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His name is Percival something whatever who cares, and Mother certainly wouldn’t approve of how much he talks. Mother isn’t here though, she hasn’t been in well over thirteen months, so instead Vex closes her eyes and pretends for a little while.
She doesn’t like the room Percival’s taken her to—she doesn’t even like him, or being behind Whitestone’s bone-white walls, or Father’s stupid arrangement for brownie points with other assholes who talk and walk and even shit like him. She’s been apart from Vax for half a week, half a week longer than she’s ever been before, and all she has to show for her extensive suffering is some scrawny rich kid who dresses like every exaggerated caricature of a noble she’s ever seen in her childhood books.
She prefers him in the moments when they were still strangers. Bright-eyed, lips pressed into an apprehensive smile, quietly watching as she stepped from the carriage in a dress she couldn’t stop scratching at. He didn’t talk then. He didn’t talk until well after they made introductions with an awkward curtsy and his hand gripping hers like a vice.
All next morning after arrival there is the tiring sound of discussion and commotion over some disagreement or another, and for two whole minutes afterwards the ground glistens with spittal, coins, string, pins, clasps, and scuffs of council activity until a maid comes by to sweep it all away. She had picked up a feather from the mess, cleaned it and wedged it in her hair. All manners of presents, lost to a single moment of carelessness.
You get gifts, nick-knacks and wonderful wearable things, from the people who love you. That’s just how expression works. Yet Vex receives dresses from her Father, very much not in a spasm of charitability, that she can’t stand and shoes she can’t stand in so she takes them off, undoing the noodle-thin buckles and then kicking one aside and then another, until all that’s left is the frigid tiled floor beneath her stockinged feet.
“You’ll catch a cold, probably,” Percy says suddenly. “Won’t your father be upset?”
“I certainly don’t care.”
She made the mistake of letting him spirit her away to a secluded sector of the castle and he hasn’t stopped to take a breath since. In hindsight, that’s how people get put six feet under: wandering off with a charming stranger. Except Percy isn’t charming, and attending political gatherings is already fairly close to experiencing dismemberment anyway.
“Percival,” Vex starts to say.
“You can call me Percy, if you want to. Most people do.”
She’s already forgotten the rest of her sentence and now defiantly plants herself, unlady-like, on the center desk, rattling the little tools and sterile equipment he’s been toying with all afternoon. Vex can tell this place is for teaching. Complicated equations and rough sketches of formulaic physics decorate the chalkboard ahead of her. It really compliments the borderline insanity spewing from Percy’s mouth. He’s approximately thirteen but spitting out facts and mathematics well beyond his learning curve.
“I expected Father to marry me off to someone dumb,” she tells him, not intentionally. Hurting his feelings won’t amount to the disengaging of the relationship but it’s a start. “You talk a lot, but you’ve yet to practically apply any of it.”
He goes quiet. His forefinger absently plays with the science set on the desk, fingernail flicking the edge of a glass beaker filled with chunks of harvested whitestone as if denoting the beats across his thought process. In later years she chalks this awful encounter up to the scarlet sunlight haloing his silhouette, his pensive expression still the clearest detail of his memory in her mind a decade later, the sounds of people in the courtyard far away giving the room a sense of surreal isolation.
“I don’t believe I’m qualified for any of those decisions yet,” he says. “You’re awfully opinionated, though Julius said Syngorn breeds stern nobles. So I guess I should have known better.”
Vex grinds her teeth. Percy looks at her like she’s said something foul, or knows he might get hit. Afternoon light pools in through the yawning windows and drapes on everything, filtering crystalline through the glass and falling over his open palm. She considers just how loved this city has to be, to know when and where sunlight can be caught.
“It’s not my fault,” Percy continues. His brow creases. “I’m not—this wasn’t my idea. Why are you so angry with me?”
“I don’t know,” she says, curiously stroking the side of the beaker to catch the rainbow on her skin. “I might run away.”
It’s not an admission of intent but it may as well be. She doesn’t know why she’s said it, let alone to him, because for all his massive words and memorized isometrics he doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do with what she’s given. “Won’t that upset your father? I bet it will break his heart.”
She catches more sunlight. “I hope it does. He’s awful.”
It’s not a conversation that continues in the classroom. Percy still keeps her close, guiding her by hand to the edge of the west battlements where he uncovers a secret stash of loose parchments trimmed into small squares from the false bottom of a crate. “I do this for Cass all the time,” he justifies, in a way that makes breaking some presupposed laws about the dangers of idling on the rampart feel manageable and fun.
He folds the paper over and under with practiced motions, fashioning it into a tiny bird. By the third one she lets him take her hands again, gentler, and show her the process, this method of creation—her first understanding of the way of the world. Hers are imperfect but they are hers and that makes all the difference.
They craft a handful, then Percy bunches them up and stands at the edge of the battlement. Pre-winter winds. A low dip in the valley over Whitestone that when he releases all the birds onto the currents they float out into that violet twilight.
“There,” he says to her. “Now when you leave you won’t be alone.”
She laughs. It’s a nervous impulse, lifted from the depths of dread finally coming undone. “Thank you, Percy.”
“I don’t know what it’s like to have a father who acts so emotionally distanced,” he says. He splays his long, pale fingers over the edge of the embrasure, exposing the burn scars he’s already accumulating on the back of his hands. “I assumed everyone’s parents loved them. What about your mother?”
Vex clutches her first bird to her chest. It’s too lopsided to fly or be of much use, having no purpose as paper and now no purpose in the air. Not suited for either world that made it.
“She’s gone,” she answers quietly.
Percy frowns at her. “I’m making a horrible first impression, aren’t I?” He rifles through his pockets, then extends his closed hand. His knuckles are white. “Uhm, here. Close your eyes.”
She does without thinking about it. When she opens them again he’s filled her palm with a silver ring, tipped green. The inner engravings simply spell de Rolo in a shaky, cursive font juxtaposed against the steadier, sturdier craftsmanship.
“The jewel is residuum,” he tells her in his matter-of-fact tone, “er, refined whitestone. I was going to save it for our wedding day, but you can have it now, if it helps.”
Vex slides the ring into her finger. It’s one size too big. One day she’ll grow into it and then one day she’ll grow back out of it but for now, right now, it’s perfect. Something she can picture herself wearing the day he turns twenty-two, when they are to be legally officiated under Whitestone’s ruling.
“If you do run,” he continues, “don’t be afraid to return to Whitestone. I’ll protect you from—well. I mean. I’ll try, of course Mother will understand and Father will come around eventually.”
She spends supper and much of the next day’s ride home thumbing at the ring, inspecting it over and over as if handling a puzzle box. It’s all she has left of Percy anymore. It’s barely spring when she steals it away the night she and Vax escape Syngorn. There’s no question to what she can have, to what she can covet as her own, when that much is freely given. You get gifts from the people who love you.
In the years to follow Vex occasionally finds herself scouting the northern hills and as far south as the farming valleys for remnants of her birds or his birds—in some ways missing him, in other ways missing the birds. She tries and forgets how to replicate those folds, following the lines in the paper for guidance because she didn’t want comfort, at least not then. Eventually she stops. The only certainty is the ring that she clings to in malicious compliance of her father’s wants and her own wants. There’s nothing else she can keep to remember what’s been lost.
Departing Syngorn is only half as difficult as mustering the courage to return to it. Vex imagines what her father’s perspective might conjure into focus after those final, rapid moments before impact: the sight of the twins dredging themselves up from the forest like repressed memories, equally as wild as he’d always feared them to be. Vex lingers outside the office doors considering whether she should slather her face in rabbit blood.
A servant exists the office. “Lord Vessar will be with you in a moment,” then bows, picks up the front of her long skirts, and takes the spiraling staircase away from the hall.
“Not too late to change our minds,” Vax utters.
It’s the middle of the day. Bells strike beyond the castle walls. The religious choir shuffling in preprogrammed unison through the foyer belts out a cacophony of celestial and elvish, sending their voices ricocheting down the long, gilded corridors and into the turbulent emotional rattle already comprising Vex’s chest.
Vax’s own voice echoes and re-echoes his feelings on the matter of Syldor as if talking to ward away the hymn. Vex casts her eyes up at him, standing in a smudge of shadow beyond the corona of the window. The rage in the back of her throat feels stale.
“We want gold,” she says plainly.
“You always want gold.” He’s in direct moral opposition to accepting any level of work while standing in the direct opposite half of the hall, the same position they’d been in with every decision ever haggled upon preceding this one. At this point, all their motions are automatic. “His promises are good as shit.”
Of course they are, and of course she isn’t here for only money. She wants to know if he still regrets them or regrets letting them go, chasing the sickening desire that roils in her stomach for an impossible relief—knowing she could have been loved, or wanted, when it mattered most. She nervously fingers the ring dangling from the thin chain around her neck.
Syldor greets them with a small noise of surprise but otherwise impassively, neither thrilled nor disappointed to have his children of five entire missing years appearing wraith-like and disheveled in his office. They stand in stark contract against the pristine, routinely maintained backdrop of the presiding castle.
He’s amicable, at least—readily discussing his requirements for hunting the beast that’s been assailing his supply line in the east and Vex decides by the third word out of his mouth that this entire endeavor is exactly the waste her brother deemed it to be from concept. She doesn’t want Syldor’s money anymore. She never really did. She wants him to hold her, to scold her, to yell or to, to anything, anything besides sound so infuriatingly indifferent.
By the time he’s done talking, she has to pry her fingers out of their fist. “Vex’ahlia,” he adds, “before you go.”
Her response is intuitive. “Yes, Father?”
“I must inform you of the annulment of your marriage with Percival de Rolo.”
“I assumed. I no longer hold a title.”
Syldor’s expression doesn’t change. “As far as I understand, assuming the reports from the acting caretakers of Whitestone are not to be scoffed at, House de Rolo has succumbed to a plague. Your marriage is null due to premature death.”
Vex goes cold. She slants away from him, memorizing the cues of his indifference, and replicating them here. “I see.”
“I figured you should know.”
She leaves. Through the remainder of their hunt for what happens to be a rabid dire wolf lashing out in protection of its territory, Vex pretends not to notice her brother's glances of concern. They track it, they kill it, they drag its mangled corpse back to Syldor for his rare twitch of approval. His servant politely hands Vex a glass of water that has just been filled to the brink of overflowing.
Vex occasionally considers in the years afterwards the implications of her marriage contract. She had no title, no place in Syngorn, no legal holdings—but it never meant the premature snuffing of her bindings. She thinks of that boy in the classroom, a cold evening sky, birds drifting listlessly in the wind. She inspects her ring as if expecting it to reveal itself as a mimic.
It occurs to her that someone is talking beyond the threshold of her peripheral, and only when they say her name does Vex realize she’s been staring out the tavern window, ignoring the conversation.
“Oh, you’re married?!” comes Keyleth’s overtly enthusiastic question. She claps her hands together. “Why didn’t you say so?”
Everyone at the table stills, dead stop in the midst of a racketing conversation. Vex hates when they look at her like she’s some anomaly, or a total stranger alchemized out of thin air. That had been her father’s face the day they arrived on his doorstep; a flinch of wonder.
Vex tucks the ring under her shirt. “It’s not much of a marriage, Kiki.”
“Is he hot?” Scanlan asks.
“Or she?” Keyleth amends, leaning forward enthusiastically. “They? I hope they’re nice.”
Vex diverts her gaze out the window again, at the far off commotion of Westrunn, a timeline of lives governed by chance or by birthright, by insuperable happenstance or a series of choices, separated from her own by a thin veil of glass. What would it mean, to have been born someone else? To surrender all you’ve made for yourself in this life, and undo the mistakes that had felt, at the time, like the only answer?
She worries a mark into the tabletop with her fingernail. “He was nice,” she says absently.
Vax awkwardly rubs the back of his neck. “I think we should order more ale.”
Grog is the first at the table to agree, and the party gets collectively drunk well throughout the evening. Vex floats up from unconsciousness sometime later to the ceiling spinning overhead and the taste of blood and acid behind her teeth, Trinket clambering on an abandoned table to scarf down leftovers, and Grog’s handiwork evident across every other inch of wall, door, pillar, chair, and floor.
“Sister,” Vax slurs, stumbling and dropping to his ass right next to her. “Bartender’s got an ax, gotta go.”
“I can’t keep drinking to avoid my problems. It’s making”—bile growls its way up her throat—“urk. That’s so gross.”
“Not the time.”
He grabs her scruff and rolls them out of the way of a half-orc who comes crashing down, shattering straight through a table. Grog triumphantly whoops. Then the feeling of falling, of flying—her body slumped some minutes later against softer, colder ground, the newly familiar pitch of Keyleth’s drunken laughter sledgehammering against her skull, and Trinket’s sandpapery tongue slipping along her cheek.
Her vision blurs with the white haze of a winter’s horizon, viewed from atop castle ramparts.
There’s a man on the other side of the bars. He’s obscured by shadows, possesses knowledge of the cult operating within the Umbra Hills, and when he moves to speak the chains around his wrists scrape heavily against the stone. His hair is shock white. The night Vex and Vax fled it downpoured, rain churning up the earth in massive sheets. Beneath the cover of a tepid, shallow cavern they waited out the storm, watching lightning convert trees into shrapnel. His hair is that same electric-white color of instant, shattering trauma.
He unfolds himself and emerges from the darkness, bloodied fingers curling around the bars. “I can take you,” he tells them, “directly to the cult’s summoning grounds, if you’d prefer.”
From this distance she sees his split bottom lip, swollen left eye, scrapes, and damages accrued from a scuffle, but none of it detracts from how terribly handsome he is. His familiarity startles her.
Vex turns towards her brother. “Vax, can you get him out of there?”
She deduces the shackles are for Goliaths by the deafening sound they make when they collide with the floor. Vax tucks away his lock picks, backing slowly out the cell as if facing down a wild, jilted animal.
“Those were awfully heavy,” he remarks. “You’re sure about this?”
“We’re not seriously trusting this guy?!” Scanlan shouts.
“No worries,” the man says, stepping out of the reluctantly ajar gate, “I understand your impulsive wariness of strangers. There’s no telling what atrocities I’m capable of. As it were”—he gestures—“may I retrieve my belongings from the jailer?”
Vex slots herself to the front of the group, taking his bruised and burn-scarred hand into her own. The moment she touches him a memory spans across the forefront of her mind so quickly it emphasizes her nerves, her uncertainties: uneven folds, a crack in his voice, frost on her cheeks. She uncoils her chain and pools the necklace into the center of his palm.
“Swear,” she says as seriously as she’s ever spoken to him before, “swear to me you’re telling us the truth.”
The man furrows his brow at the ring. He allows himself a small, upward bend of his lips that doesn’t reach his eyes. “What kind of man would lie to his wife?”
There’s a moment of silence, of dawning realization from everyone who isn’t Vex, and she wishes the ground would swallow her whole.
“Oh shit ,” Scanlan exclaims, “he’s really hot!” followed by the sharp crack of Keyleth’s staff against the crest of his head.
Vex impulsively twitches her fingers towards his face only to redirect them to the chain, to the ring, snatching it back as if panicked. She doesn’t put it on. In moments of sudden dynamic shift, of the world falling out beneath her feet, she realizes just how far she is from home.
Percy casually moves away from her. “Percival,” he says to the party. Vex can feel every pair of eyes staring trenches into her back. “Charmed to make your acquaintances. Might I ask why you’re searching for a cult, of all things?”
Scanlan and Pike alternate explaining Grog’s unusual circumstances while Percy recovers his coat and weapons. What remains of the jailer (dagger dagger dagger and stay down) is shifted into a macabre parody of a working man fast asleep at his desk. It won’t provide them any modicum of time beyond what’s already given, but that’s how they leave him, and it gets a laugh out of Grog at least.
Percy isn’t who Vex remembers. He guides them into the forest off the trampled path, the brittle autumn foliage crunching like bones under her feet, and doesn’t speak unless spoken to. Though he fills out every quality that makes him startling to look at, his demeanor is cold as frost in both expression and tone. Vex unfurls her fingers to look at her ring.
“Percy,” Vex hears herself say, and when he stops the entire party trailing behind them grind to a sudden halt. In her years of hunting she observed how rabbits would turn to stone when spotted by wolves, or by shadows bearing the features of wolves. Something bad is about to transpire. “What happened? I heard—well, I thought you were dead.”
He presses two fingers to his pulsepoint. “Hm. It seems the rumors are untrue, for now. Do notify me if the situation changes.”
She can’t tell if he’s fucking with her, or trying to be funny. A brick sits low in her belly.
He continues ahead.
Vex—and by proximity Vax—learned quickly that a person who keeps their weapon within sight is only thinking about the situation in which they’d use it. Percy carries his pepperbox in a custom holster on his thigh, a single inch apart from his palm at all times. Like a hunter or a soldier of Emon, he’s indefinitely prepared to kill.
Percy fires his unusual weapon into the cluster of cultists flocking around like startled pigeons, again and again, smoke cascading from the edges of his clothes, covering his feet. He’s unnaturally calm in the wake of surrounding violence. Heads pop, blood sprays. A bullet rips through the Nightmare’s chest and sends it toppling to the dirt.
The fighting comes to a swift conclusion, leaving the worshippers scattered in pieces. Percy blows out the kneecap of an already decently mangled cultist trying to flee, steps on their hand, and presses his lips into a thin line.
“Good evening,” he says with a plate-carrying steadiness. He casually slips a bullet into the top barrel. “I happen to be searching for the doctor, and I’ll give you one opportunity to answer my question. Do you know where she went?”
“N-no, I-I-I don’t.” The hooded figure raises their arms over their face. “W-Wait, wait! Please don’t kill me, please —!”
The weapon bangs. The cultist’s gray matter explodes across the ground. Percy slips an ascot from his coat’s pocket and cleans away some of the ichor that’s spattered his clothes.
“That’s badass,” Grog tells him.
“It’s messy,” Percy replies, placid as water. “Where to next?”
Vex feels rattled to her core. They set up camp for the night, and she sits opposite the fire from Percy, eyeing his sharp features. His furrowed brow deepens, engrossed in repairing a loose cog in his gun. That’s what he calls it—a gun, a pepperbox. His frustrated expression never waivers.
There was a time in Syngorn’s history, centuries before she was born, when a spontaneous coup destabilized the hierarchy that had been established for a thousand years. The governed people were quietly unhappy with their counsel due to the rapid hybridization of the inner circuit from multiple separate houses overseeing different aspects of the social order to only three. One of the newly isolated houses had an heir who betrayed his family, not for wealth but because there’d always been something off about him, and for reasons speculated but unknown, he took an occupation as the court’s executioner. Though the new parliament of Syngorn would remain unified for only a decade, in that time so many tales had been spun about the betrayer son that his image endured in sketches and books.
Vex sees a reflection of that man’s distant and frigid eyes in Percy’s own. The mind of judge, jury, and without hesitation, executioner. All his once wide-eyed wonder replaced with that cruel, unwavering verdict.
She’s been staring too long. Percy flicks his gaze up at her, and to her surprise his expression softens. They’re alone at the fire. They could be the only people left in the world, haunted by ghosts.
Scanlan plucks his strings from his bedroll, murmurs a tune, tries again. Pike reads to Grog and Keyleth from the same book she’s carried since Westruun, a tale of two halflings who wander the vast and violent world to find their mother. Vax rummages at the forest’s edge gathering sticks and kindling brittle from dehydration, purposefully manufacturing as much noise as possible to remind them, or perhaps only Percival, of his presence.
Percy’s lips turn up, a half-smile that doesn’t reach his eyes again. “You’re beautiful.”
Vex hides her face in Trinket’s fur. “Thank you, Percy.”
“I’m glad you’re well, after all this time.”
Ten years. Three of it spent believing him dead, and in a way the old him still is. She considers that. “I can say the same about you. Up until this morning I assumed I was a widow.”
He huffs out what could pass for a laugh. The tension knot in her stomach unravels.
“My apologies,” he says. “Yet, you still kept the ring. I’m flattered.”
She unthreads her necklace from the other odd nick-knacks in her scouting pouch and dangles it in the firelight. “Do you want it back?” she asks, nearly a murmur. “I know I ran, not from you but from all of my other responsibilities, so I would understand if—”
He stands. She knows without knowing how that Vax is suddenly closer, watching Percy gradually encircle the fire the same way he’d track a hit, back when her brother associated with the Clasp.
Percy straddles the log. He reeks of sulfur and the black powder that discharges from his weapon. Trinket sniffs him, his ripped pant leg first, then his hand when he holds it out in offering. “That was a long time ago,” he says, scratching Trinket behind the ears. “What matters most are the decisions you make from here.”
Vex takes his hand, brushes his fingers open with her own, and pools the chain into his palm. He stares absently down at it for a minute, unblinking, and a familiar broil of anger rises in her chest; residue of surviving her father’s easy deflection of love, and the guilt of being just like him rooting in her heart.
She says, “I’m not the only one who should be making a decision. There’s no longer any demand for either of us to commit to the role, and I suspect Syldor may have already burned the certificate.”
“Whitestone’s may still endure, though not for lack of trying.” Percy slips the chain around her neck, and clips it into place. “Regardless, this was a gift. Keep it.”
She has difficulty sleeping that night. When Vex opens her eyes again it’s to the thin gray veil of sky, another day to tack on to her entire years on the road, never spending a memory’s worth of time in the same place. The air swells with electricity, damp with it. A sudden rumble of thunder reverberates across the valley and directly into her nervous system.
“Better get ahead of the rain,” Pike says.
The party slowly adheres to her suggestion, packing away rations and bedrolls, and Vex actively keeps her shoulder to Percy to forbid his handsome face an opportunity in her mind. She’s tired. The oncoming tempest siphons the last bit of energy she’s pent up, the usher of change—she thinks of Percy and lightning, of the night she escaped in the cover of a storm.
When it rains, they duck out under clusters of pines growing from eroded rock. No one talks, captivated by the cascade hammering the ground around them. Vex looks across the path to where Percy and Keyleth have taken refuge; when he offers her a smile, the tiredness within her returns. The thing is: she isn’t Vax. She knows she’s going to hurt. She knows she’ll hurt a hundred times more. The distinction between survival and all the unimportant bullshit they pad hunting textbooks with is the exhaustion that comes from having endured it. What they fail to tell you is that you’ll never not be tired again.
It’s horrendously cold up in the mountains. This place could very well be a labyrinth composed of ice and stone, spiraling them around and around and through a shortcut of frosted tunnels carved centuries ago into the summit’s belly. Vex is in a horrendous mood. Basilisks had practically chewed the team apart halfway up the northern ridge, and when she bends her knees to scale a steep slope she strains against the stiffness in her joints, a lingering agony from her temporary occupation as a park statue.
All this effort for a godsdamned Nymph heart. Eskil had better be right or Vex might introduce him to her blazing bow string.
The road narrows towards the crest of the mountain, diverting the group into a single-file line. Grog isn’t intelligent but he knows how to navigate the terrain, so when Vex looks up she sees the exposed back of him at the lead, trailed by Vax and Scanlan, the latter of whom expends far too much energy bitching about the cold.
Percy hesitates ahead of her. He looks out at the horizon and she, by impulse learned from caution, follows his gaze to the cold sky hovering over the white-capped cordillera, expecting to see something out there amongst the vastness. The swollen clouds have a rip in them, revealing a bright sky behind it like a gateway to another world.
“Percy,” she tries. “Percival, you’re holding up the line.”
He’s not. Pike unleashes a string of loosely interconnected curses, very unholy like, as she slips down the bank and has to be nudged back up by Trinket. Keyleth strides easily passed them in her snow leopard form.
“Oh, uhm—I’m sorry.” Percy rubs the back of his neck. “Just admiring the view.”
“Reminds you a bit of home?” Vex assumes.
He has a far-off look in his eyes, when she asks him that. In the days since they’ve found him he’s managed to retain the low, stern expression of a man haunted by grief. Vex recognizes the pain in him because Vax carried the burden of their mother’s loss for years afterwards. Unlike her brother, Percy seems like he’s never had time to grieve what’s been taken.
“Come on,” she says. “Keep up.”
Vex leans on Trinket to help her complete the hike, and doesn’t look back to ensure Percy is following.
At the maw of the mountain, she goes with Vax to inspect a cavern hollowed into the face of the mountain, then helps the party set up camp for the night. The ice reflects the heat of their fire, and the curve of the cave’s shallow mouth does well enough to deflect the wind. Grog retrieves and dispenses wool blankets from the bag of holding.
Vex diverts her gaze to Percy. He sits away from everyone else, his attention fine-tuned on the wall of snow now separating the alp from the rest of the world. His blanket remains rolled in his lap. Vex doesn’t know what spasm of empathy compels her upwards, especially when her bones protest the notion of physical activity, but she moves to be next to him anyway. Her uncertain hands unfurl the blanket, pulling it around his shoulders.
He flicks his monotone eyes up to hers. In another instance of apportioning what little comfort she knows she can afford, her traitorous fingers stroke the underside of his jaw. His five-o-clock shadow is growing stubbornly slow.
She returns to where she was sitting next to Grog to extract some of his heat, ignoring the awkward shift in the atmosphere and pretending to ignore Scanlan’s suggestive eyebrow wags. When her attention returns to Percy he’s no longer looking longingly out to the snow and instead retrieves his journal from one of his multitudes of inner pockets to sketch something.
Vax tilts his head at her. She pretends to ignore that too.
Each day: his shadow, the edge of the world. By the end of the week she’s committed a plethora of crimes that would have her father roiling for days afterwards, her lack of nuance the exact reason why he’s never offered her a suitor from Syngorn. He knows her without knowing anything about her. The discomfort burning within the cage of her chest when she reflects on it might be pain or rage or horror—whatever it is she feels, she feels it bone-deep.
Percy must have learned by now the true nature of the woman he was supposed to marry yet he remains, pliant as old furniture. “I rather enjoy your spontaneity,” he answers, when asked. “A man should support his wife’s endeavors.”
“The couple that makes bad decisions together stays together,” she says, surprised by her own easy response. “Implying we’re a couple, of course.”
“A couple of assholes.”
The lake catches her laughter. It’s a noise she doesn’t expect but unravels easily from the base of her spine outwards, her hand flinching to harmlessly strike his own. She closes her eyes against the sunlight and when she opens them again he’s taken her wrist, where the lifeline of his palm leads to her.
Vex wants to pursue what Percy knows about Whitestone, but then there’s a lich to kill and a Grog to save, a tournament that they win by the skin of their teeth, a white dragon to slay in Westrunn, demons and aboleths and in a display of Vox Machina’s diplomatic good will, another fucking dragon.
By the time she has the mental bandwidth to consider approaching him again, it’s the evening before a renewed Winter’s Crest, and she startles awake as knuckles drum on her bedroom door. What will soon be renowned as Greyskull Keep is presently under construction; at night, and until the dawn stirs the mourning doves, what has been built is quiet and unsettling as a graveyard. The source of what’s disturbed her slumber knocks again.
Vex drags herself out of bed, and hesitates at the threshold of the door. Candlelight flickers under the frame. “Brother?”
“No, it’s me.”
She opens the door. Percy glances her once over before politely covering his eyes, and in her sleepy stupor she wonders how she must look, dressed in only her undergarments. He flushes. It’s easy to embarrass him, just not to deter him.
“What?” she asks, not unkindly, and gouges the weariness from one eye with the heel of her hand.
“Do you…never mind. I shouldn’t have woken you so rudely.” He starts to turn but she slips her forefinger under the silken sash keeping his robe closed like slitting open an envelope. It’s too intimate, too much, too bold, but he stays. “I really don’t know what I’m doing. I panicked, and…I wanted to see you.”
“Here I am.”
“…Hello.”
Vex can’t be trusted to hold him together, let alone herself, but she can try. She lets him in. The candle he carries is nearly burnt to the base, so when he sets the stick on her dresser ledge the flickering light casts a skittish orange aura over everything. The shadows extend so suddenly they seem to leap off the furniture in terror and charge at her.
“Percy,” she says. Her voice strains. “Hey. Is everything okay?”
He closes the door quietly, and puts his back to it. The dancing ember light worsens the bags under his eyes. “I know you want to ask me about Whitestone, and about the rumors.”
“Did something terrible happen?”
He clenches his jaw. He nods. “Sometimes I don’t dream. Other times the—uh, the nightmares plague my sleep. I’m afraid of shutting my eyes and seeing...” Percy reaches out his hand, taking the tips of her fingers into his open palm. He might be surprised to learn she has her own batch of scars there, too. “I can’t talk about it. I’m afraid. Too much has changed and now I’m…”
She’d asked her mother’s gravestone once, only a child with a child’s cognitive mastery, Why did you leave me? Don’t you know everything has changed without you here? There had been no answer. Not then, not now. The dysfunctional alterations of her entire timeline lately have banked in every direction not adjacent to her own; change, it appears, is an inevitable horror of her present tense. At least in Syngorn, things uniformly made sense. She knew, back then, what to anticipate around every corner
“Okay,” she says. Change is inevitable, so she decides to meet it on her terms, just for tonight. She blows out the candle, flooding the room in darkness. “We don’t have to talk.”
She takes him under her layers of newly stitched sheets and a quilted blanket from the market just to give her bland gray-white room some sapphire hues. Percy remains inert as stone, or more accurately like a corpse in a casket, arms folded politely over his stomach, eyes on the ceiling.
Vex rolls onto her side to face him. “Is this what sharing a bed is supposed to be? Feels more like grounds for a divorce.”
His expression softens. “I apologize, I shouldn’t burden you with my—”
Vex buries his mouth in her palm. She surprises herself with how swiftly she moves, gracefully mounting him like a predator in an effort to keep him steady, or from fleeing. The dark of the room swells around them; she thinks of lake waters cocooning her in.
“Don’t talk like that,” she says softly. “You’re not a burden, especially not to me.”
He relaxes against her bed. The silence permeates as ocean tides do against the shore, rushing in and out and back in, though she can hear in the background the creaking of someone else’s door swinging shut, feet pattering down the long, empty hallway. They don’t have any furniture or carpeting in the corridors yet to absorb noise.
Vex feels suddenly very alone with him.
“Sleep,” she whispers, more to herself than him. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
In the morning she awakens to his face set softly in his sleep, holding her hand between them. As the day progresses neither of them end up addressing any of what’s been bothering him. On something like that, a trauma so deeply saturated in his lifestyle he can no longer function apart from it, she lets him come to her first.
The campfire combats the deep cavernous maw of the Underdark, standing as their only line of defense from the multitudes of shadows and what other horrid things their minds might conjure up with nothing else to look at. When Vex trails her hand through the pitch dark water she doesn’t immediately revert back to the second-guessing habits instilled in her by years of political turbulence at Syngorn’s courts, that bracket of time spent circumventing her father’s limits. If there’s danger, she can handle it. She’s grown.
Later, when Percy lays a handful of modified arrows out in front of her, she notices a flicker of his old self in his eyes.
“Wedding gifts?” she muses, pressing a grateful kiss to his cheek.
He nuzzles his face closer. It’s a slip of affection. She becomes hyper-aware of Vax staring at her, his expression unreadable from the opposing side of the fire. “Would you have preferred a treasury of your own?”
“What?” She strokes the feathers adorning one arrow, inspecting the way he’s affixed packets of black powder beneath the bolt’s throat. “I thought all the fun, noble bullshit fell to Julius.”
“There was a bit of a power vacuum for a few years,” he states. “I had no interest in accepting the mantle, not that it matters what opinions I form about a parliament of dead nobles.”
“You were a noble?” Scanlan retorts. “That explains everything. Mm, mostly the attitude, though.”
Vex leans back into Trinket, resting her head. Percy sits quietly next to her. She wants to ask him again, has always wanted to ask, about the anger that’s driven him this far from home. About the smoke. When the rest of the party has gone to sleep or settled in, she finally opens her mouth.
“Is that what happened to Whitestone?”
He’s disassembled his pepperbox to clean it, and as she asks her question his hands still. The river narrows out below its basin where they've set up camp, sounding now like a burst pipe leaking across concrete. What she doesn’t tell him is that she’s seen his scars—she recognizes obvious remnants of torture from experiences she won’t repeat—the night they modestly shared her bed. His shirt had drooped. She had been curious.
“I, uhm.” He exhales a shaky breath. “I don’t— it’s not—”
She strokes his forearm. “Okay, okay. I'm sorry I brought it up. Do you want to talk about something else?”
He does, after a while. His fingers follow through the methodical motions of cleaning and reassembling his gun before replicating the steps with Bad News, and talking to her about his designs. She doesn’t comprehend the terms he uses but it’s pleasant to see that side of him again, the part she’d known for the day. His long-winded speeches distract from their quest to find Kima as the caverns reel them deeper into danger, further away from the surface.
Vex awakens sometime later with her head braced on Percy’s chest and an unfamiliar weight draped over her body. He’s talking to someone, his words a deep, barely coherent grumble in his chest, thrumming against her ear. The voice that responds with equally soft measure belongs to Keyleth. Vex becomes acutely aware that the weight enveloping her is his coat, and his arm secured around her waist.
He might know she’s awake. His thumb strokes the jut of her hip. When sleep takes her again, she gives in to it.
“Oh, a marriage?” Zahra says with a purr. Her sharp tail whacks Vex playfully in the rear, and when she glares over her shoulder she finds Zahra smirking knowingly. “What unlucky bastard did you manage to tie down?”
Vex realizes her necklace has fallen loose of her gear and swiftly tucks it away. “That isn’t any of your business.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to assume it’s the big dumb one. He seems like he’s packing.”
Grog, somewhere behind them, unhelpfully declares, “I’m packing my great ax!” and earns a cackle out of Scanlan.
Percy must have overheard them because he chimes in with, “I’d understand if you want to separate, dearest. Grog’s certainly got more victories under his belt.”
“Hells yeah I do!”
Zahra’s eyebrows raise with her smirk. Vex pulls her hood up and starts walking faster.
Vex has never willingly donned a dress before at no fault of the dress’ own. In her defense, she’s never complained to anyone who isn’t Vax; there had been a pattern to it, in Syngorn, the way there is a pattern to all law and expectation. Talk of a celebration ruminates through the political circuit, trickles down to the spiderweb networks of servants and soldiers, and Vex ascertains her place in it only when she enters her room to a scullery maid and the event’s attire splayed out, corpse-like, on her bed.
This time around is no less politically potent.
Vex watches her reflection slant herself into various angles, observing the details of her dress and noting how it falls wonderfully over the best parts of her physique. She’ll be a little vain tonight. She’s damn well earned the right.
One of the seamstresses hired out of Emon from Lady Allura’s recommendation stands meekly towards the back of the bedroom, holding correctional fabrics and a box of pins that nervously rattle, awaiting Vex’s assessment.
“Perfect,” Vex says. She doesn’t have the endurance for more than what’s been decided. “It’s wonderful, darling. Thank you.”
The seamstress, a half-elf girl like her with red hair to rival Keyleth’s, brightens. “If you’d like, I could find you an accessory to match your engagement ring. Perhaps a pair of brooches for yourself and Master de Rolo?”
Vex’s eyes reflexively dart to the necklace pooled on her desktop, the silver band glinting theatrically as starlight as if to suck all the attention out of the room. She’s barely halfway through conjuring up a reply when she hears, “An elegant idea, but that won’t be necessary.”
In the reflection of the mirror, Percy stands in the doorframe of her bedroom, fingers holding the knob in a deathgrip that betrays his mask of placidity. He’s indescribably handsome, stuffed into a suit she thinks would look better torn from his body with her teeth. Vex can’t afford to admit to any of it when he’s as emotionally fragile as falling glass.
She’s heard him at ungodly hours of the night murmuring incoherent lunacy under his breath about dreams of smoke and the various applications of gunpowder. He hadn’t left the seclusion of his bedroom or his workshop yesterday, neither answering the door for food nor for her. She suspected then as she does now that sleep has not been kind.
Vex broaches the quiet. “Won’t you come in?”
Percy has a haunted tinge in his eyes that softens whenever she speaks but she pretends, for his sake, not to notice. He glances at the seamstress. “I apologize, would you be so kind as to step outside for a moment?”
The woman bows her head and swiftly exits the room. A terse silence permeates in her wake that Percy fills with motions, not words: his hands are shaking as he closes the door behind her, uncertain where to go or what to touch but aching to touch, something broken or metal or something.
“Percy,” she says with a familiar hesitancy—standing at the window of her room in Syngorn, one leg braced on the sill, the city lights undulating far below like dropping into the sea. Her stomach churns to the motion of the waves, conditioned by the feeling of always being so close to falling.
He closes the lifetime between them. “Is it…does the dress suffice?”
She extends her hemline, a phantom of black material embroidered in golden flowers, and doesn’t miss the subtle flicker of his eyes to her legs. Like gazing down the scope of his rifle, a calculated thought at the tip of his trigger finger. A decision within reach. A decision only he can make.
“I look amazing,” she tells him.
“You always do.”
Vex offers him a coy smile and turns, closing that last foot of distance between them. She slides her palms up his chest. “Careful, darling. That’s the sort of language that’ll get me between your sheets again.”
Percy huffs out a laugh and she leans in when he does. The sill, the ocean, the sky. Vex closes her eyes against the future and jumps for it, meeting his lips with her own, joining together two timelines of possibilities. His kiss leaves a residue from the beeswax Keyleth harvests for skincare. Something in her chest unbends.
When they come apart, he’s looking at her like she’s one of his projects that has managed to surpass his expectations, all bewilderment; adversely, she thinks only of a deer at the opposite end of her arrow. Hear someone call your name. Look up—
“We don’t have to do this,” she says under her breath. “The plan. The dinner. Any of it. I know what Speaker Assum said, and I know we agreed, but… Oh, darling. What can I do to make it better?”
Percy’s expression doesn’t change, a worry carved into stone. Vex knows it’s a foolish question, an even more foolish plan—she can’t resurrect his family, she can’t undo the wounds worsened by time. But she’s lost, too. Perhaps he understands that much, or recognizes that much of himself in her, enough to unburden a fraction of his pain.
Percy lowers his head into the crook of her neck. She lets him.
“Stay at my side,” he says, his hands shaking as they rest on the slopes of her hips. “That’s all I ask.”
“As your wife? Certainly. I'd love to show off the ring, perhaps flaunt myself as arm candy.”
This time, he doesn’t laugh. Vex braces him against her by the back of his collar, taking in the scent of his wooden cologne and the lingering odor of gunpowder ever persistent on his skin.
He says, “I ask you as my friend. As my rock and as my judgment.”
There was a time when Vex once submitted to all the various expectations of Syngorn and allowed her father the mental capacity to attend a political wedding. She learned then that a traditional Syngornian wedding vow features a small segment in which the couple exchange raw ores selected from the river near the city, to have the gems harvested into official ringlets afterwards.
Be stable and be bright, said the minister during the exchange, so that the other may never be lost to the dark.
Vex takes a deep breath.
“Okay, darling. I can do that.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Vax says, intercepting Vex’s exit from the office, and the moment he opens his mouth is the same moment that all her repressed tiredness crashes back to the surface. “But we’ve both seen it. The smoke, the weapon he uses? Something’s wrong. He’s not safe.”
“I'm not in the mood,” she says. Of course she’s not. Whitestone has been a nightmare, and she’s just watched a man Percy calls Professor Anders be relieved of the back of his skull all over the wall. The edge to her tone reflects the unfathomable exhaustion of someone who has been doing this for far too long and in all the wrong ways. It’s the dragon hunting equivalent of slowly drowning.
In the background, Vex hears Grog shouting, followed by an acute bang and Scanlan belting out a tune. Beyond that, nothing. It keeps the silence, and the distance suddenly between her and Vax, from growing awkward. Keyleth appears in the threshold of the doorway, notices the thick wedge of tension between them, and quietly backs out of the room.
“Syngorn is behind us,” Vax says, “as is the expectation to fake love in a marriage.”
She clenches her teeth together. “He’s not…he’s not who I remember him being.”
“No shit,” Vax replies drily, feigning surprise. “Our father co-signed your future to a ticking time bomb. How on brand of him.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on him.”
Vax lowers his shoulders. They stand in pensive silence, reinstating the growing rift that’s been gradually widening for months.
“Sister, just…” He exhales a defeated sigh. “You’re right, I’m sorry. He’s always been there for us. I’ll do the same.”
Vex decides engaging with him any further is above her mental capacity so she leaves, following the staircase up to the next floor. Percy is easy to locate because he’s loudly churning up everything in a bedroom that hasn’t been used, Vex notices, in a very long time. She notes the thick layer of dust exploding into a plume in the air when disturbed, and Cassandra standing in the corner, inspecting a small eagle statue.
“What are you looking for?” Vex hears herself ask.
“No clue,” Cassandra says. She sets the statue down and stalks out the door. “This was a guest room. You won’t find anything of interest, Percival.”
Vex’s gaze follows Percy around the room. Smoke spills from his body the way it always has when wielding his guns but not deliberately. His hands, his coat, his mask are covered in Anders’ blood. The corpse of Kerion Stonefell is in pieces somewhere else, Anna Ripley has vanished into mist. The violence of the last few days transposed into the erratic way he talks, moves, thinks.
She takes his hand. He stills. They don’t speak as she drags him down the hall to the nearest washroom to clean him, something her mother would do for the twins when they inevitably came to blows with the other children in the village. Demonstrating patience and caring, knowing they won’t feel this way forever, so that they might disperse the pity onto others. The burden of loving.
Vex runs the water cold and dips his hands in, rinsing the blood loose.
Whitestone celebrates in the aftermath of Vox Machina’s victory, filling the streets for weeks afterwards with music and laughter and the scent of baked goods wafting on the wind. On the fifth day, Vex notices that Percy is absent from the festivities and scouts him out, locating him in the office that Anders had occupied before splattering everywhere.
“Percy—?”
“Vex’ahlia!” He exclaims, scooping her up into his arms. “Look! I vaguely remembered this drawer where my father kept his various…important documents, and I found it—the certificate!”
It’s an old sheet of parchment, dog-earned from being improperly stored in the drawers all these years. Vex recognizes her father’s prim and perfect handwriting scrawled across the bottom of the sheet.
“I met your father, actually, shortly before I met you. He was a real piece of work.”
“Percy—thank you.”
He gazes down at her, and she sees now that all his hardened edges have softened away. “You’re welcome, but I was only stating a fact. I remember never appreciating how he was talking down like you weren’t—”
“Royalty?”
“Loved.” He maneuvers them to hold her at arm’s length, always so serious. “It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re his flesh and blood. He was responsible for loving you, and he didn’t.”
In the atmospheric light of the many candles he’s lit to compensate for dusk, he looks bright and soft, standing in complete opposition of who’s he been these last few years. They’ve been here before, she realizes, her stomach tipping sideways at the thought. Voices from the courtyard faraway, the chalkboard raked through with equations she didn’t understand at her age but now she might, if he explains it all to her. The feeling of remembering a distant nostalgia.
“Percy?”
“Yes, dear?”
The boxes on the shelves, on the desks and in cases convey to her the story of what Whitestone has seen. His scars, the greenery returning to the Suntree, her own existence behind its walls over a decade later mere footnotes in the text but she’s never felt closer to the epicenter of her life.
She says, “I think we can’t undo the past, so maybe it’s not worth dwelling on, but…it needs to be said. You would have made me happy.”
Percy traces her jowls with his gloved thumb, following from there the lifetime of what makes her: a slender shoulder, a dip in her spine, the cant of her hip. He settles his palm on the flat of her waist.
“You know what’s just occurred to me,” he tells her under his breath. “We’ve never consummated our marriage.”
They’ve been talking too much, and he must agree with her sentiment because he leans in to catch her lips. They kiss slow, lazily; Vex feels him humming quizzically against her mouth. His unoccupied hands take her elbows, she slides her palm up his chest; her other thumb strokes the length of his neck, catching a clean-cut knife scar across the left structural muscle and over the sharp jut of his larynx, until his jaw falls open and her tongue slips in and the candles all burn out, two by two.
The flaw with the tale of Syngorn’s betrayer son-turned-executioner is that it’s never clear why the man desired a place as the council’s executioner. The texts obscure the finer details of the story’s conclusion, including what happened to him following the dismemberment of the court. In the golden-edged and water-damaged books Vex had once discovered in the armpit of the archives, there was a chancellor representing Syngorn who claimed the executioner had been sentenced to death for his unwavering loyalty to the usurpers.
Vex knows nothing beyond the implications of the story but sometimes she expends her creativity on the fact that the executioner had only been a person because someone had needed to know who he was. It makes her think of how she’s touched the world with her presence, and left a mark. What manners of stories will they tell about her, or would there be no stories at all?
Something that is a fact: the betrayer son had a family, before he defected. He was someone who perceived himself a loaner, or maybe excluded in his ideals, and Vex can only imagine all the dozens of different choices he could have made if someone had folded him a bird, or gifted him a ring, or showed him how to catch sunlight. He believed the way of the world was to pick a path and walk it alone. We all get our understanding of things from somewhere.
Maybe he just needed to know he was loved.