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Here’s the thing: they aren’t stupid.
They’re Volstrucker. Scourgers. The monster under the bed feared by children and traitors alike. Once upon a time they were the best and the brightest of the Academy. Now they’re the Empire’s darkest shadow. They’re powerful mages, ruthless assassins. Clever doesn’t begin to cover it. Everything they’ve ever been, they’ve excelled at.
So of course Astrid and Eadwulf know their memories were altered. It’s easy enough to recognise; magic has a distinct feeling and they’ve been immersed in it for years. It would be harder to miss.
Maybe it took them years to realise, putting pieces together one by one. But that doesn’t matter, they’ve had years.
They might have known as soon as Trent bewitched them. If so, it didn’t matter. They’ve always done as he expects.
The knowledge of what Trent’s done could change things. It could change everything.
It doesn’t though. Volstrucker can’t have connections. Tools don’t get the luxury of weak links. So Astrid looks at the man who condemned her parents for the crime of a gifted daughter, and doesn’t question him. Eadwulf finds himself a god of death to honour, and makes peace with the things he's done.
Here's another way Trent’s lies don’t matter: spilling innocent blood will always be acceptable. In the service of the Empire sacrifices must be made. They have a high purpose; nothing’s allowed to matter more than that.
It’s the deadliest kind of open secret. For this country you will do anything, no matter how dreadful. This country will except nothing less than endless, unwavering service. This country will lie to you, again and again, about the things that matter most. And you’ll believe it, because the most outrageous lie is true when we tell it.
It doesn’t matter if they knew when Astrid and Bren stood by Eadwulf as he killed his parents. When Eadwulf asked Bren for another slice of bread as the three of them watched Astrid’s parents eat their last meal. Either way, Astrid pointed out the cart sitting by the road, and Eadwulf pushed it in front of the door to Bren’s childhood home. There’s no point in wasting energy deciding it matters when it’s already done, unchangeable history they buried in unmarked graves years ago.
It doesn’t matter if they knew, or if they realised half a dozen years too late, sitting bolt upright in their beds in the middle of the night. It isn’t allowed to matter.
(They don’t speak of Bren. Bren with his hunger and his brilliant mind. With his weakness, softness, foolishness. Bren who shone brighter than either of them. Under Trent he flourished. Together, the three of them excelled. When he broke, they brought him in.)
Maybe Astrid and Eadwulf could talk about it. Whisper together under the safety of darkness, half a dozen spells protecting them. But they don’t. There are some things, most things, that are better left unsaid. Even being friendly is a stretch for Volstrucker, and being amiable doesn’t get you very far.
No one wants to have to bring their friend to Trent as a traitor. No one wants their friend to kill them for treason. No one wants to be caught conspiring against the Empire. Thoughts and questions are a dangerous game, more so once they’ve left your mouth. Better they don’t say anything. The knowledge itself has to be enough. Though it shouldn’t mean anything at all.
The root of it is this: it bothers Astrid sometimes. Not nearly as much as it would if she still had her humanity, it's guilt and doubt. But far too much for what she is. She should be able to accept the twisting of her reality as the decision of a superior. And she can.
But that doesn’t stop the doubts. Not about the past, what she did and why she did it. The problem's the uncertainty. Mind magic fucks with you. If you let it, just the knowledge that it could be used on you does the work for it.
Astrid’s sure it never happened again. She’s never found any indication it has, in contrast with the jarring realisation of that first time. But perhaps that was part of the test. Is she loyal enough to kill her parents if they’re traitors? What if she knows they aren’t? Is she still loyal enough to execute them for the crime? Is she loyal enough to forget the betrayal and manipulation of the man she has given everything to?
And she is.
That’s not the problem.
Trent’s good. He could have scrubbed Astrid’s brain a hundred times over. Chances are there’s no reason for him to bother. But there are days Astrid closes her eyes and she’s sure her mind is full of holes.
Astrid dreams of certainty that something’s missing. She can walk around for days believing it to be true before she realises it was just a dream. She doesn’t act differently, doesn’t think differently in any meaningful way. She just believes there's entire sections of her life it was deemed imprudent to let her keep. She’s just as good at her job as she always is.
Astrid doesn’t remember her dreams properly. She has a tendency to dream of things that could be true, and wake assuming they are. Until she realises, disoriented, that they aren’t. It is perhaps, a side effect of having your mind muddled with. There’s no record of such an effect. That doesn’t stop Astrid wondering. Eadwulf doesn’t remember his dreams at all. He told he so once, a passing comment made as they discussed business, casual small talk. She didn’t need anything more to understand the weight of what he’d given her. Eadwulf in turn, knew how much it meant when she murmured her vague response. For them, it wasn’t subtle. It didn’t need to be (and there’s no subtlety strong enough to hide from their only remaining kin, trying to hide only tells them you’re doing something wrong). It was safe to say just the once, unlike most things they might speak of. There’s no treason in forgetting your dreams. So long as you don’t ask why you forget.
Occasionally Astrid entertains the idea she has no doubts and few dreams because she has forgotten them. But she doesn’t indulge in such flights of fancy often. It’s unlikely memory modification is a common tool in maintaining the Volstrucker. Astrid knows too many things her employers would rather she didn’t. (There could be more, pieces she doesn’t know she’s missing). Astrid's a good spy, she finds patterns from sparse clues. A widespread practice like that leaves its marks on the bureaucracy of an organisation. There’s no indication of it. If it were common, they would be phenomenally bad at it. After all, Astrid remembers her plans for Trent.
So Astrid knows, intellectually that there’s nothing wrong with her memory. But it’s hard to kill a thought, no matter how much practice she’s had. She doesn’t think about gaps in her memory, the ones she has no reason to think are there. Except when she can’t fall asleep because she’s realised she can’t remember what her parents were like. Not the details that fade in time, but big things. Astrid struggles to find a single memory of them to grasp onto. The more she tries to remember, the hazier they get. Once she remembers that her family had a dog, and she’s shocked because she’d so completely forgotten for so long. Other things are less suspicious in their magnitude. She can’t remember the cadence of Bren’s voice, but that’s something easy to forget over the years. Can’t remember the three of them writing the sprawling notes Astrid finds in the margins of an old textbook. It’s been a dozen years. To forget is only natural. Only human.
But Astrid isn't quite human anymore, and she doesn’t know if the memories she has left are more real than she is, or twice as untrue.
Some days, every day, Astrid gets out of bed and her body's not her own. Scars and burns cover her. Tangles of arcane tattoos crawl up her arms. The way she cuts her hair, her clothes, the illusions she uses, are things based on necessity. It almost feels like she’s floating, with no control over any part of herself.
Except it is her body. She can stare down at her hands, chapped and red from a winter morning’s chill, and no matter how alien they seem, when she flexes them, they respond. Even if she can’t imagine doing anything but obeying (except when she can), Astrid still choses to do the things she does. Every ugly, wading-through-the-muck task that needs to be done, Astrid does. And she chooses to. Because she believes in doing what is right; for the world, for the Empire, for the Assembly, for herself. Though those interests rarely intersect.
When she kills a man who was sheltering a traitor, Astrid doesn’t feel helpless, she isn’t squeamish about the reality of her calling. It’s just that when she looks in his mirror, she sees something foreign. An unrecognisable evolution of the girl she used to be. There are so few changes that weren’t imposed on her by others.
But her reflection is easy enough to ignore.
Astrid wonders whether Eadwulf feels the same way. Certain and in control until suddenly he isn’t and he’s drowning in everything that’s happened since they left Blumenthal for the first time. Every time she sees him, he’s more and more a caricature of who he used to be. A shadow in all the wrong ways as well as all the right ones.
Eadwulf forgets the name of a minor lord as he reports a successful mission, stumbling for a moment before he remembers. Like the knowledge was just a few inches to the left of where it should’ve been, like somebody went rummaging through his head and put things back in not quite the right place. Neither Astrid nor Eadwulf react to his mistake. It’s normal. It’s no sort of proof. People forget things all the time. Even if -
-
Here’s what they don’t tell you: when your parents scrape together money they don’t have in a desperate bid to give you a brighter future; when you dig out your heart and your eyes and your mind with bloody hands because you won’t need them where you’re going; and when you sell your soul to soulless men, it’s with the same purpose. It’s loyalty. It’s love. For a country that doesn’t love you. Not because it hates you, but because it doesn’t care. Which is the worst part, because nobody ever said life was fair, but all they ever tell you is that the patch of land you have worked yourself to the bone for loves you back. You do it for the people you love, because you don’t know that one day there’s going to be a knife in your back that they put there.
But Astrid knows that now, and she no longer cares. Or if she does, only because she’s going to make sure she comes out on top, the wielder not the wounded. Astrid's already lost everything she's ever loved. Most of it she disposed of herself.
Shortly after graduation, Trent takes them to visit Bren. It isn’t kindness, they’d have to be stupid to believe that. They know too much of Trent to think it’s anything other than a warning. That’s how he operates. Here’s what you must do. Here’s what will happen if you fail. I will follow through with all my threats, here’s proof. Here’s punishment for someone else’s frailty, because you didn’t stop it, because I know it will hurt you.
Astrid keeps visiting Bren. She knows Eadwulf does too. They’ve visited together, but rarely. Lingering fondness for a useless old classmate is almost acceptable, Trent likes to fancy he knows his pawns’ weaknesses. Ties to one another are more dangerous.
Bren’s usually completely unreachable, detached from the world. The few times it seems he could recover are better, or worse. Because he isn’t Bren anymore, not the one Astrid knew. He’s shut down. A blank stillness barely holding back an ocean of grief and guilt. She can see the self-hatred that rises up to choke him like thick, cloying smoke. It’s more than nothing though.
Except it isn’t. Because the progress he makes clawing back to reality is always long gone by Astrid’s next visit. Wiped away like schoolwork on a slate.
It's another of the things Astrid doesn’t think. Bren is never coming back. Trent’s making sure of that. That’s the warning. She especially doesn’t think it when her thoughts feel like they’re tumbling out of her grasp. Sand falling through an hourglass.
Astrid’s going to spend the rest of her life wondering if she’s on a time limit, if she’ll reach the point where there are absences enough that she’ll notice all the little things that are missing as the last of it rushes away. Maybe she’ll end up stuck like Bren, the last few grains of sand falling away again, and again, and again.
Astrid isn’t stupid. She can read between the lines, knows what powerful mind magic looks like. She knows Bren will never recover. But what’s the use in knowing that? There’s no advantage to be gained in knowing what happens when you fail, because she won’t fail. So she doesn’t think about it.
Except it is useful. It’s good to know just how far they’ll go. What they wouldn’t think twice about doing to her.
For a decade Bren's nothing, tucked away on a high shelf out of harm’s way. But Trent doesn’t let them forget him. The first time Astrid stumbles during training afterwards, Trent snaps at her like he always does as she pulls herself back up. That she’s stupid, that she lacks Bren’s talent. She’s surprised enough (young enough) that she looks at Eadwulf in shock. Bren failed completely, yet they’re still second to him.
When Trent tells them Bren’s escaped, he’s smiling. Of course it’s all according to plan. Of course Bren’s still the favourite, even now, the prodigal son off to make his way in the world. And so they wait, and Astrid doesn’t grind her teeth through continuous reminders that she’s worse than total failure.
16 years too late, Bren stands before Astrid looking scared but like he’s learnt enough that he’s ready to withstand every shitty thing the world throws at him. He stares at her like he wants to believe she’s still the child he knew, like he still cares about her after all this time (even though he left), like he’s too smart to let it cloud his judgement.
Astrid looks back and wants to throw her glass across the room. Watch it shatter on the wall and see the dark smear off wine dripping down to the floor, jagged and broken and not quite the colour of blood.
Her control’s too good for her hand to tighten around her glass.
Bren’s almost unrecognisable. Astrid could take him for a stranger on the street; except there’s something about his nose, the cut of his jaw. It makes him the spitting image of his father at the right angle. Then he turns his head and she doesn’t know him. It’s a relief.
Even his name is different. The necklace catches her eye. It’s new too, but more familiar. She wears one, all Volstrucker do. The Volstrucker Bren killed in his escape, when he killed one of his own (again), was missing an amulet.
She can feel her lips curl up into a cruel smile and she lets them. She sees his weakness and she wants him to know it, taunt him the way they did when they were younger. Pushing too hard against each other’s tender parts; half comfort, half threat. Even after all this time, with power and allies, fresh off the success of keeping a Betrayer god at bay: he’s still ready to run. No matter how much it costs him to contact her, remind Trent of the lose end he is, he still has his contingencies. It’s so much like the careful, reckless boy Astrid knew that she would laugh or cry if she remembered how.
Bren was always the smartest. The favourite. In the beginning it had been a source of tension, Astrid honestly can’t remember if she and Wulf ever forgave him for it. Schoolwork they struggled to master came easily to him. He glided through their classes. She’d burned with the jealousy of it, knows Wulf did too. Bren’s keen intellect made him shine in a way that turned them dull by comparison. But no matter how desperately jealous they’d been of each other; they were all they’d had.
When Ikithon carved sigils into their skin, they took it in turns cleaning and bandaging each the others’ arms. When spoilt students admitted for their family names tripped Bren in the hall, Astrid and Wulf rose above it as they were expected to. Until nightfall. Then they crept out after curfew for revenge, Bren too caught up in his studies to notice Wulf leaving. When she lay awake in her bed, safe and sound and unable to convince herself she wasn’t locked in that tower with Ikithon, she slipped out into the boys’ dormitories. Bren stirred enough to let her under his covers. Half an hour later, Wulf crawled in too, and they lay there together. Unable to sleep but a little less exposed.
Astrid remembers the desperate way they acted like they weren’t clinging to each other. Struggling against being swallowed whole by the frighteningly large world they’d entered. They pretended it wasn’t about weakness and support, because they were bright enough to learn quickly what happened to the weak ones.
And now Bren stands before her, clinging to all the wrong lessons from their past. He speaks to her like he wants to save her from herself. Astrid doesn’t bother to tell him to save himself the trouble. He still thinks he can fix the world, still thinks he’s strong enough.
It’s stupid. He was the smartest of them, but now all Astrid sees is naive stupidity. It’s rather insulting given what he’s lived through, that he can be so blinded by wishful thinking.
He tells her about Trent’s lies like they matter. She wants to yell at him. Scream Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what he did to us. It was for a greater cause than any person, and even if it wasn’t it’s far too late to cry unfairness. He’s selfish, childish. Unwilling to think past than the blood staining his hands. Oh so desperate to find someone to share the blame.
It’s not fair that Bren’s standing here before her, irrevocably changed and able to hear all the things they could never say. It’s not fair that she’s off kilter around him, standing in a room with Bren’s ghost, without the shadow of Wulf that remains to balance them out. It’s not fair that even if Eadwulf was here, the three of them still wouldn’t be something Astrid could recognise. It’s not fair that Bren thinks the world owes him something just because it hurt him.
Listening to Bren talk is nauseating, for a reason Astrid finds she can’t name. If she was drunk enough, she’d roll her eyes. Life isn’t fair Bren. But she’s too good to lose control. Except, she practically tells him she’s planning to kill an Assembly member. Years ago, she didn’t need to be careful. Bren was the careful one, anxious and overcautious, deliberately counting out money, triple checking spell components. That was his job. Not Wulf’s. Not hers. They all had their roles, perfectly balanced between them.
But that was so long-ago Astrid barely remembers a time she didn’t calculate her every action. And here Bren is, walking directly in to the lion’s den after so long running, alone without any of his new friends for backup, spell books nowhere in sight. It’s not smart. She doesn’t know him well enough anymore to know if he’d have blown his cover just to see her.
Here he stands, and it’s been so long. It’s inexcusable that she tells him about plans she’s never spoken aloud or written down. But Astrid does. In veiled words she tells him she’s going to kill Trent. And that’s more than enough to doom her to a slow and painful death. She’s never alluded to it with Eadwulf. It would be stupid. Ruinous to the both of them.
And just like that she’s so, so lonely.
Between her and Eadwulf there’s a missing piece in the shape of arrogance, flames dancing over quick hands, an unerring memory. The backdrop of their adult lives has been the incremental dissolution of what lies between them as they try to continue as any sort of unit without Bren. When she stands shoulder to shoulder with Eadwulf, Astrid feels so sure it’s obvious to anyone who cares to look that as a team, they’re missing an essential piece. Implicit acknowledgment of the things they can’t say. That no one notices (except Trent) infuriates her, she wants to shove bystanders against the wall and snarl don’t you see? Why can’t you see? We’re an incomplete set, jagged edges between us. How can you miss it when it’s a wound I can’t ignore?
Bren stands in front of Astrid and pieces starts slipping through cracks she never realised where there. A shock from the past that has her falling into bad habits that were fixed so long ago they aren’t even muscle memory anymore. So she tells Bren something she shouldn’t. Because she wants him to know.
Astrid understands Trent. It could be arrogance to believe so. Folly and worse when she’s plotting against him. But Astrid is smart. There’s a reason she was pulled out of a dirt-poor farming community to attend the most prestigious school in the Empire, a reason she was pulled out of the academy for something far more selective. She does understand Trent. Well enough for this; while he relied Bren’s old affection to draw him to Astrid, there’s no doubt that Trent’s arranged for him and Eadwulf to meet. It’s too good an opportunity, he’d wouldn’t be able to resist. The same old taunt towards them all, relishing the power he holds over his experiments. The failure and the triumph. Do you see what you could have been? Do you see what I would have done to you if you were? Do you see that even now you still not good enough?
But Astrid will never know for sure what Eadwulf thought when he saw Bren. Because she won’t ask. Couldn’t even if she wanted to.
Later, they all sit down for dinner. A grotesque approximation of a family. They’re seated between the unwelcome addition of the broken people Bren has claimed in his new life, the shadows of their parents cast long over the walls. Astrid looks at Bren – at Caleb and hates him. The return of the prodigal son. Bren was the one who failed and yet Astrid is still second to him, has been all this time.
But at the same time, she wishes Trent would leave him be. Entertains fantasies of snapping across the table haven’t you done enough? She wishes she could spare Bren this, you were almost free. Astrid wants to treat Trent the way these immature assholes do, too aware of his power to be annoying him so purposefully.
The boy who used to be Bren tells Astrid and Eadwulf they could come with him. And what else was Astrid expecting? He understands why she can’t. Except that he has no idea. Except that he wants her to do it anyway. Instead she smiles, tells him she’ll beat him to the top. They aren’t 16 anymore, but for a moment it feels like they don’t need to be, like their present could be worth something.
And then Bren is gone, Astrid and Eadwulf left in his wake once more. But perhaps they’ll find it a little easier, if not to speak, then to stand side by side.
It could be Astrid’s never needed to say a word to Eadwulf. Maybe he knows her well enough to know her plans. But they’ve changed. Although it was the same forces that shaped them both, they’ve changed so much. Astrid doesn’t know if she’s become unrecognisable to him. That dissonance between perfect implicit understanding and falling out of synch is the problem. It’s not the sort of thing she can ask with the level of subtly needed to keep them alive. But maybe sometime soon, the things that lie unspoken between them will materialise. Let them acknowledge the place Bren isn’t. Say the things they make sure they don’t think. Make the plans they haven’t made because it would be suicide to do so.
Except that would be stupid. Incredibly so. It’s exactly what Trent will watch for. Proof his perfect weapons are incorruptible. The final damning evidence his toy soldiers have broken. So Astrid and Eadwulf will do exactly what they've done every time they see each other. And Astrid will wonder, with a scholar’s yearning to know, what Eadwulf thought when he saw Bren’s ghost standing before him. What he thought of the people Caleb replaced them with, while they failed to do anything to patch the gaping hole where the three of them used to be.
But she won’t ask, and neither will he. Because that would be stupid.