined pair of yellow eyes glaring between the branches as Nott loaded another bolt. They were fine.

Not far away was Yasha, clutching her sword, and Beauregard, hunched and panting. A heavy manacle hung from her wrist, and she was saying, “Can’t we catch a break even for one goddammed night?”

Yasha didn’t answer. Her head was cocked as though listening to something unheard. “Nott? No, he’s not here. He’s not with you?”

Fjord had been toeing a dead bugbear, but now his brows raised. “What’s wrong?”

“They don’t see Caleb.”

Beau snapped upright, but then bent double with the sharpness of her injury. It didn’t stop her from gasping, “Caleb? Did they get him? I swear to the gods, if they put their hands on him –”

“Easy,” Fjord said, lending his strength as her knees trembled. “Did you see him, back at the camp?”

Yasha shook her head. “When they grabbed Beau, my vision went a little red. I don’t remember if Caleb was still there. Do you?”

“We can’t let them take him, Fjord,” Beauregard babbled. “A skinny human wizard with a Zemnian accent? He won’t stand a chance with those people or any one they’d think to sell him to.”

Fjord didn’t acknowledge her, but what she said was true. In an odd reversal of their Empire status, in Xhorhaus it was the two humans who were the most vulnerable. They were desirable chattel, being uncommon in this land, and perhaps that was what had inspired the ambush to begin with. Caleb and Beauregard would have made tempting targets to the unscrupulous sort. Clearly, their attackers had not succeeded in separating Beau, but Caleb…

“Beau’s in no condition to fight. Let’s get her to the others,” Yasha said, “and then spread out.”

The Traveler imagined Jester’s anguish when she realized what had happened. Her heart was wrapped around each member of her entourage with a great depth of affection, but she had a unique relationship with Caleb, one defined by a protectiveness and openness which he also extended to her. She would be devastated if he had been absconded with, especially like this, in a way so entangled with her own most traumatic experiences.

How to help? How to help? Once again, The Traveler stretched out, listening for the sound of heartbeats, for the crackle of boots over twigs and foliage. Less than a mile away, something caught his attention, and he found himself amidst a meteor fall of orange cinders. On the forest floor, an orc rolled, slapping at his arms and beeches, which were aflame. Another laid completely still, and The Traveler recognized the odor of burning flesh and hair.

Well, well. That was a welcome surprise. It seemed the wizard had managed to give his captors the slip. But where was he?

The Traveler found Caleb struggling to press through heavy foliage. He kept tripping onto his knees, and his gait was almost hobbled. Ah. More of those nasty manacles. The Traveler send a flare of insight to Jester, enough to get her moving in the right direction, and kept an eye on Caleb’s unsteady progress. His captors were regrouping, and he had limited time to put distance between them.

And here was the conundrum, one The Traveler had been pondering ever since Jester’s unadulterated worship started to change the fabric of his being: as Artagan, an unaligned being of chaos, he could bestow a boon on whomever he chose, whenever he chose, but as The Traveler – the deity or pseudo-deity he was becoming – his blessings were bound by a different set of rules, and there were consequences for overstepping. So, did this human who worshiped no god but hovered so tantalizingly close to devotion (at least to his Jester) qualify as one of the faithful?

By moving in a lateral direction, Caleb was slowly picking his way farther from the direct path of his pursuers. An intelligent move. Finally, the undergrowth thinned onto a deer path, and that’s when The Traveler saw it. Fixed high in a tree was a swinging log trap, its tip tapered to a deadly point. Caleb’s foot caught the tripwire, and the trigger snapped.

In actual time, what happened next was a matter of instants. The log began its decent, and The Traveler knew that if it stuck, Caleb would die. Jester would find him splayed over the log, feet dangling off the ground, his skin already cooling in the night air. So he made a decision.

Flinging out his hand, The Traveler gave Caleb a shove.

The log swung by like a pendulum, and – not The Traveler, but Artagan – felt a thrill of satisfaction. There, now. That was more like it. And he’d barely had to intervene at all! Just the littlest push, and all was well. He was about to indulge in a now-rare physical manifestation to Jester to bask in a bit of well-deserved adoration, when an inhuman wail shattered his self-celebration. Curious, he drifted closer and found Frumpkin pressed against his master, who laid on his side, limbs splayed out like a broken doll.

Oh dear. That was not good.

Artagan approached with reserve, for this was the cost of acting as though he could snap his fingers and the fabric of the world would rearrange itself to suit his pleasure. Not so in the Material Plane, where matter retained such brittle stubbornness. Permanence was new to Artagan, as new as the divine aspect he wore like a cloak. And this – this –

The man was destroyed. Through Artagan had exercised only the smallest amount of his power, the raw magical energy had entered Caleb with force and left a penetrating, ulcerated wound in its wake. Not to the outside of him, no. The kind of power Artagan wielded did nothing to sinew and bone. It was the soul where he reached, and though he had taken such care, his abilities were so unpredictable these days. Swelling and growing, shrinking and stuttering. And now?

He gazed at the ruin he had wreaked and swallowed hard. “It seems I pushed harder than I intended,” he admitted. He considered attempting to heal…something of this, but it was so difficult to channel his power without a suitable conduit…

Artagan outstretched his arm, willing to give it a try, but when he did, the creature called Frumpkin rattled with expletives and batted at him with a clawed hand.

"Alright. I won’t risk it. But he’s not going to last without repair. And how exactly you expect that to happen, I don’t know.”

A roiling filled up the spaces between the trees, and Artagan could see the lesser fey’s outrage popping like soap bubbles.

“You act as though it was intentional, which is entirely unfair.” He’d been trying to help. Was it his fault that a mere nudge had been enough to shatter the man’s spirit so thoroughly?

Caleb inhaled with a rattle, and the tether between his body and spirit, already a raw, suppurating wound, frayed further. Frumpkin mourned, pressing his nose to the man’s cheek, which was a blistery white.

Artagan tucked his hands into his armpits, nettled by an uncomfortable sense of compunction. “There’s really no need for such histrionics. Mortals die. Your wizard was an interesting one, I grant you that, but if you really enjoy this… dallying with mortals, you can always pick another sad-eyed creature to attach yourself to.”

If the lower fey had been angry before, now he was enraged. He turned on Artagan, even knowing what he was, and showed his True Face, full of fang and ferocity and fervor.

Startled by his vehemence, Artagan temporized. “Alright, alright. That was insensitive of me. Though what you want me to do about it, I don’t know. This is…” He gazed at the wizard, body intact but soul in wretched tatters, and felt genuine regret. “To be honest, this may be beyond mending.”

What the little fey did next surprised Artagan so much he failed to respond until it was too late. Frumpkin reached inside, past the fur and skin and flesh, down to his essence, and pulled up a bit of silvery, shivering light.

Artagan tried to intervene. “That is highly unadvisable. You really should think before you –”

Heedless of his warning, Frumpkin laid the glimmering strand over his master’s quivering spirit, letting it sink into the fissures and wind around fractures, reinforcing and sealing them. Frumpkin leaned close and brushed the man’s face with fine whiskers. A kiss. Then he turned and glared at Artagan.

Artagan knew what he wanted. “You’re not doing him any favors. The fey-touched attract too much attention, both in this world and the Wilds.”

The lesser fey did not relent, and, in fairness, there was a kind of debt between them. This mortal belonged to Frumpkin, and Artagan had meddled. Consequences. There were always consequences these days.

“Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Artagan leaned down, combed the man’s auburn hair away from his neck, and pressed his lips behind the man’s ear, where the mark was less likely to be noticed.

Caleb gasped, the first full breath he’d taken.

Frumpkin pressed into his chest, and the man’s hands came up. “Frumpkin,” he rasped. The creature responded enthusiastically, nuzzling and kneading him with joy. Artagan looked on with disapproval.

“Caleb! Caaaleb!”

Voices in the forest. The other members of the Mighty Nein had finally passed into range of hearing. Caleb stirred, but he was too weak to move. He gave his familiar a command, but Frumpkin hesitated. “I’m alright, kätzchen. Please. Go get them for me.”

Soon the little group was together again. Beau wept when she saw Caleb, though when Fjord tried to comfort her, she snarled that it was just the pain of her wounds getting to her. Jester grabbed Caleb into an embrace. “Are you okay?”

Caleb squirmed. “My legs.”

With help, he settled on the ground so they could examine the manacles. They were ugly things, heavy with cold iron. “Maybe if we take off your boots we can get them off?” Jester yanked the leather away, which only made Caleb flinch harder as the metal shifted against bare skin.

“Burns,” he hissed.

“Let me see.” Nott elbowed in. At first she touched the metal with caution, but when there was no adverse effect, she reached for her lockpicks, and within moments, Caleb was free. He sagged with relief as the bonds came away.

Caduceus examined his red, inflamed skin. “Never seen welts like that.”

Nott was poking the manacles. “They seem normal.”

“Let’s leave them, just in case,” Yasha suggested. “No need to take a risk.”

“I’ll rub ointment into your ankles for you, Caleb,” Jester promised. “It will feel much better after that. Maybe you’ll even be so relaxed you’ll want me to give you a full body massage!”

It was the kind of teasing that would ordinarily have the man floundering, but Caleb appeared distracted, his fingers lost in Frumpkin’s fur. “I –”

“Hey.” Beau sat beside him. “You alright? Really.”

Caleb looked back the way he came, where fire could still be smelt. “They grabbed me. I was able to use a fireball before they bound my hands. Then they were burning, and I –” His confusion intensified. He touched his heart, and Artagan, silently watching, glimpsed a thrumming there, beneath the skin, brighter than it should be.

“It’s okay,” Fjord said. “No need to force things. We’re just glad you’re okay. You gave us a real scare, you know. Beau was distraught.”

“Was not!” Beauregard barked, but her face was still too pale to be convincing.

Caleb pushed himself up. “I think I can manage the bubble now.”

“Are you sure?” Jester touched his arm. “We won’t be mad if you’re too tired.”

“It’s fine. I feel…invigorated.” From his arms, Frumpkin made a satisfied “mrrp.” The moon beamed down, and Caleb turned his face to it. Artagan was sure he saw a flicker of fine silver lines there, tracing the man’s cheek, but then a cloud cast a shadow, and the illusion faded.

“Hm,” said Artagan. That could be interesting.

It was sometime later before Artagan checked back in with the Nein. By that time, they were settled into a home of their own in Rosohna, and at the time of his visit, Jester was sitting on the rug before the fire, painting statues of his Traveler persona. Her tongue stuck out at the corner, and he tweaked her ear fondly.

When Jester giggled, Yasha looked up from her journal. “Everything okay, Jester?”

“Oh, yes. I was just thinking about The Traveler. Do you think he’ll like these?” She held up one of her statues, complete with green robe and hooded aspect.

“How could he not?” Caleb was also on the floor, leaning against the furniture with one leg outstretched. Frumpkin was draped across his lap, limp and relaxed as Caleb stroked his spine again and again. “You are very talented.”

Jester fluttered her eyelashes. “That’s very sweet of you to say, Caleb.”

He flushed. “Ah…”

Fjord entered the room with Caduceus at his heels, both carrying a tray covered with mugs and hunks of crusty bread. “Soups up.”

The fire popped, and a log collapsed. For a moment the room dimmed. Then Caleb raised his finger, gave it a whirl, and the fire steadied, glowing brightly once more. Artagan gazed at it with a frown. It was subtle, subtle enough that he doubted anyone but himself had noticed, but there was just a bit too much ease in that magic. And was that a little faerie fire mixed in with the regular flames?

Caduceus reached for Caleb’s chin. “Hey. That’s odd.”

“Do I have something on my face?”

“It’s your nose,” Nott said knowingly. “There’s always ink on your nose.”

Caduceus tilted Caleb’s head. “It’s not ink. It’s just in the firelight, but I thought I saw…is that…silver?”

On Caleb’s lap, Frumpkin opened a single eye.

Beau stepped forward, squinting. “I don’t see anything.”

Caduceus brushed his thumb against Caleb’s cheek. “There. Faint lines, like whiskers. And it glows. Kind of like starlight.”

Jester puffed up with outraged. “Caleb! Did you get one of Orly’s tattoos without telling us?”

Caleb shook his head. He looked perplexed. “Perhaps you’re imagining things,” he said. “I don’t have any tattoos or markings there.”

Beau snorted. “Aside from the forty-thousand freckles, you mean.”

Nott waved a chunk of bread around. “Yes, and they’re very handsome!”

Caduceus’s hummed. “I don’t think it’s freckles.” Nonetheless, he let go and picked up his mug. “Oh, well. If it’s important, it will come out eventually.”

Frumpkin gave Artagan a smug look. “I wouldn’t look so cocky,” he warned. “The firbolg is right. Your wizard has been marked by two fey, one of whom is currently in a very…ah, transformative period. There will be ramifications.”

The lesser fey looked away dismissively. The thread tying him to Caleb was burning brighter than ever, their fates bound, and not just in a contracted kind of way. This was something new.

Artagan sighed. He looked at Jester, her glow, her spark, her delightful grasp of anarchy. For her, he had also brought about something new. Was it this group as a whole that evoked these kinds of dealings?

“Time shall tell,” he murmured. Frumpkin’s ears twitched, and surprisingly, Caleb also glanced about the room like someone who heard a distant sound.

Artagan smirked. Well, now.

He leaned in, ignoring Frumpkin’s predictable complaint. “You are at least partially mine now,” he said. “Just a touch, but a touch is all it takes. Help my Jester spread a little chaos, won’t you?”

Caleb squinted, his gaze focused just beyond Artagan, but not so absent as a mortal’s should be. He squinted like a person seeing through water and wet his lips, grasping…

Frumpkin bit his hand.

“Frumpkin!” Caleb held his injured palm, which was oozing blood. “Why did you do that?”

Artagan rolled his eyes. He wagged a finger at the glowering lower fey. “Rude. Is it really asking too much, to share?”

Frumpkin said a word that would have made even a redcap blush.

Artagan shrugged. “Have it your way.” And with a final smile for his priestess, he drew on his green cloak and departed from the Nein. But not without a final thought for the strangeness of fate, the weirdness of the Material Plane and the way things changed – not with the suddenness of the faerie veil, but subtly, and in oddly irresistible ways – and of consequences. There would almost certainly be plenty of those after this strange, recent adventure. But, after all, was it not the uncertainness that made life worth living?

As with all things in this waking word, bound by time, they would have to wait and see.

Chapter Text

They were hanging around the docks of the Open Quay when it happened. A middle-aged woman, strolling among the fish stalls with a basket over her arm, spotted Caleb and smiled. Caduceus was familiar with smiles. Some sparked with mischief, like seedlings pushing into places they didn't belong. Others were wicked as a knife cut, easily unraveling into a frown. Some were polite, excusing a nudged shoulder or an awkward meeting of the eyes. This woman's smile, however, was like none of those. Hers was a matronly smile of recognition, and she came up to Caleb in the crowded street without a qualm – even with the Mighty Nein in loose configuration around him.

“Poppy,” she said, and Caduceus saw Caleb’s heartrate leap in his throat. She went so far as to caress his face, smoothing the stubble along his jaw with her thumb. It made everyone stiffen, this stranger who touched without asking, yet her smile had not faded. “Well, who would have thought I would see you here, of all places? It's been years.”

Caduceus read Beau's rigid shoulders, Veth's teeth peeking out from her lips. Fjord and Jester mostly appeared confused, while Yasha loomed, a shadow. Caduceus, for his part, arranged his face into diplomatic shapes. “Can I help you?”

The women's attention shifted, her expression brightening. “Why, hello. Are you his nurse?”

Beau could be heard snarling, “What the hell,” in the background, but Caduceus focused on the unknown woman. She extended her hand, which he took. “My name is Caduceus. I am a healer, though I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a nurse.”

The woman seemed satisfied with his answer. “I'm so pleased to see him out and about. I mean, certainly he had his bad days, especially after he finished a rotation with the mages, but most of the time he was so docile, so obedient. I felt sure he could function more widely if he had a decent caretaker, maybe even take on simple employment. I used to put him to tatting, you know, and sell bits and bobs of it at the market. He has very delicate fingers.” She massaged them between her own, frowning when she saw the state of them. “Speaking of which, his nails could do with a scrub.”

“Okay,” Beau interrupted. “Who are you?”

Beau's tone made the woman's eyebrows fly up. “How rude of me,” she apologized. “My name is Myra. I used to work with Poppy ages ago when he was just a young thing in the Vergesson Sanitorium, outside Rexxentrum. He looks so different, all grown up! But I would recognize him anywhere. It's that pretty hair of his.” She pushed it back from his forehead. “And those eyes. I could never forget them, even – oh, has it been so long as a decade? Working in that place...hm, it could be oppressive, and I eventually chose to move on. But Poppy was one of the bright spots for me. I loved working with him, at least when he was relatively well. You were good for me, weren't you, love?”

Caleb didn’t answer, and Caduceus noticed the tremors racing through his hands and shoulders.

“Sanitorium,” Yasha said. Just one word, but it was so large it seemed to take up all the space on the street.

Of course, Caduceus knew what a sanitorium was, at least in the abstract. He'd first heard about them carried on the tongue of a mourner weeping bitterly over a brother's grave. Afterward, Caduceus's father had explained why such places existed. They could be good, he'd said – protected spaces of recovery – but they could also be bad. Those in need of healing were always vulnerable, Cornelius told his son, but perhaps none were so vulnerable as those wounded in their mind. Caduceus could still feel his father thumbing his forehead to smooth the lines growing there like twisting vines. It had taken several weeks for that troubling knowledge to fade. And now here it was again, this word, spoken in the same context as one of his friends.

Caduceus was uneasy with the way this woman’s words, even those directed at Caleb himself, pinged off him as though she expected no answer. He only just held back from drawing the man out of her reach. Instead, he asked, “Caleb?”

Myra's brow creased. “Caleb? Was that his name? It's been so long, I can hardly remember. I always called him Poppy because of the way he is. In all the years I knew him, I never heard him say more than a few words, and those all in Zemnian. Has he gotten more verbal since?” She looked at Caleb hopefully, tugging on his hands. “How about it, love? A word or two for an old friend?”

Caleb shuddered and withdrew. She let him go with a frown.

“Maybe you should go,” Fjord said. He didn't sound aggressive, as Beau might have, but his voice was firm.

Myra nodded. “Not a good day, I suppose. Well, I'm still pleased to have run into you. It does my heart good to see him out in the sunshine. I do hope you take good care of him. Goodbye, dear.” She reached out to touch Caleb again, but this time he stepped away. His back touched Caduceus's breastplate, which Caduceus took as an invitation. He settled his hand with gentle pressure on Caleb's shoulder, which Myra watched sadly. “It's good he trusts you,” she said. Then, with a farewell flutter of her fingers, she disappeared into the market crowd.

The Nein remained tense as long as she was visible, and then, with varying degrees of subtly, they looked at Caleb. Caduceus cleared his throat. “Perhaps it would be best if we split up to finish our errands.”

Fjord took the hint. “Right. I know Beau and Yasha meant to check in at The Seafloor's Bounty, and I wouldn't mind another snapper before we leave the coast. Veth, you want to help me and Jessie pick something out?”

Veth hesitated. “Caleb? Do you want to get some fish with us?” Caleb's eyes were fixed on the middle distance. His jaw worked, like he was struggling to speak. Veth reached out and squeezed his hand. “That's okay. Why don't you and Caduceus take a walk instead? We'll meet you back at The Lavish Chateau.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” Caduceus said. “I've been thinking it would be nice to visit the beach again. Are you up for a bit of a stroll, Mister Caleb?”

It was a mostly silent journey. Caduceus watched the walls of the city peter and fall away, the horizon stretch to a streak of sea so immense there was nothing but blue-grey-blue as far as the eye could see. He greeted a grasshopper stretching its back legs on a stalk of grass, but he didn't attempt conversation with his human companion. Caleb, for his part, seemed miles away. At first, his eyes moved beneath his lashes like a man trapped in a nightmare, with darting, twitching movements that seemed mostly involuntary. Eventually, though, his eyelids slipped closed, and then he was simply being led, Caduceus's hand steady on his elbow.

The sun had grown reddish by the time Caduceus found a stretch of beach he liked. The water whispered, rasping and swirling, and Caduceus arranged his legs into a loose knot. He'd almost sunken into a doze by the time Caleb came back to himself. It was a slow process, like rain seeping through soil, and then the man began – very subtly – to shake. Not wanting to startle him, Caduceus waited until Caleb himself spoke in his soft, Northern accent. “Ca-caduceus?”

“Yes?”

Caleb gazed around the sandy beach. “We've been here before.”

“It's not exactly the same place, but I liked the look of those rock formations. See how pitted they are, how the light goes through them?”

“I don’t remember walking here.”

“You went away for a bit,” Caduceus agreed.

The moon joined the sun in the sky, and the surf mixed, rose-colored ink. “The woman in the marketplace,” Caleb said eventually. “I knew her face, and when she touched me...”

“I wasn't a huge fan of that,” Caduceus admitted.

“When you can do nothing for yourself, not tie your robe or wash your own hair, you don't have much say over such things.”

Personally, Caduceus felt that should never be true, and yet... “Vergesson Sanitorium.”

Caleb stiffened.

“It’s true, then?”

The answer, when it came, was roundabout. “Even as a boy, my memory was always sharp. I remember my mother holding me up to the sun when I was too small to walk. I can still smell her, the starch she used in her clothes, the smell of flour on her hands.” Caleb held his own hands out, with his long, thin fingers. “In coloring, I favor my father, but my hands are hers. Yet even if I were nothing like them, I could still never forget them.” He paused. “And yet...there is one part of my life I do not remember. In my mother tongue, Vergesson means 'to forget'. It’s an apt name, at least for me.”

Caleb’s prodigious memory had been a wonder to Caduceus since he’d made an idle comment about an unknown herb south of the Wuyun Gates and Caleb had told him its name. Caleb had, in fact, been able to name every plant in the region. “I read a book on Nicodrani flora and fauna once,” he’d explained.

“That’s so cool, Cayleb,” Jester said, pleased to find someone with knowledge of her homeland. “Do you still have the book? I’d like to read it, especially if it has illustrations.”

“No. It was loaned to me for only a few days by a merchant passing through my hometown when I was a child.”

Impressed his recollection was so clear even after so much time, Caduceus asked, “How old were you?”

Caleb picked at the edge of his tunic, where a frayed thread had come loose. Frumpkin batted at it with a paw. “Ah. Perhaps five or six.”

“Wow!” Jester crowed. “You remember that much, even though you were so little?”

“Of course he does,” Veth said. “Caleb’s amazing.”

“Nerd,” Beau scoffed.

Caleb himself shook his head, not bothering to insert himself in their byplay, but since then Caduceus had seen many more examples of this special attribute Caleb possessed. Yet of the sanatorium. Nothing?

“Most days it’s like a fog.” Caleb raised his hand toward the waves. “Like the mist out there. Maybe there's something in it – monsters or ships or nothing at all. But there are times when something happens, like today. Then a bit of that mist will blow away, for just a moment, and I...” His voice tapered off, and he stared into the ocean. “I lost so much time.”

“How long?”

“While it was happening, it seemed endless, yet when I woke, for me it was like no time had passed at all. My body was older. My face. I remember being startled the first time I saw my reflection.”

Caduceus thought about that. “Years.”

“Eleven years,” Caleb agreed.

Eleven years. And Myra, the nurse who’d claimed to tend him, had implied that in all that time he'd had no words to answer her, no will to defend himself. It was disturbing to think about. And, yeah, it also explained other things Caduceus had wondered about. Like how young Caleb seemed at times, compared to his relative age, as well as the juxtaposition between his skittishness and the almost careless way he used and revealed his body, and though it wasn't his to begin with.

“She seemed kind,” Caduceus ventured. Though off-putting, Myra hadn’t seemed like a threat. Not in the usual way opponents of the Nein did, anyway.

“Anyone can be cruel when their power is absolute,” Caleb told him, and that was certainly true.

“Did they hurt you?” The Nein had no access to most of the people who’d hurt Caleb. If there was a chance to deal with even one... The beetles in his staff rustled.

“I was in their care, but –”

“There’s a difference between caretaking and caring,” Caduceus finished.

Caleb breathed the air. “It's so good here. Like you could walk into the ocean and it would gather you up. Like you could drift in the immenseness of it, an unimportant speck and no more.”

“That sounds peaceful,” Caduceus said. He added, “It smells good, too.”

“It smells clean. Not sterile. Clean.”

The breeze stirred his fur, and Caduceus opened his heart to the Wildmother. It still awed him that such a place could feel like home, even so far from anything resembling a garden of tangled herbs in the vicinity of a graveyard. When he looked at Caleb, though, he found the man’s eyes were intent rather than tranquil. It was as though a storm were building, filling the air with pressure and putting off the smell of ozone.

That wouldn’t do. It wasn’t good to pin up a torrent. Rain, on the other hand, even when it was violent, could be cathartic in its release. So Caduceus offered, “You know, Caleb, it’s okay if you don’t want to talk. But if you do – well, that’s alright, too.”

It didn’t happen all at once. For a while they simply sat near surf and seabird, amidst pebbles and sand. Then, as twilight deepened, Caleb opened his mouth and began to speak. It was broken, what he said. Even more so than his usual way of speaking, as though each word had to be drawn from inside like sap from a tree. But, halting or not, in starts and pauses, the story came.

“I'm going to tell you the story of how I killed my mother and father,” he said.

And then he did.

INTO FIRE & ASHES

Of all the things he took from that night,
he remembered the fireplace most.
How it was cool –
ash-grey and toothless –
when he left for the last time.

He remembered the cart,
piled high with hay.
Eadwulf took most of its weight,
but Bren had wanted his own hand
on that cart.
To seal the escape
of his parents – traitors – parents
because that is what Master Ikithon
would have wanted him to do.

When the scene was set,
he snapped his fingers around a rune,
and fire kindled in the pocket of his hand.
Straw blackened.
The roof took.
It raced, hot and red,
as smoke coiled around the rafters
like an orange-eyed serpent.

Like spinning, clicking locusts,
the embers burned,
and Bren watched –
flame in his eye,
ice in his heart

Until

Slamming
Smoke
Screams

The sound of his mother's voice,
pitched high with terror,
pierced through Bren’s training,
and from his own lips a cry burst forth,
as he thew himself at
his childhood home
while his parents – traitors – parents
burned inside,
handed their fate by the hands of their son.

Someone seized him,
and he lashed out as he’d been taught.
Astrid’s scream was like his mother's scream,
freezing him in place,
and when hands seized him again –
no, when the hard body tackled him,
he went down easily.

“What's wrong with him?”
Astrid was holding herself like she was hurt.
She’d put poison in the meal her mother made,
dripped the drops into plates passed 'round
while Bren and Eadwulf watched with whetted eyes,
and after, when their faces were turned down –
mother, grandmother, and two small brothers –
her voice had no waver
as it did now.

“I don't know, I don't know,” 'Wulf hissed.
“Should we take him back to Master Ikithon?”

The village was waking up.
Astrid knelt. “Bren,” she said with insistence.
“Bren, please.”

Tears cut through the soot settled on Bren’s face.
He choked on the words,
Mutti. Vati.

“You'll have to carry him,” Astrid said.
As she straightened, she looked into the orange light,
and, for one moment,
the raw wound of her face
was illuminated.
It was the last thing Bren saw
before Eadwulf murmured,
and he was gone.

When he woke again, Master Ikithon was there.
“I am so disappointed, Bren,” he said,
and even in his sunken state of grief,
Bren was crushed – panicked – terrified
by the dread of that statement.

But before Bren could explain,
there was a flash of arcane gold
and the smell of burning clay.
Then something with teeth like needles –
a devouring ravager
made of cold, cold magic –

ripped

his mind

apart

INTO VERGESSORN

When Bren opened his eyes
the world was like damaged parchment.
It was as though someone had spilled water
over the glyphs and letters
that should have been there,
leaving the ink a cloudy smear –
a mere suggestion where once
there had been

– all obliterated.

There had always been words in Bren’s life.
In their absence,
his mind fluttered like a moth
beating against its confines.
His cheeks were wet.
The sheets beneath him, he realized,
were wet.
And he was afraid.

A door slammed open.
“Dammit, that new patient's awake,” a man shouted.
“And he’s pissed himself.”

“First thing? I just made that bed.”

It was like they were speaking
underwater.
Their mouths moved, sounds came out,
but Bren didn’t understand.
And when the men approached
with hands outstretched like spiders,
instinct had him flexing his own fingers,
picturing fire, fire –

“What's he doing?”

“He must have been a magiciky one.
Don't worry. This ward's locked down.
The mages can't even experiment here.
They haf'ta carry 'em off to the towers
when they want to do that.”

Bren didn’t want their hands on him.
Hands had meant hurt for such a long time,
and though he’d learned to accept that hurt from some,

So when they bracketed his arms,
he resisted.

“Dammit! Hold him, would you?”

Hands reached under his ribs,
grabbed the tunic that hung there,
long around his thighs.
The tunic wasn't soft-warm-brown homespun,
wasn't taut-crisp-black uniform –
wasn't his –
but he still didn't want it off
and clung to the cloth until the man cursed
and raised his hand.
The resulting blow rocked Bren’s world,
sending even the skittery moth-thoughts
exploding into fragments.

“Geez. How hard did you hit him?
His eyes are rolling around like marbles.”

“It's for his own good.
The mages will be here any minute,
And you know they hate a mess.”

They striped him.
No more tunic.
No more shield.
Bren sat miserably, teeth rattling together,
as the men looked him over.
“Freckles,” one commented.
The other pawed at his hair
like a man tousling a puppy.
“You're alright,” he soothed.
“Calm down, and we’ll have you cleaned up in no time.”

They wiped him with a rough cloth,
dressed him in new clothes,
smoothed his hair with their fingers.
The bed was turned.
The soiled linen removed.

Then, their chore completed,
they went away,
leaving Bren alone
in the place where people went
to be forgotten.

BROKEN THINK

In time, Bren came to understand:
His Think was broken
and so he couldn’t do the things he used to do.
Not the mouth-sounds
or the inside Think.

There were pictures, echoes of past-Think.
There were feelings,
like the sun leaving stamps
on closed eyelids,
but the feelings were overwhelming
because they were the only thing still clear.
Especially in this place.

Without the Think to anchor him,
Bren often drifted.
He got lost.
Forgot time and space and circumstance.
And whenever, briefly, he surfaced –

Fear.

WHITE-BACKS

He had no names for the white people
who work in the sanitorium,
but he came to recognize them
nevertheless.

There was the one who looked like Father

There was a wiry man with eyes

There was food-giver,

There was door-watcher,

There were night-nurses

One of the orderlies was different.

Bren didn't like it.
He squirmed and made the only sound he could.

But that made the soft touch hard,
and even without the Think,
Bren knew only too well
that defiance wouldn’t stop the touch
one way or another.

Still he learned to dread the razor,
the cold, silky glide,
that scrap-scrap-scrap
that was precursor to other touches.

THICK AND COLD

He didn’t want to eat it.
The bread here was stale-bad,
but at least it was familiar to his mouth.
This porridge, on the other hand,
Was wet and slimy,
but infused with unpredictable bits
of hardness.
His stomach rolled even looking at it,
so he left it on the tray.

It was cold, congealed
when the orderly came back for the bowl.
He paused, staring at Bren’s
failure
rejection
refusal.

A finger traced the edge of the bowl.
“Hot food is a privilege around here, you know.
Do you think it's okay to waste good things given to you?”

Bren covered his lips.
As much as he feared the anger he heard,
the thought of the curdled bits in his mouth…
He couldn’t.

The orderly’s frown turned severe as black lightning.
He was angry, and, oh, just, please…

“I think you should finish your breakfast.”

Bren was yanked onto his back,
and the orderly sat on his stomach.
Fingers pressed into his jaw,
forcing his teeth apart,
and then, into his mouth was passed
scoop after scoop
of goopy wetness.

“That's better,” the orderly said
when the bowl was empty.

He got up and wiped his fingers on the blanket.
“You better not throw up,” he said.
“I'm not taking flak from the mages
if you lose too much weight.”

Bren’s teeth ached.
His jaw ached.
Like a lump of cold clay,
the porridge sat in his tender belly
as he laid back,
still as he could,
and tried not to be

sick.

TRAPPED IN DREAMS

When he closed his eyes,
a spotted cat sat in a window
and stared with his mother's eyes.
A spark flew from his fingers
to straw
to house.
and a conflagration grew,
until flesh turned to meat,
bones burned,
and the cat opened its mouth to

Bren woke with a shriek,
filling the halls of Vergesson with his horror
at what he had..

The sense of the memory was already fading,
fragments of words falling apart
like a card castle.
Yet the gagging, gruesome grief of it
was still there.

The door slammed open
and a white-backed orderly
yanked back the tangled sheets.
Instinct made Bren reach out for any comfort,
but the woman slapped him instead.

“Didn't you hear me tell you to be quiet?
You're waking up the whole ward.”

Bren’s face was sticky.
There was snot on his face.
He wiped helplessly with his sleeve,
still sobbing senselessly.

The woman grabbed the corner of the blanket
scrubbing at his face,
but the coarse texture was too much after the dream,
and Bren wailed.

“That's it.”

The woman left,
and when the door wrenched back open
she stalked to Bren
and grabbed his face.

The glass hit his teeth,
hard and hurting.
He tasted blood alongside the bitter potion,
but the woman held his throat,
and he gulped compulsively
because he needed the air behind it.

It didn't go down right.
He choked,
and the woman cursed,
shifting her grip to yank
his jaw down.

“Just swallow it, you idiot.”

And Bren –
wheezing and
coughing
but now with his
head filled
with cotton
static and
fog –
drank.

“That's better,” the woman said.

Was
Where
When

It didn't matter.

The potion had taken its hold,
and anything Bren once knew
was gone past knowing.

He slept after that.
Deep,
but not past dreaming,
and this time,
when the nightmares came,
he couldn’t wake up.

MASTER IKITHON

Bren didn't know how long he’d been in Vergesson.
There was nothing to mark the time.
There were only sleeps and not-sleeps,
cold porridges and black breads.
In another state,
maybe he could have made sense of it,
but now there was too much fog.
Whole days (days?) went by
when he barely knew what his body was doing
or what is being done to his body,
and it was so much easier
to sink.

But then came a day
that was different.

He was jerked awake by not-father’s urgent hands,
and Bren responded like he always did.

“Now, don't start that,” not-father said, wiping Bren's face.
“I'm supposed to get you presentable before rounds start.”

His eyes darted restlessly toward the door,
voice dropping to almost a whisper.
“He's coming today, and you're on his list.
So, for heaven's sake, be good.”

There was a swift wiping down with a cloth.
A thumb brushed over his jaw, testing.
“It will have to do. I don't have a razor.”

Bren shuddered at the mention of razors,
but not-father wasn’t like that,
wasn’t hurtful,
so Bren sunk nearer instead of farther away.

Not-father sighed but indulged him,
squeezing Bren’s narrow shoulders.
“Just be good,” not-father repeated,
and stood Bren on his feet.

Bren was still standing,
shifting from foot to foot,
when the ward admitted a host of mages
in long whispering robes.
Bren was startled when a pair of finely-crafted boots
stopped in front of him.

“Well,” said a voice that sent electricity through Bren's nerves.
A long, slender finger touched his chin,
and Bren was turned to face the one
whose face he would have known
with or without the Think
with or without words
with or without sound.

Master showed his teeth,
eyes blade-sharp
as they had always been,
examining every inch of Bren.

“Well,” Master said again,
hitching a knobby finger,
and another mage took Bren's arm.

Bren followed as they step outside.
It had been (days? weeks? months?)
since he last saw the sun,
and he was fixated on the transparent overlap,
white and blue,
until,
on the horizon,
he saw the stone finger,
the tower,
thrusting from the earth.

Bren knew that place.
Knew its stairs and passages,
its chamber full of wires and hooks
and
sharp
sharp
pain.

He tried to run.

There was a sigh.
Master Ikithon snaped his fingers
and everything

They carried him after that.

CONVICTION AND LOVE

It was cold
where they took him.

There were straps
that left bruises,

while driftglobes cast
the room in purple light.

“Bren,” Master spoke.
“You won't understand, not now,
why it has to be this way.
I thought, perhaps, it could be avoided.
Blumenthal was the test.
But there’s a weakness in you.
Conviction.
Or one might call it ‘love’.
And for you to be useful to me,
those things must be burned out.”

He picked up an object,
cold and fierce.

Bren was screaming
even before his master stoked the arcane
into existence.

ROTATION

He was with the mages for a rotation,
and, in that time,
they did not feed him,
they did not wash him,
he did not sleep.

He was a body,
a vessel,
a subject,
and when he was returned to the ward,
they carried him to bed,
where he laid,
too weak to raise his head.

“Gods. They do a number on them, don't they?”

“Hush. You want someone to hear
you have an opinion about what they do?”

The wounds eventually closed.
The bruises faded.
Even the nightmares
that caused him to wake
with his fist in his mouth
for days and days and days
eventually dimmed.

Until the next time the ward door opened
and the mages came in
and said his name.

MYRA

Despite everything
the pervading feeling in Vergesson
was not fear
but boredom.

The days went on,
unmarked and unremarkable,
until Bren spent most of them
in various stages of
vegetation,
barely aware
of anyone or anything.

He could not do the things he once had,
things he didn't even comprehend now,
but although his intellect was shattered,
his personality destroyed,
there were remnants.
And his brain,
butchered and black with blows as it was,
was crying out for any kind of stimulation,
for anything but white walls.

Then, one day, a new caregiver arrived.
She was plump and dimpled.
She didn't shove or pinch,
and when she moved Bren out of bed
or pulled his hands through a shirt,
she sometimes sang a song
with mouth-sounds – with words –
that Bren almost recognized.

He tried all week to say one back –
tried and tried
until he was sick with longing,
and the woman said,
“Liebling, you're as restless as a penned hog.
Why don't you settle down?”

“N-nn-nne,” he tried.
His hands were fluttering birds.
They fidgeted while his Think
wrestled.

She clasped his bird-hands.
“You know what you need?
Something to keep those fingers occupied.”

When she came again,
she was carrying a wooden shuttle
the shape of a moth with its wings folded.

Her mouth-sounds were soothing as she explained,
but it was her fingers his eyes followed,
and when she put the shuttle in his hand,
he moved it automatically,
imitating the patterns
until a thin line of lace
emerged.

“Well, look at you go,” said Myra.

She started to bring him string often, after that,
encouraging him to spend
his time in the common room
on endless rows of lace.
It was easy work,
numbing, really,
but Bren used every inch she gave him.

It was something to do.

AWAKENING

It started with the new nurse
and her familiar-unfamiliar words.
Sometimes he laid awake at night for hours,
concentrating with his poor, broken Think,
trying to parse out the sounds,
trying to make his lips speak
even one for himself.

And, as he did,
things began to change.

He was awake more, alert more.
He was aware of moon and sun,
of minute and hour,
of waking and sleeping,
and even the way people moved around him gained

One day he looked at the wiry orderly,
the one with the beetle black eyes,
and realized he knew his name:
Günter.

He knew them all
because he heard their words
and understood them.

One morning,
a morning where his limbs
almost felt like his own,
he grasped Myra's sleeve.
“Bitte.”

“Poppy!” she responded.
It was her mouth-sound for him –

“Do you have something rattling around in there after all?
Say something else to me. Can you say ‘Myra’?”

Desperation simmered.
It was so hard to shape his tongue
around the long forgotten words.
“B-bitte,” he murmured again.

Her smile was still full when the ward doors open,
and, with a sweep that filled the entire space,
the mages entered.
Bren knew it was not his turn –
his arms were still sore from last time –
yet he still trembled.

Myra, though, did not know his trepidation,
did not understand his fear.
“Herr Arcanist,” she said, drawing their attention.
“Poppy here has been doing so well recently.
He was even able to say a few words today!”

Bren felt like a tiny creature
under the gaze of a weasel.
“He spoke?” demanded the mage.
There was already a hand around Bren’s arm,
as inescapable as the leather straps waiting in the tower.

“Isn't that wonderful?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the mage.

They took him from the ward,
but not to the straps
where the sigils and the
purple lights rotated like bits of light and possibility.

Instead, he was brought to an office,
to an upholstered chair.
Bren couldn’t help but trace the velvet lining.
He imagined warm skin, a vibrating purr,
Frumpkin.
He gripped the word tightly as he waited in the room
with the mahogany desk and books and
gold objects hanging in their air.

It was close to an hour, his Think –

told him
before another entered.
Bren looked up, and a wave of
trepidation-relief-dread-fear-hope
came over him
because he knew his master now,
knew him as he knew himself –

This was Master Ikithon,
and whatever sickness he’d suffered
he was better now.
He was better.

“It was bound to happen,” Ikithon said
as he came to stand over Bren.
“Your will has always been stronger than most.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Come,” Ikithon said.

A head pressed in,
pale skin marked with ropes of past-fire.
At first Bren whimpered to see the scars,
but then she shifted, and he realized
he knew her.

Astrid!

“Is he there?” said a voice behind her,
and Bren knew that voice, too.
He attempted to stand,
even with the implied restraint of
Master Ikithon’s presence.

“We heard there was a development,” Astrid said.
There was an eagerness in her voice.
Barely discernable,
but Bren knew her so well
he couldn’t help but hear it.

Master Ikithon pressed Bren back into the chair.
“A false alarm,” he said
as Bren caught one fleeting glance at a dark
face over Astrid's shoulder.
Dark brow, curls.
Eadwulf had gotten taller.

“May we,” Eadwulf began hesitantly,
but was shushed by Astrid.
She always had the steel in her,
the practicality.

Master sighed.
“We’ve spoken of this unsightly attachment
many times, have we not?”

Bren saw them flinch.
He flinched himself.

“We must leave our failures behind,”
Trent says, gazing directly at Bren.
“And resist the urge to look back.”

“Yes, Master Ikithon,” Astrid was quick to agree.
Yet her eyes lingered.
Her hand was on the door.

“Do you both not have research to conduct
while we’re here?”

It was a dismissal, and they obeyed.
Of course they obeyed.
Bren heard them ascend unseen steps
and felt their presence fade.

“I gave you children too much freedom,” Master Ikithon said.
“Eadwulf has chosen to cope through prayer, of all things,
which is potentially useful, and therefore admissible,
but still a weakness.
Astrid remains resolute, but her ambition – well.”

He touched Bren's face.

“You are the perfect one.”

He drew a gate in the air and
plucked out a spell book and
flicked to a page.
He settled his hands on Bren's temples.
The fingertips were cold.

“But not yet.”

And in Bren’s head,
a suppuration
stitched poorly shut
was torn

open

FEEBLEMIND

RESONANT ECHO

It had been
he did not know how long it had been.
Myra was sad about it.
She coaxed him,
tried to get him to use the mouth-sounds,
to hold the shuttle,
to make the string go.

He couldn’t.
His hands hung limp
as his shattered will.

He was in the common room
when he heard the boy for the first time.
The noise of crying, anger, and fear
came from the hall where the patients
were locked into holes to sleep,
and something about the sound
made Bren’s enervated muscles
move.

He shuffled
encroaching on the scene
of distress so thick you could smell it.
Someone was screaming strange curses,
sounds that were almost like music,
if music was born at night

“What's he saying?”

“I don't understand that foreign stuff.
Hells, can't you just get him under control?”

“Agh. He bit me!”

“Fine. Just let him go.
If he wants to tear his arms up, let him.
He's already got blood everywhere.
What's a little more?”

They left,
grumbling and angry,
so absorbed in their complaints
they didn't see Bren
hovering in a shadow.

The door was open,
and someone was weeping.
Bren edged closer.

The room was the familiar narrow rectangle,
windowless and white-washed
with concrete floors, narrow cot
and thin sheet.

Pressed against the wall,
was an adolescent boy,
younger than Bren but not much younger.
His dark arms were streaked with scratches
put there by panicked, frenzied hands.
Bren stepped inside,
and the boy stilled,
reading himself for what came next –
for some fresh hell of foe or fiend.

Caleb swayed on bare feet.

“Hello?”

The boy's mouth-sounds were timid,
as small as he had made himself,
but he had seen Bren now
in his tunic hanging just above his knees,
his bandaged arms and
hollow, hurting eyes.

Slowly
he
uncurled.

“Who are you?”

Bren slipped down
until his knees were drawn to his chest.
Why? He didn’t know
except when he came here, and when he
woke, and when he cried,
he’d wished for someone
to sit beside him.

Fear was exhausting,
and as adrenaline waned into cooler tones,
the boy relaxed,
inch by inch,
until his head rested on Bren's shoulder.

Eyes heavy, breathing slow, he said,
“I started dreaming of a place
I've never been.
I remember people I haven't met.
It's like my whole life,
I haven’t known who I was – am –”

He slipped into the other sounds,
the ones like moths and fireflies
The boy pressed his face
into Bren's shoulder.

“I'm going crazy.”

They stayed like this
until the orderlies came back
and returned them to their separate beds,
but there was a connection,
born of some unspoken understanding,
that drew them like magnets on twin poles.
Often, the boy whispered his dreams – memories – dreams
into Bren's ear

Until

One day he was gone,
and when the mages returned him,
he had grown sallow and silent as grave dust.

He said one more thing to Bren,
his gaze as empty as hollow holes.

The next day
he
hung
himself.

The ward-keepers buzzed like hornets,
flapping their hands at each other
as if they couldn't decide what to do.
They didn't stop Bren
as he walked up to the body
and held the cold hand
and grieved.

IN THE HALLS OF VERGESSON

It was dark in the halls of Vergesson
in the gloaming hours
when midnight had long passed –
in the smallest hours
when things crept and spoke
and groaned
that didn't come out in the daytime.

Bren was curled on his bed,
facing the wall
where a piece of plaster had dislodged
and made a laughing face.
He’d dreamed of the boy again,
of his night-heavy words
like stars in a dome that was always dark.

He stretched his mind out,
searching for that place in his memory.
He could almost, almost…

Creak

The hinges announced the shadow,
which made a silhouette against the wall
before the door shifted shut once more,
and the room went dark
as a snuffed candle.

Bren started to turn
to see if the night nurse was here,
but all he could see was the dark absence
in the shape of a person.

The person sunk onto the edge of the bed,
rested a hand on Bren’s side.
Bren didn't understand
why they were here
until the bed dipped
and the person climbed onto it.

Onto him.

“Shh,” said a voice like a razor.

It was dark in the halls of Vergesson
in the gloaming hours
when midnight had long passed –
in the smallest hours
when things crept and spoke
and groaned
that didn't come out in the daytime.

WASHING AWAY

Myra took one look at him the next morning
and went to draw a bath,
tsking as she tucked him into
hot water, high around his shoulders.

The rag was harsh on raw skin.
Water ran down Bren's face,
around his ears
into his eyes,
as Myra lifted his arms and moved his legs.

At one point
softer and more somber
than her usual upbeat way of speaking,
she sighed as she brushed an abrasion.
“May they get what they deserve
for the hurt they give.”

Then she was back to humming the Zemnian lullabies
that had once touched Bren's enfeebled mind,
but which were now only bracken below,
as murky and soiled
as the bathwater.

Bren leaned his head
against the side of the tub
and closed his eyes

Until

the minutes

the hours

the days

the years

slipped

far

away

On the shores of the Nicodrani coast, the stars shivered like a thousand wavering candle wicks. They reflected off the surf, which turned over and over again in a dance that had gone on since the waters first filled the basin of the earth and the moon tugged its hand. Caduceus sat, watching this rhythm as the tale he'd been told simmered in his heart. ‘Wildmother,’ he thought. ‘I know suffering is a part of living, but this...’

Caleb wet his lips. While he was telling his tale, he’d spoken like a man in a dream, but now that he was finished, it was as though the fog had retreated, at least for the time being. “Thank you for listening.”

Caduceus wanted to reply in many ways: It should never have happened. It was wrong. But none of those things would have been helpful, at least not right now. “Do you want to go back to the Chateau?” he asked instead. The others would be wondering what kept them.

The others were indeed waiting. “Cayleb! Caduceus! We've been waiting dinner on you! Oh. You're both covered in sand.”

“Are we?” Caduceus shifted in his clothes, sprinkling the carpet with tiny bits of sand. “Oops.”

“Jester's mom had them cook up the snapper for us,” Fjord was saying. It was his strength, this moving along of a situation to cover awkwardness. He did it now, drawing them toward the dining room and the good smells there as though nothing unusual had happened that day. “Plus a bunch of other stuff, too. These little onions in string beans, and a salad of tomatoes, and these mashed polentas.”

Veth pipped up. “Caleb doesn't like mushy stuff. Right, Caleb?”

Though Jester’s eyes were lively, her movements were careful as she hooked Caleb’s arm in hers. “Well, then you don’t have to eat it. I never eat the vegetables anyway.”

Further back, Beau lingered until she and Caduceus were able to speak without much risk of being overheard. “He okay?”

Caduceus considered the question. “He told me a story. About Vergesson.”

“Bad?”

Few words would have been strong enough to describe what happened there, so Caduceus kept it simple. “He was mistreated.”

Beau scowled, fierceness twisting her handsome features. “Seems like he's been mistreated everywhere.”

“Not everywhere,” Caduceus said as he watched the group usher Caleb along. It was the little things – how Yasha stepped between him and strangers who drifted to close, the way Fjord asked questions and waited for an answer, even when Caleb's occasional lapses slowed the conversation to a halt. How Jester and Veth's touches, while bold, always solicited and never restrained.

Jester was offering Caleb handkerchief. “Your face has so much dirt on it, Cayleb. Do you want to use my handkerchief?”

“I like his face this way!” Veth declared. “He’s ruggedly handsome!”

“Peace, my friend,” Caleb said, wiping his cheeks and forehead, which mostly only made things worse. “It wouldn’t do to come to table with a dirty face, not with so gracious a host as Madam Lavorre.”

“Mama won’t mind,” Jester told him, but Caduceus could tell she was happy. She was always happy when her friends were taken care of, her reputation as an indifferent healer notwithstanding.

“Thanks for looking out for him,” Beau said. “When he gets like that… The group, it's a bit much.”

The Nein were always a bit much, but Caduceus understood what she was saying. “He just needed someone to listen. To care.”

“We care,” Beau insisted.

She trotted off to join the others, and Caduceus watched as the circle closed – the safety and protection that should always have been there draw in and bind itself with silver string and buttons and stale pastries. Vergesson. A place to forget. But Caleb would not be forgotten here. Not with them.