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Last Light bustles with tieflings and harpers and the last few Flaming Fist, as it has since they arrived. There’s still a mop in the corner from when someone— Wyll can’t guess who— cleaned the blood off the floors while they were all at Moonrise Towers. Someone else, or maybe the same someone, cracked into the casks in the cellar, and all around, people sit and drink with the determined good cheer of people who had just won a battle they had not expected to survive and have settled in to mourn the friends who had not made it back with them. Wyll left Halsin and a few more of the Fist digging graves, and he nearly turns back to join them.
He followed Karlach here, after they surfaced from the illithid oubliette.
Wyll spots her through the crowd. She has a tankard in hand, and she drains it in long swallows, throat working, other hand braced on the bar. When she finishes, she leans across the scarred wood to pull herself another pint and turns to say something to Lakrissa, who has her arm tight around Alfira’s waist. She smiles and she laughs, but she rubs the center of her chest as she sits back, and tension sits heavy at the corners of her eyes.
He needs to be here.
Wyll approaches. Gets close enough to hear “Up for a song, Alfie?” from Lakrissa.
“I could play something.” She looks around the room, reaching already for her lute. “It helped the kids, a bit. Maybe it— anyway.”
“How are they?” Wyll asks.
“When I left, Halsin was keeping watch while they scoured Moonrise for trinkets and the boy with antlers was playing with Silfy.”
Something in Wyll’s shoulders unknots. “Good. Thank you.”
“I’m happy to help.”
They lapse for a moment into awkward silence before Lakrissa gives him a nod and gently ushers Alfira over to a stool by the fire where she sits down to strum a few experimental chords.
“How are you?” he asks Karlach.
Karlach leans against the bar, both elbows on the slightly sticky surface, her pint between her hands. With a flick of her tail, she indicates the stool next to her, and he takes it.
“Oh, you know. Saw a giant brain, found out my old boss is a Banite, finally going home to Baldur’s Gate. Doing alright, all things told.” She takes a gulp from her ale. “What about you?”
“Oh,” he lets out a breath, slow and measured, and closes his eyes. “You know how it is. I’ll be alright, Karlach.”
“Uh huh.”
She eyes him for a moment, and he looks back as he takes the stool, turned toward her with most of the room on his good side. Behind them, Alfira settles into the opening lines of a ballad Wyll only half recognizes. Around them, A few people shift, conversations pausing then resuming as people crane their necks and catch a glimpse of her. One of the Harpers approaches to listen, taking one of the other seats around the central hearth. At any other time, he would join them and give Alfira his attention, but his racing mind cannot pick the lyrics out of the hum of voices. When Wyll looks back at Karlach, she is still watching him.
“Here,” she says and leans over the bar, rooting around until she finds a bottle. She sets it on the bar in front of Wyll with a hollow thunk. “Have a drink.”
“Thank you.”
It’s an old, dusty bottle, and it takes a moment to pop the cork loose, but the wine inside is still good, somehow. He casts around until he finds a clean, empty cup and pours himself a measure before drinking. It’s a hundred year old bottle, and he should savor it, but the most he can manage is gratitude that it’s not corked. He takes another swallow, slower, makes himself note oak and heavy nuttiness, then sets the cup down.
“Look at all these people,” Karlach says.
Wyll does. Zorru is in a corner, drinking, shoulders hunched, but alive. Fists Ulthred and Nipawa sit at the corner the Ironhands had occupied previously, backs to the wall, but smiling. Lakrissa stands by Alfira, tail swishing in time to her song, expression hopelessly fond. In the corner, Bex and Danis sway with their arms around each other and their foreheads touching. It sent a pang through him, but that way lies despair.
He turns his cup between his hands. “I didn’t actually come here looking for a drink?”
“Oh? What’d you have in mind?” she waggles her eyebrows at him.
Wyll flushes, but pushes on. “I wanted to see you. To know you’re alright.”
“I’m fine, Wyll. Fine as I can be, anyway.” she takes another swig of her pint. “We did a good thing here. We killed a god! Or, you know, the envoy of one.”
“One down, two to go.” He holds up his cup, and Karlach knocks her tankard against it. “To doing the impossible.”
“To doing the impossible,” Karlach echoes. “You got out. Finally.”
“Six months. Enough time to put that brain in the ground— and…”
He swallows more of his wine than he means to as the image of that monstrous brain flashes through his mind, the Chosen gathered, his father—
“Hey.” she sets a warm hand on his arm. “Stay with me, soldier.”
“I’m right here.”
“Anything…?” she starts, trailing off as he shakes his head.
He glances away, glances around and tries to ignore the burning at the back of his eye. His gaze falls on Bex and Danis again, still swaying, her head resting on his shoulder, angled carefully to not catch him with a horn. Wyll puts down his half-full cup and stands, then offers Karlach a hand.
She takes it, but remains where she is. “What’re you thinking about?”
“May I have this dance?”
Karlach grins. “I’m guessing you don’t mean a jig.”
“Not right away. I suppose it depends on if Alfira will take a request, but I’m happy to share any dance you like.”
“Lead away.”
She gets to her feet, and Wyll waits until she has set her pint down on the bar to spin her in, bringing his right hand to rest at the center of her back as Alfira ends her ballad. She’s still warm as summer, even through the layers of tooled leather she wears, and her eyes are bright. Her hand in his shifts, then closes again, a little damp, calluses rough against his palm. He squeezes back automatically.
“Where do I put my other hand?”
“Sorry?” Wyll asks, then, “On my shoulder. Move your thumb and index finger apart and, yes, like that.”
She settles her hand just where the muscle of his shoulder meets his upper arm. It does not burn him the way it might have, once, but it still sears through him, and he clears his throat and checks his posture and throws a glance over to where Alfira sits with her lute in her lap and watches them with a soft, possibly too knowing, smile. He smiles back, and she strums the first chords of a familiar waltz. It brings to mind sunlit days in the Wide and running in Bloomridge park, sneaking outside during banquets at the Portyr to ramble the grounds with the duke’s niece, a thousand other images that all end with his father’s face.
Wyll turns back to Karlach. “Right, now, connect your arms and your back like you’re drawing a bow— not quite so tense, just so you can feel it when I…”
He steps forward, moving from the spine, and presses on Karlach’s hand. She, after a moment’s hesitation, steps backward.
Wyll keeps moving, walking her back, back, and to the side, mostly in time with the music. After a moment, her shoulders ease a fraction and she adjusts her stride to match Alfira’s soft plucking. The sweet, slow tune carries them from the central fire to the table where Mattis set up shop, and Wyll takes the corner with a telegraphed change of weight, pressing his hip into Karlach’s as they turn. A giddy smile breaks across her face as they start down the short wall. Wyll’s heart thumps a little harder.
One of the Harpers cuts across the floor, and he draws them into a hover, sways them back a few stumbling steps as Karlach twists her head around to see what the problem is.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
“S’weird not seeing where I’m going.”
They make the next three steps to the opposite corner where he releases one of her hands. She turns, first slowly, still trying to keep her eyes on him, then keeps going after he lets up pressure on her arm. Smiling, he guides her through another half-turn and catches her hand and her waist, this time from behind.
“Better?”
“Fancy.” Karlach twists her head back to look at him. “I’m not sure, to be honest.”
They dance down the third wall— streamlined steps, a partial turn, another. At this angle, there’s more space between them, more ways to trip up. He keeps their dance simple, and Karlach follows without stumbling, although her tail catches his leg as they pass a collection of chairs. When he looks up at her face, he finds her smiling. Wyll spins her out again at the corner as Alfira’s song comes to a close. She dips a curtsy, and he bows.
For a beat, he stands there, as the assembled Harpers and Fists and Tieflings clap for Alfira and he looks at Karlach’s hand in his and does not let go. The weight of the day threatens to settle on him, then. He takes a deep breath as if he could push it off with the action of his ribs and does not look around, does not find the breaks in the gathering where people should be, does not look at the Flaming Fists and their worries, not yet.
Karlach’s thumb sweeps across the back of his hand. She opens her mouth to speak, and another chord rings off the walls.
Wyll inclines his head. “Another?”
She closes the distance to him in a single step, and he sets his hand on her back again. Hers settles again on his shoulder. She squeezes once.
He clears his throat. “This time, try closing your eyes.”
Karlach looks at him sidelong. “Why?”
“It helps, sometimes. I think it will help you. I promise, I won’t let you run into anything.”
“I might step on your feet, soldier.”
“You weren’t looking at my feet before. And I’ve survived much worse than having my toes trod on.”
Karlach laughs, more quietly than is usual for her, but she laughs, and she closes her eyes, and Wyll counts out the beats as he guides her to lean onto her left foot, adjusting his hold just a fraction before he steps forward again to carry them around the room. Karlach moves without anticipation, this time, warm, her strides shorter than they had been, but she stays with him as he holds them in a hover, leaning first one way, then the other to make sure the coast is clear. They take the corner, then sweep back down the wall, turning and turning around one another, carried on the steady rise and fall of Alfira’s music.
Wyll cannot barely his gaze away from Karlach’s face. Around them, the floor clears as people settle into chairs or into their own corners, and he stops trying. His old dancing instructor would be horrified at how he turns his head out of line to watch her, but he memorizes the soft smile on her lips and the way the flames under her skin flicker blue when he spins them both. He holds her hand.
He barely pauses when the song ends except to direct a nod of thanks to Alfira.
Karlach cracks an eye open. “Can I look, now?”
“Of course.”
By the fire, Alfira starts on another familiar tune, livelier than the last. A few of the Harpers rise from their tables, taking hands. Others keep time with their feet.
Karlach glances around the room, then grins. “Mind if I lead this one, soldier?”
Wyll shifts his hand from her back to her left hand and his hand from hers to her shoulder, taking up the position he’d coaxed her into only a few minutes prior. Already, the rest of the day felt as if it had been a year ago, not gone, but blurred and blunted. It would be back the next morning, or perhaps sooner, but as long as they stayed here in the circle of firelight, it could no more touch them than could the last vestiges of the curse that had broken with Ketheric’s fall.
“It would be my pleasure.”