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“Ma hopes that Tactful settles as something small.” Grace’s hooves kicked out into the Upper City, dangling off their little patch of wall into the night.
“I’m going to settle as an owlbear,” said Tactful, preening her speckled breast. She and Abelard both preferred bird forms up here, or else squirrels and cats—things that didn’t fear falling, not like Grace and Renske had to. “Just you watch me.”
Renske giggled, running her fingers through Abelard’s fluffy tail. “What happens then? Do they banish you from the city?”
“I think Pa banishes me, at least,” Grace said thoughtfully. “Owlbear would scare the ponies.”
“Don’t say ‘good’,” scolded Abelard.
Tactful fluffed her feathers out indignantly. “And why not? I should scare stupid ponies.”
“I like the ponies,” Grace pouted.
“You can like them. They’re just stupid.”
With a sigh, Renske set her palms flat on the rough stone of the roof. She looked out at the streetlights blinking below. “I’d go with you. If they do banish you ‘cause Tactful’s a brat.”
“Maybe Abelard will settle as a great beast too.” She set her beady eyes on the squirrel. “A horse or something.”
“And maybe you’ll turn into a pony.” His tail whisked, and he shifted into a cat—though one whose tail was no less proud and fluffy. With a sigh, Abelard kicked his back legs out before laying his head in Renske’s lap. “I don’t want to think about settling. I like things just the way they are, thank you.”
“Growing up won’t be so bad,” said Grace. “When I grow up, I can leave the stables forever, and then Ma can’t blame me if I get my horns stuck in my shirts. And I won’t have to listen to her and Dad fight.”
“And I’ll be an owlbear.”
“Yeah.” Grace smiled, leaning back. “And Abelard will be a peacock.”
“You knew, didn’t you?” said the boy who wasn’t Grace anymore. Maybe he never had been.
Tactful stretched out her paws, fixing him with her pale blue eyes. She’d settled into a shaggy grey dog, certainly larger than your average peacock, but not half so large as a wolf either. “Of course I knew,” she said. “Took you quite long enough, too.”
He sighed and sat down on his little cot—he and Tactful were the only ones in the small Lliiran dormitory, waiting until he felt quite himself enough to go into the larger temple, and have everyone want to rub his shaved head, and tell Allaine that the Llliirans had one fewer sister, but one more brother.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Tactful grumbled at his feet. “You never liked change, even when it suits you.”
“Well, of course I don’t.” He crossed his ankles, then uncrossed them. Did men do such a thing? Why, on all of Toril and Abeir besides, did he not know that? “It should have been this way all along. I should have been…”
“What,” she said, “smarter? Blessed by an accident of birth?”
“Better than cursed by the same accident.”
“You’d be my same idiot boy all the same.” She shut her eyes, moving so her head leaned against his hoof. “Don’t think of it as a curse. Think of it as a battle you’re quite winning.”
“There are more battles on the horizon than that, Tack,” he murmured. “Hells…”
He probably didn’t need to say it, not to her. Still, maybe he was the one who needed to hear the words that were slowly forming on the tip of his tongue.
“There’s a me now to fight them.”
“There’s a good lad,” she said, genially. “Knew you had it in you.”
It really was beneath a daemon to bark.
Astarion frowned, trying to focus on the book he was reading—some trashy fearmongering text about vampires, quite inaccurate in his own opinion, but perhaps somewhere in its faded pages there was a juicy tidbit or two. Unfortunately, Tactful and Lily were back at their favorite game—biting each other’s faces like common dogs.
He had thought that given Lily was twice, if not three times the size of Tactful, the fight would be rather one-sided. It then followed that it would be brief. Not so.
With a doggy grumble, Tactful slapped Lily with one paw, almost comical next to the shaggy face of a wolf. Lily wrapped her sharp jaws around Tactful’s face with a delighted growl, but then let the dog daemon snap at her jaw in turn.
“Having fun, girls?” said Wyll.
(Astarion groaned into his book.)
“Can’t complain,” said Lily, her voice as low as her growl. “And you, boys?”
With a sigh, Insolence sat down at Astarion’s side. “Wormy.”
“Couldn’t put it more repugnantly myself,” Wyll chirped.
“Yes,” drawled Astarion, “he’s very talented at that, you know.”
“I try,” said Insolence cheerily.
“No call to fear the worms yet,” said Lily, stretching out in the grass. “Not while we’re around. No offense intended to any witches, of course.”
“None taken.” Astarion bristled.
Witch. First a vampire, then halfway turned to an illithid, and now he was a witch as well? Such a pretty word, to act as if he hadn’t finally gotten the scraps of his soul that remained ripped away, now fully within Cazador’s grasp. Any power such a thing could hold was impossible—better if the thing had been destroyed instead.
He laid his hand on Insolence’s thigh, trying not to think of the ragged edges he could still feel, the scars from surviving. At first he’d taken it for the sun burning him away. Now there was another emptiness where the dull ache of Cazador’s hold on his soul once sat.
Tactful stood, stretched out her shaggy grey hackles, and trotted over until she lay at Astarion’s other side, her blue eyes fixed on him.
Sometimes, he was certain that doggy daemon was ready to rip his very throat out. He removed the hand from Insolence, and the daemon growled.
The rat beneath Tactful’s paw screamed.
Seven others, their tails tangled together, barely struggled at all. Like the vampires they were tied to, they lay there, awaiting their fate—all save one.
“Astarion,” came a small, gritted voice.
“Astarion,” said Insolence, his sword drawn but not raised, not yet.
He stared down at Cazador, cowering, beneath his boot. What, he wondered in mad reverie, had Velioth’s daemon been? Was this all simply a lineage of rats, never transcending the horrid souls their vampiric masters had forced upon them?
Tactful snarled, and lowered her great maw—she took Cazador’s daemon into her mouth, and bit, until—Astarion could feel it, deep in his chest. The severing of seven tails.
Cazador’s daemon went on squirming within Tactful’s mouth, just as seven tangled up tails went on squirming—but one of the tailless rats, perhaps a shade paler than the other six, slowly crawled towards Astarion’s feet.
“We used to be,” she said, her voice just as small as he’d always felt, “something else. Didn’t we?”
His hands trembled as he raised the dagger high.
“Come here, Tactful,” snarled Astarion. “I want the bastard to watch as we kill his soul.”
“You know, I don’t think you’re a rat anymore.”
Astarion’s daemon raised her head from the thick fur on Tactful’s neck. She utterly adored her large, cozy savior, and nestled in the grey fur it wasn’t necessarily easy to tell how her own was growing whiter and plush, how her neck was filling out and her body getting little by little longer. The tail hadn’t grown back. Astarion didn’t believe it ever would. Just a little nub, all scarred over from Tactful’s sharp teeth.
It was honestly twee, how like himself and Insolence the two were.
“Never was a rat,” she said, her voice still soft and scratchy. “Not really.”
“You’re such a pedantic little thing.”
“Course I am. We’re a lawyer, after all.” She winked one beady black eye. “I’d hoped, all these years, you’d remember who I was. What I was supposed to be. Foolish, I suppose, when I hardly remembered you.”
Astarion chuckled. He set his book to the side, slipping a scrap of fabric in to mark his place. “Two hundred years,” he said, “you were nothing but a chain around my neck for Cazador to yank on. I could walk away from you now, of course… but you’d still be there.”
“She’d be with me,” grunted Tactful. “So mind your manners.”
The daemon buried her snout back into Tactful’s hackles. “Cazador isn’t a part of me now. He’s only a part of you. But so am I, again.”
He had a soul once more. Scarred and incomplete, of course. Still—better than poor Karlach, whose infernal engine had eaten her little songbird daemon as soon as the thing was installed. Better than one of seven thousand devoured by Mephistopheles.
Better than a rat.
With a soft hum, Astarion slowly reached out and drew his fingertips along the soft white fur of his daemon. He didn’t touch Tactful, save perhaps a little of her fur catching along the side of his hand, but he didn’t truly avoid it either.
“Welcome home, Darrdartha,” he murmured.
“S’nice dream,” said Karlach, tears stinging at the corner of her eye.
“It could be more than that, you know,” said Wyll, gently laying his hand on her wrist.
“Nah.” She took his hand, interlacing their fingers and clamping down hard. “You can’t bring a daemon to Avernus, Wyll. You saw the Elturel folks—Zevlor, Mol, Dammon, all like me. No daemons anymore. Nah. I can’t let that happen to you.”
Wyll was quiet for a moment.
“I was a late bloomer,” he said, the words softly and carefully shaped on his forked tongue and sharpened teeth. “Made it all the way to my late teens without Lily truly settling. She said it was all right—I just needed to figure out what type of man I wanted to be. Of course, I thought I did already—a man my father could be proud of. But better than that. One who didn’t have to get in bed with snakes, righteous and uncompromising.” Wyll smiled. “And then Mizora made the offer. I looked to Lily, before I signed her fate over, and in that moment I knew—this was it. It didn’t matter what became of us—saying no would mean rejecting everything that we were.”
“But you’re free now,” Karlach said. “You’re finally out of Mizora’s fucking clutches.”
“Karlach,” said Wyll, “I’m a wolf. You’re part of my pack. It’s as simple as that.”
The waterfall flowed softly in Jaheira’s basement, and Insolence sighed to its tune.
There was always a spare bed at Jaheira’s house, no matter if it was only a pile of straw that sometimes rats and badgers would gnaw at and a warm quilt. Outside, it was night, and Astarion was out on patrol with Rion. Inside, the dark was warm and cozy, lit up by a thousand illusory stars swirling like the most beautiful wilderness midnight Insolence had ever seen.
It was always harder for him to sleep without streetlights.
Tactful’s chin laid on his left thigh, her sighs feigning snores, Dartha on her side rising and falling with each breath. To his right, his hand was buried in the thickness of Lily’s fur as she slept—fitfully, for worry about Wyll, so distant from her.
The door creaked open.
“I do like Rion,” came Astarion’s brisk, cheerful voice.
“Because she lets you eat looters?”
“Among other reasons. But yes—and I think we were quite fair about it, too. She said ‘stop, or my vampire will bite you’. The vagabonds persisted, and so Rion just had to make good on her threat. We even let one or two go, to pass on the message…”
Astarion knelt down by Insolence’s side. “What news, my lady Tactless?”
She cracked one eye open. “Our boy’s still sitting around being miserable.”
“I’m not being miserable,” Insolence grumbled, miserably. With a gentle smile, Astarion buried a hand in Insolence’s hair, scratching around the base of his horn.
“Of course not, darling,” he said. “You’re having a wonderful time hiding yourself away in the Harper’s dungeon.”
He leaned into Astarion’s touch. “There are just… too many people. Down here, I have control. I don’t have to be anything for anyone.”
Tactful grumbled loudly, rousing Dartha into opening one eye, then letting it flutter shut again.
“Present company excluded, I hope.”
“I don’t have to be anything for you. I just…” Insolence sighed.
“What,” demanded Tactful, “does a girl have to do in order to get her ears scratched around here?”
Astarion reached over, giving her the demanded scratches. “Quite,” he agreed.