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wayward
In the immediate aftermath of the war, of her father’s death, of the second fall of Aaravos, Claudia wanders for a while. She’s not sure what else there is to do— there are bodies and broken weapons and the scars of magical warfare, and amongst it all, there’s her, bruised and bloody and lost, dreamlike, in a wasteland of her own creation.
She’s learned a lot over the last couple of years: spells, and magic, and of the things she’s capable. She’s not proud of a lot of it. Not now. Not after this. The damage she caused is surreal and the best her mind can do is process it abstractly. The reds are too bright, the steel is too dull, the sound is muted in her ears— like she knows she did this but she’s determined to convince herself otherwise— but the truth is there and the proof is in the way her hands shake as she picks her way through the debris.
Her breath trembles as it leaves her. It hisses when it rushes back in. She wanders on.
That’s when she sees them. Callum and the others.
They should be happy, she thinks— they won, after all— but they look just as exhausted and just as wary as she. Soren’s shoulders are hunched, and there are dents in his armour and bruises on his face. Ezran’s taller than she remembers, but the tired lines under his eyes and the stoop of his posture make him smaller than she knows he is. And between them…
Claudia swallows.
Callum probably looks the least worse for wear. His eyes are older, duller, in a way, but he surveys what’s left of the battlefield sharply anyway, his grip tightening just slightly around the elf’s— Rayla’s?— waist. She, in turn, leans heavily against him, one arm around his shoulders, the other clutched at her ribs from the moment when Claudia had—
She stops there. She doesn’t want to think about it. She doesn’t want to admit she’s responsible for that too. Part of her wants to believe she’d been under Aaravos’ influence when she’d done it, but she knows in her heart that that anger, that hatred, that determination to kill , was hers. The only reason she hadn’t succeeded was because Callum had intervened before she could, and gods, she’s glad he did. She’s got enough blood on her hands. She’s hurt him enough.
In that split second, he catches sight of her.
Something flutters in Claudia’s chest. Hope, maybe? Relief that, after all this, he and the others are okay? She doesn’t know. His eyes turn cold before she can decide and the thing in her chest dies, a moth under someone’s boot, a heart crushed under the weight of her crimes.
He waits.
Claudia turns.
Claudia runs.
She remembers the battle in short bursts. There was the clash of swords and a hail of arrows; there was her father barking orders at the few men they had; there was Aaravos whispering spells into her ear and magic thrumming in her hands. She doesn’t even remember why they were fighting to begin with— only that she was told it was the right thing at the time, and she hadn’t doubted it until it was all but over.
She’d been angry, she thinks, that after everything, she’d still lost. Hadn’t she lost it all already? How were there still other things to lose? In her fury, she’d blamed Rayla. She always had, when she thinks about it, because wasn’t it Rayla who took the boys from her that day in her father’s secret workshop? Wasn’t it Rayla whose sudden appearance in her castle, her home , splintered everything she'd ever known and loved? Wasn’t it Rayla who’d killed her father the first time and filled all the spaces she’d left in the lives of the only family she had left?
It was, and she doesn’t need much to be certain of that. Soren used to banter with her like that. Ezran used to look up to her like that. Callum used to adore her the way he adores Rayla now.
Rayla, Rayla, Rayla— she’s all that matters to them now, and it’s like Claudia had never been part of their lives at all. As far as she was concerned, Rayla had taken everything , and Claudia’s hatred for her had blackened her heart long before Aaravos even had the chance to corrupt it in his favour.
She supposes that’s why she’d cornered her after her father fell. Perhaps that’s why she did what she did. Maybe that’s why she’d tried to squeeze the life from her lungs.
She can still hear it. The clatter of twin butterfly blades against the craggy ground. The sound of her own distorted voice in her ears. The sickening crack of ribs under the crushing pressure of dark magic.
Claudia wants to throw up at the memory.
She does as soon as she’s far enough away.
She wanders for about a year. She doesn’t do magic unless it’s necessary now— the last time she’d done it, she’d done it to dye her hair a ruddy brown and to disguise the green of her eyes. When she looks at her reflection in still water or in tarnished metal, she sees a stranger, and she avoids real mirrors in every inn and in every house because she’s afraid that illusion might one day fade and she might see herself instead. Both sides of the border want her dead anyway and while she agrees that she deserves it, she’s too much of a coward to turn herself in.
She finds odd jobs at farms, and in taverns, and apothecaries. Today, she’s an assistant in a clinic on the outskirts of Duren.
The little town is buzzing this morning. There’s talk that a convoy of ambassadors, both elven and human, are supposed to be passing through on their way to the capitol to see Queen Aanya. Claudia doesn’t think much of it until she hears who they are.
“It’s Prince Callum of Katolis, I think,” she hears a patient say. “They say he and that elf of his are on their way home. They’re to be married in a few months.”
Claudia might have dropped her tray of tonics if it wasn’t for the way her fingers tightened until her knuckles began to bleed white. “Where— where did you hear that?” she asks, trying to sound casual about it.
The old woman chuckles. She’s a regular at this clinic. She’s always been kind to Claudia, and she’s well meaning and sweet in spite of the chronic ache in her joints. “My daughter’s a merchant in Katolis,” she tells her. “She says he proposed to her last summer at a ball. It was very romantic. Apparently he went to the trouble of asking all four of her parents for permission, and he made the horn cuffs for her himself.”
Claudia presses her lips together. “That does sound romantic,” she says, hoping her voice doesn’t sound as raw as it does in her ears.
The old woman lets out a wistful sigh. “A boy like him is so hard to come by these days. That elf of his is a lucky girl, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” manages Claudia. “She is.”
She goes out with the crowds to see them pass through against her better judgement. She’d fought herself on it— she has no right to the details of Callum’s personal life these days, but she goes anyway because it feels like some part of her enjoys the pain and can’t leave well enough alone.
It’s busy enough that she won’t even be noticed, but she keeps her hood high and stays close enough to the back alleys, just in case. The common folk here are curious— the war’s been over for a little while now, but seeing an elf in person is still a novelty to them. The chatter is electric, excited, and when the horses appear at the gates, there’s a great welcoming roar that puts a grimace on Claudia’s face.
They’re not worth this much commotion, surely. Callum’s not even twenty yet, if her memory serves correctly, and despite the fact that the last time she’d seen him was that day after the battle, her image of him is still that kid she knew in her youth: sweet and awkward, tripping over his own feet and chasing after her attention.
He’s not that anymore, obviously. Claudia’s almost certain that’s just her wishing for what was. In a different future, she thinks it might have been her riding through those gates with him. Maybe these cheers would have been for her. Maybe she might have been the lucky one.
Salt rises in her throat at the thought of it. That familiar bitterness feels sharp in her chest. And, when she looks up, they’re there: Callum, older, his shoulders broader, his face more handsome than she remembers, and Rayla, smiling and steadfast by his side. They’re a good pair. It’s like they’ve been made to fit with each other, Callum in his Katolan reds, Rayla in her Moonshadow greens, riding so close together that their knees bump, and Callum can lean out of his saddle far enough to press a kiss into her cheek.
She laughs at him, and Claudia catches the way her lips move to tease him about something that only makes him laugh in turn.
Claudia wonders, sometimes, if they still think about her. If she crosses their minds every once in a while, or if they’ve forgotten she ever existed at all.
She slinks into the back alley before she can dwell on it.
She leaves town the next morning. She doesn’t tell the clinic. She’s not really sure what she’d tell them— she just knows she can’t be here anymore. It won’t matter anyway. They’ll find someone to replace her in no time.
They all do.
The months pass. The season changes. Claudia drifts from town to town, never staying too long in one place because, even after all this time, she’s too afraid to face the justice she knows she deserves. Deep in her heart, she hopes that, if she stays away long enough, her crimes might be considered less severe.
But she hears the whispers still. The rumours of the mage prince and the ambassador elf, travelling from village to village, city to city, across the border and back again until, at the end of the summer, she hears they’re going home one final time.
“For the wedding,” says a travelling bard. He and his companions have made camp along the road, and Claudia only happens upon them on her way to the next village. “They want to settle in Xadia for a little bit afterwards. People are saying Her Ladyship might already be with child.”
“Not very conventional, are they?” A woman with a lute on her back snorts into her ale. “Then again, I guess Callum’s always been an awkward fit for a prince. This isn’t that surprising.”
Something about the way she says it makes Claudia tense. It’s not an insult— not really— but it rubs her the wrong way all the same.
“Is that supposed to mean something?” she asks sharply.
The others pause. The woman with the lute purses her lips.
“No?” she says, frowning. “What would you know about it, anyway?”
Clauda’s breath catches in her throat. “I— um.” She coughs. “I used to work in the castle,” she mumbles, looking away. “I don’t think he ever wanted to be a prince. He’s just… a good kid. He deserves to be happy.”
The bard stares at her curiously, tankard halfway to his lips. “Sounds like you have a little crush,” he chuckles. “Sorry to disappoint, but I think you might have missed your chance.”
Claudia scoffs mirthlessly into her mead. “Don’t I know it?”
The smart thing to do would be to move on with her life. To forget Callum, and Soren, and Ezran, and Rayla the way they’ve forgotten about her. It’s not to go to Katolis for a wedding she wasn’t invited to.
But that’s what she does because she hasn’t been back in years and she’s been a wanderer for far too long.
The city’s changed, though. She hardly recognizes it— there are shops she doesn’t remember and elves milling around the square comfortably and without fear. The banners hanging from the lamps aren’t banners of the uneven towers— they’re a sigil, she thinks: two runes she remembers mean Sky and Moon, woven together like the lives of the two people they’re supposed to represent.
It must be nice, Claudia thinks, to have so many people so excited for you. But then they probably deserve it: the work it must have taken to reform a city like this would have been immense, but the people are happy and prospering, and that had to be Callum and Ezran’s work so of course their people would be grateful to them for it.
And her? She doesn’t know. Being here… is hard. The good years feel like so long ago, but this was her city once too, and it doesn’t know her. The strangeness of it weighs down her bones, and it’s like she’s searching for something that’s still the same; something familiar; some excuse to pretend that this is the same city she grew up in despite the fact that it’s changed beyond her wildest dreams.
Maybe that’s why she finds herself wandering towards the castle.
Maybe that’s why, when she gets to the gates, her mouth dry, her heart thudding, she admits to who she is.
Maybe she’s hoping, at least, that the dungeons are still the same.
Ezran comes to see her first. He’s grown into a fine young king, and it was by his order that she’s not currently dead so she’s grateful for that, at the very least. He wants her to stand trial instead, which is more than what she deserves, and if the council finds her guilty (they will), he’s hoping that the worst of her sentence will be this cell.
It’s wishful thinking. Ez might be king, but even he can’t sway a unanimous vote.
A year ago, Claudia might have called that naivete.
Today, she calls it mercy, because, while she knows that death is a more appropriate sentence for her crimes, she’s still afraid of it, and she’s glad that Ezran’s still kind-hearted enough to allow her this chance.
His face is hard though. It’s like her betrayal is still fresh to him, even after all this time, and Claudia offers him a small smile that he doesn’t return.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” he says quietly.
“Probably not,” she murmurs.
“Why did you?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know.”
Soren comes to see her too. When his familiar footsteps clank along the hall, she almost dares to hope, but when he rounds the corner, she finds he’s just the same as the others. His lips pressed thin, like he doesn’t know if he should be happy or sad or angry that she’s here. There’s distrust in his eyes, and Claudia thinks that hurts the most.
Her own brother, turned against her.
Was that her doing too?
“Hey Clauds,” he says at last. His voice shakes around her name, but he keeps his face relatively impassive. How strange, thinks Claudia. She’d always been able to read him, and now he’s a stranger to her as much as she is to him.
She offers him a grim tilt of her lips. “Hey Sor-bear,” she says. “How’ve you been?”
Soren cracks a smile there. Just a little one, but it’s a smile all the same. “Better than you’ve been, I think. I’m glad you’re okay.”
“‘Okay’ isn’t the word I would use,” chuckles Claudia tiredly, but she finds it in herself to get up this time to face him at the bars. “It’s good to see you.”
“Yeah.” Soren lurches awkwardly, like he wants to step forward but remembers at the last moment that he doesn’t trust her. He stands his ground. “I missed you.”
“ Ha.” The laugh that escapes from her lips is dry and dour. “Did you really?”
Soren pauses. He stares at his boots and Claudia knows at once that he didn’t. She and him had always been a pair, but when it came down to it, she’d chosen her father over him. Repeatedly. She’d helped Viren gaslight him, and her indecision, her inaction had forced him to make choices for her and in her mind, she’d blamed him for the way some things had turned out. She wouldn’t miss her either. Not after all that.
But Soren shakes his head, and when he lurches forward this time, he doesn’t stop himself. “It hasn’t been the same without you,” he says, taking that one step closer. “I wondered— we all did— if we’d ever see you again. At the very least, we hoped you were okay.”
Another lie. Perhaps Soren doesn’t intend for it to be, but Claudia knows in her heart that it’s not true for all of them. She scoffs. “The council wants to hang me, Soren.”
“Clauds, Ez is trying— ”
She stops him there with a mirthless laugh. “He shouldn’t.”
When Callum comes to see her, the bitterness floods back in a rush. She didn’t think he would want to. She wouldn’t want to, if she were him, and she’s hurt him so much that she wonders (often) if he would welcome a guilty verdict.
But he’s not like that. Surely he’s not. There must be some part of him that’s still that same kid from all those years ago, and when she realizes that what she’s feeling is hope , she squashes it by remembering that it should have been her .
There’s a ring on his finger now. It gleams in the dim light, and in the other life she so often imagines, there’s one on hers too. It’s not even that she loves him. Claudia doesn’t think she ever has— not in that way, anyway, but for most of her life, she’d grown up being told her marriage would be arranged eventually, and probably to Callum because it’s convenient for him, for her, and for their fathers. It would have been a comfortable life, full of opulence and luxury that neither of them really care for, and their children would rinse and repeat.
But that’s not this life. That’s not how things have turned out at all, and instead, Callum looks at her with disdain, and the ring around his finger winks— a reminder that he was never really hers to lose in the first place.
“Congratulations,” she offers coldly, in spite of the fact that she has no right to be cold with him at all. It’s just easier to be bitter than it is to be ashamed. “I hear the wedding went well.”
Callum sneers at her. “How it went isn’t any of your business,” he says shortly.
“For the other thing, then.” Claudia’s lips curl into a wan smile, and Callum visibly tenses in the poor light. The distrust stings, but she doesn’t blame him. When she sleeps sometimes, she can still hear the crack of Rayla’s ribs. It still makes her sick. "How far along is she?"
“Again,” sneers Callum. “None of your business.”
Claudia scoffs. “Why’re you down here then?”
He says nothing. She wonders if he even knows. She has her assumptions— the trial is tomorrow and there’s a good chance she’ll be dead the day after that. Maybe he’d wanted to say goodbye. Or maybe he’d wanted to gloat.
But he doesn’t do either of those things. She kind of wishes he did because this hurts more. His fingers twitch at his sides, instead, and words build behind his lips only to die before they ever make it out. Then he turns and leaves, and Claudia’s alone again in the crushing silence of her cell.
They do find her guilty. That’s not surprising. And after her various acts of treason and her history with dark magic, the vote is unanimous, and there’ll be a noose waiting for her in the courtyard tomorrow evening. There’s a part of her that wants to fight it, but she’s been wandering for long enough, and she’s tired, and she just wants it all to end.
The world has outgrown her. It has no need for dark magic, and she’d burned her bridges so severely that her friends and family don’t fight her sentence either. Ezran had said he’d try but it feels like there’s barely an effort and, frankly, she’s had enough.
She stares into the ceiling of her cell that night, unable to sleep and unable to picture anything but that noose, when she hears footsteps down the hall. For a while, she thinks it’s just the shift change, but the footsteps come to a stop outside her bars and, when the coast is clear, Rayla materialises out of the darkness.
Claudia almost jumps out of her skin. She scrambles upwards and against the wall, her breath heavy and shaking, but Rayla says nothing to her and—
Unlocks the cell.
“What are you doing?”
Rayla snorts. “Something against my better judgement.”
Against her better judgement indeed. Claudia’d tried to kill her once, and there’s no reason to believe she’s any less dangerous. The swell of Rayla’s belly is almost imperceptible, but it’s there, marking her as vulnerable despite the twin blades sitting at the small of her back.
Claudia stares at her through the open door, confused and hardly daring to hope. “Why?”
Rayla shrugs at her and steps back, the path to freedom abundantly obvious. “The boys don’t want to see you hanged,” she says. And then quietly, she adds, “Ezran really did try. Soren almost threw a fit. And Callum… it killed him to lose you the first time. I’m not willing to put the three of them through that again.”
Claudia’s still staring. “I don’t— I don’t understand—”
“I don’t expect you to.” Rayla almost sounds… kind? Empathetic? Claudia’s not really sure. “They missed you. All three of them. Soren tried to find you, in the early days, but he came back empty handed and disappointed every time. Don’t force them to watch you die tomorrow.”
“But—” Claudia swallows. “I tried to kill you.”
“So you did.” Rayla’s eyes harden, just for a moment, but she doesn’t close the cell door. “But if you think I want revenge for it, you’re wrong. This is just… how we break the cycle.”
There’s a long pause. Claudia gets up, tentative and uncertain, but Rayla’s blades remain at her back, and the cell door stays open. For the first time, Claudia understands why the boys like her; why they’d so easily adopted her into their mismatched little family; why she’d been so easy to replace.
Kindness like this doesn’t come along often.
She steps through the door. Freedom feels foreign and familiar at the same time, and Rayla closes the cell door behind her with something like a rueful smile. When she thinks about the other life this time, Claudia wonders if, there, she and Rayla might have been friends.
“Thank you,” she says.
Rayla only shrugs once more. “Don’t get caught.” She studies Claudia with that same, almost-smile and waits.
Claudia turns.
Claudia runs.
Years later, Claudia’s working at a flower shop in the outskirts of Del Bar. She’d thought about trying to find her mother, while she was here, but this is for the better, she thinks. Here she’s someone new. Someone full of hope and second chances. Someone she hopes the others might be proud of.
The spring brings blooms with it, and her shop is teeming with lilies and roses and even Xadian orchids she tends to herself in the back garden. It’s not the life she expected for herself, but she’s not drifting anymore, and this is better than the bitter sadness she’d held within her once upon a time.
She’s balancing the books for the month when a child wanders through the front entrance looking curiously at her bouquets. There’s something familiar about her. She can’t be much older than six, but Claudia thinks she knows the shape of that jaw, and the lilac of those eyes, and the chestnut of that hair.
“Hey there,” she greets kindly. “Whatcha’ looking for?”
The girl pauses and studies her appraisingly. Claudia studies her back. The more she looks, the more she’s certain of it.
“I’m looking for a present for my mum,” she says at last. She’s very confident for someone so young. Claudia would expect nothing less. “Dad said he’d let me pick it this time.”
“Oh?” chuckles Claudia. “What’d you have in mind?”
“She likes Moon lilies. I was thinking about that bouquet, maybe?” She points it out with one of four fingers, and Claudia grins and pulls it off the rack for her. “How much?”
“For something like this?” Claudia feigns a thoughtful frown. “This stuff’s pretty hard to come by. It might be dear.”
The girl narrows her eyes. “How dear?”
“A favour.” She smiles at her, a sort of lightness settling in her heart as she presses the bouquet into her hands. “Say hi to your mom and dad for me.”
The girl pauses. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Who do I tell them said it?”
Claudia chuckles. “An old friend,” she says with a wink. “Don’t worry. They’ll get it.”