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The first time they meet the Shadowhand, Eadwulf’s first thought is that the drow lives up the title. He’s floating a few inches off the ground, long cloak inky dark and shimmering with the faintest hint of sewn in silver arcane runes; dynasty fashion, dynasty grandeur. His mantle is perfectly balanced along his collarbone. He is silent, still, his skin bruise-purple and, Wulf has to admit, beautiful in the street light. He blends well into the dark.
“There,” Astrid breathes in his ear. “Is a threat.”
“He’s working with us,” Eadwulf hisses back.
They aren’t supposed to be seen here. Trent knows where they are, of course, but this is an observation mission, a quick stop to assess before they go back to training the latest class of new students. It’s a breath of relief. A hint of something safe. Not safe, not truly, but something manageable. A moment where Eadwulf won’t have to look into a child’s eyes and see terror and rage and know he’s put it there. That he is no better than his master. That there’s another generation of children ripped from their homes in search of magic only to find that power stings so much sharper than expected.
The Shadowhand looks bored, but there’s a slight quirk to his mouth that Eadwulf thinks might mean something. He hasn’t watched the other wizard long enough to understand his tells.
This meeting they’re observing is simply a trade of information—Dynasty and Empire wizards meeting to exchange notes on Beacon research. As such, there is no grand tower. No ceremony. They’re on an ordinary street, surrounded by ordinary people. The sun has turned the sky blood-red, the moons slowly blinking their light into the gray-streaked edges of the fire.
“Why do you think he’s a threat?” Wulf asks Astrid.
The drow’s ear twitches, but he can’t have possibly heard.
Beside him, Astrid bites her lip. “He doesn’t care about anything,” she says. “Only what he wants.”
He does not ask her how she knows that. Astrid has always been the more clever of the two of them at reading people. He can see the cold lines of that now in the drow’s clenched jaw, the impatient way he tilts his head when speaking to the Empire contact.
“That doesn’t make him dangerous,” Wulf says. “That makes him easy to manipulate.”
She glances at him sidelong through a haze of her hair. She’s keeping it long these days. A small rebellion against their master, he thinks. A hint of the girl he and Bren had known peeking through the wizard. “He can be both,” she says. “And it’s not our job to manipulate him.”
“Yet,” Wulf says. “We don’t know what Trent wants him for.”
She looks away from him. Her fingers tap restlessly against his arm. He knows she is not aware of it, but her hands form the somatic component for Fireball. A nervous tick she and Bren used to share in training. Despite everything, her fingers still itch with evocation magic.
Eadwulf lets her fester. He watches the Shadowhand leave, nearly silent in his casting of Teleport. The drow half closes his eyes when he casts, as if to shut out everything but the magic. The air heats with the power of the spell. Eadwulf tastes winter air on his tongue, despite the season. Oh, he thinks. This man is a threat. There’s arrogant power here that he does not understand.
The second time they see the Shadowhand Astrid barely registers his presence until he screams for Caleb. She’s been so focused on the defensive—counter spelling Bren’s magic but trying not to…well. She doesn’t want to kill him. The panic pulse of that want hammers fists against her ribs like a song, familiar after all these years: no not him, no, no, no, no.
When she was younger, broken and fresh-eyed to blood and killing, she learned to quiet that panic until it became background noise.
It’s not personal. It’s for the Empire. It’s for the Empire. This is the way things must be.
But this is personal.
This is Bren.
She will kill his friends, she knows. She may even feel something like regret about the way he will look at her when she does, but it will be easy.
She cannot kill him.
She keeps her eye on him when they fight, a dangerous distraction amid all the spells flying around. The past and the present are so sharp: sparks, smoke coating her tongue as she breathes, her arms aching from casting, her fingers crooked with the blistered heat of spells. She’s low on spell slots and blistering with the ache of it.
And then the Shadowhand says that he is scared, Bren’s new name a sacred thing in his mouth, and Astrid finally snaps her gaze to him.
They’re standing together, the Shadowhand and Bren, shoulder to shoulder while Bren casts, a wizard staff raised high above their heads —where in all the hells did he get THAT?—and there’ something intimate and dangerous in the way they’ve backed into each other. She sees it and thinks, ah, there. That’s where I can hurt him.
It is her first thought, and a piece of her howls in grief-stricken want and fury at the loudness of it. But Astrid Beck is a wizard first and a monster second and a girl third, so she holds her stance and reaches for magic and keeps fighting.
The Shadowhand lingers, after.
She learns, or rather, decides to remember, that his name is Essek.
Without the mantle of his title, stripped free of that arrogance, he is something strange to her. He gardens when the sun is low, and says very little to anyone.
He will vanish first, out of the group.
Bren does not ask her to keep an eye on him. She does it anyway.
Eadwulf finds Essek in the garden the first night they return to the Clay’s cottage. He has slipped out of bed into the cemetery air to breathe in air that is not sweet with Astrid’s breath, and despite everything Wulf has always been drawn to soil and growing things and dirt. Something to do with his hands. He has held on to his upbringing with more ferocity than Bren or Astrid. There is always something good to be found in soil. The earth holds no malice for death in the same way people do.
The drow is kneeling far from the graves in the place where the Clay’s grow food and not flowers, buried up to his wrists in dirt. Wulf can see the hem of the ridiculous gardening gloves the Tiefling girl had given him; bright pink.
This is a wizard that started a war. Comical.
Wulf says, “Can I join you? We don’t have to talk.”
Essek starts, but recovers quickly. His ears flatten briefly, his eyes rising sharp and reflective like one of Bren’s cats, before he lets out a soft sound almost like a laugh and says, “of course.”
He seems to perpetually speak in whispers, this one. As if he’s holding all the air in his lungs for spells and nothing else. Eadwulf kneels beside him, notes the pile of growing weeds. There’s more—the thorny, persistent kind—strangling what he thinks are carrot tops. He hooks them with his fingers, feels them prick satisfyingly against his skin.
They work in silence for the better part of an hour. It’s awkward at first but then easy. Eadwulf has never really liked talking, and once Essek seems to realize the silence is not a slight, he eases into the weight of it too. They breathe, and garden, and breathe. It’s something like praying.
“You care about him,” Wulf says finally. “Don’t you?”
“Who?” Essek asks quietly, but there’s an echo of the Shadowhand lilt in the way he says the word, a soft working of arrogance in the way he tilts his chin up at Wulf.
“Caleb,” Eadwulf says, the name still a little strange on his tongue.
Essek does not look at him. His eyes are down like he’s casting. His fingers are twitching into something that whispers of spell-work, but it’s not any kind of magic Eadwulf knows. Something dynasty-born, of course. Something foreign. “Yes,” the drow says. “Is that not obvious?”
It is quite obvious. Bren has always been loud in the way he loves, and Essek, skilled liar though he is, does not seem to be able to cloak this in any way that matters.
“You’re going to be hunted,” Eadwulf says instead of answering. “And that will put him in danger.”
“I know.”
“He likes danger,” Eadwulf says. “And I’m used to running.”
The drow looks at him, bright, cunning as a carefully casted counter spell. “I don’t understand you,” he says, although he does. There’s a slight curve to his mouth when he lies. Eadwulf has learned some of his tells now.
“I’m saying,” Wulf says. “That I’m going to help you.”
“They’re going to fucking Aeor?” Astrid rarely shouts, and to be fair, this one is more snarl than anything, but she hurls it with the weight of a scream.
Beauregard doesn’t look up from the report she’s writing. “I don’t remember inviting you into my office.”
Astrid had teleported here when Wulf reported that he’d lost Essek in the snow after his own misfired teleport displaced him. Beau could have asked Bren to place stronger wards around her office, but Astrid knows that Beau had asked for Wulf and her to have access. They need to be able to convene at a moments notice at odd hours—the necessity of bringing down a corrupt society of power-hungry wizards from the inside.
And Astrid never knocks, anyway.
“How are you so calm about this?”
“They’ll be fine,” Beau says, setting down her pen. “This is what they want to do.”
“They’re going to get themselves killed.”
Beau looks up then, nostrils flared, eyes ocean-dark. “This is why he didn’t tell you. You were going to stop him. Let him have this. We know what’s down there. You don’t.”
That hurts. “I don’t trust him.”
“Essek?” Beau cocks an eyebrow at that. “Interesting. I thought you’d trust him more than Caleb. You’ve known him longer.”
She’s relentless today. Something must have happened. Astrid forces herself to take a breath and sits down at the chair Bren usually occupies across from Beauregard’s desk. “You are worried, aren’t you? You think he’s making a mistake.”
“I think,” Beauregard says, glancing back down at her report and shuffling the pages in a facade of being organized. She really just needs to do something with her hands, Astrid knows. “That there is magic down there that could cause Caleb to do something very dangerous.”
“Tell me.”
“Figure it out yourself.” Beau curls her fingers into fists and stands, too restless to be still. Lion, indeed. “He’s going to Aeor with a fucking dunamancy wizard. To do research.”
“You think he’s giving up,” Astrid says. “You think he’s leaving you here to deal with this alone? He wouldn’t do that.” Even Bren, when she’d known him best, all shining glory and burning bright with the power of Empire, wouldn’t have left—
Beau snatches her staff off its rack on the wall and twirls it around until it’s at rest behind her shoulders. “I don’t understand wizards,” she says, teeth bared, and storms out.
Astrid lets her have the lie.
She stays in the office until the sun sets, and leaves only when it’s dark and Wulf’s voice whispers in her head that he’s coming home.
She meets him in her own Tower. He stumbles out of the teleportation circle shivering and spell-spent. She catches him fast, tangles her hands in his wet hair, breathes in the scent of snow.
Wulf wraps his arms around her, face buried in the crook of her neck, breaths hot against her collarbone. He whispers against her skin like a secret, “they’re gone and I can’t find them. I can’t reach them. I can’t protect them.”
That’s the part that is hurting the most, she knows. They’ve always protected Bren, made a new vow to protect Essek when Shadowhand was stripped from his spine and made it softer.
She cares about them both, she’s realizing. Her mouth is sour with the learned dread of it. The world is not kind to those she loves. And even these days, when Trent’s voice in her head is her conscience and not the man himself, to love is a dangerous thing.
After he learns that Bren and Essek are out of Aeor, Eadwulf follows Essek into a bar for a drink. The drow does not look like a drow but rather a tiefling: curved horns, spiked tail, a reddish hue to his purple skin. It suits him, this disguise, in a way that some of the others hadn’t. On the outskirts of Rexxentrum, this is the only inn that serves food he can stay for the night. So Wulf is here to ensure he arrives at Bren’s door in relatively one piece.
The tiefling catches his eye from across the bar and lifts an eyebrow, and Wulf walks over.
“Why didn’t you teleport home?” He makes the question quiet because Essek looks close to flinching, a nervous hum to his movements that Wulf finds a bit concerning.
A few years on the run now, and Essek is normally used to the strange dance of danger, but the wizard in front of him is something else.
Essek’s tiefling tail flicks, striking Wulf’s ankles. “I’m quite low on spells,” he says, and his voice is rasping. In the tiefling disguise it is nearly a growl, but it sounds like it hurts.
Eadwulf drops down into the opposite seat, instinctively reaching for Essek’s hand, pressing two fingers to his wrist to feel his pulse. The other wizard hisses a warning but does not pull away.
“What happened, Essek?” Eadwulf asks the words in Undercommon, the language a guttural hiss that few will speak here, a safe tongue for secrets.
Essek lowers his eyes, his teeth worrying at his lip. His heartbeat under Wulf’s fingers is an erratic, fluttering thing. “He went home,” he says. “To Blumenthal.”
Eadwulf’s own hurt stutters. He chokes out, “what?”
“To say goodbye, finally, I think,” Essek says. “But I had to let him go alone. And I didn’t want him to worry.”
“But you’re exhausted and don’t have enough magic to get home,” Wulf says, breathing through the knowledge that Bren is not lost in another time.
Essek ignores the concern in Eadwulf’s tone. “Do you wish he had done it? Brought back his parents?”
“No,” Eadwulf says.
“Would you have brought back yours?”
The quiet hum of the bar cloaks the intensity of their conversation. These are questions Essek can only dare ask in a public place, in the safety of strangers, of drink, of quiet corners where people look the other way as two wizards crowd into dark corners to whisper.
“No,” Eadwulf says, hollow with the truth of it.
Essek pulls his hand gently from Eadwulf’s. “I’m not hurt,” he says. “Just out of spells. But I knew you’d find me.”
“I can get you home safe. Bren will need you when he comes back.”
It hangs between them for a moment, the fear that he won’t come back. Eadwulf breathes into it.
“Please,” Essek says.
Astrid is waiting for them both when Eadwulf teleports the two of them into her tower.
Essek sways at the rush of magic, and Eadwulf steadies him. “This,” the drow says, shedding his disguise and lifting slightly into the air under Eadwulf’s guiding hand. “Is not my home.”
“No,” Eadwulf admits. “But I don’t feel comfortable leaving you alone in Caleb’s house when he’s not here.”
“Fuck, Theylss,” Astrid says softly, stepping into the room at the sound of magic. “You look horrible.” She takes the drow’s chin in her hands and turns his head from side to side. He makes a slow, soft noise of protest and she scowls at him.
“He’s not hurt,” Eadwulf says. “But I don’t think he’s tranced in days and he has no spells left.”
“Fool,” Astrid hisses, but Eadwulf can hear the affection layered underneath the anger. He’s not sure if Essek can, though; the drow hisses back. “You’re all burned down to the bone.”
Essek laughs at that, a relieved, horrible wretching sound. Eadwulf hears the echo of Bren in it, and aches.
“Come on,” Wulf says, tugging lightly on Essek’s arm. “Shower, soup, bed.”
“You made me soup?”
“Don’t sound so suspicious,” Astrid says. “I made myself soup. You can have some.”
Eadwulf wonders what their master would say if he could see the three of them, all traitors and weapons and monsters alike, tending wounds and sharing meals in the quiet warmth of night. There’s something unique here with the three of them, the ghosts of Bren and Caleb ever-present, in every whisper. No one understands the threat of that love like the three of them. No one else can possibly understand the ache.
Essek sleeps, eventually, on a sofa near the door so he will be first to wake when Caleb steps through the doors.
Eadwulf watches him breathe. Astrid steps up behind him and wraps her arms around him, chin digging in to the hollow of his throat.
“There,” Astrid breathes in his ear. “Is a threat.”