Work Text:
Margoli quits Lorroakan’s portal breathless, wiped out, and once again covered in blood, in contrast to an artfully tousled Jaheira and a spotless Gale. Karlach, at least, shares her enthusiasm for getting up close and personal with something sharp (and/or heavy), and looks equally out of sorts if significantly less gory. She’d put most of her considerable efforts into the formidable-but-less-inclined-to-bleed myrmidons. Karlach offers her fellow tiefling an affectionate chuck on the shoulder, which does wonders for Margoli’s flagging spirits.
The whiplash from Dame Aylin’s holy fury to her uncertain sadness leaves a tremor in Margoli’s hands, one she tries valiantly and literally to shake out as soon as her slightly powdery drow-made boots meet the uppermost public floor of Sorcerous Sundries. She stumbles, too preoccupied to keep her balance, and shoots a grateful look to Jaheira for the steadying hand she applies to Margoli’s elbow.
Despite looking, sounding, and behaving for all the world nothing like Margoli’s mother, the rogue has been talking to Jaheira and more and more often finding herself both missing her mom and being comforted for the same. Margoli catches herself wondering not for the first time if Jaheira would maybe travel back to her village with her, after all this was over, if she could be persuaded to meet her mom at the mill and her dad at the bakery. Surely, surely the High Harper of Baldur’s Gate herself would be strong enough to help Margoli fight whatever bad omens are in store for her return home.
But enough. There’s work to do.
“We still need to get into the vault for the books,” Margoli says to her companions in a hush, not sure if the animated armor and the lingering projection of Lorroakan (freaky!) were able to hear her. “Karlach, Jaheira, can you two draw the crowd downstairs while I get the door open?”
Karlach winks. “You got it, soldier,” she chirps, while Jaheira uses her considerable height as a shield and wildshapes into a housecat. They jaunt down the stairs – to no reaction at all from the armor or the projection – and Margoli turns to Gale.
It’s not even that late in the day, really. They’d geared up this morning and come straight to Sorcerous Sundries, after all they’d learned last night about the books in the basement and Lorroakan’s fevered search for the Nightsong. (If Margoli ever lays eyes on that asshole Aradin again, it’s on sight. The entire Steel Watch wouldn’t be enough to stop her.)
Somehow, though, the whole ugly mess has drained all the fight right out of her. The bullshit with the search for Aylin had been bad enough – the abuse Rolan had endured at Lorroakan’s hands had sent Margoli over the edge. But now her icy rage is melted and evaporated into a tepid, formless mist. (Maybe Aylin is onto something…?)
“The cowl won’t hide me long enough to get the door open,” she preempts Gale, trying to inject steel into her voice to hide her weariness. “If you’ve got the resources and the energy, I could really use an invisibility spell.”
He just regards her closely for a moment, as if weighing something. Margoli is too tired to examine what he might see, and anyway, he lays a warm palm to her face, runs his thumb over the spiderwebbing of black veins from the Emperor and the glass eye from Volo. It takes all of Margoli’s will to not cry.
“For you?” One more sweep of his thumb. “Always. Invisibilis,” he whispers. Margoli feels the slight tingle of the Weave, the light changing around her, and then she looks down and sees – or doesn’t see her hands.
The guards remain motionless. “I’ll wait here – make sure Karlach and Jaheira get back up safely when you’re ready,” Gale says, tipping his head towards them. “Be careful.”
Margoli wordlessly pats his hand where it still rests on her now-invisible face, part thanks, part reassurance, part reminder to put his hand down before someone has a chance to come up and think him either a fool or a suspicion. Somehow, though, his eyes still unerringly lock with hers. With difficulty, she stifles a smile until her love lowers his hand, and breaks for the door.
It takes all of Karlach’s charm (significant!) and deception (less so) to get herself and Jaheira back up past the guards, but at last, all four of them are shut into Tolna’s office – visible, humanoid, and faced with yet another portal as warnings of traps ring in Margoli’s ears. This portal drops them into the crackling basement, and Margoli cautiously tests the arcane floor before clearing them off to the races. Spell scrolls, gems, gold, and more all fall out of their hiding places and into the party’s waiting pockets, to bolster their (admittedly hefty) reserves.
It doesn’t take long before the traps start to make themselves known – the traps, and all the fucking doors. Margoli’s fingertips start to go numb from dismantling all the pressure plates while she implores her friends to hold until they’re clear.
“Fucking wizards,” she mutters viciously under her breath, “and their fucking wizard mazes.”
Gale, doing marvelously well at part two of her instructions, “stay put,” but failing miserably at part one, “keep back and,” winces almost audibly behind her, so she carries on, just for fun. “If I find one of these in your basement, Gale, I’m hiding all your fancy wizard staves and your fancy wizard robes and your fancy wizard scrolls.”
That, at least, makes him laugh.
She misses that sound what feels like an eternity later, when all the traps lie in pieces behind them and the doors are navigated, when the levers are pulled and Margoli holds the Annals of Karsus in hands that still feel a little numb. “All that stands between us and enlightenment,” Gale is saying, a tension to his face and a feverish gleam to his eyes, “is the turn of a page.”
Margoli likes to think herself fairly undauntable, generally speaking. After leaving home for the Gate at 13, after falling in with thieves and assassins, after everything that’s happened to her in the last however-many tendays – hells, after last night, with the Emperor’s uncomfortable recognition that it’s been the source of all her problems of late – she’s running out of things that truly scare her. But now, something in her quails; she clutches the book a little closer to her chest.
“Gale,” she says, only a little haltingly. “…I’m not sure I want you delving into this.”
A shadow crosses his face, just for a moment, and then his tone turns cajoling. “And since when have we sought to avoid trouble, hey? Come how, the knowledge lurking between these pages could help us greatly. Don’t be a hindrance after being such a great help.”
That actually stings her as wickedly as one of her own multitudinous knives. There’s something akin to a snarl behind his calling her a hindrance. In this moment, this place, he’s not the same man from the Shadow-Cursed Lands, who cleared the sky for her and told her he loved her. The man who accuses her now of standing in his way is a stranger to her.
She shakes her head, holds the Annals closer. “We don’t have time for this right now, Gale. We need to find the other books and get out of this tower before Lorroakan is found and poor Rolan is put in a very tough position. We’ll bring it with us. Forget it for now.”
He leans in very close, so suddenly that Margoli fears he’ll try to take the book and she’ll have to use the horrible, twisting knife from the temple murder to restrain him.
“We ought to make time,” he hisses. “This could be the answer to everything! I’d have hoped you, of all our companions, would be understanding of that.” The glare Gale levels at her makes Margoli glad that Karlach and Jaheira are distracted, searching the chests on the other side of the room with their backs to this horrible tableau.
She’s never been a crier. For the first time in longer than she remembers, she feels so close to tears that she’s briefly glad for the wreck of her face, the way the half-illithid dark of her veins and the glass sheen of one eye and her infernal heritage all come together to make her emotions – her tears – seem so wholly alien.
Angry first at him, then at herself, she thrusts the book into his chest hard enough to rock him back just a fraction. “Fine! – Take it. Do what you fucking must and let that be the end of it.”
His excitement takes over then, heedless of the complex thing taking over her face. He flips through the pages at a speed Margoli isn’t sure anyone could read at, talking about pieces of the crown and Karsus’ Folly and godhood and Margoli tries to keep up, to either pay attention to things that could surely help them or to insinuate that this is a bad idea or something, but Gale seems to have a counter for her every question.
And then he says something that drops a sleet storm into the hollow of Margoli’s gut –
“…I think I could reforge it.”
Her sharp ears stop working at that. She can’t hear anymore, can only hope that he doesn’t say anything else requiring and answer as he schemes – until he halts. “We should discuss this later. Privately,” he says, suddenly stiff, all the possessed excitement gone from him. He glances over his shoulder Karlach, swinging a nice, big axe of the kind they hadn’t been able to find for her in Reithwin Town, and Jaheira, who’s gone still and is making steady, subtle eye contact with a distress-numb Margoli.
“Find me later,” Gale continues, still not noticing Margoli’s crisis in real time, “and I’ll show you something truly divine. What this crown could mean for both of us.”
It takes effort to shove her numb spirit back into her frozen body, but Margoli does it. A weak “until tonight then” is all she can muster, but Gale seems appeased, eager, and he lets it drop.
As if the trouble with the Annals isn’t enough, Margoli goes and gets herself cursed reading the Tharchiate Codex, hoping to find something she can use to finish the gods-damned Necromancy of Thay, but at least the blinding pain of a magical headache grounds her. When they trudge back into the Elfsong, Margoli fully ignores Elminster Aumar waiting for them at a table, making a beeline for their rooms, where Shadowheart’s cool hands lift the curse with little effort.
“I love the new look,” Margoli enthuses to her friend afterward. “And I’ll love it better if you tell me you like it.” Shadowheart smiles at that, says she’s getting used to it. It’s nice to have some time to just relax with her – the last time had been days ago, when they crossed paths in the middle of the night on separate missions to change their looks, Shadowheart with the new revelation of her Selûnite heritage and Margoli stressed out from her latest conversation with the Emperor. Part of Shadowheart’s had to be magical, Margoli had reasoned – she’d never seen such dark hair get so silvery white so fast, and Shadowheart’s new side part always laid perfectly against her forehead while Margoli’s hair, now chopped short and slicked back, curls bullied into flatness, still wanted to part down the median of her head.
(Of course, she’d been covered in blood so often since then that it had started to serve as disgusting hair oil, slicking her hair back shockingly effectively, even if it was crusty and irony and awful. ...Shut up.)
Anyway.
Halsin and Wyll have their heads together while Margoli and Shadowheart talk. The others, including Gale, are all lounging in their beds or the sunken conversation pit by the fireplace, save for –
Jaheira wanders in from downstairs, two mugs of ale and a goblet of wine in her hands. “The wizard is still downstairs,” she reports of Elminster without preamble. “I told him to wait his turn, and asked Alan and the delightful Lakrissa to do what they could to… hold him to it.” She passes an ale to Margoli and the wine to Shadowheart. “I’m not sure we can keep him out by force unless you want to alert our own wizard,” she says with a dark look toward where Gale sits reading the Annals, “but with luck, he’ll mind his manners.”
“Thank you,” Margoli murmurs, knocking her ale against Jaheira’s and then Shadowheart’s drinks and waiting for them to finish the silent toast. “If he barges in here, you’ll just have to get Karlach to hold me back. I’m sick of him delivering Mystra’s bullshit and then leaving us – leaving me – to deal with the fallout.” She takes a swig of the beer. “Can’t believe I actually let him have those butter buns when he first found us all that time ago.”
There’s a pause, and then all three women are snorting into their drinks. Wyll and Halsin look over, perturbed, and Jaheira waves them down.
Shadowheart cackles, “Oh, you should have seen her, Jaheira, glaring and grilling old Elminster until she was finally satisfied that he wouldn’t drag Gale away and blow him to bits himself!” She chuckles into her cup, the sound rippling and echoing dully. "And the bread! Oh, gods, if anything she guarded them even more closely until he proved himself.”
“No-o-o-o,” Jaheira chortles with a widening smile. “The butter buns?”
Margoli’s smile shows off her sharp eye teeth as she nods sweetly. “Oh yes. The butter buns.”
“Why?!”
“They’re my favorites!” They remind me of my family,” Margoli defends herself, trying and failing to not give into her friends’ infectious laughter.
“Good.” Jaheira nods approvingly, sobering just a little. “Something should.” She turns to Shadowheart, who looks a bit gloomy around the corners of her mouth. “And don’t worry, cleric, we’ll find them. But don’t underestimate what you have here, either.” Margoli reaches over and squeezes Shadowheart’s hand.
She looks slightly pinched by Jaheira’s recognition of what she was thinking, but Shadowheart nods and takes a mouthful of wine.
“Poor Gale,” she says at length. “I hope he knows – a goddess abandoning him needn’t be the end.” Another sip. “I know from experience.”
Margoli shakes her head, troubled by the change in the tone of their little gathering. “Part of me hopes Elminster is just making things more dramatic than they need to be. Even though I know it’s unlikely.”
At that, Jaheira waves a hand, gulps dismissively at her beer. “That pointy hatted old fart,” she insists, “talks far too much.” Another sip of beer, and she goes on, but more pensively now. “But he has also moved mountains, walked between planes, and dragged himself back from death a dozen times. If he still believes in Gale, the boy should not be concerned with what his former” – here, she takes up Margoli’s hand and squeezes it in turn – “lady love thinks. Goddess or not.”
Her reassurance, and Shadowheart’s practiced haughtiness turned now toward Mystra, are a huge comfort to Margoli. But still, she hasn’t told them yet about the change in her lover as soon as he’d taken the book into his hands, almost as instant as if he’d been cursed as she had by the Tharchiate Codex; she’s not sure how to bring it up. Surely these two, after all the shit they’d seen, would have some advice, but part of Margoli worries they’d be defensive enough of her to rip Gale apart themselves. Unlikely, perhaps, given the reality of the explosion that would follow, but let no one say that Margoli Kastaven is good at asking for help with her problems.
All she can bring herself to say is – “I hope you’re right.”