Chapter Text
Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
Her first year at the Soltryce Academy, Astrid hates Bren Aldric Ermendrud. Everything comes easily to him: the seals, the symbols, the smiles of the professors and the other students. She never falls for his smiles, even though they flash over his face like a fish leaping out of the pond back home. Nothing comes easily to Astrid.
At night she lies awake on her lumpy cot, sweat trickling under her arms and between her breasts wondering: Why me? They must have made a mistake. Tomorrow they will realize, tomorrow they will send me back to the Zemni Fields, back to that small, stuffy town, back to my father…
She spirals down a vicious cycle, hero of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Night after night she lies sleepless like a princess under a curse, convinced she will fail. The resulting exhaustion makes her clumsy, stupid, slow.
In class she fucks up a glyph of warding, snapping her chalk between her fingers as the anger and shame sweep through her. The chalk breaks, of course, and she has no chalk to finish the fucking glyph.
Bren slides his chalk across the desk to her, that smile surfacing across his face, his jaw dusted with red stubble, his nose too big for his face - but he was growing into that, wasn’t he? Just like she was growing into her breasts, she knew because of how the boys had begun to offer hugs in the hallways and after dinner, or brushed against her in the hall. Never Bren, though. Bren always looks her in the eye.
His blue eyes not blue like the sky over the Zemni Fields, blue as the ice that rimes the river in the dead of winter are warm with amusement as he pushes his chalk toward her.
“Here. I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Astrid wants to take it, knows she’s not supposed to, it’s breaking the rules, but she is so tired and her chalk is powder in her hands and Bren has already finished his equation because of course he has. She reaches out and takes the chalk, Bren’s fingers brushing hers in the exchange, lingering a second too long. She bends over her work with a smile, her exhaustion magically fading away. A shadow falls across her desk.
“Rules are the marrow of the Empire. Those who break the rules must be punished, must they not?”
Master Ikithon places a heavy hand on Bren’s shoulder, which sinks under the weight.
“Yes, Master Ikithon,” Bren murmurs, his shoulders tensing for what’s coming. Astrid looks away, at the chalk on her fingers, at the whorls in the wood of her desk, anything so she doesn’t have to watch what’s about to happen to Bren.
“It is an important lesson to learn,” Master Ikithon murmurs, and lifts his fingers, pointing not at Bren, but at Astrid.
Astrid feels every muscle seize with sudden pain, as a crackle of white-hot electricity jolts from Master Ikithon’s hand to her own. She grips the top of the desk through the spasms and grits her teeth. She won’t scream again.
Bren’s eyes burn. “Master Ikithon, stop! Astrid has done nothing wrong. I was the one who -”
Another bolt of electricity shakes Astrid’s bones.
“Shut...up...” she manages to hiss at Bren. His face falls.
Master Ikithon’s eyes crinkle up at the corners. “Very good, Astrid,” he murmurs. “Can you explain to Bren why?”
Astrid wipes a thread of drool away from the corner of her mouth. “A mage of the Empire does not accept pity.”
She likes the shock that blooms across his face more than his smiles. But Bren does not learn Master Ikithon’s lesson. He continues to help her, quiet but persistently. He haunts the hall outside her door. He walks her to class, talking her through incantations as they go. He admires her deft touch with potions, her instinct for components. He introduces her to Eodwulf and Astrid feels part of something for the first time, one of three instead of one alone.
****************************
The next year is easier and harder all at once.
Master Ikithon moves them to a tower, Astrid and Bren and Eodwulf. Skilled and special and powerful. The tower doors lock at night, sealed with glyphs of warding, but Astrid pretends not to mind. It only takes them a few months to learn how to disable the wards and sneak out into the night streets of Rexxentrum. Beer halls and book shops and bumping into people on the street as they run back to the tower before dawn so they can rebuild the wards. Sometimes Astrid wonders if this is Master Ikithon’s design. Wulf snorts and tells her she’s paranoid, but Bren bites his lip and thinks.
Designs are Master Ikithon’s specialty. Designing their curriculum, designing the tower, designing the patterns of the crystals he embeds in their arms. Astrid traces the patterns, teaches herself to see the beauty in the maze-like designs grafted into her skin. She feels the power thrumming under her fingertips. It softens the long days, the painful hours. Astrid knows how to handle pain, has spent her childhood learning.
Bren, not so much.
He handles his own pain no worse than the rest of them, eyes clouding over as he goes to some other place. It’s the pain of others that Bren is unable to stomach. Astrid sees it in the tense line of his mouth when Eodwulf splinters a traitor’s bone instead of breaking it cleanly shards poking through the skin, when a heretic chokes on the potion Astrid pours down his throat, when Bren’s flames draw out sweat and a confession from a dissident.
At night, after the hunt, she holds Bren while he shudders and Eodwulf rubs circles in both of their backs. We believe in the Empire. We are going to make it strong, Astrid tells him, running her fingers through the soft stubble of his hair.
The trick is to find the beauty in the suffering. It’s always there if you look for it. Bren nods and kisses her neck, but she is not sure if he hears her.
**************************************
Sometimes, Astrid wonders if Bren hates her.
The thinks about it when they’re fucking in her room (always her room), hands mashed over each others’ mouths to muffle their gasps and grunts. When he comes, she imagines him filling her with his hate, pouring it into her as she shakes above him.
She imagines it until she half-believes it, and one day she asks him. The look of shock he gives her, his face twisting in pain, makes her wish she hadn’t.
“How can you think that, how can you think that Astrid, I love you, I love you…”
Eodwulf shoots her a quelling look over the top of Bren’s head. Quiet, look what you’re doing to him, he Messages her, his voice pounding like a headache. But Wulf doesn’t understand, he has no imagination. He is satisfied with sweat and spit and two sets of hands on him. It’s enough for Wulf to hold them both after, three heads on her pillow,
After that, when they fuck, Bren holds her like glass, like precious components, his touches too gentle, too reverent, too good for her, until she spits in his face and growls at him to leave. Maybe if he hated her, she wouldn’t hate herself so fucking much. Maybe if she hated him, she wouldn’t feel so weak all the time.
Sometimes Astrid can’t tell if her love for Bren is the last thread of her sanity, or if it’s the knife that’s slowly cutting through it.
**************************
It is harder than she thought, harder and easier all at once. Her mother is so trusting as Astrid helps her cut the vegetables for the stew, chattering away that she’s sure Astrid gets much better fare at the Academy now, she must be since she has some meat on her bones, now. Her father is already drunk. It is shockingly easy to reach for the cut-glass vial in the bandolier across her chest, to push out the stopper with her thumbnail and flick three drops, no more, no less, into her mother’s cup, her father’s stein. Astrid has practiced it hundreds of times.
Bren meets her eyes across the table and the pain filling them mirrors her own, but he is calm, his eyes are blue pools so deep Astrid is drowning in them and for a moment she forgets, she breathes, and by the time she looks away from him and at her parents it is over. Their heads hit the tabletop, the pine wood scarred by knife cuts and grease from decades of meals. Blood and bile mix with spilled beer.
Then they go to Bren’s house, and everything goes to hell.
****************************
Ash and flame everywhere. Everything burning. Astrid can’t tell where the screams are coming from - the Ermendrud farmhouse with its thatched roof smoking, or from Bren, his hands curled around orbs of fire. It’s noisy and it’s theatrical and it’s excessive and it’s beautiful and it’s Bren. Any minute now the people of Blumenthal will come with buckets and blankets to help.
“Shut him up,” Eodwulf tells her, not unkindly, his large hands tracing the sigils of Dimension Door.
She doesn’t need him to tell her, doesn’t need his permission, she needs Bren. She is already running across the field towards his shaking form, waves of heat washing over her face.
“Bren!” she half-chokes. “Come on schatz , we’ve got to go, I’m here, I’ve got you.”
He doesn’t hear her. He is frozen, staring as his childhood home goes up in flames. There’s no time for this, mourning is a luxury and mourning traitors is treason. That old spark of anger flares in Astrid. She was given no time to mourn.
“Komm, wir müssen hier raus!” She grabs his arm and his spins, eyes empty, and catches her throat. Searing pain erupts on her neck, crawls up her face, as his still-burning hands melt her skin. The flames dance in Bren’s eyes, the only sign of life flickering in those hollow sockets.
Astrid welcomes the darkness as it rises to greet her.
********************
“Astrid.”
Astrid jolts awake. She blinks at the clean tile of the Academy’s infirmary, at Master Ikithon sitting by her bedside. In the space between her eyes and eyelids, the night comes rushing back.
“Where’s Bren?”
A stupid question. Some small, screaming, horrible part of Astrid, the survivor in her, tries to choke back the words even as she opens her mouth in Bren’s defense. Once he has decided on a course of action, Master Ikithon does not tolerate questions.
“Master, Bren will get better. If I could speak with him, I can help him - “
Master Ikithon cuts her off.
“Your loyalty is to be commended. It is a pity you could not fuck the weakness out of him.”
Astrid gasps for air. So he knows. He has always known. The thing she thought was theirs, that last private corner of her mind, was made of glass this whole time.
And somehow that knowledge hurts more than the crystals growing agonizingly slowly through the muscle and skin of her arms. Worse than the shocks of electricity that seized her muscles and rattled her teeth. Worse than doors of the tower when she hammered them with her fists to get out, get out, get out -
“You must understand, this is for his safety and yours. It is for the Empire.”
Astrid draws in a ragged breath, stretching the newly healed skin on her neck, and nods.
“That’s a good girl,” Trent smiles, gently touching her cheek. His fingers are dry and cool and do absolutely nothing to dull the pain.