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Drowned. Fjord’s thoughts keep on circling back to that, over and over again. Nott was drowned.
She just spent weeks on the water helping him through his shit. Never mind that he made an ass of himself to her in the process. Never mind that they kept on diving down to the bottom of the ocean in search for answers to his questions.
Never mind that she had to have been fucking terrified the whole time, because of course she was, she died by drowning.
(Fjord still wakes up some nights, feeling the heat of the explosion, the unrelenting pressure of the water all around him, gasping for air that won’t come – )
They all sit next to the bubbling river that Nott died in, and Fjord cannot even speak for how ashamed he feels of himself in that moment.
He’s acutely aware of how little he’s contributing to the discussion, but he cannot, for the life of him, come up with anything of use. All of this, the politics, the Cerberus Assembly, the Kryn, unknown branches of magic…all this is more Beau’s or Caleb’s forte than his. As for Nott, well – even if he were the comforting type, Fjord is probably the last person she would want comfort from right now.
What Fjord lacks in useful contribution, he makes up for in numerous gaping questions – which is the common refrain of his life, really.
Just right now, though, he’ll settle for finding out why both Nott and Beau seem convinced that Caleb is affiliated with the Cerberus Assembly somehow.
“I need you”, Nott says, desperation obvious in every word. The story of her past she told to all of them, but now her wounded eyes are fixed on Caleb alone.
Ever since the day Fjord met them, the two of them have been a package deal – Nott and Caleb, Caleb and Nott, a matched set, almost perfectly in sync – and they remain one even now, matching terror and devastation painted all over their faces.
Caleb is silent for a long moment, visibly fighting himself. Then Beau reaches out, gentle as Fjord has ever seen her, and lays a hand on his shoulder. Some of the anxious tension goes out of Caleb, and he looks up to meets Nott’s gaze.
“Your name is Veth?”
She pauses for a split-second. They look terribly uncertain, her and Caleb both, like two people high up in the crow’s nest of a ship in a storm: one wrong step away from the void below their feet.
“It was”, she says quietly.
Caleb’s lips quirk up into a brief, sad smile. His expression is as open as Fjord has ever seen, and the affection in it almost hurts to look at.
“My name was Bren Aldric Ermendrud.”
Jester’s swiftly muffled sound of surprise nearly drowns out Yasha’s sharp intake of breath. Beau is sitting ramrod-straight now; whatever knowledge she is privy to, this was clearly not part of it. Fjord isn’t sure what sound escapes him; he only realizes that his mouth has fallen open and quickly snaps it shut. Even Caduceus has gone a bit wide-eyed at this second revelation in as many hours.
Nott and Caleb – no, Veth and Bren, apparently, good gods – are the only ones who remain still, watching each other. After a moment, Nott’s lip twitches into a half-smile. It’s not amusement, there; it’s recognition.
In a moment of complete hysteria, Fjord is reminded of nothing so much as the very day they all met, of watching the pair of them con Jester into buying that ‘magic’ clay bowl of theirs. One hell of a trick, he thinks through the numbness of his own shock.
It only gets worse from there, of course.
The tale Caleb spins is a grim one, even with the obvious holes he leaves in it. The following silence is crushing, as they all struggle to wrap their minds around the revelations from their friends.
“The Soltryce Academy, isn’t that where you wanted to go, Fjord?”
At Jester’s question all eyes turn to him, but it’s Caleb Fjord looks back at. He sees the shame on his friend’s face, the weariness, and a pain carved so deep that Fjord has no name for it.
Gods, what a fool he has been. Fjord has seen the man decode someone else’s personal cipher and counter-spell Avantika’s literal god-given powers in the span of less than twelve hours. Of course someone in power would be looking to take advantage of gifts like that. That’s what powerful people tend to do.
And if Fjord hadn’t met his friends, if he hadn’t gotten tangled up with the Mighty Nein by pure fucking chance, the same thing would have happened to him. He can almost see it, it’s so obvious now. He would have walked right up to the Academy, offered up his mysterious powers and mystical connection to a god, and ended up –
What? Another weapon to wage the Empire’s war? A research experiment?
Fjord draws in a breath, tries to calm himself. Hypotheticals are pointless now, what matters more are the facts of their situation. He is – has been for a while now – deeply aware that his friends risked life and limb for his own curiosity out at sea. And now, knowing what he knows – Fjord has to swallow back a wave of nausea as he faces the horrific facts head on.
Caleb – who insists that his cat is a cat even when it’s an owl or an octopus, who would search for books even in the Nine Hells, who never knows where to look when someone compliments him – was trained to be a weapon, nothing but another cog in the Empire’s war machine.
Nott – who will happily risk life and limb by brewing acid exclusively on the back of their moving cart, who braids flowers into her friends’ hair for luck, whose ideas are so crazy they end up being brilliant – was brutally murdered and ripped away from her family.
There’s a physical ache in Fjord’s chest as he watches them, knowing what he owes them, knowing that, compared to the weight of his care for these people, owing is the least of it.
-
Beau has never been a fan of the Empire – how could she be, with the way her childhood had gone – but this goes far beyond any of her previous gripes with authority.
Someone took Nott’s husband. Coerced and kidnapped an innocent man, a goddammed chemist, for no real reason other than because they could. Because Yeza had skills they wanted to put to use for their own selfish ends. If what Caleb is saying is true – and Beau is very much inclined to believe him – someone may be torturing him as they speak.
“They experimented on us”, Caleb says, and Beau nearly throws up her meagre breakfast.
That’s not – that’s new, she thinks dazedly, staring at Caleb’s scarred arms with growing nausea. He’d glossed over the getting tortured by his teacher part of the story last time too, but this – this –
This is the Empire you serve, Beau thinks at her father.
She’s been angry, furious, so much of her life that it’s become a part of her, but the feeling festering inside her now is something else entirely. The longer everyone talks, the more the rage inside Beau’s chest cools, hardens, sharpens into something she can use to defend her friends with.
Not that she knows how she’s going to go about defending them. Beau hasn’t forgotten the things Caleb said to her on the road, about people flaying him like a cat and murdering the rest of the Mighty Nein for good measure. Somehow, none of it had felt real until now.
Now that Beau has seen the trashed basement, the ruin of what was left of Nott’s life – now it’s real to her.
Nott’s voice trembles so hard she can barely get through her sentences, Caleb’s shoulder shakes just as violently under Beau’s hand, and she does not know at all how she’s going to protect them.
Everything is falling to pieces, yet somehow there’s nothing for her to do. Beau hasn’t felt this helpless since the day they buried Molly. She’d honestly thought nothing would ever measure up to that.
They try to come up with ideas, with some sort of workable plan. Rest outside the town for tonight, a quiet spot where no one will bother them. Reconnaissance tomorrow, find out which assholes took Nott’s husband. Figure out what to do with the kid. The kid…
Beau can’t stop thinking about the boy. Tiny, wide-eyed, all alone now.
Her own baby brother is somewhere around that age. He may have eyes like hers, may scrunch up his face in the same frown when he’s focusing (may be getting ignored, and belittled, and left without a single friend in the world) –
That’s beside the point. It’s Nott’s son who needs Beau’s help now, not some kid she’s never fucking met. A kid who has everything anyways, who will never need his big sister to begin with. But Luc needs her.
Your blood runs through his veins, Fjord told her, and damn him for it, because now Beau cannot ever get it out of her head again.
They don’t want me, she argues back at him. They don’t give a damn, so why should I?
(Her brother might be the next person the Empire takes. He might be Luc, practically orphaned in the middle of a warzone. He might be Caleb, one day, manipulated, tortured and experimented on until he crumbles under the weight of it.)
It’s beside the fucking point. Beau has to go help her real family.
-
Caduceus is not in the habit of explaining himself to people. He has not needed to be for a number of years now, with his family gone and the Wildmother knowing his heart. He is, however, trying to get back into the habit – the Mighty Nein are a curious lot by nature, and so the occasional friendly interrogation is to be expected. Also, their actions tend to leave a slew of questions in their wake; questions that, as Caduceus has learned, his friends will not answer truthfully even if their lives depend on it. By now he suspects them to be constitutionally incapable of it.
All of that to say, he has been getting a great deal of practice at explaining himself to people. So, if he had to try and explain why he joined the Mighty Nein, it would probably go a little like this:
The day he met Beau, Caleb and Nott they were about to throw themselves into a fight they had no expectation of winning.
Even if they hadn’t said so nearly outright, the hardness in their eyes would have spoken for them anyway. They’d lost one friend already, with the element of surprise on their side and the terrain known to them. There had been a very good chance that they were walking into their own destruction.
Caduceus had taken it as a sign then, and perhaps it had been. Or perhaps it had just been his own wishful thinking, his own longing to assail a power that was far beyond him.
The corruption of the Savalirwood would – unlike the Iron Shepherds, or sea monsters, or the mages of the Empire – kill him slowly, but it was killing him all the same.
So, when strangers came to him that day in the Blooming Grove, an impossible task before them and lost loved ones behind, he joined them.
It is not a decision he hasn’t had cause to question – he doubted himself, after the docks of Nicodranas especially – but he has since come to realize that the uncertainty of it all is an inseparable part of what drew him to these people in the first place. If there is no doubt, no fear of how they could possibly achieve their ends, then there was nothing to overcome in the first place. And with that realization, a pattern emerged:
There is something the Mighty Nein need to do, they have no idea how, and yet they are unquestionably doing it.
There was a tower they wanted access to, so they scouted, and questioned, and wondered until they discovered a door. They needed to escape from an interplanar Fun Ball, so they peeled back one layer of mystery after the other, sometimes carefully, sometimes brazenly. A pirate was holding them hostage, so they broke into her ship and gathered hard evidence they could use against her.
They give him hope, these people. That’s why he came with them, that’s why he stayed.
Of course, he wants to offer up something in return. Caduceus enjoys being useful, being needed. It’s a nice feeling, Jester commiserating about faith, Beau approaching him about their friends’ tendency for self-blame, Yasha asking for his advice on the Stormlord’s signs, Caleb comparing notes on magical occurrences, Nott looking to him when someone is in need of healing, Fjord relying on his keen perception.
His friends need him like he needs them, and that is especially true right now.
Caduceus is still technically on look-out, standing guard over a discussion that they can’t afford to have overheard by any of the myriads of soldiers still regrouping around Felderwin. He allows himself a glance over his shoulder, though.
Jester, Fjord and Yasha sit with their backs to him, but he can make out Beau’s grim expression, the set of her shoulders and her clenched fists that practically screaming anger and protectiveness.
Thinking back to the day he met her, Caduceus recalls recognizing Beau’s drive, her fire, for what it was. Beneath her bluster, of which there is quite a bit, his friend has a brave heart; much braver than she herself knows.
Sitting beside her, Caleb is hunched in on himself in a way that’s distantly familiar. Caduceus has seen many an animal trapped in a hunter’s snare. He knows the look of someone not daring to move for fear of tightening the sling. Caleb’s eyes aren’t on any threat now, though. He’s watching Nott like she’s the only person left in the world.
Nott herself – Nott is talking like she cannot stand to stop, her secrets and pains pouring out of her like water through a damn. What a weight that must have been to carry, what a crushing lie to uphold. To be away from husband, son and home, to know they may be endangered but have no one to share that fear with. To always pretend to be someone she isn’t, someone born to a different people, someone who had lived a different life.
Caduceus can also recall what he saw the first time he laid eyes on Nott and Caleb: two people who have been running on empty for a long time.
They’d seemed to be getting better, recovering their missing friends, catching their stride, leaving the Empire for a while, but now…
Well, the Mighty Nein aren’t quite done just yet. They agree it would be best to wait out the night in a nearby grove of trees, as far away from the wizards as they can get. In the morning, they can regroup, Caduceus will try to divine Yeza’s whereabouts, and then they can come up with a plan.
For now, they all pick themselves off the ground. Even Caleb, who seems like he’s half-waiting for one of them to chase him off. Even Nott, who looks like a stiff breeze might knock her over, her hands twitching for her flask and her gaze continuously drawn back toward the town, back to her son. They all pull themselves together and start walking.
Caduceus spent years of his life alone in the Blooming Grove, watching corruption slowly eat away at the edges of his home. He has always admired stubbornness.
-
No one has blamed her.
The thought echoes in Yasha’s head, in time with the fall of her feet as they trudge away from Felderwin.
No one has blamed her. No one has so much as looked at her sideways, as if it wasn’t Xhorhasians that burned Nott’s home to the ground.
It’s the nature of war, Yasha knows that, knows she isn’t responsible, but with everything that happened today –
Yasha abandons the thought with an internal grimace. She doesn’t glance at any of her friends’ faces, because the unhappiness there will make her want to put her fist through something, and there’s nothing out here for her to punch safe for trees.
Trent Ikithon’s face flashes through her mind’s eye, that piercing gaze pinning her to the spot like a butterfly on a board.
Potential. Yasha’s. Caleb’s. Yeza’s.
Yasha has known people like that in her life, powerful people who think they have the right to possess others. She knows how this story ends.
Thinking about Ikithon is not helping her with the urge to put her fist through a nearby tree, so instead, Yasha tilts her head back and breathes in the cool air.
I need that strength you were speaking of. I need it to help them.
It’s not quite a prayer, but it is something close.
From the corner of her eye, Yasha catches a glimpse of Nott’s expression. Her and Caleb are walking side-by-side, not looking at each other but keeping close, like they can’t quite stand to be anywhere else.
There’s a dullness in Nott’s yellow eyes that tugs at Yasha’s edges. Yeza is not dead, not yet, but he is gone, and Yasha worries about what Nott might do next.
If it was Zuala –
Yasha doesn’t let herself finish that thought either.
-
Nott has a son.
Jester turns the thought over and over in her head as everyone sets up camp in subdued silence. On any other day, she might try to break up the gloom hanging over her friends, do something, anything, to cheer them up for just a second.
Not today, though.
Today, Nott has a son, and a husband who was taken away by people who are going to hurt him. Today, Nott was murdered and resurrected as a goblin, today Caleb is on the run from the most powerful people in Empire. Today, Nott isn’t really Nott and Caleb isn’t really Caleb – though of course they still are.
Jester watches them both out of the corner of her eye when they aren’t paying attention. They don’t look any different. You’d think they would, you’d think finding out something like that about people you were – are, Jester corrects fiercely – so close to should change something fundamental about them, but Nott and Caleb look about the same as they did this morning.
Well, obviously, not the really the same. Actually, they look devastated. But still like themselves.
If only there was something she could say, or do, anything to lift some of that weight from her friends’ shoulders. Jester would gladly take her share of it from them, they’re supposed to be doing this together.
But, if she’s being really honest with herself, part of her knows that just isn’t possible right now.
Nott has a son.
Jester rarely thinks of the day she left Nicodranas the first time, now. In the beginning, she’d been thinking about it near-constantly, remembering the smallest details, like the creak of the stairs under her feet as she left the Chateau for good, or how she had pressed her forehead into her mother’s collarbone when she hugged her for the last time.
The Traveller says it’s no good to dwell on the past; you have to live for the future, because that’s what’s under your power. So Jester tried, so hard, to focus on her future. Meeting her friends has made that a lot easier – it’s harder to mope about the past when you’re having fun. Or are trying not die.
She lets herself remember it now, though.
Her mother’s hands cupping her cheeks, brushing her thumbs over Jester’s freckles. The scent of lavender perfume she has always associated with home. The writhing, half-buried terror in her stomach because she has done something so stupid and she can never take it back – Be brave, my little sapphire, but please, be careful too. Her mother’s eyes shining with tears, her mother, the strongest, most amazing person Jester has ever known –
That’s how Nott is feeling. That’s exactly how she’s feeling, only much worse, because Jester is all grown-up, and little Luc is still a baby – it must hurt like hell, leaving him alone, not knowing if he’s happy or safe, and Jester wants to cry just thinking about it.
Which is stupid, really, because what right does she have to cry?
She’s not the one who lost her kid.
Blinking rapidly, Jester turns away, busies her hands with setting out her bedroll. It doesn’t keep her brain from spinning, though, and it doesn’t keep her from throwing worried glances at her friends.
Beau is pacing the clearing, trying very hard to make it look like she isn’t. Yasha has leant her back against the tree, looking very small for once. Fjord is going through the bag of holding, counting supplies with that ruthless-practicality-thing he does when he doesn’t know what else to do. Caduceus is a ways off – praying to the Wildmother, Jester knows instinctively, her hand going to the Traveller’s symbol at her belt.
Nott has gone quiet, saying nothing, looking at nothing. She’s twisting a tiny wooden button between her fingers, and Jester wants nothing in the world right now like she wants to go and hug her, but she doesn’t dare to. There’s a bubble of stillness around Nott, keeping all her emotions contained within, and part of Jester is frightened by what might happened if she were to shatter that bubble.
There’s stillness to Caleb too, only a different kind to Nott’s hollow numbness. The air around Caleb practically quivers with anxiety, his eyes darting around the edges of the clearing continuously, and yet he sits unmoving on the ground. It’s the stillness of someone trapped so thoroughly that escape seems pointless.
Jester remembers – tries not to dwell on that either, because deep down she’s scared the memories will eat her alive – what it is to be trapped. Remembers the shackles on her arms and legs, the long days and endless nights, the hollow feeling in her chest of too much panic with nowhere for it to go –
She remembers all of it.
Trapped, and he isn’t running; he can’t run, because he loves Nott too much, loves the rest of them too, and he won’t admit it because he thinks they’re going to die because of it.
Because Caleb thinks loving his friends is something awful that he’s done to them.
Jester remembers sitting next to him in that dingy tavern on Darktow, heads bent together over a disgusting pint of ale and a somehow even worse cup of milk, remembers Caleb patiently listening to her rant about her Fjord-problems, and promising that they’ll get her back to her mother in the steadiest tone she’s ever heard from him. She remembers his panic when Fjord vanished from the library in the Happy Fun Ball, remembers him ignoring the wealth of knowledge at his fingertips to frantically search for their missing friend.
She remembers, may I have my books back, please, before you draw googly eyes in them, remembers him throwing his arms around Beau in an awkward hug, remembers him and Yasha conspiring in Celestial, and the aching affection he looked at Nott with just now when he told her the name he was born with; she remembers Caleb out on the open sea, windswept and salt-stained, brazenly bluffing his way through their new life of piracy along with the rest of them.
Jester remembers all of it and thinks – not for the first time – I wish you could see yourself the way we see you.
She sighs heavily, then freezes, afraid to have disturbed her friends in their grim stillness. Any other day, Jester would have ripped them from it gladly. Today –
Today, she doesn’t know how.
-
Caleb’s head is spinning. Clear memories are pushing up against ones half-fogged up with terror, previously unimportant facts wrestle for space with wild conjecture, cold calculations are being overshadowed by imagined scenarios.
He cannot think for all the noise, which makes him worthless to this endeavour, and he can’t be that.
So, he makes a list. Everything he can recall about the methods of the Cerberus Assembly, their routines where prisoners were concerned –
Because Nott’s husband has been taken – her husband, Nott is married – and might be facing torture soon, and Caleb knows, remembers the weight of metal tools in his hands – don’t let them shake – the feeling of them tearing into other people’s flesh, into his own –
Caleb violently wrenches his thoughts out of the past. Nicht jetzt. The methods of the Assembly and their procedures regarding prisoners. Next, he attempts to map the layout of Rexxentrum in his head, calculates distances, recalls defences – pushes down the wave of uncontrollable terror flooding him at the thought of going back there, now, after everything, to assault the Assembly –
Don’t panic, that’s useless. Make a list.
The Assembly’s methods and procedures, the layout of the city, what little he knows of its considerable defences, the distance between Rexxentrum and Felderwin, measured up against the time since the attack. Now the same thing for Xhorhas, since the Kryn could have taken Yeza just as easily. Everything he read about them in the Cobalt Soul’s library, what meagre observations he’s made of the dodecahedron, their strange findings in the cellar –
It’s your people that have done this to my people!
No – don’t get nauseous again, that isn’t useful either.
Xhorhas, the dodecahedron, the research. Then, well – Transmutation. Caleb knows little and less of what it would take to permanently change another person’s shape, all transmutation magic he has ever worked has been temporary. Nott seems to believe he could help her get her body back, but of course she does, she has to; she has a parentless child to get back to.
Luc – Nott’s child, Nott’s child – Luc Brenatto. Clever, she said, so he takes after his mother. Curious, quick to learn, fond of buttons. Caleb doesn’t know what to do with the information, but it’s printed onto his heart all the same. Nott’s child. Luc Brenatto.
Nott wants to get back to her family, to her life, the one she sacrificed protecting Yeza and Luc. The goblins drowned her, in the very river they were sitting next to, and the thought is too horrible to contemplate, Nott dying, Nott dead –
She’s not dead now, Caleb reminds himself, glancing down at where Nott is walking beside him, a terrible emptiness on her face.
He should say something to her, except that there is nothing to say, with her husband and son both lost to her in different ways – I had forgotten what he looked like, she’d said, desolation in her voice – her home burned, her tentative hopes all dashed. There is nothing to say, and even if there were, Caleb should be the last person saying it; the one who has known her longest and best, and never knew what she was suffering. If he wants to help Nott now, he needs to do it by contributing to some sort of plan.
Come on, think, it’s literally all that you’re good for.
They need to figure out who took Yeza. After that – the might of either the Cerberus Assembly or the Kryn Dynasty are equally unassailable to the seven of them, but that is immaterial right now. Nott needs help, and Caleb would follow her anywhere, for as long as she still lets him.
-
If there’s one thing that holds true, in the life of the woman who had once been Veth Brenatto, it’s that things always can – and do – get worse.
It’s a hard lesson, and one she never really seems to learn. There’s always that small, stupid part of her that thinks she’s finally reached rock-bottom, now there’s nowhere to go but up.
She’d thought so, when she’d lost her husband, her son, her home, her body, her entire life – she’d thought, if nothing else, this is the worst it’s ever going to get.
And things had been getting better for a while. She’d broken free from the Goblins, she’d met Caleb, met the Mighty Nein, she’d been getting stronger, had allowed herself to think, maybe, one day –
Now Yeza has been taken Gods know where, maybe tortured, maybe dead; Luc has lost both his parents in every way that matters, is in the path of a war that is only just getting started; and to top it all off, the only real friends she’s ever had may very well die trying to reunite her family.
Her mind keeps dredging up memories, ones she had thought long buried. Nott isn’t certain whether it’s the story she told her friends, or Felderwin itself, but she cannot seem to stem the flood of them. Dancing with Yeza at the Harvest Close Festival, both of them completely out of rhythm and not minding one bit. Sorting through her wax seal collection during a winter evening, a warm fire crackling in the hearth. That exhausting, blissful summer after Luc was born. Amusing mishaps in the lab. Long days at the shop. The rainy spring day she married Yeza, when all the world’s colours were brighter.
Nott wishes they would stop. It hurts to remember.
She wants another drink, but suspects Caduceus will cure her again if she tries. Something about keeping a clear head, and damn him for being right.
Not that her head is all that clear anyway. The day is a sunny one, unusually warm for this time of year, and still Nott is walking through fog, her surroundings distant and cold.
She saw Luc today.
Nott hadn’t entirely thought that would ever be possible again. Not for as long as she was – Nott.
He’s so tall. Still tiny, but so much taller than when she saw him last. She could have stayed frozen in that doorway forever, drinking him in. Luc’s mop of fair hair has darkened a little since she last saw him, and his eyes are still the exact same shade of blue as his father’s. Her and Yeza’s perfect little boy.
Every fibre of Nott’s being is screaming for her to go back, to keep Luc safe. She’s abandoning her baby. But Yeza –
Yeza needs her. Luc needs his father. She has to give her son his family back, what she wants is immaterial. Not that she knows what she wants anymore.
Nott is being torn in two, one half of her heart behind her in Felderwin, the other lost somewhere on the dark and dangerous path ahead.
She’s being torn in two, and she walks forward anyway, keeping close to Caleb’s side; he’s the only thing that feels real right now, with her mind all fogged with old pain and new. The tug drawing them together is something stronger than familiarity, something much warmer than necessity. They found each other in a dark prison cell when both of them were nothing at all, and made each other what they are now.
They are still in the dark together. She thinks. She hopes. Nott honestly doesn’t know how she’s going to do any of this without Caleb.
Nott is so lost in the fog that makes up her world right now, she barely notices her friends coming to a halt around her. Apparently, the grove of trees they have halted in has been deemed sufficient for a campsite.
Everyone immediately goes about setting it up, their routines worn smooth by months together on the road. Fjord and Jester clear the ground of damp leaves and particularly sharp rocks while Caduceus chats up the surrounding trees, asking for shelter. Caleb leaves Nott’s side to spool his silver thread around their camp, muttering familiar incantations under his breath. Beau stalks off looking for firewood, with Yasha trailing a few steps behind.
Nott just stands there.
She doesn’t know what to do. At least when Fjord went on his evil-god-unleashing-quest, he had some sort of direction. A comparably achievable goal, even. Nott doesn’t even know which direction they are headed in, only that both options will be equally lethal.
It will be a suicide mission. She’s asking her friends to go die for her, and they will go, and they will die, and even knowing all of that, Nott will still ask, because it’s Yeza.
Not pretty. Not brave. Not good.
Feeling sick to her stomach, Nott blinks herself out of her stupor. She must have lost time, just standing there and staring, and a lot of it too; her friends have pretty much finished setting up camp. Now Fjord is sorting through his pack like he hadn’t just done that last night, Jester keeps shooting anxious glances around over the top of her sketchbook, and Beau is going to wear a hole into the ground with her incessant pacing.
Everyone is worrying, and Nott doesn’t know what to tell them.
Instead, she just forces her feet to move forward again. Muscle memory has her walking to her bedroll, already set out on the grass.
As Nott kneels down and reaches out to shake out the blankets, her hand bumps into Caleb’s, who, also moving on sheer force of habit, was about to do the same thing – and naturally he was, it’s his bedroll too, they never bothered buying a second one, despite how they’re always accidentally kicking each other awake when one of them gets up for watch –
“I’m sorry”, they both chorus, both flinching back as though burned – no, that’s a bad comparison, not burned, never burned –
Nott looks up into Caleb’s eyes, and it is as it was the day they met in that dirty jail cell, like looking in the mirror; the aching loneliness, the desperation, the hunger and grief – she is looking at her own reflection.
Unable to bear it for another second, Nott lunges forward. In a rush of movement, she grasps his hands and tug him close, buries her head in his shoulder. Caleb’s arms are around her in an instant, holding her like someone might tear her away.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry – “
She’s not sure who’s saying the words, maybe they both are.
It’s almost comical, the two of them kneeling in the dirt, a litany of apologies falling from their lips like that might change anything. Were any of their watching friends to asks her, Nott isn’t sure she could explain what exactly she is apologizing for, and neither could Caleb.
For the lies, perhaps. For the names they gave that aren’t and are their own. For the people back in that town whose portraits Bren passed by at school, the people who may have taken Veth’s husband. For Caleb Widogast and Nott the Brave, who lived lies until they became them, who only know each other because of the dark roads they’ve walked.
“Caleb”, Nott says hoarsely, forcing something other than an apology from her lips. “I can’t do this without you. I don’t know how.”
Her voice breaks on the last words, despite her best efforts. She can feel Caleb’s heartbeat racing, but his hands are steady against her back, brushing over her hair.
“You won’t have to”, he promises quietly. Like it’s as easy as that. Like there isn’t even a question in the matter.
Nott screws her eyes shut tightly and breathes in the familiar scent of resin, damp earth and ink that clings to her friend these days.
Mine, she thinks wildly, irrationally. My best friend, my – mine. And up until today, we didn’t even know each other’s names.
“So”, Nott says, her voice hardly more than a thread, her face still pressed into Caleb’s shoulder. She’s not sure she could let go of him even if she wanted to. “It turns out we are excellent con-artists.”
There’s a strangled sound of puzzlement from somewhere to her left, but Nott pays it no mind. That’s what it sounds like when Fjord thinks she’s finally lost her mind; she hears it about twice a week. Caleb catches her meaning immediately, like he always does.
“Well, you did much better than me.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, you just cracked first. I didn’t even think to question anything about the name! And before you ever told Beau and me, I tried to steal Fjord’s letter to get you into the Academy, you know.”
It isn’t funny, really, not even a little bit. On any other day, Caleb would probably be horrified at the thought. Now, there is a moment of baffled silence, before something resembling a laugh begins to choke its way up his throat. Nott can feel it shake through him.
Caleb hides his face in her hair for a moment. “You – “
He doesn’t elaborate, but that’s alright. Nott heard the helpless affection in his voice; she knows exactly what he means.
“Look at us two idiots”, she sniffs, tangling her fingers tighter into the back of his coat. “The best con we ever ran, and we ran it on each other.”
“Our best con to date”, Caleb emphasises, pressing his forehead down against her hair. Nott isn’t sure she’s ever heard him so wildly determined. For the first time since she saw the smoke on the horizon, a true smile creeps onto Nott’s face.
First, they get Yeza. And then – Nott knows, vaguely, what Caleb is after in his search, and now he knows her goal as well. Bending reality to their will…that sounds like a pretty neat trick.
“I’ll take that challenge”, Nott says into his shoulder.
There’s so much to do, so many mysteries to unravel. For now, though, Nott leans into her best friend and lets herself breathe.