It wasn’t that Remi would rather be brooding, exactly. She was not unintelligent, and knew that brooding tended to send the mind into the Realm of Bad Decisions. However, trying to get into something resembling ‘normal’ after killing someone you loved - even if you brought them back seconds later - was difficult.
Still, for all her pact with Ziriel, there were still oaths to Tritherion to consider, and restitution was part of that.
Restitution was a date night partly spent helping brush Alisaie’s own blood out of her long white-gold hair, undoing some of the more obvious evidence of what she’d done to put it there. The faintly radiant length of it, when free from the tangles and mats and bad dye job of dried and flaking blood, was not full absolution, but it did help.
Restitution was carrying more than her usual share of the conversational load over their ‘dinner date in a can’. Alisaie was the talker of the pairing, no question, but she was also exhausted - coming back from the dead tended to do that to people, Remi had observed. But this date to rebond and reaffirm that the result of the Archfey’s challenge wouldn’t come between them was something Alisaie needed - that both of them needed. So Remi reached into her conversational bag of tricks and tried her best to keep the conversation going, with occasional tidbits about playtime with stick swords and what training with Brawdr had been like.
Restitution was a gentleness in intimacy-canoodling that was rare for those who, by nature and inclination, generally tended towards the more athletic. And if restitution also came in the form of sneaking some Healing Light into some of the caresses, what harm? Yes, Alisaie’s wounds were closed, but the faster they fully healed, the less likely they were to leave scars, and neither of them needed Remi’s potential reaction to having to see some of those scars for the rest of their lives. The gouge above her left hip, the slash along her lower ribs, worst of all the cut across the clavicle that had nicked some important parts of her throat ... which was probably the one that had finally left her bleeding out on the arena floor--
No. Remi focused her remaining healing ability on that one in particular. She couldn’t look at that for long.
Restitution was curling up with Alisaie in the bottom bunk of one of the tent beds, holding the exhausted aasimar until she fell asleep. That didn’t take very long, all things considered, and was as healing for Remi in its way as it was for Alisaie. Still, it was a solid reminder of what she could have lost had she been a bit slower with the diamond, if Ziriel hadn’t heard her plea ... if the Archfey Lord of Misrule had been even slightly more of a jackass.
For all Clarity said that Her Majesty of Whimsy and Mischief was watching them, Remi still took a watch, as much for some space as because she really thought they’d get attacked in the night. She didn’t go far - just sat at the door of the tent, where she could lean back and check on Alisaie, sleeping off her recent second death. Because restitution was standing vigil.
After awhile of that, Remi reached into her many belt pouches and pulled out two items - a mid-length lock of white-gold hair, tied at either end with a thin piece of ribbon ... and a highly polished steel disc. That latter she opened, to see Alisaie smiling at her from sometime last week ... and herself, smiling at Alisaie as if she was the only thing worth looking at. Remi looked at that frozen moment for awhile, face grave but largely unreadable, then snapped it closed. Still weighing the lock of Alisaie’s hair in one hand and the steel disc in the other, she looked out into the darkness of their campsite. Not brooding, though; the time for that had passed. Now was the time for prayer and reflection.
While she had her pact with Ziriel, and all that had granted her, Remi’s Oath to Tritherion still stood. She had kept to it with restitution - If my foes wreak ruin on the world, it is because I failed to stop them. I must help those harmed by their misdeeds. Now she considered the second tenet: the one concerned with mercy:
Ordinary foes might win my mercy, but my sworn enemies do not.
Prayers to Ziriel - apologies to Ziriel - could come later. For a moment, though, Remi’s brooding took a very different shape, nudged just a little by the words Alisaie had insisted Remi repeat to cement them in her mind. She said them now, quietly so as not to disturb anyone else trying to sleep:
“This is that jackass.”
Brooding and meditating on an oath might look the same from any reasonable distance. They were very much not the same thing.
Anyone watching Remi and Alisaie interacting could probably tell, on fairly limited exposure, that they were in love. Not that they were overtly physically demonstrative in public - far from it, in fact. And not that either of them were particularly inclined to verbal expressions of affection; Remi was not a wordy sort of person at the best of times, while Alisaie had been partly raised in a culture where words were considered too frivolous for the important things. Still, without words or anything particularly overt, their affection for each other was obvious in a way indefinable to all but the perceptive. Most just got the general impression without knowing why.
Others, however, saw the details.
They saw how Remi carried her armour more lightly, with less tension in her shoulders even the mornings after long days of combat; how she moved with the air of someone who had recently had a massage tailored to ease away the aches and knots of the previous day’s endeavours. Which, of course, she had; unless dire circumstance prevented it, Alisaie always made a point of rubbing Remi’s neck and shoulders once the armour came off of an evening. Alisaie didn’t wear armour herself, but she knew enough about how Remi moved to know what knots needed careful unpicking, when they came.
They saw Alisaie’s hair, even at its preferred length of down to her knees, brushed and braided more tidily and carefully than someone could generally do on their own. Remi might do very little with her own hair, but Alisaie’s was a different matter altogether, and as much as Alisaie enjoyed the feel of Remi’s back and neck muscles under her fingers, Remi enjoyed the feel of Alisaie’s hair in her hands. (Even if she preferred not to think of the one lock of it that lived in a special spot in the bottom of a belt pouch, and why it was there; even as she prayed she would never need to put it to use.)
They saw casual meals where Remi immediately, almost thoughtlessly, slid Alisaie the pepper, knowing that Alisaie would reach for it immediately to spice up any meal before her. Where Alisaie in her turn would slide the bread basket to Remi, because between bakers as parents and her stint in the miltiary where bread was usually the preferred food delivery system, that was where Remi generally went first at any meal. Where they’d treat each other’s plates as communal property more often than not, spearing an interesting-looking morsel off the other’s plate if they’d ordered something different, in a way that was somehow more intimate than feeding each other off their respective forks. How they’d nudge shoulders as they casually clinked their mugs together in low-key celebration after combat without any kind of visible or auditory cue from the other; it just sort of happened.
Most of all, they started to really see the hand gesture that accompanied Alisaie’s use of the nickname she’d given Remi, and got an impression of what it meant. Particularly when Remi - avoiding awkward flailing only because of the unconscious nature of it - started to use the gesture herself when saying Alisaie’s name.
Remi was understated in a great many ways, and stumbled over verbal expression of deep personal concepts. Alisaie had a lot of flash and fire, but seldom used words for things that really mattered. The love language they developed between them matched them both - non-verbal, unostentatious ... and with a depth of feeling that defied description in something as pithy as words anyway.
Brawdr raised his shield in plenty of time to catch his attacker’s blow, hardly even needing to think about it. There was potential there, sure, but his opponent had a lot more to learn. “Your every swing screams louder than you do, short-stack!”
His opponent, a twelve-year-old girl with messy black hair and a stern expression, looked even more stern when she frowned. Brawdr stifled a laugh. It was rare that he could call a human short, even a young human, but he had a good six inches on the child. Brawdr was on the tall end of dwarven height, and he wasn’t sure this Crestwind girl was ever going to be that much taller than him. Still, for all she still telegraphed her weightier strikes, she was coming along well for someone Brawdr had first seen hitting a lamp post with a stick.
Brawdr shook his head and raised his practice sword, a gesture that indicated an end to their bout. “You got that swat and riposte move down, anyway. Let’s see how well you retain it after a day’s running about. Off with you; I’m sure your folks got chores for you.”
Young Crestwind looked disappointed, but she raised her own practice blade to acknowledge the end of combat. She slid the blade into her belt, slung her practice shield across her back, and gave Brawdr one of her rare smiles – a flash of small, solid teeth with awkward warmth at the edges. “See you tomorrow, Brawdr,” she said, before heading off to the more residential parts of town; to her family, their bakery, and her tiny fluffball of a dog. To a life she was making every preparation to leave behind her for more exciting things as soon as she could get away with it.
Brawdr watched her go, shaking his head. “Kid’s got no notion of what she’s getting herself into.”
“So why teach her?” Kallad, a weather-beaten dwarf with a voice as grizzled and rough as his beard, spoke up from the hay wagon he was using as a makeshift day bed. “Didn’t think you went for them that young.”
Brawdr gave Kallad a flat, ice-cold look. “Not like that, you pile of cloaker shit. Kid wanted some lessons. Call it paying it forward. It’d surprise you how much potential teenage human girls can have, if you bring it out of them.”
Kallad frowned at Brawdr over the edge of the hay wagon. “This something to do with what happened to the rest of your Shield-Splitters? ‘Cos you been sitting on that one for two months now.”
“I’m not getting out of this one, am I?” If Brawdr was honest, he didn’t entirely want to. He was going to have to tell that one eventually. The wound in his heart caused by the loss of his squad would fester if he didn’t let the pain flow free.
Still, it was hard. So when Kallad simply fixed Brawdr with a steady expectant look, Brawdr had to take a moment to collect himself with closed eyes and a deep, slightly ragged breath before he could begin.
It was as much shock as anything else that got Brawdr to open his eyes. He hadn’t had another breath in him, and he knew it – some things even a dwarven constitution couldn’t handle, and whatever he’d just drunk was clearly one of those things on top of the rest of his injuries. But there had been another breath, dragged out of him by a feeling of light and cleansing healing that he recognised from the few times he’d had cleric healing. Of course, if we’d had a cleric on this run, when the harpies attacked, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
With an effort to focus his mind back on the present danger, Brawdr turned his attention to what his eyes were telling him. The power that pulled him back from the edge of death, however slightly, was divine, and so was the face in front of him – young, hair that looked like someone spun it from winter sunlight and white gold, eyes the same pale clear blue as a Damyl winter sky. Those eyes started worried but shaded through relief at his breathing to a combination of rage, grief and betrayal at the situation. Brawdr, staggered and almost dead, didn’t understand that expression at all. If he was honest, he didn’t want to.
A voice came from behind her, then: male, gravelly, with the inflections marking a resident of the less prosperous districts of Belarys. “Step away from them, girl. We’ve got looting to do, and a throat to cut. Then we’re going to talk about what you did just then.”
Brawdr, still staggered by the poison, could only watch as the girl – who, he realized when he got a better look at her, couldn’t be more than thirteen – grabbed Trey’s axe and staggered to her feet with it clutched in her hands, a thin human shield between Brawdr and the mid-height portly human and the somewhat pinch-faced woman who was probably his wife, neither of whom seemed to share much in the way of family resemblance to their self-confessed daughter. Brawdr spent little time on that bit of trivia, so shaken was he by the sure and certain knowledge that Trey was dead. He would never have let his axe fall if he lived. Apparently even a half-orc’s ability to bounce back from certain death got trumped by a good solid poison.
Then the girl said something that froze Brawdr’s blood. “Leave them alone, Dad! You don’t get to reward yourself for this! Anyway, we saw your workbench, me and Edrik. He’s taking all the evidence to the guard right now. Run, and maybe you won’t have to go to jail forever.”
The pinch-faced woman grumbled a particularly nasty string of profanities while the man lunged forward too fast for the girl to so much as raise the axe in self-defense. Her father slapped the axe out of her hands with one hand and grabbed her wrist with the other. For all the girl dragged her heels on the boards of the airship docking tower, it wasn’t enough, and Brawdr could only watch as the man flung his own daughter off the edge of the tower, towards the ocean-side cliff face and its jagged rocks hundreds of feet below.
The man turned away from the murder of his daughter, producing a knife from seemingly nowhere … and then the sky lit up behind him and the teenage girl with the faintly celestial look rose to the platform, borne away from her death by a pair of ephemeral white-gold wings. The three still-living people on the dock stared as she landed next to the axe, picked it up again and stood, wings bent in an unconscious mantling gesture of protection. “Leave. Them. Alone, Dad.”
The man backed away in the general direction of his wife. With a snarl at the winged little girl he’d apparently fathered, he said, “We’ll be back. And you’d better not be here when we are because if I see you again, I finish it with blades, not a fall. I’ll make it stick next time, abomination. I—”
That broke the girl’s badly-fraying calm and left a spark of purest rage, and she bellowed “LEAVE!” at him.
Her parents – her presumed parents – ran. Because apparently they had enough sense to retreat when something that looked so close to divine was that angry at them.
The rage abated quickly after that, and left only a thin, too-blonde girl who turned back to Brawdr on trembling legs. “I’m sorry. About them, and that I couldn’t do more. I … didn’t want Edrik to lose you.” With that, she offered Brawdr a hand. Brawdr took it, noting with amusement that she managed to hold a two-handed battle-axe with one hand while pulling a good-sized dwarf in full armour to his feet with the other. Strong kid, he thought. And I’ve never seen a weapon attune to someone that fast.
The amusement was faint and short-lived, though; it died when he turned around to look at what had become of his team. They all lay sprawled at the foot of the boarding ramp, where the criminal pair had set up their impromptu ‘mercy stall’. Trey, their dim-witted but kind-hearted barbarian whose axe had saved the last of the Shield-splitters even when he himself could not. Ardren, a gnome thief who could vanish surprisingly well for a man with beacon-bright red hair and more freckles than stars in the sky. Jerhen, Brawdr’s shield-brother since they were toddling. Even the newest addition to their band, a lilac-skinned tiefling bard called Mockery, who had been hurt so badly in their fight with the harpies that all they could do was stabilise her until they could get her to a healer … or a potion. Mockery was the only reason they’d bought the potions in the first place. No matter how much Trey wanted to be in fighting shape for a good carouse, they wouldn’t have bought from an untried source if Mockery’s life hadn’t been on the line. Brawdr was the leader. He’d given it the go-ahead. In trying to save Mockery’s life, he’d doomed them all … or almost all.
The girl followed Brawdr’s look and then looked away, disgusted. “This is what my parents do when they need to lie low after a big break-in,” she told him. “Usually it’s just water and some herbs to give it colour and stuff – won’t heal you, but won’t hurt you either. This time … I want to say they used the wrong herbs, but…”
Brawdr shook his head. “This isn’t your fault any more than it is mine, kid. We both just get the consequences. I look for a new crew. You, though … word gets around, and no one in those circles likes a snitch. What’ll you do now?”
The girl shrugged, still not looking at Brawdr – not even when the effort of shrugging reminded her of the weight of two-handed great axe in her hand. She offered it to Brawdr. “Sorry. You should have this back.”
“No. It’s yours now.” Then, watching the ice magic play along the blade of the axe, he smiled a little. “And I think I’ve got an idea of where you can go.”
__________
“North’s not a bad bet, for a kid.” Kallad conceded the wisdom of Brawdr’s eventual decision in a thoughtful sort of way. “The People give everyone who wants one a shot, and clan’s almost like family. Better than the one she had, anyway.”
Brawdr nodded. “Good weapon, a general direction, and all of Trey’s part of the pay. Least I could do. Pretty much literally.” He sighed. “I owe her my life, and I couldn’t take her in. Hell, I had to send Edrik to my in-laws, and they’re racist pricks when it comes to humans.”
After a long moment of silence, Kallad pointed out, “You do know the kid probably wasn’t human, yeah?”
Brawdr pondered the wisdom of flagging up that if his in-laws were pricks about human, they were hardly going to be more accepting of a faintly celestial-looking humanoid with occasional wings. He decided against it, and stuck with, “Not my business what she was, except kind and brave and … well, timely.”
Kallad chewed on his bit of straw for another long, quiet moment before he nodded, conceding the wisdom in that point of view as well. Then he changed the subject, largely out of tact. “So what does this have to do with you teaching the Crestwind girl? Totally different situation there. You hear stories – the Crestwinds are the most stable, balanced parents in the province. Maybe the country. The day they fling their precious little girl off an airship tower is the day I sprout wings and fly.”
“I sent a little girl out with a weapon she was lucky to lift, a bag of gold, and courage for three.” Brawdr heaved himself into the hay wagon at Kallad’s feet. “I think about her sometimes. If she managed. If she even got to the People. Guess you could say it haunts me. The Crestwind girl’s got big plans to shake the dust of her district off her boots soon as she can. So that’s two girls of an age on their own in the world; one by necessity, one by choice. If I couldn’t give the first one the tools she needs to survive out there, I can the second. Paying it forward, maybe.” Then he chuckled. “Besides, bet those two’d run in similar circles, one day. Maybe what I teach Crestwind’ll help that other one, too.”
Kallad, cleric of Istus the Fateweaver, gave a non-committal sort of smile, and said nothing.
At some point in the darkness, from one second to the next, the texture of the ground beneath Alisaie’s feet changed. While tracking wasn’t in her primary skill set the way it was Ava’s, five years in the frozen wastes of Eun-Bac had taught Alisaie to pay attention to what her support surface was doing. The stone upon which she stood was smoother, and there was a general sense of a reduction in unimpeded space around her, as if she were suddenly walled in. Not just physically, either: between heartbeats, that sense of magic inside her - both the internal rhythm she drew upon for bardic things and the celestial hum that bore her wings and all other abilities great and small that came with her species - clenched at the heart of her, beating against ephemeral walls like a bird in a bottle.
That was her first clue that this was bigger bullshit than ‘someone turned out the lights so hard not even someone with darkvision could see in it’. She hated it immediately. She opened her mouth to start swearing ... and stopped as she realised that nothing was coming out but air.
No voice, no wings, no magic, no light, no freedom ... no friends.
No Remi.
Lacking verbal ability, she immediately went to her fallback, learned with painstaking care in the culture she’d called her own for a few years. When the lights came back up, she was mid-invective, using Eun-Bac specific idioms that somehow managed to wed grace and obscenity. Upon seeing the night-cloaked archfey looking at her from about three feet away, she directed the rest of the profanity (the People’s short-hand for ‘pus from the cock of a pox-infected dire moose so stupid it chafed its own penis mounting an iceberg it took for a female in estrus’) at him before raising her hands and slamming both palms into the almost invisible barrier she’d already felt was there. Her glare was pure challenge; she didn’t need her words or her hands to tell him to come and have a go if he thought he was hard enough.
“We’ll cut straight to the chase,” the archfey told her, meeting Alisaie’s hate-filled look with one of tolerant amusement, a blade master watching a five-year-old with a wooden sword issuing formal challenge. “You’ll be under an illusion in a moment, and then you’ll be fighting a certain paladin of your acquaintance. The terms are to the death.”
Alisaie’s response to that was no less eloquent for its silence. Her hands flew in the worst invective she could come up with.
“Of course, she’ll need a moment to see you. Proof of life and all that,” the archfey went on with a smirk. “So she’ll be permitted a brief look. But I warn you - either before or during the combat, if you intimate to her in any way that you are other than a shambling horror needing to be culled ... I will end her. And I will ensure it’s painful. That would be on your head. So choose your course of action wisely.”
Alisaie stopped signing, hands clenching into fists. While as passionate as any barbarian or bard had ever been, one of her key elements of value to the group she’d fallen into was her common sense. She employed it grudgingly, every conclusion a dagger in a heart already lacerated with what had been taken away.
The archfey - Eryn’s “Lord of Chaos and Misrule”, probably; there was a note to his taunts that indicated the contempt bred by familiarity - wanted them to suffer. For Alisaie - the pain of either having to knowingly kill her girlfriend, or letting said girlfriend kill her, all unknowning ... until the end, at least. For Remi, the flip side of that coin; either finding out that she’d killed her girlfriend at the last possible second ... or being shown with her last breath that her girlfriend had knowingly cut her down.
Ignorance could be forgiven. Deliberate murder could not - at least without mind control being involved in some way, and fuck her life that this was the sort of shit she now had to think about. Plus, Remi had the means of restoring life, if caught quickly enough, while Alisaie couldn’t guarantee getting Remi’s body back to Hazel. She didn’t even know where Hazel was. If their flaily-cute cleric was in the same kind of mess, she might not be in any shape to resurrect Remi in time, higher-powered resurrection spell with its highly expensive diamond or not. Even then, resurrection spells weren’t guaranteed to work.
...Which meant Remi’s might not work either. Still, Alisaie would bet on her Ree, and on Ziriel. What’s more, she could not knowingly attack Remi with intent to kill. It was literally impossible for her. She was a Protector. Sometimes that meant more than just killing those who would do harm. Sometimes it meant taking the blows so someone else didn’t have to.
The archfey was gone by the time she’d worked that one out; Alisaie cut her pondering short as the barrier in front of her shimmered, clearly about to be a two-way illusion. Which meant that Alisaie had a part to play, and she’d better play it lest His Majesty of Misrule take it as an attempted warning. She knew it was pointless to punch the barrier in front of her; she knew how this had to end. Still, it was as good a way as any to vent frustration and misery. At least she had that outlet. Remi, as Alisaie saw when her small, sturdy, adorkable girlfriend’s expression went from exasperated sarcasm to frustrated rage as she saw Alisaie banging on invisible magical walls, did not. All Remi would be given as a vent to her anger was ... someone she’d regret hitting, later.
Alisaie couldn’t give a warning, a clue, anything. Even if the archfey wouldn’t understand it, neither would Remi. Determined to teach Remi more of the language of the People than endearments if and when they got out of this alive, Alisaie signed the first bit of her chosen culture’s language she’d ever taught to Remi: cupped hand to the heart, nail of the middle finger being the only part to actually make contact, before held out in a gesture of offering. My heart is yours, it said ... but it said more, in posture and nuance and all the other little things the People used instead of inflection and stressed words. It said I will never hold this against you. It said This changes nothing of how I feel for you.
It said: Whatever happens, I will live on, and if your heart is the only place where I still live, it is still the best home I can ask for.
As her perspective changed again and her illusion-draped form appeared in front of Remi, she took a moment to hope that she’d be able to explain the full meaning of that last gesture before, reluctantly playing the part of the shambling horror, she aimed her first strike at Remi’s shield.
