Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Three weeks before the Empire is to retake Ashguard Garrison, Essek finally understands what it is that differentiates Essek Thelyss, the man, from the Shadowhand, the figure, and it does not reassure him an iota.

He narrows it down to a single reason, beautiful in its simplicity. No Shadowhand of the Kryn Dynasty would ever be this stupid.

Trusting the word of a Scourger under dire straits was one thing, but volunteering the Dynasty’s most precious religious artifacts with no guarantee of reciprocation was another. Doubly idiotic was believing a Scourger when they renounced alliance to their Master, his paperiness, Archmage Trent Ikithon—or any other mage of the Cerberus Assembly, as if it were possible to do so and live. As if a Scourger had the capacity to be truthful about anything, and as if this were all about a ball rolled underneath a child’s table and not a god smuggled from a thousand-year sepulcher.

For reasons innumerable, he feels somewhat doomed, but he doesn’t see his doom arriving until it lands on two feet in front of him, stepping out from the wink of a Teleport.

“Bren,” says Essek, nodding in greeting.

He has been awaiting this arrival for the past three hours.

Already the sun has started descending past the peaks of the Dunrock Mountains to bathe this rickety safe-house cabin in dying yellow light. Essek sits floating above the snowed-in floorboards with his robes collected in his lap, then floats to his full height and waits for Bren to turn the lights on.

Bren does not cast Dancing Lights as he does at the start of every meeting. Instead, with a strange tension in his shoulders and his eyes on the floor, he nods. Not in greeting, but in registration, as if Essek has somehow shown his hand with only the utterance of Bren’s name and the tone in which it was said. Light, do Scourgers infuriate him.

“You have not heard, then,” says Bren, as if his title has changed overnight.

“I suppose not,” says Essek, cocking an eyebrow. “What is it? Should I be hollering and screaming?”

Bren has been in his life for the better part of a year. In this time, he has proved to be in all ways a nuisance and a scourge like his title, but not the least as brutish and cruel as Essek had once suspected, which is why it is entirely out of character for him to clench his fists at his sides with an unmasked rage. The man barely reveals true anger even when he has reason to strangle someone. The display alone worries Essek enough that he readies a spell in his mind as a precaution.

“I told you I had news,” says Bren. In the amber slats of light, his eyes glitter a deep and misty blue, complemented by the red lining of his black ankle-length military coat.

There’s something off about the whole ensemble, but Essek cannot put his finger to it. At least it looks attractive on him. Instead of thinking about the crispness of those shoulders in that coat, he relaxes in a show of boredom.

“Indeed you did,” he says. “Hence our being here.”

He’s met with a silence that stops and starts with words half-formed and abandoned. Bren squirms where he stands, a bead of sweat dangling tremulously from his chin. This is getting nowhere.

Essek is a patient man, but his patience has limits. Three hours’ patience has even shorter limits. At the end of nearly a minute of waiting, he turns up his nose and says, “Get on with it. I rescheduled some of the most important meetings of my career to accommodate you, young man, don’t dare say I never make the effort—“

Except before he can finish, Bren blurts out, “My Master is dead.”

The words burst from him the way a dog escapes a bear trap: mangled and ragged and frantic with freedom. Essek keeps his surprise tamped even if his long-buried sympathy hiccups under his heart. This is news indeed, and he isn’t certain whether to express condolences or give congratulations.

He settles on asking, “For how long?”

Bren’s gaze remains fixed on a point on the floor that Essek follows to a long-dead spider, which Bren stares at with an intensity that could spark flames.

“Two hours.” Bren pauses; his eyes wander across the room. “And forty-three minutes.”

Essek exhales. Some absurd instinct inspires him to reach out a gloved hand. Bren crosses the room in three swift strides and takes it, crushing it, the contact of which reveals that he is trembling.

“Be calm,” Essek commands. Bren takes a breath that seems to hurt on the inhale and freezes, holding it, until he gasps it out and tries again. From up close, his hair shines and sticks together in oily strands. The corner of his jaw bears a cut from poor shaving, and even his coat, which seems on the designer side of Empire standard, folds awkwardly in a manner only achieved by being worn for three days straight. That’s what it was; his whole look juxtaposes order and mania.

With gritted teeth and unmet eyes, Bren says, “You cannot tell a soul.”

“I am fairly certain that the Empire will discover his death sooner or later,” Essek intones, but Bren shakes his head, rustling his lank copper hair, and clenches tighter.

“Not that. They already know. It will be national news by the morning and you would know it already by the hour if I hadn’t told you. What I need is your discretion for just this second, Essek. I need you to think about who remains to become his successor. His annex.”

Essek’s eyes widen. He stares down at the vise of Bren’s grip around his hand, more and more a python swallowing him up the arm by the second, and comes to terms with the gravity of the scenario.

This was, putting it mildly, fucked.

Bren as the Archmage of Civil Influence would be an experiment in a human’s capacity for resilience. No one on Exandria could resist the allure of power and the inevitably path of cruelty that it brought; he should know. And the little Essek knows of Bren suggests it would be neither a pretty or painless succession. Bren was no coward for potentially fearing the role when no man who ever held it remained in his right mind, and neither was Bren entirely at the reins of his own faculties. Trent always held on with at least one hand, and with him gone, that part of Bren’s psyche must be untethered and flapping in the winds of politics. All of the Assembly will be climbing over each other to snatch it up first.

Essek glances back up and finds Bren already meeting his gaze. It startles him briefly, but he forces his voice to come out gently to keep from startling Bren in turn. “Why are you telling me this?”

Bren only stares with eyes giant and bloodshot. His gaze softens. After an eternity, his voice penetrates once more through the silence, dolorous and a bit oaf-like.

“You… You are my friend.”

The small words blast Essek to pieces.

Not only does the statement ring true, but it is the first statement Bren’s given him that he has been able to corroborate. It is the sweetest thing anyone has to him in the better part of a decade. It is treason itself.

“In no realm are we even peers, you fool,” he lies, horrified, worming his hand away to no avail. “We may be partners cooperating on similar projects, but that does not mean—”

“I did not say peer,” Bren urges. “I said friend.”

His mouth dries up. He stares down at their connected hands and recognizes that feeling again; the doomed aura of this connection, the electric sensation of hope it gives him regardless.

“You should not be telling me this,” he whispers. “You have no idea what I might do with the information. You cannot fathom the advantage it gives my entire people to pin you as our latest target should I whisper but a word of this up the chain.”

“You will keep the secret. And even if you do not, your people need the advantage.” There’s that acerbic smile cutting through the clouds. “I told you the Empire is three weeks from taking back your last stand at Ashguard, and it will not be bloodless. Without that choke point, you’re all goners.”

“Had he not already appointed that woman?” he huffs, ignoring entirely the other train of thought. “You said her name was… Astra? Astrid?”

Almost as quick as it had appeared, Bren’s smile vanishes. He releases his hand finally and spins to face the empty cabin, scrubbing his face. “I should not have even told you that name.”

“Speaking frankly, you shouldn’t be telling me anything.” They were well past the games now that the tiny truths were coming out. Instead of deflecting Essek’s jab as unimportant, Bren was allowing Essek to know that Astrid was significant either to him or the Empire or both. This was an act of trust in itself.

“And I should not have been smuggling divine contraband, but gods know I’ve done some unwise things.”

“Quit changing the subject. I ask you again, did your Master not already appoint a successor?”

Bren whirls around once more, sweat dripping down his collar even in the blistering cold. “They don’t care, Essek. The only person who cares is Astrid, and she’s going to murder me when she finds out.”

“Not literally, I hope.”

“Not literally.” As an afterthought, he makes a face and nods to the side. “Maybe literally. No matter. I have time to figure out why the Cerberus Assembly wants me instead of her, but we don’t have time to even be having this conversation. The third thing I came here to tell you is that we will not be able to continue meeting.”

Only at that does Essek recoil. He does not mean for his disappointment to show, yet it surely does; he lets his mouth hang open and stammers, “What?”

“You heard me, friend.”

“Now? After everything?” he splutters; countenance gone, calm out the window. “What about your half of the bargain?”

Before his deep-space rage can frost over the room, Bren intercepts with hands on either side of Essek’s mantle. “It will be upheld, I promise. I vow on whatever you can believe me vowing on.”

“That isn’t much,” Essek grouses, plucking those hands off his shoulders, which has the effect of making Bren cringe and withdraw into himself. “Are they still with Da’leth in Zadash?”

“They should be. There is no reason for them to have been moved. Trent ran some tests and gave those results over to the Martinet, but I have not seen them yet. I will get them to you somehow, but it may be some time.”

“How long?” he asks. At Bren’s lack of response, Essek repeats, “How long?”

“I do not know. Perhaps until after the invasion. Maybe months after. There is too much suspicion on me with this succession. I cannot risk you being discovered.” He looks significantly at Essek. “… Us. Us being discovered.”

“You light-forsaken romantic,” sighs Essek, pinching the bridge of his nose. Out of the corner of his eye he spots Bren’s hand move towards his wrist, but no sooner than he catches it, it withdraws as with the rest of him. “This is no time for foolhardiness. You will get me that research, or so help me, and you’ll get it before I have to…” His breath catches. “Before I have to…”

It is Bren’s turn to corner him. “Have to what?”

Essek licks his lips. To tell or not to tell. It isn’t as though this has been the only thing on his mind for weeks.

“They want me defending Ashguard,” he says, eyes squeezed shut.

And now it is Bren’s turn to exclaim, “You can’t be serious.”

“Do not feign surprise, Scourger. Your people are the reason I have to volunteer in the first place. We’re sending out weaker and younger mages, but they will not be enough to secure the garrison. This is war, is it not?”

Bren visibly takes a blow at the words, Your people, but Essek doesn’t care, doesn’t regret it even if his tongue burns on the exit. He opens his eyes again in time to watch Bren go from open concern to flinty resolve.

“How soon do you leave?”

“I can be anywhere in the world at the cast of a spell. All that matters is that I’m there five minutes before it begins.”

Bren cogitates the information, nodding, nodding, pushing his hands through his hair. He seems to understand that Essek needs the information as soon as possible because, for all intents and purposes, he cannot guarantee that he will be alive on the other side of three weeks. Either he will desert and abandon this life and never know what he craves to know, or he will risk it all and batten down the hatches with every other Kryn at that garrison for a single mote of the Empire’s research on the beacon, should he survive.

One of the cabin’s shutters bursts open as a gust of air and hail slashes the boards, pouring more fever-yellow light into the room. Essek slams it shut with Telekinesis a second too late, and now the interior cyclones with flurries of white powder, the two of them coated in it like snowbirds. Bren stands in the aftermath, shivering as hard as anything, and it takes Essek entirely too long to recognize when the shivering graduates into the same tremors as when he’d first arrived—Trent’s death in his head, grief and rage colliding at equal force, nothing in the world as it should be.

Bren dusts himself off, sits hard on the floor, and puts his head in his hands. “We’re both dead,” he says, muffled by the fur in his collar.

Essek drops to his feet from the float. He steps close enough to kick some of the snow away from around his self-titled friend. “I know why I would be dead. Why would you be dead? You have less to concern yourself with than I.”

When Bren looks back up, his bloodshot eyes are rimmed even darker with red. A haunting acceptance rimes his gaze; a rage muted by the inevitability of fate.

“Because with Trent gone, I am the one who will be leading the charge on Ashguard.”

A pulse of dread rocks through Essek. All of the cogs suddenly fall into place.

Only one of them will be walking from the fray, and the odds were ten-to-one in Bren’s favor.

He works his throat while it constricts. Bren seems to be blocking his eyes from the harsh light, so Essek steps a foot closer, opens his cloak, and closes it over Bren’s head to soothe his nerves in shadow. He regrets doing so almost immediately because the gesture might be interpreted as affection. He credits it instead to pacifying a potential threat within close quarters—but he knows that there is no need to do so when Bren seems verging on catatonic. He’d never once seen the hyper-competent Scourger in such a state, and he credits that to the destruction of the hierarchy in which he’d been groomed and cultivated.

A hunting dog reliant on its handler would be unable to sort prey from predator. A dead handler meant a dog turned out alone towards the woods, destined to serve as carrion for the birds.

For a long time, only the snow whispers against the floor and the wind whistles through the shutters. A warmth presses against Essek’s knee as the hard bone of Bren’s temple, like a child’s, brushes up against him.

“This was a good run,” sighs Bren from a world away.

“Certainly was,” says Essek faintly, allowing his eyes to follow the snow where it whirls out towards the horizon, meeting the sun right as it sets.

Three weeks later, the memory of that aperture of white over the mountains superimposes in Essek’s mind with the sunset before him.

Today, the light blossoms orange and fiery over the valley in which his garrison has fallen, one-thousand and more soldiers either dead or bleeding out into the soil. The carnage reeks of iron and flesh in a way that dizzies his head and empties his stomach, and it’s not even the worst thing he’s faced all day.

To his right, a line of fellow Kryn kneel and wait for execution. Not in a thousand years did he imagine he would be joining them.

He’d known this was coming, yet he failed at making his escape. A man with a bow and arrow radiating mythical power had cornered him before he could Teleport, shot the spell out of his hands and then shot the last dregs of magic out of him in a chase as ugly and one-sided as an execution itself, and pinned him with enough antimagic manacles to keep his hands from casting even if he wanted to flee once more.

That was how he’d ended up here. The musty fabric of the tent twenty paces away flaps and pops in the breeze of the valley below the Ashkeeper Peaks, catching the setting sun like a canvas of orange, and from within, his captors discuss with each other how best to resolve the matter of the surviving Kryn forces.

It is not so much a discussion as it is a prolonged session of foreplay. His captors are a handful of bald Empire military personnel plus one or two figures of political significance, and when they speak, they shiver with anticipation as though seconds from licking their teeth. He does not recognize the ranger that shot him down, but his wife is Archmage Daphne Dask, known through the realm as the new Archmage of Antiquity. Allegedly she’d ascended immediately after Vess DeRogna’s untimely demise to a band of colorful mercenaries in Balenpost on a research excursion, and she held double DeRogna's enthusiasm for relics of the Calamity and ages prior. The woman was a High elf of such eye-sizzling pallor that she stood out like a cataract wherever she went, including now, glowing bright white even from within the tent.

Also like a cataract, she never seemed to be anything but opaque and enigmatic. From what he could tell, the couple carried an aura of faint despair as though they hadn’t finished wiping the blood off the bottoms of their boots.

Essek is in the middle of pondering the name of her ranger husband—Johannsen? Or was it Johannes?—when the female drow soldier kneeling to his right nudges him with her shoulder. She points with her nose to the horizon line above the mountains as if to reference the sunset, or perhaps the afterlife, and speaks in an Undercommon whisper for only Essek to hear.

“Is this it?”

Perhaps it’s just his own nerves, but he finds it odd that she does not seem to quiver in fear like the rest of them.

“I suppose it is,” he replies.

Mercifully, the Righteous Brand soldiers do not interrupt the conversation. Waiting for execution must be punishment enough. The woman sags back on her haunches despite the restraints and turns her face skyward, bathing in the misty cool. “Such a beautiful sunset. I wish we had more time to enjoy it.”

With a cruel humor, he recalls the last time he ever appreciated such a sunset. Not with Bren, no. It was over one hundred years ago on the coast of the Emerald Gulch, north of the Barbed Fields. There was a strip of beach about ten miles long, devoid of the violence and torment of Xhorhas, where the sands were obsidian black and the water was so thick with mineral it glowed mango-yellow and so acidic it would burn to the touch.

But he sat on that sand with his mother and brother and father in a heap of enforced relaxation—vacation day, gigantic shading tents, gawky black spectacles to defend from the rays—and together they watched the miraculous glow of the ocean when it went to bed with the sun, clapping when it did, praying to the Luxon when the show was done.

He’d found it hardly as breathtaking as his mother had, but now he yearns to see it again. He yearns to be next to them and hear their laughter. Eat their sugar-boiled candy crickets, feel the warmth of any embrace at all. He yearns to be back on that mountain top with Bren clutching his hand like a lifeline and to be away from this terror forever.

Essek follows the soldier’s eyes to the sunset. It sears through his tender retinas, yet he still stares. There will never be another chance.

“What is your name?” he asks quietly before he thinks better of it.

“Arath, sir,” says the woman in kind. She speaks with a weariness older than time but her voice is young and fluttering. “I come from the homesteads of the Hallowed Path. I was a seer, once.”

Essek blinks with surprise. “No one comes from the Hallowed Path. There are no homesteads in the Hallowed Path.”

“I do,” she says earnestly. “There was mine.”

He considers how little he knows of his own people. He considers how many will be dead by the end of today because of his own stubbornness.

The wind rustles his cloaks and cools the sweat beaded at the back of his neck. Essek shuts his eyes in appreciation of it and takes his time to reply. “What has brought you here, then, of all fates?”

“I wanted to learn to read, sir. They were saying the Watch was going to provide tutelage after.”

His heart promptly plummets into his stomach. Great, he thinks. What good that got this poor farming woman.

He imagines her seething, barely holding back from strangling him against the ground with justified rage. He imagines her screaming at him about false promises and stolen years and empty hands after all her sacrifice, a manifestation of all the Aurora Watch, a wraith distorted by war. But she sits with him as if he weren’t to blame for any part of her demise at all. As if he were no more important than she were, or the rest of them lined up beside him on the dirt. In the end he supposes that his body is going to slump over no more gracefully than anyone else’s.

A Kryn footsoldier moans in pain from fifteen feet over, wounds racing to kill him before the blade does. Someone else begins to frantically recite prayer to the Luxon under her breath. Another soldier starts praying to the Moonweaver. There are not enough beacons in the Dynasty to justify sending one to a doomed garrison, and neither are the majority of these soldiers consecuted. This is the end of the line for a thousand and more lives.

The wind rustles the tall grass at Essek’s knees, tickling him through the rips in his trousers, and he watches the tent warble and flicker, swell and quiet—watches the lantern flick on inside as the sky darkens, watches the humanoid shadows shift and duck in conversation.

The Righteous Brand soldiers move not an inch from behind them the whole while they wait. Essek thinks that there has never been a more violent silence in all the world.

He thinks again about the woman beside him and a shame constricts his throat. Light, he's pathetic.

“Don’t feel so bad, Shadowhand,” says Arath. “I can feel you getting weepy from over here. I’m eighty-five, for light’s sake. I’ve lived a life.”

Essek does not need to tell her that eighty-five is a blink of an eye in a drow’s lifespan. That when he was eighty-five he was an entirely different person than when he was one-hundred, or one-hundred and eighteen, or one-hundred and twenty-two. She is trying to spare him the guilt he is owed, and he isn’t about to let her take it from him.

The tent flaps open as the husband of Archmage Dask emerges, Johannes, lantern swinging beneath his fist. A tall, pale-skinned human with a curtain of fashionable shoulder-length black hair, he looks every bit the ideal and virtuous Empire man from propaganda paintings continent-wide, though he radiates an off-putting miasma like the air around an acid pit. The glowing bow that shot Essek down still rests slung behind his broad back. The sight of it alone reminds Essek of the tender puncture wounds in his thighs and shoulders.

“Archmage Ermendrud is not responding,” he tells the Brand in Common. “We move forward with the executions.”

Essek’s eyes shoot wide. Something rings a bell about that name. Or— Or maybe it is the absence of a bell.

He has never heard of an Archmage Ermendrud before, but he knows that very recently a role opened up with his friend lined up as its successor.

He hasn’t seen Bren for the entire battle. He’d nearly forgotten that Bren had been assigned with leading the Empire into it. Perhaps that was on purpose.

At the word that they are to die anyway, the twenty men and women kneeling to Essek’s right all collapse with sorrow, and shortly the noise starts up again with murmurs of prayer graduating into shouts of protest. One soldier screams a curse against the whole of the Empire and gets a blade in his belly as recompense. The soldier beside him screams what Essek assumes to be the fallen man’s name—Yeezo, maybe, or Yeuzo—and starts to weep and blubber and curse the Empire as well, which gets him the same ending as his friend.

That shuts them all up quickly. Essek turns and faces the dirt and tries to keep the vomit inside of his esophagus.

There has to be some way, he thinks. Something. He flexes his fingers to reach for his spells for the nth time and finds nothing but whiffs of smoke, whorls of dunamis that refuse to yield to his empty reserves. He searches for a point in the horizon where there might be a battalion cresting overhill to rescue them, but there is none. He searches the soldiers at his side to see if they might rally and cause enough commotion for his sole escape, but they sit defeated and half-dead already.

There is no way out of this, he knows. This is no more than he deserves either way.

The Righteous Brand executioner starts his work at the top of the line. He slashes a long, blood-oxidized blade along the throat of the first Kryn soldier—after the late Yeezo and his friend, of course—and repeats the motion on the bugbear after that, and the drow after that, and the goblin after that. They each fall flat on their fronts, gurgling and spasming in pools of their own crimson.

Thirteen men left. Twelve. Eleven.

Sweat collects on Essek’s upper lip as even more cascades down his temples, scalp itching with it. Hot terror presses at the front of his face like a fever. He could keel over from this agony alone. He could sob; he could scream. He never thought he would be so poorly composed at the moment of his death, but perhaps that was his own pride speaking. Light, he can barely even fucking think.

Think. Think.

Ten men. Nine.

They pause at a female soldier for long enough that the anticipation consumes her like a swarm of wasps. Surely aware of the eyes on her, she panics and wails for them to go on and kill her already. Two Brand soldiers exchange leery glances that send a sick sensation down Essek’s belly. He knows the vulgar suggestion underneath it: Should we take this one behind the tent? Have some fun while it’s alive?

Thank the light that they kill her anyway. Arterial gouts from her throat paint the ground with deep red and flood the reeds, sending beetles swimming out of the dirt.

Essek meets eyes with soldier Arath again. She rocks her head back and forth listening to a song no one can hear, watching a vision no one can see, sweat pouring down the sides of her face.

“You did well,” he tells her. He can’t fathom anything else to say to alleviate this nightmare, but at least he can say this.

“Didn’t,” she says simply.

Eight men. Seven.

“Why is that?” asks Essek.

“I never learned how to love,” she says.

Six men. Five.

Essek’s breath catches. All of a sudden, more than anything in the world, he wants his mother.

“There is still time,” he says, even if it makes no sense at all. His lips quiver; his voice shakes.

Four men. Three.

“I don’t have any,” she says as the blade rises up on her neck—as she looks at him with a haunting wildness that shakes him to his soul. “But you do.”

She jerks to the right as the blade severs her carotid and falls to the dirt on her side, twitching in death. A gout of blood sprays Essek on the chin and he gasps as if he’s been struck himself, watching with stinging eyes as the blade resets its course and rises to meet his own throat.

The metal nips cold against his skin. There is no more time in the world.

He stares forward into the seam at the top of the executioner’s boot and imagines his mother telling him that this was all a very, very foolish to-do, a great big mistake, and that he should come back inside and brush off his knees and take a bowl of the stew she just finished, and that there will always be tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

Light, he’d died for nothing.

He closes his eyes. The blade starts to slide.

“Halt!” bellows a man, and the blade stops right as it slices a quarter-inch into his muscle. Essek heaves and recoils violently, as do all the Righteous Brand of the valley before they whirl in place to fix the source of the shout.

Archmage Ermendrud—Bren — storms out of the tent from which he’d just Teleported with a fury wild in his eyes, robes billowing all about him as he snaps at several guards in Zemnian. He then gives the scene a cursory glance and starts to shout, “Who in the Hells approved of this operation—“ when he catches sight of Essek kneeling in the dirt before an executioner’s blade, and time stops entirely.

His eyes widen. The scene catches up to Bren in slow, reverse-gravity drips. If he’d arrived even a second later, Essek would have joined Arath and the rest of the Aurora Watch on the pile of bodies buried in this valley, and he must be processing the horror of this knowledge alongside the horror of Essek’s current state: blood spiderwebbing over his face, trousers shredded below the skinned knees, hands stopped from casting by mage’s cuffs. Utterly powerless, utterly damned, his rival and friend neck-deep in hotter stuff than a creature in oil.

Essek holds Bren’s gaze and dares to beg silently. Help me.

Bren’s eyes soften just a fraction. That’s all that Essek needs.

The ranger Essek figures to be Johannes Dask swings his own gaze from Bren to Essek, Bren to Essek, and seems to pivot his agenda inwardly. “You weren’t responding, Master Ermendrud,” he says, but the tone in which he says it conveys nothing short of disappointment.

“Wouldn’t you know it, your grace, I was occupied with the strangest thing.” Bren trods forward from the tent to the line of dead soldiers beside Essek, limned by the sunset blazing liquid gold all along his back. “There was a missive delivered by a young man for me to meet urgently with our liege. And as you know, his Majesty only speaks within chambers warded from divination and evocation. Except when I arrived, he had nothing to speak about.”

Essek notes privately that the usage of ‘your grace’ indicated Johannes’s status as a Duke.

“Evocation?” asks Johannes, feigning cluelessness.

“Ja,” says Bren as he inspects the massacre. He walks with his arms tucked behind his back like his master before him, leaning over nose-first over the bodies to give them each attention and respect; this was an Empire thing, Essek assumes, because the Dynasty hardly paid mind to bodies when souls were the important part.

He’s taking his time. He has a plan. This is good.

“You know,” he goes on, “spells like Sending would not pierce through such a chamber. I hope that explains my lapse in punctuality. If I’d have known you wanted to stage an execution so pressing that you couldn’t wait another minute for my permission, I might have come sooner.”

“And it’s a shame you didn’t,” said Johannes. “You missed out on all of the action.”

“I have had plenty of action for the rest of my life,” sighs Bren. His slow walk arrives at Essek finally, stopping right beside where the executioner still stands with the blade at his throat.

Bren stares down at Essek with calculations running behind his eyes. This is not a time for sympathy; this is a time for the fastest problem-solving possible. Essek braces himself for whatever comes out of his mouth, knowing it must be an alternative better than death but unpleasant either way.

“This one,” he announces, turning his head to speak to Johannes. “The Shadowhand is mine.”

Essek spasms with fear at first, then calms. He does not know what the command means.

It certainly isn’t anything good if the silence endures for over five seconds. Eventually there’s an exchange of gestures that causes the executioner to yield, which withdraws the blade from the vicinity of Essek’s throat, and if he hadn’t sighed with relief earlier, he practically wept with it now.

But there was still much of concern. The Shadowhand is mine. In the Dynasty, that might mean a one-on-one duel. An honorable death on the battlefield instead of on one’s knees. He could hardly imagine Bren still meant to kill him after everything—and even if Bren yielded and allowed him an opening to escape, he wouldn’t make it very far with a lack of spell reserves.

Then when Bren’s hot, coarse hand fists his throat and angles his neck back—when Bren meets his eyes with a performance of hunger so loud it might as well be searing his clothes off—Essek suddenly understands.

He is being taken as a war prize. Of all punishments, he is being taken as a concubine.

He’s yanked to his feet by that grip and forced to stand even as the blood rushes to his brain in a haze of static. Before Essek can instinctively start to feel betrayed, Bren holds his gaze between a chasm of barely five inches at slightly higher than eye level and mouths something silently for only Essek to see.

He misses it the first time. Bren’s nostrils flare as he mouths it again with wide, focused eyes.

Play along.

Essek doesn’t nod, but he does start theatrically fighting his restraints and demanding to be freed, which must get Johannes off on some caliber and purchase some leeway to the lie—light, Essek hopes it’s a lie—and when they drag him off to an adjacent tent, the last Essek sees of Bren is the silhouette of his back against the sunset as it curdles from orange to blue, sinking into night on the last day of his life.

Tomorrow he will be starting the first day of his next.

Chapter Text

In seconds, the soldiers separate Essek from Bren and shove him into a tent that reeks so strongly of iron he begins having doubts about the whole thing.

“Take your clothes off,” grunts the one to his left; a bald Righteous Brand soldier holding tightly to his cuffs and taking a century to unlock them.

Essek flexes his battered wrists uselessly. “I can’t move.”

The black-haired soldier to his right leans in and growls in his ear, “We didn’t say you could speak, crick,” which introduces so much stench into Essek’s atmosphere that he recoils.

Evidently, he’d spoken too soon. The cuffs withdraw almost immediately, which tells him that these people want nothing more than to draw out any excuse they can to demean him. It may be best to keep his mouth shut for the rest of the encounter, if only to avoid the wrath incurred. He is in no position to demand respect.

Oil lanterns light the interior from atop a few collapsible wooden tables. On them rest an assortment of gleaming metal tools: tongs, needles, clamps, scalpels, magnifying lenses on moving stands that wink at him wickedly in the darkness. A chair tucked beneath the table and a chair on the other side set the stage for whatever this torture is, and the rest of the space is sparsely decorated save for sacks of rations holding up the tent poles.

With his hands free, Essek examines his palms closely.

Perhaps they will be taking his hands. He would not be able to cast without them, after all. The thought arrives in a sterile box at the front of his mind, and he does not want to open it any further than that.

“Get moving. You want us to cut that cloak off you?”

Essek snaps to attention. With trembling hands, he pulls the heavy metal mantle off his head and sets it down on the ground. Before he can think to tell anyone to treat it carefully, it’s swept up by another soldier and vanishes. He’ll probably never see it again. He spent one hundred and more years slaving to earn it for the purpose of freedom of research, and it will disappear into some warmonger’s trophy room to be ogled for the rest of its life.

And so will he, if Bren doesn’t figure out something soon.

He unclasps the front of his cloak and lets it fall to the ground. He has a few more layers on beneath that, but each one hurts like his own skin to remove. As he slowly and tortuously strips himself, they steal from him his arcane focus from around his neck, his hidden gold coins from within his boots, his contingency poisons from the sachets around his waist. The only way he can get through the humiliation is to recede into a corner of his mind like the cockpit of a great big automaton, feigning that his world is a terrible fantasy he must simply pilot himself through.

He gets down to his underclothes. For as long as he can remember, he has worn an identical pair of gray silk drawers and a utilitarian silk sleeveless undershirt. Rain or shine, he has never been without them. He hardly remembers what it feels to remove them with anyone in his presence, and now he’ll be removing them in front of five grown men that wanted him dead less than as many minutes ago.

“Everything,” growls the soldier to his left, the bald-headed man watching the show like a strip-tease, and Essek holds tightly to his sanity until his grip sears around the white-hot iron of it—and strips until he is naked. He doesn’t hide his modesty with his hands. There is no point.

One heavy armored hand clamps down on his shoulder and moves him towards the chair. He allows himself to be handled like a toy soldier, staring vacantly at a point he swears must be the transition to the Ethereal Plane. He has never sat on a wooden chair while naked before. He dreads the splinters he will have when he stands.

The words, What now? hover in his mouth, but he dares not ask. He sits in blank, dissociative silence for what must be seven days, though it is probably something closer to seven minutes.

Eventually, the tent flap opens once more to let in the Archmage of Antiquity. Daphne Dask carries herself with the dignity of someone twice her stature and doubly as strong, and for all her bony pallor she looks like a white gulf bird. She takes a seat on the chair behind the wooden desk and rests her arms on it, one hand upturned expectantly.

“Your wrist, Shadowhand.”

Ah. They are going to take his hands.

There goes his wristpocket. A corner of his brain aches so sharply he thinks he might be having an aneurysm, but it is only the pain of his panic. He revisits the ledger of things that will go wrong if he escapes: he lacks his store of magic, he lacks his clothes, he lacks a plan. He lacks even his spell focus. Every moment that passes takes one more thing away from him until he will have no choice but to proceed along this trundling, black path, and the sunk-cost fallacy in his head screams at him: Run. Run now. Run before they take any more from you.

But then he remembers the sureness of Bren’s gaze; the steadiness, the calculations running behind his whetted intelligence, and he remembers he has little choice after all.

He gives over his wrist with his palms clammy. Daphne takes it in her knife-like hands, finer and bonier than even his, and massages the meat of his palm gently.

“Worry not, Shadowhand,” she says. “This will only hurt a pinch.”

She withdraws a convoluted chromium device from beneath the desk that resembles both a pen and a firearm from Tal’Dorei, though it’s likely neither. She activates it and the runes inscribed all along the feather and the nib alight at once, gleaming golden-white in her hands. He recognizes the runes as enchantment in school, which is bad on all accounts.

She tests it on a sheet of parchment. Needles from the nib drive liquid elemental silver into the parchment, tattooing it with a loud clat-clat-clat noise. The silver runs out immediately, empty. She tisks and unclicks a chamber from the side of the device, tosses it into a crate beneath the table, then withdraws a refill from a drawer and clicks it back.

“You are going to hold very still for me, dear,” she says, steadying his wrist under a series of jeweler’s lenses that distort her eyes. “It is in your best interest that I finish this without error, or I am going to need to separate you from your hands, and I don’t think Archmage Ermendrud is going to want that.”

Oh, thinks Essek faintly. Nothing much. Just his hands.

She doesn’t need any clamps or restraints to keep his wrist paralyzed; he does that all on his own. Even when the needles fire into the sensitive skin above his veins and draw blood and create a pool of silver and crimson underneath his forearms—even when the sweat pours down his temple and upper lip and the pain gets his nostrils to water—he doesn’t move an inch.

The taste of iron pollutes his mouth from a bitten tongue. His free hand grips crescent-shaped grooves into the arms of the chair. It takes every force of willpower left in his body not to start screaming and never stop.

When she finishes with one wrist, she lets him take a look at it. He can hardly see it through his tears, but the bald soldier pours a bit of water over the puffy red skin to wash the blood from the tattoo itself.

It’s a cuff. Flashing a gorgeous silver, it might have been an accessory to a gala on any other night, bearing delicate arcane runes smaller than his eye can see up and down the length of it. Enchantment. Something binding. Flush to his skin, part of his skin, not more than three inches in width. If it weren’t so obviously serving as his punishment, he would find it beautiful.

It is. It is beautiful.

He leans over the side of the chair and expels a gout of vomit straight into the grass. The bald soldier roughly swipes a rag over his mouth as if to a child, then pins his head against the back of the chair for three angry seconds and releases him to his limpness.

“Your other wrist, please,” says Daphne, absent of concern or emotion.

Without a choice, he gives it over. In less than three minutes of her arcane needle carving an enchanted cuff into his skin, Essek’s head topples hard against the table and the world slants into black.

Three days after the unparalleled success of the Empire at Ashguard Garrison, they still won’t let Bren see Essek.

The justification for this delay is thin. Apparently, it takes a good deal of time for a high-status figure of the Dynasty to be processed as a prisoner of war, as if these protocols are put in place by anyone with a whiff of mercy.

Prisoners of war are a security risk by nature of being a foreign presence on Empire soil, and the risk only gets higher as the prisoner’s status increases. The Shadowhand is the highest intelligence officer under the Bright Queen’s chain of command; he is, in theory, a man of the same status as Da’leth, or perhaps his late Master Ikithon, and therefore he is as much a threat to the Empire in chains as he is with an army at his back. After all, it had taken some convincing to let the transaction take place once he’d announced Essek as his prize. The only reason His Majesty didn’t reject Bren’s claim outright was because Bren had stood there in his throne room and bloody filibustered.

Acting as the Archmage Pro Tempore of the Civil Influence Office (because he still had a ceremony to attend for the full induction), he only was able to swing half of his status around while making a case for Essek’s capture. Even so, King Bertrand listened: putting it romantically, staging a public humiliation against such a high officer of the Kryn Dynasty would not come so easily again in the future. It was a propagandizing tool they could not let go without using.

Optics. Boosting Empire morale. The Cerberus Assembly trodding on the Kryn’s most esteemed operative by the throat; an archmage leashing a Dynastic snake to tote around for all the public to see. To say: this is what the Empire does to scoundrels in times of war; this is what the enemies of the Empire will face.

And in a sense, there is an incentive for the captured to submit.

Concubines of high-ranking nobility were considered high-status themselves, and concubines won from war were effectively political prisoners on velvet pillows. Their lives become hollow impressions of what they once had, but at least they get to wallow in mother-of-pearl bathtubs and skulk in the company of galas; a much sought-after alternative to laying their heads against the chopping block. It was quite rare indeed nowadays for a war captive to become a concubine, but at least they had protections. It was not so dire an end as becoming a pet: an illegally indentured court prostitute who lives between the margins with as few rights as a slave.

There were pros, there were cons, but mostly, there was hope for Essek to figure something else out in the meantime without having to suffer in a war prison.

Rattling off the benefits of his friend’s capture to his Majesty had churned Bren’s stomach into a whirlpool of acid. While Essek is being processed, Bren pains to imagine what they will be doing to him when he cannot defend himself. It wouldn’t be wise to ask after him either, because it would only serve to cast suspicion on Essek and worsen the situation. As far as he knows, Daphne Dask has it handled, and that’s that.

So he swallows his tongue and moves on. At any rate, there are celebrations he must be present for—some he is even the primary speaker at—and he can spare no distraction.

When he and the Dasks had returned to Rexxentrum the day after the victory, the city that greeted him was a jubilant and lively one. Streamers and spandrels flapped red and gold against the bold blue of the sky while triumphant music roared up from each and every street in the Candles; beatific faces grinned and called to him wherever he went, parting for him in every crowd, slinging wreaths of wheat-stalks over him at every turn. Even though his weary bones begged him to sit down and sit somewhere in silence, he was expected in countless meetings, parties, conferences—some of which adjourned halfway for even more celebrations. Effervescent blue champagne was shipped all the way from the Clovis Concord, wine was shipped from Kamordah by the barrel. Bren smiled and smiled and smiled for eight hours a day, sometimes twelve, sixteen, until his eyeballs felt keen on rolling out of his skull.

The wealth of it all was, and is, fucking mind-numbing. Since the last time he met with Essek in the Dunrock Mountains over three weeks ago, he’d been getting acclimated to the sudden shift in lifestyle expected of the new Archmage of Civil Influence. Even before he was to receive the formal title at the induction ceremony, he’d been forced to catch all the gold and platinum and robes and medals and staves they kept tossing down onto him.

And to his surprise, he’d even been slotted with some deeds.

As Trent Ikithon’s annex, he’d inherited an orchard from his late Master on the condition of his death. All the way on the southern coast of Nicodranas, the existence of it was previously unbeknown to him. He’d also inherited Trent’s tower in the Candles. Almost immediately, Bren had sold back the tower to Astrid while insisting that he had not “earned” it, and, ach, he’d much rather have a peaceful, sprawling farmhouse in homage to his late parents and his childhood lifestyle, surely you understand—and the Assembly had cooed and gobbled up that answer with ease, even if they hadn’t let him pick the lot. They’d instead saddled him with a massive and under-repaired estate in rural Rexxentrum with the understanding that he would be the one footing the bill for making it Assembly-worthy.

At least his inheritance meant footing the bill was very easy. Trent’s personal last will and testament ensured that Bren—and no other kin, strangely—would be the one to whom ownership of Trent’s coffers would transfer. And Bren had never been afraid of a fixer-upper. The advantages came instantly: outside of the city walls he could do whatever he wanted, and with two or three weeks and a few hired hands, the estate was completely livable to his own standards. By the time he set off to lead the invasion at Ashguard, he’d already hired staff to keep the house maintained in his absence: a coachman, a cookmaid, and a valet.

And now that he’s returned to it, today, three days after the invasion and his reception in Rexxentrum, he finds a pair of familiar faces waiting for him at his gate.

Duke Johannes and Duchess Daphne Dask smile their matching politico smiles from the backs of two horses. A separate train of horses beside them pulls a rectangular trailer-wagon. Bren noticed long ago that the couple never rode covered carriages anywhere and seemed much more inclined to the art of steering their own mounts, which was unsettling in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.

When his own carriage stops by the gate, Bren thanks his new coachman, Olivier, who is a nice fellow. In the box, he sits and gathers courage to meet the vultures in white, then marches outside.

“Hark, here comes the newest and bravest of us,” calls Daphne with a smile. She dismounts from her great big white mare and crosses to shake Bren’s hand more weakly than is comfortable. “Glad to meet you back in civilization, Herr Ermendrud.”

She isn’t Zemnian but she makes an effort to use his language. He knows he should be appreciating it, but there’s nothing sincere about the act.

“Danke, your grace,” he says. It would feel vile to call her Frau Daphne, so he spares himself the grief. He turns to her husband. “Are you well, Myth Hunter? What brings you two to my residence?”

Myth Hunter was Johannes’s popular title. It had been bestowed to him by the legions of young women besotted by his handsome hobby of hunting and tracking mythical creatures, not that Bren ever thought it was anything but excessive. He’d been reputed for being the one to find whatever Doolan Tversky needed, and for having been the man to bring roc hatchlings and pseudodragons and monstrosities from the Savalirwood to anyone with the coin for his services. Usually, though, he hunted for the sport of it.

“Might we not pay a friend a visit?” says Johannes.

“I would have thought you hadn’t the time,” says Bren. “What with how busy you must be, peacekeeping with the Tribes.”

“Oh, the Tribes take care of themselves,” says Johannes. Bren does not miss the careful neutrality there. “It’s the forest I manage, mostly.”

In the past year, the Tribes of Shady Creek Run had worked out something out with the Empire to keep from facing constant scrutiny, and the solution had come in the form of an imperial Duchy over the Savalirwood with a scoundrel of a man like Johannes as its Duke. It kept him close to the woods where so many magical creatures could be profited from, thus the deal must have been more lucrative for the Dasks than it was for even the Tribes.

“No news, then?”

“Not news, friend, but a gift.” Johannes dismounts as well, offering his own handshake. His grip is strong and robust, and as he moves, the danglers on his elven earcuffs clink softly. It’s a little socially obscene to be wearing elven jewelry as a full-blooded human, especially one without a shred of elven heritage or upbringing, but there are strange people everywhere, Bren supposes. Certainly politicians are not immune to being strange themselves.

“A gift?” says Bren through his teeth. “Oh, you shouldn’t have.”

“But of course. You’re one of us now; we owe you a welcome gift! And you will accept it, won’t you?”

His smile suddenly pains to hold. “I couldn’t possibly turn away such a thing, your grace. Let’s see it, then.”

Johannes turns to the wagon behind them and whistles sharply. Their coachman drops down, runs to the back, and swiftly unlatches the rear-facing door to collapse it open as a ramp.

Emerging from the shade, to Bren’s disbelief, is an honest-to-gods fucking unicorn.

Bona-fide. Clear as day. Clomping more gracefully than any horse ever could, descending in a sheen of billowing silk-white hair, is a gleaming, opalescent mare more antelope than beast of burden, more dancer than strongman. Or at least, he assumes it’s a mare. A single proud foot-long horn leads the way of its gentle and tragic stride, piercing into the air and bisecting the light in the morning cold. The coachman leads it by a delicate silver bridle towards Bren, who stares in open and rapturous awe as the jewel-encrusted lead is left in his hand.

When he was a child, the unicorns of yore weren’t even his favorite, but he’d revisited them in his imagination countless times simply because he couldn’t reconcile that they were real. After a childhood of hearing about them in folk stories, they simply felt like a figment of hope.

And now he is staring straight at one.

Now he owns one.

“Where did you…” he mumbles. “How did you ever…”

“They do not call me Myth Hunter for no reason, Master Ermendrud,” Johannes chuckles. “She is but a token of friendship from my wife and I to you. We hope that with this gift you might be inclined to think of us kindly as collaborators in the future.”

She, they said.

It’s a mare. Of course it’s a mare. In his child-imagination, his steed was always a mare.

The unicorn sags her lovely head low on her neck until she meets Bren in the eye. Her eyes are clear and somber and just so very petal-blue, maybe violet, he cannot tell. Her eyelashes are giant white fans, her hooves small, her neck shapely. She is the most magical thing he has ever seen in all his days, and his heart breaks over and over as he stares at her, restricted and enslaved as she is.

He cannot seem to think of anything to say. He gets all the way to, “I don’t—I don’t even know where I am going to put a unicorn—” when Johannes barks a laugh and claps his shoulder.

“Inside, don’t you think?” he says, which makes Daphne titter at his side and add, “Oh, yes, very good, dear. You might keep it in the foyer as a statue, no?”

“Have it clop around in your kitchen!”

“Make it warm your feet, perhaps.”

Bren briefly recoils in horror, only for Johannes to shake his head and speak plainly. “Keep her boarded in your stables, good man. She’s no more complicated than a horse, only a little more chatty.”

“Chatty? She speaks?”

“Ah, you’ll figure it out.” Here, Johannes strides over to the creature and lifts up her head by the roundness of her jaw, making a demonstration of the gleaming silver collar around her throat. Something’s off about it. At first, Bren thinks his eyes are failing him. Then he realizes that it isn’t a collar at all; it’s a tattoo or a brand right on her skin, completely seamless to her form. He squints and discovers the presence of tiny enchantment runes running along the length, binding something to her—or binding something away from her.

“You’ve cursed her,” he says, the wind leaving him. Suddenly his hands feel filthy just holding the lead.

“Not a curse, my dear.” Daphne approaches from the other side and hugs the creature around the neck, which seems to begrudge her. “Simply a precautionary step. Unicorns hold magical stores of their own, as you know, and they’re just beastly to catch when they can simply vanish away. Without my magic to ground her, no one could ever keep her at all.”

His chest aches. Is that such a bad thing?

She goes on to say, “Unfortunately, it also prevents her from casting much else save for whatever inherent celestiality she has, but that’s the cost of the trade.”

With a lurch in his breath, Bren understands immediately that the best course of action to keep the creature safe is to keep her from these savages.

“I see,” he mutters. “It’s an antimagic enchantment, then.”

“Of sorts.” She kisses the unicorn one last time on the apple of her cheek, best of bloody friends, then withdraws to rejoin her husband on her own mount. “She holds one rider and no more. Her name is Rilke, but you can call her anything you like. You’ll find her to be quite the loyal companion if you assert yourself enough. Not even the most powerful creatures are immune from being broken.”

The way she says it so easily, so flippantly, is nothing short of a testament to her relationship to possession. This is a woman who has scarcely needed to fight whatever was beneath her in the past hundred or more years. Bren privately comes to terms with the fact that he must count himself as one of those creatures beneath her.

“Before you go,” he says, crossing the distance to the Duchess’s steed. He wants to ask after Essek but the second he starts sounding like a lost lover, it will all be over. Instead he steels himself, layers edge into his voice, and says, “Where’s my drow?”

Daphne’s chuckle darkens in color. “Oh, Master Ermendrud. Is one pet not enough?”

“Last I checked, he’s my new bedwarmer. Those two things don’t exactly align in purpose.”

“They do in his case.”

His smile nearly wavers, but he doesn’t let it. “Have a good day, your grace. Deliver him in one piece, please. I don’t generally expect to assemble my own toys.”

“Good day, Master Ermendrud. You’ll see him soon enough.”

With an acidic wink, they’re on their way. The carts trundle along the dirt path away from his estate and he watches them go, standing there with a lead in his hands and a unicorn at his side.

He turns to Rilke, watching her closely. She’s begun holding her head up high to inspect the estate itself, likely trying to get a feel for her new life.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She casts one sidelong look at him and seems to understand.

The next time Bren can bring himself to even look at Rilke, it’s on the day of his ceremonial induction.

It’s a useless party, to be fair. He’d been acting as Archmage Pro Tempore since the day Trent died—the day one more piece fell out of his soul and he had to give it over to Essek to make sure he didn’t stab himself with it. But it’s not his choice to attend. The public of the Empire, the courtly people of Rexxentrum, and the King himself are all looking forward to it. It is an excuse not only to celebrate Bren’s acceptance to the chair, but to parade the victor of the Battle on Ashguard around the city in a patriotic display he is not even remotely looking forward to.

Daphne Sends to him that morning to tell him to bring Rilke. He stares at himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror in a bedroom larger than any house he has ever lived in, adjusting his red silk cravat incessantly. For hours, he deteriorates, damning himself, sweating and spelling his sweat away, muttering into the silence of his chasm of a new life.

His coat is black brocade with golden embroidery, black gloves high up to the elbows. His shoes are polished brogues, his hair bears a bright orange ribbon. If only his parents could see him now, he thinks cruelly. He stares at his reflection and melts cerebrally until he nearly gives himself a nosebleed. Then he descends the staircase to the foyer—he has a foyer—and meets his coachman—he has a coachman—and teleports himself and Rilke and Olivier to the circle in Trent’s tower just outside the Shimmer Ward.

At some instruction, Olivier the coachman takes Rilke away right before the ceremony is to start. Bren therefore stands alone, quaking in his boots, in the vestibule preceding the grand stage in the shadow of Castle Ungebroch.

King Bertrand comes out and says something spectacular. The audience of nobles and commoners alike starts to roar. Bren cannot hear them above the calamity staged in his own ears.

When it’s his turn to get out on-stage, it’s Da’leth who receives him by the podium. Floral arrangements large enough to have been spawned by a druid border the stage and the curtains, and he has to focus not to trip over a vine.

When he’s finally facing out towards the sea of people, all of them with their focused gazes on him, Bren nearly disintegrates into a pile of dust where he stands. He swallows and shivers and summons a strength with which to hold himself steady and fails. It’s only Da’leth’s grip on his shoulder that keeps him from falling over.

Da’leth speaks majestically as he always does, his voice amplified by the enchanted horn on the podium.

“We stand here today to commemorate the efforts of one Bren Aldric Ermendrud. Once a troubled young man from as far as Blumenthal…”

Troubled? He wasn’t troubled when he lived in Blumenthal. The evil only happened after.

“…he who in the wake of the tragic and sudden passing of our own Trent Ikithon, the beloved Headmaster of Soltryce Academy, the stalwart pioneer of Civil Influence…”

The crowd rocks silently with collective grief. Bren stares a single woman in the eye and dares her to cry harder.

“…found himself in an unprecedented position, forced to lead a charge into Kryn-occupied territory without so much as a minute to grieve.”

He’d had three weeks.

A sigh of despair and sympathy radiates out through the crowd. Hats are removed from heads and pressed to chests. Bren itches for his spells.

“And when the moment came down to the copper wire, as we arcanists say, Master Bren rose to the challenge immaculately.”

He wouldn’t use the word immaculately.

“He has proved in the eyes of each and every member of the Cerberus Assembly that he is cut of the same cloth as his Master before him. He is worthiest of this title, worthiest of its weight, and he is the only mage in the Empire I would personally recommend for this position myself.”

A black flame of hate flickers over his heart.

“And who among us can say that we have conquered and rightfully imprisoned the highest intelligence officer of the Kryn Dynasty?”

At that news, the breath vanishes from a thousand and more people. Gasps and exclamations ring out in a massive fan through the city, more than if Da’leth had stabbed Bren on-stage.

But he’s stopped speaking. Da’leth gestures to the side of the stage.

Bren’s veins freeze over when he puts his eyes on Rilke, who rides up the stairs to the main stage carrying Essek.

Not the Shadowhand. Essek. Bound and ragged and beaten.

Blindfolded. Muzzled. Saddled on her back, chained to her bridle, absent of mantle and fight.

He’s been dressed in Empire colors. They’ve stripped him and put him in a slim-fitted black suit to emphasize the smallness of his body. A brilliant red sash bursts from an Empire crest brooch on his heart, splaying over both shoulders like silk pauldrons, trailing out behind both him and Rilke on the ground. A visualized wound; a river of blood. An Empire bow on a Kryn prize.

They’ve veiled his face from the hairline down with a black square of fabric, hiding his blindfold and his metal gag. The only parts of him uncovered are his hands, his purple ears, and his white hair, all three patchy with browned blood. A silver collar decorates his throat like a choker, as do thick silver manacles on either of his wrists.

The sound that erupts from the audience is one that Bren never seeks to hear for the rest of his life. It is a world-toppling, ground-rumbling, shivering roar of wrath and ecstasy; it is the foaming blood he imagines rushing out of the doors to Hell.

The panels of the stage beneath him begin to creak and rattle in the subsonic siege. Essek’s shoulders quake in silent and useless sobs; his head moves as if he’s blindly searching for an out, an escape, something to smash his own head against. Bren stares at him with an agony lodged in his throat, wide and dead, and cannot fathom what to do, what to do, what to do—

Within the unholy din, Bren whispers the verbal components for Deafness.

Essek’s shoulders sag immediately in relief. His hands, puny and bruised and probably recovering from being recently shattered, had been gripping the reins enough to peak his knuckles bone-white. In the gift of silence, he finally releases.

Da’leth’s hand tightens on his shoulder.

Bren swallows and faces the crowd again and smiles.

He doesn’t remember much of the parade. In truth, the majority of it had been spent trying to find ways of discreetly casting Deafness over his shoulder over and over. The duration of the spell is so much shorter than would be useful, and a few minutes of silence at a time is not enough to survive a gauntlet of humiliation.

Bren ends up resorting to rationing them, which is less than ideal. He hopes Essek understands. There is no guarantee there will be anything left of Essek after this.

The parade takes them through the Shimmer Ward on a path that carves through the main avenues of the city, which have been emptied of merchants for the purpose of smooth passage. On either side of the entourage, thousands of citizens of Rexxentrum cheer with lanterns raised up into the air. Draft horses lead parade floats with performers on their backs: bards twanging music through the reverie, soldiers twirling ladies in fanning red dresses, marching bands pounding war drums. Bren leads them all, accepting call-outs with a raised hand and a smile. In less than a few hours, it easily becomes one of the longest days of his life.

And when the crowd jeers and insults the captured Shadowhand, Bren pales at the fact that he can do nothing.

He tries to ignore them for the most part. The jewel-encrusted lead grows heavy in his sweaty fist, and its rubies resemble dollops of blood from the pressure of his grip. He dares to lag back far enough to get a closer look at Essek’s expression beneath the veil, but doing so is futile when the gag and the blindfold obscure it completely.

In the commotion, the crowd launches a rotten tomato in an arc destined for Essek’s head. It scatters across the back of his hair, eliciting a rise in taunts and laughter from the children by the barricades.

Essek’s fingers tighten sharply against the saddle horn the same way they’ve tightened before around a catastrophic spell. Bren waits a few moments before fleetingly brushing his own fingers against the backs of Essek’s. Upon being touched, Essek’s fingers flex strangely. Bren chooses to interpret this as a good thing and pats Rilke, telling her, “Very good, very good, it won’t be long now,” while hoping the message lands on the right person.

Thankfully, the charade ends when the last float makes it to the very outer wall of Rexxentrum. According to the suggestion of Da’leth, Bren is to separate from the entourage with his new concubine in tow and ride into the sunset until he makes it home. The whole thing is a perverted homage to the age-old Zemnian tradition of newlyweds leaving the ceremony early to consummate elsewhere, and therefore he’s probably expected to deliver the news that he did, in fact, proudly ravish the sly drow captive, and that his imperial virility somehow sundered the corruption within Essek or something or other. The thought of relaying it to the Martinet of all people is enough to make him want to throw up in his mouth.

He’s given a ceremonial armored stud—nothing charged or symbolic about that, is there?—on which to ride beside Rilke the mile or two it takes to return home. He hasn’t yet had the chance to take the path by horseback and in moments he concludes that it is more beautiful this way than by carriage. The sunset blooms amber-white like honey in milk; the evergreen nettles shiver in the cold gale bringing in winter. With a unicorn’s soft glow lighting the way, it would almost be a dream—and even so, it’s only half as sweet. He cannot in good conscience appreciate the world around him when his co-rider and friend is imprisoned against his every will.

He could remove the blindfold from Essek now if he wanted. There’s not a soul out around them for hundreds of yards who would see. But Bren has never not been paranoid, and he would much rather resolve the matter of Essek’s imprisonment within the four walls of his highly warded estate. He’d learned a thing or two about warding from King Bertrand’s own chambers. Thank the gods he’s already spent the extra effort to set up protections against divination.

His new valet, Viskov, is the one who answers the gate. As a squat and older dwarven man, he’s forced to look up as he says, “Aye! Welcome back, Sir Ermendrud,” and quickly stands aside for Olivier the coachman to take the leads of both the horses. When Olivier can’t seem to separate Essek from the chains on Rilke’s bridle, Bren steps in and blitzes through a few somatics to transmute the metal into wood. At the end of a tense few minutes, he methodically snaps the wood without disguising his disdain for it and lets Essek down from the saddle.

Even with Bren’s help, Essek descends onto quaking tall-heeled boots designed to trip him up in the dirt. Olivier recognizes the aura of anger radiating from Bren and takes the mounts away to the stables without needing to be barked at, just as Bren holds poor listless Essek by one shoulder and takes him inside, a strange clattering sound pursuing them as they go.

“Estefina!” Bren shouts, his voice echoing along the dome-ceiling foyer.

He doesn’t bother ringing any blasted bells to get her attention. A young and bright cookmaid no older than thirty jogs to meet him from where she’d been fussing away in the kitchen. Human, red-cheeked, ample, squirrel-like. She opens her mouth to greet him but there is no time, so he cuts her off and commands, “Dinner as fast as you can make it. Get the bread out first, I need something rich that will go down easy. Have the healing potions arrived yet?”

She startles briefly. “Yes, they have, Master Ermendrud. I’ll bring those out to the table?”

“Bring them and the bread to the first guest bedroom.” He turns to Viskov. “Start running a bath in the connected washroom. Hot water, pour in some magnesium sulfate from my laboratory and some oatmeal from the kitchen. When you’re done, get the room ready.”

The servants nod and swiftly go in separate directions. Bren takes Essek by the shoulder and firmly guides him upstairs at a slow enough pace to keep him from tripping on the steps. Belatedly, he realizes that the clattering sound from when he walks is a bloody leash trailing behind him under the cape, good gods. One of Essek’s bruised-purple hands reaches out tentatively for the railing, the other covering Bren’s hand on his shoulder. Where their skin touches, he’s cold as ice. The collar on his throat hadn’t been transmuted, nor have the manacles on his wrists, and nothing bodes well about that. If they’re enchanted, they might have to do some finagling with them.

He takes Essek to the candlelit guest room and sits him down on an ottoman for ease of accessing the back of his head, where he focuses his attention on undoing the blindfold. It’s a strange and archaic contraption, bronzed metal like a torture device, and he fiddles with it for as long as it takes to unclasp the blasted thing. Essek sits ramrod straight the whole time, hands clasped primly in his lap. Once freed, the blindfold topples onto the wooden floor with a ker-clunk, its absence revealing skin scraped raw from being trapped beneath the lock for nearly six hours.

Bren hisses with sympathy. Essek grunts exactly once as if to say, I know. He doesn’t move or battle Bren for the right to unclasp his own muzzle, so Bren takes the initiative and releases it from around his jaw.

As soon as the metal plate falls into his lap, Essek sighs involuntarily with relief. From behind him, Bren can’t see the expression on his face; part of him is almost afraid to.

The shorn nape of his neck shines with sweat. He must be hotter than the Hells beneath that black ensemble. Bren lets his fingers linger there until they descend to the collar, the leash of which still dangles and trails to the floor alongside the red sash around his shoulders. Essek’s body heat radiates all the way to Bren, the rankness of his fear and musk and stomach acid clouding the air between them.

Bren unlatches the collar as well and lets it fall. Essek himself removes the Empire brooch from his chest and flings it down along with the sash, which pools like liquid red clay on the floor.

Bren cannot fathom what to say. The only sounds in the room for a while are the ones that Viskov makes as he leaves and enters, shutting the doors behind himself, splashing the water in the bath. When the valet is done laying fresh towels over the bedspread, he excuses himself and leaves the two of them in silence.

Bren scrapes his eyes down the length of Essek’s body from behind. This is the first time he’s ever seen the Shadowhand without the massive mantle, the silhouette-obscuring cloaks; the flotation cantrip, the smoke-and-mirrors of appearances and intimidation.

Disrespectful as it may be, he cannot help but notice… just how very small Essek is after everything.

Half a head shorter, maybe more without the tall boots. Probably light enough to pick up with one arm. One of Bren’s hands could span his back to touch both of his shoulder blades. His legs are thin and scholarly, his waist concave with hunger. He looks in every way a young man. He’d always known that drow ran on the short end, but this was more than that; this was a mink trying to pass as a wolverine for years. The deception of it all has Bren reeling without the right to reel. After all, Essek never got the chance to reveal himself on his own terms.

He’s certain Essek can feel him looking, because his ticks betray so: the slightest tilt of his head into profile and back, eyelashes appearing and disappearing from the side. The smallest sound of his tongue wetting his lips. The creak as he tests the hinge of his jaw.

Eventually, for the first time in three days—for the first time since the world shifted on its axis—Bren hears him speak.

“Did you have to let them hit me with the tomato?”

His voice is a fraction of a fraction as elegant as it once was, and in the hoarseness of it, Bren hears evidence of starvation. Wounds walked on for days, skin lifted by needles. Even so, he has never been so relieved to hear his friend’s shade of dry humor before.

Gods, he’d nearly lost him.

His face crushes with grief and affection at the same time. There is nothing else he can say but, “Forgive me.”

“The tomato was the last straw, Bren.”

“Forgive me, Essek,” he whispers, inches from the nape of his friend’s neck. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

Essek reaches behind himself and palms Bren’s knee in a gently trembling hand. He says nothing to that, and the absence of a reply is infinitely worse than outright rejection.

“I tried to defend you,” Bren says. “I tried to block out the noise for you.”

“I know,” says Essek. That raw skin on his scalp starts to bleed sluggishly. Bren remembers the healing potions at the very same time the door opens to let in Estefina, who carries a rack of the stuff.

“Here you are,” she huffs, setting it down with a huge clatter on the polished stone table beside Essek’s ottoman. Before she leaves, she withdraws two fat rolls of soft potato bread from her apron and sets them in Bren’s hands. “Couldn’t carry more than that. Would you like a basket?”

Essek shakes his head. Bren says, “That will be all, Estefina, danke.”

Once she’s out the door again, Bren stands and walks around Essek to sit across from him on the stone table, getting a good look for the first time since the removal of the muzzle and blindfold.

Where his face had once before been slim, now it’s positively gaunt, with his eyes sunken into their orbitals and nose wet with snot. His right eye shines with a fading bruise and a fat ring of red encircles the iris. His bottom lip is split in two places and his skin has paled an entire shade.

“This is Daphne’s doing,” Bren mutters.

Essek blinks once very slowly and nods like it pains him.

He is going to kill her. He is going to kill her and snap her wishbone of a body in half and make her husband hunt for the pieces in the woods.

Essek allows his face to be gently manipulated as Bren examines it for further injury. He instructs Essek to follow a flame on his fingertip with his eyes to ensure his pupils are dilating well, and when it’s clear that he sustained no brain injury, Bren tilts his head back to allow a few drops of healing potion to land on his injured eye. Holding Essek’s cheek with a hand and staring down at his slackened face is so intimate a gesture it makes Bren’s breath stop for a minute. As soon as he can, he retreats from it with his fingertips burning.

“Drink,” Bren says, offering the rest of the bottle.

Essek’s eyes—both, now that the injured one is healing—fall on the bottle with reproach. Bren nearly asks what the matter is, especially now that he knows it is a healing potion, when Essek turns his face away and says, “You should not be healing me.”

“Nonsense.”

“They wanted me to sustain these injuries. They are going to want to see them.”

“They beat you because you were a war prisoner under the custody of the Cerberus Assembly,” Bren says tersely. “With my induction, you have been exchanged formally from their hands to mine, and my public-facing persona would not have injured his prisoner-turned-concubine.”

“How kind.”

“If I had a choice, I wouldn’t have a concubine, period,” Bren urges, “but gods forbid I walk around with you looking like I brutalize you behind closed doors.”

Essek’s expression sours a fraction more. “Is that not what your people presume is happening?”

Bren pauses, the words shaking his soul. It’s true, and it’s not true. He hopes it’s not.

“Drink the potion, Essek.”

Suddenly Essek hisses, “Don’t you dare start telling me what to do,” and the force of his delivery is so much that he winds himself, falling back on a weight-bearing hand.

Bren stoops to intercept Essek’s gaze. “I have no intention of becoming like them. But the game is the game, my dear, and there are rules we must play by. Fortunately, there are very many reasons why no one will look twice if I treat you humanely, and a number of them are the reasonable assumption that I am not a sexual sadist.”

Essek’s sad chuckle is almost a wheeze. “You’re not?”

Bren takes his free hand and pries it open to set a potato roll in it. “Eat, please. Drink the potion. I don’t want to have to force you to keep yourself alive, but I will. That is unfortunately what friends are for. I want nothing more than to give you your space and your autonomy, but you need to trust me.”

That smile graduates into a hollow grin. “Thank you for pretending I have a choice.”

Before Bren can shove the goddamned roll into his mouth, Essek does it himself. He takes off a flaking piece and chews it like cud, grimacing at some delicate wound inside his cheek. Bren watches him pick at the rest of the roll and wash it down with a swig of the healing potion long enough to empty the bottle, the apple of his throat bobbing repeatedly as he chugs. With the last mouthful, he rinses his teeth like a chipmunk and swallows. The behavior is so base and unclassy and therefore un-Essek-like, it makes Bren smile.

His health returns a fair bit more after the first potion. The eye unswells, the cuts on his lips seal. Essek protests taking another until Bren reminds him that, now with the status of Archmage, he has enough of a tap on the supply chain that he could order enough potions to heal the bloody Brand, so in the end Essek agrees to taking a few more. Bren gets another three Superior potions into him until they can tell there’s nothing left to be done that the body and a few bread rolls cannot take care of, and by that point, Essek’s stomach is hurting from an excess of alchemy anyway.

Bren thinks to walk Essek to the bath, but perhaps that is more than would be appropriate. He’s in an entirely new wardrobe, after all. That couldn’t have happened with his approval. So Bren stands and gestures to the towels and bathrobes on the bed and says, “If you want to wash the tomato off, the bath is ready for you whenever you wish to partake.”

Essek says nothing and continues staring blankly at his feet, probably praying to be anywhere else.

Bren clears his throat. “I will… I will be downstairs at the dinner table. If you ring the bell by the washroom, Viskov can come up and give you whatever you need. Or you could simply whisper a message to me if you have any stores left.”

By the end of the last word, Essek completely changes. He stiffens, eyes darkening, the world in his mind going gray and stormy.

He doesn’t want me here, Bren realizes. He swallows his pride and finishes with, “We… We can talk after you rest.”

Essek nods in the most depressing fashion he’s ever seen a person nod. He gets up on sounder legs and solid feet and walks by himself to the washroom without getting the towels, the slim blackness of him like a slant of shadow crossing the room. In the fluidness of his walk and the strange novelty of his unveiled body, a series of images rocks through Bren:

Essek undoing the laces down the spine of his suit. Essek peeling the layers off his sweat-dripping skin. Essek’s lips sealing around the mouth of a potion, drinking, drinking, staring up with peaceful eyes, gorging himself until the excess runs off his chin.

Bren shakes his head and clenches his first. This is not the time to be thinking anything of Essek. He’s probably had enough of being touched for the rest of his life.

Essek stops right at the door to the washroom, hand hesitating on the jamb. Water ripples quietly from inside, the sunset putting a wash of gold on both his flesh and the gleaming black of his skinsuit.

His heel turns. He’s about to look over his shoulder when his head stops partway. Bren watches him think for three tense seconds, looking on the verge of asking for something—until he resolves whatever it was within himself and heads inside without a word.

Bren sits in the sorry silence of the guest room with the broken pieces of Essek’s imprisonment around his feet. The only thing he picks up is the collar. He’s never seen a high-status prisoner without one, and it will become useful later to uphold the rest of their lie.

As he puts the collar under a cloth to keep Essek from having to lay eyes on it, the door to the washroom opens again.

Essek stands in the doorway, steam licking up his back, looking determined and sharp.

“I need assistance,” he says and retreats into the steam in lieu of elaborating.

Bren has the good sense to pick up the towels Essek forgot. He makes it all the way to the door before stopping, sending up a useless prayer to Pelor for strength, and going inside after his false concubine.

Essek is standing with his back to the door, bracing his hands against the sink and glaring into the mirror. The top few laces on the back of his suit are undone. He has not been able to get any lower than that, evidently. The reason he needs help is obvious.

“You could ask Viskov,” Bren reminds him warily, but Essek shakes his head and remains still.

Bren sets down the towels on the wooden slats beside the washbasin. The bathroom is roomy and tiled and mostly smoothstone, porcelain in some parts, with waxed wooden walls like the saunas he’s seen in Nicodranas. From here, he spots where Essek’s deposited his boots to stand barefoot on the floor, filth from his soles blurring the tile.

He steps behind Essek, keenly aware of the lost inch or two of height from his boots. Their hips are still nearly level, which means Essek’s legs are proportionally long. Condensation runs down the leather side-panels of the suit in rivulets. If he stands here and undoes the lacing manually, it will take ten minutes of cruel discomfort. Essek has been through enough, and though Bren wouldn’t dare act on anything, he does not trust that he will be able to keep Essek from suffering a scene of protracted gaucheness.

His feet shift. Their reflections swim behind fogged glass. Bren stares at the tapering of Essek’s waist, the long-hidden svelteness of him, and wonders how it might feel to fit his hands around that waist. He wars privately with the gods.

Essek’s breath flutters. His hands tighten on the sides of the basin. Bren is not the only one affected, it seems.

“I need—I need this suit off me,” says Essek with sudden urgency, and without warning Bren grips the reverse of the suit collar and rips the ensemble in two down his back, splitting each and every lace like surgical stitches. Essek gasps, lurching forward, and the sound makes Bren go red inside and blind with a need he knows he cannot sate—and he evacuates the room at once, slamming the door in his haste to get away from himself.

Essek stands in the middle of the steam with his suit slipping down his shoulders and becomes distantly aware, in the way of a man on a cliff watching the sky split open around a meteor, that he is completely and inexorably doomed.

Chapter Text

The trouble of rescuing someone is that it is, for the most part, unpleasant.

The rescuer must put their eyes on the victim’s new status quo. The rescuer must witness whatever the victim has endured in imprisonment. The rescuer must risk being wounded in breaking the chains, reach down to grasp a filthy body, and mold a new life around the burden of a saved one.

There is a reason Essek did not do much rescuing as the Shadowhand. His life and his heart were not large enough to endure the weight of another. And now, at the end of his old life and the start of his new one, he has learned the terrible burden of being saved, which is a great deal of humiliation.

Bren had stared at him the whole time with nothing short of loathing. Bren had moved in silent, jerking, withdrawn motions, spending as little time as possible touching his skin lest it burn him. Essek concluded upon Bren’s violent unbinding of his suit laces that he wanted very little to do with the matters of Essek’s pain at all, and this is both a relief and a terrible disappointment.

Even so, he can hardly fault Bren for shirking away from him. The enticing thing about their dynamic as co-conspirators was its equal-footedness, its mystique, its push and pull. Now that Bren has seen him blindfolded and gagged and paraded through streets—now that Bren owns the legal right to see him naked and flogged—there is not much ambiguity to hide behind, is there?

With the bathwater up to his eyes, Essek sinks into the soothing heat and imagines himself enveloped by his old cloaks, warm and defended. His bruises ache in gentler ways than they did when he first disembarked the horse, and the potions toil in his belly like too much sugar-compote, generating a current in his blood. He imagines the water sparking and alighting around him, his veins themselves a conduit to the healing magic that slowly knits together his broken ribs, his abused skin in places Bren hadn’t even seen.

Does he want Bren to see them?

Maybe.

Essek lifts his leg out of the milky bathwater and tries to find the fat bruise a Righteous Brand soldier left on the back of his thigh. It’d been a swat from the staff of a halberd, but it’s gone now. He reaches around himself and touches his back thoroughly. Gone too are the abrasions from the flogging.

No, he wouldn’t want Bren to have seen those. Even though he’d turned down drinking the proffered potions at first, he is grateful for having been forced to take them. The wounds would have scarred otherwise soon enough.

In a half-conscious and heat-exhausted fog, Essek navigates by feel alone for the towels and bathrobes. He finds a tub of some lotion meant for epidermal wounds left out by the sink—thank you, Viskov—and harshly massages it on, which probably defeats the point. By the time he’s out of the washroom and onto the bed in a steaming wet heap, the world outside is black and silent and so is the world in his head.

He hopes Bren did not wait for him at the table. He hopes Bren will never wait for him ever again.

He sleeps and wakes in fits. Unconsciousness does not come easy to drow, but this is an extraneous circumstance. When he next opens his eyes, he realizes that he has forgotten most of everything. The past week sits buried in his mind like a black gleam in the sand; a bulge behind healed flesh, tumorous and foul.

With curiosity, he touches the memory.

It bursts open. A geyser of repressed sensations attacks him all at once.

A city’s worth of rage suddenly roars in his ears. Essek moans and puts his head to the covers and convulses under a wave of surfacing psychic agony—too many hands on his skin, blood sluicing down his wrists—the skin on his back tearing open crack after crack after crack—and the—the wretched pain of it loops over and over, looping into circles, burning into the backs of his retinas. He phases out of the world in bursts of lost time, losing air, losing orientation in space. His heart hammers against the front of his ribs louder than the gods at the Divine Gate, threatening to explode his chest and blow apart the room.

In his panic, all he can think is: This is it. I am dying.

It takes him an eternity to stop dry-heaving and another to stop hyperventilating. The room spins on its side faster than a top, his eyes swimming in their sockets, ten thousand faces screaming hatred at him with the force of the concentrated sun.

“Bren,” he calls weakly, but the sound is barely loud enough to surpass the atoms splitting in his head, blasting his mind apart.

Wait. There is a bell in the washroom.

The second he tries to get to his feet, his head topples back onto the pillows with a lurch of dizziness. He’s not going to get to the damned bell. He grits his teeth, turns his head away from the muffling sheets, and shouts, “Bren,” and in seconds there’s a rumbling of floorboards, a commotion of footfalls.

He screams when a hand comes under his cheek and he shouts and struggles when another pins his shoulder to the bed. He only calms when Bren’s face clarifies through the burn in his eyes; a face of noble care, wide-eyed and roaming his body with raw concern.

Fantastic, thinks Essek to himself between a flurry of other thoughts. I have summoned him to pity me once more.

A second too late, he realizes he is bare. Bren swiftly shoves his bathrobe shut before Essek can. Twice, Essek damns himself. He pulls his sleeves up to his hands to hide his wrists.

“What’s wrong?” Bren urges, hands fitting up and down his biceps, his shoulders, hovering, hovering. “Hey, hallo, look at me. What’s wrong?”

He must look possessed. Essek works his tongue into cooperating and chokes on the word, “Nothing,” which does not appease or convince Bren a mote.

A thumb brushes his cheek. “You are upset, but you aren’t crying.” Bren looks him up and down more closely and pauses, some kind of deduction setting in. “Oh, gods. You’re dehydrated.”

Essek blinks. His eyes do feel dry.

“I had… potions.”

“You had three Superiors, those are almost entirely concentrate. Scheiße. Hold on.” Over his shoulder, Bren bellows the name of that valet again and demands a letter of things in a rattle of Zemnian that Essek can’t parse once the man is at the door to listen. Viskov marches away dutifully as Bren gets Essek upright by a grip around the shoulders. The room swirls again, forcing him to pitch his head against Bren’s hard chest.

“You had a burning hot bath,” Bren mutters. “And I made you drink too much on an empty stomach. How long were you starved? Three days? I am a fool.”

“Stop that,” Essek snips. “I’ve been flogged enough for the both of us.”

Bren stiffens. Perhaps that was not the right thing to say.

The water comes in a crystal glass jug. It could have come in a fucking trowel, Essek would still have drained it. Bren makes him stop after he’s filled his concave stomach—probably a good thing—and already after sitting just a minute with water replenishing his desiccated muscles, tendons, the bleached coral frills of his brain, he feels clearer-headed than ever before.

“Thank you,” he says into the quiet. Plates clatter far away in the dining room where he has abandoned dinner.

“Ach, don’t ever thank me. I put you in this mess. It’s my responsibility to… make sure you get through to the other end.”

Essek can hear the exact moment where he meant to say, “It’s my responsibility to take care of you,” and pivoted. It makes him smile, even if the originator of that feeling is somewhere pathetic and warm. He puts his head back on that chest with the excuse of not being in the right mind.

“You did what was necessary to keep me alive,” he mumbles in turn. “And even then, you did not have to be the one to claim me. You could have sent me to anyone else—to some random politician, with the benefit of keeping me out of your way.”

Bren gazes down his nose at him. “I know what it is to be a politician’s prisoner, Essek, and it is hardly a life.”

Essek nods, his cheek scratching against Bren’s shirt collar. “I am aware. You risked everything to keep me in proximity. There are… There are worlds worse than this, aren’t there?”

He and Bren sit side-by-side for a while on the edge of his mattress, Bren’s hands fluttering away from Essek at all times. Essek slowly removes his head from Bren’s chest while trying not to feel any more needy about the whole thing, and meanwhile Bren has the bright idea of reminding him about the presence of food downstairs. Food is good. But Essek frowns when he imagines what it will be like to dress himself—in what? What clothes?—and join Bren at the opposite end of a massive dinner table to converse politely on the matter of their terrible reality? No thank you.

When Essek admits so, Bren calls for Estefina to bring dinner up to the guest room instead. A giant cooked blue chicken-thing is the centerpiece placed on the stone table, along with mashed white tubers, a boat of gravy, and a bowl of nuts. A pitcher of peach juice sweats on the ottoman. They eat from porcelain plates and silver cutlery on the edge of the bed like adolescent nobles, the disrespect against the sanctity of dinner a jab against their circumstances.

This is technically the first time they have ever eaten together. Bren shovels the food down quickly while Essek takes his time and leaves the greens on the side to pick at over the course of the conversation. When Bren speaks again, it’s to ask an unpleasant question out of the blue. Spies care about decorum, but they are beyond that now.

“You were flogged?”

Essek’s stomach does not turn, thankfully. “Yes. Amongst other things.”

“When?”

“A few hours before the ceremony.”

“A few hours?”

“For a few hours. They put an herbal acid in the wounds so they wouldn’t heal. I think they only closed after I drank enough potions.” It hurts less to be flippant, he realizes. “Good thing, too. I don’t want the scars.”

Bren clenches his jaw and stabs a carrot murderously. “I see. Well.”

“Well.”

Another pause. Bren sighs hard. “Forgive me for asking, but did they…” He raises his hand to touch Essek’s shoulder as if to reference his body.

“No,” says Essek quickly. He knows exactly where this is going and doesn’t want to live in it for very long. “On the first day I was stripped and examined and… well, probed, but nothing dire. Everything else was tolerable. Only threats, really. I don’t know if you are aware, but your soldiers can be quite the batch of scoundrels.”

Essek speaks with calculated levity, but Bren’s somber voice is more gentle and real than he deserves or wants. “That must have been terrifying.”

"Indeed.”

The quiet returns. Bren then does the strange thing of putting his plate down on the stone table, turning to Essek, and becoming quite grave.

“You would tell me. If they touched you.”

Essek can feel his own eye bags weighing him down the more they test the subject. He forces himself not to bristle. “I reserve the right not to tell you about anything, Bren, let alone something so personally affecting.”

Bren leans in, blazing hot in the eyes. “I am serious, Essek.”

“As am I.”

“If anyone tries to… take advantage of you in the future. You have to tell me.”

“We can’t even say the word,” Essek marvels.

“But we understand each other. Ja? I detest that you can rely on no one else in this place, but that is the cost of playing pretend. If you come across hardship, you need to tell me. I can put a halt to it. I can stop it.”

“You cannot stop a fraction of this hardship,” Essek mumbles. “What we endure is what we endure.”

“Just because you are good at enduring does not mean you need to.”

Essek scoffs. “Me? Good at enduring?”

“Of course you are. You have endured thus far.”

“Barely,” he chuckles, rudely gnashing a green bean. “I had a nervous breakdown only a moment ago. Endurance is not my specialty, it is yours.”

Bren goes quiet and thoughtful. “How do you mean?”

“For one, this might have worked better if the roles were swapped.” He glances over. “I mean no offense.”

“None taken,” says Bren, but he looks curious. “Elaborate.”

“Take it this way. Discipline and endurance are two different things. If I were in your shoes, I could lead your reins without trouble. I could direct you and defend you and do whatever else a Master or Archmage needed to do for his false concubine, because my strengths come to me when I am in control.” He drops his fork onto the plate and sighs. “But without that control… evidently, I shatter.”

Bren sits in silence. Essek goes on. “I am a patient man. I know how to wait out a storm. But I have never been through anything like this. And I suppose neither have you. You were always the leashed one, no? You never had to hold one—or in this case, pretend to hold one. The very notion of finally being in control is what shatters you.”

Bren rubs his own bicep gently as if working out an ancient wound. Essek groans and scrubs his eyes and says, “There is no beautiful way to put it. The difference between you and I is that I am trying and failing to reassemble the pieces of myself for the first time, while you are already accustomed to walking on the shards. I am going to have to learn to be like you. That is what happens when you are a Scourger, I suppose. Your soles toughen. Your skin becomes impenetrable to sharp objects.”

When Essek looks over again, Bren’s smile is a foreign, cold thing. “Not always.”

He thinks he’s about to leave it at that, but Bren pulls up his sleeve and exposes the labyrinth of stark black lines running up and down his forearms; the raised skin Essek has seen so many times and knew not to ask about.

His arms still have copper hairs on the backs. His hands are broad and calloused and mottled with little burns; his knuckles bony and handsome but ruined. Not for the first time, Essek comes to terms with the amount of murder premeditated and followed through by these hands; the clear evidence of shards that pierced him and live in him.

For a moment, Essek expects that hand to go somewhere. On his thigh, maybe. Instead, it hovers in the air and clenches until the bones swell white under the skin. Without asking, Essek takes the hand and puts it in his lap and opens it back up. He places an uneaten green bean from his plate inside the palm and tucks it closed.

He does not know what he is doing. It might be the fates piloting him now.

“Just because you have endured more than I does not mean I expect you to endure for us both. There is so much more you can do with these hands than hold my suffering for me.”

Bren quirks one eyebrow. “We’re doing poetry now, are we?”

Essek realizes he is losing his train of thought only after he struggles through the words, “I am trying to say… I am trying to explain…” and Bren’s eyes go wide.

“You are not well.”

“I am… No.”

Conversation abandoned, Bren goes into a mania of bedtime preparations. He sets the plates in order and covers the food and does all but knock Essek backwards onto the mattress. By the time Essek has the mind to say “Hold on,” the rest of the room’s candles have been snuffed by Prestidigitation and the meal is being escorted out the door by a sudden Estefina.

“I was saying something,” Essek grouses.

“In the morning.”

“I won’t be able to trance.”

“Try,” says Bren, fussing, cleaning. “You need to rest.”

“I won’t. Trust me.”

“You need to.”

“I can’t.”

“Try.”

“I was tortured today,” Essek shouts, and instantly recoils at his own ragged voice.

Bren stops in the middle of the room with the blue chicken balanced in his hands—it’s not even his job to be cleaning up, the idiot—and stares at him with a disintegrating ray of sympathy. Essek damns himself a third time for searching for pity. Estefina squirrels herself out of the room, the blue chicken splatters on the floor, and Bren is by his side with his arms around his shoulders in a second.

Immediately, it’s glorious. The pressure tastes of everything he has ever shirked, every comfort he has ever willfully ignored, and for the briefest of moments his inner world settles into peace.

Bren is warm. Bren is a furnace powered from the jail of his heart. Essek claws at his back in a futile attempt to crawl inside of him and wracks with tremors. He only realizes he’s been crying when he pulls away to see that Bren’s tunic is wet.

He doesn’t know when exactly Bren leaves, but he does sleep. And when he sleeps, he dreams he is lying on a bed of hay in his prison cell, pearls occasionally tossed through the grille of his window to keep him company.

On the morning after the evils of the ceremony, Essek dresses in the neutral, comfortable clothes provided in his dresser and goes downstairs in his new prison to break his fast.

He expects another unnecessary buffet. He gets one. The morning chill permeates through the stone walls and inspires him to partake in a warmer meal than he usually does this time of day: a bone broth and some lamb soup dumplings to give his stomach something light to sit with. Already his bones feel better, less run-over by a carriage, but his guts are still twisted into knots from the starvation and intend to keep returning the food he puts down.

Bren is nowhere to be seen. Estefina explains that Bren’s gone off on urgent state-of-the-war matters in Rexxentrum. She offers Essek another one of those light-sent potato rolls, shiny and tender and soft to chew and easy to digest, and Essek eats four out of her hands before he realizes the indignity of his scarfing. The rest of the morning he spends exploring the estate on his own without a care for whether it is allowed, considering how much he’d misjudged Bren’s callousness.

Better said, there had never been any callousness. Where Essek once saw loathing, he realizes retrospectively that there was only ever a horrible and misplaced affection. This removes any threat of overstepping Bren’s boundaries—if Bren feels that he owes Essek, he would not cordon off any part of the estate from him, which is why he roams it so freely—but it is worse for them on many other accounts.

Certainly, Bren loathing Essek would be a safer bet in the long-term than feeling affection for him. He’d rather be seen as a purchased body than as a pitiable friend in need. It certainly would lead to less dissonance while pretending to be a war prize.

Then again, he remembers more details about their embrace last night than he remembers about his own torture, and he does not want to ruminate on this fact whatsoever.

He passes by his own reflection a few times and startles from the gauntness of it. He hadn’t gotten a good look in the washroom, as the mirror had fogged over. He stands admiring the bags under his eyes for so long he has to pry himself away—but not before he catches a flash of the silver on his wrists and has a crisis all over again.

He should tell him. He needs to tell him.

While ambling around beneath paintings left over from the previous owner of the estate, he wonders if Bren paid the servants to keep quiet about the goings-on inside. They’re certainly more gracious than he expected of imperials. When he next sees Viskov, the valet treats him like a person with the gift of life and sentience rather than a scoundrel extracted from an enemy nation. He decides that he likes Viskov and his weary dwarvish candor; he likes Estefina and her punctilious enthusiasm. He hasn’t met Olivier, but he will probably like him too. Bren has hired good people; Bren is probably a better judge of character than the ex-Shadowhand who voluntarily lives in the maximum-security prison of his suspicions.

When Bren arrives home at noon, he meets Olivier: a young human man with curly red hair and a runny nose in the cold. Essek immediately identifies him as an ex-urchin by the way he looks completely out of his depth in the presence of Bren, the estate, the wealth; by the way he scrambles to let Bren down from the carriage like a prince, by the way he retreats to keep from anyone tripping on his shoes. They chat with each other in Zemnian; they have the same nose. Bren must have plucked him straight out of another stable boy job around these parts.

He decides he likes Olivier too. Olivier, who looks in every way like a young and untarnished Bren. But maybe that is an unkind thing to think.

Essek stands outside in the cold with Viskov, wearing the nicest winter coat in the building—Bren hadn’t locked his bedroom or his closet door, which was practically an invitation for Essek to borrow from it—and watches the Empire’s newest and brightest politician make a fool of himself slipping on the icy path and into the camellias.

Bren shakes off the snow when he comes inside. The first thing he says when they’re in the privacy of the guest bedroom again is, “I know what we are doing.”

“I have to tell you something,” blurts Essek right on the end. His manacle tattoos are freezing so cold they make his wrists ache.

Bren pauses, tugging off his scarf. “Let me go first.” Quickly, he goes about locking and arcanely silencing the room from outsiders; he must have also set up glyphs against divination at some point in the past, else he wouldn’t be comfortable speaking.

Essek frowns and holds his tongue. “All right. Let’s hear it.”

“You are going to work with me to undermine the war.”

Oh. Well, that is not what he was expecting.

Essek blanches. His mind freezes over into a landscape of ice.

“I… I can’t.”

“Of course you can. You are the most powerful mage I’ve ever encountered who actually stands a chance to witness the inside of this beast and escape it. We have to take advantage of the tools you carry with you. You are versed in divination, ja? A little bit at least.”

Mage, he’d said. Essek does not nod, but Bren barrels on.

“I lied to Estefina. Sorry, Estefina.” She is not in the room. “I’ve just returned from meeting with some collaborators I’ve had since before I met you. They are called the Mighty Nein. I helped pick the name. You don’t know them, do you?”

He speaks a little too manically for Essek’s comfort. Essek shakes his head, watching the storm crest over the horizon.

“All right. Now, I met the Mighty Nein after DeRogna died in Eiselcross. You remember that, ja? She was on a research expedition. Something or other happened and she exploded. Great fun. Did you hear about this?”

Essek speaks around a leaden tongue. “I did. Something about a colorful group of mercenaries being hunted for the assassination of a member of the Cerberus Assembly. You… You work with these people?”

“I was the one assigned to hunt them down. I trailed them for well over six months, watching them eat, watching them sleep, trying to understand what their modus operandi or their agenda was. It became clear quite soon that they were only ever in the wrong place at the wrong time when it came to DeRogna, and that her real assassin was already dead. The Nein had killed him during an adventure to save the realm from a gigantic astral corpse city. They were innocent. I would dare say they were heroes.”

“DeRogna was killed by a corpse city,” Essek deadpans.

“No. She was killed by a cultist of the corpse city. Technically the corpse city was also wizards. But that wasn’t exactly something the group could corroborate to the Brand, so they ran and kept adventuring elsewhere with their heads low.”

Essek reels under the information. “And you never turned them in.”

“Well, they caught onto me after a while. It was a bizarre series of cat-and-mouse lessons in trust; sort of like the two of us, no? They understood that I was not ultimately aligned with Ikithon. They invited me into their fold more easily than would be responsible, but I was…” Bren slows from his ramble to scrub his stubbly beard. “I was desperate for action. For freedom. For anyone to listen to my heart and not my mind.”

“You doddering romantic,” Essek says. “And I suppose you all held hands and made friendship bracelets by the campfire.”

Bren takes on the wide and guilty eyes of a stag.

Essek pinches the bridge of his nose. “You did. You did make friendship bracelets.”

“They are my friends, Essek. I fell in love with them.”

He balks. “I have never heard you speak like this. Where is the real Bren?”

“I am not so new to friendship, you know. You are my friend,” Bren urges for the second time, and Essek’s deep sea serpent of a mind suddenly spasms under the weight of that sincerity.

“They changed you, didn’t they?” he mutters. “They made you soft. That’s why you nearly collapsed. When Trent died.”

Bren takes the statement as the blow it was intended as, but it doesn’t wound him nearly as much as Essek wanted.

“It is true that I learned compassion in their company. So much of my humanity had been calloused over by Ikithon and his program. But I was already on a path away from him. This was the best opportunity I had, so I made—am making—the most of it.” He visibly steels himself, spine starched. “I had been undermining the war before even them. They are the operatives doing the groundwork, and I am the mole. Every chance I get, I give them a little something that will help their endeavors. A tip, a hunch, anything.”

“That is why you were not keen on giving me tips. You already had a channel.”

“Yes. My apologies for diverting my attention from you,” says Bren with a wink. Essek groans. Worse even, he knows that Bren has only taken on the risk of confessing treason to him because Essek has no chance on Exandria of using the information against him, being as cornered and diminished as he is. Bren is good, but he is not a fool as most good men are.

“So I suppose we are to gather intelligence now. Together. Archmage and concubine, moles in the courts of Rexxentrum,” Essek jokes.

“Precisely,” says Bren with total frankness.

Essek chokes. “You can’t be serious.”

“In order to get you out of this role, we must first coordinate with the Mighty Nein to smuggle you out. And that can only be done when Daphne and Johannes Dask have either weakened their suspicions of you, fallen out of power, or died.”

Fine. Fine. Essek shakes his head and throws his hands in the air. “A mad plan is better than no plan, I suppose. If I have a say in the matter, I would very much like them dead.”

“Ditto,” says Bren, which Essek assumes to mean likewise. “I believe they have a reason for wanting you captured or dead that I have not identified yet. Their intervention was the only reason I was late to what was about to be your execution. They know something.”

Essek’s breath speeds. “They confiscated my spellbook. They ripped it out of my wristpocket.”

“Did they take anything from your mind?”

“Not that I know.”

“Well, Daphne is an enchantress. You probably wouldn’t know either way.”

Essek sucks his teeth. “If she has anything that was in my head, then she has my dunamancy. And if she retrieved everything she needed, there is no use in keeping me alive. She could have staged my death as an accident; gotten a patriotic Brand soldier to kill me and let him take the brunt of the consequences. She still needs something.”

Bren taps his thumb to the front of his incisors. “Perhaps your identity itself is significant. She needs the Shadowhand for brokering something from the Bright Queen. Information. Relics. She is the Archmage of Antiquity, after all. If she did not interrogate your mind, there are ways to validate so. What if she says to them: look, I did not peek into the plots and schemes and knowledge of the highest director of intelligence of your Dynasty. I will return him to you if only you give me…” Bren trails off and shakes his head. “Ach. What could possibly be more valuable than your mind?”

Essek pales. “She wants a beacon.”

Bren stops and turns. “She can get a beacon. She can get the ones Da’leth has in Zadash.”

“Da’leth won’t give her a beacon, you madman. She’s a child to him. High elves and their hierarchies. He wants them all for his own purposes—he never gave DeRogna any beacons, and he trusted her.”

“Ludinus trusts no one,” chuckles Bren, but the gravity of the situation is slowly dragging in the both of them. “Do you really think the Bright Queen would exchange a beacon for you? Forgive me, but that seems a little against her grain. It seems more likely that she’d send assassins to keep your knowledge out of the Empire’s hands.”

“You underestimate how possessive she is.”

Bren’s eyes flash with undefinable emotion. “Of you?”

“Of the players on her board, yes. She does not count her losses until the last possible second. She likely still believes she can win me back on her own before she’s forced to exterminate me.”

“That’s wishful thinking.”

“I’m sorry, which one of us was the premiere intelligence officer of her reign?”

Bren snorts. Essek begins, “If she’s cornered enough, she may send hooks in for my repossession. Failing that, she may concede a beacon she was already going to lose in exchange for the return of a player, especially if she cannot see another way to prevent the genocide of her people but to reemploy my skills and knowledge.” His nostrils flare. “Even if I am greatly overestimating my importance, it would still brings a clear road to peace if the exchange happened through public channels. That’s why the Dasks are such proponents of the war. They want to put pressure on Leylas. She’s already crumbling; they want to make her sloppy so that she is forced to sacrifice a beacon for survival.”

“Your nation has already suffered massive losses. Why not ‘repossess’ you now?”

“Leylas won’t budge unless the Dynasty is caught in a death spiral. Daphne and the Empire have to get it there.”

Something horrible dawns on him. It seems to dawn on Bren at the very same time.

“What if…” Bren hesitates. “What if Daphne knows of your treason?”

Essek’s eyes ache sharply, a migraine coming on. “Oh, of course she does. Da’leth does. Trent did. She ought to.”

“Then she has that dangling over your head. You can’t go back,” Bren mumbles, black fear coming over his eyes. “The second she sees you set foot back in Xhorhas, she’ll tell them. You’ll be done. Your people can’t afford to execute you for treason, can’t afford to assassinate you, and can’t afford to let you out of their sights. If you run back to Rosohna, they’ll keep you on just as much of a leash as you are on now.”

“On a leash as a parrot, not a politician,” Essek says. “The Lens have undoubtedly seen the humiliation I faced. That I still face. And if they know my crimes… Not in a million years will they put me in office ever again.” The doom of it overtakes him like an eclipse. His lungs rattle. “I will be socked in another cell, and this time, it will be in the Dungeon of Penance that I built.”

Bren allows the silence to billow out and contaminate the both of them. He sits hard on that stone table, hand on one knee and elbow on the other, looking deadly serious.

“Well, at least you know almost everyone in there.”

In the middle of his stewing, the absurdity of the suggestion makes Essek guffaw. Bren laughs just as nervously, the moment easing into a reasonable reality instead of a nightmarish future.

“We can’t kill them,” sighs Essek, lowering his head. “If the Dasks disappear, the Assembly will know. They’re smart enough to leave behind contingencies.”

“Right. Which is why are going to try to pry them out of power instead.”

Essek raises his panging head. “I am listening.”

“Now that Ikithon is dead, Daphne and Da’leth are together the most prominent pro-war voices in the Assembly. We can’t aim for Da’leth; he is untouchable right now. But Daphne. Daphne is not so protected.” He forms his hands into a tent. “And his Majesty loathes to be played by his own people. There is no such thing as a king without a bit of ego.”

“You mean to say he would dispose of anyone he discovers is manipulating him?”

“He must, if he plans on continuing being King.” Bren’s eyes narrow with sharp scrutiny. “If we work together with the Mighty Nein to illuminate evidence of her motivations for the war—enough that his Majesty angers at her agenda—then the war will have a greater chance at halting when other forces stand for peace. The Dasks would be stripped of power and imprisoned. Your escape would be easier. You wouldn’t be able to return to your mantle, but we could resume our research.”

The storm cloud suddenly clarifies.

“My escape to nowhere, you mean.”

Bren’s smile is a tentative and weary one. “We will figure something out. For now, we have to play along.”

Essek stares down at his wrists, hidden beneath the long sleeves of Bren’s winter coat, and sighs. Not right now.

Bren suddenly smacks his knee and stands. “I want you to meet someone. You recall the unicorn you rode in on?”

Essek blinks and chuckles dryly. “Ah. My head. For a moment I thought you said unicorn.”

When Bren looks at him with the expression of, Oh, you did not know, it belies nothing of the inner joke wrestling within him. Essek rolls his eyes and walks out the door, calling, “Unicorn. Fine. This might as well happen.”

He wasn’t lying.

In the stables of the Ermendrud estate, Essek stares with his breath stopped, facing the stall of a creature bathed in the white glow of fresh snow. Celestial beings all had that quality: an unrealness, an uncanny perfection; the subject of a painting that walked straight out of the canvas onto the Material Plane.

His only memory with her is being blindly sat on her fragile back. Not to mention the violence and commotion he experienced with her as the vehicle beneath him. Nothing good or romantic. Nothing he desires to remember so soon.

He decides immediately that he does not want to spend any more time with her than is absolutely necessary. When he turns to say so, he finds Bren staring with his mouth agape as though he’s seen a nymph cresting overhill in the nude.

“It’s a unicorn,” says Essek blandly.

“Isn’t she marvellous?” Bren whispers, somewhere on a different plane of reality. “Her name is Rilke. What a lovely name. I regret to see her cooped up like this. I think I will let her roam the grounds.”

“It will escape.”

Bren is already sliding the wooden latch and swinging the stall door open. “If she does, so be it. The creature deserves to be free anyway. The Dasks might throw a fit, but it isn’t anything I can’t talk my way out of.”

Essek jumps. “The Dasks?”

“Ja, well. Rilke was hunted and captured by Johannes. She was gifted to me only a few days ago, before the ceremony.”

“That Myth Hunter knows no limits,” he mutters. “Aren’t unicorns sacred in your country?”

“They should be sacred across Exandria, but I get the feeling Johannes does not concern himself with such limitations.”

A gleaming white nose emerges from the stall first, then a head with a mane that rustles in a nonexistent breeze. Rilke ventures out a few feet in the lot outside the stable and then leaps into a jolly canter through the white slush. The estate grounds are massive enough that he and Bren watch as her shape diminishes into a tiny white spot all the way in the distance.

For a moment it looks as though she might try to hop the snow-topped hedge wall surrounding the property. She very well could, at her power. But she stops short and sniffs the winter berry shrubs instead, using her horn like a shovel to disturb the ground.

Something about her neck glints strangely in the afternoon sun.

Essek squints, eyesight sensitive in the snow-light. When he parses what it is, he asks, “Is she wearing a collar?”

“She wears a tattoo, technically.” Bren crosses his arms and expresses no joy at the fact. “Daphne placed an antimagic enchantment on it. Something with runes I haven’t had a moment to examine. What an atrocity, binding a creature so free and sublime.”

It takes three seconds for Essek’s heart to lurch, stop, and disintegrate.

His lips go numb in the cold. He fusses and fumbles to pull the long sleeves up to his forearms and present his stark wrist to Bren. Might as well do it now before he has to start lying of omission.

“Is it anything like this?”

Bren looks down through his snow-powdered eyelashes and stares in silence. All around them, the flurry falls in fairy-like motes. He reaches out a hand and holds it beneath Essek’s as an unspoken request. Essek deposits his wrist into Bren’s palm, gritting his teeth to keep from shivering when the stark warmth leeches through the freezing cold silver. He identifies a ripple of disappointment pass through Bren’s expression—or perhaps of sadness, he cannot tell. The part of Essek’s soul offended by pity drives him to wrest his arm back.

“I know,” he says before Bren can speak. “It throws over your plans. I won’t be the divination mage you need. I won’t be any mage at all.”

Bren does not move or react but says gently, “Does it hurt?”

“No.” Essek pauses, minding the radiating ache. “Yes.”

“When?”

“In the cold. The silver… I suppose the silver conducts heat poorly.”

Bren makes a face. Essek realizes with embarrassment that Bren had meant, When did they give it to you?

He does not ask again. With a strange irreverence, Bren removes his gloves and hands them to Essek. “Have you tried casting?”

Essek takes them and does not put them on. “Yes.”

Bren waits for his elaboration. When it never comes, he satisfies with the implication within the silence: Yes, and it nearly killed me.

“But you’d known they were antimagic by then.”

“Yes.”

“And you still tried to cast.”

Essek shifts on his feet. “Yes.”

Even in the middle of bad news, Bren’s grin shines like day. “You are something else, Herr Thelyss.”

It certainly helps his mood to see that smile. Essek offers a similar one, though he knows his only shines half as bright. “Proverbial pot. Proverbial kettle.”

Bren laughs softly and faces the grounds again, watching Rilke eat her way through the berry bushes long in the distance. His tone light but edged, he groans, “Well, this changes things.”

Essek buries the urge to apologize. It isn’t his fault. He knows it isn’t, and so does Bren, and yet that does not make it any easier to think about. When he is about to ask what Bren proposes they do instead, Bren says, “At least we know what we need to take care of first. Your ability to cast is a priority. We’ll research what Daphne used on you, and we’ll work together to unmake it.”

And that is when a horrible heat presses against the backs of Essek’s eyes. “I do not recommend that.”

Bren turns to him with open confusion. “Why not?”

“Because they would see that I have been freed,” he hisses, gesturing strongly to his binds. “This is a game of deception. You said so yourself that we must play into these roles if we hope to gain anything from them. The moment that Daphne, Ludinus, whoever notices you have restored my arcane abilities by ridding me of these enchanted tattoos—they will know you are compromised, and they will descend on us.”

Bren meets his eye but cannot see. “If I can maintain the illusion that they are still on your skin—“

“You and I cannot trust that the tattoos are only antimagic in nature. I noticed some runes of divination within them, some evocation. They could be communicating more information than we know. I only speak freely with you because I am in the presence of your wards, but we must assume they built redundancies into the magic. You know Daphne better than I, and you know that her work is praised for its watertightness.”

Bren purses his lips and moves his hand in the sharp somatics of Detect Magic. A fuzzy static sensation spills over Essek’s skin from the crown of his head to his feet as the spell takes effect. The electrical closeness of Bren’s attention narrows in on the finest runes within the wrist tattoo, held and manipulated gingerly by his hands. After the examination ends, he satisfies and frowns, dropping the spell and letting the static vanish along with it.

“You were right. There’s a thread of divination emerging from it. But it does not feel exactly like scrying.” He wets his lips, a sign of deep thought. “I think you may be tracked.”

Essek stares rigidly at his tattoos and clenches the red gloves in his fist. “Now do you agree with me?”

“I regret that I must,” Bren sighs. “I may have a workaround, but it will take some time. And Daphne will need to verify that the tattoos have not been removed from you for it to be convincing. Trent created several stores of amulets of proof against detection and location. Those would suffice, but such an amulet on you specifically, my dear ex-Shadowhand, will be noticed. The nobility wants to believe that they can keep eyes on you. It will be better if the only ones who know you are protected are those who are interested enough to try themselves and learn by failure. No unnecessary risks.”

The idea of being in the same room with that woman again is enough to inspire a kick of nausea. The idea of using a piece of arcana devised by Ikithon is somehow worse. He fights to hold his gaze on the horizon line. “You should modifying the amulet, then. For discretion.”

“I have a design in mind that I am already having commissioned as of this morning,” says Bren lightly. But he must see Essek’s desperation, because he says, “We will speak no more on the subject for today. You should rest.”

“It’s hardly the afternoon.”

“I know. And I must return to Rexxentrum for some errands, which will give you more time to acquaint yourself with the estate.”

Essek looks over and asks with a tightness in his throat, “Will you be long?”

“I’ll be back before you know it. It’s a twenty minutes’ carriage ride to-and-from the city, a little longer if coming from the center. I need to pick up a few orders. I’ve already declared a day off to adjust to the new circumstances.”

Off in the distance, Rilke leaps over a wintering rose bush. The gloves in Essek’s grip grow warmer.

“Don’t be long,” he says. “I do not know these people.”

“They’re trustworthy.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I know that I am paying each of them a premium to speak nothing of what goes on in this house,” Bren chuckles, which does ease Essek a little more, and he begins walking out to find Olivier and take the carriage out again. “Take care of yourself. Be kind to Rilke if you can. I’ll see you at dinner.”

Essek watches him go and sits with the strange aura around the goodbye: once a gentle and everyday thing, now something so dire and unpredictable.

Bren is the only lifeline he has. Every time he leaves, the world becomes less certain. For a moment, Essek feels like a lapdog desperate to avoid the silence and danger of solitude; he takes three swift strides forward in a hope of closing the distance, only Bren is already on the move and calling over Olivier.

He has been alone for all of his life. He can stand to be alone for a night. For a few weeks. For a few months, if needed. It is only a night.

Essek sighs as Bren’s carriage trundles out onto the path towards Rexxentrum. He turns and goes and tries to find the blasted unicorn, hoping he will be able to accomplish at least one task.

When at last he finds Rilke he nearly shouts with horror; her muzzle is smeared as red and bloody as a vulture’s. Then when he discovers the trail of seeds she’s spit out from the winter berries she’d been rustling through, he calms, though not entirely.

She bats her gigantic white eyelashes at him and faces away again, tail twitching socially. From her perspective, she must have caught a glance at the world’s saddest drow and determined him insignificant: dressed in a larger man’s coat, urchin-like, chattering in the cold as if stark naked. Essek wouldn’t pay himself any mind either.

He sniffs and tucks his hands under his armpits, turning more and more blue by the second. She does not note his discomfort.

“You should leave this place,” he says, in Elvish, minding the distant connection between unicorns and fey.

She releases a soft nicker as she noses through the berry bush. Her tail whips to the side, not particularly interested in him.

He stands there in a state of hypothermia for a while, theoretically accomplishing the task of being kind to her, because kindness is company, at times. This is kind. Therefore: task complete. But when he starts trudging back through to the estate before he can die of exposure, she kicks up and jumps in front of him, forcing him to recoil for fear of impaling himself on her foot-long horn.

“Light!” he swears in Common, stumbling and nearly falling into the bush. “What? What is it?”

She upturns her head. Her cheeks are bunched up and full. Universally, this is the animal gesture of gifting food.

Essek hesitantly holds out one gloved hand. Like a queen knighting a soldier, Rilke bows her head and regurgitates whole berries—horse slobber and all—into his slowly saturating woollen glove. He shivers with disgust about it and nearly drops them, but he thinks better than to insult a unicorn.

She stares at him with intent.

He gulps. Looks between her and the berries. “I am not eating these.”

She bows and nudges him with her horn once, sharply, in the solar plexus. He feels it nearly penetrate through the layers, sharper than he expected.

Feeling meek and humbled in the face of a mythical beast, he picks a single red berry out from the slurry, rubs it all over the front of Bren’s cloak, gives it a sniff, and gently pricks it with one fang. It still smells atrocious, but the process of swallowing is not as dire as he’d thought. He is not beyond this indignity.

And magically, in no more than seconds, his wrists lose their horrible ache. So too vanishes the ache from his toes and his ears, which had become numb at some point in the journey across the grounds. He flexes his newly warmed fingers, huffs air through his newly warmed lips. The absence of what he’d taken to be his new baseline level of pain is a relief like no other—almost like the relief of being force-fed three Superior potions of healing.

Essek reaches out one hand and cups the unicorn’s cheek. It burns hot through the glove.

“That is how you are staying out here,” he marvels, giving her a good rub under the chin. “These berries here are magical. You are smarter than I thought. You have my thanks.”

You’re welcome, says a woman in his head.

Essek shouts and drops the berries as the unicorn reels back and whinnies with laughter at his expense. She hops and see-saws and kicks up snow, only calming when he says, “You can speak? But you—but your magic. But the tattoo! Does Bren know you can speak?”

Some miracles are simply celestine essence, she says, her voice an angel’s harp through his mind. She jogs behind him and bunts the flat of her head against his spine, urging him to keep pace. Come. Let us acquaint.

He skids with his heels digging grooves in the snow until he rights himself and walks with her. Apparently, “let us acquaint” means to walk side by side in companionable silence, because for the rest of the day, she does not speak to him a word no matter how hard he invites her. This must be a quality of all celestial creatures: an ingrained need to be cryptic, or at least to be a nuisance of a conversation partner. Next time she speaks in his head, it might very well be in rhyme.

The sky’s blanket of white darkens into pale gray, then slushy orange as it sets behind the line of tall pines that border the property. All the while, he walks in newfound warmth and comfort, occasionally nibbling a berry when the cold nips at his wrists again. When the ones from Rilke run out, he takes to collecting some himself with ungloved hands. In the end, he’s collected enough to fill a pocket. He leaves the rest to regrow, because light knows he might need more.

She looks at him curiously as he goes on collecting, giving him the impression he might be doing something wrong. No matter. She was the first one to pick them; he’ll blame her if Bren asks.

The stables seem adequate enough home for Rilke—she does not complain to him, after all—so he leaves her there and goes back inside by the door connecting to the manor.

While there, he discovers that the foyer is slowly filling up with trunks.

An entourage of workhorse-looking seamstresses deposit the final trunk from a horse-drawn cart right outside the front door. They clap their hands, give Essek enough of a wave to let him know they have recognized him as more than a piece of furniture, and exit expeditiously.

Essek approaches the door. Bren stands outside, giving his thanks in the form of a tiny leather satchel of jingling coins. He bows his head and the seamstress bows three times lower, nearly kissing his feet. The workers pile into their carriage, and with a whip-crack, the cart is already evacuating the premises.

Estefina clatters away at preparing dinner in the kitchen a few rooms over. Essek stands perfectly still, allowing Bren to surprise at the sight of him already waiting in the foyer.

“I said I’d be back for dinner, didn’t I?” he says, smiling goldenly. His long night-blue winter cloak buffets in the cold gale until he shuts the grand old door behind himself, a last flurry of snow skating across the floorboards between them.

Essek gives the trunks another once-over. A piece of thick indigo brocade juts out from the lip of one. His confusion settles into faint gratitude when he recognizes it as a similar color he has worn before.

“You… were out purchasing clothing. For me.”

“Not everything is about you, Essek,” says Bren with such a theatrical roll of the eyes that it makes the both of them break into laughter.

Essek rolls his eyes in turn. “This is news to me.”

Bren approaches and kicks open a trunk for him to peer inside. “Granted, not all of this is clothing. The majority of it is upholstery and blanketing. Your room needed some work, and I would rather take you to the tailor once you have regained some constitution. But for the first few public outings, the robes here should do.”

Essek leans over and takes a thick, warm-looking comforter into his hands that he recognizes immediately as having been lined with moorbounder hide; a luxury he indulged in as the Shadowhand, but a massive import expense in the Empire. The pillows beneath it gleam with silks from Ank’harel, the tags of which read that they have been embroidered with pearls pulled from the crystal-blue surfs of the Bay of Gifts.

He tuts softly, another of today’s marvels fluttering in his throat. “This was… This was not necessary of you.”

“Hold your compliments until you see my excellent interior designing,” heaves Bren as he shoves over a trunk. Belatedly, he seems to remember that he is a wizard with the capability of Telekinesis, at which point he lifts the thing into the air effortlessly and takes it with him upstairs.

With Viskov’s help—apparently the man was once a carpenter, which is the only reason any of them discover that the bed comes with secret compartments in which to tuck the flat sheets—the room is remade. Violet and gleaming and sensible, a writing desk has been given a new life as a study and an empty wine shelf now serves as an improvised holder of costly components. His old tower never knew such comfort, utilitarian as it was. The rug here is plush, not flat; he’d never had to walk on one before to know the importance of its softness. Every object and ledge is within his standing height, for he cannot cast to levitate himself any higher.

And the wardrobe. Frankly, he has seen better. But Bren has afforded him a rotating week’s worth of the same sort of modest designer robes he’d worn for the year they had known each other. Their conservative quality is probably for the best, given his current status as a diplomatic quasi-spouse. He does not want any more eyes on his body than absolutely necessary, and this will do the job of deflecting them from his obscured silhouette.

The entire time he spends appraising the stores, Bren stands hovering at his side with an unreadable expression. Only, of course, it is perfectly readable. He wants to know if Essek likes the gift.

“You’ve done well,” is all he can bring himself to say. Any more and he will either remember that he cannot make purchases for himself for the foreseeable future and crush inside with humiliation, or he will fall mute with how moved he is by the thoughtfulness of Bren’s selection.

“Of course I have,” says Bren with false confidence, preening under a pat of Essek’s hand on his shoulder.

“Master Ermendrud!” calls Estefina, knocking on the door.

All three men turn on their heels. Essek nearly reaches for his spells before he remembers the harm that he faced when he last did so and relaxes.

Bren opens the door. Between a foot of space, whispers are shared. Estefina scurries away and Bren faces Essek and Viskov, a bitterness winning out on his waning joy.

“What is it?” asks Essek, already knowing it is not something he wants to hear.

“We have been invited,” sighs Bren, his voice darkening, “to a gala of the Dask family.”

Chapter Text

Bren knows he is doing the right thing, and yet this truth is not made any more convincing by the doubts that Beauregard feeds him.

“Are you sure about this?” she’d said when he met with them last. Their residence in Xhorhas, gifted to them by chaperone Verin Thelyss on behalf of Den Thelyss, is homely enough that no one feels it necessary to dress up for their meetings. He dresses up anyway, seeing as he is the only politician amongst them—or perhaps he is the only one who thinks to.

“Absolutely not,” he had said in turn. He figured an honest approach would appeal more to the group than if he had fronted with false confidence. “Everything about the circumstance reeks of my worst nightmares, but I have no other choice.”

“You do, though,” said Fjord, the half-orc whose resonant voice could fill a room like seawater. He sat alongside the majority of the party in the rickety vermaloc chairs around the war room of their manor, rolling the hilt of his sword in his palm. “Nobody would fault you for getting the Shadowhand out of the picture. You know.” He pantomined slashing his throat with a krrrsh sound. “The Bright Queen doesn’t want him there. Neither do you.”

Caduceus had cast his bovine eyes over to Fjord in a curious stare as Bren replied, “This is true, but for different reasons. She wants a loose end tied, whereas I want my friend freed. Do not test my compassion, Fjord, I’ve only just found mine.”

“Just checking.”

“Essek is Verin’s brother,” Jester had pleaded. “We have to help him. Verin would be so sad if anything happened to Essek.”

“We barely trust Verin,” Beauregard minded.

“You barely trust Verin,” Veth intoned. “I, on the other hand, trust him with my life.”

“You trust him with your tits, Veth, calm down.”

Underneath the joke, Bren had stiffened at the revelation. He’d been aware of the Den Thelyss correlation, but so many members of the big three dens were as distantly removed as neighbors. “They are brothers in consecution, I gather?”

“Worse.” Fjord glanced meaningfully over at Caduceus. “Brothers in blood.”

“Then why do you suggest Essek’s termination?”

“Because Verin is a Taskhand. He understands duty and sacrifices just as much as we do.” At the offense in Bren’s expression, Fjord scrubbed a hand through his salt-and-pepper beard and sighed. “I don’t like it either, but it’s an option we have to leave on the burner. Otherwise you’re compromised as well. And frankly, I’d give over all the other resources we have to make sure we keep you in the game. When you were just a Volstrucker, you were the only reason we made it as far as we did. Now that you’re playing with the biggest mages on the continent, you’re the only reason we stand a chance at peace.”

“Well, you’d certainly get peace if you murdered a political prisoner,” Bren said sardonically.

“We’re not going to kill Essek,” said Jester. She swept her owlish gaze around the table of hardened warriors, perplexed by the lack of rally to her statement. “Right, guys?”

Beauregard bit the side of her lip. Fjord exhaled smoothly, and Caduceus observed the back of Fjord’s head with a patience only afforded to those who know precisely what decisions will be made in the following fifteen minutes. Yasha was off behind them standing guard at the door, and though Bren could not see her expression, he understood by her silence that she was not happy about the situation but not about to sow dissent either.

Bren had been the only one of them still standing, so he took a seat at the head of the table and put his palms flat on the surface, thinking.

“There is a way that this might work,” he’d said. When all of the Mighty Nein had leaned in to his satisfaction, he spun out a plan admittedly so ludicrous, so rife with potential disaster, four out of the six of them recoiled in abject horror.

Beauregard gaped. “You want to pimp him out?”

Bren nearly leapt out of his seat. “Was—What? How did you get that from what I said?”

“Well, how else is he supposed to ‘do intelligence’, man, he’s a sex slave!”

“By the gods, he’s not a slave,” Bren seethed, feeling for his station and cravat like an offended baron. “The nobility of Rexxentrum doesn’t take those so publicly. He is not a pet, let alone a slave—both of which are illegal, I’ll remind you. He is a… He is a concubine. Those are not without expectations of propriety.”

“So you’re telling me nobody’s expecting him to give you a Xhorhasian spitter behind closed doors?” mumbled Yasha behind him. Bren carefully did not whirl around to face her because he’d surely cleave his chin on her longsword, but he did grumble some more, and he did not ask what in gods’ name a Xhorhasian spitter was.

“Well—perhaps to me, but not to anyone else. The role of a concubine is not to service whoever I choose, it is to be paraded as a status symbol. A trophy spouse. In Essek’s case, it is also to be paraded as an achievement of the Empire, and in that sense, he is a war prisoner as well. Perhaps there are those who assume the worst of the nature of the relationship, but the most I will do is bring him with me as a social accessory.”

At his matter-of-fact exposition, Jester’s expression curdled sour. Beauregard spat, “But that’s not the same thing as what you’re encouraged to do. The legality of this shit is out of the conversation. Concubines can be demoted into pets without a problem, man, you know that. If you two agree that you’re going to throw him at random politicians so he can fuck the secrets out of them, no one would be banging at your door to arrest you if they found out. You’re an Archmage now. They’d be barging the door down to join in on whatever you were hypothetically doing to him. That’s how these people are.”

“This is the territory in which lives become toys,” said Fjord.

“I am not going to make him sleep with anyone,” Bren hissed, incensed by the repeated suggestion. “He is not a pet. Intelligence can be gathered in many other ways. He is a spy, you recall—he is the most elite spy of his nation. I am certain that he would not care to stoop so low and so immediately. But he is a good-looking fellow; you’ve seen him before, haven’t you?”

“We have. He’s really hot,” said Jester, and to her credit she did sound quite sorrowful. “Gosh, he’ll have such a hard time.”

“Won’t he have an easy time, if he’s hot?” asked Yasha.

“No, no, I mean. Oh, just. You know,” Jester said, wilting physically. “Mama says it’s always harder when you’re beautiful and young. To have people look at you different. Like they want to hurt you and eat you and love you at the same time.”

Bren’s mouth twitched in a frown. As if he needed more fuel for his fears. “Right. Well, he can use that to his advantage. Not to bed anyone, but to become close enough to witness mistakes. Secrets. To be present when conversations are had. I will never be far enough from him to allow violence to take place, and I’ll be dead before he’s forced to follow through with anyone’s invitations.”

A ripple of understanding slowly fanned out through the group. He recalled that these people knew very intimately the lengths he had been forced to go to in his line of work and knew precisely where his disgust was coming from, and hence, he relaxed a fraction. For a moment, all was silent save for Beauregard cracking her knuckles. Then she said, “And I guess he’s got plenty of magic to protect himself, huh?”

“I expect his casting might be somewhat dampened, but he should be able to contribute. I don’t see any way to permanently disable his wizardry without all but amputating him, and last I saw, he was whole.”

“People aren’t going to let their guard down around him. You just said he’s a spy. They all know that too,” said Yasha, her troubled voice the quietest of the bunch.

“Not if you pretend that you amputated his mind,” said Caduceus.

It was the first time the entire meeting that the firbolg had spoken. All eyes flashed to him, either startled or horrified by the darkness in the suggestion—or both. Caduceus did not seem to find it worthy of the attention and continued to gaze levelly at Bren, who sighed.

“You are suggesting… that I pretend to have feebleminded him?”

“Maybe. Or you could have permanently modified his memory. So much so that the public perceives him as useless.”

Bren smacked his teeth. It was dreadfully smart, if unpleasant. “That is against the law, my friend. Double the danger.”

Caduceus slowly blinked at him. “You’re the law now, Mister Bren, aren’t you?”

Nothing they were doing now was within the law anyway. No one would question him if he did it, and in all likelihood it would end up being another boon for his status, driving fear and awe into the hearts of his peers to discourage any prying.

Something flipped darkly in Bren’s gut. “...I will propose the option. I suppose it’s no more risk than convincing them he’s a pet anyway. Truscan will be a dissenter, but nothing I cannot maneuver around. Danke schön.”

“You’ll be playing pretend a lot more than you think,” Caduceus went on. “You have to make everyone underestimate you. That’s how you move without getting noticed. That’s how you get people to lower their guard.”

Veth squinted at him. “You’re talking like a spy, Caduceus.”

Caduceus slowly swaggled his head. “If it’s true on a playground, it’s true of a spy ring. People are people.”

Fjord jabbed towards Caduceus with a thumb. “What he said. Half of us were underestimated at some point or another. You were for nearly fifteen years. Now it’s Essek’s turn.”

When the meeting came to a close at four in the morning—for Rosohna was behind Rexxentrum by a good few hours—Beauregard had taken Bren aside for a private word in the antechamber to the war room, where she stood with him by one of the thick trophy blades they had mounted against the wall. For a moment, he thought she’d take it down and have at him with it. Her steely blue eyes glinted in the mirror finish, fixed on the version of him distorted by reflection. When she finally turned to face him, the look she wore was one of whetted vengeance.

“You know what not to do, right?” she’d said quietly.

It was obvious.

“I would never,” he whispered in turn. “Not in a thousand years.”

She seemed to be scraping his microexpressions for data. He must not have been convincing her sufficiently, because she began to say, “I swear to god, Ermendrud, if I find out you touched him and he wasn’t—”

“You will not need to,” he gritted out, “because it will never happen. I know what it is to be at the whims of another. I would not put a soul through that experience if it killed me.”

At that, she finally seemed to relax. He hoped that she would have perceived the terror in his voice, but it was probably his conviction that gave him away. Though he was a Scourger, the Mighty Nein had never known him to not be a man of his word when it was a word of good. These past six months had changed him. Painfully.

Still, the fact that she doubted him left him feeling haunted.

She was right to doubt him. Just because he claimed to be removed from the abominations of his mentor did not mean they weren’t still buried inside him, hidden beneath his bones like a cancer.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” she’d said, voice raw. “It’s that… it’s always the people you want to trust the most, you know? That end up betraying you once they have power. Sometimes because someone else has power over them.”

He’d glimpsed something in her eyes that nearly frightened him: the sea of white fire from a mind fixated on betrayal. He did not know much beyond what he had dredged up during his initial research into her personal history, but now he knew not to follow the footsteps of whoever had burned her in the past, lest he find himself adrift in that sea.

“Not always,” he’d said by way of promise. He held out his hand for her to grasp. She took it in her calloused grip and looked at him with a gaze that begged so clearly, so openly, Protect him, you motherfucker, and squeezed until he felt his bones creak.

He’d Teleported back to Zadash after that, landing in the alley behind his destination. After sorting out the wasps buzzing beneath his skin, he shook out his nervy hands and marched straightaway into his enchanter’s shop.

One of the privileges of becoming Archmage was to have a designated enchanter. Pumat Sol was an easy-going man—men?—and not only did he work on the Empire’s payroll, but he did it fast; there were four of him.

After setting down an amount of gold that would have made his long-deceased family weep for joy, he expended his only eighth level, for he was out of sevenths, and made it back to the abbey in Rexxentrum from which he had departed. Olivier awaited him on the parked carriage beside the market stall and jumped to attention at his arrival. Gold was thrown; commissions were made for an upholstery and interior decor delivery later today. He made it back to his new estate with a margin more hope in his pocket than before, as the Nein seemed to have that effect on him.

Though when Essek had admitted his inability to cast, that hope had wavered.

Bren had pivoted by supplying solutions. He’d been hearty and jovial and patient, but that itself was a calculated move. Essek could not know the true panic that had taken place behind his eyes. It would not do the poor man any good.

It was not as though there weren’t abundant work-arounds to the limitation. It is… no massive obstruction if Essek cannot cast.

It is not. It is not.

Bren convinces himself that it is not after a while of looping the problem in his head enough to drive himself sick. Later that night he sleeps in a disarray of sheets, overheating from the roar of the fireplace. Sweat amasses into lakes behind his neck from the furnace of nerves he has become, thinking himself into a friction-fire as he is.

Gods, how is he going to do this if Essek cannot cast.

Bren finds sleep sometime in the night, and when he dreams, he sees a locked jar in his mind.

He tries to open it. The lid does not pop off. Instead, the glass shatters entirely in his hands and spills out a froth of blackness like blood, and though he tries to collect it and pour it back frantically, there is no undoing the shattering of that jar.

There is only the black water around his feet, and he finds it slowly rising.

When Bren asks how Essek had slept his second night in the estate, Essek declares that he had been able to rest much better, crediting his luxurious new conditions. When he says so, his smile is very tight and small, which means he had not slept a wink and was instead lying through his teeth.

Blaming Essek for such a lie would be nothing short of cruel. It is a lie for Bren’s sake, not his own. It is an attempt at a mercy he is in no position to bestow.

The Dask gala is less than a week away now. Bren has little time to ponder what it will mean for the both of them. Instead, he is busy trying to get a sleep-deprived, sluggish Essek into the carriage, already significantly late for their first outing since Essek’s arrival.

Rexxentrum’s memory is not as short as Bren wishes it to be. The city remembers Essek as the captured savage in black bonds and brass muzzle, and they must be preening in pleasure at the thought of the Shadowhand’s stark failure to escape from the inevitability of the Empire’s power. They will not, in all likelihood, expect Essek to step out from the carriage free of restraints or comfortable in dress, but then again, it is not the desires of Rexxentrum that Bren is playing for—it is Archmage Ermendrud’s, of which no one can say to truly know but himself.

Essek’s dignity depends on the limit of plausible mercies afforded by Archmage Ermendrud. If the optics of a war prisoner receiving mercy and dignity—which is an oxymoron, an impossibility—creates friction against Archmage Ermendrud’s public character, then he simply has to find a way to explain to everyone how, nein, no, in fact, this seemingly small comfort to the Shadowhand is in reality grandly humiliating for him, you see, because… such and such. And he will have regained his credibility again, so long as he comes up with a sufficiently diabolical justification and sounds intelligent as he explains it.

He whispers the plot once more to Essek in the box carriage. With the black veil over Essek’s head, Bren cannot see exactly the expression on his face, but his hands are exceptionally bloodless and pale. Bren knows better than to reach out and touch them.

Tonight’s destination is a fête hosted by Soltryce’s own Professor of Magical Beasts, Hunila Seledo: a crafty dwarven woman with nothing short of two hundred golden hoops around her hefty black locks. Well-connected and politically-minded, Professor Seledo had never missed an opportunity to make her opinion known within the council of advisers to Prime Arbiter Truscan. And though Truscan had no need to take a council of opinions, House Seledo had always been one of Rexxentrum’s favorite noble families—a status which the professor secured by throwing such charity bashes as tonight’s.

Bren tries not to recoil at the sight of the chained hippogriffs standing guard at the entrance to the manor, which stretches long and white into the Candles like a tapeworm. Professor Seledo never needed the income from Soltryce; her family’s estate was larger than his own, and with certainty, their coffers were far deeper. At the entrance stands a bold limestone statue of Pelor, serving as a centerpiece to a fountain that radiates a giant blossom of heat. The snow melts at a wide radius around the water, and the socialites gather at the lip of the fountain for some privacy in a haven from the cold.

He disembarks from the carriage in front of those very nobles. Hearing his arrival, they turn their golden faces to Bren like sunflowers leeching sunlight. He exchanges a few brief call-outs with them—Professor Seledo herself calls, “Why, Master Ermendrud, we did not expect you so soon!” which is a pointed jab at their tardiness—and he steels himself to bring out Essek.

One trim black boot peeks out from the darkness of the carriage and lands on the first step. A second boot follows. Burgeoning out of the black is a veiled shadow of a man, impossible to distinguish from the rest of the night’s cover save for the gleaming silver collar around his neck. He descends like a black owl, sound dampened by his heavy brocade robes, until he stands beside Bren in his full dress and contempt. The resemblance to his old self is clear, if wan; he looks like a man in a Shadowhand costume.

At first, the crowd froths with waves of surprise, then dissent. When at last they recognize that the Shadowhand is not, in fact, here of his own volition, they ease and collectively chuckle in enjoyment of the power Bren so easily displays.

“Good gods,” calls a halfling—a young man Bren recalls was once lambasted for losing thousands of gold in Ank’Harel gambling houses. “Is he supposed to be so pale? He’s sick!”

“Drow get paler in the cold,” says a tall human girl. Her companion titters, “Yes, yes, I heard about that,” in an aside, the two of them blissfully ignorant of whatever malaise might cause a prisoner to turn ashen.

The halfling splutters, “Is this safe? Is he contained?”

A resplendent half-elven gentleman answers before Bren can. “Of course he is. The Assembly know what they’re doing. He wouldn’t have brought a Kryn here if he were dangerous, isn’t that right, Master Ermendrud?”

The night air starts to feel too hot for even his cloaks. Bren does not envy whatever steaming humiliation Essek must be feeling—but this will not be made any easier by stubbornness, so he pries his grimace into a convincing smile and gestures to his captive.

“Exactly right. How does he look?” he says with charm. “I dressed him myself.”

“Oh, he’s a beauty.”

“The boots! Wherever did you get boots like that?”

“Why give them to it and not me?” pouts the tall human girl, batting her silk fan gamely.

The partygoers start to swarm the newcomers in a semicircle. Bren represses the urge to assume a fighting stance.

Seledo cackles and says, “Is that so? You must be less adventurous than some of my other guests here. Have you seen their pets? Bless them, they must be so cold.”

The insinuation: that Essek shared a status with them.

At its best, all the smoke and mirrors around pets was to keep the courts from paying taxes on exotic entertainment. At its worst, it was to trade in flesh beneath the nose of the Righteous Brand. Elite concubines might be chosen strategically, or in some cases, won from battle, but it was all still penned in parchment; without the protections of extramarital arrangements, pets served the needs of others at their master’s ultimate command. Pimped out, as Beauregard had said.

The only reason Truscan and his iron fist hadn’t already squeezed the pet culture out of Rexxentrum entirely was because it would have been fruitless. Like illicit substances—like monster parts, blood artifacts, and death—it was a stain on the tapestry of the imperial bourgeois that not even the Arbiter’s law could bleach out. Everyone knew at least one. Certainly, had Bren ever sought to find one such pet, he would have only needed to visit a ball and spoken to the first beautiful person he saw. There was a one-in-ten chance it would be to some bored, slightly tipsy whore waiting to be summoned into bed by their lover’s business partner of the night. A lover with the rank of Duke, or Starosta, or perhaps even Martinet.

At Seledo’s words, Bren scans the crowd around himself in a flash. Of the twenty or so nobles collected, one is dressed less for prestige and more for attention: a half-elven young man, strong and strikingly beautiful and oiled wherever his skin is exposed, wearing scant to defend himself from the cold. Bren tears his eyes away from a particularly glossy turn of a calf and guides Essek by the hand onward into the manor, clenching his teeth in defense against the siege of exclamations wherever they go.

It seems that the court has not yet reached a consensus on how to feel about Essek’s presence. Skepticism and fear fan out like a cloud—wide eyes tracking them as though Bren escorts a walking bomb and not a man—and if a guest trusts Bren enough not to have brought a dangerous criminal to a party, they still gaze upon Essek with mixed disgust or apprehension. In the very best of cases their eyes slide over Essek entirely, feigning that he isn’t even there. Perhaps they were offended by Bren’s audacity to bring a crick, if a declawed one, into their exclusive atmosphere.

Wanting to ease Essek into the challenge of socialization, Bren takes him sight-seeing around the museum that is the Seledo estate. In all, it is more vast and sterile a property than Bren thought possible. The interior reeks strongly of clarifying soaps and potpourri. Trophies of monstrous beasts skulk behind red curtains, and at least two servers bustle around for every one guest, which makes the traffic in the main foyer areas nearly impossible to navigate.

It occurs to him that he doesn’t even know what this charity fête is for. No one has mentioned any part of it to him, and the only subject he overhears consistently is on the wine being served.

As they walk side by side, Bren gently rubs Essek’s faintly jittering hand between two of his own. At least now he has an excuse to warm it and ease his own nerves.

A manic-looking serving girl sails past, screeches to a halt, then turns around and offers Bren some splendid little finger foods. When he accepts, she visibly wars with herself on whether to offer them to Bren’s companion as well. He can imagine her thinking, Is that his concubine? Did I miss something?, and he takes it easy on her by taking the platter out of her hands.

Later, in a moment of relative privacy, he passes some of those beet-red quiches to Essek.

“How are you enduring thus far?”

Essek stares down at the quiches, a vein pulsing beneath the thin skin of his temple. He lets them drop out of his hands onto the stone floor.

That is an answer enough. Onward they walk, Bren sufficiently shut-up for the moment. In time, Professor Seledo catches them side-stepping around a crowd of over-eager guests and swoops in, stealing away Bren by the elbow and dragging Essek in kind.

“Let me give you a tour,” she says with the grin of someone who never tires of repeating the same twenty minutes over and over again.

Seledo leads them past the guards blockading private areas of her home. She is keen to prattle on about the hippogriffs and the gargoyles by her front door and the domesticated mimics shaped like dressers in her bedroom, and Bren lets her, smiling politely, inserting an inquiry every now and then. If he survives the next two hours without angering her or admitting that he does not, in fact, find it interesting how scalping a gorgon will regrow the snakes right back, he will call the night a success. At least he showed his face again to this court of horrors. If they survive this unscathed, he will be positively gleeful.

Rather, he would have been gleeful. That was, had he not seen who had been standing at the end of the sitting room.

Essek side-steps close enough that their arms press together, electric fear radiating from him. Bren puts his arm around Essek’s shoulders, Essek’s hand at his back, and he continues on walking beside Seledo, minding the prickle of Johannes Dask’s gaze on the back of his neck.

In the end, breathing the same air as the Dasks is just as much an inevitability as the capture of Ashguard.

“Oh, come off it, Bren,” cackles Seledo. Only three glasses of honey-wine in and she’s already gotten far too comfortable with him, clapping his knee in the way of a friend of thirty years. “You’re driving me mad, you are. If I didn’t know any better, I might say you were waiting for dear old Trent to topple over. You were made for this job!”

She says this because he made a mild suggestion of how to better the public perspective on basilisks. It was in jest: Start a market for the health benefits of their eggs.

Seledo laughs at him, as though he told her this inane idea in complete sincerity, and as though she is the first one between the two of them to discover the joke in it, which makes him want to throttle her.

He sits across from her in the sitting room surrounded by a menagerie of other guests, speaking louder and louder to be heard, trying not to be swallowed up by her confounding upholstery. The cushions beneath him are shaped like bunches of grapes and he has yet to find a comfortable position to sit in, and her arcane lamps shine far too brightly for anyone’s eyes, least of all drow.

Essek sits beside him, receding into as much of his shadow as possible. Bren keeps one hand on his wrist or his knee to keep him close, else someone might snatch him out from under him.

Duke Johannes Dask stands at the far end of the salon, swishing a goblet in one hand and holding a raw-looking plate of hors d'oeuvres in the other as he converses animatedly with a small crowd of monster fanatics; men wearing hunter’s kilts despite the formal dress code. Every now and then he takes a bite and pops something bloody-pink between his teeth. Bren has the dim feeling it might be some kind of organ, or perhaps an eyeball.

For the next awful eternity of small talk, Bren tracks Johannes’s movements across the room without betraying to Seledo that his attentions are elsewhere. He replies automatically and convincingly, injecting charm to stifle the fire of his nerves, and starts moving his eyes on a circuit. He glances down at his food, down at Essek’s hand, back up at Seledo. Eye contact, eye contact. Over her shoulder, Johannes; down again at his food. He chuckles affectionately at her jokes, then rubs Essek’s knee to draw the eye of two or three adjacent guests.

Bren glances back towards Johannes for a split second, only to find that Johannes is already looking at him.

It is a rapier riposte. Bright and flashing, those eyes freeze Bren’s breath in place.

Don’t come near here, Bren’s mind seethes. Stay right there.

Johannes begins to part from his small crowd, amicable and smiling, to slither his way to them.

Here we go, sighs Bren inwardly.

Essek’s knees press together and lean like twin slabs into Bren’s thigh. Bren reclines as fully as he can against the jumble of sofa cushions and tucks Essek into his side, at once protective of Essek and inviting ogling at the Shadowhand’s strange new servility. No one has asked about it yet, and the answer dances on Bren’s tongue, premeditated.

“You sure trained him well,” says Johannes in a booming voice, sitting down hard enough at Seledo’s side to bounce her away from him a few inches. She makes an oof sound in her throat and sits back up with slightly ruffled hair.

“Your grace,” greets Bren. “Have I? I thought they came like this.”

If Seledo notices the way his voice has gained a sudden body and bass to it—competing with Johannes’—she does not comment. She wrinkles her little rat-like nose and points a stubby finger at him. “Ah! You’re being ironic, aren’t you?”

“Ja,” says Bren, as if this is something she is very clever for noticing.

“Oh, do tell us how you did it, then,” she says, her voice a sudden squirreling coo. “I’ve been wanting to ask all night, but I didn’t want to overstep!”

Now you’re worried about overstepping? Bren thinks.

“Indulge us, Master Ermendrud,” Johannes urges. He has a simpering voice with an obscene, coy little lilt that scalds Bren’s ears to listen to. It’s like hearing his own voice distorted by a ghoul. Johannes does not disguise his intentions, and his transparency is somehow worse than his usual opacity.

Fortunately, this is precisely what Bren and Essek prepared for.

With one hand, Bren pulls back the veil obfuscating Essek’s face.

The air in the room changes dramatically. Several conversations around him fizzle out into silence as the guests detect the movement; the suggestion that they might be witnessing gossip material about the captured Shadowhand. Bren takes this magnetic attention and pulls on it by bringing himself and Essek to stand.

Another ripple of silence. Bren gently scrapes aside an ottoman to open up space between the circle of seats serving as their auditorium. He meets eyes with Essek in this moment between moments, searching for something to gird himself with.

Essek’s gaze is a blaze of growing courage and indigence. He smiles in that tiny, nervous way, and no one but Bren knows it to be a smile of assurance.

“My dear,” he says, throwing some volume into his voice for theatrics’ sake. “Our guests want to ask you some questions.”

Essek hums in dim acknowledgement. Oh, he is in good hands.

“Who are you?” asks Bren.

To both their excitement, it seems the whole room awaits Essek’s answer.

“My name is Essek,” he says simply. There is an emptiness in the delivery, a dreaminess. The words of a shambling, pleasant husk.

“And your title?”

“I have no such thing.”

“From whom do you take orders?

“You. I am your servant,” he says, as if Bren needs reminding.

Bren rolls his eyes. “Before.”

Essek blinks with open and sweet confusion, his eyelashes framing his eyes with innocence. “I think… I overheard some reference that I was once Shadowhand. To a place called the Kryn Dynasty.”

Johannes leans in, eyebrows tensed. “What is this?”

Bren winks at him to beg his patience and turns back towards Essek, holding both his hands as one might hold their betrothed at the altar. “And who told you this?”

Essek wets his lips and shuffles his feet cluelessly. “Someone. Perhaps you did, and I’ve forgotten.”

Seledo and three other nobles’ mouths drop open. A wine glass quickly clinks against the surface of a table, abandoned. All movement has ceased.

“And what do you remember about your time in the Dynasty?”

Essek blinks his lovely violet eyes again and allows no light to enter them. “I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.”

Bren drinks in the confusion storming. “Tell me about your time as the Shadowhand, then.”

There is silence. A long silence. Essek chuckles demurely and tugs his wrists away like a child would, but Bren maintains hold. “I am afraid I do not…” His accent is stronger than usual. “I do not… I do not think I was ever the Shadowhand, of all people. That seems a bit far-fetched.” He glances down at himself and the cloaks around him and glances back up to Bren, his face soft and peaceful. “Was I?”

Bren’s heart beats like a mallet behind his ribs. “No.” He puts a condescending curl into his voice. “No, you were not.”

“Oh.” In the silence, Essek’s breath is softer than a feather landing on the ground. “Ah. Well… Please do not confuse me next time. My memory…” He shakes his head, white hair reflecting all the reds and golds of the uniforms around him. “I confuse easily these days.”

“Don’t worry yourself, dearest.” Bren brushes his knuckles along Essek’s cheek as the bow wrapping up the theatrics. Essek tilts his head towards the touch like a pet cat.

Johannes is glaring a concentrated ray through Bren’s head, probably trying to boil the meat of his brain with anger alone.

Bren turns to face the guests. “Anyone care to ask my dear new friend a question?”

Thirty voices begin to clamor over each other all at once in a racket louder than an auction house. Bren squeezes Essek’s hand with satisfaction, and Essek squeezes back.

“You fried him,” says Johannes plainly.

The gargantuan greenhouses of House Seledo are warm and balmy by way of evocation enchantments. Some of them home peach and orange trees that grow tall and luscious in even the height of winter; some are nurseries for Marquesian orchids, Emon gardenias, Nicodranian hyacinths. Of all the places for a secret confrontation in the middle of a party, Johannes sure chose the best one, Bren gives him that much.

“Naturally,” Bren chuckles, batting the dirt from the bottom hems of his nice red cloak. This is an expensive garment to get fertilizer on, and Prestidigitation only works so well. Essek walks beside him at a jolly trot, their hands linked like young lovers, and they pay no mind to the frustrations of the Duke trailing behind them. Essek’s hand has graduated from freezing cold to burning hot and clammy. Bren hopes this is because of the adrenaline.

However, Johannes has no such trouble walking over the mounds and roots as they do, and he cuts off Bren before the exit to the greenhouse, arms crossed in front of his strong archer’s chest. He does not tote his mythical bow behind his back tonight, so Bren feels less concerned about a threat of violence than he does about being made. Even so, he has a good feeling about this.

“Look at him.” Johannes gestures with laid-back vulgarity up and down Essek’s body. “We gave you intelligence. We did you a favor, Duchy to Assembly, and you erased it all.”

Bren pulls in Essek to his side by the waist slightly too quickly, making Essek thud against his ribs. “Modified, sure.”

“Modifying a memory does not erase it. He’s tabula rasa. You scattered everything to the winds with the intention of melting his brainpan.”

“But he’s not catatonic, is he?” tuts Bren. “I wield a more careful scalpel than that.”

“And for what? To throw away the gift itself, just to fuck the packaging?”

Bren pauses in his stride, face soured. “But whatever makes you think I squandered anything? My friend, please. Give me some credit.”

Johannes’s voice regains its booming, accusatory quality. “Then explain yourself.”

The jousting has ended. Bren sighs, gently swinging Essek against his body in a half-dance; Essek participates as much as he can, which is very little. “I could have erased his memories, yes. Your wife knows how to do as much. But simple countermeasures could one day undo my careful work: a cleric’s restoration, an activation word fed to him by a spy. Thence, I needed to do more than erase. I couldn’t just steal the furniture from the house, so I burned it down, rebuilt it from scratch with my own building blocks, and reupholstered everything myself. Before any of the originals were lost, I extracted them and encoded them into my own mind. I’m sure you’re familiar with the boons of a good memory.”

Johannes stares at him, wildly and quietly furious while recomposing himself to that veneer of perfect teeth and mein.

“So yes,” Bren goes on, “you might say I modified his memory, in the sense that I replaced the process by which it records and regurgitates information. Much easier to do than replace individual memories—what tedium, no?—and more permanent that way too. No need to worry about pesky leaks. I had all weekend to play around with him. Didn’t I, my darling?” He directs the last question to Essek, squeezed against his side, who chuckles and pulls away sweetly as if this is all in good fun.

“And what of this confession?” Johannes demurrs. “Telling him to his face? Will he not…”

He freezes. Bren waits. Johannes eventually yields an Ahh of understanding. “He won’t, will he? That’s your first item on the list when you return to privacy. Wipe him all over again.”

Bren touches his nose. Bingo.

Johannes flares his nostrils. Stark in the moonlight, he smiles wider to compensate for his internal raving. “He is less valuable without his secrets. The point of sharing him was to share an asset that would remain in your possession and appreciate over time. Not a resource to be depleted.” There’s a tiny timbre of concern in his voice, and Bren infers that Daphne will give him the verbal hiding of a lifetime when returns home.

Bren casts another glance down towards Essek, who looks back up at him with gentle, mild eyes, like a lamb’s. “He was dead anyway. What is the point of intelligence left unread?”

A vein bulges on the Duke’s temple. He says chipperly, “My apologies, Master Ermendrud. It seems we have misunderstood one another’s intentions,” with the barely-disguised loathing of, Not all of us spit on the plates we eat from.

“Ach, well. I don’t expect I am the only one who thought to… deplete the resource, as you said,” Bren says cooly. “Your wife had three days with him. She probably got to the best bits first, didn’t she? I had to suck on the bone.”

Johannes does not allude one way or the other with his expression, to Bren’s disappointment. He was hoping he might get some affirmation that she did, indeed, peek at Essek’s memories. Ah, well. At the lack of rally or response, Archmage Ermendrud and prized Essek take their leave, skirting around Johannes’s field of malice.

“Bren.”

He pauses his stride, hand on the jamb leading out of the greenhouse. “Ja?”

When he turns to face Johannes, something shifts. Essek feels it too. The aura of having been mildly inconvenienced darkens into a type of honed-in attention that makes Bren’s skin feel invaded by beetles. Johannes Dask takes three proud steps forth to close the distance between himself and Essek. Bren holds his ground, grip on Essek’s hand tightening.

From hardly a foot of space away, Johannes utters something through the misty air in Elvish.

Essek replies. Johannes urges back. Essek blinks, recoiling with offense, and snaps in return.

The last words hiss and slide from Johannes’s mouth as he jerks his head discreetly in Bren’s direction.

It is not a spell. It is nothing material. And yet the effect it has on Essek is immediate: his hand, which had been clutching Bren’s like a lifeline, goes slack and cold as a corpse. His false smile dies; his character disintegrates.

Johannes flicks the very tip of Essek’s left ear and peels away, marching back with victory in his stride towards the manor. Bren tries to meet Essek’s eye again, but Essek only stares after Johannes with enduring horror.

The warmth of the greenhouse is a blaze. Bren drags Essek out of the gardens towards the carriages with poorly disguised urgency. The moment they make it to the cover behind Olivier’s carriage, Essek tears his hand away from Bren’s and slams his knees onto the ground, bearing down as he violently vomits his dinner, his lunch, his breakfast into the foaming dirt.

Olivier makes a thin panicked noise and falls to his knees to bat Essek between the shoulder blades. Bren stands petrified, motionless, clubbing himself over and over again in his imagination—great acting, you fool, you scoundrel, you did this—and has to shake himself out of his stupor to bow beside Essek and ask, “What is it? What is it?” even though he knows perfectly well what it is: Johannes’s horrible words or not, the source of his pain is this fucking plan.

Essek shudders and convulses like that for a good long while until he spits a final mouthful of gray matter into the reeds, then contorts his face into the single most agonized expression Bren has ever seen Essek make. Not even when he was being executed did he make such a face, with his eyes and nose crumpling like an infant child’s yowl. The faintest whispering of wind escapes his throat, a fraction of a fraction of a scream, and then the expression vanishes.

He relaxes entirely. A supernatural calm.

Bren’s heart stops for as long as it takes to realize that Essek is still responsive. He and Olivier watch in silence as Essek slowly puts his robes back in order, wipes his mouth, and stands straight again, clearing his throat around the burn of vomit.

Just as slowly, Bren stands up after him. He waits. Two tear tracts glimmer on Essek’s cheeks, bright as gems.

Essek makes a limp attempt at Prestidigitation before remembering himself and aborting it before completion. He hiccups. Bren doesn’t wait for him to ask and casts the spell himself to clean the bile out of Essek’s mouth, and Essek’s eyes flutter in surprise at the stimulation of magic down his throat.

Bren winces, prepared to apologize for the invasion, but Essek shakes his head in dismissal. Only then does he meet Bren’s eye.

“Gods,” Bren mutters. He does not know what in the realm to do. “Gods, Essek. What did he say?”

There is a damning hell of a silence. The world could have died, he would be none the wiser.

“Nothing. You were perfect,” is all Essek says, small and resolute, before he pulls himself into the carriage.

He is unconscious by the time they arrive at the manor. Bren wakes him and takes him inside. Estefina cooks, Viskov cleans, and all the while Essek stares at his new life with a removed acceptance that reminds Bren of a man on the gallows.

Before, they could pretend to be allies and spies in the hypothetical. Now, they have to do the ugly work themselves.

Reduced to an apparition and wholly unrespondent to any interrogation about Johannes, Essek bids Bren the shortest goodnight thus far and gently clicks shut the door to his room. Bren wrestles with the urge to go find an actual club with which to do the self-clubbing, but a rap on the heavy iron door knockers downstairs breaks him out of it.

He descends and flings open the door, letting in a flurry of snow. Nothing but the forceful cold of winter occupies the doorway.

Bren recognizes immediately what this is and sighs. Not tonight, he wishes he could say, but he has no choice.

He steps aside enough for an invisible Astrid Becke to make her way into the foyer.

“You could enter my home the normal way,” Bren grouses, pouring out wine into one of the two glasses pinched in his fingers. His study is not so large as to serve as a library, but it does well enough as an office or a meeting room. It has an elaborate lock, which he throws shut before sitting in the leather-bound chair at his heartwood desk.

The voice comes from closer than he expected. “Old habits.”

He rubs his eyes between his thumb and forefinger and swings his chair to the left to face where she must be standing. “Why tonight?”

“Because you haven’t spoken a word to me in a month.”

“Twenty-five days is not a month,” Bren mumbles, tipping back the glass into his mouth. He releases a parched sound and pours another for himself and a second one for his ghost, setting it on the table for her retrieval. The glass levitates into the middle-distance and slowly drains into nothingness.

“It is a long time for us.”

“We’ve survived longer.”

“You’re changing.” Her Common switches into Zemnian. “You’re growing distant. Something is happening.”

“I got promoted,” he says bitterly. “You didn’t.”

“That’s not it.”

He clenches the glass in his grip, breath fogging the inside of it as he swallows down the rest. “Don’t pretend to be sentimental, Astrid. That’s my job.”

Her empty glass floats back down onto the table. Something about the way it lands—precise, controlled—reads of barely disguised anger.

“Would you like to hear my theories?”

He knew where this was going the second she appeared on his doorstep. He doesn’t know why he was trying so hard to believe he could avoid this.

“I really don’t.”

“The drow sleeping in your bedroom,” she says. “His memories have not been wiped. We can start with that.”

“Correct,” he says brightly. She was at the party; of course she was. No reason to prolong this any longer. “But he does not sleep in my bedroom.”

“Right. Because he is but an ally.”

Oh. There was an ontic note of sadness, there. She wasn’t even trying to hide it.

Bren looks through the invisible woman and makes eyes with the portrait of a wizened mage behind her. “Astrid,” he rumbles in warning.

“Just asking questions.”

“If you want something to do with him, tell me already.”

Bad answer. Too fast, showing his hand too early. Bren winces internally, already so over this conversation. Astrid’s chuckle rings through the ether to his ears as beautiful and scraping as it always was.

“How long have you been working with him to undermine the Empire?”

She must not have been present at their conversation on the subject; she would have known that Essek had not gone into this with that goal in mind. Or maybe she was asking for redundancy’s sake.

“Two days,” he says. She laughs huskily, disbelieving. He shrugs and continues, “Believe me or don’t. He was my partner in illicit research before this all began. My friction against the Empire was a… long-running thread in my own life, not his.”

Wind whips past his ear. Bren jerks to the side in avoidance of a crystal glass shattering against the wall behind his head. For a while, Bren listens only to the sound of Astrid’s mathematically perfect breathing, ragged and pained in the pin-drop silence.

He waits in silence for her reply for six long minutes. Eventually, the cushion of an armchair on the other side of the room depresses. He stands and goes to sit on the opposite armchair and listen to more of her breathing.

When finally her voice croaks out of the quiet, she says, “You’ve ruined us.”

“Don’t give all the credit to me.” Bren cracks his fingers idly. His head is beginning to ache something fierce. “The three of us were never united perfectly. We were propping up a tower designed to collapse. It’s not my fault it took this long.”

“You were already gone a long time ago,” she says lowly, in tones of realization.

His tongue takes a while to work out of its leadenness. “I thought you were too. You and Wulf.” He loathes to sound insincere, but there is no other way to put it: “My heart breaks to know you were still… holding on.”

The leather squeaks as she shifts her weight. He pictures her in her Volstrucker robes, the ones with the handsome trousers and the long black vestiges and the gloves that always made her hands look comely and strong.

“Gods, I could kill you,” she says. Her voice does not commit to the threat whatsoever.

“I know,” he sighs.

“Have you bed him yet?” she asks. It’s not jealousy. She’s curious to know how long it will take for their dynamic to disintegrate.

Bren swings his eyes up at the ceiling to stare at the vaulting wooden latticework and the little cloud paintings squeezed between staves. “I have affection for him. Haven’t thought farther than that.”

“Is he any good?”

“You think I dodged the question.”

“I don’t think anything. I’m describing what you just did.”

“I think my love is poisoned,” he admits, conceding truth so long as he gets to drop the subject. “Dead end. I won’t try anything, and I don’t care to throw my plans into a bladewall simply because I can’t control my cock.”

“Good thing, too,” says Astrid mildly. “He looks like he’d squeal if you put your teeth on him.”

“You have no idea who you speak of if you think he’d squeal at anything.”

“Give me the Volstrucker program.”

That’s what this is about. Bren closes his eyes, lets his pupils find meaning in the darkness. “What will you do with it?”

“You haven’t destroyed it yet. The records are still there. You haven’t given a single order to any of us.”

“Yes.”

“Let me control it. Let me release the Volstrucker that exist and save the children to come. I’ll take the records and bring—”

He slants his head down finally to face her, the absence of her, and says, “You came all this way to blackmail me into doing something I was already going to do?”

Her stifled silence is evidence enough. Five little grooves form on the armrest where her hand clenches. “You weren’t moving. You weren’t doing anything.”

“I was panicking,” Bren shouts, then reels his voice back into a seethe. “I was adrift at fucking sea, Astrid. What do we do when our leaders, our parents, our tutors are dead? The world changes one day to the next. The adjustment wasn’t immediate for the three of us back then, was it? I needed to fucking think.”

“It should have gone to me,” she hisses, shoving the ottoman over with her boot as she flies to her feet. “He picked you as his annex for nostalgia and vanity, nothing more. You could free yourself from so much misery if only you recognized the limitation of your weak stomach. What happened to you, Bren? You used to be made of the same noxious stuff as us.”

He stands after her, whispering hard at nothing, at thin air. “This position should go to no one. No one at all. Not you, not me. You want the Volstrucker gone? Do it. Fine. I give you the power to assemble the resources. I have other concerns now.”

“Like the end of an Empire?”

“Like peace. You are a better mage than this war deserves,” he says, and storms over to the door to open it for her. The whole act is a farce: she could pretend to leave and stay standing there in that very room the whole night, but he listens for her footsteps until they sound on the other side.

He stands there for a while, facing the empty hallway with his eyes burning like an acid splash. For the third or fourth time tonight, he believes she’s left, until after a minute of that silence something blunt and ephemeral grabs his hand.

He jolts, then identifies it as Astrid’s own hand. He lets her take it and open it in front of him. Two silver pinky rings tumble into his palm. A matching set, made to stack together.

Before she can protest, he casts Detect Magic. Divination radiates from them. Wherever she retrieved this, it must have cost her a fortune and a favor.

“I know you’re commissioning a modified version of Trent’s amulets,” she whispers. A strained, wavering note of true kindness seems to be fighting for release from her throat. “You… You care for him a great deal. And we both know what will happen to him eventually in this climate. The treatment he will receive. The threats to his dignity. This will keep him connected to you telepathically so long as you both attune, even through the amulet.”

An invisible finger moves the rings around in his palm like ripples in water. Oh, how he misses her little tells.

“And the parameters?” he asks.

“No limit to time or distance, save for traveling between planes.”

Hefty. Perhaps even Legendary. Bren’s mouth works soundlessly while his heart twists itself into knots. “I don’t know if he can attune to anything. He has—“

“You’ll find a way.” Astrid’s voice is farther away now, down the hallway. “Be clever. I’ll tell Wulf you miss him.”

He has hardly the time to ask how she knew this, why she thought to gift it to him, or even to thank her, before her warmth in the air is gone.

Chapter Text

When Essek sleeps, he dreams of a woman speaking to him in mellow tones beneath the blanket of a sunset. He does not know her name, but it is a wrath. Her throat bulges open as if by an ulcer and erupts onto him, an execution without an executioner, and he wakes in the night with the taste of her blood in his mouth.

He does not speak to Bren the following day.

Better put, he does not speak to a soul. He does not leave his room, and he breaks his fast at the brisk intervention of Estefina’s crêpes, which he picks at until they are cold, then eats with honey folded inside in the hopes they will sit in his stomach.

At around three in the afternoon—Essek only knows this by glancing at the gnomish clock mounted on the wall, for he has drawn all curtains shut—he runs a bath for himself without summoning the assistance of Viskov. He slides down against the porcelain backing until the bathwater just barely crests above his nose, flickering glossy and yellow in the arcane lamplight, and imagines himself as the lost egg of a frog clutch, jiggling formlessly in a black sea. Then he imagines himself as a beaten dog, for he certainly feels like one; then as a bird plucked of its feathers to resemble raw poultry, for all the needles and goose pimples burning his skin.

The sensation of a hundred eyes on him—seething, prying, hunting—he does not wish to remember so soon.

He tips his head forward into the arches of his wet and skinned knees, releasing all of the air from within his lungs in a bubbling scream that no one hears.

He does not wish to remember any of it, and yet it presses against his stomach and breathes hot condensation against the glass walls of his mind.

The heat emanating through Bren’s body had been his only solace all night. The winter gale and the rays of collective hatred had left him shivering and bare, clinging like a child to his companion. He might as well have been naked from the way the savages so openly stripped him with their eyes; he might as well have gotten down on his knees and opened his mouth and started serving as a pet would. Any attempt to retain his dignity would be futile after some point. The worst was an inevitability.

Bren would not make Essek warm his bed, that was true, but the stories being spun about him—all because of this plan that they agreed to—were already climbing too high over his head. Essek had been bracing for assaults on his dignity, but he had not expected half of them to be originating from himself.

Playing dumb was one thing. This inane display of incompetence to convince all of Rexxentrum that he had been robbed of his mind… In the past, Essek would have claimed that he’d rather have fallen on a knife than be so publicly humiliated. Yes, the plan was working, but it stripped him of his hard-earned intellect: thus it was a non-negotiable. They would think of something else.

But then, in the past, Essek had never seen the white glint of a blade as it rose to split his throat apart. In the past, Essek had never needed to confront the fact that he was, and has always been, a coward.

And frankly, there is no alternative.

The Modify Memory plan was not Bren’s idea. Apparently it was a suggestion from a highly trusted firbolg in the group he operated with. Bren would not allow Essek to think that he had come up with the idea himself, which was a pitiable way of dodging blame that did not exist. Essek blamed no one for this hell, certainly not Bren. If Essek had anyone to blame, it was either the atrocious Dasks or it was his own short-sightedness, that he imagined he would escape this mess of a war unscathed.

Light, he ought to go down and speak with Bren already. The poor man must be strangling himself.

But then, as Essek rises out of the chilling bathwater, he remembers the source of his short-term panic, and a black hand of fear and pain squeezes his stomach.

In the heat of the orchard, Johannes’s words had penetrated Essek’s skin to the marrow. In that gourmand-rot of a voice, he’d said:

“You saw those eyes on you. Everyone in this city wants to run you through, and that’s with and without a sword.“

“I do not know what at all you mean,” Essek had said lightly, upholding the illusion of incompetence. He’d noted that Johannes’s Elvish was textbook-perfect, and that he was clearly devoted to the nuances of its phonetics.

But Johannes had not backed down. “I want to help you. Listen to me. Start taking philters. Potions of apathy. You will find them in apothecaries, sold at a bargain to whores.”

Essek recoiled, then had to find a way to justify the disgust. He lifted his chin, inflated his chest, and snapped, “No one gives me orders but Master Ermendrud.”

“It will make you stop caring,” urged Johannes, eyes fierce. “You remember not, but I tried to give you the mercy of death. He is the one who secured your suffering. He’ll shower you with gifts, hand you to the laps of strangers, and the whole time you’ll be the one adoring him. Watch how he will wait patiently, whispering sweet things in your ear, until you crawl to him on your hands and knees.”

“You—” Essek had stammered. “You don’t—”

“He is only a man. He doesn’t have a plan, he has an appetite. Don’t let him eat of you.”

He.

And he had nodded towards Bren.

To say Essek was horrified at the suggestion puts it far too lightly, but even with Johannes’s words stirring up the pot, he could not bring himself to doubt Bren any more than he could doubt the very notion of hope.

It was hope that he clung to, and thus it was Bren that he clung to. The two were slowly becoming one and the same the farther he plunged into the pits of this nightmare.

The prospect that he might lose his faith in Bren was unconscionable, firstly, and impossible secondly. He would never get out of this pit otherwise. The prospect that Johannes Dask had Essek’s wellbeing in mind was triply unthinkable.

And yet, Essek had been so thoroughly repulsed by the insinuation of Bren as a villain, so overwhelmed by the night’s violation, so frightened by the rapidly approaching annihilation of his future, that he had slammed his knees to the dirt and been sick with it.

Essek scrubs hard at his eyes, bruised and tormented by light as they are. He is not going to think about it.

Bile high in his throat again, Essek gets dressed and swallows down some butter-sopped crêpes from the cold breakfast laid out for him. At some point, he sits at the desk repurposed for his study and stares at the blank parchments until they hypnotize him and swallow him whole. He tries to trance, but the prospect of being awake with his thoughts resembles torture, so he puts himself to bed at four and wakes at nine to the sound of Estefina scurrying into his room. She leaves him a bowl of beef stew, a mug of digestive tea, and, as she refers to them, some sweeties: chocolate bonbons of the indulgent Empire sort.

With great effort, he sits up. Feeling less dignified than a febrile child, he drains the stew, chugs the tea, crunches on the bonbons—was he supposed to suck on them instead?—and goes horizontal again in the hopes of forcing himself to somehow reach repose through the night.

“Mighty Nein,” Essek murmurs into the air, rank with fear. “I hope you know what you are doing.”

There are no administrative duties for Bren to perform the following day. No parties and no balls, no meetings and no sittings. This is as close to life-saving as it gets for Bren, for whom the notion of leaving the manor to be a social human being sounds nothing short of impossible.

He drifts the day away, fairly certain that he is damned inexorably. The time vanishes in blips and distortions of gray movement before his eyes like the gaseous chaos of the realm before the Founding. Hours on, after a migraine settles around the base of his orbital sockets, he finds himself blinking in the middle of the kitchen with no explanation as to how he arrived there.

The room is warm despite the winter, lit by arcane sconces with golden hues. Estefina is speaking to him as though he has been exchanging words with her for a while already, so he shuts up, blames his faulty brain, and listens.

“He needs time, Master Ermendrud, don’t you think?” Estefina is sighing, busying her hands with the kneading of tomorrow’s potato rolls. Bren watches the mesmerizing flap, punch, and rolling out of the white mass for as long as it takes him to figure out a response.

It is nine on the hour, fourty-five on the minute hand in his mind. Time is all he has nowadays.

When the answer comes, he speaks in a quiet and surgical tone. “I worry that this is going to kill him anyway.”

She shakes her head, swishing her brown ringlets, and smacks the dough against the countertop hard enough to send flour flying. “You can’t possibly be blaming yourself for his circumstances, sir.”

“I surely can,” he mumbles back. There are still a few hunks of dough that Estefina has not portioned. His fingers itch to do something, so he rolls up his sleeves, washes his hands at the basin, and starts kneading beside her.

“Come off it, sir,” she says brashly. “He’s a tough’un. The less faith you have in him, the less he believes he can survive. That’s how we get the runt kittens back at home to live through their first month. It’s a winter of the soul, isn’t it? If I start saying to myself, ‘Och, poor little fellows, they’re doomed,’ and withdrawing all my touch and effort and milk, you think they’ll survive then?”

“I wouldn’t leave him to his own devices,” Bren mutters. Under his hands, the dough is smoother to knead and more yielding than he remembers; or perhaps he was just a child, and now his hands are a man’s. “I just think—“

“Keep an eye on him, mind,” she says, huffing with exertion. “I can still tell he’s the type to get a little flighty, so don’t go telling him all your worst fears from the get.”

Bren is quiet for a long time. Outside the window of the kitchen, the gardens seep black with night and whirl with snow. The dough is slowly toughening in his hands, and he has not seen Essek since last evening.

He thinks of Johannes’s secret threats. Of thousands of whispers, bold and cloying.

“He is not a kitten,” Bren says with a whap of the dough. “But I see what you mean.”

“Aye. Go talk to him in the morning, but don’t give him more reason to be fearful than he needs to be. Give him the opportunity to be strong, but don’t petrify him.”

Bren turns her words over in his head as he helps her put the buns to proof. He pauses with them in his hands, minding the time of day. “Why are you making these at nine in the evening?”

Estefina freezes as if caught by a ray of lamplight. She turns slowly to him with that sheepish, squiggly smile of hers, and says, “Oh, ah. Rilke quite likes the potato rolls, you see. I make them at night to free the ovens for the morning.” She squirms. “I know it’s not right for her diet and all. But they make her happy. Between her and your man, sir, I’m making two dozen rolls a day.”

Bren boggles. “Feeding Rilke what she wants is no crime. She’s no mundane horse. I’ll bet she can sustain herself on nothing but joy and moonlight either way.”

She stares at him, still awaiting admonishment. When it never arrives, she says thinly, “Right-o,” and takes the tray from his hands, evacuating to the backrooms of the kitchen where the proofing drawers are. Her voice echoes as she goes. “If you do see him in the morning, give Mister Essek all my love and kisses. He’s ever so sweet, you know. The poor lad.”

The following day, Bren regains a little more aplomb, so he goes out and fetches the commission he ordered from Pumat Sol early in the morning. He loiters in a thoroughfare of Zadashian street vendors for long enough to cool his mind, then orders some kartoffelpuffers—potato pancakes filled with cheese—to bring to Essek for breakfast, minding the way the grease saturates the brown parchment paper and smears his hands.

By the time he returns to the estate in his travel cloaks, it is a generous nine in the morning, and Essek’s bedroom door is wide-open.

Bren takes this as a good sign. He raps twice on the door just to make sure.

“Room service,” he calls softly.

Essek’s voice croaks from within, icy and neutral. “Bren.”

Bren shuts his eyes and walks into the room with the food extended out in front of him like an offering to a leopard. He suspects Essek won’t be indisposed, but better safe than sorry.

“What are you doing?” mumbles Essek.

Bren pops one eye open. Essek has managed to swathe himself in every possible blanket from every surface of the room save for the curtains, and now sits in the center of a cylinder that resembles a spider’s nest. Bren wonders whether this is something that drow children are taught to do to regulate their emotions.

“I brought you breakfast,” says Bren, waggling the sopping parchment.

Essek stretches out a hand from the cocoon in an invitation. Bren closes in and hands it over. His skin is absent of vibrancy, and his eyes bear a painful resolve. Something in the man has hardened overnight. This does not bode well.

Essek sniffs the kartoffelpuffer and nibbles the corner. His eyes shoot wide, pupils dilating. He rips off a hunk and begins to chew, pleased by the offering, as Bren takes the opportunity to shrug off his travel cloak and hang it on a bedpost.

“You like potatoes,” Bren says.

Essek finishes chewing. “Our favored tuber in Rosohna is yuyo, but its texture pales to this… lucrative potato. My obsession is a recent development.”

“They’re a good comfort food,” offers Bren, and he says nothing else for a while, waiting for Essek to make the next move. Eventually, after long enough of silent mastication, Essek shoves apart the cocoon and makes his grand exit from it onto the bed, metamorphosed in the form of a haggard drow. He wears only a house robe and a blanket around his shoulders, massive purple shadows weighing down his eyes. Where the robe skirts up around his knees, they have been skinned raw. Must have been from the moment he tumbled onto the ground, sickened by whatever Johannes had said.

Bren’s throat tightens. There is no way around this. To do their duty, he has to ask.

“Essek,” he says gently. “I know it caused you great distress. But whatever Johannes told you…”

Essek stops chewing and slowly lowers the food to his lap, working his bottom lip between his teeth. How like a mundane man he is now; how unlike a creature of darkness and subterfuge.

It takes another long moment for him to speak again, and when he does, his voice lacks a single hue of emotion.

“It won’t be very useful to you. Are you certain you want to hear?”

Bren nods, willing his stomach to turn to steel.

Essek sniffs. “He and his lovely monster-hunting friends wished to conquer me carnally. To teach me a few lessons in subservience and so on; the usual offenses. It’s all talk, Bren.”

Bren schools his expression into something that doesn’t resemble bloody murder. He does not enjoy that there is such a thing as a usual offense now.

“You were raising your voice at someone downstairs the night we returned from the party,” Essek says. He’s done with the previous topic and he expects an answer to the new one, whether Bren likes it or not.

Bren swallows and nods. No use in lying about this. “Astrid came to visit.”

“Your old Volstrucker partner.”

“The very same. She saw us at the party. She wanted to know what I intended with you.”

“Because she is envious?” Essek sneers, though even this is muted by exhaustion.

“Because she is a spy,” Bren intones. “She has no quarrel with us, now that she knows what we plan. I trust her.”

“You trust her,” Essek repeats, as if to appease himself, and continues to stare at a point in the wallpaper across the world.

Bren catches sight of Essek’s hand clutching the interior of the blanket. He remembers how little it helped to hold Essek’s hands during the party, and refrains from doing so again. “Very much, ja. For all the years that I have known her, she had always been fighting to free us of Trent. In his absence, she fights for peace itself. She’s ridding us all of the Volstrucker program.”

“And what will come of her?”

“We shall sort that out in some time. First, I have a gift for you.”

Essek’s eyes brighten as he gets to his feet, pleased by the first hope all day. “Yes?” He swiftly deposits the food on the nightstand, wiping his hands. “Is this the amulet?”

“Right you are.” Bren takes a few steps back from the bed to make room for Essek and withdraws from his pocket a tiny velvet satchel, marked by an embroidered PS over the front. On his bare feet, Essek stands before him and holds his hand out expectantly. Bren tips the contents over into his palm, admiring the faint noise of the pendant tinkling against the complimentary silver chain.

The amber of Trent’s original design has been filed down into what reads as a minuscule orange topaz, drop-shaped and made to suspend from an earring or a necklace. It rings faintly when Essek taps on it, divination interference like a ripple along the senses.

“Your enchanter does some immaculate work,” marvels Essek. “And in so short a time.”

“Ja, well. There are four of him.”

Essek looks up curiously at that but does not question it further. He tips the pendant and the chain back into Bren’s hand, then turns around and pulls down his robe to the bottoms of his biceps, exposing the nude lean slope of his handsome neck, the violet hills of his muscles, and the gentle white furring at the base of his scalp. Bren stands there, a little hare-brained for lack of thought. Then he gathers what Essek intends for him to do and quickly unclasps the chain, brings it around Essek’s neck, and re-clasps it, the backs of his fingers brushing against soft skin.

It is a small and collarbone-kissing necklace from which a single long chain dangles freely. Bren secures the dollop of topaz to hang between Essek’s shoulder blades so that it hides from intruding eyes and is felt only by Essek. Bren’s hand rests on the slope of his neck, the skin of which is shivering.

“You are very cold,” he murmurs. He watches his own breath rustle the fine white hairs like dove feathers.

“Is it not winter?” Essek says. His head tilts to bring one cheek into the light; his eyelashes flicker minutely. “Perhaps it is you who is too warm.”

Bren swallows back more flirtation to instead rub Essek’s skin with his thumb, savoring its smoothness and the waves of shivers that originate from his spine.

Essek takes Bren’s hand and lifts it, turning in place to face him again and replace the hand on his shoulder. As he moves, his bare feet hiss and stick quietly against the hardwood. Bren becomes aware for the second time that Essek wears nothing beneath these robes, having glimpsed the shadow of his deep purple skin in slivers between the folds.

And Bren becomes aware, for the first time, that there is a faint new scar on Essek’s neck: a thin silvery line cutting through the side of his throat from where a blade nearly spilled his life out into the dirt.

Fuck.

He can never afford to forget just how large a role he played in the destruction of Essek’s life. His battalion’s energy had been like a frothing tidal wave, washing out the Kryn soldiers—the sun of Pelor empowering the Righteous Brand to a zealous frenzy, riling them up, rabid in their conquest. He can never forget the way it, too, had nearly washed him away, as preoccupied with victory as he was. The way it corroded his senses from all that was good and right; the way it nearly made him forget the duty of protecting his friend.

Essek had never been unimportant to him, but he was becoming something else altogether—something more urgent, vital, and more tender than Bren could bring himself to acknowledge. Astrid had all but asked him if he was in love, but he never knew love to be this fragile, nor this dangerous. Bren had never known an affection rooted in such unity, such peace, to then be fractured by endless tribulations.

Or perhaps he did know such an affection, and he had promised himself to omit it from his perfect memory.

Bren thumbs over the scar before he thinks better of it. Essek’s breath wavers in surprise. Bren immediately withdraws the touch and Essek leans into its absence—a split-second of his head searching blindly and unconsciously—then recedes.

“It is only a scar,” Essek says. Quite transparently, he wants Bren’s hand back on his neck. Bren bites his tongue and cups Essek’s face with one hand instead, watching his eyes flutter closed, watching his throat bob as he swallows.

“Scars are the worst of us,” says Bren in turn. The skin of his cheek is sallow but soft. It takes great effort to speak whatsoever this close to Essek, and he feels much too large in his own body, his soul pressing hot and steaming against the walls of his skin.

“Not so. If they were, you would be less of a man. And you are not.”

It takes a panicked second to realize he only means the residuum scars. Essek places a hand on Bren’s chest and opens his eyes once more. Bren briefly contemplates vanishing himself out of the room to avoid sinking into his shoes. Essek has a gaze like diamond, like no one else in this world; it is far too luxurious a gaze to be set on him.

He’s forgotten his train of thought. Something about scars and manhood. The intersection of the two sparks a disgust in him that he finds himself blurting out as, “Not so. I was half of a man when I was scarred,” and—that—that is not what he should have said.

Essek pauses, reassessing. “I cannot believe that. Scars make men. There is no shame in bearing them.” His hand slips just barely beneath the laces of Bren’s tunic while an index finger toys at his collarbone.

Bren’s chest becomes taut with the long-buried fear of humiliation. He has no reason to fear anymore, but he still feels made; he feels caught. It occurs to him that he has never been with someone—in the sense of partnership, in the sense of devotion—who did not know that he was not born a man.

His body is perfect now. There is nothing to fear of Essek’s judgment if this escalates further. And yet he once feared so, so much—so much that even the remembrance of this fear is enough to shorten his breath. The light of a thousand eyes shines down onto him, incinerating his layers until he is fifteen and wrong again.

“I do not wish to speak of scars,” Bren whispers. Even to himself, his words come out stuttering and tumbling downhill.

Essek sees it as a shame around lust instead of what it actually is—a desire to tear the conversation to pieces, to scream and bellow at a dead old man—and he, more forwardly than Bren could have ever predicted, says, “There is no shame here,” while shifting his hand another millimeter under Bren’s tunic collar.

Bren swallows with difficulty. He burns for Essek, but he could not be in the mood for this if it was his last day on Exandria. His mind tortures him with zaps and flashes of raw, scarified memories—and too, he made Beauregard a promise.

If Essek leans into him during this plot of theirs, it will not be of his free will. It will be in the hopes that Bren will act as his tourniquet. He will not be a savior and an abuser to his friend at the same time.

Essek guides Bren’s free hand back onto his neck, placing the thumb over the slash of skin.

“I am not ashamed of this scar, for your information,” he says, and though his voice is a velvet murmur, it is what he says next that knocks the wind from Bren:

“We can both be men about this, can’t we?”

Bren tears his hand from Essek’s neck.

Essek flinches. When no further action follows, Essek just looks at him hopelessly, trying to read him, the way he’s standing dumb with his hands flexing at his side. Bren turns his face away; Essek’s head ducks and follows the averted gaze. He begins to say something glittering of compassion—but when Bren cuts him off with a slightly frantic, “Stay yourself, please,” Essek flinches again as though he’s been slapped.

Just like that?, he must be thinking. May we not speak on this?

Or perhaps, Have I said something wrong?

“Bren,” Essek says cautiously. “Have I—“

Better change the subject.

“Open your hand,” Bren urges.

Essek fidgets in place but offers his upturned palm.

“This next gift is from Astrid herself,” he says matter-of-factly. Bren fishes out the other satchel from his trouser pocket and tips out the contents into Essek’s hand.

He explains the rest of the functionality to the rings while watching the information placate Essek. He goes over its maximal distance, its boundaries between planes, its excellent discretion: “She has solved a number of problems for us. These should keep us connected mentally even through the amulet’s interference, so long as we attune.”

“We can afford to communicate during outings now,” says Essek, whose voice wavers as he marvels at it. Diminished and embarrassed, he course-corrects around Bren’s rejection by pretending nothing had happened and nothing had been intended.

Bren’s heart twists itself into knots in his chest. Essek is a creature of pride, and thus this must be catastrophic to him.

He tries for a friendly tone again. “I do hope it makes you a margin more comfortable. Tell me if it ever becomes too noisy in there.” Bren taps his forehead.

Essek smiles, then sighs out again in a huge shudder. Thankfully, beyond the embarrassment, there is more relief in the giving of this gift than Bren anticipated.

Overcome with the need to smooth over the moment, Bren immediately slips one of the rings onto his own fingers, then brings up Essek’s hand to slip a ring onto his. This happens so swiftly that his brain has hardly a moment to question it until he’s on the other side of the faux-pas—and even then, Essek does not seem to notice the significance of what he has done.

There must be something he can say. Some discreet suggestion that not all in Bren’s past is what it seems; some explanation for his erratic pushing and pulling. But he does not get the opportunity to do so, for Viskov’s heavy footfalls in the landing outside make them both leap away from each other. At some spy instinct to look low-profile, Essek plops himself on a loveseat, Bren pretends to have been chatting by the bedpost, and they hold these positions until Viskov raps on the door.

“Come in,” Bren calls, clearing his throat.

A head of mousy brown dwarven hair peeks inside. “Herr Ermendrud. Prime Arbiter Truscan wants a word with you.”

For a moment Bren is certain that he has misheard. When Viskov’s solemn expression does not change, nor affectation waver, Bren starts running through possible scenarios at a thousand miles a minute. The Arbiter has never needed to confront Bren directly before, because that was always Trent’s role.

“Just a moment,” he says through his teeth. “I must bring a conversation to its close.”

“Yes, sir, well. He’s… He’s downstairs waiting for you, sir.”

A jolt of panic rocks through Bren’s soul. There is a non-zero chance that they have both been made before the game even started.

Bren takes his cloak back from the bedpost and shrugs it on in angry short movements. He looks towards Essek, says, “I will be attuning,” to suggest, If all else fails, we will have the connection, and follows Viskov out the door.

In a half-hour’s time, Bren has still not returned. For lack of else to do, Essek goes to be with Rilke out in the estate’s gardens to see what she has to say about this mess, if anything at all.

There is no other place in the manor suitable for his fraught nerves. The more time he spends gazing upon the unicorn’s silent gleam, the more his heart rate slows. He had not intended to mount her back whatsoever, but after long enough of her bunting him in the posterior, he resigns himself to his fate.

They should not be outdoors for too long. The winter takes swiftly and quietly.

Rilke’s body grooves beneath him as they ride, going in slow circuits through the gardens and between the topiary. The trauma quickly rewrites itself: instead of thinking of the moment he sat blinded and gagged on her back to endure the worst humiliation of his life, he learns to appreciate the world at the vantage of her height and swiftness.

Even so, he still grinds his teeth to think of his failure to seduce Bren. What had he been thinking?

The answer was that he had not been thinking at all. For the eternity that Bren looked down upon him with that unmurked kindness, the thoughts in Essek’s mind had evacuated entirely, rushing out of his head and leaving but a soft white cloud of dim-witted affection.

He shoves his face into Rilke’s mane and groans for ten minutes on and off at varying volumes.

He’d done something. He’d said something to flip a switch in Bren’s demeanor and throw the conversation off-script. If he hadn’t, he might have—what, gotten what he craved? Gotten the comfort he needed, just to dispose of it in the morning? And what might Bren have to say about the selfishness in these thoughts?

Perhaps part of him had wanted to test Johannes’s claims. To see if Bren would bend his morals at the slightest proposition. But, no—there was no veracity to the insinuation that Bren was only employing kindness to wear Essek down.

Light, he wishes Rilke would trample him. It was just like him, wasn’t it, to alienate his only path to freedom in exchange for a short-term remedy at the first experience of true discomfort? And what would Bren have possibly done? He is unlike Essek in every matter but his genius—he is a cur in conversation, but far too noble to ever have succumbed in practice.

Something else catches his notice. He looks up, startled. Rilke has begun moving farther towards the edges of the estate.

His grip tightens on her reins, guiding her away from the edge. Yet, closer and closer, they approach the tall hedge fence bordering the property from the woodlands of outer Rexxentrum.

Forty feet from the fence, Rilke picks up speed.

“No,” Essek commands.

She falls into a canter, then a gallop. Oh, shit, he thinks.

“No, no, no—” Essek is shouting, when without warning her hooves hit the packed snow and launch off at an impossible incline into the air. His stomach swoops—his wintering robes around him levitate in the suspension of gravity—until finally he crashes back down in an impact that punches the soul momentarily out of his chest. She’s cleared not only the hedge fence but the small frozen stream lining the estate, and to Essek’s horror, she’s begun the process of kidnapping him deep into the woods.

“Halt!” he shouts, clinging to her reins for dear life. He thinks to throw himself off her back, but then she’s begun sailing above a field of broken branches and slashing bark, and he misses his chance entirely.

“Where in Light’s name are you taking me?” he bellows, and like the unicorn she is, she does not reply. He might need to restart his attunement process—his focus has gone out the window along with his trust in this beast.

Evergreens fly past him in green blankets. Icicles shear the bottoms of his cloaks and scatter onto him when they crash past tree boughs, blundering through any disruption in their path. Rilke pushes her muscles until they bunch and bend and steam, her breath a rocket of white vapor that flies into his face, and for a moment, he thinks she’s running on water—until he realizes she’s skipping merely on river stones with the precision of a monk, taking them downstream over rapids. Even if he wanted to dismount, he could not possibly navigate back to the estate now. In all these cloaks, he would drown.

Freezing water splashes up onto his boots, drenching them completely. He buries his face in her mane and bellows senselessly for what feels like an hour, fingers stuck in a rigor mortis clasp around her pumping neck.

She bounds from stone to stone to log to beaver dam, throwing up giant sprays of celestial glitter at every landing. Just when Essek thinks she intends to fly them over the damned side of a waterfall, she careens to the left—a surge of momentum that nearly drags him off her back—and takes him further into the forest.

“You madwoman,” he cries out, “You wretched creature! You know I can’t escape this! What are you trying to do, leave me to die of exposure?”

She races faster and faster through the underbrush, faster than a moorbounder, fast enough to dry the tears on his face.

“I can’t believe this—” he pants, begs, going mad with the grief and absurdity of it all, “I can’t believe—the terrible thing to finally kill me will be a bloody unicorn, of all inane, diabolical, pointless beasts—!”

I have precisely one point, she counters.

Rilke leaps a final time, and the forest breaks.

His world explodes in a collision of bright white—the sun shining from both sky and earth, mirrored by the widest stretch of snow he has ever seen. She has taken him to a plateau, below which a valley stretches out for miles and miles until the faraway shadows of the Dunrock Mountains break the edge. Rilke rides through the center, cutting a straight line out through the undisturbed snow in her wake; Essek holds on tightly at first, then cannot help but lift his head to take in the awesome sight of the giant white world around him.

The creeks beside them smoke in the cold. From the vantage of this mirror mesa, Essek glimpses a vastness to Exandria that stuns him, that blinds him with its brightness. He has never seen anything like this: Rilke splashes through the snow in a mirage that makes it seem as though she gallops across a clear lake of freshwater, a celestial bird pond, the sky itself. After they ride far enough that the trees become naught but black motes on the horizon, the notion of his life in binds becomes a nothing but a ridiculous nightmare to leave behind. He freezes to his very bones, but his muscles and veins pound with life—with adrenaline, with hope, with screaming and frantic freedom.

He wishes Bren could see this.

Rilke comes to a slushing halt on the other side of the plains, at which point she finds a nice big pine tree to settle beneath. She finally grants Essek permission to dismount, which he accomplishes by collapsing from her back straight onto a snow drift, hyperventilating and vibrating through his skin. With just this ride alone, he’s been reminded of what it was to be a child: the light in his head, the sweat down his back, the power collected in his mighty little body.

It takes some time for him to regain his senses. Not a minute ago, he’d been certain that she had been plotting his death. Now she snouts at him gamely, chuffing and nibbling on his hair with all the affection of a mother with her colt.

“What,” he pants, “in the hells are you doing?”

Rilke does not reply. She only puts her massive head on Essek’s lap and falls straight asleep, pinning him to the oak tree’s roots. He should have expected this, and yet he cannot find it in himself to loathe it very much.

The midday sun melts away the snow from around them. He yearns to Prestidigitate himself dry, at least to prevent the worst of frostbite from setting into his soaked toes, but cannot. When Rilke notices him squirming with cold, she rolls her tongue around in her mouth and produces a bright red berry from between her teeth.

“Oh,” Essek says, feeling stupid. “You don’t collect those, you make them. These are Goodberries, aren’t they?”

Rilke nods and spits one directly into his face.

For lack of else to do, Essek sighs, rubs the excess slobber off his coat, and eats it. It brings an instant inner warmth like a delicious tonic. He settles back more comfortably, hoping that the attunement process with his ring will not be interrupted by another spontaneous jaunt through the woods.

The sun moves in a yellow glacier across the sky. Tiny wintering birds burst from the snow to coo and hoot, then rush away at the sight of him. They must be sitting there for upwards of forty minutes doing absolutely nothing: Rilke crunching on miscellaneous twigs, Essek rubbing her impossibly soft fur and falling steeply into love with her companionship. Damned celestials.

She is a sweet animal, Essek concludes. She is kind to have invited him to this adventure, even if it had been against his will.

“Rilke,” he says quietly. “I need your help.”

She adjusts her head in his lap to gaze at him in a quite intelligent gesture, which resembles uncomfortably a humanoid woman in a horse’s body. It does not help that her eyes are so very womanly already.

“You know the Dasks, yes? Johannes Dask, the man who captured you.”

She snorts resentfully—a gust of air straight into his gut—and flicks her tail.

“Well,” he says, tongue working dry and cold in his mouth. “He told me I should start taking philters of apathy. That my violation is inevitable, and that it will ease the process. It is my plan to appeal to the court’s piranhas, and I… I don’t feel particularly keen to give myself over to them, if I can avoid it. But I don’t think I will be able to avoid it after all.”

Rilke sidles up closer to him, narrowly avoiding spearing him with her massive horn. She inhales deeply, then releases a giant pathetic sigh.

You might lose in any reality, but reality is not the realm of the mind.

At the sound of her voice in his head, Essek shivers. “How do you mean?”

Harm to the body is temporary. You must protect your mind. The body heals as a lake thaws, but the mind retains impurities.

His body does not feel like a frozen, stoic lake whatsoever. It feels made of stained glass and copper wire. Transparent, fragile. Beautiful and useless.

“You say that I should take the philters.”

Dulling the senses comes with its own consequences. Excess is never the solution. She looks at him very sternly. Be keen. Be wary. But protect yourself regardless.

Essek hugs her more tightly to his chest. “Thank you,” he says, and waits to warm again under her weight.

Essek finishes attuning to the ring nearly two hours after Bren left to speak with Truscan. With Rilke in his lap, he draws his mind together and thinks through the connection: Hello?

Almost immediately, he finds a reply. Bren’s voice collides into his thoughts with a galactic, softly echoing resonance: Hallo! Ah. You took a while.

Bren’s relief is transparent. Essek smiles to himself, then freezes with momentary guilt. If Bren had returned from his meeting with Truscan to find Essek gone and without a telepathic connection, he must have been worried indeed.

Yes, my apologies. Rilke wanted to take me on a ride, and thus it took me longer to attune.

That is no problem, Bren says. At first, his thoughts seem to wobble—a man disguising a crash of the nerves from a missing friend—then settle into conversational ease. It was a false alarm, by the way. Truscan wanted my opinion on the rising crime rates during last year’s Harvest Close festival and thought I would have some propaganda prepared to discourage unruly teenagers from ruining it again.

Did you?

Och, no. Bren’s rusty laugh fills his head with mirth. I would be remiss to stop teenaged misadventures. It’s part of the point of Harvest Close to be drunk and idiotic. Speaking of: where are you?

What do you mean, ‘speaking of’? I am not drunk, huffs Essek.

You sound it. You—Well, you think like it.

I am exhausted. We are at… Essek sits up, slightly dislodging Rilke. I do not know where we are, actually. We went downstream until the waterfall, then cut across to the plateau. Do you know a location with miles and miles of open snowy plains?

That’ll be Der Spiegel der Prinzessin. The Princess’s Mirror. Bren’s voice gains a warm, reminiscing quality. Some years it grows these great big hills—I used to travel to sled there with my mother and father. I know where it is. Won’t be too long a flight.

Essek pauses. You are flying to us?

Of course. I don’t have any anchor objects from the past six months, and she’s somehow taken you forty miles from the estate; I’m not very well going to make you ride back. It’s going to look quite silly, a giant eagle with a drow and a unicorn in its claws. But we’ll be fine.

Essek gathers up his cloaks and tucks himself further into the tree, worrying his lip. All right. I shall see you then.

The silence after Bren’s message endures for such a long time that Essek mistakes it for the ending of a Sending spell. He forgets that this connection is going to be everlasting for as long as he wears it. The prospect is—too much to think of, sometimes.

But then Bren says, You know, you can still… keep talking to me. I’ll need your directions when I arrive, and Essek allows his own chuckle to ring through, communicating without words that this enchantment, though marvelous, will certainly take some getting used to.

Chapter Text

With the Dask Gala approaching tomorrow and with Rilke’s message rattling around in his head, Essek gathers himself on the morning before the event and asks Bren for a lump sum of gold.

The request takes several moments to process. Bren, whose coffers are now deeper than the gold mines they came from, gives him a quizzical look but ultimately gives over a hefty satchel of coin without protest. Essek refuses to read into the act any more than necessary: he will not interpret generosity in the place of mercy. He stows three-fourths beneath the floorboards of his bed and takes the remaining fourth with him—still a sum enough to buy a small property—to the city.

At Bren’s insistence, Essek takes Olivier along, not only as a coachman but as a guard. Olivier resembles Bren closely enough that any attempt to approach Essek is dissuaded from a distance, and Olivier’s glare is enough to keep at bay anyone who attempts anyway. For this, Essek is grateful.

Then he wonders whether to rescind that gratitude when Olivier seems keen to join him in the dressing room of this haberdashery.

The young man is, to his credit, a nervous wreck at the notion of chaperoning a Dynastic politician-made-prisoner, and Essek gives him the benefit of the doubt. Still, he finds himself tutting and nudging Olivier away until he’s shoved him on the other side of the changing curtain.

Essek splays out the selected dress tunics over the provided chaise. Sweeping and gallant, they mimic the wardrobe of kings and emperors of yore, leaving ample space for a barrel chest and wide in the arms for bunching muscles. Essek shrugs one on and finds that it buries him like the sleep shirt of a child. Evidently, he has not yet recovered his body as it was before three days’ worth of starvation. Then again, perhaps he had forgotten more meals in recent memory than he’d thought. He had a feeling he’d been steadily losing weight for the past few years, but the concern couldn’t have been farther from his list of priorities. Now he is paying for it.

Fortunately, these tunics aren’t nearly the style he’s after. Unfortunately, this means that he needs to be looking in seedier places.

“Olivier,” he calls softly out of the curtain. “You would not happen to know where I might find a clothing shop for… pets, specifically?”

Olivier goes silent for long enough to know that his face contorts red. “I— I don’t… I’m sorry, Mister Essek, I wouldn’t have any—“

“All right,” sighs Essek. “Call the manager over for me, will you?”

He stands absent of tunic in the dark, sandalwood-smelling corner of the dressing room. He is going to need to get used to being seen without his clothing, he reasons, and thus does not don a tunic when the haberdasher nudges aside the curtain.

The storeowner is forty years old, half-elven, and too young. He knows nothing beyond what his father has told him of the business and has never taken use of a pet a day in his life, no-sir. Essek sighs once more and scrubs at his head, but he keeps his voice light and unthinking.

“Where do I find the brothels in this city?”

The haberdasher’s face squinches for a split-second. “Pardon me, sir— Sir Shadowhand? Er— Sir Ermendrud?”

Essek fights not to scowl. The city has no idea how to articulate Essek’s presence in it, and so the populace collectively considers him an unwieldy, para-political tumor. Sir Ermendrud. Really.

“I would greatly,” he stresses, “very greatly appreciate if you could direct me to where I would find clothing for prostitutes.”

The haberdasher squirms, burying an answer under propriety.

“Boudoir entertainers. Adventurous lovers,” Essek entreats. “Something that emphasizes the sex appeal of the wearer.”

“Ah,” says the half-elf finally, sweat trembling on his brow. “Ah, that I can help with. Would you follow me, please?”

Over the course of an hour, Essek and Olivier find themselves propelled through a list of neighbors and gossipers and smutty-book-readers until they arrive at a storefront in the Vigil’s Circle that resembles a butcher, with a lacquered sign swinging in front of the door simply reads: MEAT.

Well, if that isn’t apt.

“I don’t think this is the place, Mister Essek,” mumbles Olivier.

“You clearly don’t know people,” mumbles Essek in turn. There is no reality in which a butcher owns real estate in between the most lucrative textile wholesalers and retailers of the city. He pushes the door open and walks inside.

The space is triply large in the foyer already and handsomely decorated, with sausages and smoked meats hanging on hooks above a snoring deli cook on a wooden stool. Essek squints at the interior until he finds a suspicious-looking door where he knows no further room should exist, if his spacial understanding of the building is correct.

“I need clothing,” he announces to the cook.

“Who are you with?” groans the dwarf. As he speaks, his mustache flutters up and down.

Essek glares at him. “I am the only drow in this city. You know who I am with.” He swallows and coaxes his voice back into passivity. “Archmage Ermendrud, of course.”

The dwarf burps. “Ain’t no Archmage Ermendrud. Come back later.”

“There is now. I need clothing.”

“Who sent you?”

He wants more than anything to say, Do you really think the Righteous Brand is interested in employing someone like me to discover where your untaxed operations are based out of?—but he doesn’t need to. The door to nowhere opens, and an elf decked in brilliant golden frills emerges, practically singing his name:

“Esseeek Thelyss! Oh, everyone in this city knows who you are.”

Essek shocks back onto his heels. “Yes. Yes, finally. Are you employed at…” He thinks for a second. “Meat?”

“I am Meat,” the elf announces fabulously. This makes very little sense and more than anything disturbs Essek, but before he can speak on the matter further, he and Olivier are taken by the wrists through the door, down into the dungeon from which the elf emerged, feathers and kaleidoscoping colors whipping over his vision all the while. Countless beaded, ruched, velvet robes flicker over his head and brush at his sides as he’s pulled through into a portal-closet, or maybe a fucking wardrobe-dimension—until he stumbles out into the other side.

This is it, he thinks, as soon as he sees the result of his efforts. This is the place.

“Not that one.”

“This one?”

“Not that one either. No, put that down. No— No, Essek, that’s not your color.”

“For the love of—“ Essek stammers, dropping the garment in a soft clatter against the rug. “Then help me!”

“No,” says Virilia, lighting another cigar to puff.

Virilia Everosse, as Essek and Olivier discover, is apparently the most sexually desired person on this side of the Empire’s border. Essek does not understand this fact personally, but nonetheless, it is incontestable: it has been peer-reviewed by hundreds of clients over the past fifty years. Elven-aasimar, catastrophically attractive, and impartial to one gendered presentation or the other, Virilia bought their own freedom from the City of Brass, made their career as a professional escort in Marquet, then retired as the premiere designer of courtly couture in the black market of Rexxentrum’s pet scene.

For all their genius and consideration, they are also—to Essek’s great chagrin—completely impossible to work with.

“I can’t pick something of my color if you don’t tell me what it is,” he seethes, stomping around the velvet-walled dressing room with a depleted temper.

What Essek initially thought was a hole-in-the-wall boutique was in fact an underground labyrinth of epic proportion, and the pop-up shop with the sign reading MEAT had only been one of several secret and constantly shifting entrances. Down here, the stone floors were remodeled with swirling black and white marble, and the walls, despite the close subterranean air, constantly adjusted to perfect conditions for the fragile garments within. Embroidered rugs and carpets from all corners of Exandria make a tripping hazard of every one of its dozens of corridors, and racks of jewels and metals wink light off the arcane sconces. The changing room itself is large enough to contain an ivy-covered fountain spurting quietly in the corner.

The effect is that he feels like a speck of muck in a world of glamour.

Virilia shrugs back again against the divan on which they recline so easily, despite Essek not having invited them to watch him undress. He’s gotten used to the presence and the eyes by now, and he didn’t even bother with shooing Olivier out of the room when the young man made it clear he wasn’t letting Essek out of his sight.

At the lack of a response from his designer, Essek starts tearing himself out of the eye-sizzling yellow ensemble. Olivier’s eyes widen and another flush rises to his ears, which begs the question burning in the back of Essek’s mind.

“How old are you?” Essek snaps in his direction. “I am beginning to suspect this is not entirely appropriate.”

“Twenty-one, sir,” says Olivier with strangled pep.

“Light, you’re a child,” grumbles Essek. He starts to lose his balance trying to rip his legs out from the strange tube-shaped filigree when Olivier catches his elbow to tip him back upright. Of course he’s been so uncoordinated lately; he spent the last twenty-some years of his life floating five inches off the ground. “Ugh. Thank you.”

“Not a problem, Mister Essek.”

“I’d much rather you call me Essek alone.” With the leggings off, he faces the rack of garments again in his small clothes. “Virilia, you can’t possibly make me wear all of these. We won’t be done by sundown.”

“It’s my method of divining. The more I see you wearing, the more information I gather about what you can and can’t pull off.”

“What you are doing is developing an algorithm. Statistics is the opposite of divination.” He huffs, collecting himself. “You need no input from me whatsoever?”

“No, of course not. I already know what you’re thinking.”

Not a good thing to hear when he was attempting to come across as passively as possible. “And what is that?”

“I’ll tell you.” Virilia snubs the cigar against a silver tray and reaches for their tea with a soft clink. “Everyone’s heard of you. You’re the stolen Amethyst of the Dynasty. You’re here because you need the clothes of a pet, but you don’t know how to be one. You want something that makes you feel comfortable, but that’s something you’re never going to get. It’s not fun to be a court whore.”

Their narrow blue-white face, like a robin’s egg, suddenly darkens. “I can make you so beautiful they forget you are suffering. I can make you so beautiful you forget you are suffering. But that’s the extent of it. I can’t make you like the work. And if you don’t like the work, this is a sum-zero game, my dear drow.” They snap their fingers and direct Olivier to the latest on the rack. “The black one, now.”

Olivier follows suit. Essek stares at Virilia desperately.

“How do I survive it?”

“You find a way to tolerate it.”

“How do I… begin to tolerate it?”

“You find something to enjoy. The food. The clothes, in my case. You can make a game of it; how long does it take to convince an empire of your humanity? Or, failing everything else, you find a way to wrap that man of yours around your finger. With the right people, it’s not so bad.” They idly kick long satin-wrapped legs as Olivier helps the garment onto Essek and buttons up the back of a wickedly tight tunic, forcing the breath from Essek’s lungs. “It’s just like courting. Except sometimes, no matter what choices you make, you’re still getting fucked. So to speak.”

Olivier’s hands stall on Essek’s shoulders, unsure how to finish wrapping the black dupatta. Essek yanks it off in a huff, but to keep from upsetting Virilia, he takes great pains to wrap it back over the bolt it came from with more careful hands.

Thankfully, they don’t seem to mind. They raise the teacup in Olivier’s direction. “Your archmage. That fellow there, that’s not him, is it?”

“No.”

“He made a simulacrum to follow you? That is...” Their elegant head shakes back and forth, swaying white hair. “Romantic or creepy, depending.”

Olivier doesn’t look too terribly offended. “It is kind,” is what Essek settles on. “Make your judgments of him, but Archmage Ermendrud is kind.” The honesty might be a mistake, but knowing Virilia’s line of work, it likely doesn’t make it onto the list of the best secrets in their arsenal.

“For now. I can’t think of him too kindly if he’s got you opening yourself up to the court against your will.”

“Not him.” Essek paces back and forth in front of the garment rack until he finds something that catches the eye: a long brocade robe, white and mother-of-pearl, with a fetching but conservative shape compared to the rest. “I am.”

Cigar smoke expelling from Virilia’s nostrils. “Oh, do tell.”

He stares at the fabric in his hands, rolling it over and over to watch the light splash iridescent off the surface. He withdraws it from the rack, splays it over his chest to match the silhouette in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. His reflection looks back to him with more thinly-veiled fear than he likes.

In silence, without Olivier’s help, he wrestles himself into the constricting garment from the bottom-up and settles it over his body. Somewhere in the distance, chimes clink and glitter together like the sound of fairy flight.

“I do not know what there is to tell that is not clear already,” he says. Oh, that’s odd—his voice resonates so strangely with the dense fabric this tight to his chest.

When he meets his eyes back in the mirror, the difference is already night and day. An ease replaces the fear; a determination replaces his hesitation. The man facing him now is a blood diamond in the tapestry of the court and a tumor no longer. Somewhere in the black stream of this persistent nightmare, he’s discovered a lost fragment of the Shadowhand.

“Found it,” announces Virilia quietly.

“Yes,” says Essek, and even to himself his voice is faint and dreamlike with satisfaction. Virilia stands and rushes behind him to adjust the waistline until it presses completely taut to every line of his form. He runs his hands over his belly and catches his nails against invisibly-embroidered lace, white against off-white. The constriction gives him strength and stature, and he imagines this is what it must feel like to be supported by a well-fitted corset.

“One down,” says Virilia over his shoulder. “How many would you like to find today?”

Essek licks his lips, lost in the allure of the man in the reflection.

Has he ever looked like this? Has anyone ever seen him like this? Bare down to his skin where swathes of his arms and shoulders lay exposed, faintly sheened with sweat? Absent of cloak or mantle or even title—naked, and somehow, after losing everything, still unafraid?

It is not the obscuring comfort of cloaks and enigma. He is capable of more forms of courage than he thought previously, and the realization renders him in lustrous fire.

“As many as we can,” he says, stopping his hand when it starts to slip down his own thigh. “I have the coin. I can stay until the evening.”

Olivier looks at him as if to ask, Can you?, especially after he’d just complained about the time. Virilia only smiles. “Excellent. Is there anyone we need to impress?”

Essek’s faint smile in the mirror gains a glinting, whetted edge. “Yes.” He swallows harder, courage flickering for a moment before he holds tight to it. “Tell me, Virilia. Do you sell pleasure toys?”

“Of course.”

“How about philters of apathy?”

For a fraction of a second, heartbreak flashes across Virilia’s eyes. “Why, no, I don’t sell those. They come complimentary. Frankly, Essek—you’ll need them more than you need the clothes.”

Bren swishes a glass of wine with his Mage Hand as his other two rifle through a pile of parchment taller than he can bear to read any longer. After a day of chafing at the Prime Arbiter’s office in the Tower of Writ, Bren absconded to his estate in the hopes of finding peace. Had he found it, he would not have been forced to sit for hours before stacks of paperwork demanding his consent for each minute detail of Truscan’s crackdown plan for Harvest Close.

In life, Trent Ikithon made a point of prying Dwendal for control over the Empire’s holiday celebrations. This was largely for propagandizing, but for Bren, this means he has to contend with Truscan trying to wrestle power back towards the Brand now that there’s a window for it, militarizing soldiers during a holiday on the farcical basis of security breaches. It was already a steep decline towards Truscan’s dream of tyranny in Rexxentrum, and that wasn’t accounting for the fact that the breaches in question were only inebriated teenagers.

Bren closes his eyes to check against the calendar in his mind. The Dasks await tomorrow. He has hardly any idea what the point of their gala is and he’s beginning to think that there may be none. Something charity, something commemorative, something flagrant and meaningless and expensive. Savagery; decorum; obeisance to the Dukes of the Savalirwood.

It hadn’t always been this way. During his time as a Volstrucker, he’d spend each night before these meetings with his nose buried in ledgers and notations on names, relations, personal histories. Now all he has to do is stand and try not to get himself assassinated.

No, that isn’t right. He could very well have asked about the gala today at the Arbiter’s office, but his mind was elsewhere entirely.

An echo of footsteps in the corridor leading into his office brings him out of his thoughts. A voice chimes into his mind, more mellow than it has ever sounded:

Might I come in?

“Essek,” Bren says with relief. His friend has been gone since the morning upon requesting an allowance, which had been dimly concerning. He glances out the window to the blustering white outdoors and shocks to find that it is already eleven at night; he should have been paying more attention to the time. He pushes his chair away from his writing desk and faces the entrance. “I was wondering where you were.”

The door pushes open soundlessly as Essek steps inside.

At the sight of him, Bren nearly crashes to the floor.

The Essek before him might as well be a different man altogether. His hair’s been trimmed and lacquered with oil. He’s donned a pale silk tunic cinched at the waist by a complicated jewel belt and his breeches fit more tightly than is reasonable, with intricate lacing all up and down the sides. Even his boots are spick. Suede, it seems, exaggerating the length of his legs by matching in color with the leggings. It is an ensemble for sweating and celebrating in, not for making a mundane visit to a friend at the end of a night. The agates dangling from his ears flash in the lamplight against his eyes, and in all sense, he radiates manicure.

“You really took a shower,” says Bren faintly.

Essek slinks forth in the subsequent pin-drop silence—he must be relishing in it, the villain—and with his gaze all-knowing and cat-like, approaches until he has Bren cornered in his own chair, forced to sit up and lean back.

“Hallo,” Bren says. His voice doesn’t waver, somehow. “Can I help you?”

“I believe there is an apology in order,” says Essek, voice sharper and huskier than usual.

“Oh,” Bren says immediately. “Well, I apologize.”

Essek rolls his eyes. “Mine, not yours.” He shifts his weight, a note of bashfulness. “I hadn’t meant to put you out by propositioning you yesterday. I don’t intend to make our lives any more difficult by repeating the experience.”

Oh, no. Something’s been damaged, here. The thought that actually makes it out of his mouth is, “Are we not already repeating the experience?”

Thankfully, Essek takes it as a tease instead of an admonishment. “No. Forgive this as well. I am trouble-shooting. I need to know that my purchases were worth their weight in platinum.”

A sudden whiff of white floral fragrance reaches Bren’s nostrils, and beneath it a wild shot of clean skin and hot blood. His own blood jumps uncomfortably in his groin.

“Is it the cologne? I hope it’s the cologne. The cologne is doing its job.”

“I took a shower,” Essek parrots. He seems to be drawing closer—or, no, it’s only the traction of his gaze making the world seem smaller.

“I smell ambergris. Must be expensive.”

“You footed the bill. Thank you for the gifts.”

“Gifts, plural?”

“Clothes.”

“Ah,” says Bren. He points with a finger around Essek’s decorated waistline without breaking eye contact. “I noticed. You would tell me if it’s supposed to cast a charm on me, wouldn’t you?”

Essek kicks upwards onto the writing desk and takes a seat on Bren’s parchments, catching the wine glass by the stem as the Mage Hand loses concentration. The gesture reminds Bren more of a foolhardy student than a grown man, which makes his smile widen.

“You’re lucky those documents are dry,” Bren chides.

Essek’s pants are very, very tight around the knees and the arse where it creases. He sips Bren’s warmed wine and says nothing.

Bren clears his throat. “And you’ll warn me if the outfits get sexier than this.”

A quick lapse in Essek’s act; a glimpse of true worry.

“Not because I don’t want them to be sexy.” Bren holds his hands up in placation. “I have to believe that they’re sexy, after all.”

Appeased, Essek quirks his head. “You are approaching the point.”

“I am? Oh, very good. I thought I was losing it for a second there.” He taps his finger to his lips. Essek swings his feet dangerously close to Bren’s thighs. “So—the point is not only that I need to find the garments sexy, but that everyone needs to believe I thought them sexy enough to make you wear them. Another truth in place of a small lie in order to more reliably sell the greater lie.”

“A sacrifice. I could wear a gargantuan brown shawl and you could pretend to find it attractive, but I have a feeling that not even your smooth-talking can convince Rexxentrum that you don’t care about my modesty. The con is, of course, you must expose an honest emotion in a legion of other lies, rendering yourself vulnerable.”

“Yes, yes, ja, a gargantuan sacrifice,” Bren feverishly half-mumbles. The pants flex around Essek’s trim waist as he breathes; Bren finds it a war to keep his eyes from roaming. “How many other outfits?”

“I purchased twelve, to start.”

“Good gods,” he grumbles. Essek chuckles like a chime, looking close to wriggling his shoulders.

On a whim, Bren picks up Essek’s boot and turns it this way and that in his lap, marveling at the immaculate make. There are no laces; just a strong, pointed toe, and tall blocks beneath the heels like a noble’s. The suede gives slightly beneath the press of his fingers and Essek’s toes move around inside just a tiny bit, which makes a node in Bren’s cerebral processes go foggy and pink.

Before Bren realizes, they’ve allowed the quiet to take them both.

Essek breaks the pall after long enough. “I really do apologize,” he says softly. “I don’t know exactly what I must have said to offend you, but if it was the notion of… propositioning you itself, then I—”

“It wasn’t,” rasps Bren.

Essek’s foot moves along the axis of his ankle between Bren’s hands. Idle and calm, but thoughtful. His ankles are so slim. He’s never fenced like the drow do in stories, or if he has, he hasn’t done it in years. For his whole life, he must not have pressed his weight against the ground or strained on his knees in the dirt. He floats, and thus his body is a bird’s.

“I do not understand.”

“You couldn’t offend me with that,” Bren goes on. “Not ever. I would have done all that and more with you, had you the freedom.”

A long, tenuous pause. Essek holds wine in his mouth and does not swallow.

“But you do not. And so I cannot. Putting it lightly—putting it very lightly, Essek—I would rather you put a sword through my heart than us lay together for as long as you…” He worries his lip to the point of pinching blood from the chapped skin. “For as long as you belong to me, legally speaking.”

Essek swallows.

“You understand why,” Bren begs.

Essek rescinds his boot back into his own lap and crosses his legs on Bren’s desk.

“It’s what I thought, then.” Essek’s voice carries a quality of crystal latticework: perfect grace, but with fine interlacing cracks through it. “Of course I understand, Bren. I’m not a madman.”

“Please don’t start consoling me as if I am the one needing comfort,” Bren says. His mouth begins to move slightly faster than his mind can follow. “It’s my fault you’re contending with this at all. You wouldn’t have wanted this under our normal circumstances.”

Essek’s eyes narrow. “How so?”

“I believe the constant stressors and the… well, the sexual nature of the threats against you have created an environment to encourage a certain kind of coping. I cannot blame you for acting uncharacteristically, and you will not see judgment from me. I know firsthand the regrets of acting while not in my right mind.”

Essek pauses long enough for Bren to understand that he has said something twice as offensive. He’s about to spout some other explanation when Essek interrupts with a soft, swift correction: “Do not presume you understand what I am thinking before I do.”

Bren scrubs at his eyes. “My apologies again. I—I don’t know everything. There was more to my discomfort in that moment than you could have known. All I mean is that it was never your fault, and you need not have even—”

“What?”

Bren blinks. “What what?”

Like twin ghost-lights, Essek’s eyes illuminate with dim horror. “By what do you mean there were more elements to your discomfort? Is it anything to do with me?”

For a moment, Bren cannot fathom what he means. To express just how ridiculous the idea is, he scoffs and shakes his head and says, “Nein, no. I have spoken too much on matters irrelevant, and you are better off free of the weight.”

He makes to get to his feet, but Essek stops him with a boot on his chest. “Ermendrud,” he commands. “Talk.”

Bren grunts—“Oof”—and smacks straight back into the chair with a mystifying sizzle in his blood. Staring up at Essek as his weapon of a foot withdraws, one thing immediately clarifies: never once, through any of this, had Essek given him reason to believe he would be judged for revealing this wound.

That bubble of nameless fear pops. Maybe there will be a merit to speaking of this after all.

“It was… It was nothing. In that moment, you touched on a subject sensitive to me. That is all. I hadn’t confronted it with you before, and you had no way to know it could have affected me so. I did not know it could have affected me so.”

“Is this about you being a man?”

Bren blinks, stunned. Essek is looking back at him with the wide, careworn gaze of someone who has been reliving a conversation in their mind for twenty-four hours.

“I should not have spoken so crudely,” Essek urges. “I know now that the notion of questioning one’s manhood is a terrible offense in the Empire, but in Rosohna—”

“It’s not that, Essek,” Bren interrupts. Essek tries to go on but shuts his teeth with a click. “It is more complicated than that. I haven’t been honest with you.”

How does he broach this? He never needed to explain it to his parents, or to Eadwulf or Astrid. Beyond them, he has never spoken it aloud to anyone who cared to hear his pain articulated, not just screamed. After a century of circling between words in his head, he stammers eventually, “I was not always a man,” and lets the statement hang in the air.

Essek’s ear twitches. “Then I suppose you had a journey of transformation, yes?”

Bren’s next thoughts fizzle out. Cogwheels joggle out of place in the gnomish machine of his brain. He cannot comprehend the meaning behind the words—until he suddenly does.

“Yes. Ja, I believe so. Do you know what that is?”

An irrepressible grin fights its way onto Essek’s face. “I should hope I know. I went through one as well.”

“You started off as…” Bren licks his dry mouth. “I don’t know how to say it. I’ve never really talked to anyone who…” This is a miracle. This can only be a miracle. “You had a girlhood.”

“Like you, I suppose.”

“Like me.” His breath seizes; a smile breaks across his face. He stands swiftly. “Like me.”

Aren’t they a pair? The two of them loons pointing at each other in a field of posies: Isn’t that marvelous? We’re the same, aren’t we?

“Like you,” Essek repeats. He does not move to touch Bren, but all the same the words are a caress—warm, adoring, understanding, and Bren could flail. He could fling the chair over his shoulder and strike the floor with his fists and sob. Instead, his emotions collect into a contained vortex at the center of his chest, which he tempers by metering his breath and trying not to hyperventilate. He is a grown man into his thirties, not fifteen—he has lived twice a life since his first experience with this torment.

“When did you make the change?” asks Essek. It is far too soon to ask and far too heavy of a question; Bren pauses and allows the outside world to clatter on while he frantically cleans out the inside of his mind of its misplaced, pointless pain, which he’d constructed in advance of a rejection that never took place. Essek waits politely for his conversation partner to become operational again.

Finally Bren chuckles ruefully, “You say that as though it’s one big convenient procedure.”

“It was a long process for you, then.”

“Long? Long is understating it. How did you get yours?”

Essek’s expression seals closed for a moment. To Bren’s confusion, when it reopens, he looks positively guilty.

“Mine was not so difficult. I do not need to elaborate if you would not benefit from hearing—”

“Yes, elaborate. Please, of course,” Bren blurts. “Of course, anything. Gods, I’m so curious.”

Essek reads him for a while, jaw tensing and untensing. “Well… In a culture where souls routinely settle in and out of bodies, it is only natural that procedures to reflect an idealized form are quite accessible. Not even necessarily in a gendered or sexed sense; there are augmentations available for height, weight, shoe size, all sorts of things. I had experiences in girlhood, as you said—I would not necessarily describe it like that, it was more like a neutral, genderless state, but I digress—that told me I needed to seriously consider what kind of adult I was going to grow into.”

Bren listens carefully and says nothing. Essek explains this to the middle-distance, thus he must feel Bren’s stare on the side of his face.

“I took a trip to the Marble Tomes Conservatory without the approval of my mother and asked for the reconstruction procedures from the clerics. I signed a few parchments. It hurt for an hour. I walked out and proceeded to spend that whole summer obsessed with myself, as you do.” He smiles fondly and puts the weight of his chin on a hand, an elbow balanced on his knee. “My mother was incensed that I did something without her approval, but then again, the magic is not permanent if you do not wish it to be. So long as you have access to the Conservatory and a fair shot of coin, anything is possible. I could go back and turn into—I don’t know, I could look like a simulacrum of my mother if I desired. Anything in the world.”

Bren continues to stare.

He must not burn inside with rage. He must not impart to Essek a fraction of a fraction of his jealousy, of his acute sadness, of his revived grief. And even so, he’s certain that Essek feels every mote of it: the man puts his hands together in his lap and diminishes in some quality as if ashamed.

“Your experience was a struggle,” he says.

Bren lets the sound “Ha” fall out of his mouth and thump onto the ground like a dead bird.

“Outline it to me. I would care deeply to hear it.”

Bren sucks his teeth. “If I start, you won’t be able to stop me.”

“I would never stop you. I am listening.”

“All… All right.” He backs away and starts talking from the center of the rug, pacing a slow groove through his office. “I knew when I was very small. I told my parents when I turned ten and started dressing for the other side from that point on. Acceptance into Soltryce was a miracle to myself and my family for many reasons, but among them was that I would be connected to more specialists who might take care of my… physical problems for me.”

Visibly, Essek gathers that this did not happen in the way Bren would have liked.

“Trent procured me some hormonal tonics. I had the terraforming done a year after, top and bottom. It was all a physician’s work with no magic involved except to heal. But it wasn’t… I wasn’t happy with it.” He glances to a wall-mounted mirror as if to catch a flash of his old self. “Trent insisted there was nothing left to do. That I was being vain. Selfish. That I should refocus my efforts on my mind and not my body—something about the body being temporary and the mind being forever; weißt du, Archmage jabber. But I still did not feel like myself, and it was killing me.”

He scratches his hair, facing determinedly away. “The physician was a genius. No one he worked on ever came out like I did. I continued to tell myself that I would go back, ask him to try again. But that was not so easy; Trent was creating interference between us. So I… broke into his clinic. Found some… Found some correspondences.”

Wrath puts rocks in the path of his voice, making it waver and rattle. “Trent had threatened him into doing a slipshod job. He told him that if I had the presence of mind to worry so much about it, I should learn to tamper my expectations.”

He glances back towards Essek in search of some shard of pity or approval. Without needing to search him, Bren watches Essek’s expression travel through confusion to realization, then brilliant rage, then bottomless sorrow. He sits forward in deep interest, but his hands remain clenched on his lap as if to restrain them from the abstract act of murder.

“Oh, Bren.”

“I thought to kill the physician, I was so angry,” he admits, speaking around a bubble of emotion in his throat. “But he was helping so many people like me, and the poor fellow was being blackmailed anyway—it wasn’t as though he had a choice in the matter. I thought to kill Trent. I wanted to. But there were so many other things keeping me loyal.”

Essek bites his lip. With this much anguish on his face, the lines of his starvation come back in stark shadows. “And what then?”

“Life went on. A few years ago, Vess DeRogna came across some lunacy of an arcane relic with a demiplane inside. She hired the Mighty Nein to go in and return with whatever they uncovered. I told you about this just the other day, yes? They came back with the bones of Transmogrification.”

Essek stands straight up off the writing desk. “That’s where it’s from? That’s where you said they found Halas’s body?”

“The Happy Fun Ball,” says Bren, which somehow still sounds ridiculous even if he speaks with bitterness. “DeRogna then died on their watch in Eiselcross. Exploded or something, who cares. The Nein went and saved the world, and meanwhile, her research and personals went missing as the remaining Cerberus Assembly members fought like dogs over her dead body. The scattered parchments for Transmogrification were tragically lost to history.”

Bren feels himself regain some bounce if only by the way he impulsively winks at Essek. In turn Essek stands with his mouth open, aghast and delighted.

“You said you had developed the spell on your own,” he stammers. “You said you only needed my help to complete it.”

“I did,” says Bren proudly. “I lied.”

Essek all but cackles. “Well done, Scourger,” and Bren preens openly about it for a moment, a little joke between scoundrels.

“So that is why you came back with—what is it, a pep in your step? You finally got the body you wanted.” Essek takes a step back and looks him up and down. “You did look different. And sharper, like a fox. I’d thought it was purely cosmetic upkeep of the kind we have in Rosohna. It never occurred to me that the Empire would lack such a procedure.”

Bren wrinkles his nose and smiles. “You thought me vain.”

“No, never,” Essek chuckles. “I’d have been a hypocrite. You are not the only one who chose beautiful attributes in your transition.”

Essek is looking at him with something strange and intense and—hot, like a brand, and Bren shivers while a curious, wriggling thing flips in his belly. “It’s quite the thrill, isn’t it? The customization.”

“What else did you change? Beyond the obvious discontentment with your surgery.”

“Got rid of a bad knee.” Bren demonstrates by kicking an invisible ball through the air. “Fixed a tweak in my spine from standing at attention for ten years. Gave myself a few inches.”

“Of height,” Essek agrees.

“Of height and other things,” says Bren.

As though biting into a surprise lemon, Essek’s lips crinkle. “You cur,” he says, which only serves to make Bren laugh: even to himself it is a bright, soaring sound, unencumbered by the heaviness of his life for once. Only Essek and the Nein can draw such a sound from him anymore, and the wriggling sensation returns.

But after long enough of exchanging anecdotes to sew connection, Bren tires of the subject. He feels like a bruise polymorphed into a man—and even though the excitement of discovering their commonality kept them talking for well into the night, he bids Essek goodnight to put his head on a pillow and squeeze out a few tears before collapsing into sleep.

He needs as much. They will be contending with demons tomorrow.