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His people.
Nott’s voice rang through Caleb’s ears, even now as he was curled up in the back of the cart, their little group making their way away from Felderwin.
Fuck you, it was your people that did this, she’d said as he tried to stop her, tried to keep her from spilling his secret. Caduceus had held him almost immediately after, comforting him as if he were a child, seemingly without a care as their group looked on.
And then they’d all met Nott’s son, and...and now they had more questions than they had answers. More tasks to get done, more lives to save.
His people.
Was that really what she’d thought? All these months traveling together, protecting each other. She was always talking about his abilities, about how he could ‘save her’. Was he nothing more than a means to an end? That sickly taste of bile filled his mouth again, his stomach rolling now. He just curled in tighter on himself, staring blankly ahead at the side wall of the cart. There was a tense, anxious silence over their crew, broken only by the sounds of the horses hooves and whinnying. Even Caduceus couldn’t help the worried mood.
They traveled until they were forced to stop, until the horses were beginning to tire and the sun was starting to set. It was always easier to make camp with some light left, after all. Caduceus pulled the cart aside, leading the horses off road until they came to a clearing.
One by one, they disembarked, all hopping off of the cart and onto the ground to begin setting up for the night. This far into their journey, into their time together, they had a decent system going.
Caleb all but stumbled off of the cart, leaning against it and vomiting once more before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and grabbing his silver thread from his pocket. The two familiar faces in Felderwin had given no indication that they’d even seen him, but he wasn’t going to take his chances. Not when there was obviously something powerful happening.
The alarm was set, the dome set over them. Caduceus was cooking at the campfire, humming as he stirred some veggies together. And again, their group was silent, save for the crackling fire and the sound of Frumpkin purring from his spot in Caleb’s lap, as if the noise would somehow help his master relax.
“You know, I think we all need to talk,” Caduceus said easily.
“What do you mean?” Jester asked, frowning.
“Well. We’ve all been traveling together for some time now. The rest of you have been together long before I came into the mix, of course, but it’s obvious that not everyone has been honest,” he said. There was no judgement in his tone, no derision. It was just a simple fact.
Caleb snorted, staring blankly at the fire, petting carefully over Frumpkin as Fjord frowned, looking between everyone in the group.
“With all due respect, Caduceus...we can’t force anyone to talk,” Fjord said. The firbolg shrugged in response.
“Maybe not. But I think honesty is important, and as much as we all trust each other, this can only bring us closer,” he said, smiling widely.
“How can you be so sure?” Caleb said, breaking his silence for the first time since they were in the basement. His gaze, still, was on the fire. “Secrets are kept for a reason.”
“Secrets can hurt people,” Beau said, her eyes on Caleb. “After all the shit we’ve been through together...we need to learn how to actually trust each other. I get that you’ve been alone for a while. I’ve know how it is. We’re not alone anymore, though.”
Silence fell over the group, as if they were all debating whether or not to speak up. It was Yasha, surprisingly, who spoke first.
“I am married,” she said, drawing the attention to herself. Caduceus and Jester, both having known already, gave her small smiles. “I...was, married? I never know how to say it, but...in my tribe, back in Xhorhas, a mate was chosen for you, and when you married, it was for life. We broke the law, though. She and I had others chosen for us, but we...ran off, and married in secret.” She swallowed hard, clearing her throat. “They killed her, when they found out, and I...ran. Next thing I know, I was at an altar of the Stormlord.”
The group lapsed into silence at that, shocked at such honesty from Yasha. Maybe that was what spurred Beau on to talk and take her turn.
“I, uh…” she grimaced. “My parents are...wine makers, in Kamordah. I was a shithead, growing up. They wanted a son, someone to inherit the family business, and they got me instead. I started...stealing shit, selling it on the side, on top of just causing trouble in general. My dad had me kidnapped and taken to the Cobalt Soul. After that, they disowned me. Guess they had a kid while I was gone, too. A son.” She took a swig of wine from her waterskin. “There’s my shit. Who’s next?”
“I just want to say, I think you’re all doing really well,” Caduceus said. He was smiling, as if pleased with himself and the group.
“I really don’t have any secrets,” Jester said plainly, shrugging. “You guys know everything about me. My mama is the Ruby of the Sea, I grew up in the Lavish Chateau, I didn’t really get to leave a whole lot so the Traveler was my only friend,” she listed off, counting on her fingers. “Oh! I wanted to find my dad, but we maybe found him, so...mystery solved,” she added, wrinkling her nose a bit.
Another beat of silence, and Fjord sighed, groaning as he rubbed his hands over his face.
“I, uh...I haven’t been too honest either,” he said. When he spoke next, his accent had changed from it’s normal twang to something moderately more refined. “It seems...silly, but...I’ve been putting on a voice. Vandren is the only father figure I’ve had, and...part of me felt that if I spoke like him...maybe I’d be able to be a leader like him.”
Beau was looking at him like he’d grown a second head, her eyes narrowed at him.
“All the shit we just told you, and you come out and say you’ve been doing an impression of your friend this whole time? What the hell, man?” she asked incredulously.
“Hey now, no judgement. It obviously took a lot for Fjord to say that. Fjord, thank you for trusting us with that. And the same to you, Beau, Yasha. It takes a lot to say things that are so personal, even around people you trust,” Caduceus said, stirring the food before finally taking it off of the fire.
“I really like your real voice, Fjord,” Jester ‘whispered’, giving Fjord a wide grin before looking at the other two members of their group. For once, Nott and Caleb were sat across from each other. Nott was biting on her nails, hardly paying attention to anyone. “If you two don’t want to tell us, that’s okay, but...you know we would never, ever judge you guys, right?” she asked.
Caleb leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands gripping his hair tightly as if the pain could distract him from this moment, from the racing of his heart, from the memories that constantly threatened to overtake his mind.
“I killed my parents.”
His voice was hoarse, barely audible, but it had the intended effect. It was like dropping a bomb into the middle of the group. Fjord, an orphan who had always wished for a loving family. Beau, whose family had disowned her. Jester, who had such a loving relationship with her mother. Caduceus, with a family of his own. And Nott. A mother, separated from her son, from her...friend? Lover? Whatever this Yeza was to her.
“Caleb…” Jester whispered. He rubbed his hands over his face before sitting back, his eyes firmly in front of him. Firmly on the fire.
“I was a student at the Soltryce Academy. One of three, chosen from our small village to attend. We were all close friends, and our second year there, the three of us were chosen to study beneath Trent Ikithon.” Bile rose into his throat; he swallowed it down.
“We were promised...prestigious positions, within the Empire, if we were able to complete our training. It was everything our parents had dreamed of for us, we would have been fools not to accept,” he said, with a bitter smile. He could feel so many eyes on him, but he couldn’t bare to see the emotions behind them. So he forged ahead.
“We spent a year with him. We lived at his home, and from dawn to dusk, we trained, and we studied. We were...exterminators. Executioners. It was our job to find the dissidents, the traitors, the scum that marred our beautiful Empire, and to dispose of them. And one weekend, before we graduated, the three of us went home, and we each heard our parents talking. Plotting some stand, some revolution against the Empire. So we reported to Ikithon, and we did as we were trained to do.” His voice was cold, as if he had to separate himself from the story just to tell it. He began unwinding the bandages around one of his hands, pulling it up and off his arm, revealing the thick burn scars that marred his skin. Jester gasped, her hands covering her mouth. He’d managed, somehow, to hide these marks from them.
“Astrid poisoned her parents at dinner that night, as we ate with them. Eodwulf went into his parents room while they slept, and he slit their throats. They bled out without ever having woken up.” More bile. He spit it out, this time, and his hand shook when he wiped his mouth. “And I set mine on fire. Pushed a cart of hay against the door and...and lit it up. I was so sure of myself until I heard them screaming, and something in me just...broke. I tried to get them out, but Astrid and Eodwulf pulled me back,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper once more.
The group was silent for a few long moments.
“What...what then?” Fjord asked, almost as if he were afraid of the answer. Finally, Caleb looked up at him, his lips pressed into a thin line before he spoke.
“I spent the next eleven years in an asylum. I was...barely a husk. I couldn’t do anything to take care of myself, I was…” he ran a hand through his hair. “Those...episodes, I have? Those flashbacks? Extremely similar to the state I was in before. Just...an endless haze that I couldn’t get out of.”
“But you did,” Caduceus said. No questioning; it was a fact.
“I did,” Caleb sighed. “For better or for worse, I did. A new patient came in. She just...she looked at me, and took my hand, and suddenly...I was cognizant again. And then she was on the ground screaming. She took my madness as her own, I think.” He cleared his throat, wiping tears away from his eyes that had begun to gather in the last few moments. “I realized that the memories of my parents plotting their revolution, it had been implanted. That had been our final test, a test of our loyalty. The Empire comes before everything else, even family.”
The others all looked sick, but still, he pressed forward.
“I spent the next five years on the run. A few months ago, I met Nott while we were in prison. It was just us for a few months, and then we met the rest of you,” he said, rubbing his hands against his pants.
There were a few long moments of silence.
“You left some stuff out,” Nott said. Caleb snorted, dropping his gaze as he began to wrap his bandages around his arm and hand.
“Nothing important,” he retorted. Still, Nott pushes on ahead.
“You were tortured, Caleb. I saw how you were looking at the chair in Yeza’s basement. If you didn’t do as well as Ikithon wanted, or you broke the rules, you were tortured,” she said bluntly. Caleb’s jaw was tight. “You were raised to believe that the Empire was the best there is, and you saw no reason to think otherwise.”
“Indoctrination,” Fjord supplied.
“Right, that!” Nott said.
“I was tortured, but I was also the one torturing people,” Caleb snapped back. “I tortured and I killed innocent people, people whose only crimes were that the Empire wanted them gone.” He wanted to get up, to run, to leave. He couldn’t stand so many eyes on him, not even the eyes of those he considers friends.
Caduceus reached out, setting a bowl of food and a cup of tea in front of him.
“I’ve been in so many set ups like the one in that basement, both as the person in the chair and the person in front of it. You can try and justify it as much as you’d like, give me whatever excuses you want, but I was as much a part of it as Astrid and Eodwulf,” Caleb said, his voice cold. “They were my people.”
Nott’s green complexion went ashen, and Caleb could see Beau glance over at her.
“How old were you when this all happened, Caleb?” Jester asked, her voice nearly a whisper.
“Old enough to know better,” he said with a bitter smile. “I was about to turn 17 when I killed my parents.”
Across the way, Fjord cursed under his breath, sounding shocked at the information given to them.
The tea was warm when he picked it up, holding the cup in his hands and staring into it as if it held the answers to all of his problems. Some way they could all be safe, some way he could fix things.
“Caleb, I…” Caleb could hear the guilt in Nott’s voice as she spoke. “This isn’t your fault. None of it is. I stand by what I said before, that...that you aren’t guilty, and you need to learn to forgive yourself.”
Suddenly, Nott was sitting next to him, pressed against his side. Her eyes almost seemed to glow as she looked at him.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lumped you in with them. I just…” she sighed, wrapping her arms around his arm, resting her head on his shoulder. “I’ve been worried ever since I heard that Felderwin was attacked, and it got a million times worse when I saw that Yeza’s shop had been destroyed. And then suddenly, those papers were talking about Ikithon and his students, and I realized that we weren’t just...floundering about, with no idea of where to start. We have you, and like Caduceus said...you’re the solution.”
Caleb took a deep breath, letting it out slowly.
“Going after Trent Ikithon would be the most foolish, dangerous thing we’ve ever done, Nott,” Caleb said softly. “Even if I didn’t have history with him.” He lifted his head, then, looking at each of the others. “Not only does he have power within the Empire as the Arch Mage of Civil Influence, but his arcane abilities are unlike anything we’ve fought before. I’ve spent the past five years working on getting stronger and stronger to someday fight this man. Never did I plan on doing it so soon.”
He could hear Nott begin to sniffle beside him, gripping his sleeve tightly. He was gentle as he set his teacup down, shifting to wrap his arms around her and pull her into his lap, his lips pressed to the top of her head.
“I’m not saying no,” he told her gently. “We will find your friend, Nott. We’ve been in dire situations before, and this...this is no different.” She looked up at him, her eyes wide, and he cupped her cheek in his hand to wipe her tears away. It was hard to swallow down his fear, his anxiety, but he had to try, at least.
She threw her arms around his neck, hugging him as tightly as she could.
“Thank you, Caleb,” she whispered, pressing a kiss to his cheek.
“You know we’re not going to let anyone hurt you,” Jester said, watching Caleb with worried eyes. “We’ve fought lots of things, we can fight this too.”
He wanted to protest, to try and make her understand, to try and make all of them understand.
He’d been hunted for years by a force greater than all of them. If he hadn’t been a former student of Ikithon’s, then this would have been easier. The fight might kill them, but it’d be a swift death.
Instead, they were all unlucky. He feared the moment Trent recognized him, realized who he was, what these people all meant to him. He’d torture the Nein happily just to make Caleb watch and suffer.
He closed his eyes, holding Nott a little bit tighter.