Work Text:
The Soul does not trust her. Wiser not to: it was her use to Trent as a tool that made her a useful witness against him. And now she sits at the same table he had, lined with instruments at her disposal.
She’s not the same. So she tells herself, looking at the long portraits of past members of the Assembly. Walking beneath their gazes, carefully avoiding their eyes as might her teacher’s gaze.
In school Master Ikithon pointed out one painting as a cautionary tale. Astrid hadn’t bothered to commit the story to memory, so convinced it would not matter to her. Now she sits in Trent’s seat, wondering how he could point to necromancy and sneer that it was monstrous.
Did Lady Briarwood take her post with grand aspirations of being better than her predecessor? Did Trent trent even pretend to? (Did Astrid?)
The Soul does not trust her, no. She knows this, little whispers through a web she inherited, one she is not quite sure how she will maintain. Astrid learned well not to trust anyone with power.
But when her office clatters with the fall and tumble and screams of a dozen dozen magic items falling, inert (not dead), her Sendings don’t go through. Not to them: not to Bren, not to Eadwulf. Not even, in desperation, to -
Astrid curls up on the floor, mouth agape. Her scar burns, again. Her glyphs boil, again. Her head strikes back at her for the arrogance to want to know why and know, and know, and know if -
(They are your leylines, Master Ikithon had purred, walking a nail through a sharp angle. Conduits to magic as those of Exandria. Roads to power. )
The king speaks in weak rage, anger born of fear, the Cerberus Assembly conspicuously headless. And Archmage Astrid Becke, littlest of their number, can think only of her chair at this table and who held it before her.
(Divinity is shackled, it seems. Magic struggling to follow leylines.)
(He’s free. Of course he is. Has to be.)
(She’s dead, screams the itch in her scars, a map to her obituary. Dead, dead, dead.)
But Master Ikithon is nothing but a footnote to his most resplendent and revered Highness King Dwendal, most insignificant of his name. Where is Ludinus, he bellows (weakly, from his bed. So fragile). Where are my wards? Who is responsible? What Crick did this?
I don’t know, is all they can say, more unsettling for the people who usually know too much.
The rest - Uludan, Hass, the rest of the snakes. They knew what Trent did to her (her and him and him and dozens of other children), they know she knows, they still see her as useful, a tool, even at the table. They look to her, Archmage of Civil Influence, not expecting her to be the one to. Making her play the part anyways. No, her people use Sending. Sending is not working.
(No response. Has he already -?)
Hours of meetings. Increased security. Insistence to take advantage of the opportunity to dispatch a few daggers in key places. Unspoken in the presence of the king, shared in quiet mental messages: every little grievance with Ludinus, his hold over Dwendall. How, perhaps, he will finally decide to chop off a few of the Cerberus Assembly’s vestigial heads. Unless they prove their teeth useful.
She’s not included in this discussion, of course. Not like she did not come to the same conclusion easily enough. Astrid strides out and away, not looking at the other heads of her order. Portraits, the lot of them. Keeps her own chin high, on swivel, because -
She’s expecting the arm that grabs her. Expects the lines - they match, fit together, continue from her wrist to his bicep.
“Eadwulf,” says Astrid. “Wulf -”
“Blumenthal,” he replies, in croaking gasps. His shirt is undone - the silver raven feather gleams like a dagger, or death. There are fresh marks on his arms, where he clawed at the old scars as they shrieked with the magic surge. “Ikithon.”
They go.
--
Of course. Of course. Even after it all. Astrid Becke at his seat. Astrid Becke who locked the collar around his neck. Astrid Becke, never enough to be his prodigy and still not. How naive of her to think he would pin vengeance on her. Not the weak link but the traitor.
Caleb Widogast (not Bren Ermendrud) was the one he chose. The most foolish of their three, the one who let the bastard live. Frankly he deserves it: Trent should have died in that glade.
Now he has more than three Blumenthal parents dead to his schemes. For the Empire, Astrid had said and said and said, until her lips were numb. Repeated like it was true because it was true to her.
Now swaths of Blumenthal burns, and breaks, while she tried to keep the Empire from burning and breaking. For the Empire her hometown has been destroyed. And Trent, if Caleb is to be believed. Because Astrid Becke was not a second thought: no, it was always, always about Bren.
Now she cries, in the cradle of her mothers’ graves, that she dare be relieved.
--
Wulf’s house - his family’s house - is intact.
He bought it, some time after the trial. Not to live in, he’d said, just to keep. Just to visit. How he could bare to come back, after everything -
“It’s as good a place as any to disappear,” he points out. The cot is too small, yet not small enough. It should groan to fit three. “We could be counted among the dead. No one would know.”
There are two familiars curled at their feet, eyes green and watchful. One black, one white, both purring. Bren always loved cats.
Astrid thinks, head throbbing. “Not here.”
She has nothing of use in the country.
But in the city… yes. There she could be useful. The only thing she knows how to be.