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1
“Happy birthday,” whispers his mother.
He stirs from half-sleep, resisting the urge to pull the covers closer around himself against the frozen morning air — he is not a child, he can take it. “Danke,” he mumbles.
The sun has not yet risen and his small bedroom is dark, but his mother has lit a candle, and in its faint glow he sees her smile. She is holding something, a bundle wrapped in cloth.
Bren sits up. The cold bites at his skin.
“Nein, liebchen,” scolds his mother, “keep under your blankets, it is the coldest night of the year.”
“It’s morning, Mother. The sun will be up soon enough.”
Is she paler today, or is it just the dim light? Bren tries to study her face without being too obvious. Her cheekbones are sharp, her chin is weak, and her straw-colored hair hangs limp and unadorned around her shoulders. His mother is not beautiful. Bren’s looks are from his father, his reddish hair and easy smile and that cleft in his chin that girls tease him for. The only thing his mother gave him are his blue eyes.
There is no face in the world dearer to him than hers. Not his own, not his father’s, not any girl’s in the whole valley.
She is not starving, he thinks, looking closely. She is thin, but not starving. They are not there yet. And her cough is still getting better.
There is time. He can rescue them.
“Sit.” Bren pats the bed next to him. “While we wait for the sun.”
His mother doesn’t know how to not be on her feet, but at his urging she obeys, and as soon as she has sunk down onto the old mattress Bren throws his blanket around her shoulders, wrapping her up tight.
She stifles a laugh.
“And if that does not keep you warm enough…”
Bren snaps his fingers and summons a flame.
It is no bigger than the candle flame next to them on the bedside table, but his mother’s laugh dies when she sees it dancing on his fingertips. All of a sudden there are shadows in the hollows of her cheeks and beneath her deep-set eyes.
Scheisse, thinks Bren, but it’s too late to take it back now.
“I wish you would not do that, liebchen,” whispers his mother, and she clutches the edges of the blanket with one hand. “You know I do not like it.”
“It’s only magic, Mother.” He rolls his fingers in the air and makes the flame wriggle like an animal. “It’s harmless. It’s my gift.”
“It is a gift from the gods,” she agrees, “and you will use it to serve our country well, I am sure, but...please, not fire. Not in the house.”
The barest hint of irritation crawls over Bren’s skin, just for a moment. Not in the house, liebchen. Not inside. How many times has she scolded him? The Albrecht barn nearly burned down last month. Does she not trust him? Does she think that he isn’t careful, that he hasn’t studied, hasn’t practiced...?
He snaps out the flame. “There is no wood in the fireplace anyway,” he mutters.
A soft, sad smile curves his mother’s lips. “Oh, mein sohn.” Her hand comes up to cradle the side of his face. “I am so very proud of you. Your father and I both. You are going to do great things.”
Bren can’t help but give her a small smile in return. “I will not let you down,” he tells her.
“I know you will not.” Her smile broadens. “I have a surprise for you.”
She takes the cloth bundle out from inside the blanket and holds it toward him.
Bren stares at it. “Was ist das?”
“What do you think it is? A birthday present, of course.”
“Mother…” He swallows. “We agreed...Father said…”
“Your father doesn’t need to know if you don’t tell him.”
Her eyes are twinkling. She looks alive.
The bundle is lighter than it looks, when he takes it in his hands. It’s wrapped in nothing but a bit of old tablecloth from the rag bin, which Bren folds carefully before setting aside, since it must not go to waste. Only then does he allow himself to pay attention to what he is holding.
It is a book. It is a slender, leather-bound, perfect book.
“Scheisse,” breathes Bren without thinking, and for once his mother does not reprimand him.
It is not perfect, truth be told. He sees this at once. The soft leather cover is worn and bears a faint stain in one corner, and the binding is a little threadbare. He opens it, flips gently through a handful of blank pages, and some of the paper is scratched or torn. There is actually a spot where it looks like some pages have been carefully torn out. This was certainly owned and used by someone before it came to him.
Next to his mother’s face, it is the most beautiful thing Bren has ever seen.
Wordlessly, he glances at her, hoping that she can read the question in his eyes, since he does not trust himself to speak.
A faint blush rises in her cheeks. (Another thing Bren has inherited from her, one that he hates, though the girls seem to like it even more than the cleft in his chin.) She clears her throat. “Well. I saved up a little of the egg money. It was hardly anything, liebchen, I bought it off a peddler in the autumn, he was practically giving it away.”
She is lying. A blank journal, even a used one, with this many pages, bound in leather, not linen, with waxed thread for the stitching...Bren’s head swims to think of it. Eight or nine copper coins? A silver piece? Gods be damned, she cannot have spent a silver piece on this, on him, not after everything else…
“It should be nicer,” she is saying, and Bren stares at her. “You should have something nice to write in, you know, while you are away. Something...I don’t know, something for your thoughts, for your hopes and dreams. A boy your age should have a lot of those. But this will have to do for now, if you can forgive the poor condition — ”
Bren pulls her into the tightest hug he can bear to give, afraid of bruising her or setting off her cough but so determined that she should feel everything coursing through his heart. A book. He has never owned a book before. His parents have never owned a book before — Bren has had to learn in bits and pieces, in hours stolen from the family fields when a schoolteacher is passing through the valley, in precious evenings spent huddled at the kitchen table over a battered, borrowed copy of the village richter’s almanac. Once, after begging for weeks, he finally persuaded the Schreiber girl to steal something from her father’s tiny library for him in exchange for a reluctant kiss. She brought him a cookbook. He read it for hours, over and over again, until Herr Schreiber caught him with it under the apple tree behind the hayloft and threatened to tan his hide if he ever found him near his property again.
But this book is Bren’s. Bought and paid for. He has no pencil to write in it with, but that’s fine, he will have pencils at the Academy — he might even have ink, it occurs to him suddenly, he might have his own inkpen, and he realizes that he’s trembling.
“Shhh, liebchen, it’s all right.” His mother takes him by the shoulders and holds him at arm’s length, stroking his hair once, then twice, because she has figured out before him that he is afraid. “It’s going to be all right. My brave, brilliant son.”
Bren blinks back tears. “If I have any hopes or dreams — ”
“Shhh.” She pats his cheek. “Don’t cry on your birthday, it’s bad luck.”
“Let me finish.” He holds the journal against his ribs, like he’s cradling a child. “If I have any hopes or dreams, it is to make you and Father proud. Prouder. I know you are already — ”
His mother smiles.
“I will make you prouder than you have ever been. I will make this valley proud. I am going to be somebody, Mother, somebody worth being proud of. People are going to know my name.”
He only realizes how fiercely he is speaking when his father’s voice comes in from the other side of the house, cutting him off. “Bren! Where are you, boy, it’s nearly dawn!”
All the breath leaves him in a heavy sigh. It may be his birthday, but there are still chores to be done.
“He’ll let you sleep another ten minutes if you like,” says Bren’s mother in a conspiratorial tone. “Just for today. You’ve earned it.”
Bren shakes his head, a wry grimace spreading across his face as he forces himself to stand up. He stretches and suppresses a yawn. “I am only home for another week,” he reminds her. “It would be poor form to start shying away from hard work right before I leave for the capital. Hard work is all I have to recommend myself.”
“And talent,” adds his mother, rising and taking the blanket from her shoulders. “Don’t forget talent, Bren. All that fire inside of you.”
Bren grins and snaps his fingers, although this time he doesn’t summon a flame. He is still holding his new old journal. He would not risk even singeing the edge of a page.
“Bren!” bellows his father’s deep voice once more from the other room.
His mother raises an eyebrow. “Best get to that hard work, liebchen.”
After a moment’s consideration, Bren tucks the journal away carefully beneath a corner of his mattress. It will be safe there until he is actually able to use it, and what’s more, he will know every time he goes to sleep that it is there somewhere underneath him, all those blank pages ready to be filled. He wishes that he could take it with him now, carry it all day, wear it on his body like a second shirt. But there is water to be drawn and chickens to be fed and wood to be chopped, and he needs both of his hands.
When he steps outside, the wind is bitter and cruel, and he has to hold his thin coat around him as tight as he can, but he doesn’t care.
He is fifteen today, on the coldest morning of the year, and he is warm.
2
“Happy birthday,” chuckles Astrid against his bare chest.
The sun is setting, and the half-healed wounds in Bren’s arms are itching like mad, and if you scratch them he’ll know, Bren, he’ll see it, and since Astrid’s room was right there anyway, why don’t we see if we can distract you, huh?
He runs his fingers through her hair. It’s starting to grow out. Soon enough it will be cropped short again, as usual, but he will savor this now, savor its softness and richness and the white-gold of it, just a few inches long, long enough to grip while she’s down on her knees in front of him, long enough to twist a few strands around his index finger now as she smiles up at him from where she’s got him pinned to the bed.
“I didn’t realize it was my birthday,” Bren confesses, twirling his finger round and round. “I completely forgot.”
The sharp, wicked expression on Astrid’s face softens just slightly. “Well, there’s a lot going on,” she murmurs, “you can be excused a little forgetfulness, I think. Busy busy time.”
“Ja,” says Bren softly.
His mind starts to wander back over the past few weeks before he clamps down on it firmly, forces it into the present. There is no sense dwelling on recent memory. There is nothing he can do about any of that now.
Astrid presses a lazy kiss to his sternum. “Did you like your present?” she asks coyly.
The blush that had been so close to fading away flares back with a vengeance. “I — ah — yes,” he stammers. Gods, why can’t he control his face? “Yes, of course I liked it. Obviously.”
She grins. “Obviously.”
He can’t help but laugh, despite everything, despite the pain in his arms and the dread haunting his heart. “You know exactly what you’re doing. You are a menace, Schreiber.”
He remembers — this is safe, this is okay, he can let himself think back this far — he remembers that first day, fully two years ago, when the wagon came for them and he saw Astrid perched in the back among the hay bales. The Schreiber girl. She’d grown taller since that day he traded her a kiss for a stolen cookbook — softer too, and her hair a brighter yellow, but her eyes were that same strange green, like bottle glass, so rare in the valley. Bren had heard stories about her eyes, about how they made all the boys and some of the girls desperate for her, but he’d never understood it himself. She had been a means to an end, even if that end only amounted to a few dozen old recipes.
That day had been different. She’d turned up in that hay wagon with a gleam in those green eyes of hers. We’re gonna be late, Ermendrud. He’d known there was a girl and another boy, had even heard her name on his parents’ lips, now that he thought of it, but he hadn’t connected it to her until this moment. Hop in, it’s three days to Rexxentrum and if you’re late for your first class they whip you. I don’t plan on getting whipped, rotschopf.
He thinks that was the moment he fell in love. He might be wrong. There have been a lot of moments.
Astrid plants more kisses on his collarbone, his neck, his jawline where a faint down of stubble is beginning to come in. “I don’t actually know what I’m doing,” she confesses as she reaches his ear, and then his forehead. “I’ve never done that before.”
“You could have fooled me,” Bren breathes. Her scent is like a drug. His hands find her neck and he holds her there against him, not in a chokehold, but a loose collar, so that she has to kiss him again, and again, and again. “You seemed very...at ease,” he murmurs into her mouth.
She nips at his lower lip and grins when he sucks in his breath at the pain. “I’m a very good actress, rotschopf. I can convince just about anyone of just about anything.”
“Convince me that you love me,” whispers Bren.
He has never been sure. How could he ever be sure? She has kissed every boy in their village. She was perfectly within her rights to kiss whoever she wanted, of course, but that must mean that her kisses are as free as her laughs, mustn’t it?
Bren has never kissed anyone but her. He has never so much as kissed his mother’s cheek — they hugged, in his family, and his father would sometimes ruffle his hair fondly if he was pleased with him, but never kisses — that was for a husband and wife, or for a mother with her very young child, or for a sleepy cat stretched out in front of the hearth when you came home from a cold day of work and needed to press your face into something warm and soft and furry —
He shakes his head abruptly, every muscle in his body suddenly tense. No. No. He must not think about that place. He must not think about those people. He must be strong.
Astrid has gone tense in his arms too. She props herself up on her elbows, staring down at him, that blonde hair just long enough to fall forward and frame her temple, her cheekbones, her delicate brow.
“I love you,” she says firmly. Her glass-green eyes are shining. “I love you, Bren Aldric Ermendrud. I love you forever.”
She is a good actress, and he believes her.
The sun has set by the time they stumble out of Astrid’s bed, pulling their clothes on hastily, checking and double checking to make sure that no buttons or buckles are left undone. It’s not that Ikithon doesn’t know, exactly, but they have always somehow been aware that if he ever actually catches them, it will be the end. They will be separated, or punished, or forced to punish each other; and so it is safer to hide the evidence, to sneak around in the dark, and to pretend that they are rivals and schoolmates and nothing more.
Ikithon is not fooled. Neither is Eodwulf. Neither, Bren thinks, would his parents —
But that is not allowed. Not anymore.
“Where is Wulf, anyway?” asks Bren in a hushed voice as they make their way down the hall. He isn’t entirely sure where they’re going — all he knows is that he followed Astrid out here, and it’s generally a good bet that where Astrid is, Bren belongs.
She reaches back and takes his hand, her lips pursed in concentration as she makes an effort to move silently and swiftly. Ikithon has retired for the night by now — he is rarely awake past sundown — and they are breaking curfew. It is exhilarating and terrifying all at once.
“He’s getting ready for tomorrow,” Astrid whispers. “He’s got something planned, he and Ikithon. I don’t know what. Probably don’t want to know.”
A whirlpool of nausea forms in Bren’s gut, spinning and twisting. They have not spoken about tomorrow. None of them have. They have distracted themselves with study and practice and the household duties of the day, with flirting, with kissing, with Astrid on her knees in front of Bren, those bottle-green eyes staring up at him half-lidded and brimming with power, that golden hair, so long in Blumenthal, so short here, so soft wrapped around Bren’s fingers…
He stops in his tracks. He’s going to be sick.
Astrid sees it at once, pulls him quickly a few more steps down the hall and into the washroom so that he can bend over the stone basin of the sink. She wraps an arm around his shoulders.
“Be quiet,” she tells him as he retches. There is hardly anything in his stomach; he has eaten almost nothing over the last two days. “Try to be quiet, Bren. Don’t let him hear.”
When he is done, she wipes his face with a damp towel, cleans out the sink basin, and leads him outside, down the hall, to a back door that opens into a small work yard. She tosses the soiled towel onto the ground.
“You should probably burn it,” she says.
She’s right, he knows. Hide the evidence. Use your gift. All that fire inside of you.
She’s right, but he can’t. He can’t move. He can’t speak. His arms are itching and stinging and aching, and Astrid’s kisses and caresses feel like a lifetime ago. Distractions never last for very long.
He wonders if he is a distraction. He wonders how good of an actress she is.
“Burn it, Bren,” whispers Astrid.
He reaches out his hands, and fire fills the air.
Later that night, in his own room, door locked and curtains drawn tight, Bren takes his journal out from under his mattress. It’s too dark to write, but he can just make out the words on the page as he flips through the sparse entries.
He was supposed to fill this book. It was supposed to hold his hopes and dreams.
All it’s good for tonight is to confirm yesterday’s date, the last time he wrote anything. 12 Horisal. He told us this morning what we must do. We have two days to decide.
So Astrid was right. It is his birthday.
Bren shoves the journal into his belt before he climbs into bed, not bothering to change into his nightclothes. There’s no point — he is not going to sleep. He doesn’t know if he will ever sleep again.
He is seventeen tonight, on the coldest night of the year, and tomorrow is graduation.
3
“Happy birthday,” mutters Bren to himself.
He is staring into a puddle. The overcast sky is reflected in the muddy water, and so is his face — or what reason tells him must be his face, though he does not recognize it.
He has not seen a mirror in...eleven years, it must be. Glass was forbidden in the asylum in any form, and metal too. Anything that could be fashioned into a weapon, to harm another person or yourself.
(Bren had to kill the guard with his bare hands. It took a long time.)
He gazes at the reflection in the puddle, crouches down on his knees to get a closer look. Scheisse, he is old. He looks like — but he banishes the thought. He looks like an adult. His hair is a matted mess, the lower half of his face is covered in a tangled beard, and his boyish good looks have turned haggard and wan. There are dark circles under his eyes.
His eyes are still blue.
Bren shoves a hand into the puddle and destroys the reflection. “Nein,” he whispers hoarsely. “No. That is not me. That is not me. I did not do that.”
When he pulls back his hand, it’s covered in mud. He stares at it for a long moment before clapping it to his face. Mud and dirty water smear onto his nose, his cheeks, run into his beard, and drip down onto his chest.
It’s freezing in the winter air, and it stinks in his nostrils. But it’s a mask. It’s an act.
He has become a very good actor.
The asylum clothes — threadbare tunic and trousers, no belt, no shoes, no coat — do little to shield Bren’s shivering body from the wind as he continues down the road, keeping an eye out for a barn, a hedge, even a tree with more than a few bare branches. But there’s no shelter to be found.
“I picked a bad time of year for my daring escape,” says Bren to the open air.
It isn’t entirely his fault. He has only had the full command of his faculties for two weeks. The woman, that odd and wonderful woman with the symbol around her neck, who touched him and murmured a prayer and drove the clouds from his mind — she appeared two weeks ago like a shining beacon, and moments later her light had winked out like a candle getting snuffed. Mad as the rest of them. Useless as the rest of them. As Bren had been, until an impossible moment of mercy.
He doesn’t understand it. He can’t imagine that he will ever understand it. He is not worth saving. There was no deity involved, this was not his destiny, because god and fate have clearly already abandoned him. This was a fluke. This was...it was statistics. Somewhere in the whole empire, in all of its asylums (how many are there? Dozens? Hundreds? More?), it stands to reason that there are a few healers or clerics admitted as patients on occasion, and it stands to reason that a handful of them might retain some of their gifts, and that perhaps one or two might possess a split second of clarity to use that gift on a fellow inmate.
It is just statistics. Bren is not special. He will never be special again.
But this is why he is wandering under the winter sky on his birthday. Because it takes about two weeks to plan an escape like this, if you are being clever about it.
You cannot just run. He'd considered it, late that first night, after the hours spent rocking and staring and scratching in his little cell, raging at the truth of what had been done to him. He had seriously considered just running. But he would have been caught, and quickly, too, judging by the look of the guard posted at the door.
(Asylums do not have guards. They have nurses, they have orderlies, sometimes they have hired hands who will play the part of security if a patient becomes wild or violent. But they do not have guards who stand in shifts by the front door, silent, watching, waiting, with strange amulets around their necks.
Bren certainly hopes they don't. Because if they do, his list of sins has just grown longer.)
After that first night, he had collected himself enough to think things through, and what became clear immediately was that he must be here on purpose. Therefore, getting out must involve patience, underhandedness, wit. Murder, perhaps. (What is one more?) He must draw on those years of stealing glimpses at book pages, stealing actual books, sneaking down hallways with the girl he loves, smothering the sounds of sex or spellcasting or vomiting or pain, making friends with shadows and corners. He must bide his time, employ strategy. He must use his gifts.
(All that fire inside of you.)
He's fucked, of course, because he has no magic. His spellbook is long gone. Ikithon must have ripped it from him before throwing him in here to rot, and without it he is helpless — he can't even snap a candle flame into existence. Once he could do little things like that if he concentrated hard enough, spells that were useless for anything besides lighting a fire in the hearth or sending a gust of wind rippling through tree branches to shake loose an apple, but that was a long time ago. He was young, and Ikithon always reminded him that the very young often have magic at their fingertips in a way that adults, that men, lose with age.
It is fickle, Ermendrud, and it will leave you. You cannot depend upon it. You must learn with ink and paper, with your components, correctly, as I have taught you — you must memorize your runes and notation, if you are not too stupid, and follow the procedures. It is dangerous, otherwise. You must not rely upon whims and feelings.
There is a ditch on the side of the road. It is shallow, but it is something — it will provide the barest shelter from the frigid wind, and more importantly, it will help to keep him out of sight.
Bren climbs into it and lowers himself down to lie in the dirt. Sunset will not be for another hour or so, but if he continues down the road he has no way of knowing whether or not he will find anything better before it is dark. There have been farm houses here and there, but he cannot risk that. Anyone with a decent head on their shoulders would recognize him as an escaped patient, at the very least, and that is assuming that there is not already a reward out for a man of his description. Red hair, disheveled appearance, wild eyes. Extremely dangerous. Wanted alive or dead.
He should not even be traveling by road. One more thing he has fucked up.
As he lies there, huddled against the hard-packed earth, unable to stop shivering, he feels the press of a worn leather cover against his stomach, flat beneath his shirt.
At least he saved the journal.
Choosing what to take with him, what to risk stealing and hiding on his person, was the hardest part. It was easy to say first I will kill the guard, then I will hide flat on top of the low roof, then I will run as soon as it is dark. It was easy to say there will be no moon on my birthday, why not do it then? But he had no pockets, no coat, no way to carry anything except for his hands and the space beneath his shirt. Food was out of the question — he could not carry enough to make a difference, and it would not be the first time he'd starved. A weapon would have been nice, but there was none to be found. Even the guard did not carry so much as a wooden staff. It is enough to make the edges of his mouth curl into something like a smile, knowing that they never expected him to fight back.
But he knew that he must take the amulet, if he could get it. A disguise, if nothing else, whatever the insignia meant — and possibly more, if it was magical like he suspected.
(He still does not know what the enchantment is. He does not have his gotverdammt spellbook.)
It was simple enough to rip it from the guard's neck when the time came. And the little pouch of charcoal and herbs, both stolen from the asylum's dingy kitchen, is still safely tucked into his waistband. Finding incense will be a problem, but he pushes that from his mind — there is no point worrying about it tonight.
The last thing he took was the journal. He doesn't know why. He doesn't even know why he still has it — it was in his coat pocket when he broke, when they dragged him away from — when —
But he shouldn't still have it. Personal possessions aren't allowed in the asylum. Did he kick and bite when they tried to take it from him? Did he manage to conceal it somehow, under his clothes, perhaps, or in an unobtrusive hiding spot that he could return to later? It makes no sense, and he cannot remember enough of that terrible day to be sure. All he knows is that, flying in the face of reason, his journal is here with him, held tight against his bare skin, the only thing in the world worth rescuing from that hellhole.
Unbidden, the image of his mother's face comes to him, that morning before dawn when she was so pale but had such a fire in her eyes. Something for your thoughts, she had told him, pressing the bundle into his hands, for your hopes and dreams. A boy your age should have a lot of those.
He has not thought of that moment in years. He has not allowed himself to. He could not, must not, because the sound of her laugh — the comfort of her hand stroking his hair —
You cannot depend upon it, snarls another voice. You must not rely upon whims and feelings.
Bren sits up, his back against the wall of the ditch, something old and forgotten and furious blazing in his heart. "Fick dich," he spits into the chilly air.
He snaps his fingers, and he's sure, he's so sure, that nothing will happen. He is only doing it to prove that he remembers.
A flame springs to life in his hand.
For a moment he can't breathe. It's impossible. His spellbook — he doesn't have what he needs, he is alone, he is abandoned. This is not how it works. It is incorrect. It is dangerous.
It is a moment of mercy.
He drops the flame. His chest is heaving, and with every breath he can feel his journal rising and falling too, and there is pressure building behind his eyes and in his throat and deep within the recesses of his mind, places where he thought all the lies had been dug out and thrown away, but this is not the first time he has been wrong, is it?
He is twenty-eight today, on the coldest evening of the year, and for the first time in a decade, Bren weeps.
4
"Happy birthday," says Nott, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist.
Bren stares down at her. Her dark green hair, nearly black, is hanging in greasy strings around her huge ears (he is still not used to the ears, they still make him think of fairytales, of what happens to bad children in the night), and she is so short that she has to stand on her tiptoes to hug him like this. It is all very disconcerting. Frumpkin's fur is standing up on end in a ruffle down his back, wary and protective as he perches on a nearby moss-covered stone, ready to spring into action with tooth and claw if this strange little creature makes the wrong move.
Bren wonders if he is supposed to hug her back. He wonders what she expects.
When she finally pulls away, she looks up at him with those round yellow eyes, big as saucers, and something in his heart melts just a little despite the chill.
"How did you know?" he asks her, placing a hand tentatively on her tiny shoulder. (Is this right? Is this enough?) "I never said anything."
Nott's face breaks into a wide, toothy smile. (Bren is still not used to the teeth.) "I guessed," she admits.
"You guessed?"
"Well," Nott mumbles, shifting her weight from foot to foot as a darker green flush rises in her cheeks, "you told me you were born during the winter, when I was bugging you about your personal life and your secrets and your hopes and dreams and everything last week…"
Bren chuckles. "All right, ja, I will give you that."
"And — don't be mad, Caleb, I wasn't peeking on purpose, but I did accidentally see a page in your journal when I was sitting on your shoulders yesterday, and you were writing, and I didn't mean to but I noticed the word birthday."
He's sure that she can feel him go stiff and tense, even just through the contact of his hand, but he plays it off as best as he can. "You are a good detective, Nott the Brave," he murmurs, wondering what other words she might have caught glimpses of.
"Don't worry, that's all I saw," Nott reassures him hastily. (He is still not used to the way she seems to anticipate his thoughts.) "I mean, even if it wasn't, your handwriting is shitty, Caleb, so I probably wouldn't have been able to read it. You need, like, calligraphy lessons or something."
He has to laugh at this now, a real laugh. Nott's insults somehow always feel like compliments. "Are you going to pay for them, my friend?"
Nott gives him another wide smile, green and sharp and entirely without pretense or agenda. "We're gonna be rich, Caleb," she promises with that gleam in her eyes that portends a shoplifting spree on the horizon. "Just you wait. We'll be absolutely flush with gold, we'll be swimming in it…"
Her smile falters for a second, and Caleb — Bren squeezes her shoulder, unsure what's just passed through her mind. He cannot read her the way she can apparently read him. Not yet, anyway. And even if he could, she is a bit like his journal, he thinks — full of deliberately bad handwriting, so that you'd have to be really close to work out any secrets, and if you are that close then you would have already been told everything you needed to know.
She will tell him anything he needs to know. He trusts her. Gods only know why, he has only known her for — it has not even been three weeks, it has been fifteen days, and she is a goblin, she is a thief and a liar and technically a murderer now, just like him, and he trusts her.
He called her friend moments ago, he realizes, without even thinking.
Bren gets down on his knees so that he can look Nott square in the face. "We will be rich," he says firmly, gripping her shoulder in what he hopes is an encouraging way. "But to do that, we will have to be a bit more sneaky. Yesterday was almost very bad."
"Yesterday wasn't great," sighs Nott, picking absently at the skin on the back of her hand.
Bren sees her do it, and at once the ever-present itch in his forearms flares bright and painful. He grits his teeth and does his best to ignore it. The bandages help, but not enough. They have never been more than a distraction.
He takes Nott's small hand in his own. "We are going to have to get creative," he tells her. "People will continue to be cruel if they recognize who and what you are. They will do worse than drive us out of town. You will be attacked, beaten, possibly worse — "
Scheisse, what is wrong with him? She knows all of this. Her eyes have gone watery and she is clenching that stubborn jaw of hers and refusing to cry, and he has done this to her, with his words, he has already made his new friend cry and it has only been fifteen days.
He lets go of her hand. She should not be touching him.
"What I mean," he continues more softly, "is that you need a good disguise."
He turns and rummages through his pack to find the items he hid there last night.
Nott is the better thief of the two of them, but Bren has stolen plenty before — kisses and schoolbooks and amulets and his life, eggs from chicken coops and sometimes whole chickens from chicken coops, whatever he can find on the road and in the fields to keep himself going. He was on his own for five years and until a few weeks ago he'd managed not to get caught, managed to stay just on the edge of starvation and hypothermia and sanity, and he has learned to seize certain opportunities without letting himself think twice. It is not a skill he is proud of — he does not have anything that he is proud of — but it would be lying to say he is not good at it. He is careful. He has studied. He has practiced.
So when he saw it lying discarded on the pawn shop shelf yesterday, along with a dozen other battered keepsakes and trinkets, and when he was sure that the shopkeep's attention was elsewhere, he hadn't hesitated. Easy enough to grab it and turn ninety degrees, his back shielding his hands from view as he found a deep pocket in the breast of his coat beside his spellbook and tucked it away. Then the important part: turning back around, a pleasant smile on his face, and clearing his throat, asking about that old bridle there, would the shopkeep consider parting with it for three copper coins?
Technically he stole the bridle too. He wonders how the shopkeep reacted when those coins turned back into wood chips an hour later.
Sometimes it galls him, when they take from really desperate people, knowing that they must be like he was a long time ago: rising before dawn every day, working off the land, every pencil or ribbon or scrap of patterned cloth a luxury. It's not guilt that gnaws at him, because this is survival and the people in that house or that run-down shop would do the same thing in his place. There is no question about that. No, it's...shame, perhaps, or even fear. Because you work for what you have, Bren, and you earn it or you lose it, Ermendrud, and you can't have that, poppet, we don't hide things in our rooms here, you remember, don't you?
The only thing he owns, properly owns, bought and paid for, is his journal. The rest is contraband. His coat came from a hook inside someone's barn, his boots from the back stoop of a garden shed, his backpack and bandages from an apothecary's stall in Berleben while the local crownsguard were rushing to help put out a mysterious fire in the marketplace.
Even his spellbook is stolen, snatched out of a broken farmhouse window a few winters back. It was supposed to be the start of a family cookbook, he thinks — there were one or two simple recipes taking up the first few pages before he'd ripped them out. (His chest aches.) But the paper was of a fine quality, and he had a tiny stoppered glass bottle of ink that he'd been saving for months just for this, and that night he'd recorded everything he remembered from the Academy over six or seven feverish hours, curled up in an old abandoned hayloft for warmth. (His chest aches.) There are only a few spells scrawled in there now, and he's pretty sure that there are some mistakes in his notation, some runes he's gotten backwards or miscounted, but they are there. They work. They are his.
But Nott has no magic. And it is important — it is so important — that she is safe. That she is hidden.
Frumpkin has come up to them and is curling around Nott's ankles, purring and arching his back. It seems he has decided that Nott is a friend. This is good, thinks Bren, meeting his familiar's eyes. It's about time. About time we had one, ja?
Frumpkin gives him a slow blink of approval.
Well then. Bren pulls the mask out of his pack.
"This is for you," he says, handing it to Nott.
He watches her turn it over and over in her hands, inspecting the porcelain, the fraying ribbons meant to serve as a tie in the back, the miniscule cracks marring its smooth surface. The red paint on the lips is cracked and chipped, and there are a few spots where the ceramic glaze has faded from white to a sickly yellow.
Bren clears his throat, feeling a blush creep up his neck. "It, ah...it should be nicer. I am sorry. This was all I could find. It will not hide much, so we will have to keep our eyes out for other solutions — you should have a cloak with a hood, and maybe…" He shows her the extra bandages he has taken out as well. "Maybe we can...I don't know, cover some things with these. But for now this will at least give people a little bit of a pause."
Nott holds the porcelain mask up to her face. "How do I look?"
Her ears are still sticking out of her unkempt hair, and there is nothing to be done about the green tinge of her skin, or the cat-like slits of her pupils in those bulbous golden eyes, or the claws at the ends of her fingers as she keeps the mask in place. She is still unmistakably a goblin, but a goblin with playfully raised eyebrows and a smile in her voice.
There is no face in the world dearer to him than hers.
"You look beautiful," says Bren truthfully.
This time when she hugs him, he wraps his arms gently around her in return, and Frumpkin's purring grows louder. My friend, thinks Bren, even as his mind is calculating the price of a child's cloak, how many wood chips they will need, or whether it would just be better to start with a blanket for now. There will be blankets in the next stable they come across, if they can sneak in unnoticed. Bandages around her arms and hands, and those long pointy ears, and a cloak or a blanket, and this haphazard mask, and they will be all right. He will not lose her.
He will not lose her.
Nott pulls away suddenly, and her brow is knit with panic. "Caleb," she blurts out, "it's your birthday, you shouldn't be giving me this! It's bad luck!"
"Bad — " A chuckle escapes Bren's lips. "How is it bad luck to give presents on someone's birthday?"
"It's bad luck to give someone else a present on your birthday," she scowls up at him, "didn't you know that? What did they teach you growing up?!"
"Not that," he smiles. "My mother said it was bad luck to cry on your birthday, but I am not crying, see?"
Nott's eyes narrow. (He is still not used to her eyes, to the way they focus on him, keeping watch, sending a glow through his heart.) "Maybe not, but I should at least be giving you something in return, and I've got nothing. I've got…" She bites her lip, fiddling once more with the mask in her hands. "...Three buttons, an old flask, that weird dead thing we found last week in the garbage, a couple of bones…"
Bren holds up a hand. "Nein, liebchen, you have already given me a present. Believe me that I do not need your bones or the weird dead thing from the garbage."
"Oh." Nott relaxes visibly. "Well, that's great, because I want to keep both of those things, because they're cool, Caleb — but what did I give you? Besides stealing breakfast this morning, which absolutely doesn't count?"
It is stupid for him to have to blink for a few moments, to swallow, to push down a sudden tightness in his throat, because it is not really bad luck to cry on your birthday — crying on your birthday is a mixed bag, really, as he has learned through a great deal of trial and error — but it would make Nott upset, and so he keeps his composure. "It, ah. It has been a long time since anyone hugged me, Nott. That is all."
Her face softens. There is something there that he cannot identify, something that he thinks he has seen before on his mother's face, possibly on Astrid's, too, though he cannot name it. Maybe it has been so long since he has seen it that he has forgotten its name.
Nott reaches out and takes his hand. "Let's go," she says quietly. "It's gonna start snowing soon."
"It has already started." Bren flicks a snowflake out of Nott's hair. "Snow on your birthday is good luck, you know."
He is thirty-three today, on the coldest afternoon of the year, and he has made that last thing up, because he doesn't believe in luck — only in her.
5
"Happy birthday," giggles Jester behind him.
She lowers her hands from his eyes, and Caleb blinks. There is — oh gods.
There is an enormous cake on the table.
"Holy shit," he declares, and Jester laughs loud and clear, skipping around him to join the rest of their friends on the other side of the room.
Beauregard is beaming. "Pretty fuckin' impressive, right? She made it herself, y'know."
"That is a lie." Caleb circles the table, eyeing the utter calamity of frosting and candles that is somehow still standing. "I have had the misfortune — excuse me, the privilege of enjoying Jester's cooking before, and I have never seen her bake something that has not fallen over."
"We had to use a little magic," admits Jester, "but it's mostly just really good cake making skills, Caleb. I used dowels and everything, there's like seven layers there."
"There are three layers," he smiles at her.
"There's like three layers there."
Nott nudges him, and when he glances down she's flashing a knife at him. "CUT THE CAKE, we've been waiting here for TEN MINUTES!" she screeches.
The cake is doled out, with plenty to spare, and eventually Caduceus starts offering some to the other patrons in the tavern. Most of them decline. They're probably put off by the garish pink frosting and the huge orange icing flames licking up, or more like dripping down, the sides, or possibly by the way the whole thing reeks overwhelmingly of cinnamon.
Caleb polishes off two slices. It's perfect.
"Pretty good, huh?" says Jester's voice slyly in his ear as he's starting on his third piece.
He tips his head back, knowing it will come to rest against her shoulder, feeling a familiar jolt of warmth when it does. "You are a menace, Lavorre. This should be disgusting."
"But it's not, right?" Her hands are resting lightly on the back of his chair, and he can feel her fingertips just barely brushing against the shoulders of his coat.
"Like just about everything you do, it should be impossible, but it works."
When she laughs, her breath tickles the back of his neck, and it's all he can do to keep control.
"Here." He leans forward again and pats the seat opposite him. The rest of the Mighty Nein have dispersed throughout the common room, joking and conversing with the other patrons, and Jester is the only person still here in this corner. Caleb wouldn't have it any other way. "Come over here where I can see you, sit down."
She does, and she pulls the chair forward a few inches so that their knees are almost touching. There are sparks dancing in her violet eyes.
"I have something else for you," she says before he has a chance to tell her what he's thinking. The words die on his lips.
Well, that's all right. He sets aside his plate and fork, leans forward on his elbows, mirroring Jester's conspiratorial pose. I can tell her tomorrow.
"We sort of all chipped in on this," Jester continues, "but I wanted to give it to you."
"Why did you want to give it to me?"
She doesn't break eye contact. "Because you're special to me, Caleb."
If she holds his gaze a few moments longer, he thinks, he is going to steal a kiss — but at the last second she sits back and grabs something out of the haversack sitting at her feet. Caleb actually feels dizzy.
"Close your eyes," Jester instructs.
He laughs. "I am not doing that again."
"Close your eyes!"
"If my eyes are closed I will not be able to see the grin on your face when you put a snake or a cactus or a lit firework into my hands, Jester."
She snorts, her nose wrinkling with delight, and it's silly and undignified and he is reminded, for the thousandth time, how unbelievably lucky he is. How absurdly, stunningly lucky. Every freckle on Jester's face, every long lash blinking up at him, is a second chance that he does not deserve.
No, he tells himself gently. That Bren did not deserve.
Caleb apparently deserves a great deal. His friends keep insisting that it's true, and he keeps finding out that he's starting to believe them.
And then Jester is placing a book in his hands.
For the first time in several minutes, he looks away from her face, staring instead at the soft leather and crisp white pages that he's holding, bound with scarlet thread. The cover is dark red, simple and unadorned but pristine. When he flips slowly through the blank pages, holding his breath, the sound they make riffling past his thumb is like music.
"I noticed your old one was full." Jester's voice is uncharacteristically shy. "Or, well, that you stopped writing in it, so I assumed it's full. Maybe it's not. But if it is, you should have someplace to keep new memories, you know?"
He doesn't know what to say. He lifts his eyes to her face, and he hopes that she can read what is in his heart, because he couldn't make it come out of his mouth if he tried.
"I, um — " She reaches forward and turns a few pages to the middle of the book, revealing a slim blue ribbon bookmark. "I had them put that in. You've gotta stop dog-earing all your pages, Caleb."
"Old habits," he hears himself murmur, tracing the ribbon with one finger.
"Dumb habits. I thought you were a book nerd, you're supposed to know these things."
She is biting her lower lip when he looks up at her again, sitting on the edge of her chair like a coiled spring of anticipation, and he realizes that he has not thanked her yet.
"It's not too nice, is it?" she asks, cutting him off again before he can speak. "Nott wanted to get you this, like, super fancy one with gold edges on the paper and this whole embroidery thing going on on the outside, but this sort of seemed more like your style. But there were some others too that you might like better — We can go back," she hurries as he opens his mouth to try to interrupt her, "you know we still have the receipt, or, well — I can forge a receipt, anyway, and there were some plainer ones with just regular brown covers that looked a little more like what you already have — "
Caleb rests a finger against her lips.
"Let me get a word in edgewise, liebling, or you will end up promising to buy me every book in the shop."
Jester kisses his finger with a smack.
Scheisse, he thinks, and fuck it, and he nearly drops his new journal on the tavern floor in his haste to close the gap between them and press his lips to hers.
He's faintly aware that somewhere behind him, Nott has just given a little squeal, followed by someone — probably Beauregard — clapping, but they can all go to hell. He kisses Jester harder, sets the journal in her lap so that he can take her face in both of his hands, his fingers twisting into her hair and brushing against the base of her horns, making her shiver, making him ache.
All that fire inside of you, Bren, echoes from somewhere very long ago.
He gives it all to her, the only way he knows how, and her mouth grows hot beneath his.
It's only when Jester finally pushes him away, smirking and mumbling something about going someplace private, that Caleb remembers they're sitting in the middle of a tavern common room, with the remains of a mountainous birthday cake on the table a few feet away. So much for being stealthy. If he could blush harder he would, but he's pretty sure that his face is already as scarlet as the journal in Jester's lap.
"It's about fucking time," hollers Beauregard from the other side of the room as Jester grabs Caleb's hands and starts leading him outside.
They are far enough south that there is no snow on the ground, but the air is still unusually brisk for Trostenwald at this time of year. Caleb is grateful for it — his cheeks are burning. Jester's hands are cool, and he lets her pull him along after her, down the cobblestone path to the back of the tavern, where — if he's not mistaken, that's an apple tree, he realizes.
She presses him up against it and kisses him, long and languid, and Caleb holds her close against the winter breeze.
"How did you know this was here?" he murmurs as they are catching their breath.
Jester shrugs. "I didn't. I just figured no one else would be back here."
"Good spot to make out," he smiles. "Good birthday."
She leans into him, slipping her hands beneath his coat to take hold of the straps of his book holsters, still the same old leather scammed from that pawn shop two years ago. "Best birthday ever?"
"Well…" Caleb rests his head back against the tree, staring up at the bare branches and the surprisingly clear winter sky. "Last year we were in a tunnel underground for the whole day, and the year before that Nott and I were almost killed by angry farmers."
"Oh, shit."
"Ja, it wasn't great. And before that…"
He almost continues, almost tells her everything, every grey icy morning or bitter night stretching back for decades, because he remembers them all — he almost tells her about the ones that blur together unremarked upon in that cold asylum out in the back fields, about the two miserable years at the Academy, never knowing whether his parents simply couldn't afford to send him anything or whether Ikithon just confiscated gifts the same as he did letters and money, about the rough years in Blumenthal, when the harvest was bad and everybody was struggling and a birthday present was a few more bites of supper that stuck in your throat because they meant that your parents would be a little thinner tomorrow —
But Jester doesn't need to hear these things. Not right now. He will tell her another time, because there is no point trying to keep anything from her, there is no act or disguise or scam that could fool those violet eyes of hers, and he would not want to anyway. He wants her to read him like an open book, stains and tears and dog-eared pages notwithstanding, and then he wants her to write herself onto him, into him, to restitch his bindings and inscribe her magic on every surface she can find. He wants her to leave the evidence of herself spilled like ink and ashes all over his past, his present, and his future.
But not today. Today she is smiling. So Caleb kisses her again, and all he says is, "Yes. Best birthday ever."
Jester pecks the tip of his nose. "Do you want to go inside?"
"Are you cold?" He snaps his fingers, and a flame springs to life. "This is kind of my specialty, liebling."
"Not that that isn't super sexy, Caleb," she replies archly, "but I had some other ideas in mind. You know. Like. Other ways to stay warm. Like in bed."
"Picked it up on the first try, actually, but please keep going, it's very cute."
She almost singes the tip of her horn when she ducks her face into Caleb's shoulder too quickly. He snaps the flame out just in time. Scheisse, she never gives him any warning, does she? he grins to himself as they make their way back to the inn.
He is thirty-five today, on the coldest day of the year, and for the first time in his life, he is happy.
fin