Chapter Text
Eda has only just fallen asleep when Hooty screeches her name. Loudly. High-pitched. A sing-song shriek.
She startles to life, immediately smacking out at whatever’s within reach. Two bottles pitch off a shelf and shatter. Hooty, peering in through the window, makes a wounded sound. Even though her flailing arms are literally nowhere near him.
It’s not a peaceful awakening. Once the initial shock wears off, there’s a lot of snuffling, and yawning, and groaning, and falling onto the floor, and managing to bang both of her elbows against the ground.
It doesn’t help that Eda is very tired – more tired than usual. She’s still recuperating from her all-day adventure stealing the palistrom wood. The whole heist had gone much better than anticipated, but even so, she's not as spry as she once was. Her neck aches. Her feet hurt. She notes about a dozen other old-person complaints, too, but that’s just because of the tiredness. A tired Eda is a cranky Eda. She'll feel less ancient once she's slept.
Outside, the starry night sparkles indigo and deep purple and silver. Any witch with sense is still sound asleep.
Eda says, “What.”
“There’s a Coven Head coming toward the house,” Hooty informs her, with a little too much glee. “And he looks ma-a–ad.”
“What?”
Eda rushes to the window, scanning the Isles instead of the sky. Below, where the trees give way to flat ground, there is indeed a figure approaching the house. It carves a lone path through the open clearing, making zero attempt at stealth. It is also glowing purple and rumbling, ominously, like a thundercloud.
Hooty sticks his head way too close to Eda’s, his grin full of too many teeth. “Should I punt him?”
Eda does some very fast mental calculations. “Nah,” she says, all casual, composed. “It’s just Darius. Let the old geezer come grouse at me.”
All the same, she’s very quiet as she heads down to the living room. And she tucks a handful of scribbled glyphs into her pocket. Just to be prepared. Just in case. She’s pretty sure this isn’t some kind of covert arrest operation, if only because Darius is not the kind of person to sacrifice beauty sleep for petty criminals.
Darius is, however, the kind of person to sacrifice beauty sleep to chew someone out for tracking mud on his precious cloak. Eda wonders if she somehow tore some deeply prized embroidery or something during yesterday’s escapades. She hadn't noticed Darius in the area, but that doesn't mean anything. She’s excellent at leaving one-sided grudges in her wake. Always has been.
At any rate, she can’t imagine any other reason why Darius might hike his pompous, flashy self through all the mud and grime and nastiness of the woods. Doesn't seem like his thing.
Not that she’s spoken to him in years. For obvious reasons, their social circles do not mix.
Darius stops outside the door, his feet scraping on the ground. Eda can tell that he’s shifted back into his usual witch form, because the incessant rumbling stops. Her furniture stops vibrating. Her house stops creaking, does not shatter into abominable pieces.
It’s really going to suck if he is here to arrest her. Eda has literally no clue how to defend herself against his power. Even if she still had her magic, he'd be a formidable opponent.
On the other side of the door, Hooty sings a typical Hooty-style greeting. Darius ignores it entirely. Unsurprising. He never was one for real fun, even back in high school.
“Eda the Owl Lady!” he shouts. “I know you’re in there!”
Well, that does not make her want to open the door one bit. She glares at the wood instead. If he's here to complain about crimes against fashion, he shouldn't use her full title like this is official business. She’ll have to cooperate if this is an arrest, at least until she's away from the house, Luz and King are sleeping-
“Eda!” Darius shouts again, except this time it's... different. Realer, somehow. It certainly doesn’t sound like a pompous know-it-all about to list criminal charges. “Please!”
He doesn't actually need to plead with her. His magic could make matchsticks out of the Owl House. And he's not the type to be polite for the sake of politeness.
Something’s wrong. Actually wrong, she thinks. Properly wrong. Badly wrong. Not wrong like the annoyance of a poorly-sewn patch on a muddy cloak.
Darius should be alone. She expects him to be alone. He’d approached the house alone, after all, in his larger-than-life purple thundercloud haze. He'd been incredibly dramatic about the whole thing. But when she opens the door, there’s something in his arms.
She blinks. No - someone in his arms.
The figure is mostly bundled up in Darius’s cloak, his clothing hidden, but the Golden Guard’s mask isn’t exactly hard to place.
Eda processes that Darius has brought this giant pain-in-the-ass directly to her doorstep. She processes that he's done this in the middle of the night, while she's sleeping, while Luz and King are sleeping, with no warning or explanation or apology. Of all the people. This guy.
That’s pretty much all she needs to know.
“Oh, hell no,” she says, and pushes the door shut.
Darius shoves a foot into the crack before it can latch. “It's important.”
“Nothing about this guy is important enough to wake me up at... at... oh, I don't even want to know. I'm tired. Look at me. Look me in the eyes. My kids are upstairs, and they're both having amazing dreams that don't involve random visits from the Emperor's soldiers. I cannot believe you couldn't wait until morning.”
Darius growls. The sound doesn't come from him, exactly. It's more like the air around him growls. It thunders, shimmers. His eyes glint, dangerously, dancing between put-together witch and uncontrolled magic. Shadows flicker along his forearms, unspooling, looking for places to root around his feet. It's a threat if she's ever seen one. His magic seems perfectly keen on tearing into the house.
Eda doesn’t think anything good will come of a pissing contest between an insanely powerful abomination witch and her insanely powerful demon home, so she sighs. Opens the door again. Gestures Darius inside, doing an exaggerated bow. “Of course, my liege," she simpers, in her best imitation of Lilith's suckup voice. "Oh, I am but your humble servant. How can I say no to such a prestigious visitor? I might simply pass away if I squander the opportunity. I'm so glad to have been given a choice in the matter."
Darius does not react to any of this, so Eda drops the voice and says, "I hope your boots get hexed mud trapped between the laces forever. This had better be so good.”
Darius deposits the Golden Guard on her couch without asking permission, because why would he? She’s definitely cool with the Emperor’s favorite pet oozing his bad attitude all over her comfy furniture. That's a thing she loves, actually. She loves having random soldiers here in the middle of the night, especially ones that have been terrible to her entire family. She's having a great time. This is great.
“Did you know he threatened to murder King?” Eda asks. “We've met, him and I. We have a very short, very eventful history. Obviously he got what he wanted. Murder threats tend to do that. Yes, I am holding a grudge about it. I am holding such a grudge about it. I’m prepared to be extremely petty here. You get Mean Owl Lady when you wake me up like this.”
“Right. Of course he did,” Darius says, pinching the bridge of his nose. He looks so aggrieved that Eda almost laughs. Titan forbid the Golden Guard's reputation precede him.
“Of course," Darius continues. "Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t he? One wonders where he even finds the time, but no, that makes perfect sense. The night wasn’t terrible enough yet. He had to make a personal enemy of you, personally, in person. Statistically speaking, you'd think he couldn't make this many enemies. But here we are! Also, unrelatedly, would it kill you to just stop doing things that the Emperor kills people for?"
“Believe it or not, we actually weren’t doing anything bad at the time. I know. Shocking. Some days I don’t even commit arson. I'm geriatric. Slow in my old age.”
"We are literally from the same graduating class."
"You must be slowing down in your old age, too."
Darius grunts, but doesn’t answer. He doesn’t seem interested in a debate over trivial disagreements like “massive overreach of government power” and “disturbing peaceful creatures for no reason” and "wrecking the native ecosystem" and "being such a dick about it." Probably Darius knows he'd lose. No matter how she spins it, Eda’s pretty sure her current grudge is beyond justified.
“If you could put aside your pre-conceived notions,” Darius says, stiffly, drawing them back to the topic at hand, “I need your help.”
Ah, so that's why he'd said please. Eda is about to posit a theory – You knocked him unconscious so you wouldn’t have to hear his annoying voice? You want me to take the fall when he wakes up? – when Darius removes the Golden Guard’s mask.
Eda does what any sane person would do. She processes the wounded mess she's seeing, and she processes the proximity of the mess to her very dear and very stainable couch, and she says, “Oh, gross.”
Then she freezes. More details click into place, altering the picture entirely. She rubs her eyes to make sure she’s not seeing things. Unfortunately, nothing about the image appears anything less than real. Or less than awful. Wounds on some random soldier are one thing. That's a base expectation. The guard is a rough place to work. But-
Churning acid chokes her throat. “Darius.”
“Yes.”
Eda’s beside the couch, now, staring down at the unconscious face. She can’t even remember the decision to move closer. “Darius, this is a kid.”
“I am wildly aware.”
He looks like he could be one of Luz's classmates. No more than two or three years older than her, if that. If he graduated from Hexside today, she would assume he'd skipped a few grades. He's pale and blonde and exhausted-looking, even without the injuries, even without the uniform. He's just so little. Eda had sort of assumed the guy from the shoals had to be at least in his mid-twenties, probably older. What kind of teenager serves at the right hand of an emperor?
She doesn't have words for her rising horror. Instead she says, “This is the actual Golden Guard? This... pipsqueak? This guy?"
“You know. It is amazing,” Darius replies, clipped and cold and precise, “that we have so few finite seconds in our short little lives, and we can never get those seconds back once they slip away, and with every passing moment we squander more of our unspooling futures. And yet you still choose to waste my time asking questions you already know the answer to.”
Yeah, okay, fair enough. There’s plenty that Eda doesn’t already know the answer to. Like what happened to the kid. Like what Darius is doing here. Like what Darius has to do with the kid in the first place. Nothing about this makes sense.
The sheer ludicrousness of the situation makes it hard to sort her priorities – what, exactly, is she supposed to do about an unconscious teen in royal uniform passed out on her couch? What did Darius think was going to happen?
“I don’t have magic anymore, Darius. If you were relying on wild magic-"
“I just need you to help me.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say-"
“He's not safe.”
"You don't say!" Eda throws up her hands, almost barking with frustration. "You don't need me. You need the Healing Coven."
Once more, the air around Darius reverberates. It growls like an animal. Warning signals. “In what universe,” he breathes, “do you think that I am somehow not aware that I need the Healing Coven?”
“Okay." Eda breathes out. "Fine. So I’ll call for them. I’ll-”
“No. No, no, no. You cannot. You cannot do that.”
Stress is making her crankier. She pats down the pacing beast inside her, gently, ruffling up its feathers. Shh, shh, we're fine, we're fine. We're fine here. But there goes her most plausible theory.
You and the kid were doing something appropriately sinister in the woods nearby, right? The usual, you probably destroyed a bunch of the isle’s magic and its animals and its plants, for fun, I guess. And something went badly wrong. Obviously. Serves you right. So you came to the closest place you knew. We went to high school together. You wanted to wait here for reinforcements.
It had made sense, as a theory. She wouldn’t even begrudge him this.
But there's no reason to avoid the Healing Coven unless there's something bigger to hide.
“Darius,” she says slowly, “why did you bring him here?”
Darius closes his eyes.
“I mean," Eda says, "not that I don’t love a one-on-one high school reunion with my favorite classmate of all time” – Eda and Darius had had maybe four entire conversations in all the years before graduation – “but, uh, hello. Darius? This whole secrecy thing is not my jam. I do not like this one bit.”
“I can’t bring him anywhere else.”
“Why not.”
Darius is silent. Eda tries to meet his gaze, but he won’t take his eyes off the Golden Guard. Not like he's avoiding her, but like he's genuinely worried about the kid.
She doesn’t believe that his urgency is faked. There’s a strange burning in his expression that she’s never seen from Darius before. Sure, they haven't spoken in a while, and sure, she's mostly familiar with his public persona rather than his private self. But there's no reason to fake that level of ferocity. There's no reason to fake the rage that had pushed Darius all the way here in his abomination form, the Golden Guard secure and hidden inside his magic. For whatever reason, Darius really is messed up over all this.
Darius doesn’t speak.
Eda thinks she might know the answer. But he won’t incriminate himself aloud, not even to a wild witch.
She speaks with more caution than she usually does, testing the waters. “Lilith told me that the Emperor has a temper."
“I suppose some things don't escape even Lilith's notice. Shocking."
Eda ignores the dig at her sister. “Right. So you’re a fugitive now. That’s the deal here, right? That's why you came to a wild witch?”
“I am nothing of the sort.” Finally, Darius does turn toward her. It’s a relief to see some of the usual righteous indignation return. Here is the man who whines about the ground having dirt on it.
“And," he adds, "I have no intention of becoming one.”
“Right. So this is all totally cool with the Emperor, then.”
Darius huffs impatiently. "No one knows I'm here. No one will ever find out."
“So,” Eda says, “this is a kidnapping. You know. Technically.”
Darius drags a hand down his face. He grimaces. His voice comes out through gritted teeth. “I think," he says, "this is closer to taking out the Emperor’s trash.”
The kid twitches, just the tiniest bit. It's just a coincidence. Eda’s positive he can’t be conscious enough to understand their conversation, considering the shape he's in. But Darius flinches, badly.
The Emperor's trash does not seem to be Darius's trash. Eda doesn't think that Darius would bring a bag of rubbish all this way just to dump it in her yard. Like he'd said, time is limited.
When Darius speaks again, his voice is so low that Eda has to lean in, as if the volume will spare the kid. “Look. There was a meeting of the coven heads yesterday. Basic stuff about the Day of Unity. We all went to the castle, we all left. Hours later, I went through my things and found I’d forgotten a very expensive hand mirror in the meeting room.”
Eda rolls her eyes, but Darius just continues, “So I went back. I was going to the meeting room to get my stuff. And I tripped over him.”
“You... tripped over the kid.”
“I didn’t see him. He was-” Darius breaks off, closes his eyes again. Breathes out. Breathes in, a little shaky.
Oh. Eda realizes, suddenly, that he hasn't been secretive on purpose. He just hasn't wanted to tell the story like this.
She can't blame him. Her throat hurts.
Darius appears to steel himself. He nods, as if in answer to an unspoken question, and exhales. His voice comes out remarkably steady, all things considered. “He seemed to be in a hiding spot. There were a lot of shadows. Apparently he was not conscious enough to hide well. So. Now I’m walking on a twisted ankle, all thanks to this idiot.”
Eda lets him back away from the story. "So he got away," she says. "He ran away from Belos."
“I... no, I don't think so.”
"You just said he was hiding."
“It was in the throne room. I can't imagine he wouldn't be found there. I-" His jaw clenches. "I think - I think the Emperor just - dropped him on the floor to... recuperate."
“Then why would he hide?” The frustration is creeping back. Part of Eda goes back to petting her owl beast, shh, shh, shh. “Why not call for help? He could have had the Healing Coven right there.”
Darius presses two fingers to his temple. The lines around his mouth are far more prominent, now, whether from worry or a lack of makeup. He looks far older than he usually does. Older than Eda does. His mouth twists, working for several seconds before he finally manages speech.
“I don’t think," he says, "that that’s how things work for the Golden Guard."
The owl beast roars. Eda drops onto the floor and lays her head against the armrest, her eyes closed. Feathers erupt over her arms. She snarls. A real snarl, true animal snarl, her vocal cords doing something they can't in her witch form.
There’s the expected fury, obviously, at the Emperor himself. She's not used to being so angry with him. Most of the time, his nonsense is an abstract evil. It affects Eda when she's in prison or sentenced to death or mourning the loss of yet another magical creature for yet another pointless exploration. It affects her when she has to explain arbitrary rules to Luz and fight to make sure Luz doesn't get herself killed by stepping wrong. The Emperor is just - a concept, a system. Except this rage is very real and very mortal and turned toward a very tangible target.
Eda wants to kill the man who did this.
She hangs onto herself, even as Darius summons a hasty cloud of abomination and buries the Golden Guard beneath it, even as he edges closer to her like he might need to fend her off. She's not going to go after the kid. Even if she loses her mind, she's pretty sure the Owl Beast has other targets to stalk.
Eventually, she manages to wrestle back enough control to speak. "Did you know?"
"No," Darius says. "I -- no, of course I didn't. Why would I bring him here now if I'd known the whole time?"
Eda nods. That seems fair.
Darius allows the protective abomination-shroud to dissipate, and his gaze returns to the Golden Guard. "But I should have," he says.
Part of Eda says, Yes. You should have. Is she supposed to believe that somehow nobody's ever noticed? She can't be the only person who thinks it's weird for a teenager to have the most powerful position on the Boiling Isles. Didn't anyone ever try talking to the kid?
But she knows that's not fair. Or even if it is, it doesn't matter now. Maybe Darius should have known. Maybe he should have noticed. Or maybe he couldn't have paid attention to some random teenager in a place he rarely frequented. Maybe he wouldn't have been able to do anything, even if he'd suspected. Maybe the whole thing was always hopeless.
“Either the Emperor meant to kill him,” Darius says, “and left him there to die. Or he didn’t, and left him there to -- to suffer. Eda, I don't know which is worse."
The last of the feathers recede, Eda's heart rate slowly climbing back down to normal levels. Underneath the murderous rage, she just finds sickness. Hollow regret. The awfulness of the situation won’t stop hitting her all over again, endless new angles of nausea. The poor kid. The poor fucking kid.
Everything about him at the shoals recontextualizes. I'm just following orders, because of course he was. Why would he care why the Emperor wanted a peaceful creature dead? Would it ever even occur to him to wonder? The Emperor is not a merciful man. All brooding threat and intimidation and drama, except for how it wasn't. All of the friendliness, the confidence, the recklessness-
“You didn’t bring him here to heal him,” she says.
“Well, I did hope. You know more about curse magic than I do. This looks a lot like curse magic. What was the term you used? Right, gross. If you happen to know a miracle cure, well, I suppose that's a bonus. But no, it isn't about the injuries. He's had the injuries for -- Titan only knows how long. Hours. At least. You can see them. He's not bleeding. He would have died halfway here if he was bleeding.”
That’s all true, to a point. The situation is not an immediate emergency. Darius probably could have dropped by tomorrow to ask if Eda happened to know how to fix the... everything. If Eda had thought the Golden Guard might bleed out, she wouldn't have spent so much time arguing with Darius. He's stable, and his breathing is steady, and there aren’t any malingering signs or smells of infection. There's nothing creeping through him that Eda can see; she's kept an eye on him.
But despite all that, Eda isn’t sure that this is the kind of thing the kid's body can fight off on its own. Normal injuries wouldn't make him sleep like this. Her own curse had never been fatal to her, but it had still ruled most of her life. A lack of death isn't synonymous with a lack of pain. She's not sure that Darius understands what they might be dealing with, here. How does she say, I mean, we can probably find potions at the Night Market, but until we know more, we should accept that there might not be a cure? How does she say, Yeah, this kid you're so worried about, he'll be fine, he's totally fine, he just might also be in pain forever?
She needs to get it together. Obviously she's not going to say any of that to Darius. She pushes herself up so she can see the Golden Guard more closely. Having one curse does not an expert make, but she hopes that maybe she can suss out the severity.
It's even worse, somehow, cataloguing everything up close. The kid’s face has been scored by something sharp; some kind of claw, or something jagged and metallic. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. The scratches arc over one cheek, across his unchipped ear, down the other side of his jaw. One gouge arcs perilously close to his left eye. He was clearly struck more than once. Some of the marks are deep, others are not; some are long and ragged, others quick and clean.
Eda only realizes that she's started snarling again when Darius touches her shoulder.
She does feel in control, this time, even as the anger simmers. One curse recognizes another.
The biggest giveaway is the color of the scratches. They have a weird greenish tinge, but not like infection. It's more like moss or mold or rot. Somehow, it looks a lot more painful than normal scabbing would. Gross, Eda thinks, again, because it is pretty gross.
There’s a scar on the kid’s jaw, too. An old scar, something long healed. Eda almost misses it, most of the tissue obscured by the fresh wounds. Even so, it's a pretty gnarly trophy. Definitely not a scratch that the Healing Coven had ever seen to. Someone should have noticed.
His neck seems mostly unscathed. Eda doesn't know what to make of that. As soon as she starts theorizing -- Belos picked every spot on purpose to make sure he survived, Belos meant to kill him but wanted it to be slow -- the feathers erupt back over her arms. Her hands shake.
She breathes out. Moving on, then. His neck is mostly unscathed, and then there's his clothes.
“Okay, is it just me,” Eda says, “or is his armor…”
“Completely useless?”
“I was going to say 'damaged.'”
“Well. Congratulations, I suppose. You have eyes.”
“Alright, wise guy. I thought maybe the whole ‘fractured mosaic’ look was in style these days. I was leaving space for the youths to surprise me. You expect me to know what is hip with the cool kids? For shame. I intend to embarrass Luz every day of her life, every time the opportunity arises. I will not be learning the real teen lingos." This bit of chatter soothes the last of her trembling. "Here, help me move this.”
The logistics of the cracked armor aren’t as complicated as she expects. She anticipates a lot of tugging and maneuvering and awkward angling. But Darius just flicks his wrist, and a tendril of abomination purple makes quick work of eating through all the cracks. The damaged pieces split apart, easily plucked off and put aside.
There’s a pale blue shirt underneath, or at least, what used to be a shirt. The fabric is mostly shredded. The cuts mirror the slices through the armor. Since it's already ruined, Eda just rips it apart with her bare hands.
The wounds continue around his chest and ribs, because of course they do. Of course they do. Judging by the greenish tinge and bloodless scabbing, they were made by the same weapon. Somehow, though, these are worse. It seems like his face should be worst, given the lack of protection. But the wounds are far deeper here, and longer, and angrier. It's like something was trying to tear through the armor, to prove a point here on purpose.
He has scars here, too. A lot of scars. Way more scars than she could have anticipated. They’re much easier to notice, given the variety, and they match the width of the facial scar. Same weapon, same wielding.
The one scar on the kid's face looks like it might have been an accident.
The rest of these scars do not.
Darius straightens up, very suddenly. He strides toward the front door at a brisk pace. He looks like he’s en route to a business meeting, like he's brushed aside the entire situation, like he’s just checked one mundane item off a daily to-do list. Eda opens her mouth to call him back – you are not just abandoning this kid on my doorstep without any goodbye – but then he stops. He stops inches from the door, and he drops to his knees.
He dry heaves.
Eda grabs a pillow and chucks it at his head, exactly like she might chuck a pillow at Hooty. “No, not on my floor. Out. Out!”
She doesn't know why this is the hill she's decided to die on. It's not like Hooty doesn't spend half his time barfing up half-digested owl pellets on the floors. Her house demon is definitely not going to care.
Maybe she just needs something else to divide her attention. If she lets her entire mind focus on this one moment with this messed-up kid, it'll be one of the worst moments of her life.
Darius politely fumbles the door open and escapes outside. Hooty describes the proceedings with the kind of detailed, lurid fascination that only an owl demon can. It's polite of him to keep Eda in the loop. She stays inside just long enough to confirm that yes, she's reached the end of the damage; no, she doesn’t have a magic elixir on hand that’ll cure it; yes, he's still sleeping soundly, and even if it is curse sleep, it seems peaceful.
Since the kid is unlikely to wake in the next five minutes, she heads out to join Darius. By the time she arrives, he’s already pulled himself mostly together. It's kind of incredible, actually. Sure, his hair is a little messier than usual, and there are black smudges around his eyes, maybe from running liner. Sure, he looks nauseous. But that's only a few degrees off from his usual irritated expression. His clothes are remarkably clean. His face is totally clean. He could go lead a coven meeting without raising any eyebrows.
“So,” Eda says, because she needs to, “this is your kid, huh.”
Darius grunts, waving the sentiment away. But there's none of the indignation she might expect. If anything, he's too cold. “Hardly. He's a brat. Drives me crazy, always has. Spoiled little prince with all the independence of a particularly slow abomaton, it’s pathetic. At least the last Golden Guard had some spine.”
"Weird," Eda says. "I wonder what made him like that."
Darius's mouth flattens. “I barely know him. I barely knew him before tonight, and I barely know him now. None of this makes him any less annoying.”
"Don't do that." Eda crosses her arms. "Stop. Just stop. I'm not -- not telling you to quit your job. You're not gonna come live in the mud out here. You're you. You told me, you're not going to be a fugitive. I don't care if he's your kid. Don't pretend you don't care. I just listened to the purplest prose about how much you can throw up."
He stands there without moving for a good few seconds, seemingly at a loss, his hands open at his sides. But the coldness dissipates. He looks so sad. He looks so sad. “What do you want me to say, Eda?”
“You don’t have to say anything.” She shrugs. “It's not about saying something. Just listen, look, I’m just thinking. I can’t help but think – y’know, if anything like this ever happened to Luz, I’d go a little crazy. You know? I think I’d probably do something crazy. Go full monster. Eat my way through a whole army. Yum.”
“No offense,” Darius replies, “but you are famous for doing crazy things, all the time, in front of everyone, whenever you get the chance. With or without your human in danger. You just do this. This is just Eda the Owl Lady. You went half-monster just now over the most obnoxious teenager who's ever walked the Boiling Isles. You are not the epitome of restraint.”
"Anyway," Eda says, "if you wanted to do something crazy, like, say, being a giant abomination monster plowing through everyone in the entire castle, or, y'know, whatever. If you wanted to do that, I'd say, maybe... hm... don't."
Then, considering: “Well. Not until you have someone to back you up, at least.”
Darius snorts.
“I need you with me on this," Eda says. "Only for like two seconds, I promise. Listen. You’re the only one who actually knows the kid. I've met him once. Once. I'm pretty sure I know what he'll do when he wakes up in some wild witch's hut. He’s gonna sprint right out that door and straight back to Belos.”
Darius’s mouth curls unpleasantly.
"I'm not sending that kid back to the Emperor, Darius."
"Well. Good."
"I'm keeping him hostage here with or without you, now. I am fully committed to this kidnapping. You're welcome." She sighs. "This is going to be so miserable. Don't leave yet. I need allies."
Darius's eyes tighten. “You might overestimate how well he knows me."
"Sure, maybe. You know what I don't overestimate, though? How hard it's going to be to make him stop running out the door."
"Do you somehow... think... that I am good at debating hostile adolescents?"
"No. I just think you can sit on them."
Finally, there's the tiniest flicker of a smile around Darius's mouth. Not a full-blown grin by any means, but it's something. After the night they've had, it might be everything. "Obviously I'm not going anywhere. You didn't need to ask."
“Rad,” Eda replies, like this is all normal, like they’re relaxed pals confirming a fun weekend plan. “We might need to do some book research, too. Although I hope not. It’s gonna suck so bad. Hey, look, I’m going to go wake up Luz. She might actually be our best bet – she might know some healing glyphs that I don’t. She’s really... well, anyway. You’d better go keep an eye on him. I'm going to be so annoyed if he somehow wakes up and sneaks out."
This breezy confidence, at least, comes naturally to her. Someone needs to know what they’re doing, so she’ll pretend she does. She doesn't actually need to have the answers. She’ll put together the steps and explore the options and learn the facts and soothe her owl beast and squish down the mounting dread. Dread can't have her, no sir. Everything's going to be fine. If she puts one foot in front of the other, everything's going to be fine.
She just thinks things might get a lot worse once the Golden Guard wakes up.