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“Do you ever think about the manacles?” Beau says, just above the tower’s purring thrum.
She says it casually, not looking at him, playing with the chain of a bracelet around her wrist. A recent gift from Yasha, he believes, with peculiar flowers preserved in its charms. But the words ran from her lips, an old habit never beaten from her by tutor or adventure, and Caleb would not be her friend to be flippant about it.
He places his novel (Feather Leather, finally tracked down what that barkeep had been reading) on the sidetable. Jinx and Ruth will see to it’s return to the bookshelf, once they’re done grooming eachother.
Caleb, in a rare lapse, has to wrack his mind for what in the nine hells she’s talking about. “The manacles? As in, ah -”
“The manticore,” Beau says. “The - uh, fuck - something with the marrow? Could have sworn we came across them a few other times too. So many fucking anti-magic chains and everything.”
Ah. Caleb nods. Skims over sharp memories quick enough to cut, if they were pages. “The Angel of Irons.” Now his eyes meet hers, the blue of new shadows. “The Chained Oblivion.”
She hums, throwing her legs over the arms of her chair, perfecting the chair’s clumsy embrace. Keep her from kicking, nervous habit. Beau almost, almost touches the scar on her chest, where she was run through in that god’s name in a church. Gestures instead, to put the energy to use. “Yeah, that.
“I just… most of those were broken. Like, the things escaped, or were busted out. And now Trent…”
Beauregard, he realizes, is looking at his wrists. The thin shards of scar tissue peering from beneath his sleeves. He resists the urge to tug the linen down to hide them.
He knows she’s not thinking of him. Can’t. Can’t know - he never talked of that specific torment.
They had Trent thrown in irons. Thick bands splayed over weak flesh, not for the security of them but the symbolism. For him to be in shackles before trial, hands glued to forever supplicate for mercy he had never provided.
And then Ludinus heard his prayers, or that not-a-god entombed in the moon, and he was set free.
“I dunno,” she says. “Maybe we shouldn’t have expected chains to work. Hasn’t in all the times we’ve run into them.”
Caleb hums.
Maybe they should have burned Trent alive, so he could feel as a boy’s parents and cat had. Or fed him sweet cyanide, as Astrid’s mothers enjoyed. Or strangle him, of air and hope and life, and see Eadwulf’s face to the last. Or keep him to a chair and implant terrible things into him, or send him from his home to die against those he thought monsters when none - no dragon, no city, no god - could rival the evil in his heart.
But Caleb is not, and never was, the man to do that. To be as his teacher was. Besides: to many a wizard death can be but an escape to a clone. The ailing body was more a prison than any chains.
(In the back of his mind, in the knowledge of the moon hanging low and bloodhungry, he hopes this of the Chained Oblivion.)
He lets the thought lie, plucks another from the shelf: “Well. One of your wife’s epithets is Chainbreaker, so I suppose it’s something we are to stick to, hm?”
Beau leans far back. “I forgot about that.”
And then her eyebrow cocks, readying for a blow: “Speaking of… hey, remember when we rocked up to the Bright Queen in full BDSM gear? And Essek was there? Remember, Caleb?”
He sighs, resolutely picking up his book to hide his flush. No, he did not forget about that.