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The fire's burning strong when Molly wakes up, almost a bonfire; the wood turns black, then red, then white, and crumbles. It snaps and throws off sparks, and a tower of blue smoke winds away towards the grey sky. He lies in his bedroll for a moment, watching it in a half-awake haze, and the lithium-red flame seems to fill the world with glow and warmth and burning. He wonders, briefly, if it's safe having such a big fire, but it's so warm, soaked down to his bones, and anyway, it doesn't matter if anyone finds them. He knows, somehow, with a religious certainty, that he's safe here.
No-one else is awake, except for Caleb, on watch with Nott asleep against his side. He lets the fire and the open sky burn away the memories of earth under his fingernails.
Why is he awake? A star flickers.
"Caleb," he says, very quietly, voice rumbling and dry with sleep, "Why am I awake?"
Caleb knows things. Molly figures he might know this. In his defence, he is still thinking through a dream. He looks straight at him for several seconds, and the fire shatters into sparks in his eyes.
"I think it is because you have something to say," he says, and it is almost a whisper, "But I am not sure what."
Molly blinks. He's not sure why he expected something more useful.
The first ring of trees are smudges in the dark, little more than texture, and beyond that, nothing.
He levers himself upright, de-tangles a strand of hair where it's tied itself around a chain on his horns, rubs at his eyes. The sky is pale; it's not worth going back to sleep.
"What time is it?" He murmurs.
"Six hours past midnight, one hour three minutes until sunrise," Caleb says, and Molly marvels.
He then thinks, ok, I can see sunrise is fairly soon, how the fuck would I know if he was wrong about midnight?
He pulls himself upright, twists until the tension in his spine is cracked away and looks back up at the stars. Only a few are visible tonight, but the moon is full and bright and a few clouds glow around it; he thinks that it makes a perfect sort of image, very theatrical.
Caleb, as he watches, eases Nott off his knee and runs his fingers through her hair with such absent tenderness that he has to look away; he rolls easily to his feet, and Molly notes somewhere in the back of his mind that he’s not slouching like usual, shoulders back and spine military-straight. He feels like he’s seeing something he shouldn’t be.
He walks in a loose circle around the campfire, turning towards it always, and when he passes between it and Molly he is a dark shape against the light; Molly is reminded of the physics of an eclipse, in the way his hair glows like a corona. He stops by Molly’s bedroll, drops into a tip-toed crouch that makes him wonder how much Beau is rubbing off on him; maybe lack of respect for the joints of their knees is a human thing.
There is silence, for several minutes, only the sounds of fire and the distant, blurred noise of wind in the trees. There is no movement. Then Fjord, splayed half out of his bedroll a few metres away, makes a startlingly loud and undignified noise in his sleep before turning over like a confused octopus to plant his face in the dust.
Caleb’s face splits into a smile for only a second, but Molly has to work to quiet a laugh, more at the joy of seeing it than at Fjord.
This seems to break the warm stillness, and Molly pats the ground until Caleb sits next to him. There is an ease to it that he thinks he hasn’t seen from Caleb in a good long time.
“Mollymauk,” Caleb says, voice hushed, before trailing off. “Your swords, ah, how do they cut?”
Molly blinks. “Well,” he starts, “I swing them, and the blade behaves like your standard blade, it’s basically the same as any sword.”
Caleb suddenly seems to be holding one, hand clumsy around the hilt, and the fire lances through the blade. “I have not used a blade often,” he says, “Only the mandatory sabre training, and I nearly failed that, and I do not have the strength for it now. I have read enough about bladesmithing, though, to know that you should not be able to put a good cutting edge on glass.”
“Do you know, Mister Caleb,” Molly says, smiling at the ground, “You’re the first person since Yasha to notice that?”
Caleb’s face is still, and creased in a familiar expression that suggests he is going to keep going at it until he finds an answer.
“If I do not ask you now,” he says, voice still low but lighter now, “I feel like I shall never get an answer.”
Molly reaches out a hand, and Caleb passes the scimitar to him, holding onto the blade with all the gingerness that Molly would have expected.
“I’m serious,” he says, “People assume it’s anodised metal, or something, no-one makes the leap of ‘that man’s swords are made of glass.’”
Caleb hums. “People,” he says, “Are often very bad at seeing what is actually there.”
“Oh,
wow,”
Molly drawls. “What an original take on social psychology, I have never heard that before in my admittedly very short life, which I have spent with charlatans and magicians and very cynical people, and Yasha--”
“You have done a wonderful job of misdirection, Mollymauk, but I am also a con-man and I know the con-man’s tricks, so I should like you, please, to answer the question.”
Molly holds out a hand and wiggles his fingers, and sure enough Frumpkin twists out of the air and butts his head into his palm; Molly works his fingers just behind his ears and smiles.
"Thanks," he says, "But it's nothing so complicated as that. It's only weird blood magic."
"Ja," Caleb says, dry as paper, "I had gathered."
"I can do a couple different types," Molly continues, ignoring him, "But they all do essentially the same thing. If I set it on fire, it burns up the material half a moment before the sword touches it; if I do the weird holy one,
it does something weird and holy, and makes itself a shining sort of cutting edge."
“Do you know,” Caleb says, “I have never heard so much bullshit in all of my life, but somehow it makes complete sense.”
“Mister Caleb, that is because I am a better charlatan than you are.”
“I do not think you are a charlatan at all.”
“No?”
“No. I do not think you ever were. I think you are just weird.”
“A bold statement, and almost entirely untrue.”
“Whatever you say, Mollymauk.”
Molly pulls Frumpkin into his lap, watches his eyes flash Caleb-blue for a moment and smiles when he doesn’t run away or disappear. Caleb looks almost relaxed, finds his other scimitar and half-heartedly swings it about in what Molly recognises as a very poor handshake grip.
“Mandatory sabre training, huh?” he says, slowly, mind circling back like a shark.
“It was compulsory,” Caleb says, light in an entirely artificial way. “All light armour units had to do it, and I barely passed.”
Light armour units. Caleb’s rigid posture and the way he lifts his feet when he walks. Threads of information begin to come together into a bloody sort of tapestry.
“But you haven’t forgotten it.”
“I have not.”
Molly trawls over the little bit of book-learning he has, the sword drills that he woke up with. “Have you ever tried a thumb grip instead?”
Caleb squints at him. A log in the bonfire crumbles, and throws off a small shower of embers.
“You’ve got very thin fingers,” Molly says, trying to bluster past the awkwardness.
“And I’ll bet you don’t have much wrist strength. A handshake grip might be better for you than a hammer grip, but it’s still relying on strength you don’t have. You probably weren’t taught it because if you use it against mounted cavalry you’ll break your thumbs, but how often are we up against charging warhorses?”
He moves Caleb’s hand into a thumb grip as he rambles, and the scimitar cuts through the air with slightly better form than before.
Caleb raises an eyebrow at him. “I appreciate your expertise, but when have you known me to rely on a sword?”
“Well, now you’ll be in a slightly better position if you ever have to.”
The fire slinks low, the light its throwing off dripping down the spectrum to the lithium reds.
Molly furrows his brow, and then levers to his feet.
"I'll grab some firewood," he says flatly.
"Ah, there is no need--"
"It feels like snow. No reason our friends should wake up cold, hm?"
He sets his shoulders back, digs his coat out of his bad and, not for the first time, wishes it were warmer. Caleb frowns nervously at him, and he's not quite sure why.
"I shan't be a moment."
He strides away from the fire, and has to blink several times to let his night vision return, the firelight staining his retinas. The trees here are thin as wraiths, and the shadows serve only to add texture to the darkness; firewood is hard to find, the trees pared back for the winter and the ground bare. He wonders where they found the logs for the bonfire, and reasons that Jester must have been over-enthusiastic and stripped this section of woods bare; he'll have to go further from camp.
There are no tracks, but the woods are thin, although he's shivering from the cold now. He's distantly grateful for his darkvision.
Something white glitters, a couple hundred metres ahead. There shouldn't be anything out here-- it's woodland for miles, he thinks, and then realises he isn't quite sure where he is. Woodland. A camp. Somewhere cold.
Oh, he does
not
like that. Oh, that's unpleasant.
When did they get here? Where are they going?
He shivers, pushes his hair out of his face and realises he's left his swords back at camp. He heads towards the white. Satisfaction brought the cat back, and all that nonsense.
It's colder here, uphill, stinging in his lungs. He thinks he sees storm-clouds, where it was clear and bright only minutes ago. Leaves drift down in spirals, grey and dead.
Snow begins to fall.
He was right, he thinks vaguely, but snowflakes lands on his eyelashes and there's no smugness in it. He walks further, and it looks like snow has been falling for some time, weighing down bare branches and making the path treacherous.
He does not like this one bit.
There's a road. It slices through the wood, ice in the cart-tracks, entirely unanticipated.
He thought they were in deep woods. He doesn't know this part of the empire at all, the blue ridges of mountains he can see now, the strange dark shrubs.
There's a bank by the side of the road, dead grass white with frost, and there on the top of the ridge is a rectangle of disturbed earth, a branch pointing up at the sky and hanging from it something colourful, frozen and painted with snow.
Breath rises in pale clouds, like smoke. He steps towards it in some sort of daze.
His coat is still around his shoulders, but here it is, stiff with frost and ragged, a slice across the chest brown with iron.
Quiet footsteps come from behind him, and he spins, but it’s only Caleb, walking slowly from the tree-line with Frumpkin at his feet.
Molly opens his mouth, and closes it again. There doesn’t seem to be anything to say. Caleb approaches, and as he steps out of the woods the last of the grey light lands on the deep maroon of his coat. The faded, grubby brown fabric seems restored, the same cut but now Empire-red, buttons shining and gold thread picking out stripes on the sleeves.
He feels like he's seeing Caleb as Caleb is inside his head, despite himself. Things start to make a little sense.
"This isn't real," he says. "Is it?"
Caleb smiles at the ground without mirth. Wind stirs, tears at the tree-tops.
"According to tradition," Caleb says, accent thick, "I was supposed to be buried in this coat. It always seemed strange to me, that you were not buried in yours."
Molly swallows around a sudden lump in this throat. The cold seems to have wound its way into his blood.
"Can you-- check my grave, maybe? Can you go back? If I-- If I wake up again, I'd like you there. I'd like you all there."
Caleb nods, brow creased. "I thought that, ah, when you forgot you wanted to have things remain forgotten?"
"Lucien's life, yes. I think I'm better off without it. But not this one."
"Ja. Ja, okay. I can do that. We'll do that."
Frumpkin
mrows
, and Caleb kneels, busies himself with scratching at his ears. Molly smiles, but it's weak. Gold light paints the horizon over the distant ridges of mountains.
The sun rises slowly; the landscape fades into mist. Caleb wakes up.