Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Tangles were as hectic as ever; busy, far too busy. They were ancient, inefficient, ill-planned, and thus perpetually overcrowded, even more so since the beginning of the recent wars. The entire district was simply not fit for purpose. If Trent Ikithon were permitted to have his way, he would simply tear the Tangles down and expand the Shimmer Ward across the entire centre of Rexxentrum, replace this mess of sound and sight and smell with smooth, white marble. He avoided such places for the most, sending his students out on errands as needed, preferring instead to lurk on his estate at Vergesson – or, as was becoming increasingly more necessary as the fighting dragged on, to remain in the Candles’ Tower of Civil Influence. But Zivan Margolin had insisted that he come personally and view this ‘curiosity’ that the army had apparently requisitioned from the north, no matter how little time he had to spare. And so here Ikithon was, making his steady way through Rexxentrum’s Tangles marketplace with Oremid Hass at his side, knuckles white around his staff of office, nose turned up contemptuously, and a spell at his fingertips for anyone who so much as glanced disrespectfully at them.

Vendors, residents, crownsguard, soldiers of the Righteous Brand, worshippers of Pelor and Erathis, even a handful of older students in the robes of the Soltryce Academy, all stepped quickly out of the archmages’ way, cowed by the aura of power that surrounded them both. Some bowed, recognising two of the eight ruling magisters of the Assembly, in response to which Hass smiled magnanimously and Ikithon only kept walking, his cold glare a silent demand that the crowd part around him like water.

The creature, whatever it would prove to be, was being held at the Claykeep Prison. Whether that was because it was an escape risk, because it was dangerous, or just because the Righteous Brand hadn’t known where else to put it, was unclear – Margolin had Sent only that it was likely arcane in nature, possibly of use to the war effort. Take Oremid , he had tacked on to the end of the message, and as much as Ikithon rolled his eyes at the necessity of working with any of his fellow archmages, he at least found Hass to be far less irritating than all the rest of them. They had the same ruthless streak, the same unfeeling scientific manner, the same expectation that those beneath their tutelage simply endure or break. Hass put out a friendlier face to the world, certainly, but he and Ikithon were the same underneath.

The guard at the prison gates clearly expected them, directing them at once to the care of one of his fellows. This was an older man, a nervous sort, who ducked a quick bow before immediately leading them away from the main body of the jail, toward the handful of lead-lined cells below the ground where magic users were kept.

“Right this way, magisters.”

The ground was foul with slick dark run-off from the stone walls and gutters, and Ikithon occupied himself in subtly casting to keep the muck away from his fine furs. But as they travelled downwards Hass strode a few paces forward, enough to catch up with their guide.

“Any kind of trouble from the prisoner?”

Visibly flustered at being addressed so directly by such a powerful man, the guard shook his head.

“No, Archmage. A bit of strange shit, if you’ll excuse the language, sir, but he’s not a violent type.”

Hass cast a short glance back at Ikithon, who raised one eyebrow infinitesimally. Arcane shit , almost certainly – and interesting that their creature was a he, apparently, rather than an it.

“Strange? In what way?”

The guard rubbed awkwardly at his forehead beneath his helmet.

“He… talks, sir. Insists he’s not just talking to himself. And there’s the occasional magic trick, even despite the hole he’s in.”

Interest piqued, Hass tilted his chin curiously in a way that made the dry dirt of his skin fall across his collar, visible even in torchlight. His voice was the bass hum of a distant earthquake.

“Odd, indeed, then.”

Neither archmage bothered to ask the guard what manner of being the prisoner was; this man was hardly an expert, and his opinions mattered little. Such things were not without explanation, anyway – most likely this was not a wizard in the conventional manner, but some sort of creature with an innate or divine connection to arcane power. They would see for themselves soon enough.

They came quickly to a small, unremarkable stone chamber; the air around them was suffused with the weighty aura of dampened magic, all deadened and stale.

“In here, magisters,” mumbled the guard, fumbling with his heavy ring of iron keys, clearly eager to step aside and let them pass. Ikithon felt the enchantment shift as the key turned in the lock; the door was solid lead, and with it closed none of them would have had access to their powers, and so it must be left open. The chains around the ankles of the prisoner kept him well contained in any case.

Curled up in the far corner, his bony limbs folded uncomfortably against mildewed straw and cold, bare stone, was a boy. He was covered head to toe in downy silver fur, with a shock of pink hair tangling and matting around his head, grown in pale brown at the roots. If he stood, he probably would have stood taller than Ikithon – but he was all out of proportion, gangly in a way that said he still had some growing left to do. He had a broad flat nose adjoined to his lips like the muzzle of a cow, round doe-like eyes squinting as he cringed from sudden noise and torchlight, and long soft ears that twitched and pinned back as they entered.

“Hello?” he blurted, voice creaking with disuse. They ignored him.

“A firbolg,” said Hass at once, understanding and pitying in his way. “Ah, a firbolg child. Poor thing.”

The boy’s huge eyes fixed plaintively at Hass, hopeful at the kindness in his voice – Trent’s fellow archmage had always had a soft spot for small, fuzzy creatures. But it was a softness, not a weakness, and he carried on with a cool, clinical analysis, no different from the way he would have spoken of an animal or an object.

“One with highly unusual colouration and markings, though. Not a member of any of the major tribes, to my knowledge. Some unknown sub-species, perhaps. I wonder…”

Hope stifled, the boy shrunk into himself again. That kind of disappointment was of no use: Ikithon knew well enough that he needed the subject of an interrogation awake, alert. Disorientation and dismay had their uses, of course, but not here. He rapped his staff against the door for the boy’s attention, a loud enough bang that the child physically jumped, ears flattening protectively against his skull.

“What is your name?”

The boy blinked long cow’s lashes at him, guileless.

“My… real name? Or not?”

There were not many things in this world that could dumbfound an archmage of such power; little that shocked him, even less that he allowed to make him show his shock. But such casual bluntness from a creature so trapped caught him off-guard.

“Your — what?”

“Mom says not to ever tell bad people my real name,” explained the boy in his thoughtful, gravelly voice – scared, certainly, but dazed and distracted even more so. “But I didn’t — I didn’t have a fake name made up ready. Um,”

“We are ‘bad people’, young one?” asked Hass, half-teasing, with a small smile. Whatever chance there had been for him to comfort the boy with his gentleness had passed, though; there was a natural wisdom below the child’s bewilderment, and it was evident that he had seen through Oremid’s superficial warmth the moment that his facade had slipped.

“Well,” he mused, shifting his bony knees up closer to his furred chest, hiding them with the fraying, homespun robes he wore. “You have me in a cage, so.”

“Enough of this,” snapped Ikithon, frustrated that they were allowing themselves to be distracted, and moved his left hand in the quick, well-practised somatic for Zone of Truth. The magic washed easily through the cell, and he felt no successful resistance. “What is your name?”

“Caduceus Clay,” answered the boy promptly, and then frowned at himself in confusion.

“And where are you from, Herr Clay?”

“The Blooming Grove.” It wasn’t a name that meant anything to Ikithon, nor to Hass, by the look on his face. The boy, Caduceus, glanced between them, and stumbled over his explanation. “Some people call it the Bone Garden? It’s, it’s weeks away from here, northwards, I think. Past the border. In the Savalirwood.”

The spell wouldn’t have pulled such elaboration from him. Caduceus was simply a naturally helpful person, Ikithon supposed, open and generous with what he knew; in other words, a fool. If he was from the Savalirwood, perhaps this was an explanation for the his strangeness – though Ikithon could sense none of the usual twisted, distasteful magics of Molaesmyr emanating from him. 

“You live with your family there, Caduceus?” pressed Hass. “Your mother, your clan?”

“Oh, yes.” The boy reached up to rub his own soft ear distractedly, a childish self-soothing motion. “We keep the garden. We’ve always kept the garden.”

The garden, not a garden. The Bone Garden. It smacked of history, mythology. There was a rip through the sash at his belt, where a holy symbol might have been torn away. Ikithon’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Keep for whom?” he demanded, just as Hass asked, “What kind of garden?”

Caduceus hesitated, glancing uncertainly back and forth, and finally landing upon Hass’s question.

“…A graveyard. A sacred place for those who lived well.”

“A sacred place for whom?” repeated Ikithon, allowing a little more open threat to creep into his icy voice.

“The Wildmother,” admitted Caduceus hesitantly, bewildered, intimidated by the sharpness of the words but not understanding the reason for it. “Melora.”

“Ah,” intoned Hass, disappointed. The boy hunched his shoulders, daunted, tugged nervously on his long ear again. Ikithon raised his brows in disapproval.

“A heretic, too.”

“What’s a heretic?” blurted Caduceus, having apparently sensed that this was a very dangerous thing to be.

“One who worships wrongly,” said Ikithon, utterly cold. “Who worships anything other than the six permitted gods of the Dwendalian Empire.”

Caduceus seemed to be beginning to panic, putting together what a dire situation he was in. “I don’t belong to the Dwendalian Empire, though,” he objected weakly.

Ikithon tipped his chin at the chains, at the prison around them.

“You do now.”

The boy tried and failed to find words of protest, body slumped and huge eyes beginning to glint with unshed tears.

“Trent,” murmured Hass, gesturing for the taller man to lean down slightly toward him, diverting his cool stare away from the corner of the cell. “I will take him. Whatever is strange about his powers in particular, he’ll need training to be useful. The Halls of Erudition are more than capable of housing —”

Ikithon raised one imperious hand, a plan having already begun to take shape in the back of his mind. Knowing him well enough not to interrupt, Hass went silent.

“Firbolgs have a number of innate magical abilities, do they not?” he intoned, a rhetorical question. “And this is a particularly unique example. It will be a… valuable test, to see how he interacts with the residuum.  The creature has a great deal of what I have always searched for amongst the Soltryce Academy’s student body: potential.”

There was reluctance in Hass’s obsidian eyes, in the set of his lips, even as he acquiesced with a deep nod. He was not kind, not truly – young Caduceus would not have had a pleasant education, beneath Hass and his acolytes. But he was certainly kinder than Ikithon, and he knew enough of Ikithon’s methods to dislike the thought of young, soft things subjected to them. He still did nothing to stop it.

Ikithon turned to rake a long, assessing look across Caduceus’s huddled form; the boy’s large ears had swivelled toward them, probably eavesdropping.

“Disguise Self,” he ordered. “That should make a fine demonstration.”

The steel in his voice left no room for objection, but Caduceus only hesitated, made no attempt to reach for his magic.

“Well, Mister Clay?” prompted Hass gently. The boy shifted uncomfortably in place.

“…People here don’t seem to like it when I do that. They get mad.”

Sympathetically, Hass tutted. “I imagine they do, yes. But still, now we are asking, and so you will get no trouble for it.”

Caduceus blinked balefully, clearly past the point of trusting anything they said, but not quite prepared to defy them. And then suddenly the little firbolg boy was gone, and, shackled and curled up on the floor in his place, sat the human guard who had led them there: a perfect likeness.

“Impressive,” said Hass warmly. At the door, the guard in question flicked his eyes over to his prisoner and gasped sharply as he startled at the sight. Embarrassed, Caduceus turned back into himself.

“You can hide yourself too, I believe,” commented Ikithon, still in the tone of a command, surveying this display of natural power with naked greed. Margolin hadn’t been wrong: there was something unusual about the creature and his abilities, something more primeval or fey than the protective magic of his illegal goddess.

“Yes,” mumbled Caduceus, and vanished with ease, the only sign of his continued presence the way that the manacles clinked against each other as he shuffled.

Hass leaned closer and asked in an undertone, mild as ever, “Was that necessary? Surely we already know —”

“Worthwhile to be sure. Besides, now he cannot use these abilities again today.” Ikithon turned back to Caduceus, paying no heed to the fact that the boy was currently invisible. “You can read and write, boy? How old are you?”

Once again pulling nervously on an ear, Caduceus flickered back into existence.

“Uh-huh. My dad taught me to sound out the letters on the graves. And I’m — uh. Older than my sister Clarabelle, younger than Colton or Calliope? I’m probably, um, kind of, four-fifths grown, or maybe more, or —”

“In years?” suggested Hass, far more patiently than Ikithon could ever have managed. A slight frown appeared between the boy’s pale brows.

“How much is a year?”

“W-Well, it’s,” Hass stumbled, paused, considered his approach. “The time from summer to summer again, or winter to winter again. Four seasons.”

“…Oh.” Caduceus’s ear flicked as though to shake away the confusion, and he started seemingly trying to count seasons on his fingers.

“Enough,” snapped Ikithon. “You have never been to school, then. How should you like to go to school now?”

Caduceus just stared at him. Only a child, sheltered, not the sharpest mind – but all too aware of how trapped he was.

“It doesn’t matter what I like,” he said slowly, quietly, a statement of fact rather than an accusation. “I want to go home. But you’re going to take me somewhere else instead. ”

“Yes.” Ikithon stepped forward just enough to cast a long shadow across the boy, to loom over him. “And I suggest that you do not resist.”

Caduceus took a long shaky breath and said nothing, slow gaze steady. He made no promises.

Ikithon had broken worse before.

Chapter Text

Every last part of the Soltryce Academy was beautiful, immaculate. All in gleaming granite and marble, its grand arches and columns towered high above the city, cold and mighty and impassive. The building had been designed to strike both terror and awe into those that saw it, for the intricacy and scale of the masonry itself to showcase the talent of the Dwendalian Empire’s mages. It was a facade meant to inspire humility in even the boldest, and it did so very effectively, reducing its pupils to mere ants beneath its grandeur. Even the stones themselves seemed unimpressed by the meagre skill and size of the children trained within its walls.

Out in the hidden nooks of the grounds, perhaps, or tucked away in their cosy common rooms at night, the pupils might laugh or shout or chatter freely – but in the heart of the Acadmy, beneath both the eagle eyes of the professors and the lofty heights of the halls, they were universally meek and quiet, scurrying to lessons and meals with only a low, whispery kind of commotion.

It was nothing like the life that Fjord had come from. This place was regimented to the utmost degree, every second of every day ordered and organised within clean, clear lines, all hushed and reverent. Worlds away from the ramshackle orphanage where the Empire had found him. His home in Port Damali had never been entirely quiet, nor entirely dark; there had always been workers and revellers and drunks out making noise at night, always lanterns meant to keep the streets bright enough to navigate, always the lighthouses that made sure the safe harbour could be seen from the sea. And besides, within the walls of the Driftwood Asylum itself, there had always been wailing babies and restless children to contend with. That was what Fjord had been used to, though; he didn’t know how to sleep without background noise, without even the comforting rush of the tides in the distance. In the still air and silence of the Soltryce Academy, he was jumpy, self-conscious, stilted when he spoke.

It didn’t help that he was the only student there with orcish blood, among hundreds. Not the only non-human – more and more unusual faces like his appeared every year since the conquest, seized from all along the Menagerie Coast and dragged to Soltryce to be educated, many of them kicking and screaming all the way, since the Empire valued expansion far above free will or liberty. But the only half-orc.

He had quickly gotten into the habit of letting himself trail behind his classmates on their way around the school, of being the last person in or out of the dorms. Better to be a few seconds late than to give them even more of a chance to stare.

Lunch was typically simple enough, though; Fjord was left alone, there, mostly. They didn’t have very long to eat, and most pupils spent the time reading quietly over their spellbooks or concentrating on their meals, too occupied to pay much heed to one shy orcish boy in the corner. Besides, he had made sure not to provide would-be bullies with much of a target. He was big enough now that no one ever dared to shove him around like the boys at Driftwood had when he was younger; he kept his tusks and claws filed down to almost nothing, the beginnings of white streaks in his hair and blotches of less-pigmented green skin hidden as best he could. It still wasn’t comfortable – nothing was, at Soltryce – but it was simple.

Today, as usual, he tried to be as quick and quiet as possible as he got a bowl of stew and made his way to the end of one of the long wooden tables that lined the hall, focused mainly on not spilling anything. Fjord was still getting used to the food — not strong flavours, necessarily, but always unfamiliar ones. At least there was plenty of it; after a lifetime of having to earn every scrap, he was very grateful for that.

Usually no one else was alone. This day, however, when he glanced up from his food to look for a seat, he found a tiefling girl perched awkwardly at the end of the furthest table, poking disinterestedly at her own meal, far away from anybody else. He had never seen her before – in amongst a sea of humans, halflings, gnomes, and half-elves, he was sure he would have recognised her – and she looked… lost, just as uncomfortable and out of place as Fjord felt. New, he presumed, and not here willingly (as if anyone truly was).

The smartest thing to do would be to leave her. Two strange creatures together would draw more attention than just one, and he had no desire to make himself responsible for some dazed kid. She would learn to adjust, as he had. It was not so dangerous here that leaving her to fend for herself would be an act of cruelty.

But she seemed close to tears, and she was even younger than he was, a first-year student. If no adults around you cared, you had to look out for each other; Fjord had lived to that rule his whole life, had only survived this far because older kids at the Asylum had believed in it too. So he made up his mind to be brave, and walked up to the bench opposite her, and didn’t let any of his nerves show on his face.

“Is it alright if I sit here?”

The tiefling girl’s head snapped up to him, surprised, and she blinked as she processed the words, as she took in the startling sight before her: his green skin, the black hair he wore long enough to hide as much of himself as he could, the yellow eyes glinting behind it.

“Here? With me?”

She had a high, peeping voice, an accent that came from further south down the coast than Fjord’s. Her face was childish, cute, smattered with freckles; it was incongruous with everything about her that spoke of demonic heritage, the horns and tail, the blue skin and magpie-wing dark hair.

“If the seat’s not taken.” He offered, giving her a way out if she wanted it.

After a moment she shrugged, shy but not displeased, and shuffled along to make room for him. Unsure of what exactly to do, he sat, ducked his head and began to eat, mentally rifling through things he might say and finding nothing of much use. The girl hesitated a moment, reached up to fiddle absentmindedly with her stiff uniform collar. Fjord grimaced sympathetically.

“You gotta weigh it down if you want it lie flat,” he advised, swallowing hard around a steaming mouthful of thick stew. Her curling ram’s horns only made the inquisitive tilt of her head more obvious; he gestured to his own collar, by way of explanation, the sharp starched jut of the fabric up at his neck. “I put a history tome on mine for a night or two, it helped.”

The girl’s expression cleared a little in understanding, and then she pouted, squirming around to try and get the red robes they had been issued to lie a little less uncomfortably over her.

“It’s so pointy,” she grouched. “And stupid.”

Fjord could see a twitching movement behind her that must have been her tail lashing in frustration beneath the fabric, and wondered privately how long it would be before she cut a hole through the robe for it.

“And this is the worst shade of red!”

Her voice pitched a little too loud, and Fjord saw a handful of other students and two of the cooks – stern older Zemnian women, as they all seemed to be – look over to them and frown disapprovingly. Both of them shut up immediately, looked down at their food, took another bite, taking the obvious cue to pretend not to have been talking. It didn’t seem to be strictly forbidden, to chat while eating, but places like this were full of unwritten rules like that.

“I know what you mean,” he agreed under his breath, wanting her to know that he felt for her, even while he knew better than the openly cause trouble in an institution that prided itself on being faultless and perfect. “Feel like these uniforms were designed for, you know, brown and peach, not so much,”

He nodded to where his own wrist poked out of his sleeve, indicting the jewel tones of both their skin. The girl broke into a smile, secret, relieved.

“Right?” she whispered conspiratorially.

At even the smallest overtures of friendship he had offered, she seemed genuinely touched; Fjord suspected the soldiers who brought her here had not been kind. Neither had those that had taken him, though in truth they hadn’t been particularly unpleasant either. His overwhelming impression had been that of apathy: they hadn’t known what fate they were consigning children to, by bringing them to the Academy, and they hadn’t much cared.

He had been in Driftwood’s workshop when the Righteous Brand showed up in Port Damali, searching for recruits to bolster the magical ranks of the Empire’s armies. No one had told him what was happening. His first thought as the door creaked open to let in the fright afternoon sun had been relief, gladness for an excuse to stop working for a minute or two. It had been getting toward evening; Fjord and the other kids had been sweaty, grimy, ready to trudge back upstairs to their dormitory and rest. Seeing the headmaster of the orphanage, they had set aside their tools and the wooden crates and ropes they were making, and got to their feet.

Headmaster Grankton hadn’t said anything to them. He had waved a hand lazily, more or less an instruction to stay still and wait – and then behind him had come a handful of soldiers, and a wizard, dressed in the uniform of a Dwendalian warcaster. That was when the first faint threads of alarm began to curdle in Fjord’s belly, but there was nothing he could do about it, no option but to shift nervously from foot to foot and wait for explanation.

The Empire mage had looked disgusted with her surroundings, unhappy at having to do this. She still did it.

“Don’t move,” she commanded, and began to mutter beneath her breath, moving her hands in a well-practiced somatic. Fjord hadn’t known it, then, but he would learn to recognise the spell soon enough: a modified form of Detect Magic, invented within the same walls where he now studied.

As soon as she finished the spell, Fjord shivered, feeling a pins-and-needles tingle as the magic settled across his skin. Invisible, but nevertheless marking him out.

“That one,” said the mage coolly, indicating a friendly halfling boy who had barely been in the orphanage a year, then kept on pointing: two human girls, twins; a half-elven boy Fjord’s own age; a timid dwarvish girl; a tiny gnomish kid who looked too young to even be working. Then, finally, Fjord.

One of them soldiers ordered them forward; confused, full of dread, they had stepped hesitantly into a huddle before the mage. The smaller kids hung back, and the older ones let them; Fjord instinctively drew himself up, tried to put himself between the little ones and the danger.

Openly, with no attempt to disguise what he was doing, one of the soldiers pulled a coin purse from his belt and counted out a small number of silver pieces for each child. Fjord realised what was happening as though at a great distance; if there had been anything he could do to stop – and there hadn’t been – he would still have been frozen too stiff with shock to act, as he watched Grankton accept the cash and tuck it away in a pocket. Seeing the transaction done, the wizard turned and readied herself to address the orphans. Her face was sour with distaste, though Fjord couldn’t say whether it was at the children themselves or at the blatant bribery.

“You have been summoned to the Soltryce Academy, to study under the guidance of Archmage Zevran Margolis.” She recited. “It is the duty of all with arcane abilities to use them to serve the glory of the Empire. You are to come with us. To Rexxentrum.”

More than eight hundred miles, almost a month’s travel. An entirely different universe. Any protests had been quickly stifled, tears ignored; the mage hadn’t allowed them even a minute to run upstairs and gather their things — the Empire will provide for you, they had been told. By then, the soldiers had been well-practised at extracting magically-talented children from their homes in the cleanest possible fashion, and they were swift and merciless.

And that had been it.

Fjord had managed to crane his head from where they had sat him on the cart on the way out of Port Damali, and catch one final glimpse of evening sun glimmering off the brilliant blue of the Lucidian Ocean. He had always thought that the sea would be his way out, that he would find work as a sailor and escape Driftwood that way. Being hauled away in the opposite direction hadn’t seemed possible.

Fjord hadn’t done so badly at Soltryce, in all truth — the conscripted children from all corners of the Empire had been put through further testing once they reached the capital, and he had performed at least well enough to be sent to the Academy proper, rather than shipped off to Zadash or Hupperdook to serve some other purpose. He certainly seemed to catch up to the other students his age faster than had been expected of him. Having a full belly and a body that didn’t constantly ache from having to work was nice, as was being allowed to learn, to stretch his mind properly for the first time. But he didn’t think he had quite managed to get over the jolt of shock at being so abruptly displaced just yet.

He had never been so far from the sea in his life, and something dark and huge that he could feel, sometimes, twisting inside his chest, had not been pleased with him at all for that. It scared him even to think of; the nightmares he could scarcely remember echoed awfully around his head, the furious golden gaze and the endless serpentine body coiling around him, the impossibly deep voice reverberating inside his skull. He hadn’t dared to tell anyone at Soltryce about what had happened the night his bullies had tried to drown him, about the sea serpent and its terrible eye. So far it hadn’t been a problem: he had managed to muffle his night terrors in his pillow, and the dreams had quieted a little, muted and hazy when they did come. Perhaps the creature had realised that Fjord was helpless to obey it, no matter what it demanded. He had no idea what would happen to him next, and no control over any of it. All the decisions he might otherwise have made felt absurd or impossible now, all sort of faded and faraway. He belonged to Soltryce; until he had a chance to get away, the sea serpent would just have to wait.

“I’m Jester,” chimed the tiefling girl abruptly, startling him out of his thoughts. She was looking at him expectantly, violet eyes sharp enough that he knew she had been staring curiously.

“Fjord,” he replied, dredging up a polite smile from somewhere, lips closed as always to conceal his teeth. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too!”

She seemed to genuinely mean it, somehow, wiggling forward to lean across the dining table toward him.

“Everyone here is so stuffy,” she chattered on, forgetting to be subtle at all. “And I keep getting in trouble for silly things like touching my hair too much or looking out of the window or not being asleep on time, as though I can control that? And —”

From the corridor outside rang the jangling of a brass hand-bell, and all at once the pupils still eating began to hurry to be done, eager to get to their classrooms before the next bell would ring to announce that they were late. Fjord shovelled another spoonful or two into his mouth before standing, watching as Jester copied what the others around her were doing with an air of mild confusion.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, a clumsy attempt at comfort. “Just — I don’t know. Try to keep your head down.”

“I’m not very good at that!” Unbothered, unafraid, she bumped her shoulder companionably against him — she was so much shorter than him that it met his bicep. He felt a sudden shock of protective fear at the thought of her standing out so shamelessly in a place like this. “I’ll see you around, Fjord!”

She had joined the crowd and disappeared before he had the chance to respond. For a heartbeat too long, he hesitated, wavering between trying to go after the little blue figure he could just about see heading away with the others, and hanging back as was his habit, just about on the acceptable side of tardy. His own uncertainty made up the choice for him, and he trailed behind as he made his way to the grand staircase that would lead him to his next lesson — still wondering all the while who she was and if she would be alright.

The stairs were just as imposing as the rest of the Soltryce Academy’s architecture; beneath Fjord’s hand the wooden bannister was polished to mirror-smoothness, and the slabs of white marble that made up the steps themselves were just a little too large to cross in one pace, forcing students to adopt a strained, unnatural gait to climb them.

It was only around halfway up that a professor, passing in the other direction, caught a glimpse of him and brought him to a halt with a call.

“Ah, Mister Stone.”

Some of the clump of other students just ahead of him glanced back, but they didn’t even break step, ignoring Fjord as he stepped awkwardly down. He met the older woman’s gaze with dread and anticipation.

“Yes, ma’am?”

So far, the instructors Fjord had encountered here were all either stone-faced war mages, curt and displeased at having been assigned teaching duty, or frazzled academics, skilled spellcasters so far beyond the level of their youngest students that they may as well have been studying an entirely separate discipline. The teachers who had been drilling them through their first few spells had been mostly of the former category; this was one of the latter, an older half-elf with thick bottle glasses and a severe grey plait that hung past her waist, a research professor with expertise in Conjuration.

She shuffled through several of the leaves of parchment she was carrying, and handed him a small note, upon which was written only a place, date, and time: next Folsen, five in the evening.

“You are to report to the office of the Archmage of Civil Influence,” she explained distractedly. “Not the one in the Candles, the one he uses when he’s teaching here; it’s beside Headmaster Margolin’s study.”

Fjord could only blink at her, struck dumb by such a baffling instruction, by the bizarre shifts in emotion that he had been subjected to already just today. She frowned, and after a second he managed to croak,

“Yes, ma’am.”

With a slightly dubious look, she nodded and began to make her way away downstairs. Fjord remained frozen for a second, then turned to ask hastily,

“Have I done something wrong, professor?”

Obedience was not an easy task in such a strict place as this. Fjord wasn’t aware that he had broken any rules – not any major ones, at least – but it was entirely possible that he had crossed some line unknowingly, or that someone had been tallying up all his little faults, and if so he wanted to know it. The professor looked back to him.

“What?”

“Am I in trouble, ma’am?”

At this, she finally paused and turned to face him properly, looking away from her other papers. There was a hard expression in her eyes, something like resignation or regret.

(She knew what the Archmage was like; she knew the chances of anyone ever seeing a pupil that had been taken into his tutelage ever again. So many bright sparks, either extinguished or transformed into terrible, all-consuming wildfires. But where would she be without the Cerberus Assembly? Where would any of the researchers here be, without their support, their information?)

“No, Stone. We think you show a lot of potential. The Archmage – Master Ikithon – handpicks a few pupils each year who may be… of use, to him and his work. He’s interested in overseeing your education personally; it’s a tremendous opportunity.” She smiled, not happily. “Don’t let him scare you. Don’t show him that he scares you, anyway.”

With only that advice, she turned and left.

Fjord knew nothing of the archmages of the Dwendalian Empire, save that they were very powerful wizards, and that they had been a great part of the driving force behind the conquest of his homeland. Only whispers of the name Ikithon had ever reached him. He was a bully, Fjord guessed, from how the professor had spoken of him — but Fjord had practice enough at dealing with bullies, of being a chameleon, shifting himself to appease those in power. He would adapt again, if he had to.

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, so they said, the Menagerie Coast was free and prosperous. Jester’s mama had told her that it had not been a very long time ago, not really; only a few short years before Jester was born. And things were not so different, either — the coast was still prosperous, still beautiful. It was just no longer free: now all their wealth disappeared north, and crownsguard patrolled the streets in place of zhelezo.

“You would have liked it, my little sapphire,” Jester’s mama always murmured to her, when she told stories about the past, in that very soft voice she used in private — Marion’s work could be hard on her throat. “So many people, from all across the wide world. Tal’Dorei, Marquet, Issylra… everywhere, darling. Everywhere. The Clovis Concord let them come and go as they pleased.

“But the Empire was greedy, little sapphire. They wanted it all to themselves.”

Greedy and selfish were two of the worst things a person could be, in Jester’s household. Marion always taught that pleasure was to be shared equally. Love sometimes ought to be kept private, secret, but joy should not be hoarded – and so Jester shared her sweets with Bluud, and her stuffed toys with the Chateau’s other performers, and the happiness her presence could bring with everyone who was allowed to know she existed. To be so selfish as to take an entire land and all its inhabitants for yourself, that was unimaginably cruel.

“And there was a big fight,” Jester would whisper back, because she had always known that much: from her bedroom windows, she could still see the wounds of those battles, the craters left on Nicodranas’ streets from cannonballs and catapult volleys. “A really, really big fight.”

“That’s right.”

A few times, Jester asked, “Was it scary, Mama?”

Marion had tucked her close, angled her head carefully so that she could rest her chin between Jester’s small horns; Jester had more felt, than saw, her nodding.

“It was loud , little sapphire,” she confessed, careful with her words, with old fright. “Too loud to sleep, or breathe — never knowing when the next blow would fall, or where.”

Is that why you don’t go outside? Jester had wanted to ask, but had known, even then, that talking about it was very difficult for her mother. She never, ever wanted to see Marion upset; better to steer around the subject and simply accept that it would never happen than to press into painful topics.

“Bluud fought,” Marion told her once, soft and kind as ever, but a little drunk, breath smelling of spices and sour grapes. “Nadine fought too, and Carlos, and others here you wouldn’t remember.”

“What about my papa?” Jester had pressed, seizing the rare opportunity to search for information about him, violet eyes huge, small hands wrapped around Marion’s fingers. He always wore a lot of rings, her mama had said; she knew almost nothing else about him.

“Oh, yes,” Marion had mumbled fondly, distantly. “He had the most handsome scars of it. He was very brave - they were all so very brave.”

“You’re brave too, Mama,” Jester insisted, as she always did, because she was ; facing crowds and love-stricken patrons every day was no less bold than battling armies or standing against dragons. In the candlelight of her own private chambers, absent all the bold elegance that had made the Ruby of the Sea so famous, hair down and face free of glitter, wearing an age-soft thick robe, her mother’s luminous eyes always looked very vulnerable, the curve of her head beneath four proud horns very shy.

“Not as brave as you, my sapphire.” Marion smiled, tucked Jester’s hair gently behind her ear. “How can I have made such a fearless creature, hm?”

And Jester had giggled, and hadn’t answered. It was the root of a great many problems, though — that in truth Jester was not so much brave as curious , entirely without the usual hesitations and anxieties that might protect a child from harm. Little tieflings who stick their noses where they aren’t wanted get them bitten off, one of the performers downstairs had used to caution her, biting teasingly at the air around her to make her giggle, but neither lighthearted nor serious warnings had worked. She was a force of nature, always, driven by her wonder and her delight in setting well-ordered things awry.

It was her curiosity that had brought her to the attention of the Traveller, a strange fey friend whispering trouble in her ears, and the Traveller had brought her a thousand new things to be curious about. And with the powers he began to gift her had come even more fearlessness, even more questions, the nerve to go out into Nicodranas alone and begin to explore the infinite world beyond her windows. Her mama wouldn’t, couldn’t, and that was why he never appeared where Marion could see, the Traveller had told Jester when she asked — one of the few times they had ever argued. What room is there for mischief in a life governed by fear and fighting fear? , he had groused, petty, disinterested. You can’t spread chaos if you’re always fretting about the consequences of your actions. Jester had been offended on her mother’s behalf, but she had taken the implicit advice, had begun to believe that if she was fearless then she was unstoppable, no matter what.

From the rooftops of the city, in particular, where she was both unseen and well-positioned for pranks, Jester had felt entirely invisible, the queen of the city. 

It had been early morning that day, the dawn sunlight casting already colourful patchwork buildings in vibrant, golden shades; she had been sitting on the roof of the bakery, dangling her legs off the side, enjoying her pastries, and her ears had pricked up at the indistinct bellowing of a loud, authoritative voice a few streets over. A carnival barker, perhaps, or a street preacher?

“Oh, there’s trouble,” her friend’s voice had murmured in her ear.

Not the good kind of trouble, it would turn out, but Jester hadn’t known that yet. She dusted off the front of her dress, and climbed to her feet, using her tail to balance as she crept unnoticed from buildingtop to buildingtop.

The speaker was a tall man, all dressed up in the fine, stiff robes and hard face that marked him as a mage of the Dwendalian Empire. By his side stood soldiers of the Righteous Brand, hands on their sword-hilts and eyes scanning suspiciously across the crowd that had gathered to his voice. These were not the city crownsguard, who were as fair game for Jester’s fun as anyone else, but fully armed and armoured imperial soldiers, the kind that Bluud warned her to leave well alone when they visited the Ruby, lest any of their wrath turn on her mother. 

“…in our struggles against the horrors of the Xhorhassian hordes,” the wizard was proclaiming, voice grim. “Every man, woman, and child must do their part. It is the duty of all with arcane abilities to use them to serve the glory of the Empire. His majesty King Bertrand Dwendal has decreed that defiance of this edict will no longer be tolerated, and so he has ordered that the cities and settlements of the coast be scoured for magically talented young students to bolster the ranks of his spellcasters.”

Jester didn’t know what exactly that meant, and nobody else listening to him seemed to know either, but everybody knew there was something ominous beneath it. In the crowd, parents caught hold of their children and pulled them closer. At the windows of the houses nearby, small figures turned and then drew away, hiding themselves from prying eyes below.

Unafraid, Jester had rested her head on her folded hands and watched raptly.

“It is your duty,” repeated the wizard, pushing up his sleeves. “To serve the crown, if you may. We shall see who has that honour.”

All her life, Jester had been fascinated with magic, with her mother’s cantrips, with the tricks the Traveller taught her, with these more formal, book-learned spells. She leaned closer to get a better look as the mage muttered beneath his breath and his hands formed a glyph in the air.

“Over there,” he said to the guards, nodding to an alleyway, to a small group of ragged children who had evidently slept there, then “there,” to a boy passing by, carrying repaired nets back to the docks, “there”, to a merchant family and their young scions.

The soldiers began at once to stride over to each person marked out: they recoiled, shocked, and one or two tried to bolt, their protests sharp and clear above the crowd’s gasps and muttering of discontent, but not quickly enough to get far before they were hauled back toward the mage. There were manacles at the soldiers’ waists; not used, but present, an unspoken threat.

Jester watched, horrified, all her interest turned sour in her mouth. And then the mage turned and looked directly at her, leaning over the edge of a roof, and pointed, and said,

“Up there, too.”

She scrambled back, too late, knowing the soldiers’ eyes had already found her. The shingles she knew so well felt foreign, unsteady beneath her feet, and she stumbled enough as she wheeled backwards that she didn’t dare to stand upright as she tried to cross back toward the Lavish Chateau. If she had been in her right mind, it would have been a fun chase: she knew all the hiding spots, the windows left open to creep through, the dead-end alleys nobody expected a small tiefling girl to use to sneak around. But she could feel magic coating her skin, marking her like dye as prey to be caught, and she could feel the mage’s eyes following her, hear him barking instructions to his soldiers. He wasn’t going to let her go: she was gifted, and those gifts were what the crown sought.

If she had not been so frightened, the Traveller would have been with her, and escape would have been far easier. But there was no room for mischief in a life governed by fear, and he was not the kind of god who comforted scared little girls without the presence of mind to make him jokes as offerings.

They caught up to her as she tried to slip from a raingutter to the street, strong hands steadfast as they seized her by the shoulders and dragged her away. The faces of the people around her had been stunned, far too shocked and scared to do anything. She thought she saw a hint of recognition as she had tried to object to the local Righteous Brand that her mother was very, very important , that she had the ear of all the most prominent rulers of the city (because she did ) but, of course, nobody knew. Perhaps they might suspect – Jester was a tiefling, was dressed in the fine and maybe-not-entirely-proper clothes that being tailored for by a brothel got you, had rubies in her ears and around her neck – but Jester wouldn’t betray her mama by yelling aloud that she was a famous courtesan’s daughter, and without that influence and all the bribes that would come with it, there had been nothing she could do.

That had been her last moment of peace, on the roof that morning. She hadn’t been able to rest properly since the Empire had dragged her away from her home — no matter how tired, how lonely, how bored , she couldn’t relax. She could barely sleep. It was all too much, too strange. She had never had to share a room with other girls before, none of whom would even talk to her. In the echoing silence of the Soltryce Academy, without the chatter and the music and the sounds of pleasure coming through the walls as she had grown up hearing, her own unsettled thoughts were loud enough to keep her awake. Her mama was a thousand miles away, and Jester couldn’t crawl under the covers with her or smell her perfume or hear her singing. Marion wouldn’t even have known what had happened to her, and that was the worst part of it all, knowing that somewhere in the sanctuary of the Lavish Chateau, Jester’s mama was terrified for a daughter who had simply disappeared.

If her nights at Soltryce were bad, though, they were nowhere near as terrible as trying to sleep on the road between Nicodranas and Rexxentrum, on the ground or in the cart, exposed to the wind and the rain, not allowed to even get up and stretch. The Nicodranian children that had been taken were an unruly bunch, at first: some inconsolable for days, some furious and defiant, a great many simply too wild to be quiet and still as ordered. Before long the soldiers had become frustrated with them, and there had been no kindness or care to temper that frustration. Things had only gotten worse and worse: from Jester, especially, so bright and loud and different from anything the Empire expected, they had tolerated almost nothing. One of the captains of the Brand began to seize her horn to drag her along when she wandered, ceasing even bothering to give her commands or grab her wrist. Her tiefling nature in general had been a particular point of disgust for him: she had heard him wonder aloud what the Empire wanted with demon spawn, and he had hissed to her, you keep on disobeying me, I’ll take my short sword to that hideous tail of yours and stop its thrashing for good. The threat had been enough to shock and frighten her into compliance, and she had been ashamed of that - but what else could she do? What could any of them do?

Eventually she had given in. They all had. The tasteless rations, the discomfort of hard travel and sleeping on the ground, the terror of being away from home, these could all be withstood numbly. The soldiers met distress and resistance harshly, but they demanded nothing more than silence and obedience, for the sniffling around the campfire or into their bedrolls kept to a minimum. It was terrible, and she couldn’t sleep at all — but it was easy to sink into a routine and endure.

Here at the Academy, much more was expected of her: they wanted politeness, loyalty, even gratitude . They wanted Jester to squash herself into a pliant nothing and allow them to shape her. Though they were not so openly cruel about tieflings, she knew they were thinking the same: they stared coldly, as though they expected her to be embarrassed of what she was, and they gave her clothes to wear with necklines too tight to pull over her horns and no hole for her tail, and smacked her hand for trying to cut holes through to alter them. Don’t make excuses , the housemistress had snapped at Jester when she tried to explain herself, and pressed a sewing needle into the girl’s hand, saying only, fix it. Jester didn’t know how: her clumsy stitches had just made things worse. 

There were only two other tieflings at the Soltryce Academy, neither of whom would help her. A studious boy in his final year, red-skinned and yellow-eyed like her mother, who clearly thought himself too grown-up and important to even glance at her; and a mean, pinch-featured girl fortunate enough to be born with a human skin tone, who wore her small horns hidden below her hair, who wound her tail tight around her leg to keep it still, and who regarded Jester with nothing less than contempt.

The kindest person she had met – the only kind person she had met, really – was the half-orc boy, Fjord, who was quiet and careful about it, but always made sure to speak to her if he could, or at least to smile at her. He hadn’t heard of the Traveller, but he had definitely heard of the Ruby of the Sea, if the way he blushed a muddy shade of pine when she sang one of her mother’s tavern songs was anything to go by — he was from the coast, like her, and he reminded her of home. She had already decided that she would take him with her when she escaped. Fjord had mumbled to her that he didn’t have anyone who might have been looking for him, the way she did, but that was alright: he would just have to come back to Nicodranas with her. He had gone a funny colour when she told him so, too.

But though it was a comfort to know that she had at least one friend in this place, Fjord couldn’t be around all of the time. He had his own rules and routines to obey. As time went on he seemed increasingly nervous; perhaps the Academy was even stricter with the older students, if such a thing was even possible. Here, alone at night in her small dormitory room with five other girls – all too shy of their instructors’ scorn to chat with her – in the dark, she felt the weight of her loneliness too heavily to shrug off. The dread of it, the knowledge that the next day would only be the same, was coming close to dampening her spirits entirely, a task that should have been impossible.

The Traveller had been silent every time she prayed to him. After a while, it had been easier to simply stop trying. He wasn’t the kind of god who answered prayers, anyway; he answered deeds.

If she closed her eyes tight and told herself a story the way her mama used to, sometimes that helped. Not the sweet, funny stories, though — fairytales and fables were too far away now, too trifling.

Once upon a time, the Menagerie Coast was…

The coast was beautiful, it was…

She turned over in a huff, frustrated, ignoring the small shuffling sounds of annoyance in the other beds around her. All the order and the vigilance was too much for her to bear. Even now, there was probably someone coming down the corridor to check on them, who would be displeased with her.

But she wasn’t going to be able to stop herself from reacting anymore. Tomorrow, she would do something to disrupt the order she had found herself forced into: thaumaturgy in the middle of a lesson, perhaps, or tying her classmates’ shoelaces all together at lunch, or seeing if she could pour ink into her professor’s tea. Beneath the dread and the resentment, she felt a thread of almost-hysterical glee at the thought.

Jester curled her legs up close to her, fingers questing beneath the starched sheets for the scrap of green silk she had managed to keep across the months. Emerald green, brilliant and glittering: the closest she had managed to find to the colour of her patron’s cloak. Soon enough she would lose even that, she was sure, but she had managed to secret it away in her socks or tucked into her belt while the soldiers tore away their captives’ religious tokens, when the Soltryce Academy took the rest of her own clothes and possessions away from her. 

“…are you here with me?” she whispered into the darkness of the dormitory, unsure, holding the thought of the next day’s ill-advised tricks in her mind.

And for the very first time since she left Nicodranas, there was a reply. Her god was not mysterious and indirect: even in his faintest manifestations, he was not so circumspect as to whisper to her on the wind, like other gods might, or to merely show his approval in the colours of the clouds. Instead, she caught a glimmer of green and auburn in the beam of candlelight from the doorframe, the familiar gentle brush of the Traveller’s hand smoothing her hair out of her face.

“Of course,” he whispered back, as though he had never been away. There was no reproach in the tone: he was playful as ever, more friendly than any other deity she had ever heard of. She sank into her pillow with a sob of near-frantic relief.

Recklessness had got her trapped here, but perhaps it could bring her a way out too. The thought gave her hope.

“What do I do,” she hissed to him, not bothering to turn and try and make out his figure. “What can I -”

There was the click of the latch, and Jester cut herself off with a squeak, trying to feign sleep. No use: the housemistress rapped on the doorframe, just loud enough to make Jester jump without disturbing too many of the other pupils.

“Genevieve,” she snapped, disapproving, a warning tone. Jester’s expression soured: she hated hearing her given name, so soft in her mother’s accent, out of these people’s clipped consonants. “Sleep. Now.”

With a clear show of reluctance, Jester rolled away from the door and closed her eyes, went as still as she could bear.

She waited until she heard the woman’s footsteps start up again away down the corridor.

“What do I do?”

Her lips barely moved, but she knew her friend could always hear her: he had promised her so.

“My Jester,” he responded, a smile in his voice. “What do you always do, in such places of orderliness and unimagination?”

He leaned even closer; she felt his cloak graze her arm, and his magic touch her mind, blessing her with the sleep she craved.

“Let chaos reign.”

Chapter Text

“Really, Revvetha, I’m surprised at you. This kind of behaviour…” The archivist cast her frustrated gaze down over her shoulder, making sure that the novice trailing dejectedly at her heels was still listening; rather than meet her eyes, Veth ducked her head down to stare at the garden path below them, and only heard her teacher sigh. “It’s not what we expect from you at all, you know that. It’s disappointing.”

“I’m sorry,” mumbled Veth, not for the first time that day. Her first apology had been sharp, insincere, but the monks of the Cobalt Soul knew how to wear down defiant acolytes, and the more she heard the word disappointed, the more it stung.

“We show ourselves through actions, not words.” Admonished the archivist again — not cruelly, but firmly. Veth winced nevertheless.

“Yes, Archivist. Sorry. I mean —”

“This way, Revvetha. Keep up.”

It wasn’t the kind of enormous, half-feral garden of herbs and wildflowers that the farmhouses around Felderwin had mostly faced onto, nor the manicured botanical garden enjoyed by the mansions of the Shimmer Ward. Veth got the impression that it had been planted mostly to supply the Cobalt Soul’s botanists and alchemists with necessary components and space to test their theories, and then cleaned up into a contemplative space as an afterthought, squashed into an empty courtyard between the gleaming lapis lazuli walls of the Rexxentrum Archive. She quite liked it, actually: some of the plants were eye-catchingly odd even at first glance, and it was relatively private, which was a rare thing in a cenobitic community where no one of lower rank than an expositor was allowed a room to themselves. She might even seek this place out voluntarily, once she was out of trouble.

In truth, it wasn’t so bad at the Soul, and there was much about it that Veth preferred to being at home. The monks were strict but fair, their rules made sense, and she had been careful, so far, and managed not to anger anyone. Until earlier that day. She hadn’t meant to break anything - and she was pretty sure her chemistry instructor had even believed her when she claimed that, which was a change - but she had meant to steal the shiny little vial of mercury, just to look at it, because it was so shiny and interesting, and she had meant to pour it into water in a lab flask to see what happened, only she hadn’t known that there had been some kind of magically-treated chemical dust left in there, and, well, the resulting explosion hadn’t been that big, it had only thrown a few other students out of their seats and left a few scorch marks on the floor, but there had been a very noticeable explosion. All in all, it had earned her a few lectures on stealing, a few more on lab safety, and detention under Archivist Jhenna’s supervision, whatever that meant.

Maybe this wouldn’t be the beginning of a pattern, Veth hoped — but she knew herself, and she knew she couldn’t help herself. This was how it had been at the little schoolhouse in Felderwin too, to start with. And then disappointment had slowly transformed into scorn, and they had stopped expecting anything much of her at all, and eventually she had spent most days at home helping her mother with chores instead of attending class, because if the children and teachers alike were in agreement that dumpy little Veth with her sticky fingers and her squeaky voice and her collections was just too weird for acceptable society, then Veth had supposed there wasn’t much point arguing back.

Jhenna led her to the very end of the garden, and then stopped, and gestured for Veth to look up. To her surprise, they weren’t alone. There was another girl in novice’s robes stood on one leg, on a plinth before a statue of Ioun, perfectly still, eyes closed, arms raised to hold a round stone above her head. She was the precise picture of concentration. Only the steady, rhythmic rise and fall of her breath and the slightest tremble in her left arm gave away that she was alive at all. As though suspicious, Archivist Jhenna gave her a long hard look, but the girl’s meditative position and expression didn’t waver.

“Revvetha.”

Veth jumped slightly at the sound of her name, broken out of staring at the other girl — because, oh gods, she wasn’t going to be expected to hold that pose, was she? If Jhenna wanted Veth to try and stand like that she was going to fall right on her face and get a bloody nose, and probably horribly stain her uniform, and the monks would be even more annoyed with her than they were already.

Thankfully, that wasn’t what the archivist ordered.

“Come here, stand in first pose.” Veth had to swallow a twinge of embarrassment: this was a simple one, arms clasped over the stomach. “Hold, as well as you can.”

Jhenna stepped back, leaving the two girls side by side; Veth tried in vain not to fidget beneath her critical gaze, but she seemed satisfied, and added, in the tone of recitation,

“Use this time to consider how your future actions may allow you to truthfully honour the teachings of Ioun. I will return in a few hours.”

And with that, she turned and left, either not noticing or not caring that Veth made an involuntary squeak at the thought of hours. For a long minute, Veth stood and listened despairingly to the soft crunch of the archivist’s footsteps on gravel fade away, wondering if it was possible to fail detention.

As soon as Jhenna was out of earshot, the other girl relaxed out of her balance, shoulders slumped lazily, bright blue eyes blinking open and scanning Veth with interest.

“S’up,” she said, disconcertingly casual. She was maybe a year or two younger than Veth, but tall and lanky - and human, which only magnified the effect - and carrying herself with an easy confidence in a way that made her seem older. She had dark skin, a gravelly voice that seemed deliberately pitched low, a plain jade necklace hanging over her simple blue robes, and a shaved undercut beneath her regulation topknot, half of which was hanging loose over her forehead anyway. She was so cool, Veth thought immediately, and then flushed red for even thinking it

“S’up?” Veth replied, doing her best to affect an equally casual tone despite her voice wavering.

“Jhenna, like, never checks.” the other girl informed her flatly. “Just pretend when she comes to get you, and nod at whatever she says, and maybe frown like your stomach hurts, and she totally buys it.”

“…Oh.” Veth glanced awkwardly back at the statue of the Knowing Mistress, and cringed beneath the gaze of its cool, judgemental three stone eyes. Sorry, Ioun, she prayed inside her head - but she wasn’t sorry enough not to chat.

“How long have you been holding that?” she blurted, craning her neck to see where the other girl still had the stone in her hands: it was smooth and solid, about the size of two fists, and it would have become very heavy very quickly. “You’re making it look so easy.”

“Oh, you just gotta, like, fight through the burn.” She seemed pleased at the compliment, lips twisting up. “Those breathing techniques and mantras they tell you to use genuinely do help - but don’t tell anyone I was actually paying attention.”

She shot Veth a conspiratorial look, and Veth found herself grinning back.

“You’re new, right? I’ve seen you around the last few weeks.”

“Y-Yeah,” Veth admitted, suddenly wondering if there was something about her that stuck out, that was new or other. She didn’t want to fail to live up to what the Cobalt Soul was asking of her, so early on, but she wouldn’t be shocked when it happened; she had always been not exactly what was expected of her. Not pretty, not clever, not brave, not good, just not. The hope had been that taking holy orders would give her an opportunity to change that, but maybe she was already not right here either.

“That’s cool,” said the other girl, flicking her head to get her hair out of the way, and nonchalantly shattering Veth’s catastrophizing spiral. “I’m Beau, by the way.”

“Bo? Like… the staff?”

“What? No. B-E-A-U, Beau, short for Beauregard.”

“Isn’t that a boy’s name?” asked Veth without thinking. Beau’s expression darkened into a scowl.

“Dad wanted a son.” she shrugged, bitter, faux-casual.

Idiot, Veth scolded herself, cringing, you’ve ruined it already.

“I’m, um,” she shyly managed to force herself to reply, almost entirely automatically, because she had never been very good at polite interactions, but her parents had made sure that she at least theoretically knew her manners. “I’m Veth. Nice to meet you.”

For some reason, this made Beau snort a short laugh. Veth didn’t think she meant it in a mean way, although it was hard to tell.

“Yeah, good to meet you too.”

They were quiet for a few moments. Probably they were supposed to be learning patience, Veth thought, which didn’t come easily to her.

“So what’d you do?” said Beau abruptly.

“…What?”

“What did you do to get sent here?”

“Uh,” Veth grimaced, trying to figure out how much she wanted to reveal. “Like, to detention, or to the whole cult in general?”

Beau snorted again. “The cult.” She stretched lazily. “I had this friend, Tori. She and I figured out a pretty good grift — my family make wine, it wasn’t too hard for me to steal, and then she could sell it on to taverns out of town, just far enough away that no one could tell it wasn’t fully legit, you know? And it’s expensive stuff, so, we were really doing well. For a few months. But then… well, there were unexpected checkpoints, something about weapons being smuggled south from Hupperdook, and what we were doing isn’t really smuggling, but it was close enough that they were pissed. Like, they were pissed.”

There was a look on Beau’s face that was probably meant to be cheerfully traumatised, the way kids at school had looked when they talked about being caught sneaking out or getting into some other kind of trouble with their parents. But it had more shame in it than that, and she wouldn’t meet Veth’s eyes, even as she kept talking.

“Apparently any kind of illegal trade carries a pretty heavy penalty in wartime. My dad could have paid a bribe for both of us, but he wouldn’t. So he had Tori sent to jail, and me sent here.”

Holy shit, thought Veth, eyes wide. Beau’s story sounded more like the plot of one of the cheap adventure novels that Veth had sometimes borrowed from her brothers than real life.

“What about you?”

“Same,” bluffed Veth, stupidly, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, and then schooled her voice carefully into the same informal tone. “I mean, not the exact same, obviously, but pretty similar.”

This was how it always started, the spiral into some ridiculous lie, but she just couldn’t stop herself. Beau was watching her interestedly, expectantly.

“I was in a fight with some older boys on the Felderwin highstreet one night, they’d called me —” She cut herself off before she could mention that the boys she was thinking of had used to call her grub, both because she was fat and because sometimes she got herself grubby adding to her collections. Beau didn’t need to know that. “— s-some pretty mean names, and I couldn’t just let them get away with it. Three against one, no one else was around. I got one down quick by kicking him right in the balls, blocked a punch, then bought myself some time by breaking a chair from outside the inn over another one,”

“A chair?”

“A halfling-size chair.” Veth explained, waving off the incredulity. “So I whipped out a mattress spring from my pocket, and one of my socks, and the chair legs, ‘cause everyone knows that’s all you need to make an improvised crossbow, and I stole a couple of open ales from an empty table and got myself into position in an alley. When they went by looking for me, twang, and once I’d smashed the bottles and got beer all over them, it was just a matter of using my hearth-lighting flint to teach them a lesson. Kaboom!”

Veth jumped as a nearby blackbird took off, squawking in protest at her raised voice and her slamming her fist into her palm for emphasis. Abruptly, Veth remembered that this was a meditation garden, and that she was supposed to be contemplating, and that maybe kaboom was not the best thing to exclaim, under the circumstances. She glanced around to make sure that no one was watching, and accidentally met the statue’s knowing gaze again. Maybe it was just Veth’s imagination, but the goddess looked suddenly very displeased.

“Whoa,” said Beau, impressed. “For real?”

“…No,” admitted Veth, cowed, embarrassed all at once. “Not really.”

It was just a silly fantasy she’d come up with when she was upset. Those boys really had caught up to her on the highstreet, pulled her plaits and made her drop her bags and called her grub — but she hadn’t done anything to fight back, because giving them a reaction only ever seemed to make it worse. And she really had stolen some cheap ale from the inn as she passed, but only to drink, and then later her dad had smelled her breath, and been annoyed, and said that if she ever came home stinking of booze again then he wasn’t letting her out without one of her brothers’ supervision until she was thirty.

“I saw a couple of Cobalt Soul monks in town when I was taking laundry to the river,” she confessed, quietly. “They seemed really cool, but also like probably they wouldn’t fit in in Felderwin, and I didn’t fit in in Felderwin. When I asked, they said they were recruiting because so many of their acolytes are off fighting, and the Starosta was always talking about how important the war effort is, so I just… signed up. A week later I was here.”

What kinds of things are you good at, Revvetha? the monk she had spoken to had asked — a halfling man, warm-eyed, not at all pitying or condescending. She had hesitated, thinking at first, nothing much , but then she had thought harder and told him the truth: she was stealthy, she was good at puzzles and riddles, she was faster than she looked. The way that the monk had smiled had made her hope that maybe there was a place for her here.

“Asshole,” snapped Beau, jerking her out of her memories; the other girl seemed genuinely angry, hurt at what had seemed like a harmless lie. “Why would you make that up?!”

“Why would you ask, asshole?” Veth snarled back, matching her energy. “I haven’t even heard of anybody else being sent here against their will! And people don’t usually want to talk about it!”

Beau huffed, shaking her head, and then pointedly closed her eyes to shut out Veth and resume her meditation. If she had had a door to slam, Veth thought she would have slammed it. In response, Veth rolled her eyes and craned her head to watch the birds. They both ignored each other.

After a long while, there were soft footsteps again; Veth closed her eyes, tried to appear beatific and still, the way the older monks had clearly mastered.

“Beauregard,” came Archivist Jhenna’s voice, just as stern as ever. “I trust you have been contemplating Ioun’s teachings on peace and impartiality?”

“Yes, Archivist,” murmured Beau, clearly having to make an effort not to sound petulant.

“You may return to your studies, then.”

There was a shifting of cloth, immediately followed by a sharp hiss of pain, presumably as Beau lowered her arms and put the rock down.

“Perhaps after visiting a cleric for a minor healing,” added Jhenna.

“Shit,” Beau hissed, then cleared her throat. “Yeah. Okay.” And then, to Veth’s surprise, she added in an undertone, still somewhat grouchy, “See you around, I guess.”

Veth didn’t reply, didn’t move a muscle, and when she opened her eyes, she was alone again.

*

By the time Veth was sent back to class, she was bored beyond belief. She got some whispers and giggles as she slipped back into her lecture on Exandrian history, which she tried to ignore; one of the novices she had knocked off his chair with her explosion glared at her, but the other leaned close and said you have to show us how you did that!, so it wasn’t all bad.

The novices slept all in one long hall, on low, flat beds. They were quieter than Veth had expected, either because her brothers had conditioned her to expect utter chaos in shared bedrooms, or because monks in training were far more orderly and disciplined than the rest of the population — or, most likely, because by bedtime everyone was worn out by their training.

Which made it a surprise to see Beau unfold herself from sitting on a bed at the far end and make her way past everyone else, right toward Veth. She should have looked softer in the dimmed lanterns right before lights-out, wearing the loose blue tunics they had for nightshirts, with her hair down for sleep — but there was determination in her expression, and Veth crossed her legs nervously underneath her, worried all of a sudden that Beau wanted a fight for what she had said earlier.

But Beau didn’t speak to her at all. Instead she stopped beside the next bed along from Veth; the girl sat there, taking down her hairstyle, turned to glare half-heartedly up. She was older than either of them, close to actually taking her vows, and the thick muscle of her arms said she was more of a fighter than a librarian.

“What?”

“It’s Lea, right?”

“So what if it is?”  The older girl - Lea - pulled another pin from her bun and turned away. 

“Swap bunks with me.”

Lea scoffed, and finally stopped what she was doing to look properly at Beau. The strangeness of this interaction was beginning to attract stares; Veth tried to shuffle back toward her pillow and not attract any attention by proximity.

“Why the fuck would I-”

“Because,” Beau was animated now, invested in this, for some baffling reason. “I’m way closer to the door, so you get to be the first for breakfast and get the good stuff, and it’s easier to sneak out, and I can totally throw in something else too — I know where Danno hides his shitty erotic novels, if you like those.”

Lea frowned, suspicious.

“If being near the door is such a sweet deal, how come you want to swap?”

Beau shrugged.

“I never make my bed in time for inspection. This way I get an extra minute to try and tidy up, you know?”

“That’s totally not how it works,” objected Lea. “If they see you moving they’ll just tell you to stand still.”

“I can be sneaky. Come on.” Beau huffed, glanced back toward the doorway; in a few minutes someone would come and turn out the lanterns, and then they weren’t allowed to be out of bed. She changed tact. “I’ll spar you, how about that?”

Interested, Lea raised her eyebrows.

“For what? If you win, we swap bunks; if I win…?”

“I’ll steal you whatever you need,” Beau promised, sharp smile on her face now. Lea laughed.

“Alright.”

And then, too fast for Veth to properly process, Lea was on her feet, swinging at Beau, and the dorm around them exploded into chaos as the other novices shouted in encouragement or dismay, jumped either to get away or to get a better view. Veth’s own squawk of fucking hell! was drowned out amid the chaos.

Beau just about managed to duck, stumbling backward into the opposite row of bunks, then to dart out of the way of the older girl’s fist again and bring her knee up into Lea’s stomach. A chorus of ooh!’s and oof!’s echoed around the room, then redoubled as Lea, doubling over, grabbed Beau’s shoulders and hauled her down, sending her skidding painfully on her across wooden floorboards. Veth squeaked sympathetically, then covered her mouth. But Beau didn’t hesitate just because she was down: as Lea raised a leg to kick, Beau shoved herself forward and swiped Lea’s other leg out from under her. The older girl crashed to the floor as well, and Beau - groaning, but triumphant - got upright just enough to throw herself over on top of her. It was less of a spar of the kind they all learned in their martial arts practises, and more of a brawl, undignified and brutal.

Beau had all her body weight on one sharp teenage elbow, wedged into Lea’s shoulderblade, and Lea was twisting around to grab Beau’s loose dark hair; both of them, and most of the dormitory, were shouting. And then —

“Lea Dufort! Beauregard Lionett! Again?!”

And all the energy and violence faded as suddenly as it had appeared. There was a monk standing in the doorway, a stately elf with a very severe expression and a grey sash around their waist. Somewhat awkwardly, Lea and Beau disentangled themselves. Before Beau got properly to her feet, she threw Veth a quick glance: the first acknowledgement she had given that whole evening, expression bright with secret victory, which made Veth’s jaw drop, sure she had misunderstood, that Beau couldn’t possibly be implying she had just fought a girl easily three times Veth’s size just to…

“What is the meaning of this?” demanded the monk, every word radiating disapproval.

“Nothing.” said Beau promptly, reaching up to rub the back of her head where she had thumped it against the floor.

“Nothing, Expositor,” muttered Lea in agreement, pasting a neutral expression over her face.

“So you were fighting over nothing?” pressed the expositor, irritation only growing. When neither girl said anything, they exhaled heavily and looked around reproachfully to the rest of the initiates, who were now mostly trying to look innocent, as though they hadn’t been cheering a moment earlier. “You two, follow me. The rest of you, you ought to be asleep.”

They made a short gesture with their hand, and the lanterns across the hall extinguished all at once, plunging the dormitory into darkness. Under the expositor’s watchful gaze, the novices hurried back to where they should be and got quickly into bed — but they left with Beau and Lea once the room seemed to be mostly unmoving, and plenty of snippets of giggling and low conversation broke out once they were gone.

Veth was too stunned to join in.

*

Most of the others had dozed off by the time Lea and Beau reappeared, distant chastened silhouettes in the doorway.

“We’ll discuss this further in the morning,” Veth heard a strict voice say, and a reluctant murmur of agreement from the two girls. Then both turned to go to bed themselves — and, to Veth’s shock, Lea stopped at the bunk near the door that Beau had vacated, and Beau made a beeline all the way to the back of the dorm, next to Veth. She grinned, just visible in the low light, as she wriggled under the covers, and whispered,

“Hi.”

“You’re insane,” Veth informed her, huge-eyed, feeling small and childish and full of warmth in this human-size bed, in her plaits, with the blankets pulled up almost over her face. Beau wiggled her eyebrows.

“Yeah, but it worked, didn’t it? I knew Lea would take the bait.”

“ Why ?” Veth hissed, shifting a little closer to speak even more quietly, barely more than a breath. “I thought you were angry!”

“Well, I was. For a bit. But that shit you said was actually pretty funny,” Beau admitted, smiling sheepishly. “Once I thought about it. Plus, I thought anyone who actually wanted to end up here must be kinda badass, so.”

“You’re insane,” Veth repeated, but couldn’t help smiling back this time, pleased, flattered in a strange way.

Beau was odd, and clearly an asshole. But so was Veth, and if Beau liked her for it, then maybe that wasn’t so bad.

Chapter Text

"Through here.”

The weathered little gnome that Bludd had followed here gestured for him to enter before her, glancing back nervously at the half-wilderness path to her home, making sure they weren’t followed. She was twitchy, almost guilty, in manner. Bluud couldn’t say whether her twitchiness was because she feared someone in particular, because she feared the business she had involved herself in, or merely because she feared someone of his size and bulk; in any case, he was doing his best to move slowly, measuredly, and to be watchful of both her and their surroundings in turn.

The small wooden building she had led him to was little more than a hovel, half-sunken into the marshy ground like so many structures in Shadycreek Run, leaning precipitously and dripping mysteriously. Bluud had to duck low so as not to hit his head on any of the exposed rafters, had to use one of his huge furry hands to gently lift the scraps of cloth that divided room from room away from catching on his horns. Still, it was no worse than any other shack in the Wildlands, and there was, at least, a fire lit to keep it warm, a battered metal pot of some dubious meat bubbling away above it. To his careful eyes it seemed as though the gnome - she had refused to give her name, on the grounds that he was travelling from Empire territory and might therefore be a Dwendalian spy - had squirrelled away a little safety here mostly by remaining unnoticed, keeping herself a few miles out of what passed for the centre of the Run and thereby slipping under the radar of all its warring gangs. Bluud had no idea what she did for a living, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

It didn’t matter much. He wasn’t here for her.

After a few seconds of scanning the horizon she reappeared, scurrying past his ankles to obstruct his way into the rest of the house with a strangely determined expression on her face. Very deliberately, letting her see that he wasn’t reaching for a weapon, he pulled a carefully folded-leaf of paper from his bag and held it out for her to snatch away.

An identical flyer had already made its way to Shadycreek Run, somehow, and to her eyes. That was why Bluud was here.

It read MISSING in a bold hand, above a portrait, a description, an appeal, a promise of reward, reproduced a thousand times or more by magic. The portrait and the description were of one Jester Lavorre, a blue tiefling girl of fourteen years old (thirteen, when they had last seen her, but time had passed, a birthday that had been unimaginably hard), short for her age, freckled, mid-length hair, cheerful and mischievous and unruly, fluent in Common and Infernal: lost, beloved. Marion was distraught - beyond distraught. She was calling in every favour, every promise, every love-addled confession, paying and blackmailing and pleading. Bluud himself was devastated: beside her mother, he had spent more time with Jester than anyone else, and he hadn’t been aware quite how much of his heart that girl had twisted around her finger. He had held her as a baby, and now she was gone.

They had received a great many false leads to begin with, people trying simply to cash in on the reward or to catch a glimpse of the Ruby. Before long, though, news had reached Marion of roughly what had happened in the town square, the day that Jester disappeared: the mage, the soldiers, the pursuit and arrest of magical children on behalf of the ‘good of’ the Empire. But gods knew that there was every chance that Jester had escaped at the first opportunity; Bluud and Marion didn’t know what security measures the Empire employed to contain its conscripts, but they knew Jester had never met a lock she couldn’t pick, had never encountered any sort of restraint that could hold her for long. She could be anywhere by now, and that thought had not been a comfort. Free or captive, she was most assuredly in danger - Jester was a clever girl, but she was naive, unworldly. And then, to receive a tip from Shadycreek Run, of all places, the known territory of slavers and smugglers and traffickers of all kinds… well, it had felt like a confirmation of all of Bluud’s worst fears.

But the scrawled letter a mangy dove had brought them didn’t claim to have found Jester. It had described only a tiefling, of around the right age, unable to speak or identify themselves, seemingly able to understand Common and Infernal.

Marion had scrambled to summon one of her clients, a mage with the Sending spell and a heart lovesick enough not to reveal her secrets, and through him had managed to contact the gnomish letter-writer. A blue girl? she had asked, heart in her mouth, and had received the answer: Purple, and of unclear gender. No one had ever described Marion’s daughter that way, and so it almost certainly wasn’t Jester - but there was a chance, enough of a chance that they couldn’t risk abandoning her. So Bluud had put on his old travelling cloak and gathered up all the bribe money he would need to cross through the Dwendalian borders twice over each way, hired himself an enormous draft horse and cart, and made it known that if someone so much as looked unkindly at the Ruby in his absence, he would gore them through upon his return.

The old gnome took the flyer from his hand, scanned it quickly, and upon finding no new information, grunted and handed it back.

“He’s in the back,” she explained brusquely, jutting her chin toward another thin curtain, indistinct lumpy shapes barely visible through it. “Well - I’ve been saying he , but just as well might be she or they or something else, he can’t say if he minds. Thought it best if as few people saw him as possible, and he don’t move much, so, the back. Gods only know who might be looking.”

Bluud hummed, concerned, and glanced over the gnome’s head to that curtain again.

“May I see?”

She didn’t answer or step aside, just planted her feet, wild eyes glinting. For a moment he thought that she must want some reassurance, that he meant the child no harm, that he was there only on behalf of a worried mother. But then he noticed that her hand was out, palm up, and his expression soured, round bull’s eyes narrowing in distaste. Reluctantly, he reached into his coin purse and pressed a gold piece into her small hand.

“That’s all?” she sneered.

“The rest once I am sure you’re not lying,” he rumbled darkly, lowering his chin just enough to draw attention to his horns. Uneasily, the gnome stepped aside.

Bluud could feel his pulse loud and heavy in his ears as he came closer, hoping beyond hope that maybe this unpleasant old gnome was merely colourblind, that all his searching and dreaming and worrying for the little sapphire was about to come to an end.

But the child curled up at the head of the rough straw pallet wasn’t Jester. He was a tiefling, but his lavender skin was far from her sky-blue. Neither did he have Jester’s bright, human-like eyes, or the precise rounded curve of her horns; his eyes were a deep blood red, without pupils or iris, and his horns twisted out past his ears like those of a ram, chipped and nicked in places as though from fighting. There was none of Jester’s softness about him: he was scrawny, his sharp elbows and collarbones prominently visible beneath his skin, and a series of livid scars from cuts or brutal scratches striped across his arms and chest, up even to his neck. He was dressed only in a shapeless makeshift poncho, repurposed from some tablecloth or blanket, with his bare feet and spaded tail trembling absently beneath him, and he was filthy in uneven patches, his deep-purple hair lank with grease, dark dirt lingering beneath sharp nails and in the creases of his palms.

This was not Jester, but he was his own mystery. Bluud took a long few seconds to swallow his shock and his disappointment - and then crouched down curiously beside this strange new creature, as slowly and non-threateningly as he could. It had taken the boy quite a while to react to his presence, those scarlet eyes darting gradually over toward his movement, then away again when he stilled. Curious. Slowly, testingly, Bluud leaned closer again; as he did, the boy shifted away, brows twitching into a frown, mouth forming the shape of a hiss he barely voiced.

“Easy,” comforted Bluud in an undertone. “It’s alright.”

He remembered: Jester had had a toddler phase of doing the same, snarling and spitting like a feral kitten when she was upset.

“E-Empty,” croaked the boy, to his surprise. Startled again, Bluud blinked.

“‘Empty’?”

“Empty,” he said again, in a hoarse voice unused to speech, expression distant, eyes drifting away from Bluud. It wasn’t a reply; he was lost, utterly lost.

“He don’t say anything else.” came the old gnome’s voice, grim. When Bluud glanced back, he could see her standing at the edge of the little room, arms folded, frowning.

“Doesn’t? Or can’t?”

She shrugged.

“Sometimes he sorta -” She made a guttural, strangled sound in her throat, which Bluud took as a crude impression of someone speaking in Infernal. “- but only ever the one word, then, too, and other than that he just stares into space and says empty.”

Baffled, Bluud turned back to look at the boy again; one hand was reaching weakly up toward his head, where his fingers curled tentatively around the side of his horn. His gaze occasionally tracked motion before he lost focus again.

“Not who you were looking for, is it?” demanded the gnome, clearly already aware that this was the case.

She was right, and so Bluud stood up, shook his huge furry head.

“Figures.” Her voice sharpened. “You still owe me the reward,  though.”

“The child and information,” Bluud objected gloomily, well aware of what was written on the missing poster. This was not Jester - but there was a possibility that this boy had a similar story, one way or another. “Then payment.”

The elderly gnome sneered at him.

“What information? I found him wandering around the Wildlands. He don’t talk. That’s all there is.”

But Bluud didn’t budge, and after a moment she gave in and reluctantly began to expand.

“…I was scavenging in the Savalirwood one day, a few weeks back, and I heard a… panting, I guess. Quick, strained breathing like a person in a panic. Thought it might be a dying animal, might be worth eating, so I got out my knife and snuck up close. And there wasn’t an animal. There was the kid, stumbling toward me, covered in dirt. A few feet away from an open grave.”

“A grave?”

“Oh, yeah.” Sardonically, she raised her eyebrows to match Bluud. “Creepiest fuckin’ thing. Saw me and collapsed right off, and, well.” She huffed, in scorn at herself. “He would have died if I’d left him there. So…”

So she had taken him home, and hidden him.

“He’s not dead,” she went on petulantly. “But he ain’t that much better either. Thought maybe he’d been buried alive, at first, couldn’t breathe down there, got himself a head injury, and that’s why he’s all… like that. Then he started saying empty , and I thought he must be under some enchantment, something to trap his mind on… whatever empty is. But it ain’t that.”

“No?”

“No. He can learn. Learned how to eat and drink again, move around, use the chamberpot by himself, thank fuck.” She raised her voice slightly, and the boy hissed again, apparently wholly on instinct. “He don’t like being washed one bit; did my best, wasn’t worth the fight to do more. Reckon he’d figure out how to do it eventually. He’s more here than he was to start with, in any case. He ain’t trapped in there: whoever he was is just gone. Starting from the ground up.”

“How can such a thing happen?” asked Bluud, low and concerned. He tried to move away from the boy, not eager to have this conversation in front of him; the gnome, who was clearly reaching the end of a rather short fuse, didn’t let him.

“The fuck would I know about it?”

Fine, then. If she would not speak like an adult, Bluud would not dignify her with a response. He was patient, and he was a good bodyguard: he knew how to glare down a customer until they began to babble the truth. The Ruby of the Sea was experienced and discerning, and her lovers usually were not so stupid as to try and lie straight to his face - but there were other courtesans at the Chateau that could not afford to be so selective in their clientele, and Bluud took great satisfaction in dealing with their troublemakers whenever Marion could spare him. After only a few moments of his unimpressed glare, the gnome began to scratch nervously at the back of her tangled hair, eyes darting.

“Some kind of ritual, I reckon, though I’ll say again I don’t know. Only that it’s nothing I want anything to do with.”

Bluud raised his eyebrows, a silent request for further elucidation. She begrudgingly went over to the boy, reached up to take hold of his jaw and move his head, batting away the hand that came up to try and ward her off - uncharacteristically gently - and hushing his snarl of outrage as she did.

“Shut it, you, s’only me.”

She tipped his chin down and away, displaying the back of his neck to Bluud - where, emblazoned bright beneath purple skin, was a bold tattoo of an open staring eye in red ink. Before he had a chance to question, the kid bucked a horn toward her, annoyed.

“Alright, alright.”

Though she let go and allowed him to sit up, she caught hold of his wrist (worryingly thin, so much so that even her gnomish fingers almost fully encircled it) and used that grasp to angle his elbow toward Bluud, ignoring the boy’s confusion and renewed growling. There was another identical eye there.

“He’s covered in ‘em.”

“Do you… recognise them?”

“Nah. Necromancy, blood magic, some weird Betrayer rite, I couldn’t say. Ritual shit, though, for sure. Nasty stuff. Probably whoever tried it thinks it killed him, and I’m not keen to let them know it didn’t.”

Lest they try it again, Bluud agreed with a solemn nod, though he thought the gnome woman meant something more along the lines of lest I incur their wrath for interfering. Finally, the boy jerked free of her hold and curled away at the far side of the mattress like a sullen cat, tail lashing back and forth, watchful in his absent way for any further manhandling.

“Empty,” he whispered to himself, managing somehow to make the word sound bitter.

That was plainly as much as the old gnome was prepared to tell him, probably as much as she knew, and therefore as much as Bluud would learn here. There was no sign at all of Jester, no clue as to what might have happened to her. A ritual such as the gnome suspected made sense only in the Greying Wildlands, outside of the watchful gaze of the Empire and its tyrannical repression of illegal worship; here all sorts of mad cults and bloodthirsty dark gods could prosper unbothered. The same would be very unlikely in Dwendalian lands, and it was the Empire that had taken Jester. If she had managed to escape then she would be fleeing south, not north. She wasn’t here. Bluud sat with the thought for a short moment, allowed the pain of it to settle like a lead weight on his strong shoulders.

“So,” the gnome continued, tone and bearing abruptly changing, becoming shrill and aggressive. “You gonna take him?”

Bluud frowned down at her in shock.

“He can’t stay here,” she snapped. “I’m not a charity! You give me that reward, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve paid me for him fair and square.”

Disturbed, Bluud blew through his nose, folded his huge arms.

There was no good reason for him to bring the boy home with him to Nicodranas - and yet. There were a great many good reasons not to leave him behind. It worried him, for the old gnome to be so eager to give an almost helpless child to the first stranger who asked, as did her attitude to payment. Truthfully, she wasn’t so bad, not nearly as hardened or unkind as she pretended: she had taken in and protected the boy, after all, tended to his needs when he had no ability to do so for himself. But Bluud feared for what might happen to a mute, amnesiac child in Shadycreek Run. Who else might she allow to take him away, if Bluud refused?

There were, at least, opportunities in Nicodranas. Arcanists who might take pity on him as an object of study, clerics who might be able to restore some memory or higher function; or, failing that, foundling homes who might take a sponsorship from Bluud or Marion to care for him.

“Do you… have a name, for him?” he asked slowly, after a minute of consideration, instead of answering.

“How would I? I’ve only been calling him you there, or nuisance.” She seemed urgent to be rid of her burden now that she had the opportunity. “Mother always said only to name something that you mean to keep.”

Bluud sighed silently, resigned to his decision, already regretting the thought of trying to transport such a child through snowy wilderness, in an open horse-drawn cart, dressed only in a blanket. “And does he have any clothes?”

The gnome scoffed, though her shoulders sagged in relief.

“Do I look like I have anything that’d fit him?”

Disinterested in the meaningless noise of the adults speaking, the boy had turned away and tilted his head to watch dust motes float by in a sunbeam.

“Empty.”

*

Bluud liked to watch seabirds. He would often walk through the Opal Archways and down to the beach at dawn or dusk and sit quietly on the hardy jagged grass of the dunes, and there enjoy the peace of the way they wheeled above him and built their nests and went about their lives, unaware of things like missing children or changing borders. Sometimes, particularly when she was little, Jester had used to come with him, skipping along with her tiny blue hand wrapped around one of his fingers. For a few hours she would roll down the dunes or build sandcastles or chase the seagulls, shrieking with laughter, and then when she had tired herself out, he would hand her back to her mother and return her to the small apartments in which she had spent the vast majority of her young life, all but locked inside. But mostly, grateful for the rare peace, he had gone alone.

His favourite of the birds in Nicodranas was the albatross, which sailed in sometimes on broad white wings like the sails of the galleys that docked in the Restless Wharf. Rare, huge, serene-faced and innocent and strange, like a thing out of the world, unbothered and self-assured in its strangeness. They seemed to remember a time before there had ever been a city on that stretch of coast, and certainly didn’t fear people, though perhaps they should. He had heard them called fool-gulls for being easy to hunt - but he didn’t think them foolish, only unfortunate. No one deserved to die for the mere crime of being defenceless against a predator they couldn’t comprehend, for not understanding that the world was a dangerous place. The legend among sailors was that all albatrosses were lost souls on their way to the Raven Queen, and so to kill one was very bad luck indeed.

Bluud couldn’t help but think that it would be an equally terrible thing for any harm to come to this strange, damaged child.

And so it was the albatross he thought of, when he was bored on the first long stretch of dirt road down from Quannah Breach to Novgurot, trying to think of names for the boy.

“‘Alba’,” he tried, feeling out the word, watching it float away through the chill air in a puff of pale dragons-breath steam.

“Empty,” came the boy’s reply, as always. He was sitting in the bed of the cart, looking back curiously as Shadycreek Run faded into the distance. It couldn’t have been doing him much good, remaining trapped in just one room - he was more alert already, fascinated by the glitter of early morning frost. Thankfully an innkeeper in one of the Run’s more reputable taverns had been willing to sell them some breeches and a sweater secondhand. Nothing of Bluud’s would ever have fit the child, and in any case, he had no clothes to spare: he wore only a belt and cloak, the fur around his legs and hooves being more than thick enough for both warmth and modesty. It had taken a few hours of fighting to stop the boy pulling the scratchy wool off himself in frustration, but he seemed appreciative of the warmth now.

“No,” Bluud agreed, more chatty than usual. “‘Alba’ doesn’t suit much.”

When Jester had been learning to speak Marion had read somewhere that it was good for her to hear as much speech as possible, and so Bluud, usually a man of few words, had obligingly joined the rest of the Chateau in talking to her constantly. He was doing the same now, going out of his way to address the boy as though he could reply.

“Empty,” said the child quietly.

“What about ‘Diomedea’? ‘Diomedes’?”

“Empty.”

“Perhaps not, no. ‘Tristan’? Are you a Tristan?”

“Empty, empty, empty.”

“Hm.”

Bluud stroked the braid in his beard, watching the reins in his hand and the mud ahead of them with half his attention, and rummaged about the recesses of his brain for anything else.

“Mollymawk,” he said slowly, letting the word hang in the frozen air between them, then narrowed his eyes and adjusted his pronunciation slightly. “Mollymauk.”

There was no reply. Raising his eyebrows, he turned and glanced over his shoulder at the cart. The boy had evidently discovered again that his breath made shapes in the cold: as a tiefling, he ran hot, and so the effect was particularly obvious. He was taking in deep breaths and then puffing them out, darting his head about to watch the little clouds disappear, almost-smiling, tail ticking back and forth playfully.

“I will take that as agreement,” said Bluud, leaving the boy to his game.

Mollymauk. Molly. It suited him well.

Chapter Text

Fjord paused, staring at the rich dark wood of the office door, hand raised to knock, and considered running away. He wouldn’t get far if he tried to escape Soltryce in its entirety, but he could run from this: he could simply ignore the summons, turn on his heel, walk back downstairs and hide in the common room, rather than face this meeting. It was a tempting thought. Perhaps he was a coward, for even thinking of it – but then, perhaps it was better to be a coward. He still had no idea what it was that the Archmage even wanted with him. He was certain that it couldn’t be good.

Fjord knew he had no choice, really, no more than he had had a choice in whether or not to resist the Empire’s conscription in the first place. He was clever enough to sense when there was danger in refusing to play along. But this still felt a little like voluntarily walking into a monster’s den.

Don’t let him scare you, his professor had said. Don’t show him that he scares you, anyway. At least Fjord could do the latter. He took a deep breath, steeled himself, plastered a blank expression on his face, and forced himself to knock firmly on the door.

After a moment, a stern voice called out,

“Enter.”

Fjord did as he was told, feeling somehow simultaneously clumsily over-large and really very small. The click of the door closing behind sounded final.

The office of the Archmage of Civil Influence may only have been a guest space allotted to him by the school, but it was still grand beyond anything that Fjord had ever seen before. The ceiling was vaulted high above them, ornamented with awnings carved with what Fjord, now months into his studies, knew as the symbols of the eight traditional schools of magic, and all the way to its lofty heights stretched a series of sturdy wooden bookcases. Some of the larger tomes were very clearly spellbooks of scholars long-dead: elaborately decorated, thickly bound in rich leather, bulging with additional leaves of paper, and radiating that almost-imperceptible air of old magic. Others looked to be lengthy monographs on history or magical theory; others still, scraps of paper scrolled or tied up together, perhaps journals or correspondences, perhaps maps of far-off lands. Beneath Fjord’s feet was a fine rug, intricately woven into a precise geometric pattern; something about the arrangement sparked a faint hint of recognition in him, albeit one that he didn’t have time to examine any further.

The Archmage didn’t look up at him. He was much older than Fjord had imagined he would be, a human man with long white hair, luminously pale papery skin, and sunken ice-blue eyes beneath delicate spectacles; he wore robes of thick red velvet embroidered in silver, and the long, spindly fingers with which he grasped his quill were ladened heavy with golden rings.

For just long enough that Fjord began to panic, Master Ikithon ignored him entirely. The silence stretched long and taut between them, tense as a bowstring about to snap, filled only with only the scratching of pen against parchment. Then, as though at some indecipherable signal, Ikithon glanced up sharply, narrowed his eyes, and made a small, vague noise in his throat. He rummaged for a moment among the many papers scattered about the desk, and eventually produced that he lifted away from the others to read. As he scanned a few times over it, he made a short gesture to indicate that Fjord should approach; finally, he spoke.

“Fjord Stone, is that correct?”

It was not. Stone had never been a name that really belonged to him: just a casual insult, an epithet proclaiming his unwantedness. Cast away like a stone, Headmaster Grankton had sneered to him. That’s all you are. All you’ll be. And Ikithon over-pronounced Fjord’s first name, too, as so many people in Rexxentrum seemed to; his light Zemnian accent made the silent j audible, stretching the word out longer than it ought to be. Feeord Stone was not a real person, just a collection of other people’s poor opinions of him. But it was those judgements that counted, now, so Fjord ducked his head in a half-nod and didn’t object.

“Yes, sir.”

“From Port Damali.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re —” He checked his notes once, then twice, and looked back at Fjord in surprise. “ — Fifteen years old?”

Fjord was suddenly grateful for the heavy pigment on his cheeks, the way that most humans couldn’t tell what a flustered blush looked like on green skin. Half-orcs grew faster than most other species, certainly faster than humans; he was tall, lean but strong from working at the docks or in the woodshop, and he knew he read as older than fifteen. It had been useful more than once, but now it was embarrassing. He folded his hands behind his back, blunted claws digging unseen into the flesh of his palms.

“Yes, sir.”

Assessing something unspoken, Ikithon tilted his head and looked long and hard at Fjord, who turned his eyes down to the floor and tried valiantly not to squirm under the scrutiny. Don’t show that he scares you, he reminded himself. Brave like Jester.

“Which of your parents was the orc?”

The question was so direct and personal that it took Fjord completely off-guard. For a few moments he couldn’t even reply, and then he stammered out,

“I — I don’t know, sir. I was raised in an orphanage. They never told me.”

Ikithon hummed, seemingly approving. Fjord had no idea what to make of that.

“And how much formal schooling have you had, then?”

“None, sir,” Fjord admitted hesitantly. “I-I mean, someone came and taught us our letters and our numbers, a day or two a week. I can read and write. But we had to work, sir. They had the orphans making… rope, crates, that sort of thing.”

“This was permitted by the authorities?”

“…I suppose, sir.”

He realised his mistake at once. The probing expression on Ikithon’s face became a scathing glare, one that made ice run down Fjord’s spine.

“You suppose.”

“I don’t know, I’m sorry, I –” He forced himself to choke off the babbling, take a single breath, frantically configuring his thoughts into an acceptable shape. Fjord could take a hint, and he was a good talker, no matter how intimidated; he had had to be. “Um. No one ever intervened to my knowledge, sir. I couldn’t say why not, whether it was legal or w-whether maybe someone was bribing the governor.”

This degree of clarity and specificity seemed to satisfy Master Ikithon. Before Fjord lost his nerve and awkwardly dropped his gaze again, he saw the smallest hint of a sly smile pull at the edges of the old man’s thin lips.

All at once, the pattern woven into the carpet beneath him made sense. It was a ritual spell circle, half-complete, inert, ready to be activated at a moment’s notice with just a stick of chalk or white paint. Fjord didn’t know enough to be entirely sure, but he thought he recognised the spell as Teleport. If he was right, then he was standing directly on top of one of the Archmage’s bolt holes.

“I have test scores, Herr Stone,” Ikithon continued. He seemed amused, and a paranoid voice at the back of Fjord’s mind wondered if he had sensed the direction of Fjord’s thoughts, somehow. “Both those of your initial assessments and from the recent mid-term examinations. Considering your lack of prior training, they are remarkable.”

Cautious as ever, Fjord gave no reply but a nod of acknowledgement, no agreement or thanks.

“You are in Professor Uludan’s Evocation class, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you have studied the Light cantrip.” He held out his quill for Fjord to take, nib-end up. “Show me.”

There was something unpleasant in Ikithon’s frosty blue eyes, something almost hungry. Still, Fjord did as he was told, hesitantly reached out and wrapped his broad orcish fingers around the delicate swan feather pen, knowing that he had no choice but to do well. Cast incorrectly, the spell might sputter out and fail completely — or, worse, set the quill on fire. Cast poorly, it might shine no brighter than a candle. Fjord had seen every variety of mistake possible during practice.

But he held his focus in his mind and drew on his understanding of Evocation as a school, all the myriad ways that magic could bend and shape the elements of the material plane.

The feather burst to light between his fingertips, every delicate frond illuminated in a perfect halo, the ink-stained hollow shaft made almost translucent.

“There.”

Master Ikithon made a short slicing motion, and Fjord quickly cut off the flow of the magic. Without the wincing brightness, the room seemed dull.

In short order, Ikithon had Fjord demonstrate what he had learned in his Conjuration and Transmutation seminars too: using Mage Hand to lift a lit candle across the room without spilling a drop of wax, Prestidigitating the ink off a memo that Master Ikithon was finished reading. He performed both well enough, though his Mage Hand was still more faint and indistinct than he would have liked.

Any pleasure he felt as having successfully passed these bizarre tests was tempered by that look he could still see on the Archmage’s face. It was greed, he thought, like the old man wanted to own Fjord’s magic.

“More than admissible,” remarked Ikithon when it was done, the closest thing he had given to praise. “Considering your half-beast blood.”

Fjord flinched a little at the particular bluntness of Master Ikithon’s phrasing, but swallowed down the vestigial swell of old hurt that rose up. He expected this; he had heard it before, if not often so openly, and in fact he had sometimes heard much worse. Suddenly he was glad that he had been especially careful to keep his tusks and his claws filed down to nothing, afraid of what the Archmage might have to say about them if they were visible.

“Tell me, Fjord. You have grown up on the annexed Menagerie Coast — I am curious to know how you think of our fine Empire.”

It was a strange topic. Fjord’s first reaction was to protest internally that he had hardly even seen any of the Empire, only the road to Rexxentrum and then the school — but Ikithon would doubtless be quick to remind him that Port Damali was part of the Empire, and that Fjord was as much a Dwendalian subject as Ikithon himself, if not quite a citizen. The last thing Fjord wanted was to be accused of disloyalty. He forced himself to really and fully consider the question: what was the Empire, to him?

A damned nuisance, he thought, first and foremost, his mind full of memories of imperial soldiers barking orders on the streets, gawking at the ‘exoticisms’ of the Menagerie Coast, burnt in the sun like morons who didn’t know to keep to the shade at noon. There were worse things too, of course. Kidnappers, warmongers, tyrants. He was too young to remember it happening, but he knew all about the brutality of the invasion; a great many of the children in the orphanage his age or older had lost their parents in the fighting, or at least had claimed as much. He had only ever known the Empire, but he had no love for it.

Fjord said none of that to Ikithon.

“They keep us safe,” he mumbled, because that was the answer he was supposed to give.

But safe from what? From Xhorhas? Surely not. Port Damali was hundreds of miles away from the Ashkeeper Peaks, and under the rule of the Clovis Concord there had been some peaceful contact anyway. Unless the Menagerie Coast was supposed to expect an invasion from Tal’Dorei, of all places, he couldn’t understand how they were supposed to be safer under the Empire’s rule than outside it. The Empire was very strict on crime, he guessed — but not in any way that actually prevented it. Everyone knew that the Revelry was more profitable than ever, operating under the nose of an authority that had no idea how to deal with them. So safe from what? Safe from… heresy, from the Betrayer Gods? As though ancient deities of blood and chaos cared for political borders.

“Hm,” intoned Ikithon dryly, unconvinced. He pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward him, dipped his quill in his inkwell, and wrote for a few moments while Fjord did his best to stand as still as a statue before him. “Ask one of the librarians to help you find these five volumes.  I think you will find them… illuminating.”

“Yes, sir,” said Fjord automatically, taking the paper when it was offered, wondering – as he frequently did, at Soltryce – whether he had done something wrong. Master Ikithon snapped his fingers, and the door to his office swung open smoothly on its own.

“You will receive another summons soon.”

Fjord nodded, then thought better of it and did his best to correct the nod into a bow, bitter-tasting dread rising like bile in his throat. He knew a dismissal when he heard one, but he still had no idea what the Archmage had wanted with him, or what another meeting of this kind would bring. He didn’t want his magic examined so closely, not when the first time he had ever cast a spell was with the dark voice from his nightmares ringing in his ears.

He knew well enough that he would attend obediently anyway.

*

The books that Ikithon had ordered him to study were not what he had expected them to be. Only one was a history of the war between the Dwendalian Empire and the Clovis Concord: an official Empire history, clearly, and biased in all the usual ways as a result, but a generally frank and honest one as far as Fjord could tell. Another was a book of spells just a little too difficult for Fjord to actually cast yet — or that should have been too difficult for him to cast. When he wrote out the sigils in his flimsy student’s spellbook and tried to draw on the very restrained, orderly magic that he had been taught here, the spells sputtered out and failed. But when he thought back, years back, to twisting coils of scaled skin and glowing yellow eyes, of an incomprehensible vastness beneath the sea… suddenly the arcane power flowed to him easily, and the spell – Comprehend Languages – made sense. He checked, several times, grabbing a handful of random textbooks from the library’s foreign language shelves: a thin pamphlet on botany in Sylvan, a heavy Elvish volume of metaphysical research. Though he didn’t know a word of either language, he found that he could read them as easily as Common.

“Oh, shit,” he blurted, far louder than he had intended, adn was shushed by a handful of students studying nearby.

Fjord told no one. Nothing good could come of this, surely. All he could imagine were negative consequences: attention, prying questions, even more stares in the hallway.

The dark, twisting thing in his head had been quiet, dormant, for so long, but now he could feel it beneath his skin even when he wasn’t dreaming. He began to fear that he had woken it.

The rest of the books that Ikithon had wanted him to read were, to his surprise, all about Xhorhas. One told him very scientifically about Kryn culture, written with absolute certainty: about how they defied the six prime deities with unholy bending of time and space, how they kept their population fearful and compliant by shrouding the sky in terrible darkness, how they resented being confined to their dead, blighted lands, and how they were ever-hungry for new territory to blight. The next he read contained an account of the beginning of the Empire’s war with the Kryn Dynasty, only a few years prior, comparing it to earlier human battles against the drow followers of Lolth around the Calamity.

The last was the worst, and the one that fascinated Fjord the most, despite himself. It was a treatise of Kryn war crimes, dry and annalistic and meant probably to be used as a legislative aid for when the war was over and the Empire was seeking to punish Kryn nobles and generals; it was also the most horrifically graphic document that Fjord had ever read. Master Ikithon had said it would be illuminating — but Fjord found that the only thing he could feel was disgusted that the Menagerie Coast had ever traded with Xhorhas at all.

Chapter Text

It was kind of difficult to let chaos reign when you didn’t have any power. Jester felt that the Traveller sometimes didn’t appreciate this fact: it was easy for him, obviously, and it had been much easier for her at the Lavish Chateau, where she was the only person with her abilities and everyone loved her enough to forgive all the trouble she caused. At Soltryce, everyone was magical, and no one cared about her — except, of course, in that she was a valuable recruit. Because she was valuable: she had always known that, obviously, but it was clear enough that the Assembly mages thought so too. She didn’t study, didn’t pay attention to whatever they droned on about in lectures, drew genitalia and silly faces all over her exams. But she still excelled at the magic they asked of her. She had the sense that this was almost causing them more aggravation than the pranks, because it meant that they couldn’t just get rid of her. And they really, really wanted to get rid of her.

In fact, they were having a meeting about what to do about her right now. The punishments doled out when she was caught (and sometimes when she wasn’t, which was completely unfair ) had been growing more and more severe for weeks — and then they had simply trailed off, apparently with the realisation that nothing was going to make her stop. That had felt like victory, for a short while. She hadn’t let herself be scared of what it might mean they were planning for her: if she was scared, then the Traveller would get bored and wouldn’t help her. And she couldn’t be alone here without him.

At that very moment she was unwatched, a rare moment of privacy. She would have thought they knew better than that by now, but perhaps they were as tired of keeping watch on her as she was of being watched. One of the teachers had marched her to the headmaster’s office, called for the housemistress as well, and told her to wait outside. There was no chair, so she simply sat cross-legged on the floor, a tiny spot of cheerful colour besmirching all the spotless white marble. Just Jester, the Unseen Servants that kept all that marble so white, and her thoughts. Ominous, she guessed, biting distractedly at her thumb, but that was a problem for the future. Right now was for dreaming up more trouble.

“What’s going on in there?” she whispered to the empty air, tail curling back and forth behind her like a hunting cat.

“Worried, darling?” hummed a playful voice in her ear. She grinned.

“Never. Are they coming out soon? What do I have time for?”

She heard him chuckle, pleased at the bravado.

“Still arguing. They’re so frightfully slow at it, my Jester — always ten words when they could use one. Plenty of time for some quick mischief.”

She had used thaumaturgy to make the sound of the crows outside the lecture theatre grow louder and louder until they were unbearable. She had slammed open every closed window and slammed shut every open window. She had swapped all the salt and sugar in the vast kitchens. She had added her own titillating extra chapters to official biographies of Cerberus Assembly members and long-dead kings. She had drawn mustaches on every portrait and statue that lined the academy grounds. After all that, thinking up new pranks with such extremely limited resources was beginning to become a challenge.

“Redecorating would be easier if I had my paints, and not just quill ink,” she mused aloud.

“Quite,” agreed the Traveller invisibly, and then, urgently, “Oh, heads up.”

The door swung open, and Jester just so happened to stick her foot out at precisely the right angle to trip up her housemistress as she stepped out of the office.

“Genevieve!”

“Whoops!” Jester bounced to her feet as the older woman stumbled and caught herself against the wall. “Whoa, are you okay?”

Jester had just about managed to suppress her grin beneath an appropriately concerned expression, but the housemistress wasn’t fooled. She glared as she straightened herself, in a way that said both that she knew exactly what Jester had done, and that Jester would be getting another smack if the office door wasn’t still open.

“Come inside, girl. What were you doing down there?”

She was ushered into the office with a hissed warning to be sensible, for gods’ sake (and so made sure to put a skip in her step as she did.) Inside it was far larger than it seemed, and far more ostentatious, all gleaming polished wood and gilded sculpting; way, way , fancier than a teacher needed. Jester doubted the headmaster had read even a fraction of the books that lined the walls, and really, surely even he could see that sitting right in front of a portrait of himself was a bit much? With all the unnecessary furniture, five adults, and Jester inside, it was crowded enough that they didn’t even try to close the door.

All the grownups were sat clustered around the grand desk with grim faces more appropriate to a funeral than a school meeting. Headmaster Margolin – not somebody that most first-year students encountered personally, but somebody who was becoming quite familiar with Jester, to his displeasure – had his chin resting on his steepled fingers, glowering darkly at her. She smiled sweetly back, folded her hands at the small of her back as though she were about to give a recital.

“Miss Lavorre. I expect you are entirely aware of why we need to speak with you today.”

Jester affixed a look of surprised innocence to her face.

“No?”

“Don’t play coy,” snapped another of the teachers, a Divination professor. Jester had transmuted her coffee into innk a few weeks ago, and the wrath still hadn’t faded. “Your behaviour is -”

“- Unacceptable,” cut in Headmaster Margolin smoothly, before the other teacher could say something she’d regret. “On a great many levels. To the point that we are considering your expulsion. Now, ordinarily — yes?”

Jester had politely raised her hand, startling him.

“ If I am expelled,” she asked, dragging the words out. “Do I get to go home?”

“No,” snapped one of the other adults, a man with a face like thunder. Jester didn’t recognise him, and he didn’t dress like a professor, didn’t wear a spellbook or component pouch like a wizard: this was some sort of official, she guessed, some part of the nasty business of abducting children to be cogs in the Empire’s war machine. “In the event of your expulsion from the Soltryce Academy, you will be removed to one of the other imperial training centres for young mages. One that you will find far less pleasant and accommodating.”

If they tried to ship her off somewhere else, Jester would bolt, and no amount of threats or posturing or magical binding would stop her from trying. But she wasn’t about to admit that. She tried to look as worried as she was supposed to be.

“So we’re eager to avoid this for you, as you can imagine,” continued the headmaster sternly. He had a calm, diplomatic, we’re all friends here kind of demeanour, even now, even as visibly disapproving as he was. Jester hated him for it. “Genevieve — I don’t think you understand our purposes here. Your journey from the coast must have been very confusing, and I understand that the transition from home life to such a rigorous environment can be difficult. But you show a great deal of potential, and since we would hate for it to go to waste, it’s our belief that you would be best served at Soltryce. And, of course, under the auspices of the Empire.”

“Since it is so very obviously that your magical education prior was -” interrupted the Divination professor again.

“- Lacking,” finished Margolin, not quite managing to obscure her muttering entirely a series of damnable heresies. To Jester’s surprise, instead of ignoring the comment, he actually hesitated, seeming to consider this angle, and then he said slowly,

“There is that, as well. Miss Lavorre, do you know the punishment for idol worship within the Empire and its annexes?”

Jester did, actually. She had been lectured on the matter no less than seven times now: first along with all the other students, the kind of routine warning delivered to all new arrivals at the Academy (no idol worship, no hemocraft, no necromancy, absolutely no chewing gum ), and then six more times specifically and personally. One of the soldiers who delivered her here had labelled her as a potential suspect for illegal religious practices, she thought, and then when she started trying to tell people how amazing the Traveller was, she had confirmed it.

Rather than reciting the correct answer – a fine of five hundred gold pieces or six months in prison – Jester made her expression one of contrition, all pouty lips and big puppy eyes.

“It’s just such an old family tradition,” she lied. “And Mama said never to forget where we came from.”

Mama would be sighing fondly at her antics if she could see her now, Jester was sure. The added implication, in the minds of this room of humans, that Jester’s devotion to the Traveller was related to her infernal heritage, wasn’t missed.

“But a dangerous, dangerous act, and a severely punished one,” intoned the headmaster gravely. Jester wondered faintly if he actually knew the specific penalty, or if he was too important to have to care about that sort of thing. “We are in a time of war, Miss Lavorre. The Xhorhassian hordes to the north are…”

And then he was off, pontificating on the myriad horrors and darkness and evil of the Kryn Dynasty. Jester had heard it a thousand times, and she struggled not to yawn during it. Headmaster Margolin was diplomatic enough not to add on the usual speech about the horrors of the land of beasts , settlements in Xhorhas apparently comprised mostly of people with infernal or monstrous blood: people like Jester. One or two stray tieflings or dragonborn or half-orcs, even the occasional gnoll or bugbear, these were acceptable in the Empire so long as they behaved as much like humans as they possibly could. But they were isolated, not really permitted to form communities, to understand themselves. Such attempts were met with violence.

Jester knew the way the Assembly spoke about people like her and her mama. It made her sympathise with of the drow of Xhorhas, because the Assembly spoke of them that way too.

Distracted, unimpressed with this latest tirade on the absolute necessity and indisputably just nature of the war with Xhorhas, Jester let her attention wander. And out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of two young men striding by the office in a hurry: a human boy, and hurrying along behind him… Fjord? She craned her neck to see, and glimpsed a frowning forest-green skin, shaggy black hair, watchful yellow eyes: definitely Fjord, but where was he going in such a rush, looking so worried, and in the middle of lesson time?

“ — Miss Lavorre?” demanded Margolin. “Do you understand?”

“No,” she replied brightly, honestly. When she glanced back to the doorway, Fjord was long gone.

Her housemistress’s face was all red with fury, hands gripping tight to her skirt like she wanted to strangle her. Her divination professor sighed heavily. Headmaster Margolin had to close his eyes for a moment, and then exchanged a meaningful glance with the conscription office, who said, voice heavy with warning,

“Then perhaps we should allow you to do your own research, hm?”

*

  Fjord

Just a few weeks after Professor Ikithon first spoke with him, the summons came. A human boy not much older than Fjord appeared at the entrance of Fjord’s lecture theatre, bowed to the professor unapologetically when she glared at him for interrupting, and held out a letter, signed and sealed officiously. Fjord had been half-asleep, struggling to pay attention — last night he dreamed of the sea serpent for the first time in months, and its unbearable voice echoing around his head had kept him awake for the rest of the night, saying over and over, watch, grow, feed, serve. But this was enough to startle him back to wakefulness.

She took the message only a little hesitantly, read quickly through it, and then peered over the rows of curious, watching students.

“Which of you is Fjord Stone?”

All the air seemed to leave Fjord’s lungs at once, his throat tight and dry. He couldn’t speak, even if he wanted to. A few heads turned — but almost no one here knew him by name, and so they glanced past him. Unable to call out, hearing the rustle of his robes as shockingly loud in the echoing silence, he stood in place.

The young man nodded brusquely, and called up,

“Come with me, please.”

His expression was impossible to read. Fjord hesitantly did as he was told, feeling like a man being led to execution for a crime he was not aware of committing. They walked a few steps away from the doorway, just far enough to be out of earshot, as the lecturer resumed her work inside above the faint murmur of the other students’ curiosity.

“The Archmage of Civil Influence sent me,” the young man said, still stone-faced, studiedly neutral. His voice was lightly accented, Zemnian; he was dressed only in a thin grey tunic and trousers, black hair shorn almost to the scalp. “He asks that you go to your room and pack up your things.”

“What?” Fjord blurted, jolted out of his stupor by pure shock. He couldn’t have been expelled, could he? For what? Was that even possible? What would be done with him, if he was? An imperial command had sent him to be educated at the Soltrace Academy; he could only imagine that nothing less than the same would send him away.

“Master Ikithon wants you sent  to his estate at Vergesson to study with him personally instead.” When Fjord just blinked at him, baffled, the young man took a step toward the dorms, indicating that Fjord follow him. He rolled his eyes, which softened his severity not at all, but made him seem younger than he had at first: tall and strong with it, as Fjord was, but no more than seventeen or eighteen, equivalent of a penultimate- or final-year here. “Come on, wake up. Doesn’t do to keep the magister waiting.”

Numb with confusion, Fjord hurried after the other boy up the magnificent marble staircase as quickly as he could. The thought of being uprooted again was terrifying: he had at least known how to find Rexxentrum on a map, last time, but now he couldn’t even begin to guess where or what Vergesson was. Here he had a good bed to himself, enough food, even a few people he might tentatively call friends: a cheerful gnome boy he saw around on the grounds, a half-elven girl he sat beside in Abjuration, and Jester, gods, bold and defiant little Jester, whom he worried for so much.

Nobody had given the opportunity to say no. He wondered briefly, recklessly, what would happen if he tried; if he planted his feet and said I’m not going with you, I don’t care what the Archmage wants. The potential answers that came to his mind made him shudder.

So he did as ordered, and hurried to his room to put away his few belongings into the plain travelling chest that Soltryce had supplied to him. Maybe foolishly, he was embarrassed to pack in front of another person, reluctant to demonstrate that he didn’t have many things, none of the keepsakes or gifts that other students kept from their families. But the older boy watched without a word, without expression, almost as though distracted. Fjord had noticed that beneath his long grey sleeves, both his forearms were wound thoroughly in bandages. If he injured, he gave no sign of it, no hint of pain.

“What is it that Master Ikithon wants me for?” he asked, just about managing not to mumble, summoning his courage.

“Training,” supplied the older boy bluntly, mysteriously. “Beyond that which the school provide. We are to serve King Dwendal.”

We , Fjord noted: both of them were included in that statement. He still didn’t know what it meant. But it was intimidating nonetheless — the young man sounded so assured of his purpose, so certain.

Attention wavering as Fjord packed, the older boy caught sight of the book lying open on Fjord’s beside table: the last of the books on Xhorhas that Master Ikithon had ordered him to study.

“Oh, Atrocities of the Kryn March ,” he half-laughed in clear recognition, more than the barest hint of emotion coming into his voice for the first time. “That’s a good one.”

On a whim, Fjord grabbed the book – even though it wasn’t truly his to take – and placed it on top of his clothes, then began to buckle up his trunk.

“All true?” he asked, a little daring, thinking of all the lurid, gory stories he had read there The other boy raised his eyebrows.

“True, all that and worse.”

Again, he was so sure. Perhaps the question in Fjord’s mind – but how can you know that? – showed on his face as he clambered to his feet and brushed off his knees.

“I’ve seen it. There are Crick tortures that… well, they don’t just dress like insects, put it that way.”

There was no horror on his face; only a subtle, smirking smugness, pleased at knowing something that Fjord did not. Is that what we learn in this training? Fjord wondered, disquieted, feeling more trapped than ever. Kryn torture techniques?

How does that serve your king?

*

Veth:

The Cobalt Soul ordered each and every day into neat, orderly segments, clear and purposeful: prayer, breakfast, meditation, exercise, classes, lunch, more classes, revision, physical training, meditation, dinner, meditation, bed. It was not designed to give the novices any time to chat amongst themselves and thereby get into mischief — and so the novices had to make their own time for mischief. Beau and Veth mostly did so during their study periods in the library. So long as they were quiet, the monks generally overlooked this, being too focused on spying on the visiting readers and making sure none of them did anything to harm the books. The novices knew better than to risk damaging a book in any way: Archivist Zeenoth had promised them all sternly that anyone who so much as dog-eared a page would be sent immediately to the Cobalt Vault in Vasselheim to explain themselves to the High Curator personally. Veth had quaked in her regulation boots when she first heard this; Beau scoffed loudly and muttered that it was hot bullshit. 

She and Beau fit together well, that way. Beau was, obviously, cool and smart and strong and quick and brave; Veth should have felt insecure, standing next to all of that, but somehow she didn’t. Maybe it was because she had learned quickly that Beau was also a massive dork with no people skills — critically, no ability to lie. There, Veth filled in for her. Sure, Beau had a brain for history, music, mathematics, but away from the little one-room schoolhouse in Felderwin, Veth was beginning to learn that she excelled at the sciences and, surprisingly, philosophy, wrapping her head around strange new ideas. She only exploded things that she intended to explode, now. Most of which she even had permission to explode. It was… strangely nice, having a friend, especially one who stuck out just as much as Veth. Alone, Beau would make wild plans, and then falter and stutter to a screeching halt partway through trying impulsively to execute them with no idea how to pull them off — which Veth also did, all the time, so she knew exactly when and how to help. They were actually getting things done together. Beau had size and strength on her side, but Veth was small, hard to hit, and the range weapons instructor had called her skills with a slingshot remarkable. And Beau liked her for it, looking forward to the day when Veth could kick her ass.

Most of the Cobalt Soul’s visiting readers were Rexxentrum academics or annexes to the Cerberus Assembly – or servants to those annexes, or servants’ servants – with the occasional wandering adventurer thrown in for good measure. They were typically extremely serious, extremely pompous, and extremely focused on whatever research was so important that they had needed access to the Archive for it.

They were not, typically, small tiefling girls in the bright starched reds of the Soltryce Academy, bounding along cheerfully behind one of the librarians, gawping at the stacks around them with open glee.

Veth had never met a tiefling before. There were one or two here in the Soul, but none amongst their cohort of novices, and there had certainly been none in Felderwin, where even half-elves were considered vaguely exotic. She couldn’t help staring as the librarian showed the girl where she would sit – the desk right across from Beau and Veth – and left her with the usual stern warning about how to behave, a stack of parchment on which to take notes, and a book to start with. The girl nodded primly, posture picture-perfect, opened her book, and sat as neat and straight as a porcelain doll until the librarian was out of sight. Then she abandoned all pretence at doing as she was told, looking around, an impish smile spreading across her face, tail lashing behind her through a tear ripped in her uniform. And met eyes with Veth.

Veth gasped and looked sharply down at her own textbooks, embarrassed to be caught staring. At her shoulder, Beau, who had been dozing, looked up dazedly.

“Huh? What?”

“Shh!”

Beau glanced over, evidently noticed the tiefling girl too.

“That’s new,” she murmured – exactly what Veth had thought – and raised a hand like she was going to wave.

“Don’t,” hissed Veth, deeply self-conscious all of a sudden, freezing still. “Don’t move! Tieflings can only see movement.”

Beau pulled a doubtful face; before she could say anything, however, the girl leaned across her desk and announced cheerfully,

“It’s true, we have a hard time seeing things that aren’t moving. It’s very true.” Her voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “But I can hear you.”

“…Oh.” 

Veth found that her palms were sweaty; she hadn’t been this nervous since she had first arrived at the Soul. But Beau smiled, and the girl grinned back.

“Hi! I’m Jester!”

She had a pitchy, lilting accent, not something Veth could recognise as Dwendalian.

“S’up. I’m -”

“Novice Beauregard, Novice Revvetha,” snapped the voice of one of the monks, like a whip cracked through the library’s quiet. All three girls jumped. “Sit back. If you continue to lean over your revision notes like that, you’ll have ink stains all over your vestments.”

They hurried to correct their posture, chiming obediently, “Yes, Archivist.”

What they had leaning over wasn’t actually revision notes – they were a little hand-drawn map of the grounds, Beau’s latest plans to sneak out at night – and both of them hated being addressed by their full names. But it wasn’t worth arguing.

When the monk glanced over to the next desk, the tiefling girl – Jester – had her eyes fixed down on the first page of her book in apparent fascination, the very image of studiousness despite her fangs and horns. She huffed, and left them to it. 

“Novice Beauregard,” sing-songed Jester quietly, as soon as the monk was out of earshot, not looking up. “And Novice Revvetha.”

“Beau,” interjected Beau. “And Veth. Right?”

A sharp elbow in Veth’s ribs prompted Veth to snap out of her shyness somewhat.

“Veth, yep!” Her voice came out even more squeaky than usual. “Who are you?”

“I told you, I’m Jester.” The girl grinned wide, spread her arms in a behold! gesture, then scowled and fidgeted as the starched edges of her uniform shirt dug into her at the movement.

“But why are you here? Usually they don’t send —”

Tieflings? Foreigners? Students from the Soltryce Academy? Wasn’t Soltryce a school for wizards, anyway? Surely they had their own libraries? Unless, Veth realised, whatever she was reading was outside Soltryce’s usual studies.

“Oh . Well. They kidnapped me,” explained Jester breezily, as though this was perfectly ordinary. “And then they got mad for being upset that they kidnapped me. So now I have to do homework until I’ve learned my lesson and agree that the Empire only kidnaps people for very good reasons.”

Upside down, Veth could just about make out the title of the book that Jester was ignoring. Heretics And Their Comeuppances. She felt her eyebrows twitch upwards, mildly scandalised by reflex. People didn’t risk even the slightest whisper of illegal religions in Felderwin. Veth couldn’t say she was particularly devout, beyond participating in all the normal public worship – prayers to Pelor for the new year, black-draped clerics of the Raven Queen at funerals – but she knew that everybody was scared of the Reapers, of what could happen if they found anything they judged to be heretical when they inspected your home. The only people who ignored them were either rich enough to afford the necessary bribes, or weren’t from the Empire at all. 

Suddenly Veth could place Jester’s accent: she was from the Menagerie Coast, one of the mage-conscripts the Empire had taken away for training. The thought felt like ice in her belly, chilling all her blood. The same troop of Righteous Brand had passed through Veth’s hometown; there they had called for volunteers , but everyone knew, when they got further south, they would stop asking nicely and start giving orders.

The look on Beau’s face said she hadn’t heard of any such thing. She edged her chair forward, strangely intent — and Veth remembered how she said she had first come to the Soul.

“Kidnapped?”

“Uh huh. I’ll get away eventually though,” Jester continued, unbothered. Veth’s eyes must have been as wide as dinnerplates. “They’ll kick me out of Soltryce because I -” She flicked her fingers, and a nearby shelf full of books flung its contents to the floor with a horrible clatter. “- And I worship an amazing god called the Traveller that apparently is –”

She cut herself off with a squeak as the librarian who had been guiding her reappeared with another hefty stack of tomes on religious instruction, frowning distractedly in the direction of the books that had flown off their shelf.

“Here, Genevieve. These should be of use to you.”

“Thank you,” chirped Jester, smiling cutely once again, all her chaos suppressed beneath the surface. Veth had to choke down a slightly hysterical giggle.

“Genevieve ,” mouthed Beau; Jester stuck out a forked, purple tongue at her quickly. It was certainly a less fitting name than Jester .

“Girls,” came the librarian’s voice reproachfully, having apparently noticed this. Oh yeah: monk perception. “I remind you that you are supposed to be using this time to revise. Genevieve: you are being permitted to study here as a gesture-”

“That’s my name,” Jester chirped, which the monk ignored.

“- of goodwill, which you should be sure not to waste. And you should know that we have been instructed that you are to be subjected to all the discipline of the Cobalt Soul while you are here, should you break the rules of the Archive.”

“As well as all the discipline of the Soltryce Academy." Jester's sweet face over-serious, voice pitched low. It was obvious that the thought did nothing to scare her. Veth felt a warm sense of pride and admiration rise in her like a silent cheer.

With one more admonishing glare, having at least delivered her warning, the librarian moved on.

Veth raised her eyebrows at Beau – someone else just as strange as the pair of them! – but Beau didn’t look happy, chewing on the inside of her cheek.

“That sucks,” she whispered, and then, with a glance around her, barely louder, to Jester, “That sucks. It’s like a trap. Sending you here, warning you to be… quiet, and obedient, and whatever, hoping you won’t be able to and you’ll get beaten up by a monk for speaking out of turn.”

“That happens?”

“Kind of,” chorused Veth and Beau together wincingly, although the true answer was something closer to only if you’re already sparring with them. The monks seemed to consider anyone who started a fight to be fair game; part of their sense of justice, Veth supposed.

“They are really strict, though,” she added nervously. “You’ll end up holding a rock above your head for hours.”

“I – it’s not the exact same, but I know how you feel,” said Beau, rubbing the fuzz of her undercut awkwardly. “I… didn’t want to come here, either, and they took me anyway.” As though to deflect, she jabbed her thumb accusingly at Veth. “Veth volunteered, because she’s a badass.”

“You did?”

Jester’s tone was impressed, but her nose was wrinkled, as if Beau had said that Veth had volunteered for some exceptionally repellent task: scaring off giant sewer rats, or collaborating with goblins. Veth hesitated, timid, but made herself sit up and rally.

“Well, yeah. They said they could use my skills – I’m tough, and I can go without being seen – and, and, and, they said, the Cobalt Soul was all about justice, and truth, and routing out corruption. They said that, anyway. That’s what I want to stand for.”

It was what they were supposed to stand for. No matter how strict the monks were, Veth had still wanted to be a part of the Soul —  and not only because she desperately didn’t want to be sent home. But listening to Beau’s account of being sent here – the way her dad had just handed her off to strangers in the night, who’d dragged her away against her will – had made her question whether they could possibly really mean what they said about truth and justice and righteousness, and knowing  they were complicit in what was being done to Jester too… well, it only spurred those doubts on.

Jester considered this, pushing her books carelessly aside.

“I don’t think I’d want to join the Cobalt Soul, because I’m already blue.” As Veth was blinking, trying to make sense of this statement, Jester eagerly leaned forward, the spaded tip of her tail twitching like a cat about to pounce, and promised, “But I’m super sneaky too. And the Traveller has taught me all sort of tricks: I can change my face, and make people listen to me. I don’t want to be a monk of anyone but the Traveller, but…”

“But, holy shit,” Veth breathed, suddenly struck with an idea. “We could find the truth other ways. We could be detectives!” Jester gasped, delighted, and Veth warmed to the theme. “A dynamic duo! Solving mysteries, finding criminal masterminds, no matter how nefarious! All the tools, all the insights, all the instincts!”

“Yes!”

“You guys,” Beau protested, voice creaking. If Veth didn’t know better, she’d say she looked sulky. “I’m like, really good at ciphers. And breaking and entering. Come on.”

“A dynamic trio,” Veth amended, patting her arm and getting shoved away for it.

They were definitely going to get in trouble. For one thing, they definitely had ink on their vestments again; none of the three of them were actually studying; and one of the monks could probably hear them giggling together. But Veth couldn’t really find it in her to care.

Joking about the detective agency made her smile, and if they could, she was sure they would be the best investigators Exandria had ever known. But if even the monks of the Cobalt Soul weren’t immune to corruption, then what hope did the three of them have, planning to fight it? Three kids against an Empire, she thought distantly, the bitterness of it souring the amusement, all by themselves: who would ever care if they tried to resist?

Chapter Text

After weeks of travel, the familiar sights and sounds of Nicodranas were a welcome relief. The people bustling all around, the gaudy fashions of the Menagerie Coast, the ocean glittering in the distance, the great white sails off in the harbour. Bluud inhaled deeply and sighed in relief, smelling the salt air, closing his eyes for a moment to listen to the familiar shrieking of the gulls.

Then opening them again just in time to reach out and grab the boy Mollymauk by the collar as he tried to lunge out of the cart. Molly had developed a habit of this lately: the more alert and curious he grew, the more terrifyingly reckless he also became. Probably he had seen some bauble or pastry he wanted to try and steal.

“You will fall,” Bluud explained calmly, keeping one hand on the reins, drawing a wriggling Molly back onto the bench beside him with one great furry arm around his scrawny shoulders. “And probably you will hit your head right on the street. And what would be the point of that?”

“Empty, empty, empty,” mumbled Mollymauk, trying impatiently to squirm out from under the hold. Probably he wouldn’t have listened to Bluud’s warning, even if he were able to understand the words. He was spirited like that.

“It’s dangerous to be alone on the street,” Bluud continued. “You could get lost. Or hurt. Or both.”

Molly hissed in halfhearted protest, still peering frantically all around them. The steady rumble of Bluud’s voice usually served to settle the boy a little; here and now, however, Molly was simply far too excited to be distracted by listening to him. He would most likely try to jump out again. It didn’t help that Bluud couldn’t tell where those blank red eyes were actually looking, nor that Molly was far quicker than one would think, and came equipped with both horns and talons with which to try and evade him.

He had tried to run directly into the Lucidean Ocean, the first time they had driven close enough to see it. Bluud had only narrowly been able to stop him — more accurately, to slow him down, to lead him across the beach and into the shallows at a safe pace rather than a sprint, tolerating the nuisance of getting saltwater in his fur for the sake of Molly’s delighted, baffled shrieks and his wide-eyed, overwhelmed staring at the endless expanse of blue. (Afterwards, he had attempted once again to persuade Molly to bathe; but tepid water in wooden bathtubs rented from an inn was, it seemed, far less compelling than freezing seawater, and the boy would have none of it.)

Bluud brought the cart around to the back of the Lavish Chateau, keeping up his one-sided conversation with Mollymauk the entire time, trying to remain as even-tempered around the boy as ever. Privately, however, he was full of dread and shame: he had not been able to find a mage to Send to Marion with his news from Shadycreek, and so she had been waiting, all this time, praying that he would return with her Jester.

But he had not. And he could only hope that she would forgive him for that.

As he dismounted and a groom came up to unlatch the cart and take the horses, he glanced up to the penthouse window that he knew to be the Ruby’s private bedroom. If she wasn’t with a customer right now, then…

Sure enough, there was a twitch of gauzy curtains, the faint reflection of a crimson face. Bluud shook his head, and glanced over meaningfully to where Mollymauk was scrambling down onto the cobblestones — still barefoot, despite Bluud’s best efforts. A tiefling child, but not the tiefling child they had lost. Please understand why, he thought.

Expressionless, Marion disappeared from the window.

With some effort - Molly was no fool, no matter the lingering effects of whatever curse lay upon him, and he wanted to go in the other direction, wanted to wander out into Nicodranas to investigate - Bluud guided the boy inside, away from the bar and the stage, into the staff quarters. He had meant to go up the narrow service staircase that led up to Marion’s chambers, but of course all the rest of the Chateau staff were curious too, and Molly’s overactive survival instincts - still fully intact, beneath the shattered chaos of the rest of his mind - didn’t love the idea of a dark, rickety staircase into the unknown. By the time Bluud had managed to shoo everybody else back to their work and got Molly to head in the direction of the stairs, he found Marion standing at the base of the steps behind him.

She was dressed in a nightdress and a soft robe, her hair down, her four horns free of ornament. The expression on her face was open and raw, her voice very fragile as she asked,

“Bluud?”

“She wasn’t there,” he confessed at once, unable to soften the blow: nothing he could say would make it better. “I’m so sorry.”

Disappointment, grief, heartbreak crossed over Marion’s beautiful face. She looked away for a moment, closed those luminous golden eyes, processed this And then she opened them again, and he watched her take in the sight of Mollymauk for the first time. Curling ram’s horns, blood-red eyes, scarred lavender skin.

The boy was staring up at her in awe, unmoving as she came closer.

“And who are you, my dear?” she asked, voice feather-soft. “What is your tale?”

“E-Empty,” said Mollymauk, tilting his head and reaching up to brush his fingers against his own horns as his red eyes flickered over hers. “Empty, empty, empty.”

She hesitated, visibly taken aback.

“It’s all he says,” Bluud explained grimly. “The woman who found him, she said he crawled out of a grave that way.”

Though clearly as disturbed by this thought as Bluud had been – necromancy was a nasty, nasty business, and the thought of a child caught up in it left a sour taste in his mouth – Marion concealed her feelings with the ease of a practiced actress, bent down to Molly’s height to ask,

“Empty? Why are you empty, darling?”

He struggled for, and couldn’t find, words, mouth forming the same shapes again: e-m-p-t-y, em-pt-y, em -

Molly had been doing this more and more, the past few days. Trying to say something else, although he couldn’t quite manage it. That, and responding aloud to whatever he recognised as the tone of a question, turning his head when Bluud called his name. The boy could recognise words, Bluud was sure of it; or at least, he was learning to do so. He just couldn’t use them. Couldn’t use them yet, perhaps.

Marion spoke in Infernal, as gentle as she could make the demonic tongue; asking the same question, Bluud presumed. And, startling her somewhat, Molly replied in the same.

It was not, could not be, anything approaching a proper reply. It was only one word, just as he only ever said one word in Common. Marion repeated it; he gazed at her without understanding, a slight furrow between his brows, an almost petulant expression, bored at this meaningless game of making noises at each other. His tail was twitching impatiently behind him.

“It’s - he said empty,” Marion told Bluud in an undertone, glancing up to him. “But not merely empty. Something closer to hollowed out. A vessel, drained.”

Bluud wished that he could be shocked by that. But it made a nasty sort of sense. Whatever had marked Molly with those red eye tattoos had treated him as a vessel to be used, he was sure: it was not as though a boy so young would have knowingly, willingly bound himself up in blood magic, after all.

Surely not.

“What on earth has been done to you, my dear?” hummed Marion, reaching out cautiously to Mollymauk. When she smoothed a lock of that shimmering indigo hair away from his eyes, he twitched, but, to Bluud’s mild surprise, allowed the touch without snarling or bucking his horns. He was still staring at her, rapt — not only at the beauty of the Ruby of the Sea, Bluud realised, but at what must have been the first other tiefling he had ever really seen. 

He wondered what she was thinking, whether her thoughts, as his, had strayed to the fact that this was so clearly arcane in nature, when it was children with arcane potential that the Empire soldiers had taken. Whether she was wondering if Jester would end up like this, too. He didn’t think that would be so, but there was nothing meaningful that he could say to reassure her.

“She wouldn’t keep him,” Bluud explained falteringly. “The woman who found him like this. She said the reward I paid her was enough to take him off her hands. And I… couldn’t just…”

“Of course not,” agreed Marion distractedly; Bluud saw her examining Molly more closely, now that he had allowed her very near, taking in the chips on his horns, the scars across his neck and chest, the bones prominent beneath his skin, all signs of the neglect he must have suffered.  “No, it would have been wrong to leave him.”

Bluud nodded gravely, relieved.

“What should we do with you, little amethyst?” Marion asked lightly.

“Empty,” muttered Molly, as ever.

“I’ve been calling him, hm,” Bluud began awkwardly, then swallowed, cut himself off. It felt silly, now that he was saying it to someone else. “Mollymauk. After the birds. Molly, for short.”

Marion smiled, that private smile that so few of her clients ever glimpsed, so much sweeter than her public ones.

“Mollymauk,” she said testingly; the boy’s gaze flickered across her face, searching for some clue as to what she meant by it, using his name.

“Empty.”

“My name is Marion Lavorre, Molly. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She stood, nose delicatedly wrinkled, still smiling. “Though perhaps it would be more pleasurable if you did not smell that way, dear.”

Molly grinned back, sensing the hint of teasing at the edge of her voice, charmed despite his lack of comprehension.

“A bath, perhaps, to start,” she suggested. Bluud grimaced, agreeing with the sentiment, but not looking forward to the effort.

“He’s made his feelings on baths pretty clear.” he grumbled, mostly to amuse Marion.

They were still bereft of Jester, still searching for her. Mollymauk’s presence had not altered the fact of her absence.

“He cannot be worse than Jester at three years old,” she consoled him, patting gently at his bicep in a way that meant that she intended to leave the task to him. Bluud huffed a sigh, unsure of when, precisely, he had become more an expert in childcare than a bodyguard.

The problem with bathing recalcitrant tieflings, he found – whether they be toddlers or amnesiac teenagers –was that they had claws.

“He can try.”

*

The first word he learned to say was Ruby.

Before that was learning other sounds: a challenge, but one made significantly easier for him by watching Marion, mimicking the way she formed each letter with a forked tongue and sharp fangs like his. Aa, first, and making the kitchen staff jump by triumphantly announcing himself with AAH!, showing off the new skill. Then sss, an easy development from his usual affronted snarl. He copied phonetically, to begin with, not understanding what he was being taught as anything other than a strange new game. Mollymauk, Bluud would say, and Molly would respond with an enthusiastic mmmmm, dutifully echoing the first letter of his name, amusement in his curious eyes.

Most of the other staff didn’t know what to make of him. They were understanding enough – especially those who, like Marion, plied their trade in the bedrooms upstairs; many of them knew what it was to need a safe place to hide – but annoyed, inconvenienced, by the presence of a child who couldn’t understand the need for a refined atmosphere in the dining room, or why the dancers didn’t want his taloned hands investigating their silky costumes. He wasn’t actually allowed out into the parlour or backstage, of course — but Molly cared not at all what anybody deigned to allow of him, and it was already all the trouble anyone could manage just to keep him from the public eye. He slept in a truckle bed off Bluud’s quarters — Marion had supplemented Bluud’s already exceedingly generous wages to compensate for this, though Bluud didn’t mind, and in fact had been the one to suggest it. It was he who’d found the boy and brought him here; it seemed only right that he take responsibility for him, a challenge as it might be. Within a week, Molly had carved out a little world for himself, a hidden sliver of the Chateau that he roamed as took his fancy. Marion’s private suite, Bluud’s quarters a few doors down, the service staircase and all that it led to: the staff common room, the kitchens, the dressing rooms and stage, and there too, the rafters, the airvents, the cupboards and little secret niches that Jester loved too.

This was how he had picked up the name, Bluud was pretty sure. Creeping into the rear of the house at night and listening close to all that he heard, transfixed by the singing, by the glimmering candlelight of the patrons’ tables below him. Molly had learned quickly that he would get no attention during performance hours, save being told to keep quiet (in response to which he would hiss shh! loudly in return; Bluud was sure he knew what hush meant, and was making fun of them for trying), and that he had better find a way to entertain himself while Bluud stood guard near Marion and the rest of the staff catered to the customers. So he watched, and listened, and the word that he heard most of during those nights was, of course, the patrons shouting Ruby! at the stage.

He thought that the way that everyone stared at him when he parroted it was hilarious.

That first word seemed to open the floodgates. Empty was still what he said when he could think of nothing else to say, but less and less, appropriately, as he filled out his vocabulary to cover the gaps. And as he picked up more words – no was an instant favourite, and why, and bravo, and fuck off – Bluud and Marion discovered, to their surprise, that he had an accent, a brogue instantly reminiscent of the Greying Wildlands.

Muscle memory, perhaps. Certainly Bluud tried to tell himself that was all it was, muscle memory — and yet he couldn’t quite help but suspect otherwise. It wasn’t just the accent. Words began to appear, over the weeks, that no one had taught him. Give was learned painstakingly from Carlos at the bar; give it here simply appeared on his lips one day, as he was attempting, as usual, to steal Marion’s lunch. Perhaps, Bluud began to think, these changes were true recollections of who he was before: not lost after all, but merely laying dormant.

The thought worried him, for reasons he struggled to put into words. It was a comfort and a relief to see the boy becoming more and more alert each day: for those first few days out of Shadycreek he had simply followed where he was led, staring at all the world with equal confusion, and so Bluud took his inquisitive wilfulness now as a sign that something was healing up inside. But whatever his previous life had been, it had not been good. And the thought of any of it returning was a concerning one.

He was still much too thin, for one thing, and he snatched at food like he had no reason to expect ever to receive any more of it. The livid scars striped across his whole body, and the chips to his horns and canine teeth, these spoke of a life of violence. If he had any family at all in Shadycreek, they had not concerned themselves with caring for him — but likely enough he had not had anybody at all. Not to mention all the horrifying implications of the way he had been found: clawing his way out of a shallow grave, staring red eyes emblazoned all over his skin, a gaping wound where his past should have been. Gods only knew how he had ended up in such a situation, but he had been bound up in something awful, Bluud was sure, some Betrayer cult or dark experiment.

The other motions he began to remember only furthered that impression.

Bluud had found him in the kitchens one morning, absent-mindedly juggling a handful of apples — which had been surprising, but not been alarming, until he had become bored with apples, had picked up a knife from the counter without looking at it, casually tossed it high into the air, and caught it by the handle without hesitation as it spun. And then there was the time that Marion had caught him climbing up the outside of the bannister and, in response to her mild chiding, he had thrown himself off from the top and landed on his feet like an acrobat. He jumped like a startled cat if somebody touched him when he didn’t expect it —not fearfully, necessarily, but vigilantly, his whole body twisting around, tension in every muscle. When he sulked, he dropped into fighting stances without seeming to know why.

Worst of all was what happened the first time he accidentally nicked himself on a bit of jewellery. Bluud was familiar enough with the handful of cantrips that came naturally to Marion and Jester, but this was something else: the glowing ice that sprang forth from the gem where his blood touched it, the flare of unnatural blue fire when he curiously did it again, before Marion had managed to take it off him. Molly hadn’t understood their horror, their frantic redirections — and that was worse, in a way, that he knew no better than to treat his blood as a weapon.

These were trained movements, all; the body remembered, even though the waking mind forgot. Which meant that someone had taken the time to train him to fight, to teach him to perform, to induct him into this strange, awful blood magic. Children didn’t live long alone, in the wildlands. And if they did learn to survive there, they didn’t then die for no reason. Someone – perhaps those who had trained him; perhaps another party entirely – had then murdered him, had buried him deep in the Savalirwood. He represented a significant investment of time and effort, and Bluud was sure somebody was therefore searching for him, trying to make good on that investment.

The crook who found the kid had been none too subtle about contacting them. She’d protected Molly while he was in her care, sure, but Bluud didn’t trust her not to babble to the first person who came looking, faced with threats or bribes or both. Bluud was pretty recognisable himself, anyway, and even more so with a feral purple tiefling in tow. That was a trail leading right back to the Lavish Chateau.

No one outside the household had actually seen Molly, of course, thank the gods. Bluud and the other staff had plenty of experience in hiding a mischievous child from public view, and, chaotic as he was, Mollymauk still wasn’t yet quite as much a troublemaker as Jester had been when she began to figure out her magic. It was entirely natural for the Lavish Chateau to help keep him hidden, without even having to be told that it was for any especial reason: the Ruby of the Sea still could not be seen to have a family, and the mages of the Righteous Brand were still periodically patrolling for children to steal away to Rexxentrum.

Still, Bluud found himself bracing for the day that someone came hunting for the boy. 

He didn’t mean to give Molly up without a fight.

*

Chapter Text

They didn’t make him walk to Vergesson, as they had made the conscripts walk to Rexxentrum. Instead the older boy escorted him to a waiting carriage and helped him shove his trunk inside.

“Thanks,” Fjord tried hesitantly, angling for a name, and received only a grunt of affirmation.

“Don’t thank me. Thank Master Ikithon for his patronage. He’ll like that.”

There was a girl of about the same age in the same uniform, sandy hair almost as short as the boy’s, standing watching at the edge of the schoolyard — but while the boy’s face was expressionless, she wore a scowl. The boy glanced over to her, grimaced, and didn't otherwise respond. 

“Give Bren our greetings, if you see him,” said the boy as Fjord climbed inside, scuffing the cobblestones with his toe. And then before he could reply, the driver flicked his whip, and they were gone.

All Fjord knew of Vergesson was that it was Ikithon’s home. He could not imagine it. It was difficult enough to conceive of the magister as a person, much less one who had to do such mundane things as sleep and eat and live somewhere. But then also he had been told that somehow this would involve more schooling, which made even less sense: what on earth could an archmage have to teach him? Nothing good, he knew that much. His one meeting with Ikithon so far had been enough to terrify him; this seemed to be a nightmare of helplessness, worse even than everything the Empire had done to him so far, if only because he was, as far as he could tell, alone in it. He tried to read the books that the magister had ordered him to study on the way, but the constant jostling of the coach as it left the city and began on unpaved dirt roads into the countryside – entirely unfamiliar to him; he had never ridden in one before – made him feel sick, and he found there was nothing that he could do but stare out of the windows at the unfamiliar landscape rolling past, at the farmers in their fields and the occasional checkpost of the Righteous Brand, who took one look at Ikithon’s seal and waved them by at once.

The further from the centre of the Empire they got, the more the soldiers stared at him, at his skin.

His instinct was to shrink from it — but he was not an orphan half-orc alone anymore. Even if it was just for now, just for a moment, he was shrouded in the prestige of the Archmage of Civil Influence, and the humans gawking at him didn’t know that he had no right to it. As far as they knew, he was a powerful wizard too. As far as they knew, he belonged there. So instead he took a risk: sat up tall, shoulders back, and stared into the distance with the kind of lofty self-assurance he had come to expect of such people. I am important, I matter, he tried to say, and saw for a moment no doubt in their eyes. It was surreal.

Even once they arrived at Vergesson, the illusion didn’t entirely shatter. There were two paths diverging around the grand estate; both ran toward the same beautiful, enormous manor, but one looping around what was evidently a public-facing courtyard – Fjord glimpsed several glassy-eyed people resting there in wheelchairs or in the grass, shadowed by white-uniformed attendants and watched over by a sizeable cohort of bored soldiers – and the other back to a grand entryway, an enormous wooden door painted glossy red, abutted by columns and two much sharper-eyed guards. They didn’t wear the uniform of the Righteous Brand or the Crownsguard: this was something different, something secret, not really meant to be noticed. Aware of that, Fjord did his best to notice it.

It was this second, private entrance that the carriage drew up to. For a moment nothing moved but the tired horses stamping and whuffing, and Fjord wondered – hoped – just for those few seconds, if perhaps there had been some sort of mistake. But then the driver hopped down with a grunt to help him out, and the great glossy red door of the manor slipped open to reveal… not Master Ikithon, nor even another mage, but another human teenager of around his own age, a copy of the boy who had summoned him.

Not alone then, after all.

This boy wore the shapeless brown clothes too, the same stark white bandages around his forearms, startling red hair shorn down to his scalp just the same, his eyes so sharp and blue they looked almost manic. 

He could not have more obviously been a wizard. There was a lingering smell of ozone about him, a strange manic energy in the movement of his fingertips. Fjord couldn’t tell if the look on his face was curiosity or worry, though he stood very straight and his voice, when he spoke, was clear and confident, though heavily Zemnian-accented.

“You’re Fjord?”

“…yes?”

He waited only just long enough for Fjord to nod before he turned back toward the door, gesturing impatiently for him to follow.

“Come; I’m to show you the manor, and then to the dining room. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

Fjord didn’t need to ask who he was, though the other boy gave him no chance to ask who are you?

*

This, of course, was Bren.

Fjord never did ask him – and it became clear quickly that he probably wouldn’t have received an answer if he did. In any case, he didn’t need to. Bren snapped to attention like a dog when Ikithon called for him, no matter how quiet his master’s voice. 

He led Fjord around the mansion in a tone so brisk it was almost a march, indicating the kitchens, the laboratories, the examination rooms, the corridor that held the students’ bedroom, Master Ikithon’s chambers, his public study, the staircase to the sublevels, the several locked doors where Ikithon’s home connected to the sanitarium, and the tower, whatever that meant. Bren hesitated a little at this last one, but hurried along before Fjord had any chance to ask him why.

They came last to the dining room, which was a dark, narrow space like a chapel to the Raven Queen, dimly illuminated by bobbing Dancing Lights all hung in orderly rows. The doors swung open without even the need for a passkey or a word, seemingly recognising the boys’ presence: inside was a great long table laid with an embroidered green tablecloth, gleaming high-backed chairs, a fireplace almost the same height as Fjord himself. From somewhere unseen, there came the music of enchanted violins and harpischords.

In the back of his mind, Fjord couldn’t help but wonder how long it would have taken him and the other kids at Driftwood to make furniture anything near this beautiful in the miserable little workshop beneath the dormitory, and how much the citizens of Port Damali desperate enough to buy from orphan labour might have paid for it.

Trent Ikithon stood at the other end of the long table, his back turned to them, examining the embers in the fireplace as they burned low. In the low light, he was more of a shadow than a man, silhouetted there. 

Bren took in this situation without reaction, then walked quickly to one side of the table, nodding Fjord curtly to the other; when Fjord’s hand closed around the back of the chair, to pull it out and sit down, he shook his head sharply, and so they both remained standing, arms by their sides like soldiers. After a few long seconds, Ikithon finally turned and looked over his shoulder; his watery blue eyes slid across the pair of them impassively, and then he smiled, a small political smile without emotion like a nobleman.

“Ah, Bren, Fjord. You’re here.”

He took his place at the head of the table, stepping away from the hearth without pausing to relight it. It was still warm in the room, but Fjord knew from having to get up and refresh the braziers in his room at Soltryce three times a night that it would get very cold very quickly without a fire. Perhaps Ikithon and Bren didn’t feel the cold as he did — the other Soltryce students sometimes joked about southerners from the Menagerie Coast who had never experienced a proper winter before. But Bren’s clothes looked paper-thin, and even from all the way across the table Fjord could see the fine hairs on his arms standing on end.

They sat only when Ikithon did, watching as he clapped his hands softly and plates began immediately to float through the air toward them, carried by a small army of Unseen Servants. Either well-accustomed to this display of high-level magic or simply too wary to show emotion, Bren didn’t respond; Fjord, despite himself, gulped down a shocked gasp.

“Young Mr Stone, how was your journey?” asked Ikithon flatly, as their goblets filled themselves and unfamiliar Dwendalian dishes slowly filled the length of the table.

“…Comfortable, sir,” Fjord managed, floundering a little, and then added, unable to resist, “More so than walking.”

“Hm. I suppose the summons came as a surprise.”

“Yes sir.”

“It should not have done; as I said, I find you to be a very promising candidate indeed.”

“Thank you, sir,” Fjord murmured obediently, and didn’t ask a candidate for what?, though he wished to, though the constant evasion was beginning to fray his caution. Clearly sensing this, Ikithon’s thin lips curled up in amusement. He turned his attention to Bren instead.

“In fact, Fjord’s examination results were almost equivalent to your own, Mr Ermendrud, when one accounts for the deficiencies in his prior schooling. Certainly they were higher than those of the other two members of your cohort.” Any pleasure Fjord might have felt at this comment was smothered quickly as Ikithon continued, “Quite amateurish practical abilities, of course, but what first-year student is different?”

He began to serve himself as he spoke. Fjord and Bren followed his lead once again, each reaching out to the dishes in front of them — Fjord tried not to show any relief, suddenly extremely aware that he hadn’t eaten since his hurried breakfast before class that morning.

As Bren reached out, he realised that the other boy’s arms were both bandaged up to the elbow, just like his friend at Soltryce.

“It is a very exclusive programme of tutelage that you have been selected for,” Ikithon continued. “Ordinarily I would take only two or three pupils under my wing at a time — but our current circumstances have persuaded me to, ah. To expand my horizons, as I believe they say. There are two more of your number among the Soltryce entrants at present; I understand you have already met Eadwulf, and you may have encountered Astrid somewhere at the Academy.”

Bren twitched at the names, badly enough that Fjord worried for a second he would spill his goblet all over the table. Still, he concealed his expression, tried to pretend not to care. These were the two other students that he had seen at Soltryce, he presumed, dressed in the same thin uniform as Bren; the older boy’s name was Eadwulf, then. Give Bren our greetings, if you see him, he had said, while the girl – Astrid – scowled. But he had no way to tell whether that was a genuine greeting or a jab, or how Ikithon would react if he did as much.

“I trust you’ve read the books I set for you,” Ikithon continued, focused once again on Fjord.

“Um —” He had, of course, but the suddenness of the question made him feel irrationally guilty, as though he had slacked off some chore. “Y-Yes, sir, I -”

He choked himself off as Ikithon’s eyes glazed over, one bony finger held up for quiet; listening to a message, Fjord surmised, when no explanation was forthcoming. His lips pursed, mulling a response, and eventually he said tightly,

“A moment, excuse me.”

And stood to leave in a sweep of velvet. Fjord didn’t quite breathe until the door closed behind him. Bren made eye contact with him briefly after this, a strange look of wry near-sympathy on his freckled face, the first moment between them where Fjord felt anything at all from him but coldness; and he began to hope that maybe, maybe, Bren’s distance thus far had been only because of Ikithon’s presence.

“Is he always like that?” Fjord dared, in barely more than a whisper that nonetheless rang loud in the empty room.

Bren looked down, and said nothing. That was fair: a moment of silent connection was one thing; to imply that the magister was difficult was perhaps quite another. Fjord tried again, a more neutral topic.

“How long have you been here?”

Stubbornly silent, Bren kept his gaze away, dug his spoon into his bowl and continued to eat. He was luminously pale, even in the flickering shadows of the candlelight, his hair copper-red; he was very pink, very human, very Dwendalian. Fjord wondered how he had come to be here from Soltryce, if he had come willingly, or if – like Fjord – he had simply not been given any choice at all.

The rejection stung, for just a moment. But then Fjord nodded, consciously pulled himself together, and decided instead to accept it. He still didn’t know what was going on here. If Bren wouldn’t be his ally – even if everything Fjord knew about how the world worked said he should be – then Fjord would have to figure out how to survive by himself. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Ikithon returned after a long, silent few minutes, with an imperious look and a mutter of something about tiresome Assembly business. 

And as they continued to eat in the tense, drawn atmosphere that was apparently Ikithon’s preference, Fjord thought on how he might adapt to this place. He could still learn plenty from Bren, he was sure, despite the cold shoulder he had received. He had learned a lot already: first and foremost, to be afraid of Ikithon. Don’t let him scare you, his Conjuration professor had said. But what did she know, safe at the school, grown-up, free? Fjord knew instinctively, had always known, to watch other children for signs of danger, to follow their lead.

And Bren watched Ikithon like the old man was a circling wolf. 

When at last, at last, the Unseen Servants finally took away their plates, Bren sat upright as a post, eager for approval, his face turned up and his eyes darting to Ikithon, watching for the tiniest signs of affirmation. But it was a wary, hungry look. Ikithon gave no praise, no approval but lack of punishment. He said flatly,

“You will have Fjord properly attired and show him to your rooms; catch him up to our present studies, if you like. We will begin properly tomorrow. You’ll have more time to recover that way, anyway.”

“Yes, Master Ikithon,” Bren said immediately, automatically, standing as Ikithon did while Fjord hurried to his feet a half-second later. His accent was stronger than Ikithon’s. Fjord wondered if they would have spoken Zemnian together, were he not there. 

He had no time to wonder what Bren might need to recover from.

*

Bren had the bed in the middle.

It was a huge house, even the half of it that wasn’t a sanitorium, but the quarters allotted to Ikithon’s specially selected pupils was tiny, smaller than the dormitory rooms at Soltryce. Probably it had been a servant’s room, once, before the manor came into the possession of a wizard with no need for living staff to serve him; probably most of the actual guest rooms had been converted to laboratories and libraries, and Ikithon kept the other ones for guests who were actually important enough to merit breathing room. Three small beds had been shoved into a little sloped-ceiling attic that didn’t really fit them, with just enough room to barely navigate around each, a wash basin in the corner, and a few scuff marks at the end of each bed where the students were meant to keep their belongings, though only Bren’s had a travelling chest there. Still, it was far from the worst place Fjord had ever slept. At least it wasn’t rickety bunkbeds like those in the Driftwood Asylum, which creaked and groaned and splintered all night, far too full of kids, and which Fjord had long outgrown, anyway; for the last year he’d had to curl up awkwardly like a shrimp just to fit.

Fjord took the bed furthest from the door; the safest, he told himself. When Bren – perched by the wall like an anxious shadow – saw this, he made a face like he’d been struck, all startled and upset. It was frustrating, embarrassing: Fjord had to look down as he dragged his own trunk into place, grit his teeth, to avoid snapping, well, what else was I supposed to do? Sleep on the floor?

But when he straightened up he caught Bren staring at the other bed too, and it suddenly made far more sense.

“…Did someone else use to stay here?”

Bren glanced sharply at him, shocked, then back to the floorboards. He nodded reluctantly. As ever, he refused to say anything else.

Mutely, Bren went to the cupboard across the way and got him a pile of shapeless brown clothes, bedsheets, and thin towels, all identical to Eadwulf’s and his own — with, incongruously, a pair of dull shears set on top.

Not really making eye contact, he explained haltingly,

“Master Ikithon doesn’t permit long hair.”

He didn’t have to give Fjord the command outright. The implication was clear enough, as was the fact that Bren was probably not willing to help him. 

Fjord hesitated a long moment. He didn’t want to cut his hair. It was a shield, something he habitually hid his differences behind — and anyway, it was one of the few things that the Empire had, so far, allowed him to keep of his life on the Coast. In some ways it was worse, too, to be asked to do it to himself, rather than just being ordered to stay still while they hacked it off for him.

But he was here now, wasn’t he? If he was going to resist, to rebel, he should have done it already: he should have refused the summons, stayed in Rexxentrum, listened to Jester, played along with her schemes. And Ikithon had seen something in him, something valuable enough to bring him all the way out here. Maybe something would come of this training. Maybe he could make something of himself, through it. Besides, it was only hair — it’d grow back.

So he hunched over awkwardly, locked in the little washroom before the small dull mirror there, and sheared his hair down as short as he could manage, wincing at the unevenness of the cut, at all the places he nicked his skin as he did it, at the clumps of hair drifting to the floor. He filed down the nubs of his tusks and cut his claws to the quick too, ignoring the familiar ache of both – the same grim routine he’d carried out every week with a bucket of water in the corner of Driftwood’s dusty courtyard – shrugged on the shapeless brown clothes when he was done, struggling with unfamiliar buckles and sore fingertips. When he was finished, he barely recognised the boy in the mirror. Thin shoulders, looking even thinner in an ill-fitting tunic. Almost-bare scalp, pale patches peeking through dark hair. Wide yellow eyes, all too visible without anything to shade them. Awkward, ungainly thing.

He had worried vaguely that Bren would stare at him or make some comment. But Bren barely glanced up at him from where he was huddled up on his bed with an enormous Abjuration textbook, and if he felt anything about the changes in Fjord, he kept it to himself. All he said was,

“Chapter three, for tomorrow.”

And so Fjord sat opposite him on his own bed, knees up to his chest, searched briefly through his own pile of books for the same volume, and they spent the night first in the candlelight, and then in the darkness, silent, silent, silent.

*

It hurt, for the first few days: the unanswered questions, the eyes kept averted when Fjord tried to catch them, the brusque one-or-two word explanations, given reluctantly when absolutely necessary. They were both children here in an echoingly empty wizard’s tower, both equally trapped. They should have been on the same side. But Bren was human – Zemnian, born here in the heart of the Empire – and Fjord was not. The borrowed prestige with which he had shielded himself from the soldiers’ eyes on the way meant nothing to Bren. He didn’t want Fjord to be here, clearly; didn’t think orcish blood had any place in his Empire, in the heights of its magical achievements. And if he had decided that already, there was little Fjord could do to change it.

At least the other boy kept his prejudice to himself in all ways beside the constant silence, Fjord decided, wincing at memories of what the older kids at Driftwood had done to him before he grew big enough to stop them. All there was to do was try to swallow the loneliness and move on. 

Soon enough, obedience became routine, became instinct. The days followed the same rhythm, repeatedly endlessly: wake sharply to the knock of an Unseen Servant, eat silently, study, practice casting, eat silently, sit through one of Ikithon’s bewildering lectures on duty and sacrifice, practice casting over and over until his fingers could barely form the somatics and even cantrips were exhausting, study, study, eat silently, study, sleep. Every other day Ikithon would order Fjord to continue his remedial studies and order Bren off toward the laboratories, without reason or explanation. They learned about arcane warfare, about magical weaponry, about control and surveillance. Fjord had the sense they were being prepared for something, but no one would tell him for what. 

Weeks passed in this way. They lived beneath Ikithon’s constant disapproval, no less scorching toward one than the other: he despised Fjord’s orcish blood, his upbringing on the Menagerie Coast, his inexperience, but he hated Bren’s overconfidence, his occasionally stammering over difficult words in Common, hated anything that revealed Bren’s peasant background just as much. He made no secret of hating it; Fjord grew no less afraid of him.

It made the rare moments where he had nothing to criticise all the more precious, all the more worth striving toward.

In that time, the ice between Bren and Fjord barely melted at all — he began to know far more about his companion, but not to understand him. Bren had a showy, complicated way of casting. His family were farmers. He specialised in Evocation. He kept time in his head like a metronome, and carefully counted all his few possessions whenever his mind was absent, tracing the spines of the books and whispering under his breath eins, zwei, drei. He was fiercely patriotic: whenever Ikithon spoke on the importance of the Empire, his eyes shone. But Fjord still had no clue as to why he was here, what had happened to him, what it was that Ikithon did to him in secret – what might happen to Fjord, too.

The only times that Bren spoke to him willingly were when directly ordered to do so  — help him practice, Ikithon would command, or explain to him how to spar, and Bren would do so in as few words as possible.

But there were strange moments, too. Ones Fjord wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t dreamed.

Sometimes – only ever very, very late at night, when neither one of them should have been awake – Bren would whisper to him. This had surprised Fjord badly, the first time. Bren had mumbled into the quiet,

“Do you know of the Geas spell?”

It was so soft that Fjord could have mistaken it for his own imagination, save that Fjord never would have imagined something so unlikely as Bren asking him a question unprompted. The other boy sounded wide awake, worried. 

“No?” Fjord mumbled, sleepy, baffled. He rolled over, couldn’t make out Bren’s face through the dark. For a tense moment they both waited, and then, bitten back, Bren’s voice again,

“You have to not resist. You have to make yourself relax, even though it will be hard. Like… absorbing the shock of a fall, ja? Or it will hurt. A lot.”

He had been right. The next day’s practical demonstration, as Ikithon euphemistically called it, had been brutal.

But it wasn’t only that, which he otherwise might have written off as nothing more than a rare moment of mercy. He was like a different person at night, one that didn’t care or had forgotten that Fjord was a half-orc. Once, far less ominously, he had muttered into his pillow with an audible grin,

“That was cool. The way you cast that fireball. It was really cool.”

And then another night, in a dreamy tone like he wasn’t really awake, he murmured,

“The… the places where you… aren’t green, are all half-orcs that way, or…?”

“Just me,” Fjord had muttered back, embarrassed.

“Oh.”

But there was nothing cruel or judgemental in his voice, nothing to suggest he was anything other than genuinely curious — and so Fjord had pulled the blankets tighter around himself and dared to ask a question of his own.

“What about your hair?”

“What about it?”

“It’s red.”

To his surprise, Bren laughed sleepily, a response Fjord never even would have imagined during the daytime.

“Yes, my mother and father too. Rotschöpfe, redheads.”

Fjord didn’t know what he had expected to follow this: some softening, perhaps, some other small gesture of friendship between them. But the next morning, Bren was just as cold toward him as ever. They dressed silently, ate silently, prepared the day’s spell components silently — and then Ikithon sent a message summoning Bren away to the laboratories again, and he disappeared, as he often did.

On this occasion, however, he didn’t return until late in the evening. At the dining table his face was pale and drawn tight, his hands trembling; he ate nothing, though his eyes were full of strange fire, and there was such a force of magical energy about him that Fjord wouldn’t have been surprised if he were in the midst of some terribly powerful casting.

Later, as they got ready for bed, he caught a glimpse of Bren’s arms.

Blood had soaked all the way through the bandages he always wore, beginning even to stain the grey-brown of his uniform. But these were not the sort of random gashes that someone might have inflicted in a fight or a punishment: these were perfectly even straight lines like the rungs of a ladder, all the same depth, all surgically precise. And around the fresh, still-open wounds were the raised, raw-red scars of the same cuts, beginning to heal.

Bren didn’t ask for help; when he heard Fjord’s breath catch in his throat at the sight of them, he turned his eyes to the ground, hunched his shoulders. Fjord knew better than to ask questions, but he tried to offer to… he didn’t know what, to dress them for him, to fetch more bandages, to just be there and ready to do anything could, as he would for any child at Driftwood who scraped their knee or stubbed their toe or caught the wrong side of the headmaster’s temper. In response, Bren only turned away, stifling any noises of pain as he tended to the wounds himself, and then lay down in his bed just as stiff as ever.

Ikithon had said recently that Fjord was almost ready, and he hadn’t said for what.

Whatever this was, it would be done to him too, he was sure.

And so Fjord knew that if, when, he was hurt in the same way, he shouldn’t expect any help either. He shouldn’t even dare ask.

That night, feeling even more alone and powerless and far from home than ever, he dreamed of water, and drowning, and a terrible echoing voice in the deep.