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"And...there you have it, folks! Thirty-Clove Garlic Chicken!"
Taako's voice is loud and bright, and alright, maybe a touch too theatrical as he pulls the chicken from the oven. A subtle burst of magic trickles from his fingers, creating an impressive burst of steam that twists into elaborate, faintly shimmering curlicues as it creeps out over the crowd. The forty-odd assembled spectators ooh and ahh and applaud in a way that Taako will never get tired of.
"Sazed, my dear? The garnish?" He sets the chicken on the counter and his assistant mutely begins to arrange spoonfuls of elderberry relish over the top of it. Taako hovers close, and so does the audience, watching him work. Sazed throws out a little joke to the crowd that Taako doesn't catch -- he's too focused on the food. The crowd laughs, though, so he guesses they liked it. Something twinges in Taako's chest at that.
"Hm. The relish must be a bit too acidic," Taako murmurs to Sazed, too soft for his fans to catch. "I can smell it."
Sazed tenses at this, but then again, he tenses at most things lately. "The last town we stopped in was small. Not a ton of supplies," he answers back, an edge to his voice so slight that Taako might be imagining it. "The only berries they had were underripe."
"Hm. Well, we'll do better here." Taako grins at Sazed, meaning for it to be encouraging, but he must have missed the mark. Sazed only nods brusquely and starts to turn away.
"D'you need me for anything else?" He asks, but he's walking out before Taako can even finish saying no.
It's not like Taako isn't used to it by now. He gets like this every time they have one of their fights about whether or not Taako should let Sazed on the show. He'll calm down soon enough. Still, it hurts just a little bit.
But Taako can worry about that later. He has a show to finish. Lifting his chin, he beams out at his audience, hoisting the full dish onto the tabletop extending out from the side of his stagecoach. "Now, I only have one question for all of you lovelies in this audience," he says.
"What?" The crowd choruses back. Some of those who have come to see Taako before are giggling. They know this part of the show well enough by now.
Taako pauses dramatically, allowing a hush to fall over his fans. Then, in a slow voice only slightly above a whisper, he asks, "Who's...hungry?"
He claps his hands, allowing a shower of pinkish sparks to rain down from them as he transforms the dish from one large, complete bird into forty or so tiny plates, just enough for everyone in the audience to get a taste. The crowd cheers, and Taako smiles indulgently. "Help yourselves," he urges, and his fans move forward.
The next few minutes pass in a pleasant buzz of talking and eating, as nearly everyone from the audience takes a plate and tries some chicken. Taako steps out of the coach to move amongst his fans. Ordinarily, he'd be eating, too, but there are a few regular fans who he'd had fun talking to the last time he swung by Glamour Springs. He wants to see if he can spot them again.
He's just making his way toward one of them when everything -- everything -- goes wrong.
There's a young girl a little ways away from Taako. Seven, maybe, or eight. Dragonborn, with wide yellow eyes and green scales that shimmer prettily in the warm sunlight. She's wandering in the crowd with with mother when she staggers into her, doubling over like she's been punched in the gut.
"Sweetheart? What's wrong?" Her mother asks, crouching down in front of her to stare with worried eyes at her face.
"My belly hurts," the girl whimpers. Then she retches, pressing a green-scaled hand to her mouth.
It comes away dripping red.
The happy hum of conversation turns nervous as more people notice this girl, who has now collapsed into the grass and is being cradled by her panicked mother. Taako is moving to help, to do something, anything, when an old human man drops to his knees. He hunches over his stomach, groaning.
The dragonborn girl's mother. A burly young half-orc. A set of slight-framed tiefling siblings. Taako's heart sinks into his feet as, one by one, his audience falls to the ground, clutching their stomachs and bubbling blood from their lips. They're dying. Good gods, they're all dying. "I, I..." Taako stammers. What does he say to this? Is there anything at all he can do? He reaches for his wand, but just stands there, frozen, with his hand resting on it. He only knows the most basic healing spells, good for fixing first-degree burns and tiny cuts. And even if he knew anything better, he's wasted so much of his magic on the show he just finished that he could probably barely slow down whatever was happening for one person. A shuddering gasp that isn't quite a sob escapes him as it fully sets in that this, whatever it is, is entirely his fault, and completely unfixable.
His gaze flicks back to the dragonborn girl and her mother. Her eyes are half-closed, her breathing fast and labored. Her eyes lock on Taako's. "What did we eat?" She begs him, the words gurgling weakly out of her. She gives a little shiver, then falls limp. Her mother lets out an anguished cry and tries to move toward Taako, but she falls and does not get up.
Taako runs.
He doesn't remember getting back to the living quarters of his stagecoach, but he must have done it somehow, because suddenly he's bursting through the door into the tiny set of rooms that he and Sazed share. Sazed's head jerks up, confusion and concern written all over his face as he looks at Taako.
"What's--?"
"Go. Drive." Taako's voice sounds far away and much too calm. His vision is tunneling and his breathing is much too heavy. His chest feels like it's filling with static. He is vaguely aware that Sazed has asked him what happened, but all Taako can hear are the last words of that little girl. What did we eat? What did they eat? How could he possibly have messed up this horribly and not even realized? Unless...
"Shit!" The word rips itself out of Taako as he puts the pieces together. The relish didn't smell right, he remembers. Too acidic. Sazed had blamed it on underripe elderberries, but Taako had done way too much magic on those fucking berries for the ripeness to be anything other than perfect. But if they weren't the right berries altogether, that was a whole different story. "They weren't elderberries. They...I must've not looked closely enough after I transformed them. I must've turned them into nightshade."
Taako sits down heavily on one of the seats. He just poisoned an entire town.
The revelation hits him like a spear through the chest, but externally, he doesn't really do much. He can't muster the energy to cry or even blink. Even the panic he'd felt just a moment ago is fading, until all that's left is a deep and numbing kind of shock. "We really need to go," he says into a voice that is once again unsettlingly even.
Sazed just nods slowly and gets up. He readies the horses, and he drives. And he drives. He drives for at least two days before Taako can do anything besides stare blankly at the desolate, empty plains outside, and for another day and a half before they come to anything resembling a town. They get out and ask for a room in the first inn they come to, collapsing into the stiff beds they find there. The impact knocks the air from Taako's lungs, but it's not like he's breathing all that easily anyway.
"We should get rid of the coach," he says flatly, after he and Sazed have just been laying there for some time. "It'll get us recognized if, well, anybody's looking for us."
Or maybe they shouldn't. If the police find them...well, it's not exactly as if Taako is innocent. He'd certainly deserve being arrested.
But Sazed nods again, quietly and slowly, as he's done anytime Taako has asked for something since they fled Glamour Springs. "Maybe we can see about getting another one here," he suggests, in a voice just as lifeless as Taako's.
Then he wraps an arm around Taako, which surprises him. Sazed isn't particularly physically affectionate, especially with all the fights they've been having recently. But Taako figures that Sazed, like himself, needs all the comfort he can get right now. So Taako just leans into it and somehow, miraculously, manages to sleep.
Taako is cold when he wakes up. He opens his eyes to see harsh daylight and himself sprawled out on top of the bed's covers. Sazed is nowhere in sight. Neither are any of his things.
Taako runs outside and begins a frantic search, but after an hour of calling out Sazed's name until his throat was raw and looking up and down every street for the stagecoach, he returns to the inn room alone.
Of course you're alone, a cold voice in his head says. Just count yourself lucky Sazed didn't turn you in. Who'd want to keep travelling with a murderer?
This is when Taako finally starts to cry.