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Astrid had played the grieving classmate enough times to know that Soltryce students were prone to disappear mysteriously or die tragically—two fates that were, of course, no one’s fault; not as long as Master Ikithon drew breath and breathed out lies.
Once every few years, tragedy struck young mages during their last year of schooling. There would be no bodies for the families, and occasionally, no families to mourn the loss. None of this happened with enough frequency or regularity to establish a pattern, not unless you knew how many of those promising students had caught Master Ikithon’s eye.
Fortunately, those deaths didn’t quite stick if the students had the right man’s favor, not when she’d hear of a student’s dying in a shipwreck on their way to Marquet on Monday and watch them walking out of Master Ikithon’s office on Thursday.
Astrid took solace in the fact that, even after her graduation, she was still alive on paper. For now, at least, she was valuable enough not to be shoved under the radar until she stopped struggling for air. It was a way out and up that Bren hadn’t been offered.
When she first heard news of his “death” the morning after graduation night, Astrid’s blood had gone cold. She’d replayed that night countless times since then: trying to talk him down first, murmuring soothing words and offering gentle touches as he fought and screamed himself hoarse into the empty, Blumenthal night. But when he’d grabbed Astrid’s throat in a frenzy and wouldn’t stop until her skin began to bubble like so much kindling…everything became a little harder to follow. By the time their transport back to Rexxentrum arrived, she remembered Wulf pinning him to the ground with a snarl that was half-wild as her breaths rattled in and out of her, wet and pained.
At the time, there’d been so much blood on Wulf already that she couldn’t tell if any of it was Bren’s. But now Bren was gone and their last memories of him were moments of desperation, fear, and violence. As if any of their time together had ever been meaningfully different.
Even the gentler moments, efficiently consigned to the romantic musings of the girl who’d died alongside Bren on that fateful night, hadn’t been void of fear. There was no room for softness in the life of a scourger. No room for sentimentality. No room for Bren.
She hadn’t seen him since that night; she and Eodwulf had been under strict orders to rest and recuperate without magical aid, and the process was draining, to say the least.
She was still pale and shaky from the poisoned meal she’d had with her family, having eaten far more Sauerbraten that night than she’d planned to, when Master Ikithon called them for a meeting three days after graduation. He informed them of Bren’s treatment in the sanitorium, and Astrid had had to hold her tongue to stop herself from crying in relief or rudely inquiring about visiting him.
Ikithon could see her physical weakness, the way her own guilt had almost had her finish that poisoned meal, but to go asking after Bren was foolish. She wouldn’t put him in danger by caring.
It was a month after graduation that a younger student, one of Master Ikithon’s newest charges, came with a note. She and Eodwulf would be visiting Vergesson Sanitorium the next day. If they finished their other tasks efficiently enough, they would be allowed a brief visit with their ailing friend, and—because Master Ikithon was kinder than they deserved—to bring him a small gift.
Astrid was instantly on edge, unable to smile and cling to Wulf’s chest the way she would’ve a mere few weeks ago. This had to be some kind of trick. Some kind of test. They were taught to despise failure and those who were weak enough to commit such a sin, but she couldn’t do that. Not when it was Bren.
They didn’t discuss it until she had climbed into bed. Eodwulf joined her on the narrow mattress, the same one that now creaked slightly less alarmingly with two bodies instead of three.
“We shouldn’t bring anything for him. Sentimentality is dangerous,” she murmured, the note refolded neatly and tucked into the pocket of her nightgown closest to her heart. Wulf wrapped his arms around her, fitting his palm over her heart and their first chance to lessen its aching.
He was silent for so long and breathed so steadily that she was sure he’d fallen asleep. Wulf had grown still and withdrawn and pious since he’d come out of his childhood home with red splattered across his cheek, prone to gazing dully into the distance when they found themselves alone, as was increasingly common.
“You’ve seen those in the sanitorium, yes?” he asked, even though he knew the answer, “Will our Bren look like that tomorrow?”
She knew what Wulf sounded like when he would have a sleepless night—the defeat in his voice, the way she felt his other hand clutch the Raven Queen’s pendant around his throat. It was a pity that his Matron could only grant peace after the body was dead. Every time she looked in his eyes and kissed the very corner of his mouth, she was sure that they were both empty in the same way.
Astrid flicked Dancing Lights into existence, the cantrip coming to her easily. It had been Bren’s first and favorite spell for the few months between discovering their propensity for magic and being shuttled off to the academy. When she was a child, Astrid was sure that she would never forget the brush of his hand against her wrist as he corrected her movements.
They’d been young during some distant past life. They’d been happy then too, without the encroaching knowledge that they were merely making the best of a bad situation. All they needed was a gift that would remind Bren of those moments.
They spent the entire night awake and only finished cataloguing options when the pale blue of pre-dawn light began to filter into the room. Astrid knew that there was only one option that Bren would enjoy and Master Ikithon would allow.
“He’ll want this,” Eodwulf said eventually, leaning against the wall and looking down at the carnage of their room. They’d kept Bren’s things as untouched as possible until this point, not wanting to taint his eventual homecoming with the annoyance of a familiar space reorganized. Astrid nodded from where she sat in the small circle of empty floorspace.
Neither of them moved to touch it.
“I want to keep it,” she admitted eventually, when her drooping eyelids and tired muscles allowed the secret selfishness to slide out of her.
She picked up the earthen cat’s paw, the only remaining piece of the Eremendruds’ going-away present to their son. It had once been a part of a larger, cat-shaped kettle, but Bren had shattered it while carrying it through the halls two years ago. The paw was the only thing that could be salvaged, and Astrid had had it sanded down to prevent Bren from cutting himself on an edge.
He used to always turn it over in his hand when he was deep in thought, running distracted fingers over its smooth, cool grain. Bren had been skilled at finding the good in broken things. She didn’t know if she had the capacity to do the same.
“I know, but-” Wulf began, and the boundless sympathy in those three words alone made her suddenly, sharply furious.
“’But he needs it more’? ‘But it’s his in the first place’? Or ‘but what you want doesn’t matter’?” she finished for him. She was picking a fight, an offer that the old Eodwulf would’ve taken her up on just to give her something else to do. Now, he just shrugged.
“Not the third, Sassa. Never the third.” And she felt herself grow ever-closer to tears.
She ran her thumb over the paw, as if she would be able to feel some residual heat from Bren’s hand still trapped in the clay. It’d been so cold without him.
Wulf touched her shoulder, quiet and solemn as all of the priests who’d tried to talk to her during Bren’s private funeral. “Perhaps he’ll find some use for it. One day.”
In the following months, the seasons shifted and their official graduation from the Soltryce Academy—a formality at this point—approached. Bren stayed in Vergesson. The unspoken moratorium on touching his things gradually lifted.
First, his clothes.
Astrid walked into breakfast one morning to find Wulf sitting with his old friends, the ones he’d withdrawn from in the aftermath of their true graduation, grinning and chatting like he hadn’t murmured increasingly-desperate prayers for Bren every night for weeks. He was wearing the dark red sweater Bren had taken from him the previous winter and hadn’t given back, not even in the warm months. Overcome by nausea and something she didn’t dare name, she’d had to go back to their room hungry.
The next day, she clasped one of Bren’s necklaces around her throat for luck on a Transmutation exam.
On her first solo mission, an infiltration into a cult that worshipped the Platinum Dragon, Wulf stopped her at the door with a strip of fabric cut from Bren’s favorite shirt. She allowed him to tie her hair back with it. “I’m sure he won’t be too angry about this when he gets back,” Wulf had said, and Astrid couldn’t help but kiss him for finding the strength to hope.
Astrid would sometimes run her fingers over Bren’s old clothes, bury her face in them to try and pretend she had him in her arms. Sometimes, Wulf would join her. Neither of them would acknowledge that they’d long since stopped smelling like anything but old fabric.
Then, the month or two before they had to leave the Academy and truly start their new lives, they started looking through the things he used for spellwork.
It started when Astrid ran out of ink while she was transcribing a spell and she’d reached for the closest inkwell to continue without breaking concentration. It was only when Wulf looked up from his book and uttered a half-broken, “Sassa,” that she’d looked down and realized that it was one of Bren’s.
Since their first year at the academy, he’d always bought cheaper ink than their classmates simply because he went through it more quickly. For someone with a perfect memory, he always insisted on writing everything down “just in case”.
She’d read through so many of his notebooks and journals and annotations and spellbooks that she could probably mimic Bren’s handwriting in her sleep, a skill that would never mean anything other than heartbreak.
She used the ink until it was gone. Then, she washed out the inkwell and used it to store clover blossoms while spring and summer swept through Rexxentrum. While she was gone on missions, Wulf would make sure the flowers were fresh. There were many, quiet rituals in their lives; habits of those who never stopped mourning.
Another one was to burn a single stick of incense every year on the anniversary of their graduation, taking them from the half-finished pack of incense Bren secreted away when he was still trying to learn Find Familiar. There were ten sticks left. Ten more years to mourn.
By the time they left the academy, there wasn’t much left of Bren’s possessions that hadn’t integrated into their own items. Ikithon never extended the offer of bringing Bren a gift again, but it was Astrid who first bought Bren a birthday present.
On that day, she brought home earrings set with brilliant orange gemstones she could only afford on a scourger’s salary. The next day, Wulf came home with a comb made of antler, apologizing for allowing Bren’s birthday to slip his mind and buying his present a day late. The next year, it was warm gloves and a scarf: a pair of gifts that unintentionally matched. Sentimentality was weakness, but they had long since perfected the art of secreting away their weaknesses. Bren was secreted away in the basement of Vergesson, but his gifts piled ever higher in one of the drawers in Astrid’s bedroom.
On the year they finally stopped mourning, Bren disappeared.