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Minthara’s about to kill Gale.
That’s Wyll’s first thought, anyway, instinctive and more than a little panicked. There’s a stunned shout from Karlach behind him, and the sound of her whipping her greataxe out from its sheath. Eldritch magic surges up from his core almost without command, jolting down through his veins and preparing to fire, but he holds it tensed and crackling in his palms, watching—because Minthara’s gone still, too, her sword radiating with divine light and poised over Gale’s throat. More than that, though, because Minthara’s about to kill Gale rings wildly untrue, enough so that Wyll’s reeling thoughts seemed to trip over that one like a wayward stone.
Minthara’s about to kill Gale doesn’t make sense, any more than Astarion’s about to drain us all dry in the dead of night would, or Lae’zel’s decided to abandon us all and pursue a life of pacifism.
Minthara can’t be about to kill Gale, because Minthara wouldn’t kill Gale.
Which means either something’s gone very, very wrong with Minthara, or—
Oh, Hells.
Or that’s not Gale.
Harsh golden light spills down over Minthara from above, intensifying to an eye-searing white along the edge of her sword. She’s close enough to Gale that he’s been forced up against the sewer wall, hardly a few inches between their faces, with the edge of that blade just kissing the underside of his already blood-spattered jaw.
Minthara snarls, pressing closer, her voice low and echoing with so much divine magic that it’s almost hard to understand, but Wyll makes out the three syllables well enough:
“Where. Is. He.”
He thinks he could live for a thousand years and never forget this: Gale’s look of dumbfounded terror simply melts away as though it were never there in the first place, the whole act abandoned at the drop of a hat. Slowly, languidly, a smile spreads over his face that is so giddy and cruel, so profoundly not Gale’s, that the wrongness of it sends a chill down Wyll’s spine.
It’s still Gale’s voice when he says, “Oh! Is that jealousy we’re hearing? Hm? Is it jealous? Is it angry that I went and found a new toy to play with, after the old one slipped its leash?”
His neck snaps.
Even Minthara jerks backward, a flicker of genuine fear overtaking her fury for only a heartbeat, as a grotesque series of cracks and crackles and crunches warp Gale’s body into a new shape. He’s gone in a flash and a stomach-turning fine spray of what can only be blood, a red mist that drifts down to the stone floor at Orin the Red’s feet.
Her corpse-white eyes roam over the three of them, an easy smile on her face, entirely unbothered by the threat of Minthara’s sword still poised to swing—if not quite so close anymore.
“Motherfucker,” Karlach spits. “What in the Hells have you done with Gale?”
“Nothing!” Orin purrs. “Nothing, nothing, no, not a thing! Still gasping and gagging on the foul air of Bhaal’s temple, even though—” she pauses, giggles, and lets out a sigh that’s theatric in its disappointment— “oh, even though it would be so easy to snap his flapping jaw, cut out his mouth meat and mute him for good. But not yet, not yet, not so fast. His kind die too easily, don’t they?”
Shit.
Wyll lets the eldritch magic dissolve from his hands, and he takes a hurried step closer, one hand raised in a sort of temporary surrender. It serves a dual purpose, bringing Orin’s attention to him rather than on Minthara, and signaling to Minthara to stay her blade. Because just now, she looked very ready to abandon all attempts at negotiation in favor of driving that sword through Orin’s gut, and Wyll doesn’t want to think about what that would mean for Gale.
“Orin,” Wyll says, calm and low. “Why did you take him? You want something from us in return for him, don’t you? What is it?”
It’s the right thing to say, if there is such a thing when dealing with Orin. She looks bizarrely pleased, grinning wide at him like he’s the only one in the room.
“The little boy leader, so quick to business,” she coos, pouting a bit. “Should I make it simple for you?”
“Please do,” Wyll says, still carefully even.
“The Murder Lord demands a better offering. Something new, something sticky sweet and delicious. But you…” she tuts, shaking her head. “You are still dull, a blunt blade unfit to flay. You need to be sharpened, thin and jagged—”
“And how’s he supposed to do that?” Karlach cuts in. “Get to the damned point.”
Orin turns her gaze on Karlach, something sharply predatory in her grin now.
Her neck snaps again. She twists and turns, bones breaking and joints popping, until—
“Suppose you’d rather hear it in your old master’s voice, wouldn’t you, Karlach?” Gortash says, and Wyll instinctively holds a hand out between the shapechanger and Karlach—but honestly, which one he’s trying to keep from attacking the other, he has no idea. Gortash leans back against the sewer wall behind him, smiling, as unbothered as ever. “Oh, yes, I see the lust in those eyes. I know it. I live it. I, too, yearn to hang the tyrant from the hooks and drip-drop his blood into Father’s open jaws. But I can’t. He bound me against harming him when we first conspired.”
He scowls, annoyed, then shakes his head as if shooing a fly.
“The path is clear, the offer simple. Kill the tyrant. Take the Netherstone from his corpse, and bring it to my temple,” he says, and with another sickening crack and crunch of twisting bone, Orin returns to her original form again. “Only then will we be free to slice and shred each other! Slice and shred and slice and shred and slice and shred! The survivor claims the stones, and what’s left of the other… What’s left of the other goes to Bhaal.”
“So we kill Gortash,” Wyll says, “and we bring the Netherstone to your temple for a final fight. And if we do that, you’ll return Gale to us? Unharmed?”
“Yes! For the promise of slaughter, of pain and humiliation and the sound of blood dripping into the gutters—”
“Done,” Wyll cuts her off. “You have a deal. Now leave us. The sooner we get this done, the sooner you’ll get your fight.”
Orin watches him, silent, an elated smile still spread over her face, frozen stock still for a moment as though she really is nothing but a lifeless corpse. With a jolt of worry, he wonders if he’s pushed it too far, if he’s accepted her offer too readily and she’ll rescind it just as quickly, like a cat allowing a mouse to scamper away only to clamp teeth over its tail and yank it back at the last moment.
But instead she only smiles wider, leans closer to him, and whispers, “Do not underestimate the little lordling. And remember: If you step into my domain while the tyrant still sucks air, I will carve your failure into your pretty plaything’s skull.”
She’s so self-sure, so arrogant, and the hatred bubbling in Wyll’s gut for her is so intense at that moment that he almost expects her eyes to flash black rather than that sickly corpse white. He almost expects her to wink and say Ta! before vanishing.
She doesn’t, though. In a shower of blood on the stone, she disappears without another word.
“Gods damn it,” Karlach shouts, slamming her axe down onto the floor, and Wyll finally turns toward her. There’s heat rippling in waves off of her skin, puffs of smoke emitting from the seams in her armor, bits of white-orange flame flickering in her hair. “That bloody freak—” she points in the vague direction of deeper into the sewers— “couldn’t’ve just waited until we killed Gortash like we were already fucking planning to do? She thinks she can take my wizard and get away with it?”
“We’re getting him back,” Wyll says.
“You’re godsdamned right, we’re getting him back! And then he’s gonna hold her down for me with one of his fancy little holding spells while I pound her into the fucking stone for this,” Karlach fumes, and it takes a visible effort for her to rein in her anger, a gradual dampening of her flames. “So? What’s the plan?”
Wyll blows out a breath, shaking his head. “I guess we’re killing Gortash. Sooner rather than—”
“There is no time for such dawdling,” Minthara cuts in, and Wyll almost jumps. It’s the first time she’s spoken since Orin appeared, and somehow she sounds perfectly like herself again, as cold and as calm as ever. The divine light over her form is long gone, her sword sheathed, hands on her hips. “Playing by Orin’s rules is a mistake. We already know where the Tribunal is. We will go there, kill whomever needs killing in order to grant us access to Bhaal’s temple, and bring the fight to her. It is the only way to ensure she does not kill another one of us.”
“Hey,” Karlach says, frowning. “She hasn’t killed any of us yet, alright? Gale’s still—”
“Alive, yes,” Minthara says, dangerously low, practically growling with it as she turns toward Karlach. “For now. That much we know, given the entire city has not yet been reduced to a glowing crater. But Orin is careful. She is creative. She will avoid bestowing any fatal wounds—not because of the orb, of course, as she’s likely unaware of it. No, she will take her time simply because she wouldn’t want to lose her newest plaything before she’s had her fill of him.”
“Minthara—”
“And in the meantime,” she goes on unimpeded, as if Wyll hadn’t spoken at all, “you are both children if you intend to take her at her word. How many pieces do you imagine she’ll remove from him while we roam about the city at her behest, following her orders? How many pieces do you imagine she’s already removed? She’ll have started small: A bit of skin here, chunks of flesh no larger than a coin there, until she works her way up to fingers, hands, limbs. Soon she may grow bored enough to string him up by his innards so that she can use his mangled body as decor for our arrival, all the while feeding him just enough potions to keep him alive enough to feel it. Wait even longer and perhaps his nerve will break, and he’ll decide that a Netherese blast is a fitting death, so long as the torture ends and he can—”
“Minthara!” Wyll insists, not quite shouting but damned close to it.
It’s enough to shake her out of her fury, if just barely. Her teeth clack shut, a muscle in her jaw twitching, eyes blazing. Her shoulders heave a bit with her breath, though you’d hardly notice if you weren’t looking for it.
“Karlach,” Wyll says, softer this time, “can you run back to the Elfsong? Tell the others what’s happened?”
“I— yeah,” she says, her voice subdued as she stares wide-eyed at Minthara. “Yeah, alright.”
“Tell them we’re heading for the Tribunal. And bring Shadowheart when you come back, will you? Probably best we have her along, too.”
In case they need a healer, he doesn’t say. In case they need a Revivify spell, he definitely doesn’t say.
He catches Karlach’s hand before she turns away, giving it a quick reassuring squeeze, which she returns along with a grateful, barely-there smile. Then she’s turning and racing off into the darkened tunnel, running faster than he thinks he’s ever seen her run outside of a fight before. It’s hardly a few seconds before her clanking boots fade into nothing.
Then it’s only the usual dripping silence of the sewers.
Wyll takes a breath, runs his hand over his face.
“Most times, Minthara, I do appreciate your bluntness,” he says, “but in the future, would you mind toning it down when you’re talking about my friend possibly being tortured?”
As expected, Minthara only sneers at him, rolling her eyes and looking away.
By all appearances, she’s only annoyed at his weakness. But her arms are crossed now, her right hand gripping the armor on her left arm tightly enough that her fingers have gone a chalky blue-white. She’s gone almost entirely still, her eyes gazing straight through the spot where Orin—and before that, what they’d assumed to be Gale—had been standing mere minutes ago.
Quietly, Wyll asks, “Is that what she did to your soldiers?”
There’s a beat, a twitch of her head in his direction like she means to look at him and then decides against it. “All that and much more, yes.”
“And to you?”
Her grip on her arm tightens. Her jaw tenses even further, teeth grinding. “No. She needed me intact for what was to come after. She tortured my men in all manner of ways and forced me to watch until every last one of them was dead, but as for my actual person, she never progressed past a few shallow cuts before I was held down and infected.”
Hells.
Sometimes, Wyll thinks, talking to Minthara is like tip-toeing through a cave laden with booby traps. Knowing how to deal with nobility is worth just about nothing when you’re suddenly dealing with drow nobility, and an exceedingly proud, exiled drow noble who once tried to kill you at that. She despises just about everything about him, of course, and holds no reservations about saying so. And yet she still follows him. Still fights alongside him. Still catches more than a few arrows in her shield that were meant for him.
And now she’s asking him to trust her knowledge of Orin, to run into this fight headlong rather than take the longer, possibly smarter way around.
“Right now, you know our enemy better than any of us,” Wyll says. “If you say that our best move is to ignore what she told us and get to the temple as fast as possible, then that’s what we’ll do.”
“Good.”
“And you’re sure this is the right move?”
“One cannot be sure of anything when dealing with Orin the Red,” Minthara says. “But any other course of action would be folly.”
Right. That’s that, then. Wyll nods, biting the inside of his cheek for a second while he thinks. Minthara still looks as tense as an overwound bow string. She still hasn’t looked away from the faintly bloodstained floor where Orin was standing. There’s the barest tremor in her shoulders, only a blink-and-you-miss-it quiver on each inhale.
Were she anyone else, literally anyone else, he wouldn’t hesitate before saying what he wants to say next.
But when it’s Minthara…?
Ah, well. Battle favors the fearless, anyway.
“Are you alright? Aside from the obvious,” he hastily tacks on, raising both hands in surrender when she turns a cagey sort of glare in his direction. “It’s only common sense to assess an ally’s condition before a fight. And anyone would be rattled after that. Even someone without… without your history with Orin.”
She continues to glare at him, her brow pinched, arms still tight over her chest.
“Rest assured, Ravengard, my ability to separate Orin’s head from her shoulders will not be diminished, regardless of how rattled I may be,” she says. Something briefly softens in her face, a flicker of indecision in her eyes, and she glances away before admitting, “Though I am… rattled. More so than I might have expected. Inconveniently so.”
Wyll nods. “That’s alright, Minthara. It’s a scary situation. But I promise you, we’re going to get him back safely—”
Without warning, she rounds on him, eyes blazing with a newfound anger, and Wyll has just enough time to scold himself—oh, you idiot, that was one of the booby traps—before she sneers at him and says, “It is not the wizard that has me rattled. If I am upset, if I am angry, it is not on behalf of a man who was already one misstep away from his own self-imposed untimely demise, and has been since the day we met. No, I am angry because Orin infiltrated our camp days ago, and we were all none the wiser. I am angry because despite our victory over one of the Dead Three’s chosen, we have proven ourselves entirely useless in facing a second. I am angry because if one of our allies can be taken from under our noses and flawlessly impersonated, then any of us can be. I am angry because not a single one of us caught wind of Orin’s deception after the wizard was taken, when by all rights we should have done far better and prevented this from happening in the first place—!”
She takes a step toward him and then stops, abruptly, because she’s just gone and kicked something on the sewer floor.
They both look down, frowning at… a backpack?
Wyll says, “When did that—?”
Minthara, her tirade easily set aside for the moment, bends down and picks it up with a rough jerk like it’s personally offended her. It comes away from the damp sewer floor with an unpleasant squish, and she gives it a few cursory shakes, allowing the rainwater and sewage to drip off of it. There’s the sound of clinking bottles within. There’s also a dark rust-colored stain in the beige canvas, all along the one side, like it had been left carelessly in a puddle of blood before it was picked up and carried here.
A stone sinks into Wyll’s gut, and he realizes all at once where that backpack came from, who dropped it here before vanishing only a few minutes ago, and whose backpack it is, just as Minthara pulls the drawstring open and peers inside.
That careful, pinched frown of hers hardly wavers at all except for a slight widening of her eyes, and even that’s gone in an instant. But her face goes very, very pale. She goes still for a moment, as still as if she’s been carved from marble, before she shoves the backpack against Wyll’s chest and turns away. He chances a quick glance inside—potion bottles, a leather bound book, some faintly glowing rings, a few wrapped sweet rolls from that one vendor around the corner from Sorcerous Sundries, and more spell scrolls than any one man could ever reasonably need—before he looks up at Minthara’s retreating back.
“Come,” she says without so much as looking over her shoulder at him, stomping off through the sewage. “The Tribunal is this way.”
Wyll hastily pulls the drawstring shut and slings Gale’s pack over his shoulder alongside his own, hurrying down the tunnel in her wake. “Karlach and Shadowheart—”
“They will catch up in their own time. We have wasted enough of it already.”
Wyll Ravengard, for all his various faults and weaknesses and hypocrisies, occasionally has his moments. Were she asked while in a more generous mood, Minthara might even be tempted to say that there’s an impressive shrewdness about him, made all the more impressive by the fact that human men his age tend to lack any shrewdness about them whatsoever, in her experience. Were she feeling even more generous, she might elaborate, and admit that all too often he has made decisions or observations that have seemed mindbogglingly unsound in the moment, only for the hidden wisdom of it to reveal itself later.
She is not, at present, in a generous mood.
All she will say now is that he is incredibly lucky. Lucky that the doorway into Bhaal’s temple allowed them passage without any of them becoming Unholy Assassins in the conventional sense. Lucky that Bhaal’s twisted logic was willing to accept the murder of the Tribunal itself—Sarevok, most importantly—as sufficient, given that the petulant boy had been wholly unwilling to take the swiftest course and kill that useless godsdamned Hollyphant as he was instructed to do.
Lucky, because if his self-righteousness had barred Minthara from exacting her revenge on Orin, she might well have taken her fury out on him instead.
But, as it stood, the door opened for them.
She and Karlach made quick work of most of the ambushers lying in wait inside. Wyll—proving himself not entirely lacking in any sense whatsoever—made use of one of the scrolls from the wizard’s pack, transporting himself and Shadowheart across the cavern, where she rained holy fire down on the ambushers’ leader. A few well-aimed eldritch blasts then took their leader out for good and ended what was, apparently, yet another test to grant them further passage.
And now, after traipsing through the typical piles of guts and severed limbs and pools of blood, and stairs and stairs and stairs and more accursed fucking stairs, now, finally, they stand before the doors to the temple proper.
The amulet dangles from Minthara’s fist, still crusted with Sarevok’s blood, the chain still warm from having been wrapped tightly around her palm for hours without pause. The doors loom large over her. An indent in the center of the doors is perfectly shaped to fit the amulet’s crest, the path ahead entirely obvious, and yet—
For just half an instant, she hesitates.
Somewhere in her, all this time, there has been a steady stream of poking prodding doubts in a back corner of her mind, steadfastly walled off and ignored of course. Lesser things than doubt have killed better warriors than her. She cannot afford to second-guess herself. She cannot afford to stew in her thoughts. And yet now, something—instinct, likely, honed and hammered over decades of command—is pounding its fists on the other side of that wall, and she hesitates.
The doubt prods. Tells her she’s being irrational. Tells her that this isn’t the best course of action after all. Tells her it never was. Tells her she knew all along that it wasn’t.
She grits her teeth and presses the amulet into the doors anyway.
The doors roll open.
If the stench of blood and viscera on this side of the doors was an assault on the nostrils, the wave that hits them all now is nigh unbearable. Karlach lets out an emphatic fuck me. Shadowheart makes a noise of disgust, her voice taking on the stuffy quality of someone refusing to breathe through their nose as she makes a comment on the gaudy tastelessness of the Dead Three.
Wyll claps a hand on Minthara’s shoulder—for what reason, she has no idea—and then he steps past her, rapier held at the ready, and descends the final set of stairs.
There, down at the center of the platform in the middle of the temple, is Orin. A guard of her loyal followers surrounds her on all sides. Just before Orin is a raised stone dais or an altar or gods-only-know what it’s meant to be for a Bhaal worshipper—
—and on that raised dais is the wizard.
Minthara realizes several things then, in a very specific order.
One: The wizard is lying flat on his back, ostensibly in one piece with all four limbs accounted for, and there is no obvious injury that she can see from this distance. No bloodied bits lying about, nor any fresh pools of blood seeping out from beneath his prone body.
Two: Despite all of this, he is not moving.
Three: Neither is she. She’s stopped in her tracks on the steps. Her legs seem to have gone leaden. All breath has obstinately decided to stall in her lungs.
She hardly hears whatever words pass between Wyll and Orin. All she knows is that for an instant, that blade—the blade that has been front and center in all of Minthara’s worst nightmares for weeks now—is poised over the wizard’s throat, but it never drives through. Instead the bitch smiles a slow, pleased smile and pulls the blade back. She steps over the wizard and approaches the rest of them, and then her joints are cracking and warping, bones stretching as she morphs into something larger, something huge and hulking and very likely undefeatable—
And then the fight begins.
Minthara doesn’t care.
Whatever Orin is now, whatever new monstrosity she’s become, she is an enemy far more suited for Karlach’s skills.
The others, though? The others she’ll take great pleasure in killing.
She takes the rest of the stairs at a leap, boots slamming into the stone below, and she hurls a burst of Faerie Fire out across the width of the platform before any of Orin’s cretinous little servants can slink into the shadows. The first Bhaalist that comes for her gets the full brunt of an eldritch blast from afar, sending him careening off the side of the platform and presumably to his death. The second manages to sink a blade through one of the gaps in her armour, just below the ribs, but it’s hardly a papercut. She skewers that one and kicks him square in the gut, then turns—
Several of them are approaching the dais, and the wizard still isn’t moving.
She maneuvers around the closest of them—taking another dagger to the back for her efforts, though her armor reduces that to little more than a bruise—and pivots on her heel so that the wizard is directly behind her. This is a familiar scene by now, putting her shield and her blade between their enemies and their obscenely fragile wizard, but she doesn’t have time to dwell on it. Thunder rumbles down from above, thrumming through the metal of her sword, and she swings at the nearest enemy—the thunder climaxes with a clap loud enough to make her ears pop at the very same instant that her sword connects, and her vision clouds with bits of violet magic as a group of four Bhaalists are sent tumbling ten, twenty feet back.
It doesn’t kill them, of course, because she could never be so lucky in this godsawful place. But it gives her a moment to catch her breath before they come charging back, at least.
The next one to reach her loses his head, but the force of her swing leaves her open on her right side, and yet another dagger sinks hilt-deep through one of the seams in her armor. Straj, that one stings. She blinks tears out of her eyes as she spins around to beat him over the head with the pommel of her sword, and—
The Faerie Fire’s gone, dissipated when she took that dagger, and the culprit has already vanished.
Damn.
This is where one of the wizard’s fireballs would come in handy, she knows, and she can practically feel it—scorching heat all around, a blazing comet that reduces half their enemies to cinders, chaos incarnate and yet precisely crafted to leave all of their allies entirely untouched. But the wizard is still unconscious (dead, he’s almost certainly dead, Orin will have found some creative way of killing him and leaving his body intact for reasons that only a madwoman would ever—) and there will be no fireballs descending from on high to root out her assailant, not now.
She swings madly at where the Bhaalist was a second ago, but it’s no use. He’d have been a fool to remain in the same place after slipping into the shadows. She swings again, a few feet to the left, and still her sword meets nothing but air.
A dagger stabs into her left side, and again, he’s gone before she can retaliate.
Oh, she’s going to rip out their fucking insides. She is going to skewer her sword through each of their throats, and she is going to pull their own daggers from their corpse-cold fingers and stab them until there’s nothing left to stab—
Another dagger comes at her, but it skirts off the side of her chainmail. The next digs between her ribs, and ah, there’s that scorching heat she was waiting for, rippling up through her lungs and pulling the muscles in her chest taut, but that’s not all— there’s a harsh light blooming all around her, white and yellow and golden behind the black spots bursting in her vision, and is it—?
Ah. Not Gale. Not a fireball.
Shadowheart.
Minthara’s vision reduces to a hazy pinpoint, though she can see those shimmering golden guardians circling around their little cleric.
“Te curo!”
Breath returns to her lungs, a rush of oxygen she hadn’t noticed she was missing in the first place, and the scorching heat in her side reduces to a prickling warmth. She blinks the dots from her vision as quickly as she can, ignoring the multitude of other wounds that the magic hasn’t quite reached yet, and prepares to fight anew—
But the fight’s reached its end.
The last Bhaalist is a smoking corpse, still glistening with holy fire from Shadowheart’s guardians. The rest of them are littered about, bearing their various wounds from Minthara’s own attacks. More than five, less than ten. She doesn’t bother to count. A glance up toward the others reveals that Orin—or the thing that once was Orin—has fallen at last, crawling desperately toward Wyll and Karlach in one final attempt at rending them to shreds, but in a burst of blood and sinew and with a fresh new tang of iron in the air, she collapses into little more than a puddle on the stone floor. All that’s left is a blackened ribcage, a skull, a spine… but even that’s gone in the next instant.
Minthara’s eyes are fixed on that puddle, her mind buzzing with static, until—
“Gale!”
That was Karlach, bloodied and bruised to an extent that Minthara has not seen yet in all their time fighting together, rushing headlong at the dias.
“Shit, is he—?”
“Give me a moment,” Shadowheart’s saying, the guardians having dissipated into smoke, and she’s doing something with the restraints on the wizard’s wrists.
Minthara goes still, watching.
If the wizard is breathing, she can’t see it.
The task of getting him freed is, evidently, a complicated one. Shadowheart curses quietly, then loudly, and it isn’t until Wyll rushes over and hands her some sort of key that she’s finally able to unlock the restraints with a horribly anticlimactic click. All three of them are talking over each other—Shadowheart, mostly, scolding the other two to shut up and let her work, and Karlach saying something like I’ll carry him out of this fucking place if I have to, just say the word—while the shackles fall off the sides of the dias, and there’s a golden light radiating from Shadowheart’s hands, and…
And the wizard breathes.
Well, not so much breathes as he sucks in a rush of air like a man near drowning. His eyes fly open. He lurches up immediately, or tries to, his movements uncoordinated and gawky.
“Easy— hey, easy,” Shadowheart’s saying to him. “Gale.”
“What—? How—?”
He’s got one hand on the dias beneath him, propping him up, and the other flies up to grip onto Shadowheart’s forearm. Unless Minthara’s seeing things, there’s a distinct crackle of white-blue electricity in his fingertips, but then he blinks again—several times, in rapid succession—and the magic fades.
His breathing is erratic, trembling, too quick and not nearly deep enough.
“Easy,” Shadowheart says again.
“You— Orin, she—”
“She’s gone, mate,” Karlach says. “And she’s not gonna be coming back from that beating, believe me.”
Wyll squeezes himself in beside Shadowheart, laying a firm hand on Gale’s shoulder and ducking down a bit so they’re eye-to-eye. Minthara does not know what he sees there, but whatever it is, it prompts him to pull the wizard forward and into a tight embrace. And the wizard—still trembling like the tattered remnants of a spider’s web in a storm—hesitates for the span of a heartbeat before he returns it, and then one more heartbeat before he tightens his grip. From there, he holds on as though his life depends on it.
His voice is muffled through Wyll’s shoulder when he speaks.
“Did she—? Did she hurt anyone?”
“Everyone’s fine, Gale,” Wyll tells him. “It’s you we were worried about.”
Karlach smiles, putting a hand on the wizard’s back so she can give him a rub and a gentle pat. “C’mon, magic man,” she says. “Let’s get the fuck out of here and never look back, yeah?”
The sun has long set over the horizon and left the city in the soft glow of moonlight when Gale makes his way up to the rooftop terrace of the Elfsong.
The fresh evening air that greets him when he climbs up the ladder is all but a literal balm on his soul. Between— well, between all that… unpleasantness beneath the city, and the many hours fitfully attempting to get some rest in his rented bed afterward… Suffice it to say, he needed this. All the fragrant potted plants and flowering ivy crawling up the trellises. The chill breeze. The smell of something roasting down in the kitchens. The faint hint of salt that’s never quite as strong as it is in Waterdeep, but which he appreciates all the same. The distant chatter of the city’s residents still milling about the streets below.
Here, surrounded by all this life on all sides, he is about as far from Orin’s domain as one can get, isn’t he?
Granted, none of that is precisely the reason he made his way up here, now, when nearly all the rest of their ragtag little group is downstairs preparing for bed—and when, by all logical reason, he technically should be, too. But it’s a lovely little bonus all the same.
He finds her quickly, positioned as she is with a line of sight toward the roof’s only entrance. She’s seated at one of the benches in front of a brazier, her form reduced to little more than an indigo silhouette, indigo haloed in a soft orange glow from the coals still smouldering in front of her. In the solitude of the night, in the wide open expanse of the city from this high a point, she looks disconcertingly small, far smaller than a woman of her stature has any right to look.
For a moment, Gale second guesses coming up here at all.
Then he sighs, steels himself, and makes his way across the roof to her. She’ll have been able to see every detail of his countenance from the moment he emerged onto the roof, of course, but his own eyes take quite a while to adjust, and it isn’t until he’s much closer that he begins to pick up on more than that silhouette: She’s in her camp clothes, though not unarmed, judging by the glint of metal by her hip. She’s hunched over, elbows on her thighs, hands clasped together. Her eyes are fixed not on the brazier in front of her, nor on Gale as he approaches, but on some building or another in the distance.
He stops at the bench, hardly an arm’s reach away.
“Mind if I join you?”
Minthara does not answer aloud, but her eyes flick to him, and she offers a single tilt of her head toward the bench. Gale nods back, settling in beside her. Of the two items he brought up here with him, he takes the first—the blanket from his bed—and fluffs it out behind him, draping it over his shoulders to ward off the chill. The second, a bottle of the driest, most bitter red he could find in the Elfsong’s stocks, he uncorks and holds out toward her in a wordless offer.
She frowns at him, brows pinched a bit.
“Ladies first,” he says with half a shrug, his voice still carefully low. “Assuming you do wish to share it with me. And I do quite hope that’s the case, because as unwise as it may be, I am willing to finish the bottle myself, should you decline.”
She takes the bottle from him before he’s quite finished that last sentence, tips it up for a swig, and hands it back.
Gale’s halfway through his third or fourth gulp himself when she finally speaks.
“You are unharmed, then?”
He nearly chokes on the wine, but he manages to hold it back to a few muted coughs. A droplet or two clings somewhere in his airway, tickling unpleasantly, and he rubs at his sternum with his free hand. “Er— yes,” he says, nodding. “I am. Almost shockingly so, yes.”
She’s frowning at him, something like skepticism in her eyes, but she doesn’t comment.
Gale’s quick to move on before she can.
“I hear I have you to thank for that, actually,” he says. “That’s why I came to find you. As the others tell it, when my… er, predicament was— When she— Well. The way I hear it, your voice was the loudest in favor of making a swift rescue—”
“Do not thank me for that,” Minthara cuts him off, in a tone that brooks absolutely no argument. “It was a foolish decision.”
“It—? Was it?”
“Tell me, wizard,” she says, glaring ahead at the softly burning coals in front of them. “When we obtain this third stone, and we make our final assault on the Netherbrain, what is your plan?”
“My—?” Gale stammers, trying to regain his footing on a stunningly abrupt change in subject. “My… plan—?”
“When we stand before the Netherbrain, do you intend to fight alongside the rest of us until the cursed thing is dead and the crown separated from it, or is it your intention to use that orb to end the fight before it’s begun?”
Ah.
Gale swallows. He was not expecting to have to confront his own rapidly impending mortality when he ascended that ladder a few minutes ago, thank you very much, and certainly not so soon after… after everything with Orin. Still, he knows she won’t allow him to skirt around the question, so he steadies himself and answers, “Honestly, I’ve been trying not to think about it much until the circumstances leave me no other choice. Haven’t been all that successful on that front, of course. I don’t particularly like to think about it, because it’s… It’s terrifying. I could scarcely pretend otherwise. But the fact of the matter is, I know it would be incredibly selfish of me to risk all of your lives when I have the means to—”
“It would be incredibly selfish, yes, to take all of the painstaking effort we’ve expended in keeping you alive and squander it less than a few short days later,” she says, cutting a harsh side-eye at him. “It would be a pointless sacrifice. And I, in particular, would be incredibly furious with you for it.”
“Oh,” he says, and perhaps it’s a bit dumb of him, but all he can think to respond to that is: “You would?”
“Mm. When Orin revealed her deception, there were two paths set before us: One was safer, far more likely to succeed, but would have delayed your safe return by several days at the very least. The other was faster, but came with obvious risks. Steep risks. And yet I insisted upon the latter path regardless,” she says, and she’s returned to staring ahead at the coals. “It would seem that your wellbeing has become a crucial component of my ability to make sound, reasonable decisions.”
Oh.
That is—
That is a ludicrously soft thing for her to say when she sounds this angry. Gale tries, and fails, to hold back a smile at that.
“So, given that information,” she goes on unimpeded, “you can imagine that choosing to detonate that orb and wipe yourself from existence would be tantamount to a personal insult.”
He nods along, slowly, then takes another gulp of the wine, sorting through the best way to respond to that without taking a dagger to the throat. But then he decides that she isn’t likely to harm him no matter what he says. Well. Almost no matter what he says. Surely there are a great many limits on how far he can push.
Still, if she’s so invested in his wellbeing, he supposes he can afford a little cheek.
“Far be it from me to bemoan another person’s loquaciousness—that would be the pot calling the kettle black if I’ve ever seen it—but you must know, that was an awfully roundabout way of making your point.”
Minthara frowns at him.
He offers a small smile in return, and he softens his voice when he says, “I care for you as well. Quite a lot, actually.”
The frown deepens into a genuine scowl, but she doesn’t dispute him. Instead she rolls her eyes and swipes the bottle from his hands, taking another few gulps from it.
“Then why,” she says, lowering the bottle, “did you lie to me?”
Gale blinks, thrown off for the second time in as many minutes.
“I— pardon? When?”
“I asked if you were unharmed,” she says. “And you said yes.”
“Oh. No, that— That wasn’t a lie, I am unharmed,” Gale says, and he opens up the blanket he’s wrapped around himself, just a bit, as if to say, look at me, all in one piece, though she doesn’t so much as spare him a glance before he wraps himself up in it again. “A bit stiff, yes, but otherwise? Hardly a scratch on me.”
Minthara shoots him a look, scowls again, and says, “In the six hours since your rescue, you have been more skittish than a particularly maladjusted cat, jumping at every shifting shadow. You shiver constantly, as though someone has drained the strength from your bones. You have not slept, though you very clearly need it. And perhaps most damning of all, you speak of your impending demise by Netherese orb with practiced ease, and yet not once have you spoken directly of your capture by Orin.”
Gale’s shoulders slump. He pulls the blanket more securely around his shoulders, and he swallows again, his mouth suddenly very dry. Her talk of shifting shadows has him glancing around the roof again—but of course it’s nothing but flowering vines and potted plants, helpfully illuminated by a waning half-moon above and the nearly burnt out coals in front of them.
“It was… a frightening predicament, I’ll admit,” he says, his voice quiet. “But I swear to you, I’m telling the truth.”
She makes an annoyed sound, something close to a growl, and he feels it immediately: The squirming behind his eye, the uncomfortable bristle of another’s thoughts attempting to reach his own—
He flinches. A wall slams down, more instinct than true action.
“Minthara.”
“What?” she asks, turning toward him, placing the wine bottle down on the roof by their feet. Her eyes bore into his, angry. “You, of all people, would fault me for my curiosity?”
“No, of course not, I just—” he hesitates, then snakes a hand out from under the blanket and scrubs it over his face. Gods. He is shaking. He takes a breath to steady his nerves. It doesn’t work. “I would prefer it if you asked first before forcing your way into my mind. Or, better yet, allow me the dignity of choosing what to share.”
She stares at him for a long moment, frowning, searching his eyes for… something. He doesn’t know what.
But then she softens, marginally, and she nods.
Gale nods as well, and then—carefully, slowly, bit by bit—he lifts the barrier on his thoughts. It still comes with an uncomfortable bristle, like a cat being pet the wrong way. It still comes with that godsawful squirming behind his eye. But at least now he’s prepared for it.
He lets her see as he saw. He lets her feel as he felt, too—or, more accurately, he cannot quite separate one from the other, so he has to share both or nothing at all.
He allows her to see Orin masquerading as Elminster, to see him lured away from camp, to see the moment the shapechanger’s deception was revealed. That was days ago, now—four, according to Wyll, based on what Gale remembers before being taken. The sight of Elminster’s face morphing into Orin’s comes with a blood-cooling terror that sinks deep into his bones, terror not only for his own sake but for the rest of them as well, terror at the knowledge that she’s going to use him to hurt them (and that’s to say nothing of the possibility that she might simply kill him, might detonate the orb without even realizing what she’s done, might doom the whole of the Sword Coast, the whole world because of him—)
In the temple, his awareness comes and goes. Most of the time he’s drowning in a thick soupy darkness unlike anything he’s ever experienced, somewhere between sleeping and hypnosis, but other times—
Other times he wakes, but just barely. The fear which had been muffled to a distant anxiety in that darkness comes rushing to the forefront, but he can do nothing to soothe it. He can’t move. He can scarcely breathe. He has no idea what Orin may have done to the others in his absence—can’t think on it for too long or he’ll panic anew—but right now she’s here, she stands over him, those blank eyes shining, a smile splitting her skull. He tries to speak despite knowing he can’t, tries so hard to say something, anything to get through to her—maybe she won’t want the orb detonated either, maybe that would be too final, too quick for her tastes—and oh, that has the potential to make things so much worse for him, doesn’t it, but gods, at least if she avoids the orb he can take it, he can endure whatever she has in store for him if it means he hasn’t killed the entire city, if it means he hasn’t killed all of his friends and thousands of strangers besides—and that’s a lie, of course, he knows in the pit of his stomach that it’s a lie, he almost certainly can’t take it, but it’s still the preferable outcome if he can just—
Orin coos at him, tuts like he’s a wayward child, and mutters words that all blend together to his addled mind. She drags a clammy finger over his temple, traces it down slowly along his jawline, presses fingernails like claws into his pulse point and he can’t so much as flinch away—
He does, though.
He flinches, and the connection shifts.
Now he’s in a room he does not recognize, but he knows it’s the temple, still, with the same strange certainty that one usually associates with dreams. He’s in the temple. Orin’s own chambers. He’s fully conscious now, kneeling on damp stone, knees and shoulders aching, wrists and forearms chained tightly behind him. He’s been here in this same position for hours, days, maybe a tenday. There’s a body sprawled on the stone before him, more blood and exposed muscle than dusky blue skin, just out of reach—and another beyond that, and another, and another, all naked as the day they were born and all mutilated in various creative ways, and he knows them—he knew them, all of them, they were his soldiers, his men that she slaughtered like cattle—
She’s here, now, standing over him, and then crouching so that they’re eye to eye. The whole of his awareness is nothing but those corpse white eyes and a near intoxicating power that radiates off of her in waves and a cold hand that traces delicately up his throat—
The connection snaps like a bow string.
The memories retreat until they’re just that again. Memories.
If he was shaking before, gods, he’s practically convulsing now. He tightens his fists in the blanket still draped over his shoulders, tightens them until his knuckles hurt, and he forces himself to breathe. Flowers. The smell of something cooking down in the Elfsong kitchens. The faint hint of salt in the air.
When he thinks he can manage it, he consciously untenses. His shoulders first, then his fists. He flexes his fingers and shakes out the ache, then reaches up and scrubs at his face again, wiping tears from his cheeks.
“It feels a bit ridiculous,” he admits, and his voice is a pathetically small thing now. “She didn’t… do anything to me. Not physically. But…”
“But it affected you all the same.”
Gale looks up, but Minthara is no longer looking at him. She’s staring ahead at the coals again. He nods, slowly, more to himself than in answer to her question, since she can’t see it.
Then he unfurls the blanket and tosses half of it over her shoulders as well. She doesn’t flinch away or reject it, only goes statue-still for a moment, and then she sags with a sigh, grabbing the edge of the blanket and pulling it more securely around herself. The two of them are cocooned in it together now, upper arms pressed together, and if he slouched a bit, he could even rest his head on her shoulder. He doesn’t, but he could.
He lets himself take another slow breath. Steadying. Grounding.
Well. In for a copper.
“I’m terrified,” Gale tells her, still quietly, as though anyone might be listening in. “Still terrified. I know Orin’s dead. I know that particular danger has passed, but the fear is still… clinging, like a lingering sickness. I can’t seem to shake it. I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I see her again. Was it—? Was it like that for you, too?”
“No,” she says. “I was far more angry than I was afraid.”
He doesn’t call her out on the lie. He doesn’t need to. She glances sidelong at him, huffs, and looks forward again.
“But I was… afraid,” she admits. “What you don’t understand—what none of you understand—is that Orin could make herself a mirror to anyone she chose, but it was only the surface that she imitated. The skin and the muscle and the bone. Peel back that surface, and her madness lay beneath. She could not hide that, no matter what form she chose. No matter how perfect the surface imitation, few would see themselves reflected in Orin’s madness, in her soul.”
She stops, jaw tensing, and she adjusts the blanket around herself.
“But I did,” she whispers. “I do. And she knew it.”
“You—”
“Spare me your placations, wizard,” she cuts him off, though her voice is still oddly, uncharacteristically gentle. “That is the truth: I saw myself in her. A broken version of myself, but recognizable nonetheless. She… She left scars on me that will never heal, scars I may have inflicted upon her if our positions were reversed. Scars I might have left on others— have left on others, I don’t doubt. And I was convinced that she would waste no time in adding to those scars, the moment we followed her into the city.”
Again, she pauses.
“I am ashamed to say it,” she says at length, “but I never once considered that she might inflict those scars through another instead.”
Gale offers her a sad smile that she doesn’t see. Then, a bit impulsively, he gives into his earlier temptation, and he scoots back and slouches a bit so he can rest his head on her shoulder, careful to rest on the back of it lest he wrinkle one of those pointy shoulder pads of hers. And the closeness… It helps. It chases off a bit more of the frightened shiver that’s been clinging to his bones.
And she doesn’t even shake him off.
“You outlived her,” Gale says. “We both did. It may be difficult to bask in such a victory, but it is a victory regardless.”
“Mm. So it would seem.”
A yawn escapes him before he can stop it, and he realizes that this may not have been the wisest decision. Slouching against her has all but sapped the last bit of alertness from him, but he steadfastly keeps his eyes open anyway.
“Sleep, wizard,” Minthara says. “The danger has passed.”
“What, sleep right here on the roof? And trap you here?”
“I have nowhere else I need to be,” she says, “and you could not trap me if your life depended on it. I could easily remove you if needed.”
He almost laughs it off, but gods, he truly is exhausted. More exhausted than he’s been in a very, very long time. Every blink seems to last a bit longer than the last, and opening his eyes each time comes with a near herculean effort.
“For what it’s worth,” Gale says first, because this can’t go without saying. “I think you judge yourself too harshly. I’ve seen the heart of gold that lurks under that stern countenance, however adept you may be at hiding it.”
“Have you, now.”
He hums an affirmative, and finally, he succumbs to the need to close his heavy-lidded eyes. “Some broken version of yourself may have been reflected in Orin’s madness, but you’re not broken. You’re not like she was.”
The silence stretches for a long while before Minthara finally whispers, “I could have been. Had things gone differently, had you all not foolishly decided to help me, I would be still. What then?”
“Then… Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation, I suppose. We wouldn’t have had the chance to get to know each other,” he says. “And I think I would be all the poorer for it.”
Again, the silence stretches. Sleep laps at his consciousness like a gentle wake on the docks, coaxing him under.
She does something truly astonishing, then. She doesn’t lean into him, doesn’t rest her head on top of his, nor does she turn and embrace him—and thank all the gods above for that, because he might have thought Orin really hadn’t died and had replaced her otherwise. But she does reach one hand up, the hand not still clutching the blanket, and she pats his head. Once, twice, and then—hesitantly, like she isn’t sure whether she should—she drags her fingers into his hair and ruffles it a bit, nails gently scratching at his scalp before she returns her hand to her lap.
What a wonder, that such a small gesture would suffuse him with so much warmth.
“Sleep now, Gale,” she says, her voice softer than he’s ever heard it. He may even be imagining it for all he knows, half asleep and half dreaming as he must be. “You need not worry. I will still be here when you wake.”
Gods, he’s going to have a terrible kink in his neck in the morning, isn’t he?
Still, he can’t bring it in himself to move.
And for the first time since Orin crept into their camp four days ago, he drifts into a gentle, dreamless sleep.