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Molly isn’t dead, but he could be having a better day. Caleb’s seen worse, but still isn’t thrilled. After the Glory Run Road, the Mighty Nein pick up the pieces.
The slaver’s glaive had almost gone right through his rib cage, and Molly had just had time to think Well, fuck you too then, time to think I’m dying with my eyes open, and then Beau had leapt onto Lorenzo’s shoulders like a shrieking fury and gotten her staff against his throat and it had been enough for Molly to roll to the side and miss getting skewered like a Xhorhasian rat. The glaive had glanced off his ribs and sunk into the dirt and they’d cut and run right then and there.
He was a bit fuzzy on the details. A bit fuzzy on everything that had happened between Lorenzo’s glave flashing down towards him and coming to in the snow, with Beau’s hands on his chest and the smell of blood and burning flesh in the air.
“—cking wake up, asshole,” Beau said. Her face was dark red, and after a moment Molly realized that there was a cut on her scalp that had bled down her face and dried. When she blinked, rust flaked off her eyelashes and fell onto his face.
“What?” he managed. His chest was burning and it hurt to breathe. Molly had a pretty high pain tolerance. He hadn’t hurt this bad in a long time.
“Oh thank the gods.” Beau sat back and dragged her hands through her hair. It had come out of its bun and fallen in messy, greasy clumps around her face. Behind her, someone was throwing up very quietly. Molly lifted his head and saw Caleb on his knees in the snow with Nott hovering next to him, bow drawn and one hand on her quiver. On his other side was a dwarf in scarred armor, her head in her hands, shaking so hard that her gauntlets rattled.
“What?” he said again.
Beau was unwinding her arm wraps with short, vicious movements, cursing under her breath. Molly tried to sit up more and have a look around, but she caught him by the shoulders and pushed him back down. “Lay still, asshole.”
“O-obnoxious,” Molly wheezed. He tried to give her the finger, but found that he couldn’t feel his hands. Beau snarled and plunged her hands into the snow, scrubbing until they came away clean. She left red and brown smears on the ground beside them. Molly had a sudden, vivid memory of watching his own blood spatter in the snow.
Beau rooted through Jester’s bag and pulled out a roll of bandages. She hauled him up by the shoulder and started to wrap fabric around his chest, coat and all. “Not getting you undressed,” she muttered when he tried to point this out, “It’s like two fucking degrees out. Hey! Keg!” The dwarf lifted her head. “How far are we from Shitty-Creek-whatever-it’s-called?”
“Not far,” the dwarf answered raspily. There were tear tracks streaking down her cheeks, and her temple was bruised. She had a five-o-clock shadow and stubble and a war hammer at her belt. “Maybe…fuck.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Maybe an hour’s walk with the horses.”
Beau looked down at Molly’s chest, brow furrowing. He followed her gaze and saw a jagged, red-and-black pit of torn fabric and sodden thread, half-covered in bandages. There was a button, half torn off, glittering in the mess. None of it was purple, and he had the vague sense that it ought to be. Wasn’t he purple, usually? There was blood on the button. He was cold. When he looked up at Beau’s face again, her mouth was bunched up like she was trying not to cry.
“Hey,” Molly gasped out. Beau glanced up at him, blinking furiously. “D-d-don’t. Bury me.”
Beau scowled in confusion. “What the fuck, Molly?”
“When I die.” He inhaled and his chest felt like hot glass, but this was important. “Don’t bury me. S-sucks, being buried.”
Beau’s face went briefly slack, then screwed up again in a vicious scowl. “You complete fucking asshole,” she hissed, and pulled her arm back like she was going to punch him, but stopped short. “You’re not dying here, nobody’s fucking dying here. You need, like, stitches, not a funeral. Quit being such a dramatic, narcissistic asshole.”
She knotted the bandages over his collarbone and levered him up into a sitting position. He let her; everything hurt so much already that a little movement would hardly make a difference. Possibly that was a bad sign. Possibly he was going into shock. His teeth were chattering so hard that he could hear them. Beau let go of him for just long enough to shrug off her coat and drape it over his shoulders. As she leaned in to fasten the top button, she muttered, “And if you say that shit where Caleb can hear you, I’ll kick your ass so hard you’ll wish you were dead.”
After that, everything got a little blurry again, and the next thing Molly knew his fingers and ears were stinging as they warmed. They were a narrow wooden room with a fireplace flickering in the wall, and Beau was arguing with a stout gnomeish woman behind a desk.
“We’re not bringing any fucking trouble with us. We’re paying customers, we’ve got gold, and we want to rent a room.” She slammed her coin purse down on the counter and glowered at her opponent.
The woman frowned sternly up at Beau, then looked suspiciously past her to the rest of them. Molly realized that he was being held up by Caleb, who had one arm awkwardly around his shoulders and was taking the deep, even breaths of someone warding off a panic attack. On Caleb’s other side, Nott wore his shabby brown coat like a robe, her features hidden in its folds. She leaned against his side, one hand curled in his belt loop.
Molly gave the gnomeish woman a smile. She huffed at him, then turned back to Beau. “This is an honest establishment. We don’t cater to brigands.”
“Brigands?” Beau barked, just as the dwarf woman from before said, “An honest establishment, bullshit, lady, this is Shady Creek Run!”
The gnome turned her beady eyes towards the dwarf woman. Keg. Keg of the war hammer and the cigars and the five-o-clock shadow. Molly remembered her now. “I know very well who you are, young lady. Shepherd.” She spat the word like a curse. Keg jerked back, her face burning. “You’ll find no quarter here.”
“Bitte.” Caleb stepped forward, taking Molly and Nott with him. He was a tall man, but head stooped, stripped of his coat, it was clear how thin he was. How ragged. “I understand your caution, but we are no brigands. Merely a family of traders. We were attacked on the road, our goods and cart taken. They beat my—my friend, very badly. My daughter is frightened.”
Nott whimpered, as if to sell the story, and buried her face further in Caleb’s hip. Molly wasn’t entirely sure that it was an act. He wasn’t entirely sure that this wasn’t a dying hallucination. A warm room and his friends all around. But if he had been hallucinating, surely Yasha would have been there. And his chest wouldn’t have hurt so much.
“I do not know what our guard has done in the past,” Caleb continued, his voice strained and low. “But I assure you, she has done her best to protect us today. She offered her life in exchange for ours.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. Her gaze swept from Nott’s huddled form to Beau, fist white-knuckled on her staff, to Keg’s bowed head, to Molly. He didn’t know what she saw there. “We only have one room,” she said finally, begrudgingly. “Two beds.”
“Whatever you have is fine.”
They lurched upstairs, Beau leaning on her staff and Nott and Molly leaning on Caleb. Keg pushed her way to the front of the pack, shoulders hunched, eyes darting to and fro. It took Molly a minute to recognize what she was doing. She was scouting, looking for danger and traps the way that Nott sometimes did.
The room above the tavern in Shady Creek Run did in fact have just two beds, narrow and covered in rough wool blankets. There was an end table with a bowl of water on it, and a single window, and nothing else. Molly carefully staggered away from Caleb to lean against the wall, arms wrapped around his ribs, and concentrate on just breathing for a minute. His ribs were starting to really fucking hurt, in a worrying, maybe-broken way, and the stab wound on his chest tugged every time he inhaled.
There was a moment when nobody spoke. Molly breathed in, then breathed out, and clenched his fingers in the fabric of his sleeves. His teeth were chattering again, and he shut his eyes and thumped his head back against the wall and sternly forbid himself from shaking.
After a moment, Caleb knelt down in front of the doorway and pulled his silver thread out of his pocket. He started to stretch it across the doorway, then moved to the window and did the same. It was too small for anybody but Nott to squeeze through, but nobody stopped him. Wordlessly, Keg and Beau shoved the two beds together in the center of the room. Nott paced the room anxiously, peering under the lopsided table, lifting the curtains and looking out the single tiny window. Checking her sight lines.
As soon as Beau and Keg had finished moving the beds, though, she staggered over and climbed up on top of them, then fell asleep in the dead center of both mattresses, without even admonishing Caleb to have some dinner.
“Ugh, her boots are still on,” said Keg.
Beau snorted. “Seriously? We’re all covered in blood.” She gestured to her robes, which were red-stained and torn over one shoulder. A glancing spell had stained the skin there a dark and ugly purple. Keg had scars in her armor and a rapidly developing black eye, and Caleb stank of ash and burning flesh, sleeves blackened and gloves charred half-off. Molly was—well. Nott, though, looked remarkably unharmed, aside from the way she was laying face down and not moving.
“Is she injured?” he rasped. His voice was a thin imitation of itself. He felt like a thin imitation of himself, which was terribly maudlin and not a thought he would usually have indulged, but, well. He was very cold and his friends had been kidnapped and he’d almost died not an hour ago. That had a way of making a person a bit more grim than they would have otherwise liked to be.
Caleb lifted a hand to Nott’s shoulder and dropped it just as quickly. “She is not,” he said. “Only tired.”
“That’s good. The rest of us are beat to shit, though.” Beau readjusted her bad arm in its sling and glowered at Keg. “Does this shithole have a cleric?”
“Didn’t when I lived here.”
“Anywhere we can score healing potions?”
“Maybe?” Keg scratches her chin and leaves behind a smear of blood. “There’ll be bandages at the general store, at least.”
“How about booze?”
“Definitely.”
“Good enough.” Beau grabbed her staff and started for the door, then swiveled on one booted heel and jabbed a finger at Caleb. “You.” He flinched backwards, and Beau looked briefly regretful. “Stay here. Don’t die. Same goes for you, obnoxious one.”
“If I’m going to die,” Molly told her primly, “It’ll be while you’re here, so I can bleed all over your robes.”
“Fuck you,” Beau told him. It carried no heat. It hadn’t for a while. “Just—I’ll be back. Don’t do anything stupider than your usual shit.”
“Fuck you too, Beau.”
She left. Keg followed her, casting a single tangled look back over her shoulder at them. Molly shut his eyes again. He was too tired and bitter and cold to try and figure out what was going on in her head. Keg hadn’t meant to give them the wrong information, he was sure about that. If she had been trying to deliver them straight to Lorenzo, she would’ve brought it up as soon as she saw him. She was too scared of him to bargain.
“You are still bleeding,” Caleb said after a moment.
“I do that,” Molly drawled reflexively his eyes. He was warming up and the pain in his chest was starting to roar again. He could feel where his shirt was stuck to him with blood and where his ribs were cracked, a line of fire running up his side. If he moved, it would start hurting worse. If he moved, he would have to think about next steps, like cleaning up and healing potions and tracking down the Iron Shepherds again.
“Sit down.” A hand touched his shoulder hesitantly. Molly’s eyes snapped open just in time to see Caleb gently nudge him towards the side of the bed furthest from Nott, looking like he regretted every one of his life choices. “On the floor. I have—keine, no other bandages than those Beau gave you, but a needle and thread. I can stitch you up.”
There was something funny about the offer. The most powerful wizard Molly had ever met, lowering himself to use a needle and thread. But then, Caleb wasn’t any good at healing magic. That was the domain of clerics, and their cleric was very far away. Not so far away. They’d been so close to Jester and Fjord and Yasha. If Molly hadn’t fallen—if they hadn’t had to run—he’d been right up against the cart towards the end, he could have reached out and touched them—
Caleb was fishing a sewing kit out of his pocket. It had his initials embroidered one the corner, C.W., in clumsy goblin script. Molly let the hilarity of that carry him to the floor, where he sat down and leaned back carefully against the side of the bed. He would get the blanket filthy, he was sure, but it wasn’t a very nice blanket to begin with. Caleb went to the side table and scrubbed his hands pink in the bowl of water that had been left there, then came back and sat next to Molly. Very carefully, he reached out for the ragged edges of Molly’s coat. “With your permission,” he said, awkwardly.
“What? Oh. Of course.” Molly reached up with cold fingers and awkwardly unknotted the bandages that Beau had tied around his chest. They fell into a tangled pile around his waist. He went to shrug his coat off, but when he rolled his shoulders forward the scabs on his chest started to tear and he froze, making a guttural noise in the back of his throat.
Caleb cursed, then reached up and carefully slid Molly’s jacket down his arms. “Es tut mir leid, I should have thought—there.” He folded the jacket carefully and set it to the side. The blood had stained most of the embroidery on the front dark brown.
Molly looked down at it mournfully. That was the end of that jacket. He supposed it’d had a good run. “I made that, you know,” he told Caleb.
“I did not know.”
“With my own two hands. Well, Mona helped a bit. Dab hand with a needle, that girl.” He was babbling, he knew. That was alright. Babbling was something that Molly was good at, and he leaned into it like a town he’d already been to twice, where he knew the best pubs and where it was safe to linger after dark.
Caleb unbuttoned Molly’s waistcoat, which was in even worse condition, and folded it as well. His shirt didn’t have buttons, so Caleb eased it up over his head, and there was a muffled, confusing moment where it was tangled on Molly’s horns and everything smelled like blood and something was clinging to Molly’s nose and mouth, smothering him, dark and tasting of iron and he couldn’t breathe—
“Fuck,” Caleb said. There was a ripping sound, and then Caleb was blinking down at him anxiously, one half of Molly’s shirt in either hand. Molly sucked in a long and blessedly clean breath. “Mollymauk?”
“It’s alright,” Molly said, when his heart rate had slowed down to something approximating normal. “It’s—it’s alright.” He smiled at Caleb and tried to dredge up a convincing lie, or even just an entertaining one. But nothing presented itself.
After a moment, Caleb turned away and washed his hands again, then picked up the needle and threaded it. “This is going to hurt,” he warned Molly.
“I’m used to it.”
“All the same,” Caleb said, and slid in the first stitch.
Unclothed and with the blood starting to dry, the wound wasn’t nearly as bad as Molly had thought. It was long, but thin, curving from his ribs up towards the center of his chest. He still didn’t want to look at it. He concentrated instead on Caleb’s hands, which were very steady and very precise. The stitches he made were all the same size, neat little black marks against Molly’s skin.
“You’re very good at that,” Molly said, four stitches in. “Where did you learn?”
Caleb hummed and made another stitch. “I learned when I was a teenager.”
“Get hurt a lot when you were a teenager? Or know a lot of people who got hurt?”
“Mm. Both.”
“Why’s that?” Caleb’s shoulders hunched. “Or—not that,” Molly amended hastily. “But talk to me about something. Anything. Just—“ He wanted to let his head thump back against the edge of the bed, but that would have pulled on his chest in a very painful way. “Just distract me.”
Caleb nodded. Three stitches later, he said stiffly, “You are going to be alright.”
“Oh, really?” Molly choked on a deeply inappropriate laugh. The words sounded like Caleb had never said them in that order before. “You’re not a terribly convincing liar, you know that, Mr. Caleb?”
“Ja, I…I’ve been told.” The needle bit out another mark, cold and precise. “But I am not lying. You will heal. The glaive did not hit bone.”
“Bloody well feels like it did.”
“No. You have, ah. Cracked ribs.” Another stitch. “If Beau can find a healing potion, it will take care of them.”
“Is that why I’m having trouble breathing?”
“Yes.” Caleb slid two more stitches into Molly’s skin, then knotted the thread tightly. He glanced up, not quite meeting Molly’s eyes but at least looking generally in the direction of his head, and frowned. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a grubby scrap of fabric that might have charitably been a handkerchief. “Kamm du. You have, in your hair.”
“What? Oh.” Molly leaned forward. Hair matted dark with blood fell in front of his eyes. “Happens all the time. Long hair and blood magic don’t mix terribly well. I imagine that’s why my predecessor shaved his head.”
Caleb hummed in acknowledgment, wiping the blood out of Molly’s hair. Dried, rusty flakes fell onto his nose and choked the air with the smell of iron. Molly shut his eyes and babbled on. “Do you think if I’d died, he would have come back out the grave? Or maybe someone else. No memories all over again. Suppose they’d be right pissed off about all the tattoos and things.”
“Maybe.”
Molly laughed breathily. He could just about manage laughter if he didn’t think about his ribs too much. “What if they were an asshole? Last guy, Lucien-Nonagon-whatever, he sure was. Maybe you only get one good go-around and the rest are just—“
“Mollymauk.” Caleb’s hand stilled on his head. “These thoughts are doing you no good.”
“You sound like Yasha. Gods, I miss her. I really, really do.”
Caleb was quiet. He wiped the cloth through Molly’s hair several more times, then drew back and placed it on the bedside table. “We will get her back,” he said. “Her, and Jester, and Fjord.”
“What if we can’t?” The words escaped before Molly could stop them. And there it was. There was that terrible fear, the thing they were living under and not saying. “These people, these Iron Shepherds, they’re stronger than anyone we’ve run into before. We just gave it everything we had, they didn’t even know we were coming, and we failed. We nearly died. What are we going to do different now that they know we’re out there? Hells, for all we know they could be tracking us down right now—“
“Mollymauk. I need you to breathe.”
Molly sucked in a ragged breath. It hurt. He let himself sink into it for one selfish moment—breathing hurt and his feet hurt like he’d been running for hours and his chest hurt like a slaver had tried to crack open his ribs and rip out his heart. The Iron Shepherds had his family and they had Fjord and Jester and they were too strong, they weren’t going to get them back.
“Breathe. Mollymauk.”
He did. Made himself take in deep breaths, even though the air smelled like blood and he felt like screaming. He wasn’t screaming. He was breathing. Thinking. There would be time for screaming later. Or never, preferably. When they got Yasha and Jester and Fjord back, he wouldn’t need to scream anymore. And they were getting them back.
“Das ist gut,” Caleb said. One of his hands was braced on Molly’s shoulder. Molly focused on that single point of warmth, the long fingers with their shiny burn scars and writer’s callouses. “That’s good. In. Out.”
“You’re very—very good at that,” Molly said, as soon as he felt like he could say something that wasn’t empty.
“Nott is very good at that,” Caleb said. Not correcting, just explaining.
“She helps you?”
“Yes.” He furrowed his brow, then corrected himself. “We help each other.”
“Yasha and I do that.” The first few weeks that Yasha had been with the circus, when she’d jumped at sudden noises and woken up screaming every night, Molly had spent a lot of time sitting near her, talking about anything and everything and braiding her hair. “Or sometimes we smoke together.” Caleb gave him a look. “Tobacco, Caleb, moon above.”
“Are my suspicions unwarranted?”
Molly let his head fall back against the side of the bed and grinned wearily up at the ceiling. “What a bunch of fuck ups we are.” The smile on his face didn’t feel like a regular smile. He was glad that he didn’t have a mirror.
“Mm.” Caleb seemed to realize that he was still holding Molly’s shoulder. He withdrew his hand cautiously and placed it in his lap. “None of us can be tracked by magic. As long as you all are with me, you will be invisible. I have made quite sure of it.”
“Is that a spell of yours?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds like a very powerful spell.”
“It is costly,” Caleb said quietly. His hand rose to the collar of his shirt, then fell back into his lap. “But not very difficult.” He changed topics abruptly. “We were not—smart. When we attacked the Iron Shepherds.”
“Hey, I quite liked our plan. And you agreed to it.”
“Yes, I was stupid as well. We were panicked, and scared. Foolish, to attack on the open road. Knowing what we knew from Keg, we should have waited until they were in one place, so we had time to survey the terrain.”
“A fat lot of good what Keg knew did us.”
Caleb tilted his head in acknowledgement. “Ja. But she was not entirely wrong. And she could still be useful.”
“For distracting Beau, sure.”
“For distracting Lorenzo. He knows her. He clearly bears her a great deal of ill will. If we use her to our advantage, she could entice him to make mistakes.”
“Use her to our advantage,” Molly repeated. The phrase was new to him, but it fit into Caleb’s mouth like a key in a lock. He understood what it meant from the way that Caleb said it.
“That is what I said.” Caleb’s eyes slid away from Molly’s face again, but he squared his shoulders, sticking to his point. “It is the truth of things. Her history with him is as useful as her ax and hammer, in this situation.”
“Who says he’ll even go for it? From what she said, it’s been years since they worked together. And it’s not like they were partners or anything. She worked for him.”
“Men like that do not forget those that have wronged them. Especially—underlings. Students, subordinates. People they thought they had power over. You are, I think, a very kind person, Mollymauk. Or in any case, you told me that you were trying to be, and that—that counts for something. Kind people forgive and forget the wrongs that have been done to them. But this is not the time to be kind. These people are cruel. I have known men like this.”
Molly studied the top of Caleb’s bowed head. His hands, thin and burnt and agonizingly gentle where they lay in his lap. The deliberate, learned kind of gentleness that someone had when violence was their first instinct. Yasha has it. She presses her flowers with such care.
“Have you fought men like this?”
Caleb was silent for a long time. Molly shivered, thought about putting his torn shirt back on, and gave it up as a lost cause. Nott sighed in her sleep and curled tighter around her quiver. “I wish I had,” Caleb said finally. “I was not. Hm. Was not strong enough, then. To do what needed to be done.” He shook his head, forcibly dispelling bad thoughts. “Do you want to save our friends?”
“I do.”
“Then we may have to do some very bad things.”
“Have you done those bad things before? You don’t have to tell me what they were,” Molly pressed on, as Caleb hunched in on himself even further. Molly couldn’t see his face anymore, just a curtain of greasy hair falling onto arms braced over dusty knees. “But I’ve—the only thing I knew before this was the circus. And we conned a few people, picked a few pockets, sure. Camped without land permits.” Caleb’s shoulders twitched humorously. “But I gather that what you’re talking about is a bit more weighty on the soul.”
“Ja,” Caleb said into his arms.
“And moon above knows Beau’s never gotten into anything worse than a bar fight in her life. Nott’s too young to have gotten into too much trouble at all.” Molly was unclear on how old nine was for a goblin, but Nott felt young the same way that Beau did. They were both adults to be sure, but still messy, unsettled, as changeable as the wind. They were figuring out who they were. Caleb could not have been more different from Molly, but he knew who he was and he wore it like a battle scar. That, Molly could understand.
“Nott has been in more trouble than you might think. But I take your point. You want to know that I can get our friends back.”
“I want to know that you know what you’re doing. We are very out of our depth here, Mr. Caleb, and very, very far from anything that any of us might have called home. We’re missing half our party and have half an idea of what we’re up against, which I’m starting to think is more dangerous than no idea at all. If you say that getting our friends back hinges on doing terrible things, then I need to know that one of us knows how.”
Another long pause. “I will not let you down,” Caleb said finally.
“Then I’ll follow your lead.”
Caleb nodded once, then stood. “Kamm. We should get you off the floor.”
“That sounds fantastic.” Molly let Caleb pull him up off the floor and set him down on the bed. It was an awkward process. Caleb was clearly not used to helping anyone else walk—well, anyone else who wasn’t Nott, and a goblin of ambiguous age was decidedly more portable than an adult tiefling. Molly supposed he had been portable at some point, but he didn’t remember it.
In a lengthy and embarrassing process, he managed to strip down to his small clothes and bandages and crawl underneath one of the blankets. It smelled faintly moldy, but was very warm. Nott rolled away from him, scrunching into an even tinier ball and snuffling her discontent.
Caleb sat down on the very edge of the bed. “When you are well-rested,” he said, not turning to look at Molly, “And when I have gotten my spells back, we are going to talk to Keg. You will use whatever spell it is you used to charm her before, and I will cast Suggestion, and together, we are going to get out everything she knows about the Shepherds, and Lorenzo, and all the rest of it.”
“That sounds like a good idea.” Molly had used Charm Person on Keg before. He’d used it on Nott once. It was an easy bit of magic, painless for everyone involved. “Doesn’t sound too mean.”
“No. It doesn’t, does it.”
Molly yawned into the pillow. “Beau won’t like it. Beau has a thing about free will.”
“Beau is not wrong.”
Molly blinked for a long time. Sleep tugged at him, warm and black, but when he closed his eyes he could feel the crushing ache in his ribcage. He forced them back open. Caleb was still sitting on the edge of the bed. Molly could just make out the edge of his profile beyond the curtain of tangled hair. He was very still. “You don’t. I thought you would, but you really don’t, do you?”
“I…I learned, a long time ago. That there are more important things than what any one person wants.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“Where most people learn things. In school. Get some rest, Mr. Mollymauk.”
Molly was going to ask another question, but when he opened his eyes next, Beau and Keg were back, asleep in the bed next to him, and Caleb was not there.