Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You absolutely cannot mean that,” Caleb says, hearing his voice break on the words.

With a low hum, Caduceus moves from his knees to the balls of his feet. His hand is pressed flat against the wet earth; his fingers wind through the stiff blooms of grass. Caleb knows the plant by sight now: it’s coarse, and fringed with blue, and it scratched dreadfully last night when he rolled off of his bedroll onto the open field.

“And why do you say that?” Caduceus asks, grasping a star-like clump by the roots. He doesn’t pull right away—just stares intently, like he can tame the wretched thing. His calloused thumb moves up and down the stalk in a soothing motion. If the plant cuts him, he doesn’t react.

“Because it’s nonsensical. Anyone can see that. How—” Caleb is surprised to find himself reaching forward into the empty air, mindless, hands flexing, stained bandages creasing with dirt and age. (Caduceus doesn’t ever wear gloves.)

He tries again. “It’s not logical to go around saying that kind of thing. You should know that, since you are—Mr. Clay, you are a good person. I don’t know how you can be such a good person and—and believe what you believe.” He hears the undue emotion in his words; feels his voice fracturing to near-silence and then stumbling forward again. Feels himself breathing too quickly. Stupid.

Caduceus pulls the grass up with a firm motion that brooks no argument. He shakes out the dirt from the roots, then carefully wraps the plant in a piece of the soft grey cloth he carries with him in abundance. “I’m not sure I’m following, Mr. Caleb.”

“You know what I am referring to,” he snaps.

Lavender sunset swathes the plains in a milky sort of light. In the distance, down a rolling hill, Fjord’s tiny figure sets up camp while Yasha stalks a creek for fresh fish, her Magician’s Judge hefted like it weighs nothing at all.

And everywhere, everywhere, the sharp and blue-fringed grass.

Caduceus gets to his feet. He props his hands on his waist to stretch his back, making a satisfied little noise when his spine pops. He rolls his neck in a circle, facing the sunset.

“I think,” he says, “you’ve been thinking about this for a very long time.”

“Yes. You said this thing to me early on—the very first day we met, in fact, and you’ve repeated it now. It vexes me. I’ve wanted to ask you, but—”

“No,” Caduceus says, drawing out the word. He turns to face Caleb; gives him a lazy smile. “You really don’t want to ask me. But you feel like you have to. So, sure. Shoot.”

Caleb rubs his hand down his face; cups his mouth. Feels the ugly roughness of his unshaven chin. For a moment, he can’t find the words.

Caduceus waits for him. His hair catches in a sudden wind; strands of it flip to the wrong side and dangle just behind his forehead. His silvered skin reflects a faint sheen of sweat; the evening has proved humid.

“I want to know—” Caleb says, and suddenly can’t quite look up.

“In your own time.”

“I want to know how you can possibly say that ‘no one deserves anything.’ How you can exist in this dank pit of a world and think—believe that some do not deserve to suffer. And how you don’t believe that some deserved better.” He clears his throat. Feels his eyes sting.

Caduceus sighs. It’s a long and weary sound. Caleb almost feels sorry for bringing it up until the cleric turns the sound into a low whistle between his teeth. “That’s a lot. Not sure I can give you the answer you need. But maybe we can talk over tea.”

Caleb nods towards the plant. “Are you going to boil that?”

“Not yet,” Caduceus says. “This stole-grass is destined for bigger things."

Deep in an unnamed forest grown up wild and green and unabashed, Caduceus fights the dead.

Except he doesn’t fight. Not like the rest of them do. Caleb burns large swathes of the advancing zombie horde to ashes, while Jester turns undead with a frantic sort of confidence. Beau dances; Yasha roars. Nott makes things explode.

Caduceus, instead, goes more still than Caleb has ever seen him. His staff glows with a ringing crystalline light that leaves twining patterns behind Caleb’s eyelids.

 Only Caleb is close enough to hear Caduceus murmur. The cleric doesn't chant arcane words or trace sacred symbols into the air. Instead he says—tenderly, chidingly—“Come on, friends, this isn’t right and you know it. Settle down. May the earth take you down and raise you up.”

 A flash of light and the horde stops. Petunias burst from ragged rib cages, and moss lays itself down decaying limbs and dangles to the ground like fine wide-sleeved robes. Honeysuckle forces its way out from behind greying teeth. Eye sockets and wrists and collarbones put forth roses.

“There we go,” Caduceus says.

The air is hot and cloying. The closest zombie had been set aflame by Caleb’s spell. The fire climbs up what’s left of its ragged pants and shrunken, broken skin to wilt and wither the orchid petals growing from its hips.

Caduceus reaches out, natural as anything, and creates water. Puts out the fire.

The flowers keep blooming.

A haze settles over Caleb’s vision, like and unlike smoke from a fire. Time move in fits and starts as long-dead places and long-deader people chase each other around his thoughts.

“Caleb,” Beau calls from somewhere far away. “Caleb, you good?”

Dead things whisper in his ears. They run fingers down his back. They hang from his limbs, pulling him towards the earth. They are hot to the touch. They burn.

One of them circles a firm hand around his shoulders. “Okay, Caleb,” Beau says. “Let’s get you settled.”

Time jolts forward again—and isn’t that marvelous, shouldn’t be studying that? He’s been sat down among the bedrolls, his head resting against something warm and solid, his arms encircling the goblin in his lap.

“—if that sounds good?” Beau says, close by his left. He notices that his head is pillowed on her shoulder.

“Mm, ja,” he says without understanding.

He feels Nott tracing circles on his hand, her pointed nail making indents in his bandages.

“Okay,” Beau says. “He says it’ll be a few more minutes. I’m hungry, too.”

Caduceus brings them stew. He’s added something that tastes like venison, though they all know better by now. Caleb has no appetite but the bowl is warm, the steam wafting up to coat his face in subtle and refreshing dampness. He breathes in the scent. Lets it guard against the chill of a rapidly-approaching sunset.

By the time he wakes up—truly wakes to his surroundings, able to see the trees and the fireflies and to sense each potential threat like an itch in the back of his head—Beau has left and Nott has migrated to lean against his left arm.

“Easy,” Caduceus says from his right. He stretches out his big hand to grasp Caleb’s bowl by the top. His movements are clearly telegraphed for Caleb’s comfort, and while it’s unnecessary Caleb doesn’t mind. “I think this is getting cold. Want more?”

“Not just yet,” Caleb says, voice rough.

“I’ll take it!” Nott says, making grabby fingers.

“We should really start feeding you.” Caleb gently sways into her. She sways with him; gives him an over-bright smile that looks strained around the edges.

Caduceus just laughs his booming laugh, ribs shaking against Caleb’s shoulder. He slings an arm behind Caleb’s torso; gives him something to lean against.

Caleb takes first watch that night, certain he won’t be able to sleep anyway. He sits by the dying embers of their campfire while everyone else huddles in their bedrolls. After a couple of hours, Caleb sees Caduceus’s eyes shining in the dark. 

“Can’t sleep?” he asks.

“Ah, just thinking. This place is great. My home used to be like this."

“Right.”

They’re silent for awhile. The silver thread surrounds them, invisible in the dark. Caleb feels its presence like a rivulet of cool water running between his fingers. The trees are tall and grow closely together, nearly hiding the moon.

He looks back at Caduceus, just in time to see the cleric avert his eyes like he’s been caught staring. Caduceus pulls a hand from his blanket to rub at the shaved patch of pink hair at the back of his neck, looking down at the grass beside his head.

Strange. Tender.

“Caduceus,” Caleb says softly, “You were kind today.”

“Oh, it’s not a problem,” Caduceus whispers to the ground, words of modesty well-practiced. “I didn’t get hurt, and I figure that makes it my job to make sure everybody else is—” 

“That’s not what I meant, actually. You were kind to the undead.”

Startled, Caduceus meets his gaze. Caleb’s chest tightens, and for a moment, everything is silent and still.

Caduceus’s eyes are silvered in the gloom, like an old and beautiful creature watching him from the darkness of the treeline.

The cleric clears his throat. “Somebody has to spare them,” he says.

True to his word, Caduceus tucks the stole-grass away in his pack rather than make it into tea. Caleb catches sight of green and wild things inside the canvas bag. Mushrooms and wildflowers; oakmoss and rosemary. Impossible to tell what’s for cooking and what’s for strange magic.

The rest of the Nein have migrated to the bank of the creek with Yasha, trying to outfish her or, in Nott’s case, keeping a respectful distance from the water to search for interesting rocks on the shore.

Caduceus sets a little pot of water to boil on the campfire. Caleb fiddles with a stack of paper, looking over scratch notes and diagrams. He doesn’t want to write now, afraid that his tense and unsteady grip will ruin his penmanship on something important.

“There we go,” Caduceus says once the bubbles start to surface. He tosses in a small handful of what looks like dandelions. When he takes a seat, it’s with a groan of appreciation.

Small comforts sustain him, Caleb thinks. Is it naivete, then, that drives his philosophy? Small-mindedness? That doesn’t seem right.

“Dandelion tea?” he says aloud.

“Eh, partly,” Caduceus shrugs. “I’ll be adding another pinch of herbs in a moment, so don’t mind it when I get up. Been saving some hibiscus from the Blooming Grove.”

“Well,” Caleb says. “Thank you for allowing me to share it.”

Caduceus gives him a lazy smile, and something in Caleb’s stomach unknots.

“I’m being silly,” he says wonderingly. “You are not malevolent, of course. I should...I need to apologize for the way I spoke to you just then.”

Caduceus spreads his hands in a gesture that succinctly communicates, Well, what can you do? Don’t dwell on it.

A splash from the creek; an excited shriek as Jester runs from Beau through the waist-deep water. The air is growing cooler.

“It’s only that I—” Caleb says, and pauses. He looks down at the paper in his lap. “It’s only that I don’t see how you could believe it both ways. Certainly, I’ve heard some espouse the belief that no one deserves to suffer”—he finds himself smiling at that, but not happily—“but rarely have I heard it said that no one deserves happiness at the same time. It’s—okay. Let’s establish that some people are better people than I am, ja?”

“Well, see, I don’t think we can do that.”

Caleb waves a hand. “No, listen, even if you don’t believe it yourself, we can say so for the sake of argument.”

“But why would we say that? It’s not true.”

“Caduceus,” Caleb says. He’s beginning to feel lightheaded again, and nauseous; like the air has thinned and something hot has come to rest on the back of his neck. “You don’t really...understand everything yet. About me.”

Now it’s Caduceus’s turn to wave a dismissive hand. “That’s not what I mean,” he says, frowning just slightly. “I mean it doesn’t work like that at all. For anybody.”

“What?”

“People aren’t good or bad. There are no ‘better’ people than you. And there are no worse.”

“That’s terrible,” Caleb says, “and crazy. You see what I mean? How can you say that when the evidence is before you? We”—he gestures broadly towards the group at the creek— “are not wonderful people. Can you say that...I am as pure as a child? As Nott’s son? As—”

As you?

Caduceus is frowning more deeply now—not as though he is reconsidering, but as though he isn’t sure how to wrangle his thoughts into words.

“It’s—there’s no point system,” he says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a little bag of dried leaves. Shakes them out onto his palm.

“Well, not literally, but—”

“No, it’s, I mean…” He stops for a moment and closes his eyes. Breathes in. Another breeze takes him; lifts his hair and ruffles over his fur. Makes the leaves dance, a few escaping from between his fingers.

When he opens his eyes again, all uncertainty is gone. Caleb’s mouth goes dry.

“We are painting a garden—one moment, no past, no future. Every moment is its own reality. Every breath, a full picture. Every season different from the last, even as the great cycle continues. There are no good people or bad people. There are good actions, great actions, and there are terrible, despicable actions that we’ve gotta stop at all costs. There’s war. There’s reparations. There’s death and there’s tea.”

Caduceus’s stare is unrelenting and ancient in a way Caleb has never seen before. He looks lit from within. The wind, Caleb thinks, feeling himself spiraling downwards, feeling something deep inside his ribcage contract and start to pull. He speaks to—

“You’re not the same person you were then,” Caduceus says—and it’s an intonation; a curse and a blessing both. “You’re not the same person you were yesterday; an hour ago. Those people don’t exist anymore. All you can do is make this moment—this painting, this season, this day, this cup of tea, frozen in time forever—as good as you can make it. Make it the prettiest picture you can paint for everyone. Because that’s all there is. The past and the future are—sure, they’re great to learn from, but they’re imaginary. No such thing.”

Caleb’s paper slides off his lap onto the ground, where the pile separates and each sheet decides whether to bend to the earth or be taken by the wind. He tries, again and again, to breathe.

“Hey,” Caduceus says, suddenly hovering over Caleb, a hand at his shoulder. “Hey. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone to that place.”

Caleb swallows, shaking his head. Gasps. “No. No. It’s fine. I don’t know why I…”

The two of them keep silence. Caduceus is close enough that Caleb can see the pores on his arm; smell the earthen scent on him. Still, he’s tall—impossibly tall. Blocking out what’s left of the sun and throwing Caleb into shadow.

Eventually, the shudders go out of Caleb’s body. Caduceus has over-brewed the tea.

Chapter Text

His mouth fills with dirt and soot and pebbles as his lungs burn—as he feels his bones crushed beneath the weight of some phantasmal thing.

“Don’t breathe,”  it says into his ear, its words discordant and diffuse, meaning pulled from nothing, from the air itself, from ghostly vocal cords fit now for nothing but screaming and warding away.

“Don’t breathe, don’t breathe,”  it says, and Caleb is half-numb now from the pressure and from the unearthly chill pressing him into the wall. He feels his rib breaking. He chokes; tries to scream.

"Don’t breathe,”  it says as the hill comes down around them. “The air isn’t clean here.”

“And then he over-brewed the tea.” Caleb props his forehead against his closed fists, staring down at the wooden table. They’d woken up late enough that the inn’s tavern is mostly clear, missing the breakfast crowd but not yet ready for lunch.

“That’s a first,” Nott says. She inspects a poached egg of indeterminate species before tucking it in her pocket. “Do you think this place has eel? The ocean was bad, except I liked the eel.”

“No,” Caleb says. “I mean, I don’t mention it as a criticism. His tea is very good, always. I just mean that my reaction was unwarranted. It maybe upset him.”

“Oh.” Nott takes a breakfast swig from her flask to wash down her bacon. “Well, I mean, if Deuces has managed to put up with us for this long, I don’t think he’ll head for the hills now just because you, uh…” Her eyes briefly flicker up to meet Caleb’s. “You know, had a bit of an episode.”

Caleb winces.

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t that bad!” Nott stands on the bench to lean over the table. “Caleb, really, I’m sure it’s fine. We’ve seen you much worse!”

“Wonderful,” Caleb mutters. He stands up, figuring he may as well head back to their room to get a few hours’ reading in. He had meant to go shopping, as this is the first town they’d been through in weeks, but the prospect suddenly seems unappealing.

“It sounds like you just had a bit of a shock, is all,” Nott says. She scrabbles for his hand; squeezes it with bacon-greased fingers.

“There was no reason for shock. It was a perfectly reasonable conversation.”

Nott shrugs. “You’d be surprised, I think. Look, with the goblins you’d think it would be the—the death and torture-murder and the diet that would most disgust me, but really it was the little things: how they touched each other’s hair for no reason, or how wide they smiled, or their shrill little voices, or—”

“I don’t know that I’m seeing your point. Caduceus isn’t a goblin.”

“It’s that—I guess, sometimes you just come across someone who sees the world so totally differently from you that it makes you feel like vomiting bile, a little bit, and that’s just fine.”

Caleb blinks. “That’s not at all what’s happening here. While his philosophy is incomprehensible to me, I’m not…disgusted by it.”

“No, no, ‘course not,” she says, patting his hand before pulling back to her seat. “And I mean, what do I know? It’s just…it can be the little things that make it hard.”

Caleb tries to read reclining on the bed with his book held above him, but he hadn’t slept well last night and a familiar weariness coats his eyelids. Frumpkin curls up on the pillow beside him.

He dreams of staggering, wounded, into the Blooming Grove; of thorns and ivy wrapping themselves around his ankles. Of hummingbirds alighting in his hair. Of Caduceus opening the door.

Then the book smacks him in the face.

Jester shrieks with laughter from the doorway. “Caduceus, look, Caleb brained himself with smut!”

Caleb flings an arm out over the rest of the bed, bracing himself for whatever’s coming. “Would you have mercy on me, for once?” he asks her.

Jester doesn’t have a merciful bone in her body. She drags him out shopping after all.

The town isn’t large—it’s primarily a hub for farmers to bring food to market, and to occasionally sit and commiserate about soil conditions in one of two rival pubs. The only travelers, according to the innkeeper, are the ones heading towards the range of hills to the west, past which is an even smaller village by the seaside. It is, of course, inferior to this town in every way.

“That’s a pretty stupid rivalry,” Jester muses in front of the selfsame innkeeper, offending him instantly. “I mean, why bother? There’s like a whole bunch of hills in the way so you guys can’t even prank each other.”

Caduceus looks as though he’d like to apologize on her behalf, but Caleb touches his arm.

“Come on,” he says, “Let’s just go while we still have a room for the night.” Frumpkin winds his way out the door before them.

They can’t find a bookstore, but Caduceus buys them all an interesting pastry contraption with nuts on top.

“This is great,” he says, pulling the toppings off one by one. His hands are cleaned, but his fingernails are perpetually harboring thin lines of encrusted dirt across their tops. His motions are gradual, easy—like he has all the time in the world to enjoy the light coming in from the chinks in the shop’s wooden walls and the scent of toasting sugar. “What did you say these were called again?”

“Peanuts,” the shopkeeper says with some suspicion.

“Wonderful,” he beams. “Just wonderful. Maybe I could get these to grow out by the Grove. What are the soil conditions that work best for these things?”

“I just make the pastries, sir.”

“Oh, come on,” Jester says, grabbing each of them by the arm. “There’s a crier in the town square and I want to see if they know about us here.”

Caleb’s hip bumps against Caduceus as the two of them are pulled along like parasails. Caduceus grins at him—the lazy, one-side-of-the-mouth grin that makes his eyelids lower and his ears relax backwards.

Caleb looks away.

The town crier doesn’t know about the Mighty Nein. He knows about a ghost in the hills.

Beau and Fjord meet up with them just as they’re getting the grisly details. “Sup?” Beau says, and Jester immediately shushes her.

“There’s some dead person blocking the road between here and Maripoll, haunting a cave passageway through the hills, and it’s totally messing up...I guess fish trading? Fish? Everybody in town is basically pooling together some gold to get it sorted out, ‘cause they miss eating fish so much.”

Fjord nods. “Okay. Guess that’ll do.”

Dust rises beneath the wheels of a slow wagon pulling across the square, piled high with corn and wheat.  Motes dance across Caleb’s vision in the bright noon light.

Caduceus fingers the last of his pastry; examines it from all angles before popping it into his mouth with an appreciative sound. The edges of his pink hair shift gently along his shoulder; his adam’s apple moves.

Caleb catches Jester raising an eyebrow at him. He looks away.

“Don’t breathe,”  the ghost says as rocks fall behind them; around them. Caleb tries to inhale the dirty cave wall like it’s air. Tries to inflate his lungs past the freezing, biting presence behind him that pushes like an opposing barricade.

He hears no one else; his friends must be trapped beyond the rockslide in another chamber. Nott, Beau, Jester, Fjord, Yasha—Caduceus—

The ghost stretches its long and ugly limbs around his body—its arms spiral like tempests inside their translucent frame. It presses what’s left of its chest against his head and pushes him further into the wall.

The wall does not relent.

He feels his nose break; his chest caving in. He would cough if he could; he would retch. His eyes water and burn as he tastes blood.

The cave spirals into the dark.

He wakes to dull red shadows dancing on the ceiling.

Sharp rocks press up into the back of his head. The floor tilts and sways; a rivulet of blood runs from his temple down into the cracks and crevices where it will lay forever, copper beneath a cave, feeding the bugs and the rats and the worms.

His leg is trapped, numb, beneath a pile of fallen stones where the way back used to be.

But his nose is unbroken. His ribs are whole. The space in the back of his mouth tastes like ginger and forest moss, so he knows who must have healed him.

“Seems to me,” Caduceus is saying from somewhere above him, “that you’d be happier moving on. Seeing what comes after.”

A solitary candle sits on the ground, casting meager light against Caduceus’s lichened boots. The flame gutters and flares, laying frantic patterns on everything it touches. The cleric is seated on a piece of the fallen cave ceiling like it’s a comfortable porch chair.

He looks out into the shadows like he’s always done this. Like he’s always been here, under the hills, staring down the dark.

“I call Hearts,” he says softly, and tosses down a card from his hand.

Caleb’s eyes track it as it flutters to the ground and lands face-up.

The darkness breathes in. A rush of air pulls at Caleb’s hair and sends Caduceus’s long sleeve fluttering over the candle, which flickers and flows and stutters but does not go out.

Then, just as Caleb is struggling to breathe, the air comes barrelling back in a scream. The sound is unearthly—like a demon driven off a cliff; like a steed dying on a bloodsoaked field. Anguish, coming from everywhere and nowhere, seeping under his skin.

“You’re gonna have to be more specific,” Caduceus says. “Do you need me to explain the rules again?”

Caleb is convinced, lying there on the cavern floor, that one of them has lost his mind, though he’s not ruling out the possibility that it’s both. He fights back a cough.

“Best to settle down,” Caduceus says, a bit too loudly. He stares outward, as though he’s still speaking to the ghost, but then he adds more softly: “And maybe stay down for a little while.”

Caleb holds as still as he can.

“Now,” Caduceus says, “I’m trying to be friendly here, since I figure things get a bit lonely ‘round these parts, but what you’re doing now is just not acceptable. If you’re not tired yet, then we can keep playing. Otherwise we’ll just have to find another way to get you to calm down. You were doing pretty good until this past round. Something on your mind?”

It takes every muscle in Caleb’s screaming body not to startle when, suddenly, there’s a woman sitting across from Caduceus.

In the low light, she almost looks solid. Her skin is pale. Her long dark hair shifts and changes—one moment it bounces on the air behind her like feathers on the wind, the next it flows and shines as though trapped underwater. She sits cross-legged on the air.

“Don’t breathe,” she tells Caduceus, and sounds almost human.

“Yeah, I appreciate the advice,” Caduceus says thoughtfully. “Not really an option, though. You have any Hearts?”

“The air isn’t clean here,” she says, tossing a card down on top of Caduceus’s.

“So you’ve said.”

They play a few rounds, cards over cards. Caleb recognizes the deck. Caduceus bought it in Nicodranas because he liked the art on the back: a queen surrounded by flowers.

Caleb had asked if he needed someone to teach him. Caduceus had laughed and told him that he had learned more card games than he could hope to remember, sitting in the Blooming Grove and hearing stories about each visitor’s beloved dead.

Sometimes the ghost contorts; turns into that spinning vortex, radiating chill, that just barely retains its shape. When this happens Caduceus starts humming, or makes a comment about the game. Then the woman sits before him again, slender and empty-eyed.

Caleb notices strange items along the walls of the cave, just visible in the candlelight: a barrel, half a wheel of cheese, what looks like a blanket spread in the corner. The room smells of flesh and decay.

“The air seems okay to me,” Caduceus says finally, bending down to scoop up a pile of cards.

“Poison,” the ghost says. “Sick.”

Caleb feels some kind of insect crawling across his face, but still he doesn’t move.

“Did people around you get sick?” the cleric asks.

The ghost hesitates for a moment, then shakes her head. Her hair waves and shimmers.

Caduceus shuffles carefully. Shadows play against his smile lines, but he doesn’t smile now. “They didn’t give you the chance to get anybody else sick.”

The woman vanishes. Her discordant, cracking voice comes from the walls, the ground: “Lora, child, it’s too late for you now. If you care at all about your family you must stay down here until your time comes.”

Caleb watches the hurt break across Caduceus’s face. His mouth opens, just slightly; his brows draw together. Then he presses his lips together and shakes his head.

When he’s finished shuffling, he deals them both new hands, leaving the ghost’s at his feet. “Lora,” he says quietly. “That’s a pretty name. They shouldn’t have done this to you.”

“Lora”— the voice is tinged with anger now, impatient— “Lora, you don’t understand. Lora, people in the village will die. You have to stay here. Don’t you think this is hard for me, too? Didn’t you think about that?”

“Oh,” Caduceus says. “Oh, that’s—”

“Lora,” the voice says, rising, the cave rumbling around it. Caleb feels danger run clearly down his spine as the unearthly tone turns to mockery. “Lora, don’t make me hurt you. I will hurt you if you don’t stay in the caves. I will bring the hill down behind me if I have to, don’t you test me. Do not follow.”

“Listen,” Caduceus says, and to Caleb’s horror, he looks worried. “Why don’t we settle down and—”

The air slams back into the cave at force, knocking Caduceus backwards off his rock, blowing out the candle and pitching everything into screaming darkness.

Caleb lunges forward, pain searing through his leg as he scrabbles against the stones.

Light, he thinks, and creates light. The globes hover above him, brighter than the candle had been.

There’s a body of a young woman—a teenage girl—propped up against the wall. Just barely decayed. She has long, dark hair.

Caduceus staggers to his feet. “Lora!” he says. “Lora, you’re not alone anymore.”

“I will bring the hill down behind me,”  the ghost screams.

“Lora, listen—”

Her hair spinning like broken clock hands, she drops from the ceiling, right above Caduceus.

Caleb grits his teeth. He flings out an arm and casts his spell.

The room is a bright flash of light; the ghost is screaming. It’s easier, now that he knows what to look for. She had caught them all unawares; separated them and brought the passageways down between them. Not unlike how he imagines passageways may have been brought down to keep her from her home.

How long did she sit in darkness before she died? Candles would not have lasted forever.

She shrieks out in pain. Her limbs grow and twist before them, translucent as wind, cold as cave dirt. Her face spirals into nothingness, just a mask of churning spirit. She stands floor to ceiling; crouches over them. Reaches out a hand.

Caduceus holds out his staff, face grim. “May the earth take you down,” he says, “and raise you up.”

There’s another flash, blinding Caleb and leaving the impression of dancing leaf-like patterns that are not quite afterimages. The air feels clean. Inspired.

Then there’s nothing. The girl is gone.

The cave is still dark, save Caleb’s orbs. A weight has vanished.

They are alone for a moment with each other’s breathing.

“That poor girl,” Caduceus finally says, eyes large and liquid in the half-light. “I wanted to—I thought—”

“Ja, well, that ‘poor girl’ nearly killed us,” Caleb says. He starts pulling at his leg again.

Caduceus shakes himself. “Oh, here, let me help you out of there.”

They struggle against the rocks. Eventually, with a worrisome popping sound, Caleb’s leg comes free. He can’t hold back a low moan.

“I’m sorry,” Caduceus says, kneeling, his hands hovering above Caleb’s shoulders with a strange nervousness.

“What? Don’t apologize,” Caleb says through gritted teeth. “Had to get out of there—somehow.” He reaches down to pull his leg out in front of him and nearly keels over from the pain.

“No, I—I mean that I’m all out of spells. We’ll have to sit awhile before I can heal the rest of you. Or maybe Jester—”

“Ja, wherever she is.”

Caduceus shrugs like a man who wishes he had better options. He lets out a small groan as he sits down with Caleb against the collapsed pile of stones.

“Are you hurt?” Caleb asks, eyes sweeping up and down the cleric’s body. It always surprises him, when he stops to consider it, how thin Caduceus is—almost too thin for his size. Deceptively fragile.

“No,” Caduceus says, “No. She never...she didn’t fight until the end. When she started to get all caught up in bad memories and rage.” He shakes his head. His eyes are red, perhaps from the dust of the tunnel’s collapsing. Perhaps from exhaustion. “It wasn’t supposed to go this way. I wanted to untwist her thoughts—give her some some...oh, what’s the word?”

“Catharsis?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Does that feel like clarity and peace and sorrow all at the same time?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Then that’s probably the word I want, yeah.”

They sit there, looking at each other so Caleb doesn’t have to look at the girl’s shrunken, stiff body. So they don’t have to think about how they’ll get out of this place.

Caduceus’s armor is covered in dirt. He looks more melancholy than Caleb has ever seen him. He scrambles for something to say.

“She attacked me,” he settles on. “She crushed me against the wall and stopped my breathing. Everything you did—and I thank you for it—was entirely out of self-defense.”

“No, but see, I don’t think that’s what she thought was happening. I think…”

Caduceus tilts his head back against the pile of stones, leaning the side of his face against them like he would a high pillow. He keeps Caleb’s gaze. He looks pale in orb-light, and tired, but his eyes are as bright and deep as they’ve always been. When he speaks next, it’s with a wandering tone, as though following behind someone to narrate their journey. A ghost in his own right. “She got sick...and feverish...and everybody around her kept saying she was poison. They left her to die here, and she didn’t fight back because she cared about people back home.”

“She made a sacrifice,” Caleb says, feeling strangely unmoored. “So that her family would not be infected.”

“Well, it wasn’t her choice,” Caduceus says darkly. “But yeah, she didn’t struggle, and it was a sacrifice. It left her with a lot of rage. She must have died in”—here is forehead wrinkles; he catches a breath—“in incredible pain. Cursing whoever led her here; cursing the dark. Cursing herself for choosing to stay. For breathing out poison with her every breath.”

“It twisted her.”

“It did. But see, even through all that—even through that veil of terrible hurt, so broad her spirit couldn’t see around the edges of it—she tried to save you.”

“Save…”

Caleb thinks back to the terrible sound of the ghost rasping in his ear. To the woman playing cards with Caduceus, trying to communicate something important about the air around her. The disease isn’t likely in the air anymore—how long since her death, months?—and even if it is, a cleric could heal them easily at this stage of infection.

But Lora wouldn’t know that. She lived out her last days with that thought, twisted over and around and through herself into mania: The air isn’t clean here.

He leans back against the rock wall, adjusting so that his hip rests against a smooth place. Caduceus and Caleb face each other like two children sharing a bed; exchanging secrets. If only the air weren’t so cold and rancid, and the pain so sharp.

Caleb reaches out to grasp Caduceus’s wrist. Feels tendons like flower stems under his thumb.

“You’ve led her to rest,” he says. “You’ve done well.”

Caduceus closes his eyes. Nods just slightly.

“It’s...it was a poor reflection of her,” Caleb says. “But it seems that she was a good person, if her ghost retained the instinct to protect.”

“Well,” Caduceus says, eyes still shut. He raises his free hand and wobbles it back and forth in a “so-so” motion.

“Yes, yes,” Caleb says. His grip tightens as an inexplicable bitterness pinches his chest. “There’s no such thing as a ‘good person,’ right? She just lived and died doing good things, better things than many of us do, and that means nothing.”

Caduceus’s eyes shoot open.

“No!” he says. Then again, more quietly: “No. It means...everything in the world. Nothing means more than that.”

The words die on Caleb’s lips. He releases Caduceus’s wrist, but doesn’t pull back his hand.

From behind the rock wall, they hear voices: Beau’s, he thinks, and Nott’s. They’re calling out names.

Caleb thinks of “sparing the dead.” He thinks of graveyard tea.

Chapter Text

Caleb’s dreams are muddled. He sees Lora, her skin ablaze with red yarrow blossoms, burying Mollymauk in a shallow grave. He sees Beau and Astrid running fleet-footed through an underground maze with crystals embedded in the walls, while Nott sits in a darkened corner and watches her skin ballooning off of her bones like an ill-fitting dress in high winds.

He sees the door swinging wide.

He lurches, again, into the Blooming Grove. He trails blood behind him; layers it over the flowers. Rose thorns prick his remaining hand where it hangs nerveless at his side.

The air is humid and the sky curves like the bottom of a teacup.

The door swings wide, and Caduceus stands in the doorway. Caleb takes a trembling breath.

He tries to run to Caduceus, run straight to him, but his ragged body rebels. His shoulders bend beneath the weight of the teacup sky; his joints feel rusted over. Blood seeps from the bandage over his wrist.

Caduceus calls out in shock. His cup slips from his fingers.

Caleb stumbles. He leans—tries to catch himself—falls in a patch of purple milk thistle. He goes still.

The crash of fine china against the stone landing. Footsteps in the garden, running towards him.

Caleb breathes in the scent of green and growing things; lets it lift him up one last time.

“Stranger,” Caduceus says, kneeling at his side, “Stranger, let me help you.”

Caleb grasps the cleric’s tunic with a craggy hand; whispers something essential.

Then the weight of the china-blue sky presses down on him and he knows nothing more.

He wakes to the smell of ashes, his heart pounding. For a moment he thinks he is still underground, until the points of light in the dark ceiling coalesce instead into dim stars in a cloudy sky.

He wrestles his breathing under control.

The smoky smell is from a cooking fire. Caduceus is making tea. He sits silent in his watch, a placid shadow looming over the bundled forms of the Nein.

“Might rain,” he says softly.

Caleb’s harsh breathing must have given him away, since Leomund’s Tiny Hut looks opaque from where Caduceus sits on the outside. Still, Caleb appreciates that Caduceus doesn’t ask about his dreams.

“Wake me if that happens,” Caleb whispers, “and I will take your place."

Caduceus doesn’t answer. He sits as still as the grave, and Caleb feels a strange sense of peace. Bluebells spread from the cracks in the cliffs above them. A mushroom patch grows nearby.

It’s like the cleric has always been here, keeping watch over the foothills, staring down the dark.

When they approach Maripoll it’s raining. An unhappy Frumpkin stays in the wagon while the others disembark.

The line of the sea is shrouded in mist, blending the green hills with the grey waves. The village is scattered down a hill that descends gently to the water’s edge, where wooden docks reach out further into the fog.

“We’ll just alert them that their cave route is open again,” Fjord says, pulling his hood over his wet hair. “Maybe get something fresh to eat. I still figure we might be able to get some kind of compensation from this side of the cave. They can’t have been happy about that ghost; I sure fuckin’ wasn’t."

“Maybe they’ll need another job done,” Jester says with a shrug. “I mean, yeah, the place looks pretty tiny so there’s probably nothing to do, but—”

“Don’t count on it,” Caleb says. He glances back to Caduceus. “I wonder if there might be some sick people in need of a cleric.”

“Ugghhh,” Jester says. At the same time Caduceus says, “That’s just what I was thinking, Mr. Caleb. If you all excuse me, I might make some house calls and meet up with you later.”

Caduceus smiles at Caleb, lines of rainwater running down his cheeks and dripping from his jaw. He looks more cheerful than he had in the caves. Perhaps it helps to have some clear path ahead of him; a way to do good.

Caleb drops back to walk beside him. “Let me know if you need anything,” he says quietly. “If you want any help.”

Caduceus nods. “I think I’m alright for now, but I’ll be sure to let you know. I’m actually pretty hopeful that whatever Lora was sick with didn’t have the chance to spread far.” He cocks his head to the side, hair sticking damply to his cheek. “It doesn’t... feel sick here. Not much, anyway. We’ll see."

“Sensing sickness? You have a very helpful skillset, Mr. Clay.”

“Oh, Mr. Caleb,” Caduceus says, “It’s nothing compared to you.”

Caleb’s stomach lurches, disquieting and energizing both. Before he can decide if it’s a good or a bad feeling, his foot slides in a patch of mud and he nearly falls to the ground. The breath goes out of him.

Caduceus catches him, one arm swooping around Caleb’s shoulders while his other hand presses against his chest, breaking the fall.

“Whoa there,” Caduceus laughs. “Okay.”

Caleb can’t move for a moment, leaning into Caduceus’s hand. He breathes in the rainwater; blinks it from his eyes. The back of his neck burns.

“I—I’m sorry, I—”

Caduceus gently releases him, drawing his hand back along Caleb’s shoulder blades. “No worries. Careful, though.”

The cleric keeps walking, tall and unbothered by the rain.

Caleb instinctively looks to Nott where she’d been walking behind them. He makes eye contact with her like it’s a plea. He doesn’t know what he’s asking for; hadn’t even meant to ask it.

The palms of Nott’s hands are pressed against her cheeks. Her mouth is just open, like she’s been struck with a revelation.

Caleb flushes and looks away. He shuffles forward, bending his shoulders against the rain.

Caduceus and a reluctant Jester head off to ask about any sick people in need of help. Beau, Fjord, and Yasha aim for the most concentrated cluster of houses in the hopes of finding someone in charge. Frumpkin stays to keep watch over the wagon (and to keep dry).

Caleb, meanwhile, has his own mission. Nott comes along.

Something about their encounter with the ghost has been gnawing at him. Lora had recited words as though quoting someone else’s voice: the mysterious person who took her to the caves.

This person had said: I will bring the hill down behind me.

They spoke in first person, as though they were alone with Lora at the time. How could one person bring down the hill on their own, unless they were speaking metaphorically—doubtful, given the phrasing—or they possessed great magic?

“So we’re going to ask around about a—a wizard, or something?” Nott asks. “What would a wizard be doing all the way out here?”

“No,” Caleb says. “No to both the asking, and to the wizard.” They stride through the village. Caleb ignores the distrustful inhabitants who peer from their windows as they hide indoors from the rain.

It doesn’t take much effort, what with the view afforded by the descending hill, to see a ramshackle cottage set apart from the rest. It nestles in a rise of stones with a garden of herbs around it and a good view of the sea.

“In a place like this,” Caleb says, “We will not find people interested in the cloistered life of an academic mage, nor those who seek power from the written word. We will instead find, on occasion, a gifted person just on the edge of the town, separate and yet a part of things, essential but untrusted. We will find the village wisewoman.”

“Ah,” Nott says. She picks her way around a mud puddle. “So like, a witch?”

“Very much like a witch.”

“Okay.”

Caleb jumps as her cold hand grasps for his. She winds their fingers together and squeezes. A smile plays on her face as she stares at some distant point on the horizon.

“He’s very kind,” she says. “That’s what I like best about Yeza, too. Kindness.”

Caleb swallows. He hesitates, then squeezes her hand back.

Midway through the grassy field separating them from the cottage, he stops walking. Reaches up his free hand to push his wet bangs from his face. “I will not do you the disservice of pretending I don’t know who you mean.”

They can hear the ocean now: the rise and crash of a distant force, dulled by sounds of rain and light wind through the grass. Water seeps through Caleb’s collar; runs down between his shoulder blades.

“It’s just,” he says, and hears his voice falter on the words, “I don’t know what to do about it. About him.”

“Oh, Caleb,” Nott sighs, coming around in front of him, still clutching his hand. “You’ve made it all complicated in your head, haven’t you?”

“Perhaps,” he says, hunching against the rain.

“Perhaps nothing. Before we found Yeza, I thought—I thought he would never—”

To Caleb’s horror, Nott reaches up to wipe the back of her hand across her eyes. Caleb resolves, not for the first time, to change things if he can: to turn back the clock and fix everything. To stop her from drowning and waking up wrong; to keep her family with her.

There are so many things he could fix, given the time and the power.

“Nott—”

“No, it’s—it’s just rain. Listen. I’m just trying to say that when it’s real, when what you’ve got with someone is really real, it’s simple.”

The two of them ponder this for a moment, together in the field. Then they both make the same face.

“No,” Caleb says.

“Okay, no, that was a lie,” Nott says. “It’s really not simple to have your husband kidnapped to a foreign country and your hometown razed and—”

“—and to have your lover help burn your parents to death,” Caleb says thoughtfully.

Nott lets out a startled laugh, then instantly claps a hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

“Uh, it’s okay,” Caleb says, more shocked with himself than with Nott. “My fault. Bad joke. Not a joke.”

He waits for the punishing burn: for the flames licking around his vision, for the muscles in his arms to seize and to shake.

None of this happens. A sadness nestles down inside of him like a bird come home to rest, but it doesn’t begin to tear at his insides like a starving thing.

Something inside him is changing. How terrible—he deserves to be unhappy.

Without his noticing, the rain has begun to let up, petering into the occasional spittle. The field smells like dirt and growing things.

“Hey guys,” Caduceus calls from back up the hill, and the sound of his voice brings Caleb’s heart leaping to his throat. The cleric jogs down the rise, hair rain-plastered to his scalp and sleeve dripping.

“Hi Deuces,” Nott says, giving Caleb’s hand one final squeeze. “That was quick. Find any sickos?”

“What? Oh, ha, I get it. I got pointed in this direction, actually. Village gossip says everyone’s in good health except for the woman who lives in that cottage, there—she’s got some kind of flu. Village wisewoman, can you believe it?”

He grins at Caleb specifically, coming to a stop with a slight slide on the wet grass. Caleb reaches out his arms to steady him, only to awkwardly put them down again when Caduceus recovers on his own.

Nott hisses like she’s witnessed Caleb do something painfully embarrassing.

Caduceus continues: “Always wanted to meet one. They come up in fairy tales a lot. Usually that’s the person treating the sick, so I thought she might like the help for a change.”

“Well, now may be the time,” Caleb says. “Shall we?”

“You two go on ahead,” Nott says too loudly. “I have...other business to attend to.” She flashes Caleb a conspiratorial grin and scampers back the way they came.

“Huh,” Caduceus says cheerfully, watching her go. “That was her lying voice.”

“Was it?” Caleb replies weakly.

“Yep. I’m ready when you are.”

The cottage is unlit save clouded daylight coming in from a high, small window. The air is sour and heavy—laced with after-traces of vomit and something Caleb doesn’t recognize. The stove-fire has gone out.

Caleb sees it on Caduceus’s face as the cleric stoops to pass through the doorway: something is wrong here, and it isn’t the flu.

A low rustling comes from the collapsed bed in the center of the cottage’s only room, like air being pressed slowly out of a tight-tied bag. It takes Caleb a moment to realize that the sound was an attempt at speech.

“There’s a draft,” the old half-elven woman wheezes, her eyes glittering in the dark. “Close the door, you big idiot.”

She almost seems to be melting into the bed, her skin wrinkling into itself, her sweat-damp hair clinging flatly to her pillow.

“Mother,” Caduceus says, “We—”

“I ain’t your mother,” comes the reply, quick and razor-bladed.

For a moment Caduceus seems thrown. “Uh, apologies. It’s a figure of speech—respectful, where I’m from.”

“She knows,” Caleb says. The wisewoman has caught his eyes and won’t let go. Caleb feels, like an instinct honed by years of interacting with people habitually devoid of empathy, that he will not like this woman.

“Oh,” Caduceus says, glancing curiously between the two of them. “Okay. What do you want to be called, ma’am?”

“Don’t make any...difference,” the woman says, then devolves into a coughing fit. The sound is wet. When she reaches a shaking hand to wipe away her mouth, it comes away red. “I’m already dead,” she mumbles.

Caleb looks to Caduceus, but the cleric frowns and shakes his head.

“Well now,” he says, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But I think you might be in a bad way. We’re just here to—”

“Go to hell,” the woman says. She smiles, and spittle traces down her chin. She warms to her topic and her energy seems to rally: “I heard about you all coming—coming down here to relieve us of our ghost. Damn stupid thing you did, and people might...suffer for it.”

Caduceus opens his mouth and closes it again, looking rather at a loss. Clearly he hadn’t expected such a reception.

“How did you hear about us?” Caleb asks. “We just arrived, and we told no one we were coming. How?”

The woman tries to laugh: a reedy sound interspersed with choking. The spit on her chin starts to look more like vomit. Caleb feels nauseous.

“I got spies in the trees. In the sky. In—in the earth.”

“Are you a druid?”

“None of your business, child. You meddled in things you shouldn’t have.”

Though Caleb would be hard-put to explain it, something in Caduceus seems to still. His body doesn’t change, but some other level of him becomes that tall, guarding figure that kept watch over Caleb in the foothills; that speaks to the wind and brings answers; that opens the door of the Blooming Grove in Caleb’s every dream.

“Ma’am,” Caduceus says calmly, “You took Lora to the caves, right? You were with her when she died?”

“Yes to the first,” the wisewoman says. She meets Caduceus’s gaze defiantly and adds: “No to the second.”

“You left her alone,” Caduceus says, expression inscrutable.

“Well, it wouldn’t have done...any good to get me sick, now would it?” She smiles, all teeth, at the irony.

She shifts, and Caleb notices vomit trailing down her blouse. Caleb wonders if the disease normally takes people this slowly, but he doubts it. Perhaps, instead, she has been extending her life through unnatural means: bartering with nature, or stealing from it. Hiding her weakness from her neighbors.

The wanness of her skin, the yellow in her eyes, seems to be fair punishment—not that Caduceus would believe in such a thing.

“Seems to me,” Caduceus says—conversational, blank-faced—“Seems to me, if you don’t mind me saying, you wouldn’t be having this ghost problem if she had had someone to sit with her and talk, frankly and kindly, about what might happen next. About the mystery, and about the peace.”

Frankly and kindly. He says the words like they go together naturally; like someone had told him that this was important a long time ago. Perhaps his parents, who had kept watch over the Grove together. Perhaps his siblings.

“And maybe I don’t know what wisefolk are meant to do around these parts, but I’d always thought—”

“If I had done that...” the woman says. She pauses to catch her breath, and Caleb feels the weight of her next words like a premonition: “If I’d done that, then we wouldn’t have won ourselves a ghost.”

For a time, the only sound in the room is the wisewoman’s hacking.

Then Nott’s voice fills Caleb’s head like a sieve pushed underwater: Lora’s parents are alive, and her grandparents and her brothers. Nobody else got sick. You can reply to this message.

“I don’t understand,” Caduceus says slowly. His hand moves, as though for reassurance, to the pouch hanging at his side.

“You wanted to keep people away from the village for a time,” Caleb says flatly. “You thought—”

“This one’s mind goes to dark places,” the woman grins. “I like that. You almost got it.”

She coughs again, seizes, and produces blood.

Caduceus blinks and tries to walk forward, but Caleb grabs his arm. The cleric’s expression is torn; his lips pressed together.

Once she’s wiped the mixture of fluids from her chin, she continues without much struggle, as though possessing the rhythm of a practiced storyteller gives her the energy to speak clearly: “We are an old village. I know all the tales; know the signs. My mother and my grandmother before her said the mist sickness comes out of the hills, carried by travelers. It shakes and tremors its way out of the ground, killing everyone who passes through. The travelers carry it back to the village, but only slowly: nobody dies faster than the ones who go through the caves when the sickness rises.”

Caduceus is deathly still beside him.

The woman shrugs: a sad, lopsided motion. “Ain’t got no fancy clerics around here to heal us. We die and rebuild. It hasn’t happened for two hundred years, maybe more. Wives’ tale, they call it. How quickly they forget. I know the signs. Lora died from it after a journey inland, through the passageways. It nestled into her bones and ripped her apart.”

“And you took her back to the caves,” Caleb says, feeling an odd tingling in his fingers, “not just to stop the other villagers from sickening, but to stop clueless outsiders from journeying through the passageways and bringing death to you. You wanted to invoke fear of a ghost.”

“Sickness spreads fast from the caves. Spreads—slow between people. I knew if I could get her away from us in time—”

The hacking continues, muddy and disgusting, like every organ in her body is trying to displace itself.

“You twisted her up on purpose,” Caduceus says. “Made sure she died an unquiet death.”

“She was going to die anyway," the wisewoman replies.

It makes a mad sort of sense to Caleb: a ghost would serve as a concrete ward, far more efficient and long-lasting than warning signposts or the rumor of disease. Even when everyone who knew Lora’s story had died of old age, her ghost would continue to keep others away from the source of sickness, in case the infection ever came back “out of the ground.” The village would suffer from loss of the convenient trade route, but longer ones would replace it in time.

The decision was monstrous in isolation, but you could almost see—

Caduceus moves.

His shoulders bend first, as though pressed down by some unbearable weight. Then he breaks away from Caleb’s hold; takes quick strides to the side of the bed. Drops to his knees there beside the wisewoman, his head bowed. His hands ball into fists at his sides, fingers scraping along the rotting floorboards.

Caleb’s stomach lurches at the sight. Shame sweeps through him.

The woman’s head lolls to the side. Her bright eyes watch Caduceus. “You judge me unworthy, cleric? You want to tell me I failed in my duty to tend to my people? You’re a child. Hell, you’re an animal. What do you know?”

Caduceus makes no answer.

“You can’t deny it, dumb as you are,” she says loudly, hoarsely. “I’m right. We both know what would have—”

“Gott, shut up,” Caleb says. “You are insufferable.”

He goes to Caduceus. Kneels there beside him to wrap an arm around his shoulders. Remembers slipping, nearly falling, in the rain.

He imagines he can feel Caduceus’s heart pounding through his armor.

Caduceus’ hands move in his lap. Caleb reaches out to still them. Then he sees what they hold.

“Ma’am,” Caduceus says roughly. “Where do you draw your water from? We should get you into a bath.”

The next silence is stunned. Strange expressions pass over the woman’s papery face in rapid succession.

Gently, Caduceus pulls his hand out from beneath Caleb’s. He finishes drawing the grey cloth from his pack. He lays it on the bed beside her and unrolls it there.

“Stole-grass,” he says. “Makes a medicinal brew, but tastes terrible. I figure if we can grab some herbs from your garden—”

“This is a punishment,” the wisewoman says with wonder. “You—you want to shame me for leaving her.”

“Not the intention,” Caduceus says evenly, his voice gaining strength. “Do you grow fennel? Just for flavor, mind you. The stole-grass is for pain relief, and for tranquility, and it’s...well, it’s strong. You might not feel completely clear-headed if you take it, but you’ll be more comfortable. Your choice. Think it over while I get the bath warm?”

The fact that Caduceus doesn’t offer to heal her reveals something about the nature—or the duration—of her disease. To have survived this long, she must be powerful. But leaving Lora hadn’t saved her in the end.

“I told you to go to hell, ” she hisses. “Don’t—don’t want your pity. Get out of my house.”

“Caduceus—” Caleb says.

Caduceus looks at him.

Caleb’s breath catches. He takes in the set of his jaw; the steadiness in his eyes. The gentleness that traces the lines of his lips.

Sitting in a dim cottage smelling of blood and vomit, Caleb takes in air and tastes wildflowers.

“I’ll get the fennel,” he says, and helps Caduceus to his feet.

Outside the cottage, the sun has broken through the clouds. Caleb blinks through the light.

Only when Caduceus has made it through the doorway does Caleb drop his grip on his arm. “Why are you bathing this woman?” he asks.

“Because she can’t be comfortable all covered in sick.”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Caleb says. He scans the garden; realizes he doesn’t know what fennel looks like. “She doesn’t seem to want you here, and—and I don’t think she deserves your attention.”

“Doesn’t matter. Nobody deserves much of anything.”

“Caduceus,” Caleb says, voice tight in his throat. “You—you don’t have to atone for that girl dying alone.”

Caduceus looks at him. His smile is almost apologetic, but not quite. “Is that what’s happening here?”

Caleb swallows. He takes a step forward. “I think so.”

Caduceus’s eyes trace his face; sweep over his drab clothes and the bandages on his arms. “Not everything is about atonement,” he says, and the words are gentle.

Caleb doesn’t know what to say to that.

Caduceus takes his wrist; pulls him into the garden. Caleb follows like a penitent on pilgrimage.

“It’s true that bad things have happened here,” Caduceus says absently, looking over the plants. “Wisefolk, in villages like this, have a—a sacred trust to sit with the sick and the hurt and the dying. To spare them pain. ‘Least they do in the stories.”

Bitterness rises in Caleb’s throat; he wants to say that life isn’t a story. Then he realizes that Caduceus knows this—sheltered, yes, but never naive. What must it be like, he wonders not for the first time, to encounter death from an early age? The noble and the ignoble, just and unjust? To shake death’s hand, play cards with it, invite it to tea?

“You’re better than them,” he says without a second thought.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Here, let me show you the fennel.”

The blossoms are a pastel yellow. Caleb realizes he’s seen the plant countless times at the side of the road, but never understood that it was good for anything.

“Yes, but…” Caleb struggles for words. “This...this person did the very opposite of comfort the dying. And I know she upsets you. You don’t want to go back in there.”

Caduceus looks down at the garden, then up at the sky. He lets out a long sigh, rolling his shoulders back. “Can’t deny that.”

“So perhaps we should get someone else to tend to her. Someone from the village. We don’t have to leave her, but surely someone else can handle it. With Lora—”

“I can’t shy away from this.”

“Surely you see the irony!” Caleb says. He feels an odd panic creeping up in his throat; feels a haze swimming over his vision. “She abandoned her role to let someone die alone. Now she may die alone. It’s a direct exchange, likely one she herself would consider fair trade. And she practically spit on you! You won’t be doing the wrong thing by walking away.”

Caduceus has been shaking his head since Caleb said “alone.” Caleb feels anger pinch alongside the anxiety in his chest, until—

Caduceus turns back to him. Places his hands on Caleb’s shoulders.

The watery sun paints rays across the clouds like its light is a solid thing. The ocean roars from a distance. Caleb remembers to breathe.

“I don’t care about fair trades,” Caduceus says. “I’m sorry I haven’t explained myself well enough until now. I’m not good with words like you. But listen: happiness is good. It’s really good. It’s the best, most moral thing in the world. More happiness is more moral than less happiness. No matter what. No matter who.”

“That’s—I don’t—”

Caleb pulls back; stumbles and nearly falls in a patch of purple milk thistle.

“Some people don’t deserve happiness! They just don’t, and to argue otherwise—to comfort them is—” He hadn’t meant to raise his voice.

“Mr. Caleb—” Caduceus reaches out to him again.

“No!” Caleb shoves his hand away. His voice breaks on a sound he hadn’t meant to make.

His next words pull their way out of his stomach like meat turned bad, like sickness: “Some people don’t deserve you.”

For a moment, Caduceus looks wounded, and Caleb realizes he never wants to see that look on his face again.

Then he watches as the features rearrange themselves into those of the cleric: watches understanding supersede raw emotion.

Caduceus’s hand hovers between them, open-palmed. He doesn’t pull it back.

“I’m sorry,” Caleb says, voice breaking on the words. “I’m truly sorry. I didn’t mean to—I—I’ll help with the bath. I’m sorry.”

He rubs the back of his fist over his eyes. Hunches into himself. Tries to make his mouth form the right words; some magic phrase to make everyone forget everything he's ever said.

He feels arms wrap around him, and his mind goes blank.

“Caleb,” Caduceus says, like his heart is breaking on the word. His body is warm, even through the armor; scented with rainwater and earth. A hand comes to rest on the back of Caleb’s head; just barely musses his hair.

Caleb leans into the embrace, exactly as he doesn’t deserve to do.

“Easy,” Caduceus says, and Caleb realizes his breathing has gone erratic.

“I—I’m not—”

“You’re fine.” Caduceus speaks frankly and kindly. He rests his chin on the top of Caleb’s head, holding him together. “Caleb? You’re fine.”

The wisewoman’s name is Anett. She dies early in the morning, after a long night of restlessness and anger and bile. Caduceus had stayed up with her until she passed. Eventually, he tells Caleb, she had agreed to play cards.

Whatever else she told the cleric in the cruellest hours of that long, dark night, Caleb doesn’t know.

Caduceus places a pinch of salt and one copper piece on each of her eyes. The villagers come to mourn her, and although she kept to herself and took no apprentices, their grief seems genuine. One remembers how she helped through a particularly dangerous childbirth, while another looks fondly upon the herb balms she’d made to help soothe arthritis.

“You know,” Nott says quietly, watching the proceedings from a distance, “I don’t think she had any magic at all.”

“No,” Caleb agrees. “But I suppose that wasn’t the important thing.”

Caduceus stands near the cottage, comforting a wave of strangers. He looks up to meet Caleb’s gaze; smiles just slightly. There are shadows beneath his eyes.

Good actions and bad actions. Death and tea.

When the crowds have gone home, when the rest of the Nein have heard their story (“Why couldn’t she just go to the caves and put up a fucking sign?” says Beau), Caduceus props an arm on Caleb’s shoulder.

“You’re tired,” Caleb says.

“Yeah.” The lazy smile returns. “Sometimes the living are harder than the dead.”

Caleb takes his hands. Pulls him through the fennel and sage and comfrey in the garden, towards the village, towards their wagon with its soft blankets and softer conversation.

“Then we’ll rest,” he says.

Chapter Text

Without the cave tunnels, the hills are a torment.

This takes everyone by surprise. Certainly they’re tall as hills go, steep enough to exhaust the horses and slow the wagon. Certainly the slopes dissolve into sheer cliffs at the most inconvenient times, forcing the party to double back and find new ways forward.

Still, winding through the valleys had seemed a simple enough solution—they should have been back on the other side of the range within days. And yet, each route seems to only go so far before veering off-course, turning the Nein in circles and starting arguments over the map. Caleb could swear he’d woken up to take his night’s watch only to see that landmarks had moved in the dark: the shrubs that proliferate in dense patches, shooting even through cracks in stony cliff faces, play tricks on his memory that no one else seems to notice.

The effect is eerie, and leaves the Nein in restless silence more often than not. Caleb finds himself wondering about primordial gods and energies and natural laws; about the ancient forces that wrinkled the world and where they might be now. He decides to purchase a book of theory on the subject the first chance he gets, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else.

He’s not the only one who passes the time reading.

“Is it useful?” he asks Caduceus early one evening, taking a seat next to him by the cooking fire.

Caduceus doesn’t answer, frowning intently at the cramped handwriting of the wizard who’d written so thoroughly about corrupted plants.

Caleb hesitates for only a moment before resting a hand on the cleric’s shoulder.

“Mm, what’s that?” Caduceus shakes his head, blinking himself back to the present. His eyes squint, slightly red.

“Can I say? I know the feeling of tearing myself away from a good book, but it doesn’t look so much like you are enjoying it.”

To his surprise, Caduceus winces. “Oh, I am! Sorry, it’s a great book. Really great, a lot of useful information from what I can, uh, glean here.”

“But…?”

Caduceus seems to cast around for something to look at besides Caleb’s face, which is certainly worrisome.

“You don’t have to read it if you don’t like it,” Caleb says hurriedly. “Really, I just found it somewhere, there’s no way to know if it—”

“No, no! I want to read it. Really.”

“Um. Alright. Well, if you’re sure.”

Caduceus finally looks at him then, a placid scrutiny that always makes him feel exposed. Then he sighs.

“Agh.” He holds the book up by the front cover, letting the rest dangle, and it’s all Caleb can do not to grab it from him. “It’s my fault, really. We didn’t really have books around as a kid, and now I can’t read so great. With handwritten stuff it’s...well, it’s worse. Letters get mixed up in my head.”

“Oh,” Caleb says, feeling a twist in his stomach. “I’m—sorry, I think I’ve given you a poor gift.”

“No, of course not, don’t think that. You’ve been really thoughtful, Mr. Caleb. It’s a great gift that I think is about to come in handy.”

He sets the book down beside him, then reaches down to place his hand over Caleb’s.

Before he can think, Caleb jerks his hand away. Places it awkwardly in his own lap for a moment, then reaches down for his notebook as though he’d meant to do it all this time.

Now it’s his turn to look away: to cast his eyes for anything else, anywhere other than here. To feel that he’s failed something.

He can barely make out Beau in the distance, walking the hills with Yasha. The others, stir-crazy with each others’ presence in the silence of the hills, are nowhere to be found.

It’s understandable. Too long spent with another person and you’re bound to mess something up.

He hears Caduceus stand up beside him and winces.

“Not going anywhere,” Caduceus says in a voice so sweet and casual that for a moment Caleb wonders if he’d even noticed Caleb’s retreat. “Just think I could use a break. This headache of mine is starting to come round to the front part of my brain, so figured I could make some tea. Want some?”

“Headaches?” Caleb says. He looks up despite himself. “Do you suffer from headaches?”

Caduceus smiles down at him—lazy, as usual, but with a solidity and a peace to the expression that seems intentional. Caleb’s throat begins to close up in what feels like gratitude.

“No, not usually. Maybe it’s allergies.” Caduceus laughs like he’s told a particularly funny joke.

He makes fennel tea, adding ginger for the headache and lemon for more flavor. In the time it takes to set the pot to boil and the herbs to steep, Caleb calms.

Maripoll had been an odd experience. In some ways, Caleb feels he should apologize for his behavior; in other ways, he isn’t sure he’s done anything wrong. Caduceus is slippery like that: he reacts calmly enough that sometimes you forget to berate yourself.

Baby blue hydrangeas dot the landscape.

“Turns out Anett didn’t like fennel much,” Caduceus says. He pours the tea into the two traveling cups that usually hang from his belt. “Said she kept it around for other people, mostly.”

“And we are other people.”

Caduceus smiles; hands Caleb a cup. “Taste this.”

Caleb wraps his fingers around it, enjoying the warmth against the slight evening chill. The sun is stooping lower on the horizon. “When it cools a bit.”

“Savoring the experience,” Caduceus nods. “I can respect that.” He sits down with a satisfied sound; clears his throat. He’s close enough that his leg brushes against Caleb’s if either of them shift.

And that’s the other thing: Caleb finds himself reaching out more often—touching Caduceus’ shoulders, sitting close by. Like it was with Beau: at first each touch was awkward, but then the instinct became natural. With Beau, however, the change had come slowly. With Caduceus, things have gone quickly, as though Caleb had been trudging up a hill all this time and only now has crested the ridge and begun to head downhill with more momentum than he can fully control.

The experience is frightening. He should do the right thing and get his legs back underneath him, keep to himself, untangle his own thoughts and work towards the impossible task of balancing his ledger any way he can. Pull back and pull up short before anyone else gets hurt. He should.

Caduceus brings his own cup to his lips and holds it there. He closes his eyes. Faint traces of steam rise up across his face—the dips, the rises—and disperse into the sky.

Silence unfurls between them. Caleb looks down at the unopened notebook in his lap; places it back on the ground beside him.

Finally, Caduceus takes a sip. His eyes flutter open, long lashes moving like insect wings. “It’s the bluebells, you know.”

“Mm?”

“The bluebells—did you notice them on the hillsides near the cave exit? Growing out of the rocks? They stretched for miles, on and off.”

“I believe so.” Caleb recalls waking to a clear night sky soon after they left the caves; looking around to get his bearings. Seeing Caduceus on watch, and bluebells above them.

“Well, something about them seemed wrong to me.” Caduceus shrugs ruefully. “Felt a bit like home.”

“Just...something?”

“Yeah. Hard to describe. I mean, first of all, I saw them underground.”

“What, really?”

“Yep. After we all got separated down there, I saw a few patches of them along the cave walls. They looked like they were suffering from lack of...sunlight, or really anything to help them grow, but they got there in the first place, you know? And they clustered in the direction of where I found you. I ended up following them.”

“That is odd.”

“Yeah, and even the ones we saw above ground looked...bright. Really bright.”

“Ah. Unnatural, you mean.”

“Yeah. I figured with the book I might be able to find something—”

“—and that it may have something to do with the cave sickness, if the roots spread from there.”

“Yeah.” Caduceus grins at him, a flush of excitement climbing his cheeks. “I figured, I mean, it’s a long shot, but if we’re gonna go back around to put up a sign anyway, may as well look to see if there’s anything else we can do.”

This was the primary reason the Nein wanted to travel back the way they came: Beau had originally suggested the sign as a joke, but it was a good enough deed to merit consideration. Putting up a warning on the far side of the hills, where the townsfolk of Milotte clearly hadn’t heard about the sickness, wouldn’t take too much time. They would then try to pick up payment in town for taking care of the cave ghost. Of course, there was some question of whether the townsfolk would consider their actions worth the payment, if the caves were still impassable for other reasons.

“This might be good practice,” Caleb says. “For cleansing your home.”

The cleric takes another sip of tea, a faraway look in his eyes. He doesn’t look unhappy.

Caleb swallows hard. Breathes in; gathers his words so they can’t shake or fall out from under him. “I could read it to you, you know.”

For a moment there’s silence, and not for the first time, Caleb wishes he could take back his words. Maybe this is too much, too big—hinting at a tangle of emotions between them that should instead go unspoken, shapeless as a ghost losing hold of its mortal form.

Maybe it’s too much to ask for Caduceus to accept this, to grant Caleb this, but not take things any further. To let Caleb fall forward down the hill for just a little longer, while knowing he must pull back.

Caduceus reaches up to rub the shaved patch of his neck. Looks to the ground, almost bashful. “That—” He clears his throat and tries again. “That would be wonderful, Caleb.”

Caleb’s throat goes dry. He hurriedly takes a sip of the tea, and his eyes widen.

“Licorice!” he says.

“That’ll be the fennel. The taste is pretty similar.”

“You didn’t tell me this would taste like licorice,” Caleb scolds. He takes a big swallow, savoring the bitterness and the sweetness both. The warmth spreads through him, from his center outwards.

Caduceus laughs. He lifts his hand as though to put it on Caleb’s shoulder, then draws back. Lowers it again.

That’s alright.

“I have a question for you,” Caleb says, lowering the plant book to his lap. He leans forward in the wagon to where Caduceus is guiding the horses.

“Yeah, me too,” says Beau beside him. “How come we’re veering left?”

“Because that’s where the valley goes,” Fjord says in the tone of someone who’d prefer to never answer another question like this for the rest of his natural life.

“You’re not driving, Fjord!” Beau says. “It’s not even your turn in the wagon. Right now you’re a walking-peasant. Deucey gets to decide where we’re going. Deucey, I think we should try going over the hill to the right.”

“Because that worked out so well the last time,” Yasha mutters, walking on the wagon’s other side.

“But it’s a different hill this time! Right? God, please tell me this is a different hill.”

“What I wanted to ask you, Caduceus,” Caleb says loudly, “is a philosophical question.”

Multiple members of the Nein groan.

“No more philosophy!” Jester says. “If I had to listen to Caleb reading a boring book about plants for two hours, I don’t want to hear about philosophy, too. Philosophy is stupid.” Caleb finds this fascinating coming from a cleric who had always seemed rather wise.

“Good point,” Caduceus nods.

“What?” he interjects, inexplicably scandalized.

“Philosophy can get in the way of morality if you’re not careful,” Caduceus says.

“Oh my god,”  Beau says. “You realize this is philosophy, right? You’re doing philosophy at us right now.”

“Beauregard, you could pick up a book for once,” Caleb grumbles, folding his arms over his chest. “Broaden your mind. You have access to plenty of them.”

Beau feigns punching his shoulder, clearly trying not to smile. “Somebody’s grumpy today.”

“Beau reads books,” Nott says. “Remember? You guys read that book together about the pirate and the warlord’s daughter, where they—”

“We are not talking about this,” Fjord says rather desperately.

“That was a good book,” Caleb says. Jester and Beau nod seriously.

“What did you want to ask me, Mr. Caleb?” Caduceus flicks the reins to increase their speed on the uphill.

“Oh, yes. Um…it was nothing that can’t wait. Would you like me to keep reading?”

“Ah, I’m feeling pretty tired, actually. Little achy. Maybe somebody else could drive for awhile.”

“Oh, no—are you feeling alright?”

Caleb can feel Jester and Nott making eye contact behind him. A problem for another day, perhaps.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s fine. Just been stuck sitting in one place for too long.”

“The question I had for you is about happiness as a moral good.” Caleb steps around a patch of what look like honeysuckle shrubs, then stops as Caduceus kneels to pick the blossoms. “It occurred to me—here, let me help you.”

“Oh, thanks. I only need a few. Can you get the white ones, over there?”

“Of course. It occurred to me that you believe both that happiness is a moral good and that no one deserves happiness. How can that be?”

“Easy,” Caduceus says, pocketing pink and yellow blossoms. “I mean, it couldn’t be any other way. Happiness is good because it’s good for everyone. Once you start talking about ‘deserving’ you start drawing lines that don’t need to be there. Who gets to decide who deserves what? Maybe I hate the folk down the other side of the creek, and then I get power over them and decide they don’t ‘deserve’ happiness. That’s no good. Better to treat people like they deserve it.”

“Even though they don’t.”

Caduceus laughs. “Now you’ve got me saying it. ‘Deserve.’ But what I meant was—look, remember when I was talking about the painting? How the past and the future aren’t real the way you and I are real? It’s—it’s like that. In every moment, you want it to be the prettiest possible painting of the world. And sometimes the way to do that is big and grand, and sometimes it’s small and personal. Hospitality, or sympathy. It’s not about deserving; it’s about making the world better.”

He smiles without a trace of bashfulness over his broad claims of universal betterment. Like he really believes them.

Well, a voice inside of Caleb says, You believe it’s possible, too. That the Empire can be destroyed; that time can be rewritten. The methodology is different, perhaps, but—

Caleb hands the blossoms over. Wonders what kind of tea Caduceus will make, and if he’ll offer to share it.

“If you don’t mind me saying,” Caduceus says, fingering a white petal, “I think...you might be a good example here. You don’t believe you deserve to be happy.”

Caleb's nails dig into his palms. It shouldn’t surprise him that Caduceus can state this so plainly—Beau has said as much to him before, as has Nott, and Caduceus’s uncanny perception outmatches theirs. It’s hard, though, to hear it each time: to be read so thoroughly by everyone who gets to know him.

Caduceus tucks Caleb’s flowers away in his pack. “But if we leave history out of it—completely put aside this thought of...cosmic moral balance, or a reckoning of everybody’s decisions—you being happy is absolutely good.”

“How so?” he swallows.

“Well, for one thing—I mean, we could start with the completely practical, if we wanted. I absolutely believe you are meant to do great things. I think I was led to you for a reason. But that’s…” Caduceus looks up at him, then, his expression urgent. “That’s a weight. That’s a big weight. Nobody can carry all that destiny while they’re trying to burn themselves up at the same time. You lose yourself. You lose sleep.”

Caleb rubs a hand over his chin. Forces himself to meet Caduceus’s eyes. He’s surprised to notice that there are still shadows there, as though Caduceus himself hasn’t made up all of his sleep in the days since Maripoll.

“But to be honest,” the cleric continues, “Do you know what’s more important to me, Caleb? When you’re happy, you’re happy. And I love that.”

Caleb feels heat rising through him, from the base of his stomach through the skin of his cheeks. “Oh,” he chokes out.

Caduceus’s eyes widen in what looks like panic, but he doesn’t look away. Speaking faster he adds: “And—and Nott’s happy. Beau is happy. Yasha has someone she can bond with on that—that quiet level the two of you share. I know you think they deserve happiness, so it’s—it’s just better when we can make you happy. For everybody around you. For me. For you.”

They stare at each other for a moment longer. Then with mutual relief they turn back towards camp, where the wagon rests between two indistinguishable hills. Thunder rolls in the distance. Maybe it’s storming in Maripoll. The sky above them is mostly clear.

“Alright,” Caleb says, an odd buzz in the base of his skill—not unpleasant. “If it’s as you say, does this make my unhappiness a burden to the others? Am I wrong to be unhappy?”

“No. ‘Course not,” Caduceus says softly. The wind picks up, as it often seems to when he’s at his most introspective. “We were put here to help you, just like you were put here to help us. I’d say you’ve repaid us a thousand times over, except we don’t keep score.”

“But with Anett—she died right away,” Caleb says. The two of them trail behind the wagon, where Beau and Fjord argue loudly about which way is north.

“Yep,” Caduceus says, squinting against the sun like it’s brighter than it is. He stumbles slightly on the grass, then recovers.

“What I meant is, making her happy wouldn’t have made a difference. She couldn’t...pay it forward, or change anything.”

“Well, for one thing, we can’t know that. Things ‘pay forward’ in unpredictable ways.”

Caleb thinks of fennel tea.

“For another...and I know you’re not going to like this, but happiness is good for its own sake. She couldn’t hurt anyone anymore, so why not?”

Caleb shakes his head. Caduceus’ system—is it even a system?—is bull-headed, a descriptor he had never thought he would apply to the cleric. Still, there is peace to be found in these rambling discussions. He feels some proud part of him start to unwind.

“Nope,” Fjord says loudly. “Nope, I’m telling you, I’ve had it. We’re going back the way we came. Back to the shore. We’ll go around the goddamn hills if it takes another week. Better than losing my mind in here. This is not my hill to die on.”

“Fjord!” Jester shouts, “You made a pun!”

“No, I am being extremely literal.”

Caleb sighs. “Okay. Ja. It’s about time we tried another route anyway.”

Caduceus doesn’t answer. Caleb glances over; takes in his muted expression. “Are you alright?”

“Tired,” Caduceus says. He rubs at his nose.

“Alright, but plenty of horrible people are happy with themselves,” Caleb says, tossing the King of Diamonds onto the floor of the wagon between them. “Would you try to make an—an active, unrepentant mass murderer happy, if you could?”

Caduceus’s hand hovers over his own cards, caught mid-decision. He blinks through what Caleb knows is another headache. “That’s...well, if by making a murderer happy I could save everyone around them, I definitely would. But I figure most of the time—in the moment, you’re usually weighing that person’s happiness against everyone else’s life. I hate saying that, but sometimes there’s no way around it. I mean, that’s why we kill people.”

“So if you think it’s appropriate to—to urgently weigh one person’s happiness against the greater good, do you believe Anett did the right thing?”

The reply is immediate, the tone thoughtful: “No. It’s one thing to save others by taking a life when the enemy can’t be stopped by conversation, or bargaining, or even threats. But it’s another to look into the eyes of a person who doesn’t want to hurt anyone and lead them to madness. It—you have to take it moment by moment. Make the decision that fits the situation, not the decision that fits in a—an imaginary system you’ve created to weigh people against each other.”

“Philosophy getting in the way of moral good.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I meant! You really have a way with words.”

“I said,” Nott says loudly, “does anyone have any spades?”

“What if,” Caleb whispers, closing the plant book on his lap, “you were absolutely certain that making a dangerous, foul-minded person happy—perhaps someone who had personally wronged you—what if you were certain it would do no additional harm, but it wouldn’t save their victims either?"

Caduceus clears his throat. “I know you’re kind of having fun with this now, but I’m not really that good at these...what do you call ‘em…”

“Hypothetical situations?” Caleb suggests.

“Yeah. Okay.” He closes his eyes a bit too tightly; turns on his side on the wagon floor.

“Are you alright?” Caleb asks urgently, scooting over to sit cross-legged by Caduceus’s head. “Really, are you okay? You haven’t seemed...quite yourself.”

“Mm. I figure it’ll pass. I don’t think it’s the cave sickness if that’s what you’re worried about. Jester and I cured everybody the minute we left Maripoll, remember?”

Caleb considers waking Jester where she’s sprawled out on the grass beside the wagon. It’s a warm night, and the close quarters of the Tiny Hut weren’t doing anyone any favors with tempers running high. Caleb and Caduceus had cloistered themselves in the wagon to go through the book together, though they hadn’t made any headway in tracing particular corruption patterns to the bluebells.

Caduceus had said he wasn’t tired. Caleb should have known better; should have parsed that as can’t sleep.

“Even so,” Caleb says, starting to feel anxiety like a tight ball high in his chest. “Another quick spell…”

“I’d rather save that for something serious.” Caduceus swallows like his throat is dry; reaches a hand out of his bedroll to pat Caleb’s knee. “You never know who we might run into.”

“I’d—I’d really be more comfortable if we could cure you if you still feel ill tomorrow. Just to be on the safe side. I mean, you’ve been in contact with a deadly disease.”

Caduceus hums. Shuts his eyes again. His hand hasn’t left Caleb’s knee. Odd, given how careful Caduceus has been about touching ever since Caleb pulled his hand away at the cooking fire.

“Headache?” Caleb asks.

“Mm, a bit.”

Caleb looks over Caduceus’ silvered face, slightly dewy with sweat. His eyes trace the waves of his bright hair. He imagines what it might be like to smooth the strands back; to lean down and press their foreheads together.

Instead he lays the back of his hand over Caduceus’ brow. He feels some warmth there, but nothing too serious.

He startles when Caduceus grasps his wrist.

“Mr. Caleb,” Caduceus says, pinning him with red-rimmed eyes. “I’m not nearly so smart as you, and I could be wrong about this whole…‘deserving’ thing. Stranger things have happened. But I think you believe what you do in order to punish yourself. Not because it fits what you know about the world. You’ve done incredible things—daring, outrageous, wonderful things. You’ve saved my life more times than I can count. Even if ‘deserving’ were real, if you permit me saying so, you would deserve every happiness in the world. I admire you.”

Caleb doesn’t know what to say—doesn’t trust himself to say anything at all. The air seems to have gone out of the wagon; the walls seem to close in.

He wants to say: Why are you doing this?

He wants to say: You’re making it harder.

He settles on: “I should get you some water.”

Caduceus says: “Please stay?”

Caleb flashes cold and then hot: a chill down his spine, then a flush on the back of his neck. He feels distinctly defenseless.

The silence grows between them until Caleb is almost mad with it: until a thousand things rest on the tip of his tongue but none of them feel worth the interruption.

Caduceus releases his wrist with a sigh. "Sorry. You don't have to—"

"Hush."

Caleb lays down on his bedroll besides him (as if he could choose anything else; as if he could deny him this). He curls up on his side. Watches the cleric’s eyelids twitch and flutter; examines the twin patches of flushed skin high on his cheeks.

Eventually Caleb falls asleep.

He dreams of the Blooming Grove covered in fluorescing bluebells, a mosquito in the heart of every one.

“Stranger,” Caduceus says, “Stranger—”

Chapter Text

In the morning the mist rolls in.

It dulls the hills into a grey blankness; coats the grass and dampens Caleb’s bedroll. He wakes to a disconsolate Frumpkin burrowed under his blanket, and to the sight of Caduceus shivering beside him.

Caleb swears quietly; presses his palm to Caduceus’s shoulder. “Mr. Clay,” he says, “time to wake up. We should have gotten you settled by the fire, I think.”

Caduceus’s lashes flutter, then his closed eyes scrunch up. He nuzzles further into his traveler’s pillow with a small sound that does strange things to Caleb’s heart.

“Now now, my friend,” Caleb says. “You are the morning person here. If we hurry we can prepare breakfast before anyone else has even started moving.”

“Mmph.”

“Indeed.”

Caleb raises his hand to Caduceus’s forehead, intending to check his temperature. Then he freezes, anxiety shooting up his spine, with his palm hovering perhaps half an inch away from Caduceus’s skin.

Heat pools in the air there, radiating from Caduceus. Caleb can feel it without touching him.

“Hey,” Caleb says. He swallows, mouth dry despite the surrounding damp. “Hey, I think you need to wake up.”

As though with great effort, Caduceus pries one eye open. It appears irritated, nearly bloodshot, with an odd yellow tinge around the edges of the sclera.

“Mm-mm,” he says, a sound that starts like a word and then trails off into silence. He makes an odd noise in his throat and tries again: “Mr. Caleb...I think…”

Caleb doesn’t need to be told. His memory is his greatest gift, and his most dreadful. He knows what Anett’s eyes looked like.

Then Caduceus starts to cough: a drowning sound. Raw.

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Beau says. “He’s—he’s been healed twice now. How long until he’s supposed to feel better?”

Jester looks smaller than she usually does. She twists the skirt of her dress in her hands, a gesture Caleb has never seen from her before. “I don’t know. I think—I mean, it should have worked right away. Right?” She looks up at the sky. Caleb doubts she’s asking anyone mortal.

“Well, it clearly isn’t working!” Beau half-whispers, half-shouts, as though her instinct is to stop Caduceus from hearing. “Maybe you should try again.”

They stand huddled a short distance away—all save Nott, who’s stumbling through making tea, and Yasha, who sits silently with Caduceus in the wagon.

Clumps of fluffy white flowers dot the hillside nearest them. Caleb wonders what they are.

“I can’t!” Jester frets. “I mean I can, but probably it would just not work again, probably! I think—I mean, the only reason I can think of for this to happen is if the sickness is magic somehow, which would be super crazy since we’re like in the middle of nowhere!”

“Doesn’t seem too crazy to me,” says Fjord, who probably expects most dark magic to come from caves in the middle of nowhere.

Caleb listens to their conversation with abstracted interest. He feels as though he is floating somewhere above his body, which is a definite improvement from about ten minutes ago, when he had shaken Jester awake in a mixture of fear and fury that threatened to stop his breathing. He thinks he can make out small individual petals on the white flowers, curved in towards their centers to make the blossoms look almost spherical.

“Well, okay, so what happens if it’s magic?” Beau asks.

They’re probably chrysanthemums, now that he thinks about it. Is there such a thing as chrysanthemum tea? Bluebell tea?

He stares for hours, until his eyes dry and his vision blurs over. Then he shakes his head like a cat dragging itself out of water, and no time has passed at all.

Everyone is looking at him.

“I’m—I’m sorry, what was that?”

“Magic,”  Beau says, slowly, as though speaking to an invalid. “Do you know—can you check him, somehow?”

Caleb shrugs. His coat has become heavy; it seems to weigh him down. “I don’t know, I—I better understand artifacts. Weapons. I’m not a healer.” A sour taste coats his tongue like morning breath.

“There’s gotta be something you can do,” Fjord says with a frown.

Caleb feels like the mist has infiltrated his mind and stuffed his brain full of clouds like cotton.

“What did the villagers call it?” he says conversationally. “Mist sickness? Though I doubt it rises from the mist itself; we didn’t encounter any below. Bluebells, on the other hand—did you know Caduceus saw them there? We’ve been reading a book.”

“Caleb,” Beau says, pained, and puts a hand on his shoulder. “You’re mumbling. I can’t understand anything you’re saying.”

He shrugs her off. “It doesn't matter. I’ll try.”

He heads to the wagon; pulls himself up.

Yasha watches him, her back to the interior wall. Her eyes are solemn—pinning their weight on him. Waiting to see what he will do.

He moves to Caduceus; sits down with his legs tucked beneath him.

“Hey,” Caduceus says. He lies in his bedroll, which is turned down and ruffled. He seems tired. A bead of sweat traces the line of his face; his skin is clammy. His smile crinkles his eyes and ignites his laugh lines and raises the flush on his cheeks.

(Caleb dreams of the door swinging wide.)

“Hey,” Caleb echoes, the word sitting strangely in his mouth. He looks to his own hands, Caduceus’s hands, the bedroll. He thinks he is smiling, but he doubts the effect is any good.

“Caleb—” Caduceus says.

“I think it’s very odd that we haven’t found anything about corrupted bluebells yet. Perhaps the solution is more abstract. An adaptable corruption, moving from plant to plant? A new permutation?”

Caduceus frowns—the kind with a visceral, sympathetic tenderness that always makes Caleb feel scrubbed out and tired.

“May I touch you?” the cleric asks.

“Oh—oh yes. That’s always been fine. You don’t have to ask me, I meant to tell you—” Caleb sees his own nails digging into his thighs. He feels dizzy, like he’s been inhaling smoke. “Ah. Scheiße, you mean because it could be contagious. Well. That’s fine also. We all went through the same cave.”

“Maybe,” Caduceus says, his voice hoarse. He clears his throat and sounds a bit better: “But I’m the one who stayed with Anett all that time.”

“Ja, you did do that,” Caleb says. “You took that risk. Yes.”

“Because—”

“Because you had to.” Caleb swallows. Lunges forward and grasps Caduceus’s hand between both of his own. “I mean, how you see it, you couldn’t have made any other choice. It’s you. You spare the dying and the dead.”

Surprise passes over Caduceus’s face. Then it softens into what looks like gratitude. “Wow,” he chuckles, and the color in his cheeks rises even further. “That’s—wow.”

“Yes,” Caleb says, looking away. Caduceus’s hand is calloused and warm. His rounded nails just press into Caleb’s skin; his palm is wide and flat. Like patting the earth down after planting a seed.

“Perhaps,” Caleb says, “this isn’t the time for that kind of—of conversation. But, ah, listen: you were going to comfort me, correct? You were going to make up something soothing to tell me and—and—”

Caleb hears Yasha shifting behind him, perhaps uncomfortable listening in. Well, too late to worry about that now.

“I mean,” Caduceus says, and clears his throat again. Caduceus often clears his throat, a sort of filler sound that paces his words. This time it sounds, instead, like an irritation or a blockage. “I mean, yeah, I guess so—I wasn’t gonna lie to you if that’s what you—”

“No matter. What I’m trying to say is that it’s no good. You can’t waste your energy on that, and I…”

He gives Caduceus’s hand a squeeze, then lets it go. Closes his eyes and breathes deeply. Imagines the wind carrying his mind like it might carry Caduceus.

Well—that’s not going to work. Caleb’s power doesn’t come from spring winds; from ethereal cycles and mystic messages and the dark black earth beneath him. It doesn’t come from peace.

It comes from himself: sparks jumping behind his eyes, connecting every perfect memory he’s ever collected and synthesizing them in new ways with new information. His thoughts are wildfire, changing and consuming and growing anew.

He can shape this. He can control it.

He opens his eyes. Caduceus is watching him carefully.

“My friend,” Caleb says. Only now, when his voice has lost its tremor, when his vision has regained its clarity, does he understand what a state he’s been in since waking. That’s no good. There are important things to do.

“Forgive me,” he says, “but I’m going to be busy for some time. I’m going to fix everything.”

At first Caduceus just blinks, and Caleb worries that he doesn’t believe him.

Then he says, “‘Course you will. You were always meant to.”

“He says you’re right. Anett had books, or at least journals,” Jester tells Caleb. She frowns, waiting for the rest of the message from Maripoll’s town gossip to come in. “She kept them...I guess she used to hide them? He says everybody knows they were under the floorboards, though.”

“But did you ask what they were about?”  Caleb hunches over his notebook, plotting out careful lines. The mists have burned up under the daylight; the grass has dried.

“He doesn’t know, but he says if I check back in like a couple hours he can get somebody who can read to look at them.”

“That will have to be good enough for now.”

Nott approaches with a steaming cup clutched in her hands. “I made more,” she says, and Caleb takes it gratefully.

“Thank you. Can I give you something?” He rips out a page.

“Sure, what is it?”

“The map out of this place.”

“What?” Jester and Nott say at the same time, loudly enough that Beau and Fjord look up from where they’re sitting with Caduceus. They’ve propped him up between them, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. From the looks of it he may shed it soon, switching from cold to hot again.

Yasha is nowhere in sight. She’d quietly suggested to Caduceus that perhaps he’d feel better out of the wagon, closer to the grass—he’d said yes. Then she disappeared.

Blearily, Caduceus’s eyes meet Caleb’s. No message passes between them. Caduceus just looks tired.

Caleb twitches his lips into what he hopes is a smile, then looks back to Nott. “I’ve been a dummkopf up until now. My memory is—well, you know it’s good, but I let that work against me. I thought I could remember our way based on landmarks: really just flowers and shrubs around here.”

“Well,” Nott says. “Maybe some things are too repetitive for even you to remember.”

“No,” Caleb says simply. He reaches out to touch the paper in her hand; traces the line he had drawn. “This is west. If you remember to count the hills, this valley path should take you all the way out the way we started.”

Nott frowns. “We’ve doubled back on ourselves a few times. You’re sure this is—”

“This is absolutely the way, yes.” He envisions the route in his own memory as though he’s physically walking it again; sees his life for the past few days sped up and amplified. “As I said, the landmarks distracted me. I should have counted the hills.”

“I don’t get it. What’s wrong with the landmarks?” Nott asks.

“Yeah, and why are you talking so weird about it? Like you’re not gonna be here.” Jester crosses her arms over her chest. Her hair is frizzing, unbrushed, and Caleb almost feels bad for waking her.

“Well, I suppose I should convey the most crucial information first. The landmarks are moving.” He sets the tea down beside him and flips to a blank page in his book.

When no one breaks the silence, he looks up to dumbfounded faces. “What? What is it?”

“Caleb, that’s super creepy!” Jester says. “You can’t just say stuff like that and then not explain anything.”

“Yeah,” Nott says, twisting her fingers together. “Are we—are we in some kind of terrible mirror dimension? Are we stuck?”

“What? No, of course not. You—you would have noticed if we were trapped in another dimension.” He pauses; frowns. “Right? I mean—all of you would have noticed something like that. Right?”

“Come on, Caleb,” Jester says.

“Oh yes, well. It’s nothing so ominous as that. It’s just that all the plants move when we’re not looking.”

“Fucking what?”  Beau yells from the other side of the breakfast fire. Then, marginally more quietly: “Oh shit, sorry Deucey.”

“It’s as I said.” Caleb begins writing a list: potion-making processes, enchantments, poisons, herbalism, plants with magical properties, types of corruption. “I’m sure of it now. The shrubs are the most conspicuous; you can see a row of bushes over to your left that was north of us last night. I don’t know why they move. I can’t imagine. But right now that’s not important. Or at least, it’s less important than other things.”

He hands the list to Jester. “When you next check in on Maripoll, please ask them to look for any of Anett’s writings that pertain to these topics. Tell them I will arrive shortly.”

“You will?” Nott blinks.

Caleb rakes a hand through his hair. He doesn’t quite meet her eyes when he says, “I will. One person on a horse will move faster than all of us with a wagon. And—and I think the faster I get those books the better. I’ll come right back and meet you in the middle.”

Options are slim with no library or bookstore nearby. He still strongly suspects that Anett wasn’t magical herself—at least, not inherently so. Still, a wisewoman knows things, tracks things, about the local natural world. She’d demonstrated as much with her understanding of the sickness, and with the various poultices and potions she’d made for the villagers. Perhaps if Caleb and Caduceus couldn’t find what they were looking for in the plant book, they’ll find it in a more niche local tome, or in a practical almanac.

Perhaps Caduceus would prefer to help, as a distraction. Perhaps—

He sneaks another glance. Caduceus has fallen asleep, his mouth just barely open. Too tall to lean on Beau’s shoulder, his cheek presses into the top of her head. Beau meets Caleb’s gaze and shrugs at him, otherwise holding very still.

“Do you think this will work?” Nott asks. She sounds rather lost. Caleb knows the feeling.

“It had better,” he replies, grabbing her hand. “Rather, it’s going to.”

He watches Fjord and Beau work together to move Caduceus to his bedroll, careful not to bump his head, working against their natural inclinations in order to be gentle.

“Mr. Caleb,” Caduceus says, “would you play cards with me?”

Caleb finishes buckling his bag onto his horse’s saddle. He fiddles with a few other materials here and there: tightening straps and checking his waterskin for leaks. Only when he can find nothing else to adjust does he turn back to Caduceus.

Unable to sleep for long, the cleric seems to have hit a second wind. He’s able to sit by his own power, back against the wagon, bowl in hand. Beau’s oatmeal leaves something to be desired, but it’s better than nothing, and Caleb is concerned to see that Caduceus hasn’t made a dent in the contents. His skin is still wane: more off-white than silver now. His hair lies flat, sticking to his forehead like it had after the Maripoll rain.

Caleb swallows. “You seem to be feeling a bit better.”

Caduceus twitches his shoulders in a way that could be a shrug. Tired and ungainly.  The motion is all wrong: Caduceus had always moved well for his size. “Think it’s probably worse in the mornings. Head still hurts something fierce, though.”

“Perhaps you should get some rest, then.” Caleb scans the campsite for any crucial travel gear he may have missed.

“Well, to tell the truth, I get the feeling I’m gonna be resting a lot over the next few days. I’d rather do something nice with you.”

Caleb’s breath catches, high in his throat. He sweeps Caduceus’s expression for clues and finds nothing concrete—just that slightly nervous earnestness that he’s come to associate with Caduceus saying things that make him feel ready to jump out of his own skin with a mirroring anxiety.

“I mean,” Caduceus says, “before you go.”

“I would, my friend,” he says, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He fights the incongruous urge to flee. “But—but I have to be elsewhere, just for a little while. I should run this errand as quickly as possible. Maybe Nott—”

“You’ve gotta leave for now, right?” Caduceus says calmly. It doesn’t feel like a conclusion. It feels like reckoning: not in the sense of judgement, but in the sense of taking stock.

Caleb feels his throat closing. Vocabulary has never been his weak point. Now he feels he is swimming through a conversation he hardly understands, drowning in concepts too big for the words that contain them.

“Only for a little while. I’ll—I’ll be with you soon.”

Caduceus holds Caleb’s gaze with a finality that startles him: like the cleric has, somehow, said his piece. And like Caleb has given him something important in return.

Then Caduceus closes his eyes and nods, expression serene beyond tolerance.

Caleb notes a little bundle of aster blossoms sitting by Caduceus’s outstretched ankles. He wonders who gathered them.

Caduceus clears his throat; wrangles down a cough. “Great. Mm, that’s great. Can I ask you a favor for the future?”

“Anything,” he says without quite meaning to.

“I think you’re gonna do great things. I think you’re gonna find what you’re looking for. But Caleb, one thing I want to say is: if this all takes longer than we want it to and I’m still under the weather when we get to the next town...don’t take me to see any doctors or healers.”

Caleb frowns at him, trying to read the small upturn of his lips. “Because...we can really only find that kind of person in well-populated areas? And you may be contagious in ways we don’t understand?”

“I am contagious,” Caduceus says with a shrug. “No point in being dramatic about it, but there’s no point in denying it either. Or in softening it. Better to look the thing full in the face.”

Caleb feels his chest constrict; his breaths shorten.

“Everyone is contagious in some way or another,” he says, and hardly know what he means. He turns back to pull himself onto to his mount. He regrets the twist of anger in his words, but not enough to eliminate it. “People can’t just isolate themselves every time they’re afraid to—”

He stops short; glances at Caduceus from atop his horse. Clutches the reins.

The expression he sees there is new in gestalt, but it’s made up of several expressions he recognizes: Caduceus pensive, Caduceus melancholy, Caduceus satisfied.

“I hope you mean that,” the cleric finally says. “And...I think you maybe do, now. I’ll be here.”

Caleb’s face burns.

He reaches out to Frumpkin in the back of his mind. Sends the cat to cuddle up next to Caduceus’s lap, leaning his little head against his thigh. “I’ll leave him with you,” he says. “You need anything, you let someone know right away, do you understand?"

Caduceus tries to laugh until he begins coughing. The sound is unnatural; deep and dirty enough to enough to invoke another spike of primal fear in Caleb. Still, Caduceus is smiling again—Caleb hadn’t known to miss that until it was gone.

“I’m serious, you know.” He tucks his feet into the stirrups. “Right away.”

Caduceus reaches down to stroke Frumpkin between the ears. “I think I can manage that.”

“Okay, then. Okay. I’ll be back when I have what I need.”

He trots the horse away until three hills and a shallow cliff face stand between himself and the party. Only then does he allow himself to slouch in the saddle; to clutch at his chest and breathe erratically until the icy adrenaline has gone.

Stop that, he tells himself. Someone is relying on you.

He waits until the trembling stops. Then he closes his eyes and opens Frumpkin’s. He can’t feel Caduceus’s lap beneath his head, but he can almost imagine it.

“I brought these, too,” Yasha is saying quietly, posture radiating insecurity. She’s even more colossal from the eyes of a cat.

Caduceus takes the flowers: a rough bundle of tiny white blossoms that almost look like weeds, or like a flowering apple tree in miniature.

“Wow, this is really sweet, Yasha,” he says, voice only slightly more gravelly than usual. “You know, you have a really good heart.”

“I just—” Yasha says, and breaks off. She looks away, out over the hills back the way Caleb has left. “I just don’t like sitting around and doing nothing. You know, it’s easier when I’ve got something to—to—”

“To piledrive, yeah,” Caduceus says thoughtfully.

Listening in, Caleb is almost startled into a laugh, but Yasha’s expression makes the sound die in his throat. There’s still a lot they don’t know about her: about who else may have died around her in a rough and barren place. Caleb thinks of quiet evenings and good shaves. Maybe he should have taken her with him.

“These are baby’s breath,” Caduceus tells her, pressing the tiny stems against his face. They bend around his flushed skin. “You know what these symbolize where I’m from?”

Yasha shakes her head. “I—they don’t mean anything in Xhorhas. Because they don’t exist.”

“Sure, makes sense. And I’m sure they mean different things in different places. If you’d like, I can tell you some of your favorites later. These ones mean ‘innocence.’”

Yasha gives him a tentative smile.

And isn’t it remarkable: even as the Nein worry over Caduceus, even as they try to help him, his instinct is to comfort and to calm. Guilt roils in Caleb’s stomach. They aren’t fair to him. They can’t keep up; could never sufficiently balance the scales.

Of course, Caduceus wouldn’t see it that way.

When Yasha wanders off with the excuse of packing up the bedrolls, Caduceus sighs and leans his head back against the wagon. He looks tired. He holds the flowers loosely in his hands.

“These had just started to bloom in the Grove when I met someone pretty weird,” Caduceus says aloud. “Showed up maybe a year before you all did, speaking in metaphors I couldn’t understand back then—an innocence of my own, I guess.”

He turns his head to look Frumpkin dead in the eyes. “Remind me to tell you about him sometime.”

Caleb jumps back into his own head with a speed that feels like cowardice. Unease crackles across his skin. Suddenly, guiltily, he wants to get as far away as possible.

He swallows. Envisions the path before him, out of the hills and away from Caduceus. Leaving in order to return.

He rides hard.

Chapter Text

The journey outward takes a day and a night at his pace. Stars spin above him, then fade into the daylight.

When he reaches the far edge of the hills, he sees the bluebells: swathes of them, entire hills’ worth, impossible to miss. They hum with something. They resonate. The petals curl back into openings like trumpet bells.

They coat the earth with colors ranging from dark blue to vivid violet, running in stripes away from where Caleb pauses to view them. The color gradient seems too symmetrical, too perfect, to have grown naturally. They cluster close to the valley; they stretch as far as the eye can see.

They hadn’t looked like this before.

If he needs a sample, there will be plenty to choose from, but for now he’d rather keep his distance. Caleb shakes his head and keeps riding until he reaches the village.

Anett’s garden still blooms around the cluster of stones that shelters the cottage. Caduceus had taken some fennel out of respect for the crop of the dead and the cycle of life. Caleb takes some both out of respect for Caduceus and out of spite for Anett.

He brews it for longer than Caduceus had, letting the licorice taste saturate the water until the bitter overwhelms the floral. He scoops up his cup and an armful of journals; takes them out of that awful, claustrophobic cottage with its creaking floorboards and its half-imagined scent of death. He sets himself up on a flat rock facing the sweep of the ocean, with the wall at his back.

The villagers do not disturb him. He’d told them to keep their distance for their own safety, and they’re only too happy to oblige.

The gossip and his friends had done surprisingly well, pulling out meticulously-detailed journals in Anett’s rough handwriting. Most of her words are misspelled, but all are chosen with utmost precision as they detail the natural world she’d seen around her, phenomena ranging from cattle illnesses to off-color moss. Caleb sifts through piles of farmer’s almanacs. He finds homemade calendars based on moon cycles and harvest festivals. He finds carefully-compiled records of village folklore, including of the mist sickness, as though Anett had been determined to track down every long-winded elder with a long-winded legend to tell that could have some scrap of wisdom hidden in it.

He reads as the sun moves across the sky—as the ocean draws away from him, back into low tide, leaving rocks and glass and slimy seaweed strewn across the beach.

In none of the tales does he find a single mention of bluebells.

How’s it going, Caleb?  Jester’s voice is recognizable through her sending spell, but her presence itself always feels like temple bells in the back of his head: dissonant, resonant, too loud to be comfortable. Caduceus is okay but he keeps trying to make us dinner. Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’m sitting on him.

A wane smile crosses Caleb’s lips before he can stop it. “Well done,” he says. “Nothing so far. A few descriptions of local plant creatures, ones I recognize—wouldn’t line up with our moving shrubs.” He pauses to count his own words and adds: “No bluebells.”

With that he’s plunged back into silence. He almost misses her.

Anett had not been an educated woman. Sometimes it takes him a moment to understand her meaning, but once he does he can’t help but be impressed by her shrewd analysis of her surroundings and by her intuitive understanding of deeper patterns. She predicted crop sickness a season before it happened; she drew sea-maps of where the biggest tuna would linger.

Someone he doesn’t like thinking about had once told him that half of magic is observation.

Still, none of it—the lore, the village birth records, the bestiary—leads him to answers. His eyes begin to play tricks on him, like fog creeping in at the corners of his vision—or like smoke from a fire.

Caleb, Jester says as the sun touches the horizon. Caleb swallows; focuses on her voice to quell the tremor in his fingers. We’re moving slow to take care of Caduceus. It’ll take days. Are you ready to come back to us? Want to say something to him?

Caleb’s stomach flips. He imagines Caduceus, his back to the wagon, aster blossoms at his feet. Sees him closing his eyes in serenity—or had it been resignation? The memory feels suddenly shallow; he can’t re-capture the sense of inevitable depth that had layered itself over their conversation. How is he to know what Caduceus had really thought of him; had really meant? How is he to understand—

“I—not yet. I think I may have missed something important somewhere. It—it will take me some time to re-evaluate everything.”

He expects another silence. Instead Jester responds immediately, with a force so grand and terrible that Caleb knows she would be practically standing on his toes if she were here in person: I think you’re being really stupid, you know? Caleb, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have gone, but there’s a difference between leaving ‘cuz you’re scared—

Nothing else.

Caleb takes a tight breath; hears it whistling through his teeth. “Ja, and what do you know about it? I’m trying to help. Do you have a better plan? Everybody thinks they know what’s best for everybody else around here! Everyone thinks I need advice, like I don’t know my own mind! Like I can’t—can’t account for my own actions!”

He stumbles to his feet. “Well, let me tell you: I’m staying here to read all of these books over again—until you get here or until I’m ready, whichever happens first!”

He realizes he’s hefted a journal over his head like he’s braced to throw it down into the thistle and sage.

The ocean sound has swallowed him up, so consistent he can no longer hear it.

No good. Jester can’t hear him—which is just as well. She would just tell him she knows about his eidetic memory. Rereading books has never been much of much help to him.

He swallows the sound in the back his throat. Sets the journal down and makes more tea.

The sun sets; the air chills. He walks on the shore that night—tries to puzzle over the concepts he’s encountered until he can come up with something new. His boots fill with sand until he removes them. The smell of salt and seaweed overwhelms the taste of tea.

Caduceus hadn’t liked sailing, but Caleb can’t imagine he had anything against the sea.

He wanders until he can’t see the cottage anymore—until great cliffs of sandstone rise up behind him, ominous shadows splitting the waves. He feels small and breakable in their presence.

The water is cold and black. He swallows down his misgivings and lets it run up to his ankles. Tries to think, somehow, of answers.

He sees lightning on the dark line of the horizon. It illuminates strange patterns in the clouds, leaving the impression of giant creatures crouching half a world away.

He doesn’t move for a long time.

Then, pulling his coat tighter around himself, he walks back to where he started. Hops onto his stone, picks up a journal, and starts again.

Caleb reads through another day. He doesn’t truly sleep until late the next night. Even then, it’s accidental: there’s no time to waste, and he refuses to sleep in Anett’s bed.

He guiltily jerks awake on his stone, pulled from dreams of fire and fennel and red yarrow blossoms. The dawn sky over the sea is painted as orange as marigolds.

“It’s in the next one,” he mumbles to himself, despite having read each journal twice over. “It’s in...”

(The door swings wide. Caleb says, help me— )

Caleb, Jester says, jolting him awake again—her voice is less chipper than it normally is. Are you ready? How about bring the best books with you and then maybe we could help. We miss you and he misses you.

Caleb buries his head in his hands.

“No,” he says, voice wandering up and down the words, close to breaking. “No, ah. I can’t find a thing. There has to be something here, but I’m not ready yet. I don’t want to leave anything behind by accident. Thank you, though, for thinking of me. I’m sorry I—”

No. Too many words.

That’s fine. Caleb suspects she knows she’s right.

He thinks of walking the hills to collect honeysuckle; of Caduceus telling him he should be happy. Of himself, drinking warm tea but pulling back his hand.

He thinks of bloodshot eyes and yellow.

“You don’t deserve this,” he says to the sky—to the dawn stars just fading. “You shouldn’t have to put up with any of this.”

The cup beside him is empty, but the tide is coming in. The ocean looks fuller than he’s ever seen it.

When the sun crests the horizon, layering gold over the hills, Jester says: Not to be all boring and serious and whatever, but you’re never going to be ready, Caleb. I don’t think anybody ever is, you know?

Caleb almost doesn’t respond to her. The wind is picking up. He sees village women coming out into the fields, their shadows long and their dresses fluttering. He feels a pressure—clean, inevitable—behind his eyes.

He sniffs. Rubs his hands over his chin, his cheeks, his temples. “ I don’t understand clerics. You learned everything you know about romance from smut novels, but here you are—no matter. You’re...incredible. I’m coming."

The great bluebell patch is gone. Caleb can’t muster up any real surprise.

The trip back to Nein is shorter than leaving them had been, about half a day’s hard ride. He dismounts in a hurry, then tries to pull everything off his horse at once. He can’t quite get his fingers to cooperate; they grasp the buckles only with several tries.

Someone knocks his hand away. “Here,” Beau says. “I’ve got this.”

Caleb can do little more than nod.

Beau gives him a wry look: one of those halfway-judgmental faces that want to reprimand him and comfort him all at once. Her hair is coming loose from her ponytail; her eyeliner is smudged to nonexistence. Her skin is glowing like she’s just finished a jog.

“I’m sorry,” he finds himself saying, at the very same time she does.

“What? Dude, for what?” she laughs. “I’m the one who was, like, talking down to you while you were pretty majorly freaked out the other day. To everybody, really. I’m working on it.”

“For—” He thinks back to thoughtlessly shaking her comforting hand from his shoulder so he could go to Caduceus. It had felt, in the moment, like a very minor betrayal—an object lesson in his own flawed personality. Thinking back, he isn’t sure why. Beau understands him well enough; she likely doesn’t even remember such a small moment. To use this as some sort of evidence against himself seems suddenly silly.

“I’m sure there’s something,” he settles on, and feels a lightness in his fingertips.

Beau’s lips quirk upwards. “Listen, I’ll take care of the horse. You’ve got better things to do.” Her gaze moves meaningfully to the wagon.

Caleb takes her cue, his heart beating so high in his throat it threatens to suffocate him. Each step takes an eternity.

Miraculously, despite having been quite recently on the move, every other member of the Nein has managed to disappear from the wagon’s vicinity.

Caduceus lies inside.

He’s kicked off his blanket; his arms are flung wide. Caleb has never known him to sleep like this: sprawling on his back, hair a mess, mouth open. His feet are bare. The plant book lies beside him, propped neatly against the wagon wall as though someone had read him to sleep.

When Caleb pulls himself up, his arms shake from exhaustion.

He goes to Caduceus; lowers himself to his knees. He watches for a moment, hardly daring to breathe. The air smells like sweat, but like peat beneath it. The noon sun beats down until it almost hurts his eyes.

Someone should cover the wagon; keep Caduceus cool. In a moment.

He lays down at Caduceus’s side. Turns Caduceus’s head towards his with a gentle hand along the line of his chin. Presses their foreheads together.

“Mr. Clay,” he says. Caduceus’s skin is far too warm. When his eyes blink open in confusion, they are more yellowed than before; more sunken into the skin.

“Hello,” Caleb says, his voice contorting strangely. “I’m here.”

Caduceus’s eyes go wide: they trace the lines of Caleb’s face, flickering up and down as though doubting his sight.

“Oh,” he says, with a precariously hopeful pang Caleb has never heard before. “Yeah. You’re really here.”

“Ja.”

“I mean, you’re here.”

“Ja. Did you doubt it?”

Caduceus raises a hand; pushes Caleb’s hair back from his face. Caleb’s eyes drift shut. Something blooms under his ribcage; turns its face towards the sun.

“Not doubt, exactly,” Caduceus says quietly. “More...it’s more that things have to happen in their own time. In their own rhythms.”

“Maybe so,” Caleb says. He swallows. “But I—in my belief, sometimes you shouldn’t wait. We are active agents here, are we not?” He feels stupid and sunlit and tongue-tied. He feels on the edge of some great wisdom.

He opens his eyes. Motes of dust drift by, lit up golden.

Caduceus is smiling at him.

“That sounds about right for you,” he says, “and I think I agree.” He coughs, hunching towards Caleb.

Caleb reaches out to clutch his shoulder. “Are you alright?”

“Mm. Mmhmm. Hurts a bit. Head and chest both, now.”

“In any case,” Caleb says. “I’m here. I’m going to be here now. I’ve...I’ve decided.”

He lets go. His hand wanders upwards; settles on Caduceus’s neck. His ring finger brushes the space where ear meets jaw. He feels a pulse under his palm, fast and flourishing.

A flock of starlings crosses over them, small birds moving across the sky by the thousand. Caleb feels himself sliding, inevitably, towards sleep.

“I guess today’s my day to be selfish,” Caduceus says with a wondering smile, wiping sweat from his brow. “Because I gotta tell you, I’m almost happy to be stuck lying here, so long as you’re stuck with me.”

Laughter bubbles out of Caleb like a new and dizzy thing.

After a solid night’s sleep, Caleb spends his days with scratch paper, with the best of the journals (tree monsters, sprites, curses), and with Caduceus.

He works nearby, even when Caduceus is too tired to stay awake. When they’re both conscious, Caleb makes tea—he can’t quite get the timing right on the steeping, but Caduceus never says a word about it.

Caleb reads even as the party travels, tucked away in the wagon, sitting on the floor with Caduceus or lying next to him, their shoulders pressed together.

They’ve decided to head around the hills by a northern route, up the coast, a particularly tedious journey that promises to extend their travel by weeks. According to the Maripoll locals, they shouldn’t expect to see much in the way of civilization until they’ve taken the long way around back to where they started. Even the sparse other villages they could reach with detours would be worth little in the way of medicine or magical texts. Caleb hopes in vain that the slightly larger settlement at the other end of the cave tunnel—Milotte—will have something of value, though intellectually he knows that by the time they get there it will be too late.

All of this disregarding, of course, Caduceus’s request to avoid towns.

Spreads fast from the caves, Anett had said, and slow between people. Caduceus had tried cautioning the others to keep their distance from him when they could, but the message had sounded half-hearted, even from him: if the sickness is already in their lungs, there’s nothing else for it but to wait and see.

Caleb wakes up with headaches—not unheard of, for him. Nott occasionally sniffles or sneezes, but Caleb has long suspected her to be allergic to some native pollen. Fjord can’t sleep through the night, but he’s suffered that before.

At this point, there’s little Caleb can do except to think harder. Nott helps where she can, reading the journals and making off-the-wall suggestions that are helpful in shaking up his mindset if not in finding the solution.

When Caduceus is feeling well enough to talk, Caleb takes a break from the research to tell stories: sometimes fictional, sometimes trivial tales from the Nein’s time before Caduceus had joined them.

Sometimes he goes further: he brings up light anecdotes from the time before he was Caleb. At first this terrifies him, but Caduceus is a good audience. To hear someone chuckle when he recounts something silly he’d done with Astrid as a teenager, or to see someone smile when he talks about a conversation with his father, has a peculiar effect on the memories themselves: the edges seem to round. They feel more like memories than like knives.

Caduceus reciprocates at first with tales of his siblings, or with the fairy tales about wisewomen he had so enjoyed in childhood. But as the days wear on, his stories shift to anecdotes about the grievers who had visited the Blooming Grove: their pains and their joyful memories, and the things that brought them hope through their misery. Caleb tries to listen to these stories, but he can’t help but worry—as the headaches worsen; as the coughs sound more wet and miserable—that Caduceus is trying to tell him something he doesn’t want to hear.

It reminds him that there’s no time for stories: for heartfelt get-to-know-yous and secrets shared. He’s selfish to want this; to feel a lightness in his chest that has been absent for a long time. But Caduceus asks— when no one else is around, when they are both awake, Caduceus asks to share stories. Who is Caleb to deny him this?

Three nights from Caleb’s return, Caduceus sinks into another one of his half-sleeps.

Caleb knows no better word for it: Caduceus loses consciousness but does not seem to rest. His face flushes; his eyelids flutter restlessly. He jolts and shudders like he’s dreaming of falling. Caleb had once tried to hold his hand, but this woke him immediately, leaving Caleb feeling guilty and Caduceus unable to sleep again.

The fire has nearly burned down, embers glowing in the pit. Crickets chirp loudly enough that Caleb would shush them if he could.

“Mmcaleb,” Caduceus says, his hand balling into his blanket. The wet cloth has slipped from his forehead.

“Yes?” Caleb replenishes the cloth from a bowl at his side, then replaces it.

“Mm.”

“You’re sleeping. I’m here.”

“Huh,” Caduceus says. “Yeah. I guess I’m sleeping.”

Caleb waits. When nothing else seems forthcoming, he turns back to his notes. What if Anett had written in code? Could the doodle of an imperfect fern on the sixteenth page of last year’s day-journal be a cipher?

He’s being ridiculous; grasping at straws. But what if the misspelling on page forty-three—

“Caleb,” Caduceus says, eyes hidden beneath the cloth, voice dull with sleep and with a horrible, creeping dryness.

“What is it? Can I get you anything?”

Caduceus sighs. It’s a long, burdened sound.

The wind picks up in a night that had once been windless.

“He showed up about a year before you all did,” Caduceus says. A bead of water runs down the side of his face, pooling on his bedroll pillow. “An—an old man, really beat up to all hell. I don’t—I don’t know if he was actually as ancient as he seemed, or if life had really just done a number on him. His face was burned beyond recognition. The end of his arm was just a stump. Some of the wounds seemed fresh.”

Caleb looks around at the sleeping figures of the other Nein. No one seems to stir, not even Fjord.

Frumpkin lifts his head to look at Caleb expectantly, his eyes unblinking.

Caduceus continues: “I was—I mean, you know how quickly we’ve all learned together. A year before I met you, I could barely—I could heal, a bit, but it wasn’t enough. Not with how close he was to passing over.”

Caleb puts his notes down beside him. “You don’t have to speak,” he says carefully. “You’re not—”

“What got me the most was the look in his eyes—” Caduceus starts hacking. The force of it jerks his shoulders from the ground with each cough.

Caleb moves to steady him, pressing a hand to his chest. Caduceus pats it absently, then lets his arms go slack beside him.

“It’s—you could see the thickness of his despair like...like deep waters. Like a night sky. I wanted to talk to him, give him some peace. Instead he died in my arms, there in the garden.”

Something prickles down Caleb’s back, across his skin. He pulls back his hand.

“He told me some strange things,” Caduceus says. The cloth hides his expression. His chest rises and falls and rises again. “I don’t remember the words exactly, but it went something like, ‘I was wrong to change it all, but I’m changing just one more thing.’ Funny thing to say, isn’t it? Man I hadn’t met.”

“Caduceus,” Caleb says, “please—”

“He said, ‘It was a trick.’ Or maybe it was, ‘They tricked me.’ Dunno what the trick was. Something bad. Then he said something like, ‘It’s time for you to leave. Go with them. Maybe if we”—deep coughing—“Maybe if we had met sooner, you could have stopped me.”

The wind whispers through the grass, overcoming the sound of nighttime insects. In the distance, Caleb can hear the sea.

“The last thing he said,” Caduceus says, “I remember more clearly. Dunno if he meant to do it, but he sort of...branded me with it. Christened me. You know, for all I grew up with death, rarely did it happen in my arms. You tend to remember the first time that happens. Makes an impact. He said, ‘Help me spare them. Help me let them rest.’”

Caleb takes in a shaking breath; feels like he’s breathing through smoke.

Caduceus lies there, sweat and water commingling. He reaches a hand towards Caleb, blind.

Caleb takes it without a second thought, perhaps selfishly: without an anchor, he fears he may drift away. He may stand up from this place and walk, and never stop walking.

Caduceus clears his throat. “I took it as a sign from the Wildmother.” He reaches his free hand up to touch the cloth. “Before that, I didn’t feel ready to leave the Grove. I thought my place was at home, waiting for my family to return. Somebody had to keep caring for the grounds, and for the mourners, and—and things didn’t feel dire enough yet for me to abandon that duty to a stranger. This was my life’s work, and my family’s. Leaving was...wow, almost out of the question to me. But this—this person said to go. So in my head, I started to leave.”

He pulls the cloth away; blinks up at Caleb with bloodshot eyes. “When you all showed up, I was ready to go with you. It took almost a year of communing and crying and apologizing to the primroses, but it had to be done.

“It’s kind of funny to think about what would have happened otherwise; if that stranger never came to the Grove. I don’t know if I would’ve gone with you, past the time it took to handle Lorenzo. I might—might have left a season past then. Or dozens of seasons. We might not have met again for years and years...if we met again at all. Funny world, right? Just goes to show.”

Caleb swallows. He realizes he’s squeezing Caduceus’s hand too tightly, his nails digging into skin. He can’t bring himself to let go. “What...what did he mean by that, do you think? ‘Help me let them rest’?”

The wind has died down. The grass is sparser here: to the west, it gives way to sand. The flowers that grow are hardy, pushing onwards and upwards despite all odds.

Caduceus lets out another sigh—rasping, guttering like the candle flame under the hill.

“Well, I have my ideas,” he says, watching Caleb carefully. “But I guess there’s things we’ll never know.”

Chapter Text

The next day Caduceus vomits.

He stands up on shaking legs; stumbles to the side of the wagon and doubles over there, spilling his breakfast onto the grass. He slumps to his knees, hanging his arm over the wall for support. He keeps vomiting.

Fjord brings the horses to a stop. Caleb scrambles to his feet. He wraps an arm around Caduceus’s shoulders. He pulls the damp hair from his forehead; smooths it back from his cheeks. He waits for the shudders to go out of him; for the dry retching to stop.

The rest of the Nein seem to go very still. The wind is colder, now that they’re only a mile from the shore. The sea is visible past a sharp drop-off: sandstone cliffs from which they keep their distance.

“Buddy,”  Beau says into the silence, her forehead creased with worry.

Caduceus coughs. He tries to wipe a hand over his mouth.

Caleb touches his wrist. “Here, use my handkerchief. We’ll get some water.”

Caduceus nods, seemingly speechless. He takes the cloth and rubs it across his chin.

Nott sidles up to the wagon, holding her waterskin. “Do you—can I get you anything else, Deuces?” she asks. Her smile is brittle.

Caduceus clears his throat several times, each dissolving into a cough. “Turmeric,” he finally spits into the handkerchief. “Some...if you check my pack…”

Caleb squeezes his shoulders more tightly.

“I can brew it,” Nott says nervously. “I can do that. I—”

“Wish I...had some honey,” Caduceus says. He tries to pull away from the wall; sinks further toward the floor of the wagon and into Caleb’s grip.

Caleb tries to lift him up again; pulls Caduceus’s arm over his shoulder and heaves. “Come on, let’s get you settled,” he says. The words come out more clearly than he expects them to. He wonder if Caduceus can feel the pounding of his heart where their sides press together.

The cleric is dressed in a thin grey linen shirt, unbuttoned down his chest for fit. They’d borrowed it from Yasha to give him a clean change of clothes after his own became soaked through with sweat. The fever isn’t a constant, but it returns with a vengeance every time.

Caduceus feels very hot right now.

“Okay, we’re stopping,” Fjord says. “Let’s just...take some time to regroup.”

Caleb starts to lower Caduceus to the wagon floor, precariously balancing the weight of a full firbolg on his shoulders.

Caduceus mumbles something.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“N...no. Can I lie in the grass?”

“Certainly. We’ll move your bedroll.”

“No,” Caduceus says again. Caleb looks at him. Sees the squint of his eyes—the headache, Caduceus told him, is constant now, no matter what he takes for it—and the slight bulge of swollen lymph nodes below his ears.

“It’s worse,” Caleb breathes, and feels his own limbs begin to stiffen.

“Just would like to lie in the grass for awhile,” Caduceus says. “Promise we can get moving again after that.”

Caleb feels hysteria rising like laughter in his throat. He thinks: to where?

“Don’t be stupid, Caduceus,” Jester says. She hops into the wagon; pulls his other arm around her shoulders. “We’ll stop for as long as you need to, okay?”

They move him, gently, to the ground. He breathes a sigh of relief; twines his fingers into the sparse grass intermingled with sand. Caleb hasn’t seen him look this happy since he himself returned from Maripoll.

He finds himself saying, “No stole-grass around here, I fear. Do you have any left?” Then he regrets saying anything: he had meant it as an option for pain relief, rather than as a commentary on the sickness’s severity, but Caduceus had offered it to Anett in her dying hours. Perhaps it’s an ill omen to speak of that now.

“Nope,” Caduceus sighs. “S’fine. Figure I can...talk to the Wildmother, some. Take some comfort.”

Caleb’s stomach flips. “You don’t—come on, my friend. You should be saving your strength.”

Caduceus opens his eyes to look at him; gives him a lazy smile that makes his head spin and his heart clench.

“Talking to gods is very relaxing,” Jester says. “That sounds like a good idea, Caduceus.”

Caleb watches Nott heat the water. He rubs a hand over his arm.

He should be working harder.

Rather than rereading the journals again, he spends his time trying to conjure up any distant memory he may still have regarding poison, or plant magic, or various corruptions. He’s already turned over and examined most of these recollections, and he doubts that he’d forget something so essential. Still, it’s possible that by going over them again, in a different order this time, he may unlock some secret knowledge born of facts set in combination with one another.

It’s a stretch, Caleb knows. But he has to fix this somehow, and there isn’t anything else he can do.

He delves into his own notes, his own spellbook. He reads with a passion unheard of even for him. He focuses strictly on what needs doing—shoves Caduceus’s guest at the Blooming Grove to the back of his mind. He nears to be clear-headed, and if he focuses too hard on the implications of that conversation his thoughts start to white out around the edges.

After the first vomiting incident, Caduceus has trouble keeping his food down. The best he can manage is soup, and even that proves risky. Beau, who has trouble thinking of things to say when she’s in Caduceus’s presence, throws herself into helping at mealtime. The results are not particularly appetizing, but she’s careful to note and replicate anything that Caduceus doesn’t eventually heave back up.

Caleb is always nearby to help him to a sitting position; to make himself as solid as possible so that Caduceus has something to rest against. This is the only break he takes from reading—he eats with his nose in his books, or staring off at the distant sliver of the sea, trying to make his mind work faster.

When Caduceus offers him his hand, he always takes it. Sometimes, though, Caduceus seems to lose the strength to clench his fingers. These are the worst moments.

Caleb is sitting next to Caduceus where he lies on the grass, clutching Caduceus’s hand, when Yasha stumbles.

She had come back from a run with Beau—the two of them quickly go stir-crazy in this quiet stretch of land with only the occasional tree monster to fight. Walking by the wagon, she seems to tilt and lose her balance without cause, but catches herself almost immediately.

She meets Caleb’s eyes. They watch each other for a moment, waiting for the other to break the silence. Caduceus twitches, half-asleep, beside them.

“Sometimes I get light-headed,” she says finally. “Nothing to be done, right? No need to make a big deal out of it.” Her eyes flicker towards the stretch of flat rock where Beau is performing impressive exercises of flexibility.

“Of course,” Caleb says, and lowers his eyes.

The next morning, thunder rolls in the distance. Yasha and her horse are gone.

“Amber is traditionally used in cleansing spells, which isn’t quite what we want. Amethyst addresses the nervous system, though it’s said to work better in winter. There’s bloodstone, of course, but that’s somewhat gauche.”

“White chrysanthemums,” Caduceus mumbles, his eyes closed.

“Really? I hadn’t come across any references to them in my studies. But then again, medical magic wasn’t exactly a specialty of mine.”

Caleb looks to the sky. The sun set not long ago. The clouds seem to bend towards the earth, thick and promising a storm. The air smells like rain.

“We should get you into the wagon,” he says. “Cover it up.”

Caduceus doesn’t respond.

Caleb sighs; massages his temples against the ever-present headache. He sets down his papers and crouches down next to Caduceus.

The cleric’s eyes are clenched shut. His skin is pale, almost yellowed. With a nausea-inducing jolt, Caleb sees that he’s stopped sweating. Not good, given that he hasn’t even been able to keep down water today.

“Caduceus?” He tries to wrap his arm behind his shoulders to lift him up.

There’s no one nearby to help him. The party’s had to venture further and further away to hunt down dinner in an increasingly barren landscape. Yasha’s been gone for days. Nott was supposed to stay behind to help with Caduceus, but she fell asleep early. Caleb can’t bring herself to wake her. Lately, she’s seemed exhausted beyond natural limits—almost as though she’s fighting off a sickness.

“Come on, let’s get you—”

Caduceus makes a series of sounds that likely were meant to be words. He clutches Caleb’s shoulder, his eyes shut against pain. The dark circles under his eyes have swallowed up half his face.

Caleb’s heart beats double-time.

“I don’t understand,” he says slowly. “Could you—”

“—want to be here,” Caduceus says. “In the rain.”

Caleb shakes his head. “We—you can’t, Caduceus. Your health is...tenuous. If you’re out in the storm—”

Caduceus clenches his teeth. The noise that comes from between them sounds like a sob.

“Oh,” Caleb says, hearing his voice break beneath its own weight. “I—I’m so sorry.”

He lets himself collapse on the grass next to him, staring up at the heavy sky. He crosses his arm over Caduceus’s; twines their fingers together.

“This isn’t right,” Caleb says. He feels as though he’s standing on crumbling ground, watching the collapse come for him, unable to move. “This isn’t—you shouldn’t have to suffer this. Not you, of all people.”

He can hear the objection in his head, as though Caduceus himself had the strength to make it: no one deserves anything at all. It happens anyway. He can almost see, around the edges of the idea, why it would be a comfort.

He still wants to vomit.

“I would—Caduceus,” he says, and turns to face him. “Caduceus, you know I would do anything to stop this. I would—”

Travel backwards?

Caleb remembers the broken old man in Caduceus’s story. He thinks: perhaps it wouldn’t always turn out that way. Perhaps—

Caduceus shakes his head. He takes a deep breath—or tries, before it dissolves into a bone-rattling cough.

Caleb clutches his hand more tightly, afraid to move. “Talk to me,” he says weakly. “If—if you could talk to me—”

Caduceus tilts his head back into the sparse grass. He opens his eyes. His next breath is quick and full of wonder.

Caleb traces his gaze; sees that a break has opened in the clouds. Small, early stars speckle a grey-blue sky streaked with yellow.

“Wow,” Caduceus says in a small, wavering voice. “Wow. That’s great. You and I get—get to see this. All this. Everything outside the Blooming Grove.”

“Stop that,” Caleb says, his vision quaking, heat rising across his back. “I know what you’re doing.”

“Every moment paints a garden,” Caduceus says. He turns to Caleb. His face is very thin; his eyes are bright with fever. His smile is ethereal. “Caleb, it’s—this is how we are. People—people paint gardens. You might think nothing lasts until tomorrow, but there’s only ever been right now anyhow.”

Caleb can’t feel his fingers anymore. “You can’t—you can’t think like this. Caduceus, you can’t. The moment you do— ”

“At the Blooming Grove—”

“Verdammt! Listen to me!”  He scrambles to his knees, plants a hand on each side of Caduceus’s shoulders, and holds himself there: hanging over Caduceus, taking in every inch of his face with a love that feels like anger. “Quit speaking in parables. I am not the bereaved at your door. I am not grieving!”

His words hang over the empty plain.

Caduceus blinks up at him slowly, an unreadable expression on his face. His hair fans out beneath him in all directions, settled over the earth.

“Caleb,” he says, “you’re always grieving.”

Caleb scowls. Hot pressure forms behind his eyes; Caduceus blurs out into a watercolor of pink and silver and green. “Yes,” he says, “but never for you.”

He tries to catch his breath; loses it in a sob.

A raindrop, cool and merciful, spatters against his neck.

“Maybe the past doesn’t matter to you,” he chokes, “and maybe it shouldn’t matter to me. Maybe—maybe it won’t, one day. But the future—the future can be real.” The word rips out of him, almost painful. He closes his eyes. Reaches up to rub the back of his hand across his face; to dry his cheeks.

After awhile, he feels Caduceus’s hand on his wrist.

“I’m sorry,” Caduceus says quietly. “I’ve upset you.”

Caleb shakes his head. “No, I—I need to get myself together. This is about you.”

“You know,” Caduceus says, “you don’t have to take all this on yourself. It’s my duty to—”

“Spare the dead? Bring comfort? Yes. I adore this about you.”

Caleb opens his eyes.

He loses his words at the sight of affection written plainly across every line in Caduceus’s face. He seems to drink Caleb in—like looking out on a perfect landscape in an irreplaceable moment.

“I—” Caleb says, and swallows. “You’re not dead, Caduceus. And I’m not dead. No matter—no matter who else is. I refuse this. We have more to do together. More—more people to save and gardens to paint. And that’s why we’re getting you into that wagon before it starts to pour.”

“Wow,” Caduceus says with a cough. His lips edge into a smile. “It’s—you refuse harm wherever you find it. You really are a—a mosaic of good actions, here. Like it or not.”

Caleb can’t bring himself to respond.

Getting Caduceus into the wagon is difficult, but he manages. Nott is easier; he lifts her up bodily and then goes back for her bedroll.

He pulls the covering over them all just as the rain lets loose, pattering on the tarp with a vengeance. He lies down between the two.

Caduceus opens his arms in invitation. Caleb only hesitates for a moment before pressing close, shoving his nose into the crook of Caduceus’s neck. He smells like sweat and vomit. Perhaps this was why he wanted to spend time lying in wet dirt and grass.

Caduceus sighs in what sounds like contentment. “Future, huh?”

Thunder booms above them. The wagon stays warm and dry.

“The future, yes,” Caleb says, wrapping an arm around Caduceus’s waist.

“I’d like to think I understand you pretty well...” Caduceus murmurs.

Caleb waits for the rest, but it doesn’t come: Caduceus has fallen asleep. For once, it doesn’t seem fitful.

Caleb will need to leave the wagon and summon the Tiny Hut when the others return. For now, he presses closer and tries to clear his mind.

Grieving. A restless word, but clean and pliable. Like waiting for the end of a spring storm. Twined into the past, but not bound to it. A heart that breaks and keeps breaking, but not in punishment to itself.

He repeats it to himself under his breath. Imagines coming to Caduceus’s door as a stranger and saying: I am grieving my parents.

It is a very different word from others he’s used for himself. It feels strange. Like looking at a painting upside-down and seeing something new.

Nott mumbles something in her sleep; turns over to hug his waist. Frumpkin creeps out from behind the pile of Caduceus’s armor to curl up against the back of Caleb’s knees.

He listens to the rain until sleep takes him.

He dreams of the Blooming Grove. He limps, breathing his last, towards the door.

Lora walks beside him.

She is radiant in a trailing dress made of white yarrow and white roses. “Poison,” she says, smiling at Caleb like he hung the moon. Hummingbirds alight in her black hair.

Then she collapses slowly: each step takes her lower as her legs turn to dirt and her dress unravels to become the flowers of the garden. Her hair becomes dark blood on the path; it seeps into the earth and disappears.

Caduceus is not in the doorway.

Caleb has never seen the Wildmother before. She’s unmistakable: the entire garden curves into her, and upon her head she wears a crown of wheat and lavender. When she smiles in what could be gratitude, Caleb sinks to his knees.

She opens her mouth and her voice is Caduceus’s. She says: “Crop of the dead.”

The sun warms Caleb through to his bones. He feels light enough to fly.

Someone grabs his shoulder.

“—cold out there, Caleb,” Jester whispers, shaking him awake. “Can you get the Hut going for Fjord? I’ll stay with Nott and Caduceus.”

For a moment Caleb can’t think. His thoughts jump, and spark, and tumble from his reach. His chest constricts; he feels lightheaded.

“Jester,” he says, gripping her arm. “Jester, I need the journals. Right away, I need—”

“What? Get them yourself—hey!”

Caleb scrambles to his bag; pulls out each worn booklet and tosses it aside. “It’s—it’s from eight years ago. When she was studying large flora, and there was—it was—”

“Everything okay in there?” Fjord’s voice comes from beyond the tarp. “Come on, I’m soaked. Either make room or—” A cough rips through him. It’s wet, and miserable, and a terrible sign, but Caleb feels only excitement.

For once, his headache is gone. His heart races.

“Here!” he says, recognizing the wispy drawing of a willow on the cover. He opens the journal with hands that shake so badly he nearly rips out the pages. “We’ve been going about this all wrong. Lora tried to tell us: it’s a—a poison, not a sickness in the traditional sense.”

“Caleb?” Nott asks behind him. Her voice is heavy with sleep. “Do you need help?”

“A moment, just a moment please.” Caleb flips through and nearly despairs—wonders if he’d dreamed it all. Then he sees it: the drawing on the fifteenth page. A monstrous spiny tree, reaching skywards with limbs like a hundred human arms, flowers growing on their tips. A twisted human face is carved into the bark.

“Here!” he says, shoving it towards Nott. “Here, look at it, the both of you.”

“Barkskin,” she reads. “Hey, isn’t this—didn’t Beau and Yasha say they fought a tree monster during one of their runs?”

“They’re native to the area. Based on this drawing, I think they’re what we called ‘blackthorns’ at the Academy. Intelligent magical creatures, but territorial.”

“Caleb,” Nott says carefully, “we—we didn’t see anything like this in the hills.”

Jester pulls herself to her knees. She grabs the book from Nott; peers at it upside-down. “This is a good drawing, but yeah. There weren’t many trees there, Caleb, and I feel like we would have noticed a big plant monster. The shrubs didn’t look anything like this.”

“No,” Caleb says. “No, I mean, look at the next page. Look at her notes on the body.”

“Okay, well,” Fjord says. “Guess I’m just out here, then.”

“Oh, just squeeze in, you big baby!” Jester shouts. “Okay, um...she says she...found a dead little one in the woods to the south. She tried to keep it to study it—kind of gross, but okay!—but she started to get headaches and feel nauseous while it was in the house.”

“The blackthorn generates a poisonous gas,” Caleb says. “Usually it can control it, fire it off in a concentrated burst when threatened, but when it dies—when the body starts to decay—it’s reasonable to assume the poison may seep into the atmosphere. It would become slow-working and diffuse. Look, don’t you see? The symptoms are the same. She says—just here—that her eyes were irritated also. With enough contact—”

“Caleb.” Nott touches his arm gently. “It’s...this seems like a wild guess.”

“No,”  Caleb says, impatient with his own words, with his inability to speak as fast as his brain can think. “No, listen. Blackthorns can awaken lesser plants for a time: make them live and think and move around, like the shrubs we saw on the hillsides.”

He flexes his fingers; tries to channel his energy into the clenching of his hands. “What’s more, blackthorns themselves grow and retract flowers. Different kinds of blossoms, the mixture determined by each individual’s lineage. They appear up and down their body, as a mating display or as—as aggressive posturing. That’s how you recognize them; it sets them apart from other tree creatures. And look here—she wasn’t aiming for detail, but there are some blossoms drawn onto the topmost limbs that seem familiar. If the blackthorns in this area are related to one another—”

“Are you talking about the bluebells?” Jester asks. “Those grew out of the ground, though.”

“And the cliffs, and the hills, and the caves, yes. Just keep reading.”

Rain splatters into the wagon when Fjord shifts the tarp. He squeezes in next to Jester, careful not to step on Caduceus’s hair. “Okay,” he says, “I heard ‘gross’ and ‘body.’”

“She says the tree-thing grows,” Jester says in wonder. “She moved the body when she realized it was dangerous, but she kept going to visit it. It grew slowly, like a real tree, even though it was dead. Oh, creepy, it rotted but it kept putting out roots and flowers. Like it’s just a normal tree, except it’s a dead thing, too.” She hands the book back to Nott. “I feel like that’s not supposed to happen. Like it didn’t...die right.”

“Yes, exactly!” Caleb says. “She only saw its growth over the course of a year or so. But what if—what if you left it alone, just like that? What if you let the body grow and keep growing?  For hundreds and hundreds of years it kept growing, untouched by fire or other disasters?”

“I mean, that would have to be huge,”  Jester says. “You’d notice it right away.”

“For something that big to be around here,” Fjord says, “it’d have to be either in the ocean or—or under the ground.”

Thunder booms above them. Caleb breathes in the scent of the storm.

Caduceus shifts on the wagon floor. His brow is drawn downwards in pain. Caleb forces himself to look away—if he starts staring now, he may never stop.

“What if the ground came up around the body?” Nott says slowly. “Like, isn’t that how hills work? They build over time and bury stuff?”

“The last bout of sickness had been at least two hundred years ago, according to Anett,” Caleb says. “But that wasn’t the first time. If this thing is—is ancient, a thousand years old, its roots could span for miles. It could put forth and retract its flowers in the cave and on the cliff sides; it could give life to the shrubs on the hill. The only question remaining is: why now? Why only periodic sicknesses, and periodic imitations of life from a dead tree?”

“The bluebells,” Caduceus says clearly, “are the symptom instead of the disease. The blackthorn decays, and dreams in its death like a ghost gone wandering.”

Everyone looks at him in surprise. Nott helps him struggle to a sitting position. His breathing is ragged; his face is drawn.

“That poor thing,” the cleric says. “Somebody should help it rest.”

Chapter Text

Mandrake, mugwort, bezoar.

The first two are plants. Caduceus has mugwort in his pack, and a mandrake is a principle item in so many magical preparations that three members of the party have one on hand. The bezoar is trickier, but only slightly: Caleb sends half the party out deer-hunting, with the understanding that they may need to gut a few stomachs to find an appropriate ball of indigestible food mass.

“This is the easy part,” Caleb says, leafing through a journal. “Knowing the poison is plant-based means I have a broad idea of how we may counter it. But I don’t know that we can create an antidote for a species none of us have ever studied.”

The day is cloudy; the wind cold. He can almost smell the sea.

Nott looks up from peeling an apple with a pocketknife. “I mean, we can kidnap a tree if that’s what you need.” She coughs, pounding her own chest.

Caleb isn’t feeling any better than she is. Half-asleep this morning, he thought he was having a panic attack: his vision blurred around the edges and he could only breathe with difficulty. Instead it turned out that his headache had evolved an aura, and that his chest was full of phlegm.

The party hasn’t moved since Caleb made his blackthorn discovery. In part, this is to allow more time for study and the collection of antidote components as needed. In part, this is because everyone is exhausted.

Even now, he finds it harder and harder to focus: the words slide off the page, or drill into his eyes to burn against the back of his skull. No matter. He’s learned all he can from the journals. The rest will need to spring from his own training and his own wits.

“I don’t think that will work,” Caleb says, setting his papers aside. “We haven’t seen a blackthorn since Yasha and Beau’s encounter. And—and I’m not certain that looking at a live one will even work. It would be best if we could get a sample from the actual culprit. But…”

He looks to where Caduceus is laid out by the fire. He hasn’t woken in hours. His whole body twitches at random; his eyelids flutter. The flush has disappeared from his cheeks in favor of a uniform sick paleness.

“I don’t…” Caleb swallows. “I don’t think we have time to get back to the hills.”

Nott puts her knife down, her ears drooping. “I could—we could send one person? To ride hard?”

Caleb shrugs helplessly. Some of the weight of the previous day comes back to his shoulders. “Even then...I don’t know. It would take days to make the round trip. Whoever goes…”

He coughs. The wetness of the sound had been hard to listen to in others. Now he can feel the full pain of it; the way it seems to rip through his chest and displace anything in its path. He can see the way Nott looks at him in a mixture of pity and fear. It’s a wonder Caduceus has taken all of their fussing with such good grace. Another day or two and Caleb might start screaming.

“Listen,” he says finally, “I’m not saying we shouldn’t send someone. But...I mean, they’ll have to understand that things may be different when they get back.”

Nott winces. She looks down at her apple like she’s lost her appetite—Caleb knows she hasn’t had much of one in the first place.

Caduceus coughs in his sleep. The sound is softer than it should be.

Caleb rubs his hands over his face. “Oh, we are so close. There has to be some other way.”

If he’s correct—if the source of even one of his dreams has been divine in nature, a borrowed sort of inspiration—there would be no reason for the Wildmother to lead him to a lost cause. He cares little for gods, but he can’t imagine that Caduceus would worship one so capricious and cruel as to give false hope.

The wind picks up. Caleb smells rain.

For a moment, he thinks he hears thunder rolling in the distance. By the time his tired mind fathoms the sound into hoofbeats, Nott is on her feet and running.

“It’s Yasha!” she shouts. “She needs help!”

At first Caleb thinks the horse is riderless: no tall barbarian sits on its back. Then his stomach flips as he sees the long tangle of Yasha’s hair cascading around the horse’s neck. He sees her collapsed, boneless, in the saddle.

He swears loudly and gets to his feet, lightheaded enough to nearly fall over again.

Nott’s already there. She begins fumbling with something at the front of the horse, and it takes Caleb a moment to understand that Yasha’s wrists are tied loosely together, around the horse’s neck. Her legs are tied into place in the stirrups.

“Did—did someone get to her?” Nott says in a voice tight with panic. “What happened?”

Caleb thinks back to sailing with Yasha; watching her knot the lines. He starts working her ankles free. “No, I—I think she’s okay. I mean…”

Her normally-pallid face is tinged with an odd blue color, and he sees crusted traces of what looks like vomit at her lips. The dark kohl she wears around her eyes seeps down her face in muddy trails of dried sweat. “I—I mean, she’s not okay, but I think the knots are her own doing.”

When Nott gives him a blank look, he adds, “To ensure she could get back to us, even in utter exhaustion.” He hesitates, hands hovering at her shoulder. “Even...even in a sickness made worse by days of hard riding. In and out of storms.”

To his relief, Yasha seems to stir: her eyelids flutter, and she groans something in a language Caleb doesn’t know.

“Come on, friend,” he tells her, “we’ll get you down. Perhaps this wasn’t the ideal time to commune with your god.”

She tries to sit up in the saddle; collapses forward again.

“Good horse,” Nott murmurs.

“He—he told me to do something important,” she says.

“A moment, Yasha.” Caleb reaches up to put a hand on her back. “We need to, ah, strategize here.”

“I could...spot you?” Nott says. “Or, okay, let’s get the horse to kneel—”

“Listen,” Yasha says. “I have—” She takes several jagged breaths that dissolve into whooping coughs.

Caleb clicks his tongue. “We’ll get you cleaned up. Scheiße, you look exhausted.”

Lightning flashes on the horizon behind her, off away from the sea. The whites of her eyes are edged in yellow.

A shiver runs down Caleb’s spine, then a sense of cold awe. He thinks: how many gods—

Yasha reaches into the pack at her waist with a care and a delicacy Caleb recognizes from quiet, communal campfire nights spent pressing flowers into her book.

“I have something to give you,” she says, and pulls forth a sprig of bluebells.

It doesn’t rain again.

Yasha and Caduceus are kept huddled by the fire. Yasha wakes on occasion, and even manages to eat—and keep down—a bowl of mashed-up tuber at Beau’s urging.

Caduceus doesn’t really wake up anymore.

Sometimes he speaks: the words come out in garbled Common and Giant, if they are real words at all. Sometimes he tries to open his eyes. What’s worse is when he succeeds: they stare out, glassy and unknowing, and Caleb feels something in himself sliding out down the sandstone cliffs and towards the sea.

He has fever-addled nightmares of Caduceus as a rotting tree, laid out in a garden.

Caleb works ceaselessly, a wet cloth on his forehead, sitting by Caduceus’s side or laid out on the grass beside him. They lie back to back so Caduceus doesn’t choke on vomit in his sleep.

The little bluebell sprig curves like a shepherd's rod. Nine blossoms grow from it, all of them bright beyond reason: an eye-searing hue of blue-purple that sends Caleb’s headache into overdrive. He studies the blossoms together when he can, rather than plucking them from the sprig. The exception is when he needs to study the plant’s reaction to something that may destroy it: then, gently, he removes a blossom and works it in isolation. One he coats in charcoal; another he dips in acid. A third, he burns.

If his reasoning is correct, the poison seeps up from within the bark of the blackthorn. The flowers grow out of the tree, so they should be enough to create an antidote, but they are not the source of the sickness. Nevertheless, he keeps them in an isolated coin purse when they are not in use, and keeps them some distance apart from the party. He handles them in gloves.

The first time Fjord vomits, he looks for Caduceus’s turmeric. He finds stole-grass, wrapped in grey cloth, tucked away in the bottom of a small pouch that had hung from the cleric’s belt.

“Why the hell’d he lie?” Beau asks. “He said he ran out ages ago.”

No one responds: the answer comes to them all quickly, with a horror that makes their eyes dart guiltily towards and away from the unconscious bodies by the fire. If things went wrong—if things stayed bad—Caduceus wanted his friends to have the option of pain relief long after he was gone.

Caleb vomits into a shallow pit of sand.

“I’m fine,” he tells an anxious Nott, wiping his mouth with a cough. “This—I think this is regular vomit. Guilt vomit.”

“Well, that’s just fine then,” Nott says. Caleb can’t tell if she sounds outraged or relieved.

The bluebells swim in and out of his vision. His face burns and his hands fumble. Chrysanthemums bloom and decay behind his eyelids. There’s no time.

There’s no time and he’s burning.

If he can find the reverse—if he can take the properties of the poison and run it backwards, find its equal and its complement and its opposite—

Caduceus is warm at his back, bright and breathing.

Who’s to say how long it’s been? Minutes crawl by like days. Clouds and stars trace paths above him, moving like shrubs in the hills.

Frumpkin curls up in his arms sometimes, mewling softly. Then he gets up; brings Caleb fish and birds and little bugs.

Fjord and Beau prepare the gifts that pass for food and hunt down food of their own. They’re still standing, though they move slower than they should. Jester sleeps too much. Nott sponges Caduceus’s forehead and sings Yasha little songs.

Caleb’s head hurts and hurts and tries to split down the middle.

Caduceus is warm at his back—bright and breathing, bright and breathing.

He sets another blossom alight; draws the pattern of the smoke with a shaking quill.

Caduceus is warm at his back, bright and breathing. The Wildmother loves him so deeply. Caleb understands. Caleb sees, and keeps seeing, and sees the door open wide.

He opens his mouth to speak; coughs on his own spit. Beau pulls him upright; lets him lean against her shoulder. Jester brings him his waterskin; forces him to drink. Yasha’s hair spills out over the grass and sand; fades to white.

“Aster,” he chokes out, weary and wrung clean. “Aster and azalea and fire.”

Beau finds the aster blossoms Yasha had brought to Caduceus, dry and disintegrating in his pack. Nott mashes the mugwort and the mandrake and the bezoar with a mortar and pestle. Fjord and Jester ride out in the direction Caleb points them—there, he knows he saw azaleas bruise-pink and faded and clustered for strength there—and Caleb waits and waits and tries not to feel like falling. Tries not to burn; tries to see.

When Nott hands him the concoction, he adds a bluebell to the bowl.

To fight poison is to know poison.

He sets it all on fire; sends his arcane power through it. Then he boils a pot of water. Seeps it all like tea, but doesn’t strain it.

The sun spins above him; the blue sky bends like the bottom of teacup. Clouds break apart and move together again, on and on, in cycle.

Caleb stumbles to his feet. He takes the cooled pot off the firepit. He tries to say Caduceus’s name.

Yasha struggles to support herself on her forearms, the blanket falling from her blue-flushed skin. She watches Caleb with exhausted intensity. Dark clouds roll on the far edge of the sea.

Fjord wraps his arms around Caduceus’s shoulders; Jester mirrors him from the other side. Beau helps them lift the cleric to nearly a sitting position, supporting his lolling head from the back.

Caduceus’s hands stretch out to either side of him, his knuckles brushing the grass. His eyes are closed. His lips are just open; his cheeks alight. Lichen edges his leggings; yellow-gold dandelions spread at his feet.

Caleb approaches, holding the pot by its handle. It sways like a censer at his side.

He drops to his knees.

Nott gives him a cup—one of the sturdy traveling ones that had swung from Caduceus’s belt. Caleb fills it to the brim.

“Take this and drink it,” Caleb says, and holds it to Caduceus’s lips.

Beau carefully tilts his head backwards. His hair falls down around her face. She makes a sound that could be a sob.

At first there’s nothing: Caleb pours the sludge down Caduceus’s throat and fears he will choke him to death. 

Then with terrible joy he hears Caduceus cough and splutter; watches his Adam’s apple bob with a swallow.

Caleb puts the cup down. He stares at his knees. His spine bends forward; he contemplates falling to the ground and sleeping there. The grass is cool and his skin is burning, and his heart has leapt to his throat with a vicious tenderness that makes him want to vomit and cry and waltz all at once.

“You did it, Caleb!” Nott is telling him, hugging him, her fists balled up in the back of his shirt. “We did it. Now you have to drink. Caleb, we’re gonna live!”

He presses his chin into her shoulder and wraps his arms tight around her. She’s bright and she’s breathing.

Caduceus’s hair layers over the landscape, the most radiant thing he can see.

Caleb is bright and breathing and the door swings wide.

Chapter Text

Caleb sleeps and sleeps. Even when he wakes to sip the antidote, the weight of exhaustion presses down on him like five Frumpkins lined up along his chest.

He doesn’t dream of the Grove. His dreams are normal, verging on insipid: Kiri chasing violet mice, or Jester tattooing a tea kettle onto Fjord’s chest.

He’s never felt so tired, but neither has he felt so clean or breathed so deeply: like stepping out of a dark, steaming bathhouse with Mollymauk, into the domain of the sun.

The ache leaves his body so subtly that it takes Nott asking after him to realize it: “How’s your head?” she says on a bright midmorning, helping him to a more upright position. “That big brain of yours got a workout.”

Her eyes, always yellow, hadn’t shown the sickness as clearly as the others’ had. Still, there is something undeniably clearer in her expression today: a lightness to her glance and a quickness to her smile. She’s changed into fresh clothes.

“You know, I’ve had better days.” Caleb notes the way his arm tremors as he props his weight upon it. He taps his brow. “But my head? Clear as a glass.”

Nott stares at him. Then she starts to laugh, flopping down next to him on the grass.

“What?” Caleb asks. “What did I say?”

“Caleb—no real reason for asking this, but is that, like, a common saying in Zemnian?”

“Well, yes—if I say my head is ‘glass’...ah. I see. Oh, ha ha, let’s laugh at the dummkopf who calls his brain vacant.”  He schools his features into stern offense. “Yes, yes. Ohoho, how frivolous.”

Nott bursts out in another fit of giggles. “Terrible! Never laugh like that again!”

“Mm. Perhaps it can be weaponized.”

Nott rubs her eyes. She scooches forward and swings her legs over his lap, feet dangling off his opposing thigh. She props her weight on her hands, leaning back to look at the sky.

“Feels nice to breathe again,” she tells him.

Caleb nods. His breath falters slightly as his thoughts brush up against what might have happened if they’d moved too slowly—what he might have lost.

What the world might have lost.

Caduceus is laid out on his bedroll, under the blankets: the fever left him quickly, and the tremors had followed. His curled hands rest just in front of his face, obscuring part of it from Caleb’s view. His mouth is half-open. His brow is smooth and his skin is lusher than silver.

He’s woken up once already. At least, Caleb thinks he was conscious. He opened his eyes as Caleb was tilting another small sip of the antidote into his mouth. He swallowed, then smiled. Met Caleb’s gaze.

Before Caleb could think what to say, he was sleeping again.

Nott clears her throat.

He looks down to see her smiling at him. A small, sharp tooth presses into her lip.

“I’m proud of you,” she says.

“Team effort,” Caleb mumbles, pushing his hair from his eyes. It’s coarse with dried sweat and restless toss-turning nights. He considers going down to the sea.

“Hmm,” Nott says. She points and flexes her bare feet in rhythm. “You’re right. ‘Course it was.”

Caleb suddenly isn’t sure she’s talking about the antidote.

She gifts Caleb with another pointy grin; pats his hand. “Sweetie, you’ve come a long way.”

Caleb brews rosehip tea from Caduceus’s bag. Caduceus had once told him that the drink is customary during recovery from injury, though it has no magical properties of its own. The rose is called “sweet briar,” and while its petals are a delicate pink, the hips look like distended cherry tomatoes. They float on the water’s surface, turning gently. Caleb decides not to strain them out.

Carefully, he kneels by Caduceus’s side. He watches the slow rise and fall of his chest as he tries not to let retrospective panic clog his throat.

Don’t, he tells himself. We’re okay now. In this moment. It’s not quite a garden, but Yasha has laid a bundle of tall goldenrods at Caduceus’s feet.

Caleb sets the cup on the ground. He presses a hand to Caduceus’s shoulder.

“I’ve brought you two things,” he says softly.

Caduceus opens his eyes.

“Mm,” he says. And then, so warmly: “Caleb.”

Caleb’s breath shudders. His shoulders bend forward before he can stop them; his vision fractions into watery points of light.

Caduceus waits for him. The morning chill is dissipating—the day will be pleasant.

“...have two things for you,” Caleb repeats, willing his voice past the cracks and the breaks. He furiously rubs at his eyes. “Can you sit up? One is your, ah, medicine.”

“Of course,” Caduceus says. He doesn’t seem to need help, but Caleb hovers anyway, steadying him by the shoulder. Caduceus’s eyes move naturally and smoothly around the campsite: they take in the wagon, the horses, the distant figures of Fjord and Jester disappearing down the sandstone cliffs and heading to the sea.

Then his eyes flicker back to the start. They take in Caleb’s face.

Caleb’s heart picks up tempo. He clears his throat; presses his fingers against the bags under his own eyes.

“The other thing I have for you is—well, it’s just a cup of tea. Sorry. I made that sound more exciting than it was, in the lead-up.”

“That’s wonderful,” Caduceus says quietly. “Sit and drink it with me.”

The sun moves across the sky. They talk and they talk.

Caduceus’s voice is strained, rumbling even more deeply than usual. Caleb’s isn’t much better, but he can’t bring himself to care. Everything Caduceus says sparks a thought; deserves a response; brings a pool of lightness welling up inside him like dawn.

From here, when there’s no wind, they can hear water crashing on the shore—distant enough that the sound could blend into their consciousness, if they let it. If they tried not to hear.

Caduceus lays his hand over Caleb’s, and Caleb doesn’t pull away. The both of them pause for breath for the first time in what feels like hours.

Colors grow vivid: the bright of the sky, the spread of dandelions. Caleb’s heart pounds and pounds: relief, relief, relief.

“I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about ‘deserving,’” he finally says.

Caduceus shrugs. Some of his old grace is returning to him: the motion is fluid and free of judgement. “I can work with that. Can I tell you something, though?’

“Of course.”

“I think one day you might learn to see yourself the way other people see you. Use your notions of ‘deserving’ to make wise and just decisions—which you do already, I think—without also using them as a battering ram on your own head.”

Caduceus reaches out; presses two fingers into Caleb’s forehead. He smiles. “You’re so smart, Caleb. You were right to fight this in a way I couldn’t bring myself to. Imagine what the world would’ve lost without you.”

Caleb only goes cross-eyed for a moment before giving up, turning his gaze back on Caduceus.

“Can’t be more than the world would gain,” he replies, but the words taste odd in his mouth.

He can see the broad shape of it again: Caduceus’s philosophy. The past isn’t the present. There are no scales, balancing the loss of his parents against his continued life. There is simply life and more life. Deeds and happiness.

(And there are dark paths where self-loathing could take him: an old man who never reaches the open door.)

He sees delicate commonalities wound between them like his silver thread.

“There are things I want to do in atonement,” Caleb says slowly. “And you want me to do most of those things, too. But not for the same reason.”

Caduceus’s smile goes soft. He lowers his hand from Caleb’s forehead; places it on Caleb’s thigh. “No,” he says.

“You want me to live.” Caleb takes a deep breath. “And not—not for atonement, either.”

“No.” His eyes trace the line of Caleb’s chin. Then they fall to his throat. Then they follow the strands of Caleb’s long hair back up to his eyeline.

“Thank you for saving me,” he says.

Caleb swallows. Pictures himself from the outside.

A happy shout from the cliffs: Jester is running towards them, hefting silver fish on a line.

Caleb turns his hand over beneath Caduceus’s, weaving their fingers together.

“I’ve missed you,” he says. “I suppose we should make the most of all this.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Caduceus says, and nods towards his cup of tea.

Caleb walks until the waves come up to his bare stomach.

“Mm. Intolerably cold, of course.” He crosses his arms over his chest.

“Really?” Caduceus reaches over and grasps Caleb’s wrist, pulling it down between them just as the next wave comes, water running around and between their fingers, soaking them through to the thighs. “I feel more awake than I have in ages. Cleaner, too.”

“Easy for you to say!” Nott yells from the shore. She picks her way along the rocky sand, just far enough that only the boldest of waves touch her feet. “You and Caleb are never clean clean. Nasty ocean salt? Whatever! Wooo, I just love being brined! It’s just like hygiene when you think about it!”

Beau surfaces to Caleb’s left, swimming on her back like an oddly muscular jellyfish. “What’re we fighting about now?”

Yasha’s head pops up beside hers. She shakes water from her hair like a dog.

“Brining,” Caduceus says. “You know, I have a great recipe for pickled beetroot.” He runs a fingernail along Caleb’s wrist, then repositions so their fingers link together.

Beau gets to her feet, stumbling with a particularly strong wave. Her bangs stick to her face, flat to her eyebrows. “Okay, neat. But controversial how?”

“Just get in the water, Nott,” Caleb calls. “It’ll be easier if you go under fast.”

Fjord is a slip of green in the distance. He moves through the wave crests like he’s melted into them. Jester approaches Nott on the shore, saying something too soft to catch.

Caduceus stoops down to speak into Caleb’s ear, close enough to evoke a shiver. “Should maybe take your own advice, you know. I’ll go down if you do.”

Beau raises an eyebrow. Caleb raises a competing eyebrow right back.

“Okay,” he says. “Ja, we’ll go on three.”

With a shriek of laughter, Jester rushes past them all, diving headfirst into a wave. Nott follows with an echoing scream, all terror and excitement and bravery.

“One,” Caleb says. He squeezes Caduceus’s hand.

The cliffs rise up behind them, crumbling yellow stone reaching for the sea.

“Two,” Caleb says, and Caduceus’s smile is lopsided-sweet.

“Three,” Caleb says, and plunges his head under the sunlit water. He lets the salt and the sea roll over him, cool and new.

On either side of the grass pathway, the earth inclines steeply. The trees rise up around them, curving in like bright walls of a high tunnel. The whole effect is dazzling: like passing through a cave of leaves and dying light. Early-evening fireflies blink between them; one alights on Caduceus’s shoulder. Another settles into his long sleeve.

“This’ll take us a ways yet,” Caduceus says. “It’s called a hollow way. A path nobody made, except that everybody did.”

The trees are high enough, set on the raised ground, that even the lowest branches don’t come close to brushing against his tall head. His smile is lazy; his strides long and slow.

“Riddles,” Caleb says, hearing a softness to his own voice that he hadn’t meant to put there. He has to take nearly two steps for every one of Caduceus’s. He doesn’t mind. Their pace is easy; their packs are light.

Caduceus clears his throat. “Folks travel back and forth through forests, again and again, until the way wears down beneath them. Nature bends around them and mingles with them. Makes people a part of it all.”

“It all?”

Caduceus quirks a grin at him. He quickens his step so he’s walking just in front of Caleb. Then he lifts his hands at his sides as though in offering, palms upwards, fingers splayed towards the trees. He spins on his heel. His sleeve trails him like a spider web caught in the wind. His hair floats around him, just for a moment, with the momentum. Then strands of it come to rest against his nose as he completes his turn. Just as he’s facing Caleb again.

With the colors of the forest path behind him, with his face decorated in flashes of sunset-light through trees, Caduceus takes backwards strides. Not for a moment does he drop his gaze from Caleb’s. Not for a moment can Caleb look away.

“I meant, all of this,” Caduceus says. “All of everything.”

Something in Caleb’s chest constricts. Memorize this moment, a strange and desperate part of him says. Memorize this.

Another part of him says: a moment is not enough.

After recovery (a slow few days that Beau had mourned as “sickness-jail”), it had taken another two days to round the north side of the hills. From there, at their gentle pace, it took over a week to get back to Milotte. They camped an easy day’s ride from the cave entrance that started it all.

Jester had conveyed the antidote in a series of messages back to Maripoll, and sent a warning to the innkeeper in Milotte. Still, travelers moving between towns could easily stumble upon the sickness without realizing. The best solution seemed to be to plant a sign.

Or, as Caduceus said, to give the blackthorn some peace.

Their lives had been interrupted, of late. Certain personal developments had been forced to take a back seat. It was with no great surprise that Caleb heard Jester and Nott whispering to each other while casting him furtive glances. He was even less surprised when they approached him with a proposition: surely not all of the Nein needed to head back to the caves. The ghost is gone, and they know the antidote to the poison. The countryside is peaceful and there’s a reward sitting uncollected in Milotte.

“Plus, I can’t wait to sleep in a bed again,” Jester had said. “I hate to stick you with the bad end of the deal, Caleb, but it makes sense for you and Caduceus to go together. You’re the ones who’ve done the most research. Don’t hate us, okay?”

Caleb had struggled not to roll his eyes at her transparency, watching her restrain her grin.

“We’ll suffer through it,” he managed.

When he delivered the news to Caduceus, pulse stuttering oddly, the cleric nodded in contemplation. “Well,” he had said, picking wild strawberries, “might as well make a vacation out of it. How do you feel about walking there?”

Now, in this moment writ large as Caduceus takes backwards steps in lichened boots, as the cleric’s grin becomes soft and self-assured, Caleb can’t imagine doing anything else.

Frumpkin emerges from the treeline, dropping down the incline to meet them. His little tongue flashes over his lips, cleaning off any residue of dinner.

Caduceus lets his walk peter to a stop; rolls his shoulders back. He stretches his arms over his head with a grunt.  “Should we make camp for the evening?”

“I…” Caleb swallows, his throat suddenly dry. “Will you walk with me, for just a little while longer?”

“Always.” Caduceus reaches out to squeeze his arm. “Nothing quite like a night walk.”

Caleb breathes deeply. Frumpkin trots ahead of them, his tail swishing. They walk in silence for a time, until a warm near-summer’s darkness takes them. Every breath Caleb takes feels layered in something potent and thick. Like night magic, or like electricity lingering in air.

His thoughts wander, then return.

“Another thing I remembered,” he says, “about blackthorns.”

“Mm?” Caduceus scratches at the back of his neck. His other hand dangles at his side. Caleb has taken it many times. This time he just lets the backs of their hands bump together; let their knuckles brush.

“It’s...they can immerse people in dreams. Send messages.” He bites the inside of his lip. “What I told you about the Wildmother, how she seemed to appear to me...I hate to admit it to you, but it probably wasn’t her.”

“It was her,” Caduceus says, calm as anything.

Caleb frowns. “How can you be sure? Did you feel her presence there?”

Caduceus shrugs. “I always feel her presence. That’s how I know it was her.”

“That...I’m not following.”

Caduceus glances at him, forehead creased—Caleb knows the look, now. He’s trying to find the right words for something he understands intuitively.

“You think maybe a bit of nature reached out to you,” Caduceus says slowly. “Whether it was asking for help, or just...imposing its nightmares on you through the lens of your own memories, or...who knows. Whatever happened, if the blackthorn reached out to you, or if it was the Wildmother in her mortal guise—doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing. ‘It all’ again. One big power. The world speaking out.”

Caleb bites back questions, commentary. Thoughts on dreams and visions and prophecy and glimpses of another time and place (“help me let them rest”). Deep knowledge, alien and powerful. A type of feral logic he may never understand.

It feels like comfort; like tea in a wild place.

They round a bend, and Caduceus lets out a breathless oh.

Ahead of them, the trees break on either side: they are replaced, instead, with wildflowers. Stalks of giant hyssop cluster down the slope. They’re on the dusky side of lavender, bending with the warm breeze. Nearer to the path are daffodils, bright yellow even in the rapidly-darkening evening.

Everything is interspersed with fireflies. They rise from the grass pathway, ever upwards: they wink into existence as they reach the open air, then wink out again while still in motion, giving the illusion of a continuous stream—a continuous rising until they’ve become the stars that appear, one by one, where the trees have given way to open sky.

Caleb doesn’t know what to say. The air tastes suddenly sweeter.

“Now that’s just lovely,” Caduceus says with the most radiant smile, and for a moment Caleb believes that happiness is a moral good.

He feels something unfurling between them, and lets it come to rest on his shoulders. Its weight is not a little thing.

“Come here,” he says, and reaches for Caduceus’s hands.

Caduceus gives them willingly. Something in his face changes: his eyes grow just slightly wider, and his lips part just enough for Caleb to see a glimpse of white teeth. A flush rises to his silvered cheeks.

His gaze flutters up and down, taking Caleb in. Then his long lashes dip, his eyes becoming half-lidded. His hands are rough and warm.

Caleb swallows.

“There are so many things I want to tell you.” He says it like a declaration.

He moves like one, too: he reaches up to cup the back of Caduceus’s neck, pulling his face downwards just as he thrusts up his own, stretching his spine straighter than he usually deigns to. Their foreheads bump together, not hard enough to hurt, but solidly enough that Caleb thinks of cats and how they show affection. Once, of course, you’ve earned it.

Caduceus’s lips curve upward with something like wonder. He’s holding very still.

Caleb watches his clear bright eyes until he can’t anymore. Then he closes his own eyes and presses his lips to Caduceus’s jawline.

Caduceus smells like moss and dark earth; his skin is smooth and dewy. His breath hitches. His free hand comes up to rest on Caleb’s thigh, pressing in and downwards.

Caleb kisses the space between jaw and neck. Jaw and ear.

A pulse stammers under his lips as Caduceus’s breath releases in a slow, faltering stream. He is eternally, painstakingly calm.

“Come on,” Caleb murmurs, and kisses him on the mouth.

Caduceus is still for a moment longer, their lips just touching. His skin is cooler than Caleb’s is. It doesn’t, for that moment, feel real.

Then Caduceus moves all at once: his lips pressing, his arm wrapping around Caleb’s waist and his tall body bending forward to meet Caleb and to surround him. Caleb finds himself tilting his chin up, up—his tongue presses experimentally against Caduceus’s bottom lip. His head fills with moths and his chest fills with light.

He could rest all his weight on Caduceus’s arms, if he wanted to. He could collapse and still be held up.

A moment isn’t enough, but moments on top of moments are practically a life.

The caves are dark and empty. Near the entrance there are at least strange fungi, casting odd shadows in torch light, to occupy Caleb’s attention. It’s not long, however, until the rocky walls become bare and the sounds of skittering animals fade into a silence sharp and cold. His footsteps echo more than they should.

Caleb imagines he can feel the poison settling in his lungs. He reaches into his pack for reassurance; clutches his bottle of antidote tightly. There will be no trouble. Symptoms don’t even set in for days. By then he and Caduceus will be gone and healthy again.

Still, it feels wrong: walking back into a power that nearly destroyed them all.

Caduceus gives his shoulder a squeeze. He lifts up his torch, scanning the walls. “No sign of bluebells. Further in, I guess.” His voice echoes strangely, and Caleb thinks of a cleric lit by candlelight, staring down the dark.

“Ja. I think we’d been walking for some time before we encountered Lora—hadn’t we? It all sort of...blurs together in places like this.”

“How so?”

Caleb glances at him. The torch light glows on Caduceus’s cheekbones and glints on his armor. Caleb experiences, for the hundredth time today, a rush of jittering affection.

“Mm, I suppose it wouldn’t be the same for you. You probably feel as at home in these low places as you do among the trees.”

Caduceus smiles slightly. “Normally, yeah, you’d be right about that. Never did understand what people have against guano.”

Caleb opens his mouth for a moment, then reconsiders and closes it again.

Caduceus continues: “It’s different here, though, ‘cause there’s something unacceptable happening on the line between life and death. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.” His smile goes regretful around the edges. “I felt it way back the first time—that sense of...the undead, the restless—but I thought it had to be Lora. Powerful feeling. Couldn’t understand why we defeated her so easily, if her presence was so strong.”

“But it was the blackthorn you were sensing.”

“Must have been. Lora was...she was powerful in her own right, maybe, but she was new. Really new. The blackthorn is ancient.”  The last word twists with disapproval: like Caduceus doesn’t think such a thing should be allowed to happen. Like someone should have stopped it. Spared it.

Silence overtakes them, the only sound the gravel under their feet. Caleb wonders if anyone else has died in the caves. Probably not often, given how slow-acting the poison is. No, much more likely to leave the caves and spread it to friends and family. Still, it wouldn’t be smart to rule out the idea: he watches out of the corner of his eye for strange motions, for glowing ghosts.

Frumpkin, unbothered by the atmosphere and bored of walking, makes a clean leap into Caleb’s arms, then clambers up to fold himself around Caleb’s neck. Caduceus watches their interaction with clear delight.

A bend in the passageway. Another.

“We still haven’t determined why the poison is only intermittently contagious,” Caleb says.

“Inter-hmm?”

“Ah, I mean occasionally. Sporadically.”

“Oh, that?” Caduceus shoots him a quizzical look. “I think we know that already.”

Caleb strokes a knuckle down Frumpkin’s head. “Alright,” he says, somehow unsurprised. “And how did we learn this?”

“We didn’t.” Caduceus frowns slightly. “I just...know.”

“Ah. Clerics.”

Caleb presses his hip into Caduceus’s, only relenting when the cleric stumbles in his walk. Caduceus wrinkles his nose at him and presses back. Not hard. Just enough to say: I am here.

“Well, it’s like this.” Caduceus holds his lantern up higher to light their path. “Things come in cycle. It’s only natural that trauma works the same way.”

Caleb hears his own feet scratching against gravel. Frumpkin shifts on his shoulders.

“Pain is...” Caduceus says. “The blackthorn couldn’t die right. For all intents and purposes, we can call it ‘undead.’ What that means for most creatures is that they died in terrible pain. They got all wrapped up in something—usually not just physical injury, but spiritual—and they couldn’t let go. But living people do that, too. That’s trauma. And it’s not—not always just the same feeling, day in and day out. It comes in cycle. Like seasons, or tides. For a being as old and slow as the blackthorn, well...”

“But you can help the dead rest, can’t you?” Caleb says slowly. His pulse rises in his ears. “You keep trying to spare them.”

When Caduceus reaches for his hand it’s natural. Caleb doesn’t need to think to move in response; to make space for their fingers to entwine. His hands were, perhaps, made for this.

“We can spare them, yeah,” Caduceus says, equally slow. “Caleb, to be truly spared, they have to let go of this life. And this life has to let them go.”

Caleb tries to swallow. It makes his throat hurt and his eyes burn; his mind flashes to the poison before he remembers that this just happens to him sometimes.

This time, the lump in his throat stings like gratefulness.

“We can let them rest, Caleb,” Caduceus says, and squeezes his hand.

They reach the place where Lora tried to bring the cave down on top of them.

At the top of the blocked passageway there’s a gap in the rubble, left over from when the rest of the Nein had rescued Caleb and Caduceus from the cave-in.

“It’ll hold, probably,” Caduceus says. He climbs up first, awkwardly holding the torch, then lends Caleb a hand. Frumpkin brings up the rear.

“You probably did not mean to make that sound as ominous as you did,” Caleb tells him.

Caduceus, already beyond the gap, is silent.

When Caleb emerges, he sees why. They don’t need the torch anymore.

The cavern would be familiar to him, were it not covered in bluebells. They spill from the crevices—dangle from the walls, cling to the ceiling. The floor is like a garden patch. They glow with an unearthly light that increases in intensity towards the far end of the cavern: the gaping space where Caduceus had stared out so long ago, into the dark. Now, lit by blue light, the space is clearly empty. A dead end.

The fallen piece of ceiling Caduceus had used as a chair is still here, untouched by flowers.

Lora’s dried-up body lies propped against the wall. Bluebells grow between the stones around her. One sprig, perhaps passing from the rock through her flesh, seems to grow from her cheek.

Caleb wants to vomit. He looks to Caduceus instinctively, only to see a look of wonder on the cleric’s face.

“The best we can do for a body,” he murmurs, “is to let the earth take it down and raise it up.”

His response is not surprising. They’ve done all they can for Lora; given her the closest thing she could have to peace. Were the body and the bluebells not poisoned, Caleb imagines Caduceus may have taken some blossoms with him to make dead people tea. As it stands, the most respectful option—from the perspective of a cleric of the wild—would be to speed the rate of decay.

Strange to think that they never knew her. Not really. He met her, once, in a dream.

Caduceus walks to her side; casts decompose. The flowers multiply.

Holy work or not, Caleb has to look away.

The cavern flowers, on closer inspection, look withered around the edges. They glow, but the edges of the curling petals look crumpled. Perhaps magic does not sustain them as well as daylight would.

“This place certainly looks different now,” he says after a moment. “Do you think...”

He steps towards the dead end where the flowers cluster. The wall is smooth in the few spaces he can see between the blossoms, nothing like the messy rubble of the tunnel. But perhaps after many years...

“Caduceus,” he says, “I’m—I’m going to try moving the wall.”

“Sounds good,” Caduceus says. “I don’t...think that’ll bury us alive, but hey, I can walk through stone.”

“Comforting for you, certainly,” Caleb says, and casts earthen grasp.

The wall permutates, then moves: the rubble forms into a giant hand, covered in bluebells. It slides along the bottom of the cave floor and out of the way.

A few streams of dust shake free from the ceiling, but nothing else moves or threatens to collapse. The wall hadn’t been the only thing holding the cavern up.

Caleb stands before a monstrosity.

The body is twisted, gnarled, and unmoving. Wet brown wood is mottled with black rot, nearly consumed by it—the damp-sweet smell overpowers Caleb and nearly sends him to his knees. He smells mold; tastes spores of it. He begins to hack into his arm.

Even with his eyes closed, he can see the mouth, the image burned into him: a massive gaping slash in the wood, bigger than his own body laid out sideways. A damp cave. A blackness. Above it, a hole where an eye should be.

A hand comes to rest on his back. Caleb coughs once more—poison, he’s breathing poison all over again—and turns towards Caduceus. He clutches the cleric’s arm.

“It’s terrible,” he hears himself saying, his vision swimming. His fingers tingle. He swallows. “We’re only seeing such a small part of it. Scheiße, I can barely get my mind around it. It’s too big. How—”

A hand cups his cheek. “Hey,” Caduceus says, “Look at me?”

Caleb looks. He sees long hair and light eyes in darkness. He sees a wide pink nose and a spiral earring. He sees, as he always does, Caduceus.

“We can let them rest,” Caduceus says. “Caleb, we can.”

Caleb’s next breath is less erratic. He takes air in slowly, imagining open sky above him.

Caduceus reaches out towards the tree, palm forward. His posture is firm and self-assured, but his fingers betray his gentleness: they curl in over his palm slowly, like Caleb has seen them curl when Caduceus falls asleep.

“I don’t want it to...hurt when we do it,” he says almost dreamily. “It doesn’t have a brain, but it has...receptors. Ways of feeling pain. I can dull those. Make ‘em mushier.”

He steps forward, a small man compared to the vastness of the tree. Caleb nearly stops him, but thinks better of it: this is, after all, what Caduceus does.

He touches the goopy, rotted bark, first with the tip of a finger, then with the flat of his hand. He doesn’t hesitate.

“Come on, friend blackthorn,” he murmurs. “Let’s settle you down a bit.”

Then he casts decompose, and everything changes.

The blackthorn explodes into flower. There are fresh bluebells, unwithered, bursting from the wood like time has sped forward. Then there are clusters of petunias, bruised black in their centers but ringed in pink and lavender. Proud stalks of sword lilies, all colors—yellow and peach and red and royal purple. Then sweet briar roses. Then bluebells all over again.

They bloom, and grow, and overtake one another: color after color, new life after new life, born from a dying thing until all Caleb can see is a solid wall of flowers: filling the blackthorn’s mouth and its eye, covering the mold, growing from rot, a vertical garden, sweet-scented and heavenly. Airy and lustrous and climbing. Alive.

Caleb breathes and breathes: poison buried in flowers so lovely he can barely stand to look at them.

Caduceus removes his hand, stumbling slightly. Caleb blinks to awareness. He wraps an arm around the small of his back.

“Alright?”

“Mm.” Caduceus’s eyes are half-lidded. His face is bathed in blue light. “Yeah, it...took a lot out of me. But this is good.”

Caleb nods. He suddenly cannot imagine finding the blackthorn grotesque. It is, if anything, tragic. Trapped.

A petal floats down from the wall of flowers. It’s bright blue and gleaming.

“I know what you want me to do,” Caleb says. “I think I can do it, but we’ll need to leave quickly when I’m done.”

Caduceus touches Caleb’s waist. He looks at him with eyes that are clear and healthy. He looks at him with a calm affection that Caleb hadn’t know to look for in the world anymore.

“Sure. But until then, go slow,” Caduceus says. “It’s okay if it takes time.”

Caleb swallows. He puts just enough space between the two of them that he can pull sulfur out of his pocket. He mashes it with guano, then faces the garden-tree, palms forward. His fingers, unlike Caduceus’s, do not curve softly inwards: they are immaculately straight and still. He’s made the gesture a thousand times before. It’s born of his training; of the time when he thought he had a powerful destiny that was worth throwing everything else away for.

He remembers walking up to his parents’ door in the dark of night. He doesn’t remember much else, besides the flames.

The flowers hum with something. He leans forward until a sword lily blossom brushes up against his wrist, light and wistful. It has no thorns.

He remembers a different door, much later, swinging wide.

With the slightest push to the energy flowing under his skin, he sets the blackthorn alight. The flowers go up in smoke, petals on the air. The flames cleanse and consume and work their way through to the wood, to the core of it. They’ll work their way outward, too: traveling around the wooden roots behind the cave walls until lack of oxygen puts them out. By then the thing’s heart will be burned clean. Smoke in the air, lingering but transformed. Laid to rest.

He knows that Caduceus is beside him, alongside him, murmuring under his breath: “May the earth take you down…”

Flaming flowers rise up high.

And deep in an unnamed cave grown up wild and dark and unabashed, Caleb spares the dead.

“Look at this,” Caleb says. “Stole-grass. It’s rare, isn’t it? Should we take some?”

“Sure, in a minute.” Caduceus is kneeling at the side of the path, the loose ends of his belt just brushing the ground, his staff laid down beside him. “Wow. Haven’t seen carnations this bright in a long time.”

Caleb folds his hands behind his back. He approaches Caduceus with the lack of urgency the two of them have basked in since leaving the cave that afternoon: making a slow lunch of stew and strawberries, then exploring any branching forest path that seems to lead vaguely in the right direction. It feels, for once, like they have all the time in the world.

The gift of time is not one Caleb is likely to overlook again. He’s giddy with it, reckless in a way he hasn’t been since childhood. There are so many paths in the forest.

He crouches next to Caduceus, a slight bounce in his knees. “Hmm, they are nice. I’m more used to seeing the white ones.”

Caduceus grasps a stem with great gentleness, running his thumb down a long and slender leaf. He picks the bright red blossom with reverence.

“Looks a bit like a papercraft,” Caleb says, leaning into his shoulder. “With all the petals folded around each other like that. Did you make those as a child? I could make a boat and not much else.”

“We made swans,” Caduceus says. He rolls the stem between his thumb and forefinger. The blossom spins like a dancer’s red skirt. “Corin was the best at getting the folds right. Mine always came out looking like squirrels, somehow.”

“Can you make carnation tea?”

Caduceus brings the flower up to his nose absently. He seems to forget to smell it. Instead he holds it there as he speaks, his lips hidden in the red. “Sure. If it’s an herb or a flower, I can make tea out of it. Really anything with a petal or leaf, s’long as it’s not poisonous. Whether it’s any good, though…”

“Are there better uses for carnations?”

Caduceus’s eyes flash over to him, mischievous.

He pushes Caleb’s shoulder, overbalancing him. With an offended sound, Caleb falls to the grass.

He props himself up by the elbows. “Careful,” he says. “You could have pushed me into the stole-grass. It’s extremely uncomfortable. I should know, I—”

Then Caduceus is over him. He presses Caleb back to the ground by the shoulder. Caleb goes willingly, his breath escaping him in an audible shudder.

He feels the weight of Caduceus’s thighs; his stomach. He feels the hand pressing down on his shoulder, keeping him still and stable. He feels Caduceus’s leg finding space between his own.

Caduceus props himself up, then; watches Caleb with an energy both ethereal and immediate. From this angle his cheekbones are sharp and high. His collarbone is fine and lovely. Caleb doesn’t want to move an inch—doesn’t know how.

Then, just as suddenly, Caduceus’s face flushes a deep pink. His ears flick back nervously, and Caleb thinks: oh.

Caleb raises a hand; wraps his fingers in the loose white shirt that covers Caduceus’s chest. Pulls.

Slowly, Caduceus obeys: he lowers himself over the hand until the pink hair that spills around his shoulders is brushing along Caleb’s forehead, his cheeks, his jaw. A curtain falling over them both, until Caduceus is the only thing he can see. Until Caleb’s hand is the only thing keeping their chests apart.

“You’re incredible,” Caleb finds himself breathing. He almost says, More than I deserve, but thinks better of it. Time enough for doubts and self-recriminations later. Some things are more important, in the moment.

He flattens his hand against Caduceus’s chest. He lifts his head to meet Caduceus’s lips; pushes upward to kiss him long and deep. Lets Caduceus push him right back until he’s lying flat on the grass again—being kissed. He feels utterly weighted down, and in this, he feels as light as smoke on the wind.

Tomorrow they’ll meet their friends in a small town in the countryside. Frumpkin will walk ahead of them, tail swishing in the grass. They’ll sleep in a warm inn and plan out their next adventure.

Today Caduceus pins Caleb’s hand to the ground over his head, their fingers entwined. With his other hand, he reaches up and tucks the red carnation behind Caleb’s ear.

And everywhere, everywhere, the sharp and blue-fringed grass.