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Stop.
He’d thought her a monster.
That first day in the cell, that first hour. He had little experience with goblins outside of his grandmother’s stories when he was small: creatures who stole naughty children away. Who stole and killed and ate. Her unblinking yellow eyes. Large, mobile ears. Mouth full of teeth. The way she’d smelt of alcohol and bile and sharp metallic sweat. Her lips chapped and bitten. She had a frightened, desperate look to her in those days. And he had been quick to see threats.
She’s rarely still, Nott.
Picks at her nails and fingertips. Twists and braids and unbraids her hair. His, too, if in reach. Her ears twitch, heedless of her intent. Her narrow shoulders rise and fall with each quick breath. In sleep, she’s often a mild irritation: bones digging into his calves. Fingers scratching absently at her leg or his. Huffing and sighing and snoring, too.
He’s told her so. That she snores. Gotten her huffy and indignant and embarrassed, so he’d laughed at her outrage, so she’d woken him days later, three-forty-two in the morning, to tell him that he had been snoring just now, to please be mindful of her rest. Settled herself back down when he was properly awake, her eyes narrow and gleaming triumphant in the dark.
He had thought for a long time he would never again laugh. That there was nothing that could possibly amuse him. Make him smile. Cause him happiness. Ever again.
So he reminds her periodically. That she snores. She forgets; she can forget things. He likes to remind her. He likes it when she’s funny. When he can remind her. She forgets.
She —
She —
He had thought her a monster.
Her yellow eyes. No eyelashes unless you looked closely. Cheekbones so high and narrow they cut, a mouth too large for her face. All angles and sharp proportions.
Then: The bandages thick around her arms and calves and chest. Her strange, expressive eyebrows. The lock of hair always in her eyes, no matter how often she pushed it away. Her long fingers, tugging at the edge of his coat. Her hand, warm in his.
He is always cold, it seems. His fingertips numb. The tip of his nose. He always feels a hardness in his limbs; a frozen edge against his skin. Ironic, he knows.
She’s always warm, her heart thrumming in her body, her breath quick and soft. Her limbs light and pulsing with heat. They met in the last days of winter. Would curl up in the cold. Both feeling strange about it. He’d assumed her reason was mere shyness.
She was so warm. Thin and bony and small, snoring and kicking and poking in her sleep. But warm. Her breath hot against his ankles or forearm or neck. Neck had been later. Lately. Her heart always humming, pulse vibrating warm through her body and into his. She’d snore. Breathing hot and damp into his calves. He’d listen, awake and cold and wishing her closer.
He picks her up. There. Against his chest. So small and light.
He’d thought her a monster?
You were reckless today, he says to her, his chest tight with worry and anger and fear. You were drinking.
She pushes her thumbnail between the skin and nail of her other thumb. Looking left and right and everywhere but him. He nudges Frumpkin forward and she looks at the cat. He looks up at her through his eyes. An old trick that usually works. He sees she’s frightened. Her body tense in preparation.
She doesn’t speak, to apologize or offer an excuse.
Nott the Brave, you must take care of yourself. What will your family do —
She flinches.
What would I do? He thinks. Doesn’t say. Can’t say, although he’s thought about it, even willed the words forward: each time, they stick solid and hard in his throat.
She doesn’t move.
He’s been told I love you, in Zemnian and in Common, by a handful of people in his life. His grandparents when he was small.
His parents.
Astrid.
And Nott.
He has said I love you only ever in Zemnian.
The last time was many years ago. To Astrid, the afternoon before he was lost.
He had last told his parents he loved them some weeks before.
It’s difficult, not to read symbolism into that. Choices made laden with meaning and truth: that he would love someone as tainted and corrupt as himself over his mother and father, innocent and murdered.
He has not said it since.
He picks her up.
She is not breathing. Not moving.
Her body still warm.
He’d gestured. Tapped her shoulder. Before he could, she’d flinched away. Slid from his hand, raised hers in a dismissal. Looked at him over the same shoulder, her eyes narrowed, then widening: over-acted confusion. Eyebrows too high.
He’d grit his teeth. Annoyed. She’d turned away, pulling out her lockpicks. He’d begun to write her a message.
He has good handwriting. So does she, which had startled him until the day he’d found out about Veth Brenatto. Her letters are narrow and spindly. She presses too hard on her pen, leaving ink tails at the ends of her sentences.
She struggles with spell notation. Doesn’t have the patience for it. He asks her to teach him her new spell, and her eyes narrow. Keeps looking at him askance as he tries to follow her piecemeal instructions — copper wire, yes, but what movements, exactly? He has to reverse engineer. He asks her: must the initial bend be leftward or rightward? Her eyes narrow.
It frustrates him. She is objectively a bad teacher. He wants to succeed. To close the gaps, to understand her intent. To write it down as proof. Of what, he doesn’t quite know — only that the first time he does cast the spell, the first time it succeeds without effort on his part, he feels a warmth and excitement — has to stop himself grinning. Remembers the heat of flames in his hands, the joy of learning to conjure fire.
She squeaks and shouts in excitement. Leaps to hug and praise him, her own wire digging painfully into his cheek. Scratching the skin. He runs his finger along it idly for the next few days. Almost misses it when it heals away.
CHECK FOR TR, he had written. She is faster with a pick than he is a pen. He heard a click and stopped writing. Tensed and braced: for flames, explosion. The metal shnk of hidden blades. Weight on his toes, ready to dart backwards. His arm twitched forward, to grab her if he could —
There was no sound. A dark wisp of smoke. She had not moved, had not breathed — it slid gently, twisted from the air and between her parted lips, the needle spires of her teeth.
Her eyes lolled closed. Her shoulders fell in exhale.
She is light and quick on her feet. He considers her largely weightless, all water and air where he is plodding and clumsy. Fire and ash and earth.
She falls heavily. Loudly. Her flask banging metallic against the stone floor. Little trinkets spilling from her coat pocket. Her picks scattering loud against the floor.
Someone makes a choked noise. A suffocated gasp or cry, a cough that shakes in his chest and lungs and throat, dry and choking and painful.
Jester inhales sharply. Jester. Jester.
There is a box.
From the box he takes: Jester can bring people back. I have seen her do so before. She will do so now. In a place that is safe.
In the empty spaces, he puts:
The body in his arms. The stillness. No anxious twitching, no darting eyes or fingers, no quick heartbeat, no warm breath.
A man and a woman slumped over from poison.
A man and a woman bleeding from knife wounds.
A house. A house on fire. The terrified cries from inside.
Coming to consciousness wet and confused, Nott panicked, straddling his chest. Coming to consciousness bloody and pained, Nott’s tears on his cheeks. Coming to consciousness with the sticky taste of a healing potion. Coming to consciousness, Nott before him, beside him, on his feet, his chest, his arm, his lap.
Nott running on a bridge. Her yellow dress flapping behind her. Stopping. Looking back, her eyes distant and unseeing. Her tiny body hurling out into the darkness below.
He takes out the ability to stand. To stand with her heavy in his arms. He takes it out of the box.
He inhales. His head pounds with each step up and out of the chamber.
Careless.
Foolish.
Reckless.
Doesn’t she know? Doesn’t she know better? Can’t she see, the consequences, the pain she causes? The mistakes she makes, the ones that harm others, the ways she is ruining herself, ruining him, ruining —
How can she not understand? How can she be such a fool? To take a life and just destroy it, to be thoughtless and idiotic and heedless, forgetting, to cause him to forget, to —
The stone bites into his knees. Into his bruises and scrapes. Jester reaches for him, for the body, and he pulls it closer to himself —
Remembers.
Imagines — tells himself he imagines — it growing colder. Stiff and still. Her mouth slightly open. Her lips dry and chapped.
Aching. Aching. Aching.
His head pounding. His heart. His.
Jester speaks. Jester pushes a diamond against Nott’s chest, in hollow between her breasts, against her ribs. It lolls. Rolls. He watches it turn, sick and cold. Wants to push it into her flesh, into her skin. Cracking her ribs and tearing her flesh, into her lungs, her heart. To force them to move, to force her to draw air. He is not kind. He is not selfless. Cause her pain. Cause her suffering. Cause her to live.
But he cannot move. Cannot release her. Cannot shift even one hand. Cannot. Will not. Will —
The diamond blackens and shatters.
They ignore one another for their first days together. Pretend, mutually, to be alone in the cell. He acts as though he is unaware of the monster he is caged with; unaware of the irony in that sentence. She hides in corners, so silent and still he almost does forget.
Day three, and they have had no food, and almost no water.
He asked her: Do they feed us here?, thinking that she had at least been here a while longer.
Not me, she’d said. He’d been surprised by her voice.
She’d moved from her corner, for the first time that he had seen. Over by the bars. Settled down there, in that new corner.
Late that night, she’d poked him with a piece of limb straw until he’d stirred, woken, and almost burnt her to death in fright. She shrieked and hidden and dropped the rat she’d caught and killed for him.
Day four.
“Have you been here long?”
“I — a couple of days. More than you. I think. Umm… you should eat. The rest of that. It’s really not much food and you can’t afford to be picky.”
“Have you eaten?” Politeness, mostly. He has little taste for rat, even grilled quickly with his magic, but between rats and starvation and selflessness, he prefers the meat.
“Umm, well… I can eat. On my own.” She touches her fingers to her mouth. Her sharp predator teeth.
“Do you have a, a family? Nearby?” He’s wondering about the feasibility. If a goblin raid can be called for. A cover for his escape from jail, or a method.
She hardly lets him finish the question: “No.”
He doesn’t know the area well. The nearest town proper is Felderwin, but he’s never been.
“Umm…”
“Ja? Yes?”
“What’s your name?”
He’d had three days to invent one. “Caleb Widogast. And yourself?”
“Oh. I’m not… I’m Nott.”
Jester cries out. The diamond shatters and blackens and fills the air. Were he to breathe, the shards would surely enter his throat. His lungs. Heart. Tear and rip and shred. Bright and sharp and painful.
He does not breathe. Does not stir. Does not so much as blink.
Just holds. And holds.
One morning he’d woken up stiff and cold with an ancient holy relic in his lap and a scroll at his side. She was sleeping, warm and heavy against his thigh. The hard lines of her face softened. Her shoulders thin. Her breath warm.
He’d intended to leave her.
In the prison, after the prison, on the road, in the next town. To find her companions who would keep her safe — to leave her safe. To leave her.
His hand rests on her shoulder. She stirs and nuzzles against his leg.
Oh, he thinks.
Oh, oh.
I will be at your side until you do.
He hadn’t believed her.
I love you. I’m not leaving you, no matter what.
He had.
She is dead in his arms.
Careless.
Foolish.
Reckless.
How — how dare she. How can she. Doesn’t she know —
Doesn’t she remember?
The lies in the jail cell. The lies in hotels. On beaches. Promises. Secrets. Looking backwards and leaping from a bridge and into a chasm. How — how? Can she be such a fool, such an idiot, so stupid? So reckless and thoughtless and selfish? To not check for traps when she knows better, to ignore him when he tells her, to refuse to listen when he says —
To die, to die, to risk herself for Jester and for Fjord and for himself, for some stupid box, when she is beholden to him, when she has promised him, when he loves her and has known it since a basement in Zadash, the echoes of possibilities and lives and futures fading and twisting, opening his eyes to daylight and morning and reality and her?
Those are possibilities. These are possibilities. This is real.
She is dead in his arms.
The diamond shimmers and reforms.
She breathes in.
He breathes out.