Work Text:
i.
The first crack in the façade that Throné sees is within a week of meeting Inquisitor Temenos Mistral, in a seedy, dingy bar in the New Delsta slums.
The razorblade he procured from seemingly nowhere hits the table over and over, a rhythmic clack-clack-clack against the wood, scarring the coarse, unfinished surface. None of the new little marks he’ll leave behind will be noticed; it’s already scratched to hell just like every other table here.
They’d been together the whole evening. She slipped away from the group that the mild-mannered traveling apothecary had managed to fold her into, and for some reason their cleric had trailed her. After the jabs he’d taken at her thus far, she assumed his objective was to have more to pass judgment on her about, but that was not the case. After a short walk, they ended up here—and while they hadn’t stuck together too closely, Throné knows for a fact he hadn’t purchased a whole damn eight-ball.
He has made several comments up to this point about her habitual thievery but she finds it in herself to hold her tongue rather than call him a hypocrite. She remains silent, watching him chop a piece of the eight-ball down into fine white powder. It crumbles easily beneath his small, dull blade. Once it’s been broken apart, he uses the razorblade to scrape it into four lines.
“Would you like some?” he asks, unexpectedly.
“I’m fine,” Throné replies.
“I have plenty.” He produces from his pocket a piece of paper folded into a square. There is text on it.
“I know. What is that?”
He rolls the paper up. “As of now, it is a tool.”
“It’s got text on it.”
Temenos smiles amusedly but doesn’t reply. He leans forward so one end of the rolled-up paper can rest at one of his nostrils while the other stays on the table at the start of the first line. He uses his index finger to push shut his other nostril and inhales the line of cocaine. When he sits back, he wipes his nose and hands the paper to Throné.
Throné frowns slightly as she takes it. She straightens it out the best she can but she doesn’t unfold it. She doesn’t need to; Aelfric’s name appears three times on the part of the page she can see, and the type of paper the words are printed on is most commonly used for books of holy text.
“And you’re a priest?” Throné asks, deadpan despite her surprise. “Not an impersonator?”
“Not an impersonator at all,” he replies. His smile widens and he reaches over to take the holy page back. “Everyone has their vices.”
“Sure, but that’s just excessive. Most people do their coke with hundred-leaf notes.”
Temenos shrugs. Rather than offering a reply, he snorts up a second line.
“Vices,” he repeats after swallowing thickly a few times. “I am certain you’ve done worse.”
“I don’t claim to be religious,” Throné says.
“It’s hardly fair to say I claim to be religious. I simply am religious. Adherence to the Church’s traditions is not a necessary prerequisite for belief.”
“I never said it was. Unorthodox or not, why the fuck are you using holy texts for cocaine?”
“That’s hardly your concern.”
Throné bites her tongue to keep herself from shooting back a retort. There’s no reason to pick a fight, if only because this is not the sort of place where she wants to draw attention to herself or to Temenos. She remains silent as the cleric waves down a barmaid and orders a drink for both himself and for Throné, and though the barmaid’s gaze lingers skeptically for a couple of seconds on the remaining two lines on the table she complies with his request without voicing any questions or concerns.
“That doesn’t seem like a good idea,” Throné comments once the woman has gone back to the front counter.
“That is because it’s not,” Temenos replies cheerfully.
“Well, at least you’re aware of it.”
“Poor choices are not reserved for the stupid, Throné.”
She has nothing of worth to say in response. The gods know she has her own collection of dangerous and self-injurious vices.
The barmaid returns with their drinks, and Temenos pays up front. As the woman accepts the money, she takes a closer look at Temenos’s attire, and while her expression suggests confusion she doesn’t give voice to whatever questions might be going through her head. “Enjoy, and let me know if you need anything else,” is all she says.
Throné drinks her mead slowly, careful not to upset her empty stomach. She hasn’t eaten since dinner four hours ago, and her sorry excuse for a meal had consisted of a few pieces of jerky offered to her by Ochette. Temenos, on the other hand, downs his with large gulps.
There is something wrong with this man. Throné has known since the first moment of day one that he’s fucked up in a way somehow not too dissimilar from herself, but tonight is making it more obvious than she would have thought he’d be comfortable with. People like him tend to hate others seeing the mask begin to slip and avoid letting it happen in front of others at all costs. But here he is, making no effort to hide any of this from her.
He’s going to regret it when tomorrow rolls around.
Later on, when Temenos is absolutely piss-drunk, Throné makes the call to head back to the inn they’re staying at. She has somehow maintained something adjacent to sobriety, leaving her fortunately capable of supporting the cleric’s weight as she helps him navigate the filthy New Delsta streets.
Lantern light seeps out from beneath the door to the room Temenos is sharing with Osvald, indicating that the scholar inside must still be awake. She knocks, and is thankful she doesn’t have to worry about waking him up.
The door is answered within seconds. Osvald pays little mind to Throné, his attention instead on the cleric half-slumped against her. “Is he all right?” he asks.
“He should be,” Throné says. Hopefully it’s true enough.
Osvald appears unconvinced. He is quiet for a moment before he speaks again. “Temenos… are you all right?”
“Should be,” Temenos slurs, and even those two monosyllabic words are hardly intelligible.
“I’m afraid I don’t believe either one of you.”
“I didn’t say he was fine now,” Throné says. “I said he should be. As in, at some indeterminant point in the future.”
Temenos tries to nod in agreement but his neck can hardly support his head. He hiccups almost violently, wracking a tremor through him, and he gags on the force of it.
“This is my fault,” the thief continues. She is well aware of Osvald’s keen perception and observational skills, and she knows she has to formulate a story she can keep clear, direct, and preferably very simple. “We were at one of those shitty bars in the shitty part of the city. He tried to outdrink me.”
“You seem rather sober for that to have been the case.”
“Because I cheated. Either Temenos didn’t notice or didn’t call me out on it, but I had the barmaid serve me more water than alcohol.”
To Throné’s relief, the hint of distaste and judgment that briefly crosses the scholar’s features indicates to her that he has bought the story. She doesn’t know him well enough to confidently make a guess as to whether or not he’s the sort to snitch on her to the others, but she supposes she wouldn’t be too pressed if he does. It’s better than the truth slipping out. She has no reason to cover for Temenos, and when Temenos was still thinking clearly he had no reason to believe she would—but here they are regardless.
“He’ll have a hell of a hangover tomorrow,” Osvald says.
“No way—really? Let me put him to bed.”
“I can get him into bed.”
“Sure, but I’m going to.” She doesn’t know why she suddenly feels so protective of the cleric.
Osvald sighs but doesn’t argue, and he moves out of her way and returns to whatever it is he had been reading before she interrupted.
Every step Temenos takes makes his entire body lurch with it. He’s rapidly becoming less and less able to support himself, making him little more than dead weight unable to remain up without her help. The inch she has on him is no longer helping her any. She barely manages to get him over to his bed, and she has to use her foot to clumsily push aside the blanket; keeping him from falling to the floor is task she needs both hands for. Despite her best efforts, he collapses in an uncomfortable heap on the mattress, and he doesn’t react to her maneuvering him into a semi-acceptable sleeping position and tucking him in.
“Castti should have a remedy,” Throné says, mostly to herself.
“I don’t see why she wouldn’t,” Osvald replies, “unless she hasn’t the right ingredients for one.”
“I’m sure I’ll get one hell of an ass-kicking if she doesn’t.”
“It’s late and you’ve gotten him settled. You should turn in for the night yourself.”
“Yeah.”
Throné presses two fingers to Temenos’s neck to check his pulse. It’s weaker and a little quicker than it should be, but it’s largely steady. She should try to find some excuse to monitor him until he wakes up but there’s nothing she can say that wouldn’t seem suspicious. She should do more than leave him here and hope he doesn’t die while Osvald is asleep, but no other option feels appropriate.
As she leaves the room and heads to the one she’s sharing with Castti, she concludes that this makes her a bad person. But she has known since she was six years old, or perhaps younger, that the only sort of person she’s capable of being is a bad one, so she has to be okay with it. It’s all she’s ever known.
The lights are out and Castti is asleep when Throné slinks into the room. The apothecary rolls over and wakes long enough to mumble the other woman’s name, though when met with a reply of “I’m going to bed, go back to sleep,” she falls back into her slumber.
The next morning at breakfast, Temenos and Osvald are both late to to the table. Throné makes no comment on it as she sips on her milky, unsweetened tea and occasionally takes a bite of toast or egg. Her anxiety is rising with each minute they’re both absent, and the more adamantly it gnaws at her insides the more steadfast she becomes in her refusal to voice it to her companions. Castti and Hikari are worried enough as is, and there’s no reason to dampen the optimism that Agnea, Partitio, and Ochette have that they’ve both simply slept in by accident.
It’s reasonable to assume Temenos is oversleeping. In the days that she’s known him, it seems that’s a habit of his. But his eagerness to mix alcohol with cocaine has Throné badly on edge, and Osvald strikes her as the sort to be punctual in all things unless physically forced not to be by factors outside his control. This doesn’t sit well with her at all.
Right after Castti says that she’s going to go check on them, they both enter the inn’s dining room. It’s a relief to see them both able to come down for breakfast, but their appearances raise new concerns. Temenos looks about as hungover as Throné could have expected, accentuated by the redness of a deep malar rash, though that would not be anything of note if not for his recent overindulgence in drugs. Osvald, on the other hand, is so exhausted he appears ill, with his clothes pulled on with seemingly little care and shadows under his eyes so dark it looks as if both of them might have been punched.
“Son of a bitch,” Partitio says. “What were you two up to last night? You don’t look so hot.”
“Throné thought it a valuable use of time to—”
“I never said it was a valuable use of time,” the thief cuts in. “I just said he got wasted trying to outdrink me. And I cheated.”
For a long and deeply uncomfortable moment, silence falls over the table and Throné can sense that everyone’s attention is on her. Whatever appetite she had been able to muster dissipates; after this, she doubts she’ll be able to stomach anything until a while past lunch.
Ochette is the one to speak first. “Why would you—”
“Fucking hell,” Throné snaps. “Drop it. It was stupid. I shouldn’t have. It’s none of your damn business anyway. It’s between me and Temenos, and I’ll settle it with him like an adult.”
“Doesn’t explain why you look like shit, Osvald,” Partitio says, thankfully drawing the attention away from Throné’s false confession. “No offense, of course, but, uh—you’re looking real rough.”
Osvald takes a seat next to Castti, who slides him the plate that had been waiting for him and pours him a cup of tea. It takes Temenos a few seconds longer to figure out how to walk the rest of the way over to the table, but when he does, he sits down heavily beside Throné and smiles sleepily as he leans against her. Another thing she has come to learn about him is how annoyingly touchy he is. She moves his plate toward him.
“He was sick in the early hours of morning, and it didn’t ease up until near dawn,” Osvald says.
“You should have woken me,” says Castti.
“It was not anything unusual, considering the overconsumption of alcohol. He requested repeatedly that I not wake you.”
“And you listened?” The apothecary looks over at Temenos. “And why would you be insistent that I not at least have a look at you? That could have been something serious.”
Guilt twists in Throné’s gut. But their nepo baby inquisitor is still here, alive, so it couldn’t have been that bad. Trying to convince herself of a lie like that makes the guilt worse.
“I hardly think it’s fair to hold anything I said against me while I was too intoxicated to recall any of it.” Temenos takes a small bite of his toast without topping it with anything. “I haven’t any memory of a single thing since sometime after Throné and I began drinking. And as she’s said already—it’s none of your concern. Was I not the fool who accepted the challenge? I’m not much of a drinker in the first place, but she didn’t know that.”
“She cheated,” Ochette points out.
“Which is better than us both being too drunk to make it back to the inn, yes?”
There is no point trying to argue, so the subject is dropped.
ii.
The group is in the middle of nowhere, between cities, the next time it happens in front of her. The tent protects Throné and Temenos from the winds outside, and a large lantern holding a flame Osvald used magic to light keeps them warm enough.
“I’ll need to restock once we make it to civilization,” Temenos comments as he chops up some of his cocaine. He doesn’t have much left, after this. He uses one of Throné’s knives this time, and the firm surface he prepares the powder on is the worn leather cover of a holy book.
The knife fits unexpectedly well in his hand. He holds it with grace and precision, as if he has past experience with daggers like hers. Neither his grip nor his technique is possible for someone who hasn’t had practice. It seems out of place for a man of high standing within the Church, but it somehow is perfectly fitting of this man in specific.
“Well, it shouldn’t be long,” Throné says.
“Before nightfall tomorrow,” he replies.
The cleric scrapes the powder into a single line. Throné expects him to pull out the paper he used the first time she watched him do this, or perhaps a more sensible hundred-leaf note like she’d previously suggested, but he doesn’t yet. He brings her blade to his mouth to lick off the cocaine clinging to the sharpened metal.
Throné wonders if this is something she should be allowing to happen. If he wants to do a line, she wouldn’t be able to stop him, but she could alert the others. Should she have gone to Castti already? Their party’s cleric has proven herself diligent and sufficiently trustworthy, and she would surely want to know if she was traveling with an addict who has a tendency to be reckless with his own health. Something could happen to him as a result and she would need to have context for the situation to provide accurate, efficient care.
But Temenos is not the sort of person to want help from others. People like him are often not particularly interested in getting better, and she would know—she isn’t any different. Everyone around her is aware of how badly she restricts her own food intake, but that’s one of those things that can’t be hidden from them. They’ve seen a handful of self-inflicted wounds in various stages of healing littered among countless slashes of scar tissue from the same type of injury, but no one ever considers those to be as severe, as detrimental, or as worthy of derision as a drug habit. She keeps this secret of his because it’ll do more harm than good if she doesn’t.
That doesn’t absolve her from allowing him to use her knife instead leaving him with his cheap, worn razorblade. But what difference does it make? It isn’t as if she provided the cocaine, and he had his own sharp edge to cut it with anyway. The mild convenience of a blade better cared for made no meaningful difference. He would have done this either way.
He slices a minor cut into his tongue, and he recoils with a pained hiss but it’s all performance. Throné can tell instantly that it wasn’t an accident. His deliberate hold on the weapon never falters and licking the side of it as he was wouldn’t lead to accidental injury. She doubts that would have happened if she hadn’t lent him her dagger—but how was she meant to know he’d do something like that?
Beyond the first false reaction to the slice, he appears unaffected by it. He redirects his attention to the single line of cocaine on his holy tome, retrieves from his pocket the folded page from before, and snorts it up. When he licks the residue off the leather, he leaves behind a smear of blood that he doesn’t bother wiping up.
“A shame we have nothing to drink,” Temenos says after wiping away any white left behind around his nostril.
“And here I thought you weren’t much of a drinker,” Throné replies.
He shrugs. Throné has nothing worth saying, so she settles down into her bedroll and shuts her eyes. She’s suddenly exhausted. To her surprise, Temenos doesn’t disturb her as she tries to sleep. He is respectfully quiet as he always is at night when sharing a space with someone else trying to rest—nothing like the loud, rambunctious, and unpredictable behavior she had come to expect from a man high on cocaine.
“That’s just what it does to people,” she was always told. Clearly it does not. It seems to her now that that was another one of the lies she was told to make her more willing to accept maltreatment, because Temenos is sitting on the bedroll beside hers, experiencing the jittery rush of an upper high without disturbing her attempts at rest. She doesn’t want to have to think about it, but it keeps her awake more effectively than if he’d left her beaten and raped and alone with fresh injuries like every other coked-up man she’d encountered before.
iii.
“I don’t even like cocaine,” Temenos says as he and Throné stand at the railing of the ship taking them to the western continent. Night fell hours ago, and the two other people out this late are too far to have heard him.
Throné stares down at the dark water. Starlight ripples across the surface and she wishes she could bottle up the brilliant silver to keep it handy for moonless nights spent away from civilization.
“Then what’s the point of it?” she asks eventually.
“It’s about the first minute and about the first ten minutes. The initial hit is euphoric, and those ten minutes are… not terrible, precisely. It’s called a high for a reason. It could never be truly that bad.”
She knows better than to ask, but she doubts those ten minutes are actually “not terrible.” She suspects it’s more likely that they are simply less miserable than they would be without something mind-altering, but she knows she will never receive confirmation from him about it. It isn’t her business anyway, she supposes.
“But why coke?” she asks, primarily to distract her from the question she really wants to give voice to. “There are other options.”
“There are indeed, and I have preferences. But in some places, cocaine is easier to obtain.”
“If you really wanted something that bad, what about Castti’s bag? I don’t know much about herbs and drugs and whatnot, but I’m sure she’d have something in there to give you a better fix than something you don’t even like.”
Instantly, she despises herself. If she died right now she wouldn’t have any objections. Why would that cross her mind as a suggestion? In the half-second between conjuring the thought and verbalizing it, it had seemed harmless—the point made is a valid one, and it briefly struck her as a safer alternative to whatever he was doing to get something he found unenjoyable. But those are their group’s medical supplies she suggested he take from and he must have had the thought to steal from their apothecary before. Someone like Temenos would’ve considered it already, and now Throné is validating the idea.
If they’re friends, she’s the worst friend he could possibly have.
“I couldn’t do a thing like that,” Temenos replies. “If Castti’s bag stops being off-limits, I doubt it ever will be again without repercussions—and I have no desire to let anyone else catch onto this particular habit of mine.”
“Fair enough. Just don’t fuck yourself up too bad.”
“I doubt you’re under the impression that I can make any promises.”
“Try not to fuck yourself up too bad.”
Temenos laughs softly and places his elbows on the railing so he can put his weight on them. “The same goes for you.”
“Excuse me?”
“We are alone, Throné. There’s no need to act stupid. You’re starved by your own desperation to maintain control over something even if it takes you to the grave, and everyone can tell that most of the scars you bear are of your own making.”
“Touché, motherfucker.”
He laughs again, and this time it’s horribly bitter.
iv.
The Blacksnakes have bases in nearly every city and halfway-noteworthy town across Solistia, in the wealthiest and the most impoverished. In well-known cities that don’t have significant crime statistics attached to them, people struggle to believe that such an organization could find locations to hide and operate, but Oresrush is one of those places where Throné doubts anyone but the most naïve could be shocked to learn is home to a branch of the Blacksnakes.
Many across Solistia are aware of the Blacksnakes in vague terms—a crime syndicate, a cult that specializes in the torture of children, a sex trafficking ring, and all manner of other general things along those lines. Not many know of them by name, and most who do tend to be skeptical about the organization’s existence, or at least about the extent of it. There is something about the human mind that instinctively rejects the belief in things that are so twisted and horrific that it might shatter their current understanding of the world. It’s as if they think calling bullshit on the unimaginable horrors countless many people have faced—most of which are children or were first victimized as children—is worth it if it means being able to deny how bad people can be.
She was relieved when she found that none of her companions jumped to denial when they learned of her forced involvement with the Blacksnakes and some of the severe abuses that happen within the organization. However, Temenos did not react the way anyone else did; he was sympathetic, certainly, but he was unsurprised to hear any of it. It put her on edge, not out of distrust but because it gave her the sense that he knew far more about the Blacksnakes than she was comfortable with. A high-ranking man in the Church, including one from a small and isolated community like Flamechurch, would not know of the Blacksnakes and sincerely believe in the extent of their criminality unless he was responsible for coverups or had ties to people who did. Throné has no reason to place her faith in him, but he doesn’t strike her as the sort to cover up corruption. Covering up corruption would be against everything he stands for, and as shifty, cryptic, and somewhat manipulative as he is, Throné is positive he wouldn’t contradict the strongest moral convictions he has.
He knows too much, somehow with neither malicious intent nor firsthand experience. She also picks up on the fact that he is the only one who doesn’t offer to accompany her when she figures out where she needs to go in order to find information on Mother’s whereabouts. Normally she would have no issue dismissing it as a lack of investment in her personal journey or an unwillingness to put himself on the line to that extent for her—but there is more to it. Swallowing the question is difficult.
Temenos comes across his choice substance here without difficulty. He shows it to her on an arid Wildlands night as they sit together outside of Partitio’s childhood home. Neither of them are feeling talkative so there is no conversation as he rolls up the coarse off-white grains with cigarette paper.
Throné expects him to light it up immediately, but he pulls out a pack of regular tobacco pre-rolls. The sole reason he doesn’t smoke the entire pack by himself is because Throné takes three of them, and each of those she burns through much slower than he does any of his.
After that, he moves onto the one he rolled up himself. It smells different from a regular cigarette when he lights it, takes a long drag of it, and exhales after several seconds. He lets her try it and she does, and as the burnt-sweet taste stings her throat and lungs she wonders what this says about him, if anything. She hands it back as she exhales and does not ask him why he’s so willing to share this with her when it’s well on its way to ruining his life if it hasn’t already
She doesn’t think less of him for it. She can’t say with confidence she wouldn’t do the same thing in his place.
v.
Throné waits on Temenos as he scopes out the ruins outside of Crackridge, fiddling with the pipe Partitio carved for her upon learning of her occasional tobacco use. She finds herself wishing she had gotten some off him before heading out. When she smokes she prefers the subtle and strange gender affirmation she gets from cigarettes, but pipes aren’t bad. In her mind, they carry distinctly masculine connotations, but she’s been living her life female since she was six years old so it isn’t as if a bit of self-perceived masculinity can make her uncomfortable anymore.
It is nearly sunset when Temenos finally emerges, and as she straightens up she takes note of his distress. His steps are unsure, his bangs are sweat-soaked against his forehead, and he has a hand clamped over his mouth despite the twitching in his shoulders making it clear he’s going to be sick regardless of how hard he tries to prevent it.
Throné doesn’t get the chance to ask what transpired before he’s puking his guts all over the dusty ground. It barely misses his feet and the edge of his robes, but it pools around the bottom of his staff. When she grabs his arm, offering support, she feels him lean more of his weight on the staff instead in a silent refusal. She chokes back her frustration.
“What the hell was in there?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” The blatant lie falls from his tongue inelegantly, contaminated with the same panicked desperation as Don’t make me think about it would be.
“Fuck. Okay. Let’s just sit here for a while.”
“A little further from this place, perhaps.”
“Yeah. Come on.”
As soon as they’ve moved out of sight of the ruins, Throné applies some pressure to Temenos’s shoulder to prompt him to sit and he doesn’t resist. He slumps down, and she sits beside him as he lays his staff down so he can go through his bag with unsteady hands.
Not at all surprisingly, he retrieves the leather he uses to wrap up his coarsely ground substance of choice. The last thing he needs is to spill it, so Throné reaches for it before he can unwrap it.
“Let me,” she says, and he responds by relinquishing it.
She doesn’t understand why he trusts her to do this for him. She knows what she’s doing but she could just as easily dispose of it all. He knows she doesn’t approve of his habit and in his current state he’s taking a significant gamble by letting her handle his supply. He likely can’t imagine calming down without smoking. This could be the part of their relationship where Throné breaks him and proves to him that she is everything her twenty-three years of life have been spent shaping her into—everything she is afraid of continuing to be, everything he has faith she no longer is.
The thought startles her. This is the sort of weakness she could use to keep him leashed and obedient to her forever. With the right choice of words, she could kill him here; she wouldn’t need to get her hands dirty because she could talk him into doing it himself. He wouldn’t even hate her for it.
She follows the steps she has watched him go through multiple times before. She lights it for him as well, holding it between her lips and striking a match and inhaling a small breath of the stinging charred-pastry smoke to set it burning, then hands it off to the cleric.
It takes a few lungfuls of smoke before he begins to relax, but once he does, every hit after that seems to help more and more. The trembling stops and his breathing returns to normal.
They sit and watch the sun sink fully below the horizon, and when the last of its glow disappears from the sky, Temenos summons a luminescent ball of Light magic so they can find their way back to town.
vi.
“Do you like him?” Agnea asks with a grin as she comes to stand at the ship’s railing beside Throné.
Throné spares a glance in the girl’s direction. “Excuse me?”
“Temenos,” she clarifies, and her grin widens.
“We’re friends.”
“Nothing else?”
Throné never would have been boy-crazy because she has known since shortly before puberty that that gender is excluded from her preferences, but she can’t help wondering, however briefly, if she might have been girl-crazy at Agnea’s age had she been allowed the opportunity. It isn’t that Agnea is boy-crazy in actuality, but in theory she is. Her fixation on straight romances from the woman’s side of things, her tendency to assume all girls like boys and all women like men despite being bisexual herself, and her frequent interest in the relationship related gossip going around every town and city they stop at speaks for itself. She does not, at the moment, seem to have any romantic aspirations for herself—but in fiction and in other women’s lives, her fixation runs deep.
In a way, Throné is envious. The idea of being enthralled by such things does not appeal to her in the slightest, but she wishes she’d been able to experience something so common in girlhood that it’s an insult favored by every misogynist alive.
“Nothing else,” Throné replies. “I’m not interested in men.”
Agnea is unfazed. If anything, she appears more intrigued. “I think it’s cuter if you’re not.”
“I’m not following.”
“Well—it’s like—you’re so close! You’re together so often and it’s obvious to everyone how much you trust each other and care about each other. But to have that without a relationship? Without it being romantic at all?” She laughs with delight, as she tends to whenever her enthusiastic thoughts run too far ahead of what she can convey all at once. “I think it’d be real sweet if I could get on with a boy like that. Nothing but the sort of friendship I’ve only had with girls. It’s kind of—romantic. Funny, isn’t it? Romantic, but not in a romantic way.”
Throné wonders what would happen if she mentioned Hikari. Whatever little crush Agnea had on him at the start of this journey dissolved as she got to know him, and while he still struggles not to fumble his words when he speaks to her, it’s no longer about his rapidly diminishing attraction to her but about the fact he is just a shy and insecure person. The budding romantic potential ceased some time ago, on both sides. It doesn’t seem appropriate to mention any of that, however.
“It’ll happen eventually,” Throné offers.
“Do you think so?” Based on Agnea’s tone, the reply she receives might be able to make or break the rest of her day.
“Yeah. You’re still younger than me. I bet you’ll find the right kind of guy for that before you’re twenty-three.”
Agnea twirls around, her skirt flaring out around her, then throws her arms around Throné. “You’re always so sweet, Throné!”
Hikari’s name sits on her tongue. It’s heavy, like the fact that she knows but Agnea doesn’t is a tangible thing that has mass.
Later that evening, Temenos chooses a few lines of cocaine over his self-rolled cigarettes.
“I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation you had with Agnea,” he comments after clearing one of the white powder lines with his tube of holy paper. One of Throné’s daggers rests on his side of the table, glistening with wetness in the flickering lantern light where Temenos licked the residual coke from it—without injury, this time. The table had been unmarred, but now there are new shallow slashes left behind by the blade hitting a rhythm against it.
“What about it?” Throné asks.
“Oh, hardly anything. But I am curious about one thing. Do you find it romantic?”
Throné’s brow furrows. “Why would I?”
“That is how Agnea described it. Romantic, but in a way entirely devoid of romance.”
“I think we’re both fucking deranged, frankly.”
Temenos laughs. “Yes. That we are.”
“I also don’t really find it that romantic. The foundation of our relationship being—like this—whatever it is—it’s not exactly good.” I wish we’d had better lives than the ones we got, she almost adds, but that would be too far. Too much sentimentality too often leaves them both with bitter tastes in their mouths.
“Well, I suppose I can’t argue with your reasoning. But, if I am to be perfectly honest, I think I would give you a chance if you wanted one.”
“Are you saying you’d date me if I asked you out?”
“Correct. Or if you wanted something a little less… dramatic.”
“What, like if I wanted to fuck? Or what?”
“Exactly that.”
“Whatever happened to being a gay man?”
Temenos shrugs. “Nothing at all.”
“I can’t say I’d be all that interested in someone who doesn’t care to date or to fuck women.”
“When it comes to dating, that is understandable. But as far as sex goes—it isn’t quite fair to say I’m truly uninterested, so long as I’m handled with heavy enough a hand.”
Throné feels sick but she can’t tell if it’s more from how lightly he takes the idea of someone assaulting him or from the implicit accusation tied to it.
“Damn it,” he swears, and he reaches across the table to hold one of Throné’s hands. She hadn’t realized she’d started shaking. “I’m sorry. It seems I’ve upset you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
“You suggested that I might rape you,” she retorts, though she knows, logically, that he hadn’t realized what he was saying. “That I might rape you and you’d be fine with it.”
Temenos lapses into one of his rare silences before finally letting out a sigh and saying, “I’m sorry. I did suggest that, didn’t I? I didn’t mean to. It didn’t occur to me that I was insinuating something so—heinous. I am aware you wouldn’t. If I’d realized that is how it would come across, I never would have said it. I really, truly do apologize, Throné. That was… not fair to you in the slightest.”
As he speaks, Throné can see him pull his composure back together right in front of her, fixing the mask back into place as if it hadn’t slipped at all. For the first and last time, she takes him up on his offer to let her do a line, and she has no trouble understanding why he doesn’t care for it.
vii.
Winterbloom is miserable, though under different circumstances Throné could have enjoyed it. The weather is much chillier than the more temperate climes of the Brightlands but it isn’t bad. The worst part of the trip is the reason she’s here, though the way Castti’s stress radiates from her in palpable waves is a close second. Throné doubts her companions would allow her to go off on her own when they know the danger that’s brought her to this town in specific, so she’ll have to sneak out.
In the middle of the night, while Castti is busy attending to her own business, Throné clambers out of the third-story window and nearly slips multiple times on her way down to the ground. She needs shoes better equipped for snow and ice, but she doesn’t have time to think about it now.
It’s a tedious ordeal getting to the Snowhares’ hideout, but she gets to it before her patience wears too thin. A woman chained to the floor near the entrance begs to be released, and Throné promises to free her on her way back out.
She learns too late that coming here had been for nothing, but she manages to get away with her life. Her arms and stomach bear a few superficial cuts, her ankle is sprained, and her thigh is bleeding too heavily for it to be safe, but she prepares to free unknown woman before she leaves as she limps toward the way out. There’s no sign of her aside from the heavy shackles bolted to the ground. Throné briefly considers searching around for her but she isn’t stupid enough to believe that woman is still here; it’s doubtful she’s alive at all, and if she is it’s unlikely she will be for too much longer.
Throné doesn’t have time to waste anyway. She has to get aid for the injury on her thigh. It isn’t a nicked artery but it’s deep and serious nonetheless. A trail of blood follows her through the snow, and in the empty dead of night she allows a few tears to fall. The wetness freezes almost instantly and the sting of it mercifully offers a new point of pain to focus on for a few moments.
Castti is on her way back to the inn at the same time and she freezes for a second when she sees Throné, then races over to her.
“Throné!” she exclaims. “Throné, what’s happened to you? We have to get you inside.”
Throné allows the apothecary to take her arm and walk her into the inn. The man behind the front desk has fortunately fallen asleep and doesn’t stir when the two women enter.
“Damn coward ran,” Throné mutters. She staggers up the stairs, but doesn’t flinch when the ascent forces her to put extra stress on her injuries.
“You went after him by yourself?”
“I didn’t want anyone getting involved.”
“Throné, we’re in this together. We’ve all agreed to travel together so we can help one another! It would be more straightforward for us all to go our own separate ways, but we aren’t. We have all mutually agreed to exchange more expedient results for the opportunity to be helped and to help each other.”
Throné shrugs as Castti unlocks the door to their shared room.
“You wouldn’t have left any of us to do something so dangerous alone,” Castti persists as she sits the other woman down on her own bed, then goes to light the lantern. She is sparing Throné’s sheets from being bled on at the expense of her own. “It isn’t different when it’s you. What can we do to help you understand that?”
Throné shrugs again. It’s better than being honest and saying that there’s nothing. The harsh reality is that she is not human, and if she ever was it was so long ago she has no memory of it. Her personhood was stolen and her humanity was scooped out, making her into whatever she needs to be in the moment: an observant shadow, a sharpened blade, a punching bag, a pet, a sex doll. The truth is too bitter a pill to try to make Castti swallow.
Castti kneels before her with a cloth and the pitcher of water provided by the inn. “I need you to move your skirt out of the way, please.” She spills some water out onto the rag to soak it.
Throné is reserving a change in her style of dress for when she’s earned, when she finally claims her freedom, but the Winterlands are too cold to get by without warmer clothes than she typically wears. She went out to the Snowhares’ hideout wearing a thick skirt, though it’s torn badly where she sustained the leg injury and is drenched in blood. Taking it off is easier than pulling the hem up, so she stands briefly to drop it to the floor. Without leggings—her goal was to avoid freezing, not to be too comfortable—she is left in her underwear and a pair of thigh-high woolen stockings.
The apothecary carefully peels the damaged, blood-soaked stocking down to the knee. She proceeds to wipe up some of the blood closest to the wound, then presses the rag firmly to it. Throné grits her teeth against the pain that flares up as a result, but doesn’t react more than that
“I have bad news and tentative good news,” Castti says. “Which would you like first?”
“Bad news first,” Throné replies.
“All right. It seems Temenos has suddenly fallen ill with something I’ve not diagnosed yet. With how unwell he is, I’m not comfortable waking him to ask if he can heal this. But if he weren’t ill, you would be much better off in his care, not mine.”
“That’s not too bad. I wouldn’t want you waking him up anyway.”
“I would, if not for—”
“No, if something else like this happens so late—”
“It will not, Throné. You will not be going out alone like this ever again.”
“If something else happens this late and he’s asleep,” Throné tries again, with a flatter tone skirting the edge of aggressive, “you’ll leave him. Anyone who sleeps that much and that heavy clearly needs it.”
Castti doesn’t argue. “The better news is that this gash is not quite as bad as it looks, nor as bad as I imagine it feels. It’ll need stitches, but it’s not terrible otherwise. Here, hold onto the cloth.”
The thief does as she’s told, and Castti reaches again into her bag. This time she retrieves a sleeve containing supplies for sewing an injury, and threads one of the needles. She holds the needle between her teeth so she can take out a small jar of green-brown paste and a drawstring herb pouch.
She removes two leaves from the pouch and gives them to Throné. “Here. I’ll use something on the skin to help numb the area, but you’ll want a strong pain remedy as well. You can chew on these, but don’t swallow them.”
“I don’t need it,” Throné says. She was twelve years old the first time she had a gash stitched up while awake, alert, and not drugged out of her mind; she was forced to sew it closed herself with nothing more than a block of wood to bite down on.
“Then take it for my own peace of mind, please.”
Reluctantly, Throné takes the leaves, folds them with her free hand, and bites down on them with the teeth on the left side of her mouth. The juice that seeps out is mild in flavor but bitter, and it makes her tongue tingle slightly. It isn’t bad.
Castti uncorks the jar, spills some of the paste out onto two of her fingers, and corks it back up. She takes the rag back from Throné so she can dab away more blood as needed and properly apply the numbing agent around the gash, and then presses the rag back over the wound.
“It needs a few moments to work,” the apothecary explains. “How are your arms and torso feeling?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Throné says. “Got through the clothes, but not by much. They stopped bleeding on the way back.”
“All right. That’s a relief. Are there any other injuries?”
Throné shrugs, but she knows how telling an answer that is. There is no point in mentioning her twisted ankle considering how comparatively minor it is, but she’s also aware that Castti will find out about it one way or another. Being honest is the rational thing to do but it doesn’t feel particularly relevant or worthwhile.
“There are,” says Castti. “Where?”
“My ankle.”
“Which one?”
“Left one.”
“All right. I’ll see to it when I’m finished tending to this.”
“It’s not really necessary.”
“It is to me. I value your wellbeing, Throné. Our whole group does. We want you to be well, and so I will be taking care of you as much as my expertise allows me to.”
The next day, while Castti is out, Throné is confined to their shared room. There is a knock at the door while she’s sitting in a wooden chair by the window, and she looks over her shoulder without moving her arms from where they’re folded on the windowsill.
“Who is it?” she asks after a second.
“Realistically, how many people might it be?” comes Temenos’s reply.
“Come in. It’s unlocked.”
The door squeaks quietly on its hinges as the cleric opens it, and it squeaks again when he shuts it gently behind himself. When Castti said he was ill, she didn’t illustrate the extent of it very well. His complexion is somehow paler than normal, he looks exhausted, his hair is a mess, his clothes are unkempt, and he looks ready to collapse at any moment.
“Fuck, Temenos,” Throné says. “Go back to your room. Shit. You shouldn’t be up, looking like that.”
“I look far worse than I actually am, I assure you.” He smiles weakly, though it’s thoroughly unconvincing.
“I’m going to go get Castti.” Throné stands up, and the pain that flashes through her thigh makes her grunt and stumble. She manages, barely, to catch herself with palms braced against the wall. “I’m going to get someone to go get Castti,” she amends.
“No, that won’t do. No. I came here to ask a favor.”
“What do you think I can do for you that an apothecary can’t?”
“Well, for one, you’re able to steal from said apothecary. You’re also able to keep secrets without minding little details like ethics, moral obligations, the like… And you make much less a fuss than anyone else I know who I do not have an unfavorable opinion of.”
Throné sighs heavily and staggers over to Castti’s bed. She sits down on it and wonders how much of her herbs and medicinal concoctions have been left inside it in her absence. There is paste to smear on wounds because Throné is meant to apply it to herself every so often in the apothecary’s absence, but whatever else she decided not to take along with her is unknown.
“I don’t know what’s here,” Throné says finally. “What do you need?”
“Something for infections,” Temenos replies.
“Why don’t you ask her yourself? I don’t know shit about medicine.”
“You don’t need to. You are familiar with the salves she uses on wounds to prevent infection, correct? That is what I’m requesting.”
“Uh.” Throné pauses, brow furrowing. “Why do you need me to steal it for you?”
“Because I can’t very well steal it myself.” If Castti’s bag ever stops being off-limits, I doubt it ever will be again.
This isn’t a good idea. She should continue insisting he take his problems to Castti, especially if this sudden bout of illness has been brought on by an infection. Throné knows little about this sort of thing, but she is almost certain that infected wounds that get so severe as to cause such drastic symptoms rarely—if ever—resolve themselves without treatment. Castti would know what to do. Her hands are more capable than those of a girl who grew up to be a weapon instead of a woman.
But Temenos is a stubborn man with guards higher than any mountain in Solistia and more impenetrable than any stone. It’s impressive he could conceal the true nature of his suffering from such a diligent apothecary, and he will continue doing so for as long as he is capable. If she managed to draw the truth from him or if Throné went behind his back to spill this secret, would he accept her help? There is a nonzero chance he may try to bear this burden six feet down if it came to it. He would never trust Throné again. Only the gods know how far he’d take things if he starts feeling trapped or cornered or smothered.
It’s something Throné hates about him but she understands it. She doesn’t shy entirely away from healing, but she resists where she’s able to. Her control rests largely in her body and her food—small meals, skipped opportunities to eat, the outline of her ribs and sternum, the perfect flat of her stomach, the tips of her middle fingers and thumbs meeting when she wraps her hands around the very tops of her thighs. But had she been a healer, perhaps that need for control would manifest in a total refusal of care from others. Perhaps that is why Temenos is desperately scrambling for control in this regard.
He had been the first one to understand why she starves herself, why she squeezes her hands around her wrists and her biceps right below her shoulders so often. It’s the same need for control in a different shape.
“Fine,” Throné relents, and opens the bag so she can retrieve the salve that had been left for her. “Here it is. Let me see what happened.”
“I beg your pardon?” Temenos says.
“You need this for an infection. Let me see it.”
“I hardly think that’s necessary.”
“I didn’t ask what you thought was necessary.” She holds up the jar in her hand to emphasize the fact he can only have it if she allows him to. “Let me see. It must be pretty damn bad.”
She can see the beginning of a protest forming on his tongue, but he silently complies. He removes his cloak and his church robes and the thin shirt beneath it, leaving him bare from the waist up, and turns away from Throné. His back is wounded so badly that almost none of the skin is the color it’s meant to be. Most of it is a splotchy mess of reds, pinks, purples, and yellows, with a faint tinge of sickly green here and there—nothing but inflammation, scabs, bruising, and infection, with more of it raised than not. Fortunately it is not all infected, from the looks of it, but everything across his shoulder blades and the space between them is, swollen and crusted yellow with dried pus.
“Shit,” Throné says. “That’s pretty bad.”
“Truly?” Temenos turns back around to face her. “I never would have guessed.”
“Fuck off.” She checks the bag again for a cloth to dampen with the jug of water on her bedside table. “This is going to hurt but I have to clean that.”
“And if I say no?”
Throné swallows thickly and checks the bag again for the pouch Castti had procured the analgesic herbs from last night. It’s there. She opens it to make sure it’s the right one, and it is. She fishes out five of the leaves and holds them up. Two had been enough to make her begin to feel hazy and distant. “I have these for you.”
“That isn’t quite accurate. Castti has them, and you’re offering some of her supply to me.”
“Whatever. Do you want it or not?”
“Some would call this enablement.”
“I’m calling it a bribe. Those wounds have to be washed.”
“One more and I’ll give in.”
Throné hesitates but pulls out another. Temenos takes them, pocketing five and rolling up the sixth to chew on. He hands her the pitcher of water without needing to be asked, and she wets the cloth with it.
The cleric sits on his knees on the floor in front of Throné, his back to her, so she can clean him. She works as gently as she can but the entire expanse of skin she’s working with is delicate and sensitive, and every brush of cloth against it makes him flinch. Tension pulls his body rigid and his breathing soon devolves into pained gasps, but he doesn’t complain or try to move away from her. He endures, remaining as still as he’s able to.
Reality fully sinks in all at once. She bought an addict’s compliance with mind-altering herbs. She was driven by necessity and she doesn’t regret it, but there’s nothing ethical about it. The lesser of two evils does not become just by virtue of the alternative being worse. If they’re friends now, will they be after this? Should they be? Would a friend find enablement so easy even if it was the better option?
“Fuck,” Temenos gasps once Throné begins spreading the medicinal paste over his infected wounds, the first proper vocalization from him since she started.
“Yeah,” Throné replies. “How did something like this even happen?”
“Are you not able to tell?”
“Should I?”
“There are certain… practices endorsed by much of the Church. They are extreme, painful, and not at all supported by scripture.”
Throné pays closer attention to the details of the marks across the cleric’s back. It’s difficult with how the hues bleed into one another and how the injuries overlap, making it unclear enough without the added complication of infected yellow-green and open holes where the pus must have oozed from. But as she takes in the tiny nuances hidden among the colors and muddled patterns, she can decipher what caused all this—the style and shape of the markings indicates the use of a multi-thronged lash far beyond the point of having split flesh open.
She is confused by it for a moment, and then her stomach twists when she finds the reason it took so long to identify the cause of the harm. Upon inspection, it’s clear each strike from the lash landed from over the shoulder. She would have thought him to be above this, but in retrospect she doesn’t know why.
“Ah,” she says. “Not supported by scripture. What’s the point?”
“It’s human nature to invent flimsy little excuses to justify bad habits,” says Temenos. “I suspect you know that as well as I do.”
“Yeah, that’s true. Still. Fuck.”
“What profound input.”
“Oh, go to hell.” Throné folds the cloth in half so she can wipe her hands clean on it. “I’m done.”
The cleric turns around, still on his knees, and steadies himself with a hand of either one of Throné’s lower thighs. He doesn’t look any better but he does seem to be in slightly better spirits. Whether or not the mild boost in mood is genuine is unclear. His smile, at least, comes easier now.
“You are a life-saver, Throné,” he says. “Where were you hurt?”
“It doesn’t really matter,” says Throné. “Castti took care of it.”
“I have the energy to heal whatever may have been done to you.”
“I don’t need that. It’s not like we can move on until you’re better, and I think I’ll be fine before you are.”
“But it’s painful, isn’t it?”
“After what I just did for you—what you’re expecting that I keep doing for you until you’ve healed, and I will keep doing it—I’m telling you to drop it. I’ll recover.” The words are venom on her tongue and the taste makes her feel ill. This should not be a bargaining chip.
“You are suffering,” Temenos says.
“I always am. Drop it.”
“But—” The rest of the sentence comes not with words but with an action. One of his hands slides under the hem of her skirt to push it up until the bandages wrapped around her thigh are exposed.
“Drop it, I told you.”
“Did it get too close to an artery?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“Stitches?”
“Fucking drop it, priest.”
Temenos recoils, pulling his hand from her thigh as if he’s been burned. “I—I apologize.”
“Castti would know if you used your magic for that, and I don’t think she’d appreciate it. She’d give you a whole lecture, and she’d end up keeping a closer eye on you. You know how she is.”
“I do. I apologize.” The cleric swallows thickly. “I’m not sure what came over me. Again, I apologize. It is in both of our best interests to leave you in Castti’s care for your injury.”
Throné doubts he is telling the truth when he says he doesn’t know what caused him to act out so uncharacteristically, but she isn’t going to push it. This is supposed to be a transaction, in his mind. No one would go out of their way, risking their reputation by stealing and formulating a collection of lies to cover for it, without receiving something in return for the trouble.
Someone taught him that interpersonal relationships are transactional, and she wants to bury them alive. Whoever did this to him doesn’t deserve the privilege of dying before they’re put in the fucking ground.
viii.
Stormhail is not the worst place Throné has ever encountered, but it’s not great. Once she resigns herself to the perpetual discomfort of the unshakeable cold, it’s hardly more than a minor inconvenience. Castti has her bundled up to stay as warm as possible, and upon Hikari’s suggestion, she starts drinking tea near-constantly to help keep out the worst of the chill.
He had been such a sweetheart about it too, and it made her feel a bit bad that his kindness is a waste when spent on her. If he keeps expending energy on people like her he’s going to end up jaded and it makes her heart ache to think about. But she was endlessly grateful for his suggestions, and more grateful still when he compiled a list of teas he found available in this icy town of permanent blizzard from most palatable without sugar to least palatable.
“I dislike that you do this to yourself,” he had said as he handed her the list alongside a small bag of the tea that made the top of it, “but I recognize I’m… ill-equipped to do anything about it. If you refuse to sweeten your drinks, the least I can do is help you find the ones you’ll like without adding anything extra.”
Reminders that her actions affect other people are always painful and unwanted, but she understands that they are necessary.
Ochette headed off on her own as soon as they arrived, and everyone respected that finding Glacis was something she and Akalā had to do unaccompanied by any of the others. Before her return, a particular Sanctum Knight Throné recalls meeting back in Canalbrine is found murdered. Throné does not attend the burial and does not visit the grave after the fact because Temenos doesn’t invite her to.
He was a good man, as far as Throné is aware.
The first time she walks to his grave is because she is looking for Temenos, and no one else has seen him in a while. Sure enough, he is there, with a cigarette between his index and middle fingers. Throné catches the smell of regular cigarettes as she approaches, indicating that he’d been chain-smoking for a while, but the sharpness to what Temenos is breathing in and out now is all she needs to know he’s moved onto something harder.
“Hey,” she says as she comes to stand beside where he is sitting on the ground.
“Hello, Throné,” Temenos replies. “What’s brought you here?”
“I don’t know. Are you all right?”
“He was a good man. This shouldn’t have—” The sentence breaks apart, hit with grief like a sledgehammer, and Temenos pretends he can hide it from Throné by taking a long drag. “This is my fault.”
“It’s not.”
There is a tense silence. It’s the inquisitor’s way of avoiding an argument he doesn’t have the energy for.
Eventually, he asks, “Do you know what the job of a shepherd is?”
“It’s right there in the name,” Throné replies. “Herding sheep.”
“Certainly. But it’s a bigger job than that. A shepherd will do everything in his power to defend his flock—up to and including laying down his life.”
“No one should have died. It’s fucked up that he did, especially like that, but let’s be honest here—that doesn’t mean something should’ve happened to you.”
“No one should have died, but someone did. And if someone had to die…”
“Is it that you should have died, or is it that you want to die without doing it yourself? For the love of Aelfric and the whole fucking pantheon, Temenos. Kill yourself or don’t, but don’t use someone getting murdered to feed some stupid complex you came up with because you’re allergic to owning your own suicidal ideation.”
A long stretch of silence follows. Throné knows she went too far but she doesn’t apologize. She threw the ball into Temenos’s court, and she’ll leave it up to him to make the next move before she decides to say anything more.
“You’re too good to me, Throné,” he murmurs finally. He swallows so hard it’s audible.
“Hardly,” she says.
“You are. You’re entirely correct. Thank you.”
“I told you to kill yourself.”
“That isn’t quite accurate, is it? You told me not to place that decision on someone else’s shoulders. More, you’re defending a dead man you hardly knew from the selfishness of your closest friend. You keep me in line where it matters. Even the people closest to me in Flamechurch rarely bothered to do that.”
Throné doesn’t know how to feel.
ix.
Six days ago, Throné killed Father, and the aftermath has been grueling. Even in her sleep, she cannot escape the unwarranted horror at her own actions and despair over the loss.
She is pulled from a nightmare by a loud crash, the sound of glass shattering, and a burst of light. Her reflexes give her no time to process the situation before she retrieves the dagger tucked under her pillow, jumps to her feet, and readies for an attack. She squints against the brightness filling the room, hardly able to see anything.
Magic is not her strong suit but she gathers together whatever focus and energy she can to pour into summoning it. The signature purple of Dark magic swirls around her free hand and spills into the rest of the room. She realizes belatedly that the blinding white-gold is from Temenos, not because he’s the most logical source but because of the way it feels when it meets her own deep violet shadows.
The give of the Light magic concerns her. The fact her shadows are not banished instantly is terribly worrying; she lacks proficiency and the inquisitor’s surpasses most others. But her Dark pushes back against the Light, and though she is incapable of snuffing it out, she makes it dim enough that it’s tolerable to look at.
“Fuck!” she shouts. “Fuck! What are you doing, Temenos?”
Temenos, sitting in bed with his knees drawn up to his chest, tucked into the corner, doesn’t respond. His hair has a gold-tinged shimmer and the sparkle that lights his blue eyes like gemstones in the sun might be from tears as much as from the magic.
She won’t get anything out of him like this. All she can do for the moment is keep the Light at bay until he lets it die down. Her head is starting to hurt and the exposure to the making her skin tingle with the first hints of pain.
There is commotion outside of the room but Throné can’t afford to pay it any mind. The Dark wavers for a moment when someone finally knocks frantically at the door, and she has to shut her eyes for the few seconds it takes to rebuild the energy that her shock caused to falter.
“Is there something going on?” It’s Castti’s voice, panicked and rough with sleep.
“It’s—an ordeal,” Throné replies.
“I need to come in.”
“Door’s locked. Can’t do anything about it.”
“Throné, what is going on?!”
“An ordeal, I told you!”
The doorknob jiggles uselessly, and then Throné can hear the scrape of metal on metal as the movements of the doorknob become gentler. She swallows the fury that comes with the recollection that Osvald’s lockpicking skills are nearly as good as her own. Damn him. Her role as the default lockpick makes it easy to forget.
The door swings open, and before Castti and Osvald and whoever else may be on the other side can adjust to the brightness, Throné squeezes her eyes closed and dismisses her shadows. If she can’t overpower the Light, she’ll let it prevent anyone from seeing anything.
“Get the fuck out!” Throné screams. She can’t remember the last time she raised her voice so much. “Get out! Get out! I’m telling you to leave! I have this handled!”
“I don’t think you do,” Castti replies. She sounds far calmer than the slight tremble to her voice suggests.
“Light like this leaves burns if you remain exposed too long,” Osvald puts in. “You’ll be injured. Magic is my specialty, so if—”
“I didn’t ask!” Throné interrupts. “I didn’t fucking ask! I don’t care!”
The Light begins receding and Throné’s heart lurches up into her throat. Her head is pounding. She isn’t supposed to panic like this for the sake of others. Did the efforts used to hone her into the perfect tool for the Blacksnakes fail, or have her companions weakened her?
Throné can feel her heartbeat racing in every pulse-point throughout her body as Dark magic overtakes the room. The fear she can feel when it meets the dying Light makes her stomach churn. It feels so similar to the fear of her weaknesses being perceived, of her failures being discovered—and it is identical to the fear of being known and understood. It’s a fear that was not perceptible through this point of contact a minute ago, but now it borders on stifling.
It isn’t only Castti and Osvald here; Partitio is present as well. The fact Hikari and the girls are absent is a small mercy.
“Situation handled,” Throné says. Her elevated breathing gives away her exertion, but she knows how to glare and hold her weapon so as to counteract the potential impression of weakness. “You can leave.”
“Throné—” Castti starts.
“She has it handled, doesn’t she?” Partitio offers, uncharacteristically quiet.
“I do,” Throné says. “And I want you gone. Are you not listening to me?”
“We’re listening. We’re listening. And we’re going.”
“Are we?” Osvald says skeptically.
“Yeah. You ever see her this serious about anything?” Partitio motions to the dagger in Throné’s hand. “Doesn’t look to me like she’s messing around. This ain’t our business. Let’s go.”
Throné doesn’t add anything more, but she lifts her weapon in a silent threat. She wonders if she’d go through with it. But she won’t have a chance to, because Partitio practically pushes his way past both the apothecary and the scholar so he can pull the door shut. She is left stunned.
The shadows fade, and Throné finds the lantern with the beam of moonlight shining in through the parted curtains and lights it. A pitcher is broken on the floor and the water that it contained is soaking into the wooden floor. Temenos is sitting as he was before the interruption, eyes damp and rimmed with red, face bearing a butterfly flush.
“What the hell was that?” Throné asks, as calmly as she can manage.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“That’s a lie.” She avoids the shattered pitcher as she walks over to the inquisitor’s side of the room. She kneels on the floor at the foot of his bed so she can go through his bag. “You always act like I’m the one suffering between the two of us. And I guess I am, but so are you. We both are.”
“What are you doing?”
“Do you want a cig first or do you want to go straight for the hard stuff?”
“Tobacco isn’t going to do anything for me.”
“All right.”
A silence falls over them as she prepares his substance of choice. This time, she nearly chokes on it when she breathes in the smoke to light it before standing and handing it off to Temenos.
“Thank you,” he murmurs.
Throné gets up onto the mattress, though she stays against the footboard. “What was that?” she asks again.
Temenos sighs, takes a drag, and sighs again when his lungs have been voided of the smoke. “I am so fucking tired.”
“Yeah?”
“I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep losing people.”
“This is—something I can’t fully understand. Not yet. People haven’t been—fuck—you know what it’s been like for me. But I know what it’s like to have something that’s just—it just can’t keep happening. It’s not survivable. But then it is. And no matter what happens, you’ll live in the end.”
“And if I’d rather not?”
“I’m not giving you a choice.” She pauses for a long moment. “Hey, what is it that’s unbearable? That people keep dying, or that you’re the one who didn’t? The loss of people you care about, or the loss of people better and kinder than you?”
Temenos laughs because it’s the only chance he has to avoid crying, but it fails when the sound breaks with a sob. He uses his unoccupied hand to cover his face but it doesn’t prevent Throné from seeing the tears that start falling. Despite all the times she’s seen the mask begin to slip and despite the few occasions she’s heard him crying as the cocaine comedowns shake him apart, she has never had to watch him cry.
Eventually he calms down with the help of whatever smoke he can inhale with his irregular breathing. Once he can respond properly to her, her does: “I’m not sure I have ever hated anyone more than I hate you at this moment.” The sentence lacks any real bite.
“Yeah,” Throné says. “To be honest, I’d be surprised if you didn’t. That’s not really an answer, though.”
“I suppose not.” He closes his eyes as he brings the cigarette to his mouth. Ashes fall from the end and onto his nightshirt. “But I don’t know. I don’t know.”
The response feels like a shock to Throné’s nervous system. She is used to him using I don’t know as a way to avoid giving away things related to himself he either doesn’t want to think about or doesn’t want known to anyone else—but when he says it now, it’s genuine. It’s somehow worse that he truly doesn’t know.
The next day, Throné catches Partitio’s wrist on the way to the Montwise arena. He allows her to hold him up without question or resistance.
“Last night,” she says. “Why were you so easy to deter? Did you really think I’d hurt you?”
“Yeah, ’cause you would’ve,” Partitio replies, without hesitation or alarm or judgment. “I know you would’ve. You would’t’ve wanted to, but shit happens. If you have to fight to protect someone you love, there ain’t much a choice there to make, right?”
Throné swallows thickly, then nods slowly as she lets go of him. “How much do you know?”
“Oh, don’t you worry any about that. I don’t know a thing. It’s kinda like this, though—everyone knows there’s plenty that Hikari’s not sharing, but they still trust him. They don’t gotta know. But I know most of it, and I think—if I was in your situation—if something was about to get out before he was ready—if I could do something to stop it—I’d like to think I’d be just as ready to fight as you were. Wouldn’t be happy about it, mind—but life’s full of stuff you’ve gotta do without being happy about it. Y’know?”
x.
Truth always comes out eventually. The unfortunate thing about prolonged deceit is how fragile it is, becoming more delicate with every established lie repeated and every new lie necessary to construct to keep the others from falling like a house of cards.
Hours into the night, the door of Throné’s Clockbank inn room bursts open without warning. Hikari stumbles a few steps in, clutching the doorknob to keep from falling—an indication of how much force he barreled into it with as he opened it.
“What—” Throné starts.
“Apologies for the intrusion,” he says, quickly and breathlessly. “We need your help. It’s—oh, gods, it’s bad.”
Before Hikari is finished speaking, Throné is already on her feet with two of her daggers on her person. “What’s going on?”
“There isn’t time to explain. Please. You have to trust me.”
Throné gathers snippets of information as she follows Hikari’s lead. Castti is handling things as best she can, but it’s quickly becoming obvious she can’t defuse the situation. It’s about Temenos, and Agnea had been the one to suggest Throné to be the best and only possible solution.
The old clocktower the city is named for is where Hikari stops, and where Castti is standing outside of. Agnea is sitting hunched over and crying on a bench nearby, and beside her is Ochette, looking deeply somber in a way that doesn’t at all suit her. Throné looks up toward the top of the tower where the apothecary’s gaze is fixed, and her fear is confirmed.
“Oh, fuck,” Throné hisses through her teeth. Louder, she calls up to Temenos, “What the hell do you think you’re doing up there?”
“Not a whole lot of anything, at the moment,” he replies. “But you aren’t exactly seeking an answer, are you? You’re seeking confirmation.”
“How long’s it going to take before you jump?”
“Roughly eight minutes, I believe.”
Throné’s dread increases. Seldom has she ever needed to talk reason into him in general and never have there been drastic stakes, but now she is suddenly solely responsible to make him reconsider an active suicide attempt while he’s coked up.
“Can I come up to sit with you?” she asks. “I won’t try to drag you down. I don’t think I could if I wanted to. I just—want to sit. Eight minutes.”
“I can’t say I wouldn’t appreciate that,” he replies. “With or without ulterior motives, I quite like your company.”
“All right.” To Castti, she adds, “I need you to leave.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Castti says.
“And what the fuck do you think you’re going to do? Leave, I said. You’re making everything worse.”
She doesn’t wait around to hear any potential argument, but considering she hears neither Castti nor Hikari calling after her, she trusts that they’re complying with her terms.
At the top of the tower, she sits down beside Temenos, who doesn’t react to her arrival. His hands stay curled over the edge of the building and he taps a rhythmic thumping against the stone with his heels as he kicks his feet.
“It’s a nice city,” he says. “Rather lacking in night life, though. I suppose a city-wide culture of rising early requires retiring early as well.”
“Any place that runs on the watchmaking industry is going to have pretty rigid structure,” Throné says.
“That’s not what you’re up here to talk about.”
“I guess not.”
“Get to it. I’ll hear you out. You have a few minutes.”
Any decent killer knows how to detect every possible opening to strike and every possible way to strike. Nothing that isn’t a killing blow is almost certainly a waste of time and a risk. Throné knows very well that, in the only line of work she has ever known, there is no room for error—so she goes in for the metaphorical kill before she can consider the cruelty of it.
“The freshly appointed Sanctum Knight Crick Wellsley died for this,” she says. “You know a thing or two about that, don’t you?”
Temenos opens his mouth to speak but it takes him a few seconds to recover his words. “I suppose so,” he says. “I suppose he did.”
“There’s no one else. This whole grand conspiracy keeps operating without you. Good men will keep dying—keep being murdered. You have pieces of this puzzle that have been buried or completely lost by now.”
“I suppose I do. I suppose there’s not. But what if I no longer wish for this to be my problem?”
“Not much I can do about that, but it’d be a little insulting to the memory of the guy you seemed to be so upset about the death of.”
It’s instantly clear how sensitive the nerve Throné struck is, and for a second she worries that she hit the wrong one. But Temenos stays unmoving beside her as he sighs and says, “I suppose it would be.”
“So finish taking apart this whole thing for him, if not for any other reason. And you’re so damn close, too. You’re almost there.”
“I—suppose you’re right. But I’m so tired of this, Throné. I am so fucking tired of this.”
“I know. Fuck, I know, because I’m sick and tired of everything right now too. But the end of your case is right on the other side of the southern border. This isn’t just a case, either, is it? It’s revenge. It’s revenge.”
“It is. It’s revenge.” There is an extended pause before he asks, “But what happens after that?”
Throné shrugs with as much feigned nonchalance as she can manage. “Simple. You kill yourself. I’ve technically succeeded my father so it’d be pretty easy for me to get you all the drugs you could ever want, if you asked for them. I can get you enough to overdose a thousand times over for free. It’d be a hell of a lot more guaranteed than the fall we’ve got below us right now. And it’d be the purest shit in Solistia.”
Temenos sighs, reaches into his bag, and retrieves a pouch. He leans away from where anyone on the ground could see him, pours a small pile of powder onto his hand, and snorts it up, then licks his palm clean.
“You’ve succeeded,” he says finally. “I’ll save suicide for when I can have a favorable overdose instead. Don’t let me down, Throné.”
“After the wild goose chase of a revenge plot you’ve got going on, I’ll give you whatever you want if you pull it off.”
Temenos rises, steadier on his feet than Throné would have expected. “This… incident is going to follow me around, however. I’m not looking forward to that.”
“Not like you’re the only person here with an attempt under their belt.”
“True enough. Still…”
“The mortifying ordeal of being perceived during a moment of weakness. Is that it?”
“Precisely that.”
xi.
Throné does her best not to be a liar these days. When all is said and done, she doesn’t go back on her word.
Opium is not Temenos’s usual, but according to him, it’s good for celebrating. Throné provides the purest opium that can be sourced anywhere in Solistia. It’s well over a lethal overdose, and after smoking enough to start feeling the high, he tells her that it’s at least four lethal overdoses.
“It’s what you asked for,” Throné says.
“This could be a suicide,” he replies with a playful lightness to his tone that confirms her suspicion that it won’t be.
“I told you, I’d give you whatever you wanted. And opium’s for celebrating, right?”
Temenos laughs and holds the pipe out toward her. “Indeed it is. Would you like to try some?”
She considers it for a long moment but ultimately shakes her head in rejection. “No. It’s all yours.”
Perhaps this makes her a bad friend. There were the times she sat by and let him take whatever he wanted because she knew her interjections wouldn’t do anything. There were the times she rolled his drugs up for him, and the times she reached for his supply before he did to calm him down. But now there is also this—a celebration between the two of them as Throné sips on a glass of wine and Temenos gets high on the opium she provided.
“Now that I’ve succeeded in my objective,” he says when they’re both settling into bed, “I’ve one final request to make of you.”
“And what would that be?”
“Remove the collar.”
“What else would I do? My freedom does not rely on what you do or don’t want.”
“I am well aware of that. What I am saying is—avoid dying in your pursuit of freedom.”
xii.
Throné doesn’t die. The pain and the turmoil make her wish she was dead, but she lives through it. She lives, and she is free.
It’s another night of wine and opium, after that. Throné alive to walk without the collar marking her both as a Blacksnake and as property of the Blacksnakes, and Temenos lives to see another day without further loss. The occasion calls for it, regardless of how ill-advised it is to drink on an empty stomach or to continue fueling an addiction. They have plenty of tomorrows left, after all, and bad habits don’t get kicked overnight. If she’s a bad friend then so is he, and sorting their shit out is a job for one of those coming tomorrows.