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Chapter Text

Essek had risen from his trance that morning earlier than was his already early habit, well before the sunrise hour that had the rest of Rosohna stirring. In the absence of any visible dawn, the daybreak was only noticeably marked by the gentle prayer chimes emanating from the city’s many temples and chapels of the Luxon, wavering notes sounding out just as the Bastion’s honor guards drew the doors closed behind him. 

He’d intended to be productive, in those early hours. And yet, he’d no sooner settled at his desk than found himself utterly unable to focus on the admittedly pressing tasks before him for idle and fleeting daydreams of bed. 

When he had risen that morning, he’d done so graced by the utterly unfamiliar warmth and weight of a body sprawled carelessly across the mattress beside him, the impressive tangle of sheets and limbs and hair like fanned flames demanding he linger for longer than his morning allotted just to gently extricate himself without waking his bed partner, a task he undertook with all diligence. Even after, he’d been obliged to hover a few moments more to appreciate how he’d partly failed the task, a grumble that didn’t even approach words—much less a language he fully understood—muffled facedown in the mattress, a clumsy hand groping blindly at the warm place he’d recently occupied.  

He had frozen then, and waited, chewing on the beginnings of a private smile while his heart tapped an off-kilter rhythm between his ribs. It took the span of four sleep-steady breaths more to watch Bren sink back down into slumber, only after which did Essek finally depart.

The image of it stayed with him still, accompanied by a fragment of warmth lodged between his ribs that he hesitated to put a name to. 

It was dangerous , that feeling Essek was beginning to grow comfortable with, no longer a fledgling thing, and more dangerous the more comfortably it nestled inside his chest. He was well past denying the existence of the thing, but even named phenomena with a proclivity to kill were no less dangerous for being known.

A part of him had hoped, foolishly, by postponing what meetings could reasonably be postponed and scheduling the rest for the early morning, intending to take what other work could be completed from the comfort and safety of his own study back to his towers, that his companion would still be there when he returned—if not unmoved and unwaking, then raiding either his pantry or library. Either image brought a resurgence of that feeling to his chest, all efforts to tuck it away for later private contemplation growing increasingly ineffective. 

And yet upon returning in the early afternoon, to Essek’s disappointment and greater annoyance with himself for the same, he found no sign of Bren, nor even a trace he’d ever been there after scanning those rooms where he first expected to find him, followed by those rooms where he did not. No sign of him, barring, of course, the small, furred, ruddy-brown and spotted creature curled up in the center of his desk atop a once-tidy stack of read but unreturned missives, evidently asleep and purring like a moorbounder.

He’d experienced altogether one too many ambush-by-polymorph incidents, followed up by a lecture on personal safety from simultaneously the most and least qualified man to give it, for Essek to react with anything short of suspicion. That whatever the creature was had not triggered any of his many alarms or wards to have gotten where it lay hardly lessened the feeling. But, the creature didn’t immediately attack or even react when he entered either, and in fact didn’t seem to notice him at all as he hastily weaved together Detect Magic, revealing nothing out of place save an odd glimmer like Faerie Fire clinging to the creature. 

Still, he approached cautiously, two more steps inside the room.

“Bren?” he tried, looking at the comfortably dozing creature with only increasing confusion. That would be odd, but it ranked highest in probability among the possibilities he could conjure, and ranked more desirable than the current second highest, and would entail far less imminent violence than the third. 

The creature lifted its head and swiveled to face him with very round, very green eyes, decidedly feline now he got a proper look at its pointed, fur-tufted ears and suddenly swishing tail. Somehow, the wavering mrow it made sounded like a question. 

“Oh, tell me you are Bren, and not a gift,” Essek pleaded with it, grimacing at the idea and the disheveled state of his desktop now he got a better look at it. “I really do not need a- a pet .” 

He was just grateful the inkwell that the animal had seemingly knocked to the floor along with a well-chewed quill was thoroughly stoppered.

The creature only chirped at him, rising to its four paws and stretching with an elegant arch across his desk, many ivory-white claws suddenly on display and digging into the varnish. 

Essek’s grimace became a wince. “I might actually rather you be another Scourger than a gift,” he told it as it stepped to the corner of his desk, peering down the side and at the carpet as though calculating a descent before glancing back up at him, a rumbling purr beginning in its chest. Its eyes, Essek then noticed, had gained a decidedly odd blue-glow sheen to their surface.

The words to Identify were already on his tongue when he felt the gentle pulsing of an arcane signature like warm coals at the base of his skull, blooming heatedly in the back of his mind, a familiar magic like woodsmoke brushing sweet and rich across his senses. 

“There you are,” Bren’s Sending reached him. “I was beginning to worry,” his voice huffed softly, amused and slightly breathless, Essek noted, one seemingly having nothing to do with the other. Distracted, he almost jumped when he felt something brush his shins, the creature’s head butting against one leg before it sniffed an ankle, its tail flicking against the other. “Say hallo to Frumpkin. Not a gift,” Bren corrected, amusement in his tone growing. “A loaner. He’ll keep an eye on you for me.”

Essek huffed at the suggestion, watching the familiar’s—Frumpkin’s—claws protrude again as it stretched, flopping over somewhat less gracefully than expected to lay across one of his boots, kneading at the carpet and purring uproariously. 

“Bren,” he began, almost reproachful, not quite nervous yet but not a far cry from chastising. The spell tether wavered with his reply. “Where are you? And why does whatever you are doing mean I suddenly require supervision? Not that—” he stopped himself, both for lack of words and the right ones. “I’m sure he’s… lovely,” he offered dryly, belatedly, and not at all convinced.

Not a moment later, Sending recast, it trembled with Bren’s laughter. Frumpkin’s nuzzling turned to a sharp nip at his ankle, making Essek jerk back with a yelp, glaring darkly at the familiar now sprawled on its back looking up at him innocently. “Because I won’t be back until tonight, and I’ll feel better with another pair of eyes about,” he answered only vaguely, though Essek hardly expected anything more. “He’s a good boy,” Bren reassured, as Frumpkin’s eyes shone that same glossy blue again, just for a flash, then he was rubbing himself demandingly against Essek’s calf. “Give him my love.”

Resigned, Essek crouched down, offering his hand to Frumpkin to sniff. “You didn’t answer the questions,” he sighed, his words and their soft rebuke as much directed at the familiar and its blue-glow eyes that he suspected Bren was watching through as they were in reply to Bren’s Sending. “Where are you? Has something happened?”

Evidently satisfied or at least unmoved by however Essek smelled, Frumpkin nudged his head against his palm, accepting the tentative scratches Essek offered behind his ears. 

The spell’s connection to Bren frayed and dissolved after Essek’s last words. A moment long enough to have recast twice-over stretched through the study, silent save for the low rumble in Frumkin’s chest. The sound of it only faltered for a second when Essek withdrew both hands to glide through the somatics of Sending himself.

“Are you alright, d’anthe?” he asked simply, and left the rest to Bren’s reply. 

It only took a few seconds more to receive. “Yes, Schatz. Just crowded here.” Another, lengthier pause. “Observing your new colleague, as discussed,” he said, and yet with hints of the audible grin of one caught doing precisely what they shouldn’t be. The end of that answer was punctuated by a similar pause. “Cautious, because I heard from Astrid,” he admitted, doing Essek the courtesy of growing slightly more serious. “Many eyes on Rosohna of late.”

Essek watched the feline familiar lose interest suddenly and trot off toward the window, leaping up to perch on the ledge, eyes fixed on the street below. He shed his cloak and abandoned it over the back of his desk chair, fighting the urge to draw the curtains closed by occupying his hands with another Sending instead. 

“I presume you’ll explain what that means in greater detail upon your return,” he said warily, calming himself by setting to reorganizing his desktop. “As for my… colleague ,” he sighed, sinking into his chair. He would only insult him by pressing the importance of keeping his distance, of patience , again. They’d had this conversation enough times already. “Be careful, Bren. Please.” 

He let the thread of the spell go slack between his fingers. A long moment passed before Bren’s words had it thrumming to gentle life again. 

“ I always am, Liebling ,” he assured, with a breathless confidence that worked too hard to soothe Essek’s doubts to actually put him at ease. 

Essek’s imagination conjured the sight of him, hood up, head down, darting between the shadows of passersby and alleyways, a persistence hunter of the most terrifying sort. It had a faint chill rolling down his spine, though Essek felt foolish the moment after; it might as well have been pure fantasy for how little he had actually seen of the process of Bren’s work, save for second-hand reports and the bloody aftermath. Of course, the delivered product, coupled with the raw ability Essek had seen him harness on those occasions he’d wet his appetite with a suitable bit of dunamancy, was proof of competence enough. But it hardly freed him from the curiosity that itched most ardently to see his stolen Scourger at bloody work.

Where his imagination wandered further evoked a heady sense of power coming to heel, as intimate as the swell of magic under his skin—as dangerous as the temptation to trace fingertips along the sleep-softened edges of the predator he’d left curled in his bed that morning. And the fledgling warmth housed between his ribs grew hot and sank low where it roiled.

Essek blinked back to himself, staring at some point well past the whirl in the wood grain of his desk, the silence of the lapsed spell ringing. He cleared his throat, easing a finger between his high collar and throat and tugging it loose. That even Bren’s opaque warning had flitted from his mind as he drove himself to distraction was surely a sign that this thing in his chest was going to get him killed, or worse. 

Sighing, he turned his attention to the familiar—a facsimile of a creature the nature and name of which he still wasn’t certain, but had a great many questions for Bren about—diligently standing watch from his window. 

“Ah, Frumpkin?” he tested the familiar’s name, its head swiveling to blink wide saucer eyes at him. He cleared his throat again, suddenly deeply unsure of the creature’s intelligence and capacity for affront, opting for caution. “I suppose you—if you needed to be let out or fed or, something, your master would have informed me…”

Frumpkin received his inquiry with another slow blink and a near silent sound that he opened his jaws wide around, displaying far too many needle-like teeth.

“I see.” Essek did not see. “Well, carry on.” 

With a deep breath, Essek turned back to his desk, flicking his Wristpocket into existence to retrieve the paperwork he’d deigned not to complete in the Bastion that morning. Another breath, as slow and intentional as the last, and he resisted the urge to go recheck his wards, settling in to work, and wait, and fail at pretending the extra pair of eyes at his back was the product of thoughtful but needless concern.

***

Bren remained crouched below the edge of the raised roofline for long enough that his knees complained and the knot in his neck ached furiously for how he’d slept on it, or on Essek, evidently very wrongly. He willed the discomfort into the background with every other distraction. 

The Taskhand Telaarin that was the subject of his reconnaissance—and it was purely, only, decidedly reconnaissance, Essek having given himself a near aneurysm arguing against even that much—had proceeded through the front door of the establishment adjacent Bren’s perch in the company of three fellow officers. That had been eighteen minutes and twenty-three seconds ago. 

Bren had not been in Rosohna so long as to familiarize himself with all its dens of iniquity and the denizens thereof, useful though they were when in need of discretion and a place to lie low. The nature of this one was fairly evident though. The self-proclaimed social parlor was positioned optimally in a private corner near the Firmanents, its patrons clad in all the trappings of Rosohna’s elite and bearing themselves with all the severity that entailed, though exiting with substantially more liquored ease. Then there was the occasional passing of half-naked, artfully ornamented bodies by gaps in the window draperies. Bren knew fairly quickly what he was working with. 

He wondered if the lone figure trailing his quarry had appraised the situation similarly before scurrying up the drain pipe rising along the back of the building. 

When he had first clocked the individual wearing the convincing illusion of a female drow in the outdoor marketplace, he’d dropped back and taken a few errant turns to determine if it was his mark or himself they were after. When no one pursued, he circled back to follow the follower, a subtle Detect Magic from the farthest range the spell permitted confirming the existence of the illusion, with the added reveal of the ring on their finger that seemed to generate it. 

Those facts, and the absence of any other magical auras, ruled out the possibility the individual was Volstrucker to a satisfactory degree. That they stumbled through an embittered and less than native mastery of undercommon with an over-committed stall merchant compellingly ruled out the possibility they were with the Lens. So there remained the Augen Trust and Cobalt Soul to Bren’s mind. Either would fit Astrid’s warning of the renewed interest in Rosohna by Rexxentrum’s political magnates of late contained in her unexpected Sending that morning, even if the cause for the shift was as of yet unclear. Among the ranks of both were competent spies, and among the Augen Trust in particular, plenty competent assassins; and Bren could fathom no decent reason why this operative would let their carefully maintained distance evaporate now, choosing this particular moment, if they were not one of the latter. Which was unfortunate. 

Hence, his present predicament. 

Essek would not be pleased. 

But he would perhaps be less pleased, to Bren’s rapid calculus, if he allowed this interloper to kill the Taskhand, and after Essek had put so much work into convincing Bren that the idiot was more useful alive. Enough so that he was starting to agree. No matter that his continued existence stung Essek’s pride. 

In the end he had relented of course, if not because he accepted the logic and fail-safes of Essek’s proposal then because he bore the weight of being the cause for Essek’s unavailability in the immediate wake of the Felderwin attack; thus, the cause for the Dusk Captain having seen fit to replace Essek with the Taskhand, his present quarry, in overseeing the interrogation of the Empire alchemist pulled from Felderwin’s rubble; thus, the cause for the need for all this careful choreography in the first place. And after they had only just so carefully shifted blame for the beacon thefts onto a faction of cultists and the conveniently situated Adeen Tasithar, Bren was all too aware of the razor's edge of suspicion that they walked. 

There was little point Sending to Essek again. He would only worry him, and there was no conveying the scope of the situation and the decision that needed to be made in so few words. 

And Essek was not his Master; that the comparison came to mind at all conjured an ill feeling twisted itself about in Bren’s guts, brief but distasteful, accompanied by a feeling like grime on his skin he wanted to be clean of. He shoved it away with malice.

Bren arrived at a decision the same moment the interloper tested a third floor window, finding it unlocked, and slipped neatly inside. For a brief moment he regretted that Frumpkin was outside his range of recall, a pair of eyes and ears inside most useful. But then, last he checked, Frumpkin was very hard at work lounging in Essek’s lap, and Bren wouldn’t dare interrupt. And he had already opted to ask forgiveness rather than permission. 

He scanned the illuminated windows and entrances, listening a moment more, rolling a gossamer cocoon from his component pouch between forefinger and thumb. He did miss it, the tease of adrenaline and magic quickening through his veins, laying low long enough in Rosohna now at Essek’s insistence that he’d nearly forgotten the thrill of the chase—a savage pleasure, only rarely a guilty one. 

Still, the feeling was antithetical to the vigilant calm he settled into in the span of a few breaths more, leaning into training more than instinct, before the far less reliable nerves of the sparrow overtook his body. The Polymorph spell and his forward intent guided him down from the roof, across the street, and through a slight gap in an open window on the second floor, just below where his new friend had slipped inside. 

The sparrow landed on an ornate candelabra atop an end table below the window, looking down a narrow, softly lit hallway. The muffled sound of music and laughter, movement below, carried through the rest of the house. Movement too, soft voices, from behind one of the nearby closed doors. Glancing this way and that, waiting a moment more, he judged the hall empty. 

It was the work of a moment, returning to himself in the shadow of a closed doorway. Another to weave a competent illusion between his fingers with a few whispered words and melt into the visage of a wisp of a male drow, delicate and alluring and draped in far too little clothing for the climate. Then the incantation of Detect Magic, casting his senses out through doors and walls to scan for the signature of the ring he’d identified earlier producing the figure’s disguise.

Pushing off the wall with a sigh, Bren loosened his limbs with the first few steps and adopted the far more careless, unhurried gait of one well at home, keeping his footsteps light across the thin carpet. Humming snatches of a tune to himself, fingers rasping along the faded wallpaper and blood thrumming, Bren set off down the hallway toward the central staircase and the third floor above. 

He gave a careful berth to the stumbling patron he encountered descending the stairs, too preoccupied with the giggling young woman racing just ahead whose skirts he chased to pay Bren any mind. Finding the landing above empty, he paused at the head of another lavishly draped, narrow hall lined with a few closed doors. Similarly heady with incense and empty, it was quiet, save for the sounds of a rather raucous party echoing up from below.

He was halfway down the hall before, at the very edge of its radius and just behind the last door on the left, like one pressed to the wall in wait, his spell pinged on the first pink-red signature of illusory magic not his own. 

Bren dipped his fingers inside his components pouch, letting his footsteps fall more heavily on his approach, humming a jaunty little snippet of the music reverberating through the floorboards for good measure. 

Raising his free hand, he knocked, soft and unobtrusive. He was met by silence.

Nothing else for it, Bren tried the handle, found it unlocked, and pushed gently inside.

The attack was at least silent when it came. A flash of movement in the dimly lit bedroom from where he was watching in his periphery for it. But surprisingly quick also, a sliver of cold steel catching the candlelight as a knife-bearing arm attempted to loop around his throat before the door was even fully closed, the cutting edge of it skimming his jaw before the verbal component of Misty Step was past his lips and Bren was suddenly five feet to his right and immediately behind her. 

“Not Cobalt Soul then,” he muttered, annoyed at the trickle of warmth he swiped from his throat as the figure still wearing the disguise of a female drow whirled around, eyes wide and expression scrutinizing. “Augen Trust, I presume.”

His Zemnian-accented Common evidently not yet enough to make her hesitate as she was already lunging to bury the blade in his chest, he allowed his illusion to lapse, though he braced with a Shield prepared in case. 

“Who are you?” she hissed, and he allowed her empty hand to strike forward for the front of his coat, grabbing the collar and shoving him forcefully back against the wall.

“Hello friend,” he gasped with a dry chuckle as the air left his chest. He paused a moment to regain it, grinning as the blade tip pressed none too gently into his diaphragm in warning. “I’m afraid I’m not authorized to tell you that, but I felt it appropriate to intervene before you throw a real wrench into the delicate balance my Masters are intent on maintaining.”

Even through her disguise, he watched her process what he felt was just enough in the way of hints and lies for a member of the Trust to gather what he was. It would be rather kitsch, being so forthcoming about a thing as naming oneself a Volstrucker. He studied her as her brow knit tightly, parsing his words with mounting concern and shallow breath as the gears turned behind her eyes, until that blade of hers hovered not so near his belly. Until, at least, he’d assessed she’d sufficiently come to believe his assertion of “friend”—or at least harbor serious enough doubts—to permit the Dominate Person spell falling honeyed from his tongue to penetrate that much more readily and deeply into her mind. 

To her credit, once it began to take hold, she resisted up to the final word of the brief incantation. Her entire person went rigid as she threw her whole weight forward behind the knife Bren was forced to wrestle her for as he hissed the few final words past his teeth, still unable to prevent the blade’s tip from sinking an uncomfortable inch into his side. 

But then it was done just as quickly, the spell’s sickly-sweet tendrils having worked past her mind’s resistance, and her eyes glazed over with it before clearing again, body going lax. She  released the knife he took from her to slide it gingerly back out of his flesh, and she withdrew with a nudge of his will.

Huffing curses below his breath, his immense annoyance with the pain radiating from the gash just below his ribs, though relatively shallow and unconcerning all things told as he took a moment to prod at it, at least helped to undercut his distaste in employing such a spell. An unfortunate necessity, given the circumstance. 

“Have a seat, why don’t you,” he breathed, nudging her with a thought toward a chair in the corner, sitting himself at the foot of the bed with a hand pressed to his middle to stem the light bleeding. “And take off the ring. Let’s meet properly.” 

“Of course,” the woman murmured as though perfectly pleased to do so, if somewhat dazed. She complied and revealed herself as human and pale as himself beneath the illusion that flickered and faded, long dark hair braided back, wearing the same Xhorhasian-style simple clothing as her disguise.

“I apologize my friend, I am not normally so hasty or crude, but there are many eyes and ears about and we have little time,” he sighed, eyes flicking to the door and pausing to listen for a moment, relaxing a fraction when nothing seemed amiss. “Remind me, you are a member of the Augen Trust?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she answered with an easy smile, always the most unnerving part, how they seemed outwardly perfectly content to be puppeteered by the magic pulling their strings, all the while staring though somewhat vacant eyes. 

“You were sent here for the Taskhand Telaarin?” he confirmed. “Currently downstairs?”

She nodded. “Yes, the same.”

“Why?” 

The woman treated him to a slightly perplexed look, unnervingly fond, like it was a foolish question. “Because he has been assigned to carry out the questioning of the alchemist from Felderwin, Yeza Brenatto. Because he will know what interest the Dynasty could have in Brenatto, and what he’s said.”

“You were not here to kill the Taskhand, then,” he grumbled, almost disappointed with the fact if all this could have been avoided. But then, her interference would have had consequences best avoided too, and this conversation could prove fruitful still.

“Certainly not before learning what he knows. Not if it can be avoided,” she agreed.

“And who has an interest in learning about the Dynasty’s reasons for taking the alchemist?” Bren asked, frowning down at the red staining his tunic and hand, not quite slowing. He rose to pull a clean shirt from an open dresser drawer, folding it over a few times before pressing it to his side. He returned his eyes to the woman. “Who set you to your task?”

“I serve the Crown.”

“Yes but Bertrand himself didn’t come to you with your orders,” he huffed. “Who did? What do you know of the talk of Rosohna—of Ghor Dranas,” he corrected, “in Rexxentrum of late?”

Another perplexed look. She shrugged somewhat helplessly. “The Crown, the Crown’s advisors and war counselors,” she answered again, but it sounded like a guess. “Like you, Scourger, we receive only our orders and what need be known to carry them out; we are not present when the decisions are made. I don’t know who decides them, or why. Only what I am given.” A pause. “But,” she allowed, inclining her head, ”we do talk to one another, and hear things, piece things together, based on the assignments that are handed down of late. And, of late, there have been more of us sent to Xhorhas, most to Ghor Dranas, as you say. And we have not been permitted the assistance of the arcane practitioners supplied by the Cerberus Assembly, sometimes ones like yourself, as it is usually arranged when there is the need. For there are whispers—I know not their truth or origin—that the Crown is suspicious of the Assembly of late.”

“That is interesting,” Bren mused, certainly interesting, if the Dynasty’s attack on Felderwin and investigation that must have followed opened the Crown’s eyes to the Assembly’s activities—Trent’s activities—studying the stolen beacons. Or, to the importance, or even the existence of the beacons themselves. 

He would discuss the matter with Essek, later, once he’d been forgiven. But presently, her word choice, “we”, nagged at him, a cool prickle of concern at the back of his neck. His eyes turned again to the closed door, listening intently. He’d presumed she was waiting for the hall to clear before altering her disguise and making her way down. He’d presumed the pair making their way down the stairs when he’d been making his way up, and then his own audible approach, had stalled her. He’d presumed much, based on the solitary figure she cut all evening as he followed, certain she was alone. 

“You have a partner downstairs don’t you,” he sighed, his attention split between the woman and listening for anything beyond the closed door, resigned to the truth of the prospect before she’d even confirmed it. 

“I do,” the woman agreed, and Bren’s jaw leapt in displeasure.

A partner who would have been planted here for some time—as soon as the Taskhand’s routine became predictable enough to become actionable—who would have been ingratiating themself, gaining trust and learning whatever secrets might be spilled with enough alcohol and friendly plying, before luring the Taskhand away to this secluded corner where the trap would finally spring. Because that’s what he would have done.

He bit the inside of his cheek painfully, a stubborn sort of self-flagellation.  It should have been the second thing he’d asked her, if she was working alone. He’d been cloistered to Essek’s towers with nothing to do for not even a week yet and already he was losing his edge. 

He knew very well how Master Ikithon would punish the misstep, no matter how seamlessly Bren salvaged the situation now; he was uncertain as to what Essek’s reaction would be, having already broken the terms of their agreement to stand where he stood. The uncertainty was worse.

Bren forced himself to uncoil the useless tension he carried, swallowing the taste of blood in his mouth. 

“Just the one partner?” he asked cooly, settling deeper into his own skin, into that calm place where instinct and impulse had been carved out in favor of precision. He rose to his feet as he fished pieces of amber from his coat pocket, throwing the bloodied shirt down to the floor and setting about placing the pieces at careful intervals all around. 

“Just the one,” came the confirmation.

“And you have not tipped them off in any way to my visit?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t have the time.”

“Alright then. Last question,” he assured, impossible not to let something like sympathy enter his tone. “Please describe for me what they look like, in detail, if you are familiar with their current disguise. And come stand here,” he gestured beside his wide circle of amber.

“I am familiar,” she agreed, standing and moving as she was directed, and began to describe the woman he was looking for in fair detail.

It was a simple thing, miserable for all it was relatively bloodless and painless, and utterly unsporting. Bren took no joy in it, but he’d set about a task with an inevitable conclusion, and there was no sense completing it by exerting more energy or exposing himself to more risk than necessary. 

He stepped up behind her, empty hand braced on her shoulder, knife slotting easily between her ribs—a quick, forceful stroke as neat as Eodwulf had taught him, straight through to her heart. 

“I’m sorry friend,” he murmured, though the life had already left her as she slumped in his grip, his thread of concentration on the domination dissolving. “But your side and my side are no longer the same.”

The sound of a body hitting the floor was too distinctive a sound to let her fall, and so Bren struggled with her weight a moment to lower her to her knees, then to lay her down in his circle of amber. The blade remained inside her chest. Lacking the privilege of time enough to trudge though the ritual of the Vault of Amber, he moved quickly through the verbal and somatic components to execute the spell, though it required more of his strength than he would have liked. No matter.

In the work of a few moments, Bren breathed deeply in an empty, dimly lit bedroom, recollecting him amber pieces and looping the pendant he’d placed at the top of the circle back over his head. 

Recasting Disguise Self, figuring himself for a patron rather than employee this go around, Bren slipped out the door silently and was gone. 

***

Essek did not, in the end, manage to be fully productive with his time. He only noticed he had drifted into the comfortable lull of the beginnings of a trance there at his desk, assisted by the steady purring rumble in his lap, when the feline at fault shot suddenly upright, eyes wide and ears swiveling toward the doorway. 

He blinked, wincing at how his back protested as he corrected his posture. Withdrawing the hand he hadn’t remembered leaving buried in the creature’s soft fur, he raked the renegade locks of hair falling in his eyes back into place. Frumpkin, making an odd chirping sound now, though the flick of his tail seemed more attentive than agitated, hopped up from Essek’s lap to his desk, stepping gingerly for once around the open inkwell.

His eyes followed the path of the familiar’s, and suddenly what Essek assumed had just been a few minutes’ reprieve for his eyes struck him as having stretched closer to an hour. 

Bren looked back from where he leaned comfortably in the open doorway, one shoulder checked against the frame, head tipped to the side and a private smirk hooking the edges of his mouth. He’d stripped out of his outer layers and changed into a comfortable but threadbare shirt since his return, unless he’d seen fit to slink through Rosohna barefoot and in his shirtsleeves. His hair fell loose and wind-tousled about his shoulders, which rose and fell at the greater than resting rate of one having only just jogged up the central tower stairwell, though he gave the unhurried impression that he’d been there for a while.

“I do not know what form of creature this familiar of yours takes after,” Essek admitted, finding his voice rough with disuse and clearing it gently. “But I like it very much, I think. When not repeatedly sticking its claws into my leg.”

Bren’s grin took on an endearing, lopsided quality, the sort of pleased which overwhelmed and so was partly tucked away for later, but not entirely out of sight. “He’s just a cat, Schatz . If you let him in your lap he might knead you a bit—it just means he’s getting comfortable.”

Frumpkin, quite possibly detecting the conversation was about him, yowled a note Essek would not have taken for a friendly greeting but for the way he leapt down and trotted up to Bren’s feet, nudging his head against his legs as he circled. Sinking to a crouch, Bren obliged the attention-seeking behavior with a few loving scritches under his chin.  

For a long moment, Essek only watched them, content to bask in the relief of an unwinding anxiety that he hadn’t realized he’d carried.

“Do you dream?” The question jolted him back to the present moment. Bren was looking up at Essek with a bemused quirk at the edge of his lips. It was only then that Essek noticed the cut upon his cheek.

He only returned the look, lifting an eyebrow pointedly. “What?”

The tilt of Bren’s head turned the other way, appraising. “Do you dream?” he repeated.

“I heard what you said,” he huffed, quietly amused and perplexed by the seriousness with which the question was asked. “Why do you ask?”

“Your ear was twitching,” he said as though that explained everything. “Like Frumpkin sometimes when he’s dreaming. And you’re very alike, I’ve decided.”

Essek narrowed his eyes, scowling down the bridge of his nose at the pair, Frumpkin now having flopped over onto his side, purring uproariously at the belly rubs that followed. “I don’t see the resemblance,” he muttered, realizing too late the affronted uptick of his tone at the end like a question only invited an explanation that he really could have done without. 

Bren glanced up at him, raising an eyebrow. Essek decided that particular smile spelled only trouble. “No?” 

He watched with increased caution as Bren rose to his feet, stepping carefully over Frumpkin to round Essek’s desk. 

“You’re both all claws and teeth and wary of new people, of most people,” he mused, making a seat for himself on the edge of the desk, and in the same fluid movement leaning over and into Essek’s space, hand braced on the armrest of his chair, all with enough confidence to prove the sort of presumptuous Essek found annoying on principle.

Essek’s brow furrowed and lips pressed a flat, unimpressed line. 

The backs of Bren’s knuckles brushed Essek’s jaw, a brief point of contact that—even teasing, even when he saw it coming, even after all this time—still startled him for its careless familiarity and affection. His glare wavered, and only after too long a moment of wide-eyed staring did Essek remember the game they played, fixing his expression and turning his head haughtily away. 

“You’re about to learn that I bite, too,” he advised, earning a delighted low note that was not quite a laugh, and all the more real for it. 

Bren ducked down to bring his face closer, warm breath on Essek’s cheek, lips brushing his ear such that Essek had to suppress an honest-to-gods shiver. “I don’t doubt it, Schatz. But it doesn’t take much to have you purring for me,” he murmured, even as a chuckle worked its way up from his chest to dispel some of the heat teased in his tone. 

Essek was slow, almost reluctant to lean back in his chair, producing more distance between them, only on principle, only in the interest of precluding the formation of a terrible habit. “I am busy, and you are intentionally distracting,” he warned, choosing to disregard the bait and leveling a well practiced, reproachful look at Bren. 

The pout it earned him was equally well practiced, fingertips skating along the corner of Essek’s jaw, brushing, then tugging lightly the jewelry that hung from his ear. “You did not look busy when I found you.”

“Well I am,” he informed pointedly, ignoring the distraction, tempting though it was. Then, “You are in a particularly bothersome mood,” Essek assessed, leaning back to eye him considerately. “I am very near to holding it against you.” 

Bren’s eyes shifted away; something filtered through his expression, the way he carried himself, his very gait from the moment he’d entered the room, and still Essek could not parse it.

With a breath, Essek consciously unveiled the interest and sympathy that then softened his expression. He lifted a hand to cup the side of Bren’s neck, thumb tracing lightly beneath the freshly-scabbed but still angry red line there, little more than a scrape now he got a better look at it, but running very nearly from the corner of his jaw to bottom lip. 

“How did this happen?” he asked, glancing back up to meet Bren’s eyes.

He shrugged away Essek’s concern but turned into his touch, ever contrary, humming something somewhat apologetic. “Would you believe me if I said my hand slipped shaving this morning?” It was a half-hearted deflection at best.

“I might have, had you not led with ‘would you believe me if’,” he huffed, lips twitching at a smile, thumb stroking his cheek, “but still doubtful.” He dropped his hands back to his lap, tilting his chin up, expectant. “Explain.”

“Hm.” 

Essek jumped, nearly squeaked as Bren pinched the point of one ear, his grin turning self-entertained and utterly unrepentant. 

Essek slapped his hand away with a derisive curse and rubbed at his smarting ear, Bren’s eyes only sparkling with a troublesome glee that ran headlong at the thinning veil of Essek’s patience.  “ Brat ,” he grit past his teeth—felt his fangs flash around the word as his lips curled back in warning. His irritation carried him to his feet before he’d formed the intent to go anywhere.

Bren shifted forward but did not rise from his desk after him, murmuring a low apology, head dipping and forehead nudging Essek’s chest like seeking closeness and forgiveness both. It gave Essek pause.

When he straightened again, face turned up to Essek, Bren’s expression was inscrutable. “You did not answer the question,” he reminded, reaching, more slowly this time—pausing altogether when Essek drew back warily, waiting for permission—to comb a few fingers through Essek’s hair in apology, tucking wayward strands back into place in far more tender a gesture than Essek was prepared for. 

“Hypocrite,” he muttered, looking down on him cautiously, to which Bren only waited, expression unchanging, oddly intent. Essek couldn’t help but feel he was stalling, blatantly, an anxiety underlying it that made Essek nervous for its cause. 

Allowing some of the tension and affront to which he’d clung to dissolve, willing this odd tension between them away, “No,” Essek answered with a sigh. “It’s meditative, but not entirely unconscious. I can ruminate on memories or my imagination I suppose, but I do not dream.” 

A beat passed, in which Bren seemed to contemplate his answer and Essek’s hands came to rest again at his sides. Bren shifted somewhat under his touch, expression flickering again, this time different than the last. 

“Satisfied?”

Bren hummed considerately, his eyes trailing lower down the side of Essek’s neck, his fingertips drifting after it before he let gravity pull his hand away. “That is handy, trancing,” he said, possibly to himself, possibly an afterthought—again, the topic felt irrelevant, and this felt like stalling. His eyes didn’t seem quite fixed where they landed on the wall, a much lengthier and more tangled thought left unvoiced.

Just as quickly, Essek watched him blink back to himself. 

“I picked up dinner on the way,” Bren declared with a charming smile that came far too naturally, and yet felt entirely too forced all the same. He didn’t yet know what lingered behind it, the thing responsible for Bren’s mercurial mood. “Got your favorite,” he added, and pushed up to his feet, brushing a kiss to Essek’s cheek. “You should join me before it goes cold.”

He hadn’t even opened his mouth to ask how he could possibly know that before Bren was retreating the way he’d come, disappearing beyond the doorway. The heavy sound of uncharacteristically careless footfalls grew distant down the stairs. 

Frumpkin, rather than following after his master, turned and lazily made his way back to the windowsill, resuming his vigil of the street below.

Essek had half the mind to call him back, to get to the bottom of whatever had happened. He had to assume something had happened between his last Sending and the present, before it soured both of their evenings, with whatever additional consequences aside. He might have ascribed the behavior to Bren’s growing boredom and the restlessness it bred over the course of the last week, driving Essek to distraction and Bren nearer a thing like recklessness, but he couldn’t help but feel there was still something significant left unsaid, between the cut to his cheek and the dinner invitation that felt dreadfully like an apology, too far outside the theme of his usual gift-giving. 

Not for the first time that week, Essek reconsidered and dismissed his doubts over the course of action he’d insisted upon over Bren’s initial protests and begrudging acceptance. Patience was key; the man was not lacking for patience per se, but it was only for an abundance of caution that Essek had stayed his hand—that, and an intimate knowledge of how best to nip court gossip in the bud, which Essek could not fully explain and Bren would not fully understand.

Domesticity (for all that the better, wiser part of Essek scoffed to call it that) suited his hard won and harder kept Scourger no better than captivity. It implied domestication, and even if that were possible so far as Bren was concerned, there was an ugly violence in the act of beating fine blades into garden trowels that Essek could never endorse. There was only to mollify him for the time being, accomplished with rest, and sex, and a few choice pages from Essek’s spell book that kept him occupied for a time, but all of that grew a more difficult task as Essek’s days grew only longer within the Lucid Bastion. Hence, reconnaissance , what seemed an unnecessary risk and unneeded step to the plan already in place, but sufficed to keep them both sane until the time was ripe to act. He only hadn’t expected Bren to begin the task the very next morning after they’d come to a tepid agreement. 

Patience in this matter proved admittedly to be a more energy-consuming commitment than Essek had accounted for. 

Sighing to himself, he rose and quickly tidied the surface of his desk, beginning down the stairs after him. 

True to Bren’s word, a delightful, thoroughly spiced scent—immediately familiar and setting his stomach to rumbling—led Essek to a sitting room much smaller and less formal than the dining area, and to Bren perched on a windowsill, somehow managing to look pensive while shoveling noodles into his mouth. 

He didn’t pull his attention back from the window when Essek entered. 

“I will not ask, I think,” Essek said quietly as he examined the second container on the table, pleased to find a rich, well spiced soup filled with a medley of diced meats and vegetables he had indeed likely ordered from a nearby establishment more times than bore recounting. Plucking up a spoon from the assorted utensils on the table, he sampled a few sips with pleasure, finding it still warm. “Neither how you know my order nor when you learned it. I only hope it was from after the start of our arrangement,” he huffed, a wry smile slipping into place. “That would have been a rather embarrassing security oversight, had I allowed it to happen when you still had no qualms about poisoning me.”

Through a mouthful of food, an inarticulate but dissatisfied grumble escaped the back of Bren’s throat; Essek looked up, finding his back still stubbornly turned to the room, only a fraction of his reflection visible in the dark glass. Ridiculous, really, how the man brooded.

“What’s that?” 

With a deep breath, Bren’s shoulders rose and fell, and fell further. “S’always ‘ qualms ’,” he muttered, spitting the word back out like it didn’t half encompass what he meant.

Essek considered this new data, studying Bren’s posture as he let himself enjoy a few more spoon-fulls before setting the soup aside, heels scuffing slightly as he neared Bren’s back to announce himself. “Of course,” he soothed. “I spoke, I believe the idiom is ‘tongue in cheek’.” His fingers brushed the back of Bren’s shoulder lightly, drifting to the vulnerable bit of skin visible at the back of his neck when he met no ill response, enjoying the shiver it earned him before his fingertips skimmed to the underside of Bren’s jaw as he rounded where he perched, tipping his chin up to look at him. 

Bren met his gaze with a melancholy question. 

“I do not think you a mindless butcher, Bren,” he assured softly, smiling softer, thumb brushing the cut along his jaw. “It is this mind I am so fond of,” he reminded, an amused smile flitting over his mouth. “Rather, merely…” He mused over the thought for a moment, gaze flicking between Bren’s eyes and his lips, parted softly. “Enviably efficient, and capable,” he assessed, and with a proud smirk, “now with appropriately selfish priorities.”

Essek watched his throat work as he swallowed, bared to him still. His thumb traced his lower lip reverently as Bren’s breath hitched. Sliding his fingers into his hair at the nape of his neck, nails scraping his scalp lightly, Bren’s eyes fluttering low, a pleased, breathy sound escaping as Essek’s fingers curled into a fist. A flattering response, and tempting, and perhaps even what his lover needed. But not to be indulged before he understood the full scope of whatever danger did or did not exist following the day’s events.

Essek hummed quietly to himself, amused at a thought. “It’s moments like this I wish you had a surname I might use to emphatic and full effect, my dear.”

“Ermendrud,” he rasped under Essek’s touch, so immediate and unexpected Essek first didn’t recognize the Zemnian syllables for a name.

“I—” He choked on a surprised laugh. “I very pointedly did not ask, and you don’t owe—” he hurried to defend his intentions.

“I know,” Bren murmured simply, eyes cracking open a fraction to look up through his lashes. Then, with a sly thing tucked into the corner of his mouth, “Maybe I wanted to hear the emphatic and full effect .”

Breathing through the terribly pleased sensation that bloomed inside his ribcage, Essek could only shake his head, bowing to press a kiss to Bren’s forehead. “I do not think you a mindless butcher, Bren Ermendrud ,” Essek tested the name, and found it satisfying, met with Bren’s hum of approval as well. “But I am very glad you’ve better sense than to poison a perfectly good bowl of soup.”

That got a chuckle of amusement from the man, who pressed up to steal an off-center kiss that Essek indulged in for a moment before turning away, his grip tightening in his lover’s hair to keep him there, tantalizingly out of reach. 

“So I’m going to finish that before it goes cold,” he murmured against damp lips parted on soft puffs of breath that mingled with Essek’s own, far too inviting, “and then you can tell me what’s happened, and how you earned this–” he swiped his thumb again below the shallow cut upon his jaw– “and we will decide what’s to be done about it. Yes?” It felt foolish to need to say he would not be angry, that it would not be productive, not now, and yet part of him wondered how deeply the ways in which his former Master might have responded influenced Bren’s mood. 

Then a greater part of him wondered just how former Bren considered him.

The low murmur of Zemnian he earned in reply seemed generally in the affirmative, and Bren’s posture had much relaxed when Essek next looked up after re-taking his seat, so Essek took it for agreement enough. 

A moment later, Bren pushed up from his perch on the windowsill with a sigh and removed himself to the table like polite company. 

A moment after that, between, but at least not through mouthfuls of food that still had Essek consider retracting the ‘polite’ assessment, Bren began to speak. 

***

They made it as far as the couch, after—the very same Bren had somewhat foggy memories of waking half-dead upon. Bren again sprawled back across the cushions, Essek half sprawled over him, chin propped up in one hand. The other hand toyed what could almost be mistaken for idly with the amber pendant hung from the cord around his neck, if not for the keen way Essek’s gaze returned and returned again to the bauble, as though looking for something in its opaque shine. 

“You make me nervous, coming to me looking for some sort of punishment rather than assistance,” Essek chastised lightly, breaking the last heavy stretch of silence. He shook his head, lips twitching at a smirk, fingers tracing over amber and the leather cord that bound it. “And over something as inconsequential as two Empire spies easily dispatched.”

Bren turned his face away, feeling ever more the fool. Displeasure with the fact settled uneasily in his belly. But at least, unlike before, it did settle. 

He felt foolish for the lingering doubt he’d harbored over his manner of dispatching the Augen Trust operatives—

“The situation called for a scalpel,” Essek had shrugged, before pausing, reassessing in the face of Bren’s mute unease. “There is shame in waste, in needless suffering, in taking pleasure in necessary violence,” he elaborated over a steaming mug of tea, ankle nudging Bren’s under the table. “You partook on none of these.” Then a pause, the twitch of a poorly concealed smirk, a note of pride. “They should have been more prepared.”

—foolish for being ignorant to what felt so obvious the cause of his own inarticulable distress afterward, which Essek identified with almost too casual ease—

“Have you been subjected to mind-altering magic in that vein, yourself?” he’d asked after a lull in Bren’s report. They had migrated to the couch by then. Only after he asked did Bren recognize the look he’d been giving him as one that weighed whether to ask it at all. He worked his jaw, looking away. It was answer enough. Then, “Are you rethinking our current intentions for Telaarin and the alchemist?” 

“No,” Bren had answered immediately. Indicting the Assembly, divesting Essek of the Bright Queen and Dust Captain’s suspicion in doing so, it was too important. He would do what needed to be done.

—foolish, and guilty too, for his anxious uncertainty as to how Essek would receive the news.

“Even hindsight being what it is, I think you made the correct decision, for what it’s worth,” Essek had sighed, accepting Bren’s dry-mouthed explanation of his reasoning in stride. His head had rested against Bren’s collar then, before Bren had slipped down the back of the couch as though the strings holding him tense had finally been cut, Essek huffing a softly amused sound and following after. He was tucked comfortably into his side, the line of his nose cold against Bren’s throat compared to the blushing warmth he felt pool across his skin at the contact. “Their interference, even if not ultimately lethal, though I have my doubts about that,” he murmured, “would have certainly rendered our current plan inoperable. The lockdown and inquiry that would have followed alone was best avoided. Better Telaarin remain alive and unbothered at least a few days more,” Essek decided—long enough for the Taskhand to have reasonably arrived at the correct questions and methods of asking for the captive alchemist, and to have reasonably obtained the answers. 

He felt Essek’s fingers go wandering along the leather cords around his neck, never still for long. “I want to be there when he delivers the news to court,” Essek hummed, like considering a pleasant daydream. 

“To take credit for making his career?” Bren murmured low, a slight grin tugging at his expression.

“I’m afraid we must humbly seek no gratitude,” he sighed. And Bren understood it, the desire to see the stone drop, the first ripple that would be a tidal wave of their careful making, the weight of the Dynasty to crash down upon the Cerberus Assembly with religious zeal when it was unveiled the alchemist, Brenatto, knew not the significance of the figures at whose direction he worked, knew not their names, but recalled their likenesses upon delivery of the beacon in his care, as unmistakable as the Cerberus crest upon the crate in which they’d delivered it: Master Trent Ikithon and Martinent Ludinus Da’leth. 

Only two small, corroborating lies, implanted in the memories of the Taskhand and Brenatto both, lying between the court’s mere suspicion without evidence and the reconstructed truth—and Essek had wondered at Bren’s want of patience.

Essek shifted again where he lay against him, drawing Bren back to the present moment. His chin propped on one hand, he lifted the amber pendant for closer inspection with the other, his weight still carefully arranged to avoid the side of him where Bren had been—lightly, he’d insisted—stabbed; Essek had not been pleased with that part, demanding to see the suture work Bren had managed in the washroom mirror before coming to Essek’s study and then glaring only more displeased for having seen it. 

“You must promise me in the future you’ll cut your time spent brooding by half and just—” Essek resumed and immediately faltered, brow pinching and fingers starting a soft drumming beat against Bren’s sternum. He exhaled, a self-conscious tilt to the corner of his mouth. “You know I would help you. If you need it. If you ask.”

Bren blinked his eyes open, unsure when it had become easier to just let the exhaustion that had been dragging at his limbs all evening weigh them closed, his brow drawn into a furrow a delayed moment later at the serious note that had entered Essek’s words. He lifted a hand to cover Essek’s and hold it to his chest, putting a stop to the incessant tapping, thumb stroking the back of his hand. 

His voice, when he found it, returned rough with disuse. “I make no promises,” Bren murmured, but his small smile was fleeting. “I know. Danke .” Then another heavy exhale. He tipped his head back further against the pillow, willing himself to sink further into the cushions. 

After a moment’s silence, longer than he expected, Bren cracked his eyes a fraction and looked up at the blurred shape of Essek through his lashes. Still propped upright, he turned the amber pendant curiously between forefinger and thumb, this way then that to catch the light as though it might reveal the silhouettes of two corpses Bren hadn’t the time to dispose of properly before his return. 

“At least you look rather handsome brooding. Makes my attempts feel inadequate in comparison,” Essek mused, the oddly intent moment passed. He stretched out again comfortably, a pleasant weight bearing Bren into the cushions, knee slotting between his as Essek shifted a leg over and tucked himself closer into Bren’s side.

“That’s a lie,” he groused, voice like gravel in his throat. He rolled his eyes without the energy to open them, grin turning his lips. “You’ve never been made to feel inadequate in your life.”

“Not so,” Essek protested, and Bren couldn’t see but knew all the same the pout on his lips. “For example, I’ve still not been able to figure out how you’ve done this,” and Bren felt a few gentle tugs of the cord around his neck. “A dimension not unlike Wristpocket but with a permanent anchor, and quite a lot larger for it. Impressive,” Essek hummed, dropping the smoothed piece of amber again against Bren’s sternum, fingers trailing instead to the delicate skin at the hollow of his throat. 

“Teach you in the morning,” he mumbled, “‘s’not complicated,” and tilted his head back just slightly further as he felt those curious fingers trace the lines of his collar and throat, not unpleasantly at all, bearing more skin to Essek’s wandering touch. 

The fingertips hovering over his pulse paused in their design of a lazy shape he couldn’t make sense of. “You’re being terribly generous today, delivering upon requests I do not make, Bren Ermendrud ,” Essek spoke lowly in his ear, a pleased sort of breathlessness underlying the heat of it. 

Bren dragged his eyes open, just far enough, drawing in a stuttering deep breath. He wet his lips, gnawing at the bottom one.

Essek shuffled again, pushing himself up onto both elbows, and Bren felt his warm exhale against the corner of his jaw this time, careful lips pressing gently to the cut that had long since stopped stinging. When he spoke, he almost felt their lips brush with his words he hovered so close.

“I think I will accept your tempting offer,” Essek purred, lavender eyes glinting darkly in the low light, white lashes sweeping low and mesmerizing across his cheeks. “And how shall I repay this favor?”

Bren tilted his jaw up, straining just barely, just enough to catch Essek’s bottom lip between his own. It was a chaste thing, as soft as the note of pleasure escaping Essek’s chest before he let himself sink back down into the cushions, blinking slow at the heady feeling buzzing in the back of his skull, muddling indistinguishably with the siren song of sleep.

Essek followed him down after they’d barely parted, gentle hands cradling Bren’s jaw, fingertips teasing at his nape, a small smile at his lips, the kiss unhurried and sweet. Bren’s hands found Essek’s hips, enjoying the closeness, the heat between them, but making no effort to pull him closer, and no effort to deepen the kiss. 

A moment more of lazy indulgence and Essek withdrew far enough to meet his half-lidded gaze, a question in the lift of his brow, thumb stroking his stubbled cheek. “Bren?”

He was reluctant to disturb the saccharine haze that had settled over them. Reluctant, and resigned. “We need to do this sooner. Not a few days, tomorrow.” He watched Essek’s expression shift, shoulders fall. “Please,” he murmured, fingers closing loosely in the fabric of Essek’s tunic.

Essek pushed himself to sit upright, perched atop Bren’s hips, little of his weight on his knees on either side. He combed a flop of hair back from his face, head tilting appraisingly, eyes dark as they studied him. “We’ve discussed this at length,” he said quietly, neutrally, the part left unsaid, I thought this was settled.

“It’s not just the Assembly, it’s the Augen Trust interested in why an alchemist was dragged from Felderwin in chains, why he still lives in Rosohna’s dungeon,” Bren said softly, despondently, pushing himself up onto his forearms. “Where both the Assembly and Trust invest their interest, the Cobalt Soul follows, and only puts pressure on both to act sooner rather than later. The Trust will try again, when they learn their operatives are missing. They may very well decide Volstrucker are to blame, and based on Astrid’s warning and the woman I questioned, the Crown is already distrusting of the Assembly after Felderwin; I have to imagine they found some remnant of the alchemist’s study there. They would have investigated. Do you not see the storm coming this way, Essek?” he breathed, looking hard past the vague worry and displeasure that muddled Essek’s expression, unsure what wheels turned behind it. 

Essek inclined his head in some understanding. “Your worry is fair,” he allowed, tone as measured by courtly grace as Bren ever heard it, “but a time of heightened unwanted attention demands if anything heightened caution, not hasty—”

“ Essek ,” he insisted, pleading now with the look he gave him. “They are not merely watching, they will act . Trent knows just as well as we do what damage you could do them with Brenatto and the Queen’s ear, especially now if Dwendal is looking for reasons to mistrust Ludinus and the rest. And he will do it before risking what Brenatto knows falling into the hands of the Augen Trust. If you think they believe the intentions you expressed—to resolve the fallout from Felderwin for the Assembly and yourself—you’re a fool.” Bren swallowed, throat constricting around his words, the cavity inside his chest suddenly feeling scraped raw by them. “He stopped trusting me some time ago. And that I haven’t heard instructions from him since he let you take me terrifies me.”

“Bren,” Essek breathed, even in just his name sounding something between wounded and shattered. The hands that cupped his face were gentle, Essek’s forehead coming gently to rest against his own, cradled close as Bren dragged in a stilted breath, willing the old and bitter dregs of anxiety away. “Of course I don’t expect trust, nor do I trust,” he assured, far steadier than Bren felt. “I am their asset, not their ally. But if the Assembly is under such scrutiny from all sides as you suggest then striking out against me, us , now,” he emphasized, dipping to try to catch Bren’s gaze to only fleeting success before Bren closed his eyes, too much. “Or any other high profile act in Rosohna, it would be rather unwise, don’t you think?”

Bren drew in a deep breath, exhaling slowly through his nose to calm himself. “You expect much from an old man with little to protect but a legacy, and the Volstrucker at his back,” he said, voice falling uncomfortably flat. “Ludinus has a long memory for loose ends and a great patience when it comes to tying them. Trent does not. And you cannot depend on them to act in concert. The Assembly will cannibalize itself before any one of them passes on the chance to gain some advantage at the expense of another. Please, Essek, he will not trust me to do it. He will send someone else after Brenatto or Telaarin or you —please.”

Essek hushed him softly, unmoving for a long moment as he merely held Bren close, until both their breaths slowed to match. “ D’anthe , when it comes to that man, I believe you, of course I do,” Essek whispered, voice raw at the edges. “But if we act tomorrow, we will not be prepared for what comes after.”

“After,” Bren rasped, the breath rattling inside his chest and voice hardening, “I will protect you.”

Whatever next words Essek had prepared, they left him on a soft exhale. Their noses brushed, Essek’s thumbs sweeping across his cheekbones, a whisper of a kiss as his lips ghosted over the corner of Bren’s mouth, and he was pulling away, a mournful sound in the back of Essek’s throat. Bren pushed up from his forearms to sit upright, a jerky motion, hand braced on the cushions behind him, the other arm looped around Essek’s waist and tightening as though he could keep him there. But Essek made no move to rise. 

“My dear,” he said, and Bren’s heart clenched at the careful tone, the sadness there, “I do not doubt your intentions or capability. But what we provoke is a renewed declaration of war, and Leylas will not undertake it lightly. Soldiers will line the walls of the Bastion, of this whole city. Officials like myself will be given personal escorts, day and night—“

“You’d rather have them—“ the growl began to rise in Bren’s throat, his grip on Essek turning desperate. 

“ No , but they will be there nonetheless. And so when that time comes you cannot remain here,” Essek said dryly, with regret. 

Bren swallowed the wounded sound threatening to spill free. “They will not see me— you won’t see me. I will not let you send me away.”

Essek’s expression tightened. “I am not sending you away ,” he protested. “I prepared safehouses before I upheld my end of the deal with Ludinus, I just need time to see to them again. I would—“

“ Essek ,” he whispered, approaching ruin. “I would prolong this time we’ve had, this past week, for as long as you. But if we miss this opportunity, there will not be another. No more clever lies will put us out of their minds.” His resolve wavered, voice threatening to break as Bren continued, each word an effort. “I will be made to either defect, in which case both of us will be running for the rest of our lives, or else go back to him,” he rasped, “and whatever else would happen to me—“

“No.”

“—he would not let me come back again, I—“

“ No, ” Essek repeated, with only more conviction, his mouth a distressed line and eyes bright with vitriol rarely seen. His hands alighted on either side of Bren’s face again, the starkest difference from the sneer contorting his expression, the gentle reverence in the touch. “I would run with you before I let them take you back.”

The promise gripped Bren unexpectedly by the throat, constricting with a wash of emotion as moisture welled in his eyes. “You shouldn’t,” he began to say, tried, a strangled sound, his breath giving out from under the words. “You shouldn’t say things you don’t— shouldn’t— “

“You doubt me, Bren Ermendrud?” Essek asked, sympathy and faint humor coloring his tone and the softening tilt of his expression. “You doubt I would leave this miserable political game behind to be anywhere else with you, in the face of the alternative?” The question came a near laugh. “When it is so appallingly plain that I am in love with you?” 

The sound that tore at his throat was pitiable. Bren canted forward, face buried in the crook of Essek’s shoulder, hands grasping blindly for some part of him he might hold—grip fierce to the point of bruising—and not let go. 

“I know,” Essek consoled, with quiet murmurs of Undercommon, arms coming around his shoulders, a cool hand soothing at the back of his neck. “Preposterous, isn’t it,” he teased, only the lesser part self-deprecating. “What a ridiculous thing we’ve done to ourselves.”

It took a while more for Bren’s heart to slow its racing, his lungs to cooperate with the effort to form words. But Essek appeared in no rush. When he was collected once more, he peeled himself away to scrub the wrist of his sleeve over his face, dragging in a deep if shaky breath before lifting his face to look at Essek, and everything he might have said fled from his mind. He opened his mouth, closed it. So few things else seemed to matter, not when Essek Thelyss loved him and assuredly already knew Bren loved him in return. Knew he might have even loved him first. 

Essek raised an eyebrow, smirk conceited, but even that look faded to take on a more sober tone. “I don’t suppose you could be persuaded now to wait a few days more?”

Bren felt his expression fall. “Essek…”

“No, I know,” he allowed, sighing at the loss. “The unfortunate thing is I think you may be right. The circumstances have changed. So we must adapt.”

Relief loosened a tension strung between his shoulders that was keeping Bren upright. He exhaled deliberately, inhaled, his forehead gravitating to the corner of Essek’s jaw, face turned into his throat. “I will stay,” he murmured, eyes fluttering closed, the steady rise and fall of Essek’s chest a comfort. “I will be here with you when they come.”

Essek’s fingers carded through his hair, nails dragging lightly, pleasurably along his scalp.  “And when he sends Astrid, when he sends Eodwulf, you would protect me even then?” he asked gently, not to be cruel, but to speak the reality of the thing. His words wrenched at Bren’s insides all the same. 

Bren pressed a kiss to the soft place beneath Essek’s jaw, and lower, to the hum of his heartbeat beneath his skin. “I would,” he promised, words a low rumble, for it was truth. And it would not come to the decision Essek envisioned. 

“Tomorrow, then,” Essek decided, with all the gravity with which it was fitting. “We reignite a holy war, set the Dynasty and Empire both against our enemies, and pray we live to benefit from the end of it.”

“Fuck the gods,” Bren rasped, dragging his lips from Essek’s jaw to the corner of his mouth, teeth catching his lower lips, only gently. “It will happen because we make it so.”

Essek grinned, a soft chuckle beginning in his chest, head tilting obligingly as Bren’s lips trailed down his throat again. “Indeed we will. Or else we discover what Tal'dorei is like this time of year.”

“I wouldn’t be opposed to that,” he murmured between kisses, teeth scraping lightly over skin. “Not with you.”

“No, my love,” Essek breathed, humming with pleasure. “It doesn’t sound so bad at all.”