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Pike Trickfoot is born to Fenna and Bilmin Trickfoot and she’s tiny and dark-haired and screaming.
Her parents are also tiny, are also dark-haired. They travel with her uncles and cousins, and they are lithe and crass and sticky-fingered. They are cheerful and shady and sly. They make excuses appear, and wallets disappear. They are nothing, nothing like their great-grandfather will be.
In three years, Pike will learn a new adjective for them.
Gone.
—
(“You have a bastard for a father,” says Uncle Ogden, sipping bitter tea as the night grows long.
Pike nods.
“Your no-good parents,” mentions Johann, caught up in his tales of the Trickfoot clan.
Pike nods.
“What kind of terrible people would do that? Leave and leave us with you?” he adds later.
Pike nods.
“My brother didn’t do a damn good thing in his life, and that wife of his definitely didn’t,” says Uncle.
Pike nods.
Later she’ll bite her lip and wonder—then what does that make me?)
—
“Pike!” JB giggles, springing up to poke her in the side. “Pike!”
Pike stumbles back from where she was trying to read words off a sign—she didn’t hear JB approach. When she realizes who it is, she grins back. “JB!”
“Pike!”
The two of them laugh. For the past few days, they’ve been driving Uncle Ogden crazy, speaking only by using each other’s names. Johann just laughs at the two girls—baby Trickfoots, old man, learning their trade—and Pike feels vindicated in irritating Uncle. Besides, sometimes she gets the feeling that he doesn’t really like either of them at all.
“What’re you doing?” JB asks. She peers owlishly at the sign through her overgrown bangs.
“Tryin’ to read it,” Pike explains, sticking her hands in her pockets. She toys with the hole at the bottom in slight embarrassment. “’M not really great at my Common letters yet.”
JB shrugs. “That’s okay. Ogden told me Johann didn’t learn to read properly till he was ten.”
“Ten?”
JB nods and smiles.
“That’s old,” Pike says, eyes wide as if Ogden isn’t well into his second century.
“Yep,” JB says. “Johann is old-old-old.”
“Old, old.”
“Old!”
They look at each other and giggle, their shoulders bumping into each other playfully. JB isn’t typically a physical child, but with Pike…well, Pike is special. The two of them stick together like tree sap, tumbling over each other and into worlds of their own. They’re two black-haired mischief-makers, and half the time their family doesn’t bother telling one from the other.
“D’you want some help with the sign?” asks JB.
Pike’s forehead furrows. “No. I wanna try,” she declares. She stares up at it again. “M-moh-uhn. Moh-uhn-t-ta-ee-uhn. Mountain! That one’s mountain. Mountain T-t…t-t…”
“Keep going,” JB encourages quietly. She reaches a small hand out and slips it into Pike’s equally small palm, giving a light squeeze.
“Mountain T-terr-terr-ah-een. Mountain Terr-ah-een?”
“Terrain.”
“Mountain terrain a-he—aheed. Ahead. Mountain terrain ahead.”
JB’s little gaptooth shines through as she smiles. “Yeah!”
“I did it! I read the sign!” Pike does a proud little jig, her blue eyes and bare feet both dancing. She’s a sight to behold, a little gnome girl hopping on a forest path, little bells jingling from bracelets wrapped around her wrists and ankles. The sun falls through the leaves in shafts that highlight her freckles and her copper-brown skin. The warm breeze carries away her high, childish laughter, carries it all the way up to the tops of the trees—her cousin stares at her with quiet adoration at the way one accomplishment can cast her entire being into warmth and good cheer.
Then Pike pauses. She stills her arms and legs. “Wait, JB?”
“Pike?”
“What’s a terrain?”
JB covers her mouth with her hand to hide a laugh.
—
Pike loves her family.
She loves them with everything she is, everything she has. She loves the way Johann’s moustache twists, the way he throws her in the air and pretends to lose to her at arm wrestling. She loves the way Uncle hunkers down in the light of a fire, his eyes bright and his voice twirling a tale. She loves JB the most of all, the way they can pull each other into adventure after adventure without hardly having to leave the path of the cart.
She loves them so much sometimes it hurts, deep in her chest where she thinks the love comes from. She wants to share the feeling, wants to give it away in spades. She wants to hug Johann and Uncle as much as she can, play with them and sing their songs, but the two of them don’t have much time for children. They’re too busy scheming up new ways to make their penniless ends meet. They were never made to be the homemaker type, anyway: they each take the mantle of Trickfoot up with ready shoulders, sliding beneath the name like it’s a suit of armor.
(Trickfoot men like to wage war at the world with nothing but deceit and humor in their hands, and at their backs they leave little girls behind.)
That’s okay, though; Pike has JB. Whenever Pike gives all her attention to JB, the girl’s eyes light up like the moons at their fullest, saucerlike and warm. She’s never that way around strangers, but that’s the effect Pike has—Pike’s capacity for love is no little thing. (When she’s grown, she’ll use it to topple dragons.)
Pike has JB, and JB has Pike, and occasionally they have Uncle or Johann, and, well—
That’s enough.
—
It’s late in the day. The sun is gold and low, pressing down on their backs. They’re heading towards a town, small and nestled in the crook of a stream. It’s been a while since either girl has slept in a real bed, and Uncle had promised they would stop at an inn—the two are giddy with anticipation, grinning and jaunting along the path with bounces in their steps.
Uncle is within earshot, so their babbling still consists only of each other’s names. It’s been months, but gnome children can be stubborn if they set their mind to it.
“Pike?”
“JB!”
“Pike, pike.”
“J-B, J-B, J-B!”
“For the love of the damned,” Uncle finally snaps. “If you don’t shut up, one of you is going into the cart crate for the rest of the way!”
Pike has a sudden image of being crammed into the little box, wooden slats pressing up against her chest and back, nails catching on her ratty, vibrant clothing. She shudders to think of how dark it would be, how scary and tight. She lapses into silence, her enthusiasm torn from her.
JB, on the other hand, is less skilled at telling when Uncle is joking or not. She takes it as another sign that their game is paying off. Instead of falling quiet, she pipes up: “Pike, Pike, Pike!”
Ogden turns, and he is not the trickster man who charms his way through human crowds. He is not the story-spinner or playful old fool, not the seer or the peddler or the vibrant gnomish caricature. His face is hard, lips drawn tight beneath his thick moustache and eyes flinty and blue.
Johann, at his side, opens his mouth to say something, then thinks better of it. (He is still young, but he has already grown into what he will always be—a coward.)
“What did I just say?” Uncle asks.
JB shrinks beneath his gaze, her face falling and her mouth dropping open. She nervously begins to fold her hands together. Her eyes well with tears.
“What did I just say,” Uncle repeats. He advances.
JB takes a step backwards, shaking her head. Her bangs swish from side to side.
A rising sense of panic fills Pike’s chest, like water welling too high in a basin. Uncle is going to do something, Uncle is going to do something to JB, Uncle is going to put her in that crate and lock her away. The idea terrifies Pike. She thinks of the impression of the dark she’d gotten, of the cold and the rough and the wood on all sides. JB can hardly stand some textures in her food. JB would not do well in that box.
Pike can’t let her get into that box.
With the most force her six-year-old voice can muster, she shouts, “J-B!”
Uncle turns slowly. His nostrils flare. Quicker than Pike can react, his arm flashes out and grabs hold of her wrist—one day she’ll be strong, so strong, but here she’s six and tiny—and he yanks her behind him. She’s dragged along the dirt, her heels scuffing, the joint of her shoulder scraping. Uncle strides over to the cart. He slows the mule with a sharp tug on the reins, nimbly stepping up into the inside and casting his gaze around for a box. He spots the crate he’s looking for and flips open the top with his spare hand.
Pike’s legs kick out uselessly as she tries to struggle, shaking her head. She pleads with him to stop, her voice warbling. She’s never really been the biggest fan of tight spaces. It’s not a phobia, exactly…but she’s a little kid and her uncle is shoving her inside a small dark box.
She curls in on herself as her feet hit the bottom, the wood just as rough and splintered as she’d imagined. She’s about to fight, but then she remembers JB standing outside. With a deep, stuttering inhale, Pike swallows her panic. She squeezes her eyes shut so she can’t see her hands shake.
Uncle lifts the lid and clasps it shut. “Can’t be a pest in here,” he says. His words aren’t malicious, just mildly peeved. With that, he hops back out of the cart and nudges the mule back into motion.
Only Pike and the dark are left behind.
—
“Pike! Pike!” There are little hands on her chest, on her shoulders, on her cheeks. They shake her and prod her, desperate. “Wake up!”
Groggy, Pike shakes her head. It pounds. She swallows: her throat is sore. She’d cried herself to sleep, trying to keep her tears silent. She doesn’t like the box. Does anyone know that? She doesn’t like the box, not at all.
“Wake up!” The voice insists, high and scared.
“’M awake,” she mumbles, waving at the source of the concern. “’M awake.”
As she opens her eyes a crack, JB’s face swims into her vision. The girl’s lip is white with fear, trapped beneath her gapped teeth.
“Oh,” Pike says, “JB.”
“Are you alright?” JB frets, patting at Pike’s stomach. She’s nearly hyperventilating. “You were in there for…for…forever.”
“In…” Pike trails off, opening her eyes properly. The cart still surrounds her, high enough that she can’t see what’s happening in her periphery. They’re no longer moving. Craning her neck, she sees the crate empty at her side. The memory—stuckstuckstuckdarkdark—rushes through her mind and brings tears fresh to her eyes. She swipes a hand at them, brusque, and sits up. “’M fine.”
“Uncle put you in the box and–“ Gasp. “–I didn’t know what to do–” Gasp. “–alone and–“ Gasp. “I c-can’t–”
“Shhhh,” Pike shushes, half out of concern for JB’s breathing and half because her head is still pounding. “Where—Where are we?”
JB gets in a stuttering inhale and sits back on her heels. “We’re in town. By the river. And—And Grandpapa Wilhand is here, and now–” she wavers, close to tears again, “–he and Uncle are ar-arguing.”
Pike nods. Now that JB’s breaths are less ragged, she can hear out to the male voices that are raised outside.
“She is a child!” someone who is not Uncle—Pike assumes it’s Wilhand, though she doesn’t remember his voice—exclaims. “You locked her in a—”
“Oh, be quiet, old man,” Uncle replies, spiteful. “The girl needed a lesson. It’s hardly the worst that’s been done to gnomes.”
“She’s six years old!”
“She’s a Trickfoot.”
“And so am I, and I say—”
“Are you? Are you a Trickfoot? When you value your stone statues of a woman higher than your own blood—“
“Boy, be careful what you say—”
“If you have such a problem with how the child is being raised, then take her! I never wanted her anyway, her parents were the ones who—”
“Scuse me!” a third voice rings out, new and deep. “’Re you the ones causing such a disturbance here?”
“Well, sir, I apologize for any issue, we’re just family, see, estranged—”
“What’s yer name?”
“Ogden Trickfoot, and I am humbly at your service.”
A snort. “Trickfoot?” There is derision, there is disgust. “Stinking deep gnomes. There’s no board for you here.”
“We only bring some supplies—”
“Git’, the lot of you. ‘Fore I bring out the rest of the inn, and we clap youse in irons like you should be.”
“But, sir, we have children—”
The man’s voice is dangerous. “Git’.”
There’s the sound of a small weight being dropped, thudding to the dust like a sack of potatoes. From the whump it makes on impact, the pained coughing and the whimper, it was probably Uncle. A beat passes. Then there’s a rushed commotion. The cart kicks back into movement beneath Pike’s bottom.
At this point, she clamps her hands over her ears. She doesn’t want to hear anymore. None of it. Nothing. It’s her turn to choke as if there are holes in the seams of her lungs. JB stares at her, eyes wide. With nimble fingers, so much less clumsy than Pike’s, she reaches out and tugs the two of them together.
They cling to each other, trying to pretend that they’re the only ones in the world.
—
Grandpapa Wilhand settles down next to Pike, miles from the town and the crook of the stream. He sits pensively, with a weathered hand on his knobbed old knee.
Pike looks away. She breathes in the sunlight and smell of overripe apples. She doesn’t trust Wilhand—Johann says he’s a gas-breathing old fool, whatever that means.
“Hello,” says Wilhand after a long silence. His voice is kind, and Pike tries not to let herself be fooled by it.
(Trickfoots can put on a pretty attitude for anybody, she knows.)
“I’m Wilhand. I don’t reckon you’d remember me.”
Pike doesn’t answer.
“Hello? Anybody in there?” He smiles from behind his glasses. “Not much of a talker?”
“I talk lots,” Pike retorts, ruder than she’s been to anyone in quite a long time. “Uncle knows that.”
Wilhand sighs. “I suppose he does, doesn’t he? Well, I’m not your uncle.”
Pike gives him a look—um, duh.
Wilhand smiles again, that infuriatingly kind smile with the twinkling eyes almost getting lost in his masses of wrinkles. He nods, seems to chew on his words for a while longer. Finally, he speaks. “D’you want a berry?”
“Huh?”
Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulls out a sky-blue handkerchief and unknots the top. Inside, he has a scattering of bright purple berries, some of which have stained through the cloth. They look full, round, and fresh. He pops a couple onto his tongue, sucking on them happily, then offers the rest.
Reluctantly, Pike scoops up a few. She’s a Trickfoot—who’s she to refuse free food when it’s been given? She crams a couple into her mouth.
They’re very good berries.
“Do you believe in anything, Pike?” Grandpapaw Wilhand asks into the calm that follows. “Any god, or deity, or anything like that?”
Pike wrinkles her nose—she doesn’t know what a deity is. “Uncle curses Cayden Cailean, sometimes. That’s a god, right?”
“Yes, he’s a god.” Wilhand sucks a couple more berries. “I’m a follower of a goddess, myself. Have you heard of Sarenrae?”
She shakes her head.
“She’s a goddess of healing, patience, the sun. Second chances. Love above evil, peace above violence.”
“She sounds nice.”
“She is. She’s like…you know when you feel all warm inside, because you’ve helped someone?”
Pike thinks. She remembers when she’d knocked over a couple of potted wares in the market, and had spent the entire rest of the day attracting customers to make up for it—her voice had been so tired after a day full of shouting endorsements, but she had felt so good in her chest. She remembers when she’d found a rabbit with a cut up foot and had found the right plants to make it better, and that time when Johann had postured and pretended not to be sick for three days until his fever was so high that only she managed to remember how to bring it down. She remembers the split second of relief after she’d crawled out of the box—the moment when she’d realized, it was me, not JB.
Tentatively, Pike nods.
“That’s what Sarenrae believes in. Doing good. Helping people.”
Pike chews on the seed of a berry glumly. “I wanna be good.”
“Aren’t you?”
She thinks of “My brother didn’t do a damn good thing in his life, and that wife of his definitely didn’t.” She shrugs.
“Why did your Uncle put you in that box, Pike?”
“Because he was gonna put JB in there! And I wouldn’t let him. So it was me instead, and that was better.”
“Why was it better?”
“That’s a dumb question.”
Wilhand smiles, looking off into the distance. He’s older than Uncle, Pike notes, his hair all gone silver and his forehead deeply lined. There’s something about him that makes her like him, even if she doesn’t want to—an inner peace, a natural kindness that she’s never seen in her family before. She wants, all of a sudden, to be like him. She wants to share berries and smiles and make other people feel warm inside.
(But that’s not what Trickfoots do.)
“I think that was kind,” Wilhand says finally. “I think that was good. Not a lot of people would do that, you know.”
Pike looks down at the scuffed knees of her pants.
“Pike–” he calls her Pike, not girl or you, “–do you love your uncle and cousins?”
“Yes.”
“What does that feel like?”
She hesitates. “It kinda…splooshes, like from a river? Just in my heart.” She prods at her chest. “And then it fills everything and I get happy and, and…. It’s good. Extra with JB. Extra good.”
“Extra good?”
“Yeah.”
There’s another pause. They seem to stretch, with this man, like he’s waiting to be given the right words to say. “Do you like living with your uncle?”
Pike’s about to respond—obviously, yes, of course—but something twinges in her chest and she pauses. She shrugs. “He put me in a box.”
“He did.”
“I’m hungry a lot.”
Wilhand nods.
“All the other kids spit at me n’ JB. I tried giving ‘em flowers and they still did it.”
“That’s awful.”
She puffs out her cheeks and rolls the berry seed down into her bottom lip with her tongue.
“Your uncle’s asked if you’d like to come live with me for a while. Did you know that?”
She shakes her head, even though she remembers the words, spat out like they were nothing. “I never wanted her anyway.” Like Pike was nothing. She should be scared, but—
She’s so tired of being nothing. She wants to be good. And Wilhand…. Wilhand feels safe.
“Would that be alright?”
Pike frowns. “Can JB come too?”
“We can ask Ogden tomorrow, how’s about that?”
Pike sighs, exhausted from all the thinking. She nods. “Okay.”
“Do you just want to sit here for a little while? Not talk?”
Pike’s throat feels tight and weird. No one’s ever asked her what she wanted so much before. Instead of crying, she smiles a little smile. She nods. Wilhand lifts his arm, and she leans into his side. He smells like a little like mothballs, but he also smells cleaner than anyone else she’s ever hugged.
The two of them stay like that for a long time. They’re two gnomes—one very old, one very young—tucked into each other. Wilhand, his brown skin folded and creased in compassion, feels the quick-beating heart pressed against his middle. There’s a small snuffle, then a contented sigh.
(This is what goddesses were made for, he thinks. This is a life worth saving.)
Pike, her knees pressed to her chest, her clothes patched and stained, smiles up at him. Her eyes are brilliantly blue, ancient eyes that are also newborn eyes that are also just…eyes. She watches him with a simple care, her copper-brown skin warmed by the sun. Her hair is dark. She’s tiny.
Wilhand falls in love with this little girl, and vows to watch over for her for as long as Sarenrae grants him.
—
They ask Uncle tomorrow, if they can take JB.
He goes red with fury, going on and on about how Wilhand wants to destroy him, wants to wreck him, thinks he’s so much better in his ivory tower with his goddess of light and not a care in the world for his own family who are suffering just as much as some poor victims in Westruun. He makes it all about Wilhand, about old family matters, about stature and class and loyalty.
But at the end of the day, Uncle’s reasoning is simple. Pike sees that.
(After all, she still loves him.)
JB is his, and as little care as he may have extended to her in the past, that is something that cannot be simply handed away. Pike was an extra, in Uncle’s mind—another girl to trip him up, but not his. Pike has never been his, and so she may be given without consequence to pride or family or personal life. JB, on the other hand, cannot and will not. And without her, it would be just Ogden and Johann, no one to tend to them or wait for them when they go out on their raids.
Wilhand tries reason with him, tries appealing, but it’s no use.
Uncle will not allow JB to go with them.
After JB and Pike run together, hugging each other as tightly as possible, refusing to be separated, begging to go with Wilhand, Uncle also refuses to let Pike stay.
So that is that.
—
Pike is miserable on the journey to Westruun.
Miserable.
She wants her best friend in the whole world. She wants her more than anything.
The guilt builds as she learns how nice Wilhand lives, even if it’s small and simple. Pike gets this—a house, a home—and JB should be with her but she’s not. And Pike cries, every night, to her great-great-grandfather and to the dark and to her new goddess, begging—
(But this is a prayer that isn’t granted.)
And, as time passes, Pike grows. She adjusts. She heals and she loves and she does good, and the other Trickfoots start to feel like a dream, like a haze. She swears she can only remember JB’s face in black and white. The two of them were so young, after all. Six years is such a small time for a gnome. Wilhand becomes more real, because he is genuinely kind and positive and faithful. He is a lot of things Pike wants to become, virtues that Pike realizes her former life sorely lacked. She’s happy, mostly.
And then Grog comes, and she has a new brother, and any remaining sense of alonealonealone is soothed as if by a balm. He’s not a JB replacement, exactly, but he’s a friend. It’s been a long time since she’s had one her age. The adults of Westruun all love her, but few of them have young children. With Grog’s arrival, Pike’s life bursts back into beautiful companionship.
They play tricks on the town, mischievous and gleeful—but they always clean up after. He carries her on his monster shoulders, roughhousing with her until the sun sinks low—but they always sleep in warm beds at night. They dash and they dive and lumber, exploring the forests in thick and green—but they know the paths home, and follow them with ease.
Goliath and gnome, barbarian and cleric, contradictions and grins and alcohol late into the night. He spends his days training to be a warrior. She spends hers at the church. They fall together at night as siblings, puppies curled up in his bed and sleeping peacefully side-by-side. No one struggles to tell them apart.
Pike tries to teach him how to read. Grog tries to teach her how to properly swing a battle-axe.
So she forgets. She forgets the constant gnawing of hunger in her chest. She forgets the feel of foreign paths beneath her feet. She forgets how to be faithless—though her faith wavers, many times—and she forgets how bitter the taste of poverty is. She forgets how to be spat on, how to be cast out. She forgets the parts of Trickfoot life that have made them twisted to begin with, that have warped good hearts among them and left them streaked with rancor.
(One day, Pike dies and comes back. Her braids bleach themselves white. She is less tiny, and no longer dark-haired.)
—
Vox Machina becomes her home. They teach her the slope of the roads again, and the ache of trauma and hardship. They make her laugh more easily than any people she’s ever known in her life. They’re a band of fuck-ups and misfits. They’re a family.
(Here’s a secret—Pike is no more perfect than the rest of them. No holier, no less of a jagged puzzle piece. She’s a girl whose sense of self curls in on itself like an ingrown toenail, whose past refuses to make peace with its present no matter how hard she tries. She loses herself and finds herself in storms and in battle and in hospitals that reek of death. Sometimes her knees are rubbed raw with praying, hours spent begging her goddess for the strength and patience to keep her people alive and together. She is furious with herself and her goddess, other days, and then guilty for being so. She throws herself into healing work and occasionally wouldn’t care if the spells needed to eat her whole.)
She is one of Vox Machina as they stand together, broken and fixed in all the right ways. The road stretches long before them, empty lands that will one day echo their names.
Pike’s love can topple dragons, and does.
—
It is on a mountaintop, the full moons casting stark shadows and harsh light, when Pike truly remembers why she and her great-great-grandfather have been trying to reshape the Trickfoot name.
Uncle, trapped in Tary’s box, his make-believe phantom gone, stares at her with wide, panicked eyes. His lips are stretched wide in a nervous smile.
The magical container hovers over nothing but open air. Betrayal sits like a stone in Pike’s throat, cold and choking. It stops up any tears that might have come. She’s even able to see the irony—Ogden is the one in the box, now.
Somehow, the chill of the wind has stopped pelting though her. The treachery has numbed her senses.
The box disintegrates. Her uncle falls.
There’s a second when she doesn’t want Vax to catch him. She wants him to die. She wants him to suffer for the pit that is opening up inside her, the chasm in her chest that feels like it won’t ever close. Pike knows the sea below, the clamor of the water and the spit of salt. She knows exactly what it will look like if Ogden is pulled under—his breath torn sharply from his lungs, crushed, his pale back bobbing and swirling beneath the waves—and for a fleeting, fleeting moment, she wants to see it happen.
(This is not what Sarenrae teaches, but it is what Pike wants. The two are not always the same. Pike has room for cruelty, just as she has room for kindness and compassion. It is her actions that make her who she is, not her desires.)
She heads for JB, caught on the ground by Vex’s rope of entanglement. The girl’s skin is waxy, her eyes desperate. Looking at her, Pike feels a flash of abject pity. Not sympathy—pity. What a miserable creature, she thinks, until a different thought collides with it. This is my family. Pike had held so much guilt for her abandonment of JB. While some of that still lingers, churning in her gut, sadness rears its head far more prominently.
JB is both a miserable creature and Pike’s cousin as, wretched, she says, “I’m nothing.”
I’m nothing.
And Pike remembers that, suddenly, the vivid feeling of being nothing to Ogden or Johann. She remembers wandering on a road for hours with a parched throat, the no-good daughter of no-good people, kicked out of town after town.
JB adds, “That’s my lot in life.”
Pike thinks of Wilhand, of trying to be good, of the love that toppled dragons and the loyalty that would drive her to the ends of the earth. She thinks about pledging herself to her goddess, about learning to heal with her entire being. She thinks about afternoons in wooded clearings trying to read signs. She thinks of two black-haired little girls, almost identical to all but each other, until one of them grew up and the other one didn’t.
She says, “It doesn’t have to be.”
—
They interrogate Johann easily. He has always been a coward.
The whole thing was all about money. Fucking money and fucking jealousy.
And gods, Pike may remember how important money once seemed, how vital it can be for livelihood, but to do this? Over money? She would have given them anything, anything they asked for, as long as they’d been upfront about it. Pike, we’ve gone through the cash you sent and now we can barely buy ourselves jerky and we’ve been kicked out of four towns…
That’s all it would have taken. She would easily have given everything she could. Fuck, she’s made a life out of giving away every part of herself she can muster. Why would they possibly think they had to do this? Trick her, taunt her with stories and lies, drag her friends into an inane performance and swindle them out of their gold and tools as well?
She looks down at the mace she’d dropped on Astra’s foot. For a moment, she thinks a broken toe is not enough. She feels her holy symbol warming, trying to remind her of the tenets she swore to. Then Vax re-emerges from the side of the cliff, his black wings a streak against the lightening sky. He drops Ogden in a thudding heap.
Upon seeing him, fury crashes through Pike all over again. She’d loved them. Maybe she’s angry because she still loves them, no matter how many times they’d proved everyone’s assumptions right.
Vex stands near her, not judging, waiting to see what choices Pike will make. She does lean over to whisper, gently, “If you send them on their way, think about JB. That’s all I ask.”
Pike nods, rage still howling in her ears.
Ogden is small, on the ground, crumpled. She stalks over, slaps him. The sting to her hand doesn’t make her feel better. She wants it to. She wants him to bruise. He blinks awake, his elderly affects nearly entirely gone, his eyes wide.
He tries joking, tries Gotcha.
All she can think of is how big this man had seemed as a child, how important, how intimidating. How he’d ignored her most of the time, just as he’d ignored his own daughter, and how they’d thought that made them nothing. How he’d put her in a crate and left her there for being a child. How when all is stripped away, he is such a little, little man.
She’d always thought Johann was the only coward. She was so, so wrong.
Her fury is cold and her voice is even.
Because not only is she angry, but she is hurt. She is so hurt and she doesn’t know how to staunch the rush that is bleeding from that place in her chest where the love was supposed to come from. She briefly registers her friends around her, either concerned or angry on her behalf, but the world seems to twist until it is just her and Ogden. He is in focus, his beads of sweat, his attempts to bargain. He is clear.
He is clear. He is a coward. He is, most importantly, her family.
Pike is a cleric of Sarenrae, and when she was very young she sat beside an old man who was then a stranger. His third question was to ask her if she had faith. At that point, she didn’t. Later, when she was a fixture in his home, he asked her if she would like to. She asked, how? And the old man had taken her to the temples, to the hospitals, to the graveyards and to the midwives’ houses. He had waited for her to take them all in, had watched her laugh and cry and stare in awe at the multitudes that one little town could hold.
She hadn’t understood. Papa Wilhand, how is this faith?
It’s not, he’d said. But I’ve shown you these things. What do you want to do about them?
She hadn’t known the answer. It wasn’t until she’d sat on the deathbed of a dying boy, a teen about four years older than her, a boy who had once mocked her, that an inkling of understanding slid into her mind. The boy’s breaths rasped like sandpaper. His lips were pale and cracked. His mother sat outside, sobbing. All the other healers were out dealing with the victims of a nearby flood.
And Pike had looked at the boy, and didn’t see the mean gleam of his eyes or the jeering edge of his jaw. She saw an ailing child. She saw someone with so much left to do.
What do you want to do about it?
Her hands should have been useless, barely trained. But she’d looked up, fiercely. Forgiveness, she’d invoked, thinking of Papa Wilhand’s prayers. Second chances. He is not done yet.
What do you want to do about it?
And she’d reached for something, something she’d never thought to before. Warmth had threaded down into her palms, tearing through the fever, chewing it to pieces until it melted into sweat. And the boy had gasped, and choked, and lived.
(This is what goddesses were made for, she'd thought. This is a life worth saving.)
Here, on the cliff’s edge, white hair raked over by the wind, Pike looks at her uncle. He squirms beneath her. Her holy symbol pounds on her chest.
What do you want to do about it?
“I’m going to give you my whole purse,” she says. She is full of disappointment, yes. Fury, yes. Grief, yes. But her goddess is forgiveness, and her faith is a decision. “I don’t ever want to see you, Johann, or Astra ever again. JB will stay with me.”
She looks at the cousin, tear-stained, who only wanted to get to know her.
“We are going to change the Trickfoot name,” she says. Because they are still Trickfoots, after everything. They are roads and disgrace and fury. It just doesn’t need to turn them cruel. “But, if I ever see you again, I will fucking kill you all.”
They prepare to leave, half-groveling. Vex calls out for them to avoid sweets.
Pike feels a surge of satisfaction as she quips, “There actually is a curse on our family. It’s called diabetes.”
She stares at them, scampering away, and her eyes are hard and her heart is soft. She thinks: This is what I am doing about it.
—
There is an after.
(Of course there is. But there is an after after the after, too, and Pike wonders how long those will go on.)
After the Trickfoots flee, after Keyleth falls to her death, after she is brought back, Pike remains standing. Her ankle aches, still wrenched from her fall. Her chest is bruised from where her armor took impact. But the sun is rising, scarlet and golden as it splits through the horizon.
The path stretches ahead.
As a group, all of them stumble down the mountainside. Pike takes Grog’s massive finger in one hand, more for balance than anything—he is her brother, and doesn’t mind. After a moment of consideration, she reaches out and catches JB’s wrist with the other. The girl jumps, startled, but then her eyes light up like the moons at their fullest. She clasps her palm to her cousin’s.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers again. Her words are almost lost in the gentle whipping of the wind.
Pike stares at her for a long second. With an odd look, she turns her head and looks back at the peak, then at the forest below. She says, “Mountain terrain behind.”
JB frowns. “What?”
—
The next morning, Pike wakes to the sight of a face with dark bangs and a gap in her teeth.
It’s enough.