Archive of Our Own ^beta

Astrid faces Beauregard Lionett across the wide edge of a table. A sheet of paper rests between them. It was blank when they began five minutes ago. It is blank still.

Bren stares them down from the table's head. He has every right to; it's his table. He crafted it from thought itself, it and the rest of the tower around them.

The tower is inside of an alarm spell, inside of room at a nondescript inn in Zadash. It is the result of a compromise between Astrid and Eadwulf on the one hand, and Bren, Beauregard, and Essek Thelyss on the other. Bren and Beauregard wanted to turn Ikithon over to the Cobalt Soul immediately, bringing their investigation into the open and providing a political disincentive against retaliation. Astrid refused to cooperate under those conditions; if Ikithon was publicly arrested before they amassed their evidence, he might create the political conditions necessary to have any investigation dropped. She would pursue a legal course of action for Bren's sake—but if it went wrong, she wanted to be absolutely certain that she was in a position to kill Ikithon.

So Wulf and Thelyss are guarding over Ikithon on a remote island called Rumblecusp where the Mighty Nein apparently had friends, while Astrid keeps up appearances in the Empire and gives her deposition to Beauregard in secret.

That's the idea, at least. In practice, Astrid has yet to be able to say anything.

"Perhaps," Bren says with intolerable kindness, "a break."

"We haven't even begun," Astrid snaps. At any other time, she could handle his pity. Welcome it, even, or use it. But she is not in command of herself. She entered this tower and sat at this table with the aim telling her story to Beauregard. It would be too much to say that she wanted to, but she intended to. And yet she has not.

Frankly, the entire situation is an embarrassment.

"Sprocket," Beauregard says, nodding to a spectral cat, "can we get a glass of water?"

"I do not need—" Astrid breaks off at a sudden look of alarm on Bren's face. He stands, hand dipping into his component pouch.

He just has time to say, "Someone has breached the perimeter," before the tower snaps out of existence. Astrid collapses to the floor as the chair holding her weight disappears, and then a flash of white light overtakes her, and she knows so more.

Astrid wakes to the face of Quoros Uprock inches from her own. She can feel the hours that have passed, so her unconsciousness was some form of sleep; but the awakening is sudden, not gradual, so the sleep was magical in nature.

Not that she needed to go through that whole thought process. She knew from the instant she saw Quoros that she must have been placed under his specialized version of the Imprisonment spell. It's his favorite.

The rest of the information from her environment arrives automatically, rather than by any conscious process of deduction. Astrid's been doing this for nearly twenty years; if she still had to think actively about these things, she'd be dead. Her hands are cuffed behind her, attached to a fixture in the wall. There are two bodies in the room besides her and Quoros: one unconscious behind him, one conscious but quiet off to the left. She does not have access to her magic.

"Good morning," Quoros says, efficient and polite. "You have two choices. Tell me where Master Ikithon is, or watch me slowly kill Bren Ermendrud."

Yes, that is the thing that Astrid has known but avoided thinking about until now. The unconscious body behind Quoros is Bren.

"You will kill him regardless," Astrid says. And her as well, but that goes without saying.

"Yes. But quickly, if you talk."

Astrid spits in his face.

Quoros is too well trained to snarl or yell, but sadistic rage flares in his eyes. He doesn't just want to wrest Ikithon's location from her; he wants her to suffer in the process. He is, she thinks, glad that she resisted. Astrid has always suspected that the reason Quoros is such a diehard supporter of Ikithon's has little to do with love of the Empire, and everything to do with the fact that Ikithon gives him a perfect excuse to hurt people.

"Slowly, then," he says, and smiles.

Quoros turns toward Bren. Importantly, he turns to his left—Astrid's right. Away from the conscious person at the edge of the room.

The moment his field of vision shifts away from her, Beauregard Lionett rises from the floor, and in a single, vicious motion, grasps Quoros's head between her hands and snaps his neck. He's dead before he even realizes she moved.

It reminds Astrid of Wulf and his "killing art." He prefers to kill with his hands when he can, as an acknowledgment of the gravity of the act and a token of his devotion to the Matron of Ravens. Astrid considers it overwrought nonsense, and has told Wulf as much. Wulf thinks that she's just envious because she's never been very good at hand-to-hand combat. In the past, there was a third act to their script: Bren would conjure a jaunty little flame in his fingertips and remark that perhaps the Matron preferred a burnt offering.

Anyway, the essential facts are these: Beauregard is free, and Quoros is dead.

Beauregard approaches Astrid with a set of lockpicks. "Got myself free a minute before he came in the room. Lucky I keep these in my bra. You okay?"

"It's an arcane lock," Astrid said. "Lockpicks won't work."

Beauregard smirks and takes the chain of Astrid's manacles in hand. Astrid cranes her neck to see what she's doing. She runs a thumb down each chain link in turn until she finds one that satisfies her—Astrid can't get a good view of it to see what distinguishes it from its brethren. Then she fits two robust lockpicks into the link so that their hooks rest snug against each other, grasps both handles in one hand, and squeezes them together. The hooks push out against the chain link and in against each other. The tension between the two mounts until it seems unendurable; the metal screeches; Beauregard's knuckles tremble with effort. Then at once, the tension releases as the chain link snaps, and Astrid's wrists drop free of the wall.

"Fancy locks don't mean shit if you skimp on the soldering." Beauregard shakes her hand out and sets to work freeing Bren.

It grates to be shown up by Beauregard, not least because Astrid's objection was silly in the first place; clearly Beauregard had already freed herself, and therefore lockpicks would work. It does not, however, grate as much as being chained had.

A satisfying pop signals that Beauregard has freed Bren. Having conclusively demonstrated her competence, she immediately sets to belying it by smacking him across the face.

"Caleb. Caleb, dude, wake up."

"He's enchanted," Astrid says. "Abjured, technically. It's what Quoros does. It will take an equally powerful abjuration to wake him."

"Have you got the juice?"

Astrid displays her wrists, still locked in their cuffs. "Not while I'm wearing these. As I said, abjuration is Quoros's specialty."

"So you can't wake him up until you take off the cuffs, and you can't unlock the cuffs without magic, which you don't have, because of the cuffs."

"That is the point of them, yes."

"Fuck. We've gotta get out of here. That guy wasn't working alone."

"No," Astrid says. "I imagine he was working with a middle-aged half-elven woman and two halfling teenagers."

Beauregard's eyebrows raise. She's either impressed or suspicious or both. "How…"

"The half-elf is Dulara—the only other Volstrucker who actually likes Ikithon. The halflings are Adele and Lukas. Ikithon's most recent graduates. Quoros and Dulara always take the new ones under their wings."

A thousand conjectures and questions gather behind Beauregard's eyes, and she visibly pushes them away. "They dumped us here about, I dunno, ten, twelve hours ago? I haven't seen them since."

"Probably out looking for Eadwulf. But Quoros and Dulara will have arranged a check-in time. We must leave before Quoros misses it."

Wulf and Astrid have their own scheduled check-in, and if Beauregard is right about how long they've been here, Astrid missed it between five and seven hours ago. Hopefully Wulf's retained enough sense to remain on Rumblecusp with Ikithon.

"All right, let's get going." Beauregard props Bren up and threads her arms under his shoulders and around his chest. "You get his legs."

Astrid lingers a moment longer over Quoros's body. She spits on him one more time for good measure. Then she hooks an elbow under each of Bren's thighs, and together, she and Beauregard lift him from the ground.

The prison they're in is pitiful. One small dark cell with an iron door—unlocked, thankfully, presumably to admit Quoros—that opens out into an equally dark and nearly equally small antechamber, furnished with a single cot and an impressive array of torture implements. A ladder leads up to a hatch in one corner.

"You think we're in a basement?" Beauregard says.

"I think we're in a bolt-hole. Some secret hideaway of Quoros and Dulara's."

Beauregard eyes the hatch with suspicion. "Guess we'll have to gamble there's no one waiting up there."

"Unless you want to forego gambling for the certainty of dying down here."

They lay Bren back on the ground. Beauregard scrambles up the ladder, spends a minute fussing with her lockpicks, and then eases the hatch open just far enough to peek out.

"Looks clear," she says. "It's just forest."

"Wonderful. How are we getting Bren up that ladder?"

Beauregard eyes the distance from the hatch to the ground. The ceiling is low—perhaps six and a half feet. "Can you do a soldier's carry?"

"Across the shoulders, you mean? For a short time."

"Short time's all I'll need."

Beauregard heaves Bren enough off the floor for Astrid to get an arm around his legs and her back under his chest. She loops his left arm over her left shoulder and pins it against his legs with her right. Slowly, carefully, she stands.

Bren's weight, slight though it is, immediately sets her wobbling. "Hurry," she grits through her teeth.

Beauregard scampers back up the ladder and through the hatch. She leans down, dangling her head and shoulders through the hole. "See if you can get up on the ladder."

Astrid puts a foot on the second rung and a hand on the fourth and lifts with all of her might. She would tell Beauregard to hurry again, but she hasn't the breath.

A moment later, the weight disappears from her shoulders. Astrid looks up to see Beauregard dragging Bren through the hatch. She's not doing it quietly or elegantly, but she's doing it. She wiggles and squirms and grunts until Bren's feet slip safely past the edge of the hatch.

Astrid scans the room for anything useful. Her and Bren's spellbooks, Bren's component bag, and all three of their veilers are on a table beside the torture implements. Astrid's veiler and spellbook go on her person immediately. She sticks a large, serrated knife in her belt, and throws the blanket on the cot over her arm. A peek into a wooden crate in the corner reveals two healing potions and enough jerky and hard tack to feed two people comfortably for two days, or uncomfortably for four. She wraps the lot in the blanket and climbs out of the hatch.

Just forest is correct. The hatch sits at the edge of a very small clearing in pine woods so thick that Astrid can only see a few yards into them. The air is cool, verging on chilly—notably colder than it had been in Zadash. The only sounds are wind, insects, and Beauregard's quiet breathing.

"You got any idea where we are?" Beauregard says.

"I would imagine that we're somewhere in the Pearlbow Wilderness."

"Oh, cool, so anywhere in the top third of the Empire." Beauregard huffs. "At least we know to go south."

"Complaining won't change the situation."

"No, but it'll make me feel better."

Astrid spreads the blanket on the ground. "We need a way to move Bren. Can you do something with this?"

Beauregard pauses to give Astrid a long, somewhat opaque look. Astrid wishes she wouldn't; they really can't afford the time.

"Yeah," she says. "Gimme two secs."

"Wait." Astrid proffers one of the veilers. "Put this on first."

"Maybe we shouldn't. If Essek or Eadwulf scries on us—"

"They'll see indistinguishable wilderness. Dulara will see terrain she knows and can identify."

Beauregard hesitates a moment longer, then silently puts on the veiler. One would think that after nearly dying in the attempt to steal them, and then nearly dying again after she and her friends for some inconceivable reason removed them, Beauregard would be more enthusiastic about the things.

While Beauregard scours the trees at the border of the clearing for materials, Astrid puts Bren's veiler back on him. She fastens his holster around his shoulders, and replaces his spellbook. There's a second book as well, slimmer, made of lower-quality paper. Its contents cannot possibly be relevant to their situation. She should put it in Bren's holster and forget about it.

She opens it to the first page. The handwriting is clearly Bren's, but looser and messier than the tidy cursive she remembers, like he'd been writing with his off-hand. The format is that of a letter.

Lieber Mutter und Vater, reads the first line, and that is as far as she gets before Beauregard plucks the book from her hands. The look she's giving Astrid is unbelievably judgmental, given that she is the one who wants to drag every humiliation and trauma Astrid has ever suffered out into the public record.

"Here." Beauregard drops two long, straight pine branches on the ground. She's put a third in the empty holster where her quarterstaff usually sits. "We can use these."

They set the branches two feet apart and wind the blanket three times around them, ending with the loose edge on top. Beauregard's design is rather ingenious—when they lay Bren atop their makeshift stretcher, his weight holds the whole thing together without any rope. The rations and healing potions nestle in a line beside him; without a bag, it's the only way they can think of to carry them.

Beauregard takes the end by Bren's head, facing down towards his feet, which leaves Astrid to take the lead position. She picks up her end of the stretcher, turns in the direction that the shadows indicate is south, and sets off.

Progress is agonizingly slow. Worse than that, it's loud. There is no path to speak of, only gaps between trees that are slightly wider than the rest, and where the tree cover is thinner, brambles and shrubs have grown in to fill the space. The stretcher catches on thorns and branches; every ten minutes or so, they have to stop so that Astrid can cut a path with the knife.

Slowly, they develop a rhythm. By the second hour of walking, Astrid's arms ache and her palms are blistered, but she's learned how to guide the stretcher over a bramble, and how to silently signal to Beauregard that they need to turn left. There's something familiar about it.

"I keep thinking about if anyone knows we're gone," Beauregard says.

"Wulf knows. We have a scheduled check-in time that I missed while I was asleep."

"So should we be expecting a pick-up? Will he find us?"

"I doubt it. Wulf isn't much of an investigator."

"Harsh. Isn't he like your boyfriend?"

Astrid hasn't had to actively work at schooling her face in years. All the same, it's nice to not have to hide her grimace at the word boyfriend. "We each have our strengths. Wulf would be much better suited to trekking the wilderness than I am."

"Yeah, but you're doing it, aren't you?"

"For now. There's plenty of time left to fail." Astrid pushes back on the stretcher to call a halt so that she can cut through a shrub. "He'll contact me again in about fifteen hours. We can reassess then."

They walk four hours, and stop when it's too dark to maneuver. Exertion made it easy to ignore the growing chill as the sun faded, but the moment they sit down, it becomes obvious. Sweat dries cold on Astrid's neck and armpits. A campfire would be a beacon to Dulara, and anyway they have no tinder, so to keep warm they disassemble the stretcher and wrap the blanket around themselves. All three of them huddle together in a hollow between tree roots, Beauregard and Astrid guarding Bren between them. There is something familiar about this, too.

With only two people conscious, they cannot set a watch, so Astrid falls into uneasy sleep to the sound of Beauregard snoring three inches from her ear.

She wakes at the first grey light of dawn, to riotous bird song and an unbelievable headache. Bren is mumbling something unintelligible with a Zemnian cadence. Beauregard is chewing on a hangnail.

"Morning," Beauregard says.

"Good morning." Astrid's throat rasps. "We need water."

"Yeah, I've been thinking about that." Beauregard's voice is dry, literally and figuratively. "I think someone needs to scout ahead. It's quicker going solo, and once we've found the water we can go straight there with the stretcher."

"Assuming the scout can find their way back."

Beauregard holds up her cobalt-blue sash. "Tie a string to a branch every so often. Follow the path back."

It will probably work—though of course, it also leaves a path for any Volstrucker on their trail. But it's been almost 24 hours since they last had anything to drink, with four hours of heavy exertion yesterday. They can't afford to spend an entire day carting a stretcher through the woods looking for water.

"You go," Astrid says. "I'll stay with Bren."

"I don't know much about how to find water," Beauregard says.

"Neither do I, and you're faster."

Tense silence falls, as it becomes clear that neither of them wants to leave Bren alone with the other. Astrid's reasons are practical: Beauregard is well suited to a speed-focused scouting mission, and Astrid is well suited to standing over Bren and murdering anyone who gets too close. Beauregard, she suspects, simply doesn't trust her.

Beauregard's eyes flick down to the second book in Bren's holster. Matron's mercy, it's not Bren's life she's afraid for. It's his privacy.

Astrid slides the book out of the holster and hands it to Beauregard. "Take it with you, if you're concerned."

They wait with the book in both of their hands for a moment, neither in full possession. Then Beauregard slips the book into her belt. "Okay. I guess I'm looking for more plants? Heading downhill?"

"I think so." The chirping overhead drags some half-buried memory out of Astrid's brain. "And birds, I think. They congregate on the water."

"Awesome. Time to stalk some birds." Beau stands, stretches, and heads off in the direction of the slight downward slope. Twenty feet out, she pauses to tear a few strings from her sash and tie them to a branch. Then she slips away into the dense forest.

Astrid takes a long time eating a very small piece of jerky, both to make it seem more filling and because it's a tough food to eat while dehydrated. She combs out Bren's hair with her fingers and guesses at the meaning his mumbling. She listens closely to the sounds of the forest, alert for any shift. She keeps the knife in her hand.

Lieber Mutter und Vater.

Most of the long wait, Astrid spends considering how to break Beauregard Lionett. She has no immediate plans to do so, but it's the closest thing she has to a hobby. And it never hurts to have contingencies.

Torture might work. Probably not applied directly, but to a loved one. Bren, perhaps, or the barbarian woman Yasha. Though Yasha seems the type to suffer in silence, and Bren would probably endeavor to kill himself before anyone could break for him. And they're all dangerous targets for capture, as Quoros's rotting corpse attests to.

Better the soft approach. Cleaner, too, with less political fallout. Seduction is always an option, especially since Beauregard prefers women. The fact that she's in a relationship is an obstacle, but not an insurmountable one. Some investigation would be warranted to determine if she has a type.

But seduction is so rarely about sex. Beauregard has a girlfriend, good looks, a certain charm born of brash confidence, and more than enough money to pay for a courtesan. She can acquire all the sex she wants much more safely and cheaply than anything a Volstrucker would ask of her. Most targets can. Seduction is about finding the thing they can't buy, and offering it to them. Sometimes sex is a part of that—it makes them feel loved, desired, young, powerful. Whatever the thing is that they actually want.

What Beauregard wants, Astrid doesn't think that sex would be a part of. Beauregard wants to right wrongs. She wants to overturn rocks and expose their dark, wriggling underbellies to cleansing light. Come to Beauregard with a desperate need that only she can meet, or a sordid secret only she can unearth, and she'll follow you anywhere.

That is, of course, the exact situation that Astrid is in. But it wasn't her design, and she doesn't know what to do with it. Other than wait for Beauregard to return, which Astrid knows she will. Because two people desperately need her to. And if they die, their terrible secrets die with them.

The sun is well and truly out, but not yet overhead, when Beauregard returns. Astrid hears her before she sees her, and readies the knife just in case.

"Chill, it's me," Beauregard says as she emerges from the trees. Her voice is significantly improved.

"You found water."

"Yeah. It's not that far from here, even, I just had to poke around for a while before I found it."

Wulf would have said a prayer of thanks to the Matron for that, as though the Raven Queen has anything to do with the placement of rivers in the Pearlbow. "Let's go, then," Astrid says.

They march steadily east, Beauregard in the lead this time. Astrid unties the blue strings from the trees as they pass. Half an hour brings them to a wide, shallow stream at the bottom of a wide, shallow valley, running almost exactly north to south. Astrid dips her hands into it and loses feeling at once. It's so cold it gives her brain freeze when she drinks. Snow-melt from the Dunrock Mountains.

"Holy shit, your hands," Beauregard says.

Astrid tracks her gaze to her open palms. The blisters from yesterday have intensified; a couple burst on the short walk to the stream. She hadn't forgotten, precisely, but she is very good at ignoring pain. Beauregard's hands, she notes, are protected by her arm wraps.

"Here." Beauregard removes her sash and rips it lengthwise. Weakened by the threads she's been pulling all morning, it tears easily, leaving her with two long, thin strips of silk. "Let me wrap them."

"Leave it," Astrid says. "They'll callus."

"Take the damn arm wraps," Beauregard says. "There's no prize for toughest bitch in the woods."

A laugh bubbles in the back of Astrid's throat. She swallows it like bile, and silently offers up her arms. Beauregard takes her right hand and begins to wind the silk around it. A sense memory: Bren's hands, quick and sure, Wulf's hands, strong and gentle, dressing her wounds.

"Caleb used to wrap his arms like this," Beauregard says.

"Why?" Astrid says, which means both: why did he do that? and why bring it up?.

"To hide the scars."

It's not really an answer to either question, though Beauregard probably thinks it's an answer to the first. Bren's scars are not particularly prominent, and anyone who recognized what they were would have recognized his face first. There's no practical reason for him to have hidden them, which means the reason was emotional. Astrid has no idea what the reason was.

She's fairly certain of why Beauregard brought it up, but Astrid has no interest in discussing Trent Ikithon right now.

Beauregard winds Astrid's wraps like a boxer's, tight around the wrists and palms. It's probably the only way she knows. It suffices; loose cloth wouldn't help with blisters, and Astrid doesn't need much flexibility in the wrists to carry a stretcher.

At Astrid's request, Beauregard reserves six inches of silk off the end of each wrap. Astrid dips them in the stream and uses them to slowly drip water into Bren's mouth. She gets perhaps a teaspoon into him before he starts to fuss and cough.

"That's not very much," Beauregard says as Astrid pulls the cloth away.

"He thinks he's drowning. Any more will be coughed up. At best."

"Drowning on three drops of water?"

"The wet cloth," Astrid says. "We put it over people's faces to simulate drowning for interrogations."

Beauregard's eyes sharpen into scalpels, dissecting her words. Astrid ignores it.

They pick up the stretcher and continue south, following the stream. There's no way for them to carry water, so they have to keep it to hand, and if it feeds into a river, it may lead them to civilization. Beauregard's wraps hold strong, and Astrid avoids any new blisters.

Just as the sun is reaching its peak, Wulf makes his check-in. "Astrid, if you're alive, you'd better answer. I mean, you'd better fucking answer. And if you can, tell me if Bren and Beauregard are alive."

Wulf has always had the knack for sendings that are both informative and colorful. Astrid settles for efficiency. "All alive. Taken by hardliners. Escaped, Quoros dead. Others at large. Somewhere in Pearlbow. Magic inaccessible. Bren asleep. Veilers on. Information uncompromised. Stay with Ikithon."

"Eadwulf?" Beauregard says.

"Yes. One moment, I expect he'll send another."

A few minutes pass while Wulf composes his reply. "Thelyss can stay with Ikithon while I search for you. Include any distinguishing landscape features in your reply. Unless you want to die out there."

"No. Ikithon requires two powerful minders. Check in daily. I'll tell you when we've reached a recognizable landmark. Send Nein if necessary, but stay put."

"None of the rest of them can teleport, and you know it. I can at least search part of the day and return here afterward."

Astrid doesn't respond. Sometimes cutting Wulf off completely is the only way to let him know she's serious.

A moment later, Beauregard speaks, responding to a message in her own head. "Astrid's right, Essek. It's a needle in a haystack. It'd put you in danger and risk Ikithon escaping. You can come when you know where we are."

She's two words over the limit; Essek will have missed "we are." Astrid mentally edits the message down: Astrid's right. It's a needle in a haystack. It'd put you in danger and risk Ikithon escaping. Come when you know where we are. That even leaves one word for sentiment.

Which apparently Beauregard could have used, because after a few moments, she responds to a follow-up message. "He's fine, just unconscious. It's some kind of abjuration, Astrid said. She can lift it when the anti-magic cuffs come off."

She's left four words on the table this time. How wasteful.

Beauregard waits a moment, then sighs loudly. "I think that's it for me. What about you?"

"Are you speaking to me or to Essek?" Astrid says.

"You."

"Yes, I think Wulf is done messaging me for the day."

"Do you think they'll listen to us?" Beauregard says.

Astrid considers the situation and the personalities involved. She doesn't know Essek Thelyss very well, but somehow he is not the wild card. "Wulf has three guiding principles," she says. "Honor the Matron, obey orders, and protect me. Usually the three are in alignment."

"Usually?"

"His priorities can be unpredictable when I am the one giving the orders."

Beauregard clicks her tongue. "Are you his superior officer?"

"There's no hierarchy." A half-truth at best, and an unintentional one. Astrid has never had to explain this to anyone before. "No official hierarchy. But Ikithon's favor holds a great deal of weight."

"And you have that? Ikithon's favor?"

"No one has it forever," Astrid says.

Astrid has taken the lead again, so she can't see Beauregard. But she has a keen sense for when she's being watched, and every hair on the back of her neck is prickling. Beauregard must be starving to ask more.

They walk most of the day in silence. Every few hours, they stop to rest and drink water. Astrid eats a few bites each time, but Beauregard turns it down.

"I don't think I need it," she says. "I figured out a way to kind of force my ki to run things instead. It's not super pleasant, but it works."

Four days of food becomes eight, just like that. Astrid allows herself one extra bite of hard tack.

At each stop, Astrid drips a little bit more water into Bren's mouth. He coughs less if she doesn't let the cloth touch his face, but it takes more control. By the time they bed down for the night, she guesses she's gotten three good sips into him.

Beauregard watches closely the whole time.

"You can do it if you like," Astrid says. She doesn't bother to make her voice friendly.

Beauregard shows no shame at being caught staring. "No, you're probably doing better than I would."

"I haven't slipped poison into the water either, if that's why you're watching."

"Well, I wasn't worried about that before." Beauregard shakes her head. "No, it's just… you really care about him, don't you?"

Astrid squeezes the cloth a touch too hard. The water trickles over Bren's lips; he coughs and whines. No more water today, then.

"You have," Astrid says, wringing the silk out violently on the dirt, "no idea what I have endured for him."

"You also set a house on fire with him in it."

"And you think that's incompatible with loving someone?" Astrid looks pointedly at Bren.

"I'm just trying to understand."

"You can't."

"I don't accept that."

"Don't you," Astrid says, in a voice that has made seasoned operatives piss themselves.

Beauregard is unimpressed. "You're not the only person in the world who's ever bonded with someone because of trauma. Fuck, I bonded with him because of trauma."

Fine. If Beauregard is so desperate for sordid stories, Astrid can give her one.

"I visited him in Vergesson once," she says, voice stripped down to bare essentials. "We weren't supposed to. He was weak, you see, and we were strong, and we gave no quarter to failure. But the day after I received my veiler, I went to see him, under cover of night, with certainty that I wasn't being scried on.

"Of course Ikithon found out anyway. The next time I visited Vergesson with him, he told me he had a special assignment for me. He led me down to Bren's room and told me that Bren was lonely, and since I clearly was as well, I could help with that. Then he watched while I fucked him, and when I was done he clapped me on the shoulder and told me that of course I was a grown woman with needs, and I shouldn't be ashamed of them.

"So no," she finishes. "You cannot understand."

If Astrid finds it hard to look at Beauregard when she's done, there is at least consolation in the fact that Beauregard finds it hard to look at her. More to the point, it shuts her up. She busies herself with nothing in particular while Astrid drinks and eats and wraps herself and Bren in the blanket, and makes no move to join them.

Astrid holds open one end of the blanket. "Get in."

"I feel like you could use some space."

On the list of things Astrid could use, space doesn't make the first page. "You'll die of hypothermia out there, and I can't carry him alone."

"I won't die. It's not that cold."

"Would you like to hear the story of how I know exactly how cold it needs to be to freeze to death?"

Beauregard gets in the blanket.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I shouldn't have pushed."

Astrid has less use for Beauregard's apologies than her space. Her shame, though, has potential. "I don't think he knows it happened," she says. "I would prefer it stayed that way."

"I'm not sure that's entirely your call," Beauregard says after a long moment of silence.

"Of course it isn't," Astrid says. "It's yours now. That's how it works."

"I meant…" Beauregard sighs. Her breath smells horrible. "Never mind. Good night, Astrid."

Astrid lays her head on Bren's chest and closes her eyes.

She wakes with the birds again, still half-stuck in a dream she can't remember. It follows her into the day, ambushing her at unexpected moments with flashes of undefinable sensation. It's strongest when Wulf messages to check in: "Mighty Nein are on the case. Trying to find a Cobalt Soul person to help, Dairon. Send location details and I'll spare us the humiliation."

"Still no distinguishing features," Astrid responds, suppressing a shiver of something. "Stay where you are."

Early in the day, the stream they're following feeds into a larger one running southwest. They stay with it, hoping that the change of direction means that it will eventually lead to the Erdeloch.

"I've been thinking," Beauregard says when they pick back up after their midmorning break. Astrid is taking the rear today. "Maybe this whole deposition thing would be easier if you knew more about me. I mean, it can't be easy telling all your shitty secrets to a stranger."

"I already know quite a bit about you."

"Oh yeah?" Beauregard says. "Like what?"

The back of Beauregard's hair is starting to matt above her undercut. Astrid imagines yanking it out by the root. "This is a very clumsy interrogation tactic."

"Wow, you're making this so needlessly antagonistic. It's not an interrogation. You volunteered."

"Convincing people that it was their idea to tell you what you need is the essence of spycraft."

"I'm trying to tell you that I'm not playing mind games," Beauregard says. "I don't do that. I just want to help."

She does. Astrid knows that to be true. And since their aims align, perhaps it is best if Astrid lets herself be interrogated, though it counters every instinct she has.

"Remind me of the question," Astrid says.

"Huh. I think it was 'What do you know about me?'"

"You are the eldest child and only daughter of Thoreau and Clara Lionett, of Kamordah. Thoreau has mundane political aspirations largely in line with the status quo, and he and Clara are nominal followers of the Lawbearer, though not particularly observant. You have one much younger brother, Thoreau Jr., whom you have either never or rarely met. You were arrested when you were seventeen, likely for drug trafficking, but charges were never filed. Shortly after, you joined the Cobalt Soul in Zadash as an initiate, and remained there for four years, never advancing very far. In Sydenstar of last year, either in or very near to Alfield, you formed a group called the Mighty Nein, whose feats include but I assume are not limited to winning Zadash's Harvest Close festival, ridding Alfield of a gnoll infestation, thwarting a cult of the Chained Oblivion, arranging the end of the War of Ash and Light, and stopping the ascension of Cognouza. You are romantically linked with Yasha Nydoorin of the wastes of Xhorhas, and have recently been elevated in rank within the Cobalt Soul. That's the gist of it, anyway."

Beauregard's shoulders rise a little higher with every sentence. Astrid might have been a little less thorough, but she wanted to see if she could get them all the way up to her ears. Not quite, but pretty close.

"Well," Beauregard says, "I guess you do know some stuff about me."

"Some, yes."

"So did you guys look into all of us?"

"Not me personally. Ikithon gave us dossiers when he sent us to track you in Eiselcross."

"Well," Beauregard says again. She shrugs the tension out of her shoulders, forcing Astrid to stumble to keep the stretcher even. "Is there anything you want to know that wasn't in there?"

"You are asking me what you could tell me about yourself that would make me feel more comfortable sharing highly charged information with you?"

"Yeah."

"You understand you are asking me to interrogate myself."

"If that's how you have to look at it, fine."

Astrid daydreams about how to interrogate people in her spare time, but she's certainly not going to turn that lens on herself. Instead she picks a question whose answer would, if she knew it, help her interrogate just about anyone. "What are you ashamed of?" she says.

Beauregard glances backward for long enough to give Astrid a knowing smirk. "I'm trying not to do shame, these days. It's counterproductive."

"So you did 'do' shame in the past."

"Well, yeah."

Astrid doesn't ask the obvious question. If Beauregard is so determined to open herself up, let her take some initiative.

Beauregard rolls her shoulders, destabilizing the stretcher again. "Did your dossier have anything about how I joined the Cobalt Soul?"

"Nothing at all."

"My dad bribed one of the archivists to come drag me out of my house with my hands tied. So, see, this isn't my first time escaping a kidnapping." Beauregard throws a wink over her shoulder—a little bit too nonchalant. Her shame isn't as far in the past as she pretends.

Astrid slots this new information into place, then steps back to look at the picture it suggests. A troubled relationship with her father—well, that's not a surprise. The troubled relationship with the Cobalt Soul is more interesting. Beauregard has never expressed anything but calm confidence that the Cobalt Soul will aggressively pursue justice against Ikithon. There are political reasons that the Soul would like to undercut a member of the Cerberus Assembly, but Beauregard doesn't strike her as a particularly political thinker. Or rather, Astrid senses that Beauregard doesn't trust politics. Which is an oversight; politics usually provide a much better prediction of what people will do than principle does.

But if Beauregard believes that the Cobalt Soul would pursue justice, she likely has reason to do so on principle. Something must have happened to change her attitude towards the organization.

Astrid considers and disregards several methods to fish for that information, before settling on one that frames things in a way that she thinks will appeal to Beauregard. "You have asked me to put a great deal of faith into an organization that kidnapped you," she says.

"The Cobalt Soul didn't kidnap me," Beauregard says. "Archivist Zeenoth did, and when I finally told someone what had happened, they had him arrested. I have a lot more trust in an organization that takes accountability for the shitty things its members do than one that pretends it never does anything shitty."

Again, the distrust of politics. The Cobalt Soul has nothing to gain from tying themselves to a corrupt low-level archivist, and a great deal to gain from cultivating the favor of an increasingly influential mover in Wildemount's international affairs. But that is a tally in their favor for Astrid's purposes. Aggressively prosecuting Ikithon will certainly cultivate Beauregard's favor.

"I'm guessing you don't buy that," Beauregard says.

"Are you."

"I asked Caleb what he believed in once, and he said he didn't believe in anything anymore."

Astrid can see his face today, since she's at the back of the stretcher. He looks tired even in his sleep. Lost, like he had when he'd visited her house. When they were young, he'd always known where he was going. Always been alight with belief.

"That's unfortunate," Astrid says.

"He got over it." Beau pauses. "So you do believe in something?"

"I have priorities."

"Like Eadwulf?"

Astrid rolls her eyes. "Why not? Like Wulf."

"So his are honoring the Matron, obeying orders, protecting you. What are yours?"

Why does Beauregard want to know, is the real question. So that she can pass judgment? So that she can decide whether it's really a good idea to have Astrid at her back? Astrid might lie, anyway—but her priorities are largely ones that Beauregard would agree with, and the one that isn't, Beauregard wouldn't trust her if she didn't hear.

"Protect the Empire," Astrid says. "Advance my own position. Destroy Ikithon. In that order."

"And they're usually in alignment?" Beauregard says dryly.

"Often horribly opposed, actually. But each requires the next."

"Mm." Beauregard taps her thumbs on the handles of the stretcher. "What about Caleb and Wulf? Where do they fit in?"

Lieber Mutter und Vater.

"They are vices," Astrid says. "My only ones."

She shouldn't have said that. It is too revealing by far—the very fact that she said it proves its truth.

"That's really fucking sad," Beauregard says.

"We have wandered from the topic," Astrid says. "I have a question about you."

"Shoot."

She takes a moment to compose her question like it's a sending. "If Ikithon escapes justice—if he is acquitted, or the Crown declines to prosecute—political considerations may protect you and Bren. But I will die. And before I die, I will suffer in ways…" Better to trail off. Better to let Beauregard's mind fill in the rest. "I will suffer."

"Yeah," Beauregard says. "Yeah, I can… well, I can't imagine."

"My question, then. Where does Ikithon's destruction fall in your priorities?"

Beauregard pushes back on the handles of the stretcher, signaling a stop. She turns around, releasing and catching the handles so quickly that the stretcher doesn't have time to fall; Astrid's eyes only barely track the movement. She can only have done this so that she can meet Astrid's eyes—as if that changes the truth of her words in any way. But Astrid returns her gaze.

"I am not letting that motherfucker take one more step as a free man," Beauregard says. "I'm gonna be in that courtroom, and if the Crown says he's innocent, I'll kill him before he takes his next breath."

Interesting. Astrid believes her. At least, she believes her intentions. "You won't be able to do it alone."

"Maybe not. But I could do it if you helped me."

Imagine for a moment the future in which Ikithon stands trial—at this point, Astrid's hoped-for outcome. Imagine, as Astrid has done frequently, that he is not convicted. Imagine that Astrid helps to kill him on the spot. What happens next?

She is subdued—there will be no getting around that—and killed. But Dwendal will be in command of what happens to her, so she will be killed quickly. Preferable to the alternative? Yes. Better to be killed quickly and openly than in agony and degradation, in secret and after days of waiting. Better to be killed after killing Ikithon than to die with him still alive.

"It's a deal," Astrid says. She contemplates setting down the stretcher so that she can shake Beauregard's hand; Beauregard seems the type to be reassured by that. The awkwardness of the set-up would probably undercut the gesture, though. "If he is acquitted, we strike immediately."

Beauregard nods in a way that makes Astrid think she's very much missing the opportunity to shake hands. "Deal."

An awkward moment passes in which Beauregard fails to figure out how to gracefully transition out of the grandiose interaction. "Well. Okay," she says, before turning back around and resuming their hike.

They walk until the light turns grey, then set to their minimal bedtime activities. Bren is fussing less today, but Astrid doesn't think that's a good sign. She checks his tongue before giving him water; it's dry to the touch. Worse, when she checks again after feeding him his two teaspoons of water, it's already dried out again.

"How far do you think we've walked?" she says. She has her own internal sense, but Beauregard is a seasoned adventurer by foot and cart, and likely has a better feel for distances.

Beauregard furrows her brow down at the wraps she's rewinding around her hands. "Gotta figure twelve hours of walking a day once you take out sleep and breaks, plus four-ish that first night. We're not walking very fast, so maybe thirty miles? A little more?"

Thirty miles, but not in a straight line. If they're to the east of the Erdeloch, which the direction of the water flow seems to indicate, and if they started out very near the Dunrock Mountains, which the chill of the water seems to indicate, then the shortest way out of the woods was probably fifty or sixty miles directly south, and then perhaps ten or twenty miles before they got to a recognizable road. Which they would only be halfway through anyway, but they're not headed directly south, they're headed southwest along the river. How far are they from Rexxentrum, if they head south now? How far are they from the Erdeloch, if they continue on their path?

Too far, either way. At least another two days' journey. Astrid doesn't know the precise odds of Bren surviving another two days like this, but they can't be good. There must be a way to speed up their escape.

Possibility one: Literally speed up their progress. Walk faster, for longer hours. Faster isn't really a possibility, though—walking near the water is necessary, but the foliage is thicker along the river's edge, and the stretcher is an unavoidable hindrance. Longer hours may be achievable; there will be a toll on their bodies, but nothing near to the toll on Bren's if they don't get out of here soon. But they do require some rest, and they have to stop with some frequency to try to work water into Bren. It won't be enough to make the difference.

Perhaps Beauregard could get Bren out faster if she strapped him to her shoulders and ran on ahead of Astrid. It would be a gamble, though; she could easily injure herself or him, and she would have limited means of fighting if she ran into dangers natural or unnatural. And of course, she simply might find herself unable to carry him alone for the distances needed.

Possibility two: Bring someone with magic to them. They have a theory as to their very general location now. Somewhere to the east of the Erdeloch, perhaps twenty miles south of the Dunrock Mountains, on one of the minor rivers that feeds the loch directly, or one of the tributaries of the Erdefluss River. That leaves dozens of square miles for a search to cover on foot; Astrid and Beauregard might very well get to the Erdeloch before they were found. And in the meantime, Wulf—because it would be Wulf—would be leaving Ikithon half-attended, and opening himself up to attacks from Dulara. Unacceptable.

Possibility three: Remove the block on her own magic.

Astrid examines the cuffs on her wrists. They're more snug than they were when she first woke, cushioned by the wraps that Beauregard wound under them. Fashioned from steel. Half an inch wide and perhaps a quarter of an inch thick. She runs her thumb along the one on the left and feels the fine runic etchings.

The arcane lock is solid and unbreakable by mundane means. But what was it that Beauregard had said? The best lock in the world is useless if you skimp on the chains? Perhaps there is another way around the problem. Perhaps she can break the cuffs themselves, or failing that, ruin the abjurative enchantment within them.

"I'm going to relieve myself," Astrid says.

Beauregard gives her an absent thumbs-up. "You go, girl."

She walks until she can't hear Beauregard anymore, leaving a blue thread on a tree every twenty feet. Rocks are everywhere in the forest, at least everywhere that trees aren't, so she doesn't have to look long to find what she needs: a craggy, flat-topped stone the size of a loaf of bread, stuck firmly into the ground like a flat grave marker. She sits down cross-legged in front of it, picks up a nice, hefty pebble, and considers her options.

The cuffs are each constructed from two long, curved strips of metal, with a hinge at one end and a padlock at the other. In theory, the padlock should be susceptible to Beauregard's lockpick trick, but the arcane lock spell is well fortified against physical incursions like that.

She looks instead to the hinges, held together with small rings of soldered metal. If the cuffs have a weak point, it's there. They're too small to fit lockpicks into—Beauregard had tried her trick in every nook and cranny of the cuffs that first night, with no success. But they might succumb to sheer force.

Astrid lays her left wrist on the flat stone and twists the cuff until the hinged end lies flush with the rock. She takes the pebble she found and slams it into the metal ring holding the cuff together.

The sound is atrociously loud, and the impact jolts her wrist and fingers. It does not appreciably damage the cuffs.

Astrid tries again. Another ringing crack of stone on metal on stone; another shockwave of force through her skin and bones; another blow that might as well not have landed, for all that the cuffs seem to care.

She gives herself five more tries, and when those five are up, she gives herself five more, and then five more still. She beats at the cuffs until her fingers are numb. It doesn't matter. The metal doesn't give. It doesn't even weaken.

Option number two, then: leave the cuffs, but remove the abjuration. Astrid is no enchanter, but she knows that rune-based enchantments come in two varieties: those that persist if the runes are damaged, and those that do not. She does not know how to tell the difference, except by damaging them.

Astrid picks up the end of the chain dangling from her right cuff—it jangles and beats at her thighs as she walks, and Beauregard grumbles about it constantly, but Astrid has mostly forgotten about it until this moment. She sets the chain against the runes on the left cuff and scrapes. Scrapes again. Scrapes again.

The runes are small, and the light is dim, but after a few minutes she's sure she's rubbed off some of the figures on the left cuff. She repeats the process on the right, just to be sure. Then she casts Prestidigitation, to turn the blue silk wraps on her hands to black.

They remain blue.

Astrid screams into the crook of her elbow. It's still loud, but no louder than the sound of stone beating on metal.

She slips the pebble into her pocket and returns to what passes for camp, where Beauregard tracks her with obvious curiosity, but doesn't ask questions. They sleep fitfully, waking each other with twitching and snoring, and rise before the sun. Beauregard hasn't said anything, but Astrid senses that she, too, is concerned about Bren's state.

Before they set off, Astrid does take the time to prepare Teleport. Just in case.

Beauregard manages her worry by pestering Astrid. They've barely walked one hundred feet before she begins questioning.

"What's your favorite color?"

Astrid, in the lead again today, glances briefly over her shoulder. "Is this meant to help bring down Ikithon?"

"Sometimes people just have conversations for fun."

"Nothing about this is fun."

"Wow. Sometimes it's really obvious you and Caleb know each other."

Beauregard professes fondness for Bren, so one would think that would be a compliment, but it doesn't sound like one particularly. Astrid tightens her fists around the stretcher handles.

"Come on," Beauregard wheedles. "It's not a state secret. What's your favorite color?"

"I don't have one," Astrid says honestly.

Beauregard snorts. "Just like Caleb."

What conversations has Bren had with this woman that she says that? Has he told her his favorite color? Does his toe still tap when "Ich het an sie gewendet" plays? Does he still have a weakness for apple tarts? What did he write in that book that Beauregard still carries on her belt? What is he dreaming of? What did he dream of in Vergesson?

Lieber Mutter und Vater.

She loses time to her thoughts. When she resurfaces, it is midday, and they stop for lunch. Beauregard frowns while Astrid gives Bren his water.

"The river banks are getting steeper," she says.

So they are. When they first started following the stream, it threaded the bottom of a valley so wide and shallow, it hardly deserved the name—but as they walked, the valley walls have drawn in closer and raised themselves higher, rising like Beauregard's tensing shoulders. They've been walking along the inside and camping atop the outside, but soon, they'll have to choose one or the other. Very soon. In fact, if they want to leave the valley, Astrid thinks they might have to backtrack a mile or so; she's not sure they could carry Bren up the slopes here.

"The valley has water," Astrid says. "But it also pens us in."

Beauregard shrugs. "If we get attacked, it's not like I'm running. Are you?"

Astrid looks at Bren's eyes darting back and forth under their lids; his dry, flaking skin; the downward curve of his mouth. "We'll stay with the river, then," she says.

By nightfall, the valley has become a proper ravine. Their speed picks up; the slopes are too steep to sustain trees, and the strip of flat ground at the bank of the river is too rocky for underbrush.

"I bet we made fifteen miles today," Beauregard says, as they settle against the ravine wall to sleep. It's not quite as cold tonight, but they still bundle up all together in the blanket.

"Twenty-five miles since we turned southwest, then."

"About." Beauregard hugs Bren to herself like a child's doll, cheek pressed to his shoulder. They stare at each other across the narrow bridge of his chest. "It can't be more than thirty or forty more miles to the Erdeloch, right?"

"I don't recall the width of the Pearlbow. But that sounds reasonable."

"Two days," Beauregard says. "Just two more days."

She doesn't sound as reassured as she probably wants to be. Astrid closes her eyes and listens to Bren's heartbeat. Faster than it should be in sleep, but present and steady. For now.

Astrid falls asleep listening, and wakes up with Bren's heart still in her ear. It's gotten faster overnight. She asks Beauregard to keep time so that she can measure it.

"120 beats per minute," she announces.

Beauregard bites her lip. "Maybe that's not so far from his baseline. I mean, he's not exactly athlete of the century."

Astrid says nothing. If Beauregard wants to fool herself, that's her prerogative. As long as she keeps moving.

She takes a moment to prepare Teleport again before giving Bren his water. He is fussier than usual, as though his dreams are worsening with the dehydration. She has to give up after only a few minutes, and she can't guarantee any water even got into his mouth.

Something dark hovers over Astrid's head. She can't look at it, or think about it very much at all, or she won't be able to stand up, and she must stand up. But it's difficult to keep her eyes away; the pull is strong, and Bren is dying.

"Good morning, Astrid," Wulf's voice says in her ear. He's early for the check-in. "The Nein are still looking. Please give me something. I'm worried for you. And for… all of you. Please let me help."

Astrid focuses all of her attention on Wulf's low, familiar voice. "Sing for me, Wulf," she says. "Please."

A long moment passes before Wulf sings. His voice is clear and melodic from a thousand miles away.

Schwesterlein, Schwesterlein,
Wann geh’n wir nach Haus?

Schwesterlein, Schwesterlein,
Wohl ist es Zeit.

Astrid laughs. "Fuck you." Then she sings the response.

Morgen wenn die Hahnen kräh’n,
Woll’n wir nach Hause geh’n,
Brüderlein, Brüderlein,
Dann geh’n wir nach Haus.

Nineteen words. "Forty miles northeast from Erdeloch, approximate," she says as she stands up. It's not enough to find them, but it's her best guess. Maybe it will help the Mighty Nein.

Beauregard is watching her intently. Astrid ignores her in favor of turning the blanket back into a stretcher.

They march silently, steadily, for hours. The ravine deepens; the river widens. A fine mist drizzles down, slowly soaking them. No trees remain to catch the rain. They don't speak, but Beauregard mutters every so often, usually numbers. Astrid thinks she's gauging their progress. If the numbers she hears are any indication, they're probably making good time.

The sound of the river has been a constant companion for the last three days. It grew from a burble to a rush to a rumble as they walked, and today it grows louder still. Quite quickly, the river goes from background noise to an all-encompassing force. Astrid cannot hear herself breath over the roar of the water. It takes a few minutes for her to wonder why that would be. And then only a minute more after that to discover the answer.

She's been looking at her feet, watching the path ahead for unwieldy rocks. And then suddenly, the path ahead drops away.

Astrid stops. Three feet ahead, the river bank cuts off into a cliff. The river rushes forward unperturbed—a waterfall. She cranes her neck to see the bottom. It is distant.

"Astrid?"

Numbly, Astrid sets down her end of the stretcher. Beauregard follows, and sees what Astrid has already seen. "Shit."

The walls of the ravine are too steep to climb. The waterfall is too steep to climb. The only way out is a day of walking back the way they came. A detour that Bren absolutely cannot afford.

Astrid's eyes fall to her wrists, to the thin metal cuffs that are the only thing that truly stands between her and salvation. A key turns in her mind; a lock shifts; a door falls open. She remembers, now, what her mind had hidden from her until the right moment. Why she kept the rock that sits in her pocket. Why she prepared Teleport yesterday, and today.

The cuffs won't break. But her thumbs certainly will.

"Beauregard." Astrid kneels to pick up a river rock from the ground—it's better suited to the task than the one in her pocket, wide and smooth and heavy. She holds it out. "You need to break my thumbs. At the base, where my hand is widest. I'll slip the cuffs and teleport us away."

Beauregard flinches back. "What? No."

"I can't do it myself. Once one hand is broken I won't have the strength to break the other."

"But you'll be able to cast a spell?"

"Teleport has no somatic component."

"Astrid. Look me in the eye: there is no fucking way I am breaking your fucking thumbs."

The black cloud is creeping over Astrid again. This time, it rains rage, and with nothing to distract her and nothing left to do, Astrid lets herself soak in it.

"You are unimaginably arrogant," she says. By the end of the sentence, it's more of a scream. "You have no idea how arrogant you even are, because no one has ever taught you! Do you care for this man? Truly? Do you think he won't die out here, without water? Do you think Wulf won't die looking for us, when Dulara finds him? That I won't die when she finds me? What use is all of your caring if you won't do anything with it, just because it upsets you?"

The cloud envelopes Astrid, and she screams, loud and wordless, with no arm to muffle her. Bren is going to die. Wulf will die. She will die. She's going to die, and Ikithon is going to win, and she's exhausted, and hungry, and her feet throb and her shoulders ache and her hair is wet and her clothes are wet and she itches everywhere and she is scared, so very scared, and she misses her mother—

Hands, cloth-wrapped with calloused fingertips, grip the sides of her face and wrench her head up.

"Astrid, look me in the eye."

Beauregard's eyes bore into hers. They are dark and liquid and look nothing like the eyes of anyone Astrid has ever cared about.

"I'm going to get us all out of here," Beauregard says. Her fingertips push bruises into Astrid's cheeks. "Fucking believe me."

"How?" Astrid says, quiet and pathetic.

She's on the ground, she realizes, half sprawled over Bren, hands fisted in the front of his robes. Beauregard is kneeling on the wet rocks in front of her. She lets go of Astrid's face and reaches for Bren, for his shoulders. Astrid's fists tighten unthinkingly.

"Trust me," Beauregard says.

With no options left, Astrid lets go.

Beauregard manhandles Bren until he's upright on his knees, leaning against her chest to chest. She drags them both up to standing, squats down, and shoves her shoulders underneath him, rising slowly into a soldier's carry. She doesn't look quite as unsteady under his weight as Astrid was.

Three slow steps take her to the edge of the cliff. Beauregard bounces experimentally on the balls of her feet once, twice, and then leaps out into the air.

Astrid scrambles for the cliff. She peers over the edge, utterly convinced that she will see Bren and Beauregard's bodies splayed across the ground. But Beauregard has landed lightly, knees bent, one hand holding Bren's limbs against her chest while the other braces against the ground.

She sets Bren carefully down and grins up at Astrid. "Monk shit!" she yells. She's barely audible over the sound of the water.

"How do you propose to get back?" Astrid yells back.

Beauregard eyes the cliff carefully. She leaps up for a handhold seven feet off the ground, jams a toe in a cranny, and kicks off again. With unbelievable ease, she hops from tiny ledge to tiny ledge. Just once, about halfway up, she slips on the wet rock and seems like she might fall—but she catches herself, stabs her foot into the cliff with a ferocious yowl, and gets back into her rhythm with twice the energy she had before. She crests the top in less than five minutes.

"All right," Beauregard says, holding out her hands. "Your turn."

Astrid's heart is still settling down from the jump, but she tries not to show it, or any sign that she's impressed. She rolls up the blanket with their supplies inside and holds it and the two stretcher handles in one arm while she loops the other over Beauregard's shoulders. Beauregard heaves her up in a bridal carry.

"Can you make the landing without a free hand?" Astrid says.

"Oh yeah." Beauregard bounces a few times. "Ready?"

Astrid sets her face. "Go ahead."

Beauregard jumps.

The fall is fast, but not as fast as it probably should be. Astrid has time to take in the view of the river spilling out ahead of them into an endless carpet of green-brown treetops. Her heart has time to beat a dozen or so rapid strikes against her ribs. Her brain has time to forget, just barely, that they're going to hit the ground.

They hit with a jolt. But that's all—just a jolt. The impact pushes the breath out of Astrid's lungs and probably does a number on Beauregard's knees, but they are uninjured, and perfectly capable of walking. They've made it through. The cliff is past.

Astrid untangles herself from Beauregard and considers their new situation. The cliff marks the end of the ravine; the ground at the bottom of the waterfall is much flatter, and from what she saw in the air, will continue so for a long time.

On the other hand—it continues for a long time.

"You should still break my thumbs," Astrid says.

"For fuck's sake. Why do you want me to break your fingers so fucking badly?"

It's tempting to snap again, but Beauregard kept her head while Astrid lost her own. If she is stubborn and naive, she is at least competent, and capable of some measure of lateral thinking. Calm logic may sway her more than reproachments.

"He is dying, Beauregard." Astrid nods down at Bren, curled up on a rug of dead pine needles. His lips have passed chapped into flaking. His cheeks are hollowing out. "Even with this obstacle past, we are a day and a half out from civilization at least. It may be as much as half a day after that before we can contact Wulf, and his teleportation may deposit him miles from us. Do you truly believe Bren will survive another two days like this?"

Beauregard stares down at Bren. She doesn't speak, but her jaw twitches and her fists tighten. Astrid is getting through.

"We're already walking as fast as we can," Astrid says. "This is the only way to speed ourselves up."

It seems for a moment like Beauregard has been convinced. Her stare deepens. Her brows furrow. She actually frowns, a perfect little upside-down bow of her lips.

But then her fists relax.

"What if we don't need to speed ourselves up?" Beauregard says. "What if we slow Caleb down?"

Lateral thinking. For the first time in ten minutes, the possibility opens up of a world in which Astrid's thumbs survive this intact. "What are you proposing?"

"You think he's fighting the water because he thinks he's being drowned, right?"

Astrid nods.

"So some of the outside world is getting through to him in there." Beauregard's body reanimates with the energy of her idea. She looks up, rolls her shoulders, bounces on her toes. "So what if we make the outside world less like his shitty memories? Make him feel safer, so he doesn't think he's drowning, so he doesn't fight the water, so he can actually get a decent drink."

Astrid's brain races ahead to the inevitable endpoint of Beauregard's logic. "You would like me to describe the circumstances of his torture. So that you may… provide a counterweight."

Beauregard shuffles like a chastened child, shoulders up around her ears. "Well. Yeah."

The proposal has the outlines of one of Beauregard's little games of interrogation. What a convenient way to encourage Astrid to share her history—simply call on the weakness that she's admitted for Bren.

But whatever else Beauregard is, she's an idealist, and whatever other motives she has, she does care for Bren. Astrid doesn't believe she would manipulate her in that way. She doesn't think it would even occur to her. If Beauregard is proposing this, she truly believes it will help Bren. And Beauregard has shown undeniable capacity for that in particular.

"What," Astrid says, as plainly as she can, "would you like to know?"

After a moment's thought, Beauregard says, "Start with the mechanics. How exactly do you torture someone like that?"

Easy enough. "You chain them to a table on their back and put a wet cloth over their face. When you pour water on it, they feel like they're drowning, but as long as you don't let it go on too long, they usually don't inhale much water. It's useful for when you want someone to remain relatively intact."

Beauregard makes an obvious, and failed, effort to hide her outrage. "Chained. Was Caleb chained? Even though he volunteered?"

Astrid never said he volunteered. Beauregard has intuited quite a lot on very little information. Astrid will have to remember that for later.

"We all were," she says. "There is a base instinct to remove the blockage from your face. None of us were ever able overcome it."

"Yeah, of course you fucking didn't, you were fucking drowning."

Astrid shrugs. What precisely does Beauregard expect her to say?

Nothing, apparently. Beauregard drops to her knees and begins unwinding the cloth from her wrists.

"Can you get the blanket under him?" she says.

Once Astrid has situated Bren on the blanket, Beauregard starts wrapping his wrists. She leaves the cloth much looser than she does with Astrid, and makes sure it sits fully between the cuffs and his skin.

"Okay, that's one sense covered," she says as she works. "We've got touch. What about sound? What would he have heard?"

"The water pouring." Astrid glances at the waterfall—they can move away from it, but there will be no getting away from the river. "The chains."

They were too short to clink much, but they made a sort of dull metallic thud when Bren yanked at them. His arms would strain with the effort to stay still, and he would make it ten seconds, twenty, before inevitably his will broke and he made a wild grasp for his face, only to be brought up short. Afterwards, the only mark of what you'd been through were the vivid bruises on your wrists.

"What about voices?" Beauregard says. "Ikithon?"

"Certainly. He instructed us on what to do—when to start pouring, how to know when to stop."

Beauregard's hands pause for just a moment. "He made you do it to each other?"

"As you said, we volunteered. One of us would learn to resist interrogation. The others learned to interrogate. It was efficient, if nothing else."

Beauregard flexes her fingers and resumes wrapping. "So your voice too, then."

"Yes," Astrid says, looking away.

They cover smell and taste and even sight, though Bren has none right now. For each detail Astrid mentions, Beauregard finds a countermeasure. They move a few minutes downriver, to lessen the sound of falling water, and set up with Beauregard sitting at the base of a tree, Bren propped against her chest with his head tipped back on her shoulder. The hope is that the change of position will help.

The water always tasted of the cloth it ran through, so they soak the rags in the healing potions, hoping to infuse the water with their distinctive flavor instead. The dungeon always smelled of rot and urine, so Beauregard holds a sprig of pine by Bren's nose. It was always cold, so they wrap Bren in the blanket.

Astrid dips a rag in the river and cups it in her hands until it's warmed slightly. As she lets it slowly drip onto Bren's tongue, Beauregard begins to speak in a kind of stage whisper, right into his ear.

"Hey Caleb," she says. "Veth taught me a bunch of knock-knock jokes. You ready? Knock, knock. Who's there? Water. Water who? Water you doing in there? Eh? Eh?"

She throws a big grin up at Astrid, inviting her to laugh, but it would defeat the purpose if Astrid made noise, and anyway the joke isn't funny. That doesn't stop Beauregard from telling another one, and then another, and then launching into a shaggy dog joke so long that Astrid forgets there's supposed to be a punchline. She keeps up a steady, cheerful patter of puns and innuendo and inside jokes for as long as Astrid works.

And Astrid works for quite a long time. By the end of the shaggy dog joke, Bren's tongue is no longer dry, and he hasn't fussed at all. So she dips the rag back into the river and keeps going, and going, and going, until she's gotten at least half a cup into him and Beauregard is starting to sound hoarse.

"That should suffice," Astrid says, sitting back on her heels. "For now."

Beauregard exhales like she's been holding her breath, despite the ample evidence to the contrary. "It worked."

"Yes, it did."

"I think the new position helped, like, logistically too. Gravity, right?"

"Drink some water," Astrid says. The've spent most of the afternoon here. They should move soon if they want to make any more progress today.

They both drink, and Astrid eats her allotted half a hard tack and two strips of jerky, and then they set off again. The stretcher feels lighter between them than it did this morning. Beauregard whistles, and the birds whistle back. The river merges with another smaller tributary, and the joined waters rush strong and fast towards the promise of civilization.

One good turn deserves another, as Wulf would say. Or as Astrid thinks of it, a favor returned is an investment in future favors. People's good opinion can be bought like a line of credit at a shop. Not that Beauregard helped Bren as a favor to Astrid, but she is unquestionably the hero of the day. If she's still not tired of talking, well, Astrid has forced pleasant conversation in worse circumstances than this.

"What is your favorite color?" she says.

Beauregard laughs and glances back at Astrid—she's in the lead again. "Now you're interested?"

"You did say to ask whatever I wanted."

She laughs again. "Okay, well, I really wish it weren't blue, because it makes me feel like I'm showing school spirit, but it's blue. Maybe a little lighter blue than the Cobalt Soul."

"How do you know?"

"Know what?"

"That blue is your favorite color."

"I just… I just know," Beauregard says. She sounds perplexed even to have been asked. "I see like, the sky, or the ocean, or whatever, and it makes me happy." Her head tilts fractionally to the left. "Do you not do that? Just see something and enjoy it because it's pretty and you like it?"

"Pleasure is not high on my list of priorities." No, that's true, but not the whole truth. The whole truth is something that Astrid has never put into words, and she finds herself considering how to explain it to Beauregard. Understanding that she will explain it. "This is not a life one can last long in with… strong preferences. To favor something is to create an opportunity for injury when it's taken away. To disfavor something is to create an obstacle where none is required."

Beauregard mulls that for a time. "Does Eadwulf have a favorite color?"

"Green," Astrid says immediately. Deep green like the fabrics he gravitates towards in disguise; bright green like the jade plant he keeps in his sitting room that can survive months of neglect no worse for wear. "But he is not as good at the psychological aspects of our work as I am."

"He seems pretty well-adjusted to me. You know. Relative to the situation."

"He has faith," Astrid says. "It's a workable stand-in for detachment in many situations, and it keeps him centered. But it's also a target for others to hit. And it means there are lines he won't cross."

"You don't have lines?"

"When it comes to my goals? No."

"What about Caleb and Eadwulf? You were going to break your hands for them. Are you really telling me there's no line you wouldn't cross there?" Beauregard's tone has been casual, but now it takes a turn for the combative. Despite her determination to pluck every ugly truth from Astrid's mind, she's frustratingly unwilling to receive the ones that Astrid shares freely.

Astrid traces the spray of Bren's hair across his face. Tangled as it is, it's still in better shape than it was in Vergesson. She'd forgotten the way it captured the light.

"If Ikithon were here right now," she says, "and told me to cut out Bren's heart, I would do it without hesitation. If I believed it would protect the Empire, I would do it without guilt."

Beauregard's head dips down like she's looking at the ground. "Maybe you're right," she says quietly. "I can't understand that."

Belatedly, Astrid recalls that she began this conversation to try to make Beauregard happy.

After another, much longer, silence, Beauregard says, "I don't believe you."

"Is it so much more unbelievable than everything else I've done to him?" Astrid says. "I set a house on fire with him inside, if you recall."

"Yeah, and that was fucked, but." Beauregard shrugs. "You'd cut out his heart on Ikithon's orders? Really? Cause in Nicodranas you wouldn't even counterspell his escape."

"What are you talking about?" Astrid says.

"You had the chance to keep Caleb from escaping, and you let him go. Even though Ikithon was basically right over your shoulder."

"No, I didn't."

"Caleb says you did."

"There wasn't time to get the Counterspell out. That's all." It is all. She saw him casting, and began the somatics to counter him, but he'd disappeared too quickly. Counterspell is quick to cast, but it isn't instantaneous. That's part of why it fails so often.

"Okay," Beauregard says in a thoroughly unconvinced tone.

Very well, let her keep her self-deceptions. They work in Astrid's favor anyway. "Do you have any other favorites?" she says. "Food? Animal? Monk… trick?"

"Well, I'm feeling pretty fond of slow falling at the moment," Beauregard says.

"Would you look at that?" Astrid says, straight-faced. "You finally told a funny joke."

Beauregard bursts into laughter.

For the rest of the day's travel, Beauregard treats her to a list of her favorite things, and a few of her least favorite. She buttons each item with a story about why she likes or doesn't like it. The stories are mundane but revealing, as all stories are: Beauregard likes black moss cupcakes because she needs her sweetness to be tempered with something complex, and she hates owls because she got attached to one and it abandoned her, and she loves the ocean because it is the freest thing on the planet and it could kill her in an instant.

None of it is a particular surprise, but Astrid catalogues it all carefully. It adds color and texture to the profile she's built of Beauregard. It would all be extremely useful in a seduction attempt.

Around the edges of the stories are anecdotes about Bren: how the first time he saw the ocean he stripped naked and walked into the waves like he was answering a siren's call; how he turned his familiar into an owl to console Beauregard when she lost hers; how he tore the center out of a fresh loaf of bread and used it to warm his hands. Astrid catalogues these as well.

They stop for the night with just enough light left to set up Bren in Beauregard's lap again and repeat the process from the afternoon. This time Beauregard sings, mostly bawdy folk songs and sea shanties, all of them slightly out of tune. Astrid refills the rag with water three times. She only stops when she can no longer see Bren's face well enough to keep the cloth away from his lips.

When they wrap themselves in the blanket to sleep, they find it even fouler-smelling than it already was. Bren has pissed himself. Beauregard's breath hitches with relief.

It's just barely warm enough that it's preferable to wash the blanket in the river and sleep in the open air while it dries, and they huddle all the closer for it. Astrid cups a palm under Bren's head to pillow it from the ground. Beauregard pulls his arm around her shoulders and burrows into his armpit. Astrid has slept in worse conditions, but rest doesn't come easily.

It's the memories, mostly. The cold air on bare skin, and the sounds of two people breathing beside her, and Bren's particular smell. They never did sleep much on those nights in the tower.

She could tell Beauregard about that. She'll have to eventually, at least in part—Beauregard doesn't strike her as the sort to leave stones unturned, and Bren certainly isn't, so at some point Astrid will tell this part of the story, if only to corroborate Bren. Why not now? When it's dark and the memories are close anyway, and Beauregard's face is hidden. Like whispering secrets to Wulf and Bren in the private world of her bedsheets.

"I have a confession," Beauregard whispers.

Funny. Astrid has heard those words, more or less, dozens of times. Usually she has to work much harder for them. "Oh?"

"There are still a few things I'm ashamed of. And it's not like, a major thing, or the big regret of my life or whatever, like I think it turned out pretty well in the end, but I thought you should know."

"Okay."

Beauregard swallows. "When Caleb first told me about his past, it wasn't 'cause he trusted me. I pretty much extorted him. He wanted into the archives, and that was my price. And at the time I felt like, a little bad, 'cause I definitely got more than I bargained for, but honestly the more I've gotten to know him, the more I don't feel… I don't know, I don't feel great about it. He was like you. He'd have broken his thumbs to get in that archive."

Astrid waits her out, but that's all Beauregard has to say. It doesn't seem appropriate to her confessional tone. "Why did you want to tell me that?"

"I know the thing I'm asking you guys to do takes a lot of trust. I guess I just want you to know that I don't take that lightly." Beauregard peeks up over Bren's chest. Her eyes glint in the starlight.

"That is…" Unusually, Astrid finds herself lost for words. She doesn't know what it is, and she doesn't know what she should tell Beauregard it is. "It doesn't matter whether I trust you. I'm rather committed to this course of action."

"I dunno, I kinda think your feelings about it matter a lot."

Ah. The pieces slot into place: why Beauregard has confessed, and why she's looking at Astrid with that intensity that burns even through the darkness of the night. Somewhere in the last few days, somehow, Astrid has seduced her. She wants to help, now. She cares.

Having hooked Beauregard, Astrid can think of nothing else to do than release her. "I'm not like him," she says. "I'd make a poor project."

"He's not a project," Beauregard says. "He's a friend."

"I'd make a poor one of those as well."

"I don't want to get Da'leysen mimosas with you. We're not gonna start a book club. I don't have to be friends with you to think you matter as a human being."

Astrid closes her eyes. She should get some sleep. They have a long day of walking tomorrow.

"Maybe you should join a book club," Beauregard says ponderously. "You need a fucking hobby more than anyone I've ever met."

Astrid smiles. "Good night, Beauregard."

The blanket isn't entirely dry by the morning, but it's dry enough to turn back into a stretcher. Astrid spends an hour dripping water into Bren's mouth while Beauregard tells a rambling, apparently improvised story about what adventures she thinks her lost owl has gotten up to since he left, and then they set off again, Astrid in the front.

The river has bent around to run almost directly east to west. Astrid's shadow shrinks in front of her as they walk. At the beginning of the day it is a long, insectoid creature with fragile limbs. Around mid-morning, when Wulf makes his check-in and Astrid updates him on everyone's relative health, it is a nearly perfect mirror of herself. As high noon approaches, it shrinks to a dwarf's proportions, then a halfling's.

It has withered to almost nothing when Astrid feels eyes on her.

She's still not sure what causes that sensation—whether there's something magical underlying it, or if it's a matter of purely mundane signs and sounds that she picks up on subconsciously. But the ability to sense someone's gaze is invaluable in her work.

She thinks at first that it's Beauregard. It wouldn't be the first time that Astrid's felt eyes on the back of her head as Beauregard stews over some secret she wants to dig out of it. Astrid glances over her shoulder, prepared to tell Beauregard to just ask, already, but—Beauregard isn't looking at her, particularly. She isn't even quickly averting her eyes to avoid being caught. She looks, if anything, bored.

Astrid stretches her gaze beyond Beauregard just in time to see Dulara, her rowan wand focus held in front of her, forming the somatics for Hold Person.

Wulf has always been good at resisting this spell. He says that it's about remembering that Hold Person is an enchantment. It doesn't physically stop you from moving, it only convinces your mind that you can't. Nothing is truly holding you.

Astrid tries to remember that, but she runs into the same problem she always does: there is something holding her. The magic wrapping around her brain is as real as any chain, and it binds her just as surely. Her limbs freeze; her hands harden like stone around the stretcher handles.

Beauregard shakes the spell off without trouble. She drops her end of the stretcher—Bren slides boneless to the ground—and swings around, makeshift bo staff already out of its holster, ready to fight.

"Vaarn!" shouts Dulara. Beauregard stops in her tracks. The staff wavers in her hands. Not held, just stunned by a power word. It's one of Dulara's most powerful enchantments. She begins the somatics for another spell, a complex one that Astrid's never seen her use.

It's only magic, Astrid tells herself. Your body isn't frozen. Nothing is holding you. She tries to move a finger; nothing.

Dulara completes her somatics with a short, brutal shove at thin air, and Astrid's mind shatters.

Pain, pain, pain.

Some time later, she blinks through the agony enough to notice what's going on around her. It's only been a few seconds. Beauregard is still reeling from the same psychic blow that Astrid took. Dulara's hands are still pushed out in front of her. She drags her rowan wand up her forearm.

Disintegrate. After that last spell, it could probably turn either of her and Beauregard to dust. And Beauregard is still dazed.

Nothing is holding you, Astrid repeats desperately. Nothing is holding you.

A jet of sickly green light bursts from the rowan wand. Astrid tracks the angle; it's headed towards Beauregard.

At the last instant, Beauregard's eyes clear. She side-steps. The spell skims past her, close enough to shear the fine hairs off her arm, and fizzles out harmlessly on the ground.

Beauregard launches herself at Dulara, who just has time to throw up a shield spell to stop the makeshift bo staff from crushing her nose. A second blow muscles through the shield and lands solidly across Dulara's temple. Dulara staggers back, and the spell holding Astrid in place disappears.

Immediately, Astrid drops the stretcher and unsheathes her knife. In the foreground, Beauregard is still fighting, her fists moving too fast to track, but Astrid stops paying attention. Whatever Beauregard is doing, it's buying precious time, and Astrid intends to use that time fully.

She has a theory about the cuffs. They abjure magic, but it would be more accurate to say that they abjure spells. They don't, for example, muffle the effect of enchanted items—Astrid's veiler is still working just fine.

The glyph chant is not a spell. It is a permanent magical effect that is activated by a somatic. And if Beauregard can keep Dulara distracted for just a few more seconds, Astrid may be able to activate it.

She flings her arms out, forearms to the sky, and flicks her wrists.

The buzzing in her skin tells her that it has worked even before her tattoos begin to light up. She can feel the magic taking hold; can feel it burning through her arms. But working isn't enough. It has to work quickly, because if Dulara manages to get off even one more spell, Astrid is dead.

Time stretches out interminably while she waits for the activation to complete. Beauregard hits Dulara once, twice, three times, does something so fast Astrid can't make out how many hits it actually involves. Dulara doesn't seem to have the time or the breath to react. Bone crunches, and Astrid thinks that maybe Beauregard will get a killing blow in before she even gets there. Probably not, though—it is very difficult to beat someone to death.

Then the glyphs finish lighting up and power surges through Astrid's body, and she stops thinking at all.

One-two steps to Dulara, swing around behind her, wait for Beauregard's fists to clear the area—eye contact for the merest moment, you see what I'm going to do here, Beauregard falls back half a step to give her space—left hand braces on Dulara's shoulder, right hand slips around her throat and sinks the knife deep, deep, deep into her flesh.

Blood sprays in a hot, arterial arc over Astrid's hand; she's severed Dulara's carotid. Dulara wavers for a moment, pawing weakly at her throat. Then she drops like a stone to the ground. Dead weight.

Astrid kneels down and removes Dulara's wand and components pouch and sets them out of arm's reach. She's not dead yet, not quite; the blood hasn't stopped pulsing from her throat. Astrid watches it slow with each passing heartbeat, until the geyser fades to a weak dribble, and then to nothing at all.

Dulara was elegant in life, but she makes an ugly corpse. Her throat gapes wantonly, drenched in blood. Her nose has been wrenched off its axis, and two of her front teeth are missing. Worse than her face, though, are her hands: At some point in her onslaught, Beauregard broke both of Dulara's thumbs.

Interesting. She wouldn't have figured Beauregard for ironic vengeance.

Dulara's eyes are still open, dull and speckled with blood. Astrid pushes them gently closed with the palm of her clean hand.

Beauregard is watching her with that careful, intense look. An arc of dark blood spatter cuts across her bright blue robes. "Was she a friend of yours?" she says.

Astrid never learned with any certainty how Ikithon knew about her secret visit to Bren in Vergesson. But she knows that at nineteen, the people she'd been close enough to that they might have guessed her plans were Eadwulf and Dulara. She knows that if Eadwulf had sold her out, he would have admitted it. And she knows that a year later, as her suspicions of Ikithon grew, she had carefully asked Dulara about her family—and that Dulara's voice had seemed to carry a hidden meaning beyond the obvious when she responded, "Master Ikithon asks difficult things of us for our own good."

Dulara had meant it, too. She wasn't a sadist like Quoros. She was like Eadwulf; she had faith.

"I used to think she was," Astrid says.

There's nothing to be done with the body, so they leave it where it lies while they reassemble the stretcher and check that Bren didn't break anything from the fall.

"How do you think she found us?" Beauregard says.

"I think," Astrid says, picking up her end of the stretcher, "that we are very near to a town. They must have decided that the most efficient way to find us was to stake out our likeliest exits."

"Do you think the other two are nearby? Or would they have split up to cover more exits?"

"I would imagine one of them is at Vergesson, in case we went north. Other than that, I can't say."

Not ten minutes later, Astrid's theory bears out: They pass by a small wooden footbridge, flanked on either end by a rough dirt path. It's the first sign of civilization they've seen in days.

Over the next two hours, the signs grow thicker on the ground. Chopped-down trees, wagon tracks, an abandoned log cabin, several more bridges of increasing size. Finally, they come upon a cabin that is clearly not abandoned—fresh firewood neatly stacked against the wall, family laundry flapping on a line—and retreat a mile back to discuss their options.

"We could knock," Beauregard says. "Ask where we are."

"If Adele or Lukas is here, they may have taken over the house. It would make for a good base of operations."

"Okay, then fuck it. We've gotta be close to the Erdeloch now, let's just go."

"You and Bren should stay here," Astrid says. "I'll do reconnaissance in whatever town we're near and report back."

"If there's a scourger waiting for us, we'll have better luck together."

"And if there isn't, but they've paid off a spy in town, we'll draw much more attention together."

Beauregard drums her fingers on the ground. "Okay. You know these guys, you know how they operate, so if you say recon, we'll do recon." She glances at Bren. "If you want to stay with him, I can go."

"You don't know the area, you don't know what you're looking for, and your clothing is covered in blood."

"Point taken. Thought I'd offer, though."

Astrid smooths Bren's hair off his face. "If I don't return, don't come looking for me."

"If you don't return, we're fucked," Beauregard says.

Unhelpful, but accurate. Astrid takes one last moment to look at Bren's face before leaving.

After days of trudging along tied to Beauregard by the weight of the stretcher, Astrid's progress feels almost magically hastened. It's not dissimilar to the feeling the glyph chant creates. Her feet bounce lightly off the river bank; her arms swing in the air. She's past the log cabin in no time, skirting out a dozen yards from the river to hide from any watching eyes that might wait within its windows.

The closer she gets to the Erdeloch, the farther she strays from the river. She has to. The trees are thinning out considerably, and the bridges and footpaths and cabins are multiplying. After an hour of walking, it's undeniable: she's not in the wilderness anymore.

She's reached what seem to be the farthest outskirts of a small town. Too small to be Odessloe, which is unfortunate, since Wulf once spent two months in Odessloe undercover and could've teleported there easily. Astrid tries to remember any towns and villages on the eastern shore of the Erdeloch or the eastern bank of the Erdefluss River. There's Tannedorf, she thinks that's on the east, and Flusstrom. Tannedorf is a logging town, which this clearly isn't, and she's almost certain Flusstrom is farther north than they are now.

If absolutely necessary, she can find someone and ask where they are—preferably a child, someone unlikely to have been bribed by Dulara and naive enough not to be spooked by Astrid's chains. But she would very much prefer not to take the risk.

Just as she's considering moving deeper into the forest once more, a faint metallic creaking catches her ears. It's coming from the direction of the river. Astrid creeps closer to the treeline, trying to catch sight of the water without putting herself too much in the view of the buildings along its edge. The creaking grows louder, but its source is still hidden from her. Finally, frustrated, she ventures out of the woods entirely, edging along the windowless back wall of an industrial-looking stone building until she can see the river.

The creaking is coming from a large steel water wheel that juts out from the front of the building she's lurking behind. The river turns the wheel; the wheel turns its axis; somewhere inside the building, the axis turns the gears of a mill. Astrid inches forward just a little bit more, and spies a large cart at the far end of the mill, being loaded by two sweating workers with fat reams of paper. It's a paper mill.

Astrid rocks on her heels, momentarily paralyzed by sheer relief. She knows where they are.

She shakes the relief more easily than she did Dulara's Hold Person, and slips back to Beauregard as quickly as possible.

Quiet as she is, Beauregard hears her approach; Astrid finds her crouched over Bren with her makeshift quarterstaff at the ready. She stands down when she sees that it's Astrid.

"Well?" Beauregard says.

Astrid smiles a feral grin of victory. "Spinnestrom."

"That's where we are?"

Astrid nods. "It's a little village north of Odessloe. They have a paper mill on the river—they make most of the spell-quality paper sold in Rexxentrum. The Assembly buys from them directly."

"Have you been here before?" Beauregard says with animation. "Has Eadwulf?"

"No, but it doesn't matter. He can teleport easily—he has something from here."

Beauregard's confusion lasts only until her eyes touch on Bren's spellbook. "His spells."

"As soon as he checks in tomorrow, he'll be able to get to us within the hour."

Beauregard sags with the same tidal wave of relief that hit Astrid earlier. "We did it," she said. "We actually fucking did it. We're getting out."

"We haven't done it until it's done," Astrid says. "Come on, let's get Bren more water."

That shakes Beauregard out of her stupor, but whether it's practicality or irritation that does it, Astrid can't say. They give Bren his afternoon drink, breaking occasionally to stretch or eat a little, luxuriating in the time that they suddenly have to spare. They spend hours on it, only stopping when Astrid thinks she's gotten a full pint into him, and then they move a few hundred yards south of the river to make camp.

It's early yet, but they're worn out from the fight earlier. They wrap themselves in the blanket as soon as it's dark enough to reasonably expect to sleep.

Tomorrow, either Eadwulf will find them and take them away, or Adele or Lukas will find them and, in all likelihood, kill them. Either way, this is the last time Astrid will sleep like this with Beauregard. The last time she'll sleep like this with Bren. The last time she'll press close to him, feeling the cold in her fingers and toes but trapping his heat against her chest.

"We used to do this," she says. "The three of us, under Ikithon."

Beauregard stares at her sideways, head on Bren's arm. "Do what?"

"Sleep together to keep warm. There's an abandoned tower at Soltryce. Ikithon would lock us in there on cold nights sometimes. We'd huddle up just like this. Without the blanket, of course."

"As a punishment?"

"Sometimes. When we were getting too used to finer things, he'd say. When we needed to remember we hadn't signed up for a spa retreat." Something tickles the back of Astrid's neck, and she shudders. "We had our first kiss, one of those nights. I kissed Bren, and then Bren kissed Wulf."

"So it was the three of you."

Astrid studies Beauregard for signs of deception, and finds none. "I assumed you knew."

"Caleb never said it, you know, outright. I guessed."

"Perceptive." Astrid lays her cheek against Bren's shoulder. "We're not together anymore, you know. Wulf and I. Since you mentioned before that you thought we were."

Beauregard opens her mouth to speak, closes it, opens it again. "Huh," she says, finally.

She clearly wants to ask more, but doesn't think it would be polite, or possibly can't think of a polite way to say it. Astrid thinks about telling her more. But she can't think of how to say it either. Sometimes she still doesn't understand why she and Wulf couldn't make it work without Bren. Or because of Bren.

"I'm sorry he did that to you," Beauregard says. "None of you deserved that."

Astrid closes her eyes. "If you apologize after every admission, this will be a long process."

"Unfortunately, it's gonna be a pretty long process no matter what."

"So it is," Astrid says, and lets herself fall asleep.

She wakes in the pale pre-dawn light to Wulf's voice in her ear. "Astrid," he says simply, "please give me some good news."

It's the earliest he's ever checked in by far, on the very day that it will finally do them some good. Wulf will probably thank the Raven Queen when all is said and done.

"One hour upstream of Spinnestrom. Dulara was here yesterday. We dispatched her. Be on lookout for Adele and Lukas." After a moment weighing whether Wulf will think of it on his own, Astrid adds, to be entirely safe, "Use your spellbook as an anchor."

"Danke, Erzieherin," Wulf says wryly, in the tone he always takes when Astrid micromanages him. "See you soon."

"Travel fast, travel safe."

Astrid shakes Beauregard awake. She rises in a flail of limbs and gets tangled in the blanket.

"Wulf is on his way," Astrid says. "We should get to the river to meet him."

Rearranging the stretcher and carrying Bren to the river only takes twenty minutes. It doesn't seem worth it to go through the laborious process of giving him water when he will either be awake or dead within the hour, so there's nothing left to do after but wait. Astrid and Beauregard sit on either side of a tree, Astrid facing downstream and Beauregard facing up, so that they can spot danger if it gets to them before Eadwulf.

Astrid is quite accustomed to long waits in tense circumstances, but Beauregard quickly loses patience. She drums her fingers on her thighs; she hums and whistles; worst of all, she gets up and paces, which undermines their attempts at keeping watch. But it means that forty minutes later, Beauregard is the one who first spies Eadwulf walking up the riverbank.

"He's here!" Beauregard shakes Astrid's shoulder with excitement. "I see him!"

Astrid leaps to her feet, and with the added perspective, she sees him too: Eadwulf, a quarter-mile down the river, marching with single-minded focus in their direction. He speeds up when he sees them, not quite to a run, but just shy of it. Beauregard and Astrid pick up the stretcher and walk out to meet him halfway.

He doesn't say anything when they reach each other, doesn't stop for a hug or a greeting or to check on their health. The moment he's within ten feet of them, he squeezes his hand around a bit of driftwood and teleports them all away.

Three days later, after Bren has been woken up and all of their cuffs removed, and after Caduceus Clay has looked them all over "just in case" and pronounced them undernourished but fine, and after Astrid and Beauregard have had two very long nights of sleep and Bren has stayed up for twenty-four hours straight, they meet up to try again.

They're staying in Rumblecusp for now, since it's clear that the Volstrucker are aware of what's happening and who's behind it, so there's no point in trying to keep up appearances. But Bren still casts his tower, and strings his alarm around it, for privacy. At Astrid's urging, he stays outside this time.

Astrid and Beauregard face each other once again across the wide edge of a table. Beauregard pulls a cheap book out of her bag and places it between them. It's a novel: Tusk Love.

"I thought you could get a head start on your book club," she says.

Astrid picks up the book and flips through it. The writing is extremely overwrought from even a cursory glance. She already knows she'll read it cover to cover.

"I suppose they can't all be great literature," Astrid says.

Beauregard snorts. She pulls a folder from her bag, opens it, and sets a sheet of paper in front of Astrid. This one isn't blank: It contains a summary of everything Astrid told Beauregard about Trent Ikithon while they were walking through the Pearlbow Wilderness. The abandoned tower, the simulated drowning, the incident in Vergesson.

Below, there are questions. Many of them. Dates and times; corroborating witnesses; physical evidence; locations. And that's only for three isolated stories out of the fifteen years' worth Astrid has to tell. They'll be at this for weeks.

"Are you ready to get started?" Beauregard says.

Astrid meets Beauregard's eyes, dark and honest and intense. "Ask away."