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They make camp within the cavern, surrounded by the stone Stone family whom they cannot muster the energy to save. Not yet.
‘I do not wish to presume,’ Caleb says, voice soft, drawing Jester’s attention from the unmoving village, ‘but we are staying tonight, ja?’ He rolls a small orange bead between his fingers and, when Caduceus inclines his head—slow and creaky as thought he were the one recently stone—Caleb nods in return. ‘Gut. Because I expended most of my energy – ah – turning sand to glass.’
‘So you couldn’t teleport us even if we wanted,’ Beau calls. She’s sitting on the floor, leaning back against a pillar, and for a moment a spike of fright goes through anyone looking at her—goes through Jester—because dust and the pale of blood loss has settled on her and she looks too close to stone for comfort.
‘That is correct.’
‘Why’d you ask, then?’
‘Beau, c’mon,’ Fjord mutters, ‘leave it.’
‘I’m just asking,’
‘Well,’ Caleb interrupts, having formulated his answer. He stands tall and lean, thoughtful, his eyes lifted to the ceiling; in the moment, he reminds Jester of her piano teacher from when she was little, who had been a very patient individual and hadn’t mind answering Jester’s thousands of questions. ‘While I could not teleport us, if we were to leave there are other spells that I still have energy for.’ The little orange bead rolls between thumb and forefinger. ‘We could still leave here, leave this space, and head into the jungle once again. I am still capable of casting a number of –‘
‘See? He doesn’t mind,’ Beau hisses to Fjord, who backs off, shaking his head. ‘Hey. Hey, Caleb.’
‘ – less demanding spells – ‘
‘Caleb. Caleb.’
‘ – and though I am, ah, tapped of the more powerful, more complicated arrays – ‘
‘Caleb!’
‘Yes, Beauregard?’
‘That thing you did? The Widogast special.’
‘It is titled –‘
‘Of course it is.’
‘Widogast’s Web of Fire.’
‘Awesome. It was fuckin’ awesome.’
‘You did not get to see it the second time,’ he says, and no one can miss the way his form relaxes a fraction as his eyes settle on her, his friend. Beau might miss it – her eyes are closed, head tilted back. ‘It was even more spectacular.’
‘Oh yeah? Well, we could head back out, see if there’s another one, show me—‘
‘No!’ the rest of them say, shaken just by the thought of encountering another of the creatures.
Caleb huffs the smallest laugh possible. ‘Not tonight, Beauregard,’ he says, and begins the ritual to prepare the dome: boot steps tap against stone as he paces the exterior of the circle slowly; as he does so, fingers trace runes and sigils through the air and the faint orange of his magic glows at his fingertips, trails a heartbeat behind the motions, dragging wisps of that same orange light through the air. The magic builds and builds, coming together piece by piece as though he conjures brick after brick.
As he prepares, and as Caduceus sits with the few members of his family they have managed to restore, Jester wanders.
The Menagerie temple village is incredibly strange like this. The houses stand open and empty and the strange figures are frozen where they stand. Some wear expressions of fear, others confusion. Some look like they were in mid-conversation and sometimes Jester finds some that look as though they were standing alone, except for the pulverised rubble at their feet. At one point, a level above where Caleb has set the hut, she finds a long stone table. The food on it has long since decayed and rotted away to nothing but a few of the statues are locked halfway through eating, and at first it had looked very silly and she took a seat with them, but the longer Jester sat there and stared at the unaware, unresponsive people…it didn’t seem so funny.
Jester takes a seat at the end of the table, far from the statues who look like they had been eating together—friends, petrified together—and with only one a few seats away. She pulls out her notebook and sets about capturing the image. Only, where the food has disappeared from their hands she adds strange fruits and cupcakes, gives them a feast. She softens the harsh stone of the table with curling vines and beautiful flowers. Begging beside one of the statues, Jester adds a blink dog wearing a helmet with two curling horns, like a bull, decorated with ribbons and bells. Dancing fairies share drinks, and a fiddler’s music fills the page. Hamster unicorns. Company, for the statues. Something to pass the decade more pleasantly.
It hasn’t been too terribly long—half of an hour, perhaps—before she hears someone’s boot steps on the shale floor. One of her friends come to find her.
Nott, maybe, Jester thinks first—come to suggest another really funny prank. Yasha, making sure she’s safe? Or Fjord, checking in or come to ask for a little healing. Jester starts at the thought—remembers that he had been wrecked by the fight too. Caduceus, come to thank her?
Jester turns, words on her lips to tell Caduceus not to, because she should have been able to save his aunt, figure something out already.
But it isn’t Caduceus.
Jester watches the other girl as she steps up into the dining hall. Beau’s eyes are fixed on the floor, avoiding a pile of what was once someone, but as though she can feel Jester’s eyes on her, Beau’s eyes snap up from the floor to catch Jester looking. Her steps falter.
Hardly visible. Noticeable enough.
Jester’s lips turn up obediently into the cheerful, welcoming smile she conjures. ‘Hi,’ she trills. ‘You’re slipping, Beau. I heard you coming. You used to be way more sneaky.’
Beau’s feet carry her forward. She takes a seat on the bench down from her, easily room for two people between them, and faces out from the table. Her uninjured arm comes up to stretch out across the line of the table, the other in a sling she keeps still tucked against her chest.
‘Must be tired,’ she says, without putting any effort toward the lie.
Something about it—about her casual care—grates at Jester. It doesn’t make sense, she should be pleased that Beau cares enough to be careful, to not want to startle her, but she isn’t. Dark brows snap into a frown.
‘You don’t have to not sneak up on me, you know. You can’t scare me. I’m fine, Beau.’
Blue eyes widen in surprise, before they drop to the challenging jut of Jester’s chin. Beau shrugs. ‘Hey, you don’t need to tell me twice. I saw the way you rung that bull’s bell—excuse me if I don’t wanna go deaf.’
‘Oh. Well.’ Jester brightens. ‘That makes sense.’
More sense than not wanting to frighten her? More sense than not wanting to surprise her tonight, only a handful of hours after the Traveller—Artagan? Artagon?—appeared and – Jester returns to her drawing, the tip of her pencil scratching across the paper. She adds a few beetles in honour of the Clays, all of whom seem to be as strange as Caduceus.
‘How far underground d’you reckon we are?’
‘Hmm?’
‘I was tryna figure it out earlier. The gold—it’s pretty awesome, yeah? But there’s no upper or lower limit to that shit, gold ore is found way up close to the surface and way the fuck underground. Did you know there’s a gold mine in Kraghammer that goes into the Underdark?’
‘What? Beau, what are you talking about?’
The girl shifts awkwardly. Shrugs. ‘I dunno. I thought – it’s cool or whatever.’ She looks away with a huff. Jester peeks up from her notebook, takes a better look at her friend, a real look, without worrying about Beau getting embarrassed or annoyed.
Beau looks tired. Her eyes are ringed with dark bags and her hair is plastered to her head, greasy and dark with sweat, dotted with muck and leaves from their march through the jungle. Grime, too, over her skin in layers of dark red, smudged from sweat and a haphazard dunk of her head into the lagoon. The arm she wears in a sling is bandaged and she plucks at the material with obvious distaste. Her knuckles are still badly bruised, purpling from the impact against the gorgon’s strange metallic hide, and she’s freely scraped up across her shoulders and forearms. Elsewhere too, probably, but that’s all Jester can see of her at the moment. She wishes—she wishes—she could do something about the scrapes, the bruising, but at some point in their journey, the healers had stopped healing things that could be dealt with after a few nights solid rest. The minor injuries stopped being as important as the life-and-death injuries. Jester isn’t sure when that had happened, exactly, and she considers it now as she examines how Beau holds her wrist close to her chest.
‘It’s fine,’ Beau says.
Jester looks up to find Beau watching her again. The harshness in her jaw that tells Jester it’s definitely not fine, that it actually hurts a lot, eases the smallest bit.
‘Don’t worry ‘bout it.’
‘We always worry, Beau.’
‘We?’
‘Me, obviously. Caduceus. Yasha. Fjord, now that he can heal.’
‘Okay, heal is a stretch. He can fix up scratches. The best fuckin’ healing he’s done is remembering to hand out those fucking potions finally.’
‘And he cured Frumpkin’s poisoning. Don’t forget that.’
Beau snorts. Nods. ‘Sure. That too.’
‘And, and, he’s getting better at it. It’s something he’s gotta work at but you know he’s going to.’
‘Right. Good and noble,’ Beau says very softly, and her eyes slip sideways toward the faint glow of the hut where it is hidden down the staircase from them.
There’s a note to her voice that Jester can’t place; she’s nowhere close to understanding what is going on with Beau at the moment when the other girl takes in a purposeful breath, like she’s about to speak. A moment later, Beau sighs, letting the breath out again. She lifts her uninjured hand to scratch at her undercut, at the still faintly oily back of her neck. Jester’s eyes drop to the layers of grime and thinks about Beau bleeding, and sweating, and made of stone, not breathing, not moving, all the colour bleached from her skin and her eyes, of standing in front of Beau and the other girl not moving, not even seeing her there. And then she had been hale and whole again and it’s – a lot. The images are interspersed with flashes of green poison and Fjord laid out flat on the beach, bleeding, and the super-heated geyser of flame, and it’s enough to occupy her mind that she almost misses Beau’s words when she finally does speak.
‘Hey. Look. I want – I wanted to apolog—’
‘Do you think they’re lonely?’ Jester blurts.
‘—ise. What?’
Jester waves a hand and Beau glances over her shoulder to the statue nearest to them—a well-bearded dwarf, their mouth wide as though about to take a bite out of something. Or laughing, maybe.
‘Oh. No. I don’t – think so? I dunno how long I was out for but it just felt like…sneezing.’
‘Sneezing?’
‘Yeah. You know how you can’t keep your eyes open when you sneeze?’
‘Really?’
‘Haven’t you ever trie—‘ Beau shakes her head. ‘No. Nevermind. Well, humans can’t. Maybe tieflings can.’
‘We’re pretty amazing.’
‘Yeah,’ Beau agrees.
‘So it felt like sneezing? That’s it? You – they’re not hurting?’
Beau’s eyes go molten blue, flooding with warmth. She doesn’t say anything about Jester’s slip, just says, ‘They’re not hurting. They won’t remember a second of it.’
‘Okay. Okay. Wait – apologise?’
‘Yeah.’
That gets Jester’s attention. Beau doesn’t—she doesn’t not apologise, no matter that the others tease her about it. But Jester knows that the really important ones are hard for her. This sounds like one of those for some reason, with the way Beau is working up to it.
‘For what? You haven’t done anything wrong. You basically killed that thing.’
Beau pulls a face. ‘No, I basically killed Fjord doing it. Stupid. Should’ve been using lightning the whole fucking time. And Caleb’s the one who really got it.’
‘True, true.’ Jester taps the end of her pencil against the page. Flips to a new one and tries again to capture the look on the half-elf’s face as they look up from their plate, eyes wide. Frightened. A pang of fear rushes through her and she glances sideways. Beau is fine—she’s fine, mostly, except for bruises and bloodied teeth and a maybe broken wrist. She’s not made of stone anymore, and her face isn’t frozen in that horrible expression anymore. Her eyes aren’t grey—they’re blue, and staring at her.
Behind the pain, there is shame. And a glint of knowing.
It’s a strange look to be pinned by, equal parts gently and unrelenting.
‘I laughed at you,’ Beau says. Jester grimaces, returns to her sketch. ‘You were having a rough enough time this morning and you were—you’re always strong and awesome but you were being real vulnerable,’ she says all in a rush, ‘and I laughed at you.’
‘Gee. Thanks for reminding me.’
Beau has the gall to laugh again, this time at the bitter bite to Jester’s words. ‘Sorry.’ Then, a moment later and much more sincerely, ‘And I’m sorry. For doing that. I—it was a—it won’t happen again.’
Jester frowns. Glances up from the page. Narrows her eyes at Beau, who narrows her eyes right back.
‘What?’ she demands of Jester.
‘What were you going to say?’
‘Huh?’
‘It was a—what? Bad name?’
‘What? No!’
‘Silly? Easy to make fun of? Let’s all laugh at Genevieve,’
‘No! Of course not! It’s a really pretty name, Jes! I mean, it’s not your name, but it’s really pretty still and if you wanna use it, that’s cool. It wasn’t – I wasn’t – I just – ‘ Beau lifts her hands halfway to surrender, halts there. Her blue eyes are entirely shame now. ‘I’m sorry. For hurting you.’
Jester knows what she has to say to get rid of this weird sickly sticky-sweet feeling that gunks up the space between her ribs where her lungs should be, cloying, clinging, choking her up. And to get Beau to lower her injured hand, which is shaking now.
‘You didn’t.’
Beau’s expression blanks. Then, so very agreeably that it makes Jester itch all over, she says, ‘Okay.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘I’m not hurt, I just thought you weren’t being an asshole anymore!’ Jester snaps. She leans back the moment she says it, hands flying up to cover her mouth like she can cram the unkind words back in. But they’re out now—gone—and she watches as Beau is struck by them. Watches the other girl rock back in her seat, watches her move like she does in a fight, shifting back to absorb the blow. Unlike in a fight, she doesn’t move to retaliate. Just…sits with it. Jester’s breath hitches. ‘Oh no – no – Beau, I didn’t mean that,’
‘Hey,’ Beau says, grins easily, ‘it’s fine. One for one.’
‘No, that wasn’t fair,’
‘It’s fine, Jes. I’ve heard way worse. Hell, Nott said worse to me like ten seconds before I came over here. I was – I dunno – breathing wrong or something? I wasn’t listening to her. Anyway, you’re not wrong.’
‘Yes I am! I didn’t mean it, I was just hurt,’ she says, and realises that Beau has talked her around into admitting it, and now she glares. Beau doesn’t gloat, doesn’t smirk. She nods. Jester’s shoulders slump. She drops her pencil into the dip between her sketchbook pages. ‘I was hurt,’ she says again. ‘Okay? You’re right. I never thought you’d – laugh. Not at me.’
Beau winces. Her shoulders hitch up tight and she winces again, breath hissing between her teeth as the move jostles her arm.
Jester jumps—the sound, the hiss, is entirely too close to the sound the gorgon had made as the poison and gases burst from its body.
‘Jes.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s okay,’ Beau says, voice distant. A warm hand closes around her wrist and Jester looks down to it, follows it to Beau who has shifted closer. ‘It’s okay, it’s dead. We got it—it’s not coming down here.’
Jester’s eyes dart to the entrance way once more. She can’t really control it. A moment later, the words take hold, Beau’s calm logic settles, and she lets herself be eased back down to her seat. Nods.
They sit in silence for a long moment before Beau speaks again.
‘I panicked.’
‘Huh?’
Beau grits her teeth. Colour blooms high on her cheeks and she won’t look at Jester, won’t even look toward her. ‘I panicked,’ she says again, voice strained. ‘I thought I was gonna say something stupid so I…said something else. Which was also stupid and worse.’ Now she does look at Jester like she can’t not, helpless against the impulse. Jester wonders if it is as instinctual as the fear that had her eyes jumping to the entrance; wonders what Beau is scared of. Or what she is feeling if not fear, seeing how Beau’s eyes soften a little out of pain’s grip again. ‘Hurtful.’
‘What – ‘ Jester licks her lips. ‘What were you gonna say?’
Beau’s nose crinkles with distaste. ‘Do I have to tell you?’
Now she definitely does. Jester wants to know what has the girl squirming on her seat. She bats her lashes. ‘It would make me feel so much better.’
Beau stares at her a little longer. Pain creeps back into her face and Jester becomes aware when Beau’s breathing goes ragged for a second that the fingers of her injured hand are curling into a fist at her side. It must hurt—Jester could hear the crack of it from across the beach, despite the thundering hooves, despite the rush of waves and adrenaline in her ears. She had healed it as best she could but it must still hurt. And now Beau pushes past the pain—or into it.
‘It’s lovely. A lovely name.’
Jester stares, confused. Then says, ‘No.’
‘Huh? What d’you mean no?’
‘That’s not what you were gonna say. I don’t believe you.’
‘You don’t be—it was!’
‘Nope.’
Beau scowls at her in such a suspicious manner that Jester can only be certain that she is right in her guess. She’s searching, eyes scanning her face, her posture, for a sign that Jester has read her mind, been in her head or something, but that’s not it at all. Jester simply knows that if that was all it had been, Beau would have said it already. Fjord had said it, and Beau takes cues from him often enough that she would’ve done the same.
‘Tell me the truth, Beau.’
Perhaps it’s the way she says it. Entreating, not cajoling or sweetened, but as much a please and it is a now. Beau doesn’t do ultimatums. Jester would never give her one—but Beau understands boundaries, and can hear in her tone that Jester has reached one. One that Beau made, she could point out, and Jester is just knocking on the door to be let in. Beau can open this door or leave it closed, and Jester knows which she is hoping for.
Beau shifts again on the bench, back to her original position. She kicks her legs out, ankles crossed, and stares out from their seat to the tiered temple in the centre of the cavern. At the glowing pool that illuminates the central space in a slow shifting incandescence, reflecting from the lines of gold and something purely divine.
‘Do you know,’ she says, words halting like she is already wanting to take them back, ‘what Genevieve means?’
Jester doesn’t.
And she doesn’t know what it means when Beau says that name like that; it is nothing like the way she had brayed it just that morning, laughed, thrown it out like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Now, Beau handles it like she does the history books in the Archives. All cool and distant—clinical, almost—on the surface, but Jester knows Beau and she knows she’s far from disinterested in history; Beau burns with interest about everything: about people and who they worshipped, about their secrets and their mail and their clothes and industry and how they built what they built and when, and about mines that stretch down into the Underdark, about creatures and their languages, and what and how and why.
There’s a spark of it in her now. Like there is history to that name.
Beau is looking at her now, expectant.
The question isn’t what Jester had expected – but Beau doesn’t always say things outright, Jester knows that about Beau too. Her truths can be terribly complicated.
Jester shakes her head no.
‘It means tribe woman. Or family woman, depending on who you ask. Some folk say it means a woman who is family, or part of the family—or the tribe—but sometimes it means wife.’
‘Oh.’ Jester’s frown is painted overtop an incredulous smile. ‘You just…know that?’
Beau plucks at the dirtied knee of her pants. Flakes mud and muck between her fingers, splinters of stone and dust, and brushes it off to the ground.
‘The origins of the name,’ she continues like she hadn’t heard Jester, ‘are from the Old Empire. Julous Dominion. Beauregard – ah – Beauregard is as well. It doesn’t really mean boy, exactly. I mean—Beau can mean boy, sometimes, but Beauregard means – a nice outlook? To…’ Her hand comes up in front of her in such a familiar gesture, part her own and part Caleb’s, the way both of them do when they’re trying to get their point across like they’re trying to mould something into the correct shape, something the other person will understand. ‘To see things well?’
‘Hmm. I like it. It fits.’
Beau smiles.
At least, Jester thinks she smiles. Beau isn’t looking at her again, which means Jester is looking only at the left side of her face and it is only because she is so familiar with her friend’s crooked smile that she can read it in the faint tilt to her lips this side of her profile.
‘Thanks. Anyway, it belonged to this really famous dude. Famous in, like, history books. So. Not really famous at all. Because it’s – kind of nerdy. And – yeah – anyway, he was this Commander of the Julous army. One of the last ones, actually, before the Dominion was subsumed into the Dwendalian Empire. He was this amazing strategist and won heaps of battles and, uh, probably if they’d still had him in the end they might’ve won. The whole world would be different right now. Kinda wild how that works.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He died,’ Beau tells her simply.
Jester scoffs. ‘Obviously. I mean how? What happened?’ She likes Beau talking to her like this. Jester would never pick up a book like this – but hearing it from Beau? It’s way more interesting.
Beau smiles, a smile that fills this side of her face as well. It’s entirely too amused and fond of Jester’s impatience but she continues before Jester can think of getting too irate.
‘He was this important Commander, second or third only to the Dominis. So they – the Empire – really wanted him dead. But he could strategise like a motherfucker and was an awesome fighter too, right? No fuckin’ weaknesses.’ Beau’s smile falters. Falls. She licks her lips. ‘Well. That’s not true. He had one.’
‘O-kay.’ Jester draws the word out to show Beau she’s listening, even if she doesn’t understand what this has to do with her first name or why Beau had laughed at her.
‘I have a point,’ Beau assures her, like she can read Jester’s mind too.
‘Are you nearly at it?’
‘Yes. Gods, yes. Nearly.’
‘Okay. It’s just, not that it isn’t a super fun, super sad story but it’s more sad than it is fun so far and also I don’t really see what this has to do with –’
‘You heard me say that I have a point, right?’
‘Mhm.’
‘And you realise making fun of me just…delays me getting to my point?’
Jester nods. She is delaying it, she knows, and she does want Beau to get to the point, but a sweet, weak sense of victory washes over her—not enough to dispel the exhaustion and absolute tragedy of the day, and of finding Cad’s family like this, of nearly losing Beau or Fjord to it—but victory nonetheless at the fact that Beau has turned toward her to exchange these little barbs and Jester can see the full extent of the smile she wears.
Beau arches a brow. ‘Can I finish up then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. One weakness.’ Beau sucks in a breath. ‘Ah. A wife. His wife. They – captured her,’ Beau tells her, and Jester sees in some awe that Beau’s eyes—both of them, with Beau now turned almost fully toward her—go distant and soft. Sad. The man has been dead for centuries and still Beau feels for him. Or for the wife, maybe, for being caught up in the whole thing. It tugs at Jester’s heart and she makes a small sound that she hopes Beau takes as surprise or upset. Beau pats her knee once. ‘They brought her out onto the field. Told him to surrender or they’d kill her.’
‘Oh. Did he?’
Beau tilts her head. Her eyes trace over Jester’s face, never settling anywhere in particular, before meeting her eyes.
‘Of course,’ she says, like there was never any other option.
Maybe, in Beau’s mind, there isn’t.
Jester swallows. Feels a slow curl of cold sorrow below her throat. ‘Did he die?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did she?’
‘I…think so. Hope not.’
‘Oh. I hope not too. Maybe – maybe – he sacrificed himself and distracted the guards long enough for her to run. Maybe he sent his best friend to save her because they’re the only one he could trust with his wife’s safety.’
‘Right,’ Beau grins. ‘And the best friend, like, finds her wherever she’s being kept and they meet eyes and,’
‘She could tell just by looking at them what her husband had done,'
‘Definitely. Because they loved him too.’
‘Yeah, best friends. And they fight their way out together because she’s secretly a badass too,’
‘I mean, she’s gotta be.’
‘Totally. He was one of those super cool husbands who was like, I want a wife who’s a total badass and could kill me but doesn’t because she loves me.’
‘Definitely,’ Beau agrees, shares a grin with Jester.
‘Beau?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why’d you tell me all of that?’
Beau blinks. Rolls her eyes at herself. She shifts, swings a leg over the bench so she’s facing Jester fully now. ‘Right. The point. Well – his name was Beauregard. The Commander.’
‘Yeah.’
‘His wife – her name was Genevieve.’
Jester frowns. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘It’s – what were you gonna say? That’s so bad?’
‘It’s not bad,’ Beau huffs, colour rising to her cheeks again. ‘It’s just weird. I was thinking about Caduceus and the family names, and Fjord Stone, and Caleb being Bren and Nott using the name Bren, and all those weird coincidence and my da- my father calling me Beauregard,’ she almost snarls, ‘and – I thought it was weird that your first name was – what it was. That’s all.’
‘But what were you gonna say?’
Beau’s lips twist.
‘Beau,’ Jester teases, ‘were you gonna call me your wife?’
She doesn’t know what she expects when she says it. For Beau to laugh is all she really wants from the comment. She doesn’t – she doesn’t really expect Beau to obey, to laugh gently, and shrug, and to say some smattering of words that mean so very little that Jester doesn’t even really hear them. When Beau says a nice goodnight a short while later and wanders back toward the hut, Jester doesn’t expect to be more confused than when they had begun. Doesn’t expect to be left with the sensation that she is missing something.