Can you keep a secret?

Far off from their conversation, as Lucie confessed and Málmr wept, a man had been running for his life, and swore about it loudly enough to wake the dead. There were rips in his black and white striped pants, and he'd lost his feathered hat and saber back a ways. In his defense, he hadn't been thinking too clearly when a bunch of stupid twigs grabbed out at him from the brush, and stabbing it clearly hadn't worked. For a stupidly ridiculous moment, he'd tried to jostle the blade out from its tangling torso, and it'd just stood there, hissing and reaching for him like he was an autumn snack.

Just because he was a snack didn't mean he wanted to get eaten by a load of swoghoggling, beardsplitting pizzle-sticks! Like any good Raven, he ditched the sword and ran, his hand tight on the jingling purse full of coins he'd stolen from the witchfinder back there. As if one problem wasn't bad enough.

The mark in question had only been a horse and cart, the bench sporting only two. How was he to know the merchant had up and decided to keep such hoity-toity company on today of all days? He'd already followed them all afternoon to find a good place to jump them - what, was he supposed to magically know their identities too? Their jobs? Their hobbies and pastimes and how they liked their cup of tea?

Grace, that'd be nice. Better than the lark of a spell he had, anyway.

He swore up down and sideways as he bounced down a hill, losing a few coins along the way, his cape fluttering behind him with more nobility than he himself could muster. Jericho was going to rip him apart for this. No more solo gigs for Diggory Lock after this one, no sir no how.

----------------

Close on the trail of the thief was a scarred, grimacing witchfinder. Gods above, she was following a complete idiot. Her heavy steel-toed boots crunched the leaf litter as she plucked a scrap of black and white patterned cloth from the thorn brush, and she spied the hastily broken branches that marked the way he'd went, clear as day. She had a raging headache and was in utterly no mood for this.

Roughly a week ago, she'd been assigned to follow rumors of young mages cropping up far from the city, with decent inns far and few between. Since then, she'd decided that camping was the worst experience of her life. Bug bites, constant nightly rain making any attempt at firewood a waste of time, and one too many rocks under her pallet had made her turn around and extend a thumb out for a ride back to Mead. Gwyn was as seasoned as the lot of them, but she'd rather a fistfight than another night out in the woods.

And then as soon as she'd started to relax, after giving the merchant the stink eye when he'd conversationally asked about the scars around her eyes and stoically ignoring him when he wisely shut his trap, this little weasel here tried to rob them.

Well - tried in the way that she'd seen him coming from a mile away. The twad had been leaning over a small cliff with the stupidest grin on his face, like he'd already won and was counting how to spend the gold in the back of the cart.

He'd leapt, saber drawn - and she'd just caught him, like a bear catching a wet fish. She'd given him a flat stare, he'd gone pale, nervously giggled, and then disappeared from sight.

Shock and age-old jealousy flared in her stomach stunned her enough for him to slip off, yanking the merchant's purse from the back in a clatter of gold and swearing. A piece of garbage like that, and he had something useful. Grace really was blind.

Spite made her follow rather than any sense of duty to the merchant or to the cause. She was minutes behind him at best - at least she'd have a way to vent off this awful headache at the end of it.

----------------

Málmr, while all of this went on, was at a loss. He wished he knew the magic words to ebb Lucie’s desperate sobbing, to take away her fear, but how could he when the same fear clenched under his ribs? Her magic could be anything, and with the new Archon focusing more on imprisonment than education, he worried for who would teach her.

Lucie’s words held more hope than he felt he could muster, tired at the mere thought of what she had to go through now. “It will be, auðœfi. It might come with time, but it will.”

She stiffened at the appearance of the wicker servants in the underbrush and let him pick her up. “It’s alright.” He murmured into her hair, his arms protective around her. “Let’s get you home to you mother, and we can talk to her together when she comes back.” 

He didn’t get very far when a ruckus of swearing and crashing leaves stopped him in his tracks. Lucie’s cry made him turn his shoulder towards the sounds to keep her away from it, and a deep frown replaced his soft concern.

A scraggly man in strangely torn pants broke out of the treeline, and would’ve crashed straight into them had he not taken one look at Málmr’s imperious width and skidded to a dead stop.

Neither of them noticed the stars silently rising from the ground like morning dew. “Fuck me sideways over a herring barrel,” The man spat, holding onto his bulging purse with one hand and rapidly patting his sides with the other, till he whipped out a pathetic dirk to point at him.  “I don’t want any trouble, ah?”

Málmr’s eyes narrowed in a scowl so deep that the rogue faltered, taking a step back. Málmr clenched his jaw when he still held the knife up, and his hand over Lucie’s back tightened to keep her close. “C-cute kid! Really takes after her pop! I mean not really but –“

“L e a v e.”  Málmr growled so heavy and low that it rattled in the bones of everyone listening.

The rogue gave a shaky, high-pitched laugh and dropped the dirk, letting it clatter among the fallen leaves. “Yeah – I’m – uhuh – just gonna,” He hooked two thumbs to the left with a crooked, terrified grin, and would’ve let his vanishing magic fill in the word ‘go’ for him, had the scene not had other plans for him.

Instead of making him disappear from view, his magic coalesced in front of him, swirling into a ball about a foot from him. He’d only a moment to look at it in dumb confusion, and Málmr only a split second to sharply gasp and call upon his shields, when it exploded in a flash of blinding light.

In the overwhelming aftermath, the thief yelled, clutching at his eyes and tripping over something he couldn’t see in a tumble of limbs and swearwords and clattering of gold. Málmr turned Lucie away from it, his eyes shut tight as his summoned magic rushed past him.

Rushed. Like arrows whizzing past.

The rogue’s yells turned into blind screams and writhing on the ground, and Málmr hazily squinted over his shoulder, his vision blurred and painful. What he saw made his heart stop cold in his chest.

Transparent, vicious spears lay embedded in the grass, through tree trunks, through the rogue’s cape, through his boot, and scattered around him in a dangerous outline as he thrashed in pain. They couldn’t have been from him, couldn’t possibly – but his runes marked their handles, whispering through their blade edges, and with them came a rush of strength that surged through his skin, prickling him injured arm and setting his teeth on edge.

Málmr was the one who stepped back this time, shielding Lucie from the sight in cold horror. “No, no, no,” He whispered. His corrupted tusks felt wrong in his mouth, damning, a wretched omen to the violence at his feet. This was wrong, this wasn’t him. He tried summoning his shields one more time, but instead of their comforting walls came a second round of spears, all aimed at the rogue’s throat.

He almost didn’t hear the second intruder to the scene, his blurry eyes only dragging to them when they called his name.

He knew her, had worked with her recently and in the past, before they’d both joined the Witchfinders. They’d drank together at taverns all across Ivras, fought together, when the opportunity threw them both together.

She was horrified.

His guts twisted as if her look were knife in his belly, and his mouth opened to protest, to explain. He wasn’t a monster, he wasn’t.

“Could someone for fuck’s sake help me!” The rogue screamed on the ground, cutting off his explanation and making him flinch. His hands wrapped around the spear embedded in his foot, struggling to free himself with desperate, pained grunts.

Gwyn swore under her breath, and would have gone over to the rogue had the hovering spears not kept her at bay. She raised up her hands, drudging up a deep breath, and something else along with it too. “Málmr,” She uttered low, “Put your weapons down.”    

The breath she released should have been calming. What she expected was the rush of quiet that stilled emotions, her own useless magic that couldn’t stop spears, or heal, or any number of practical things other mages could muster. Instead, the stars above the ground brightened, consuming her spell and turning it to its opposite.

Málmr’s pounded harshly in his chest, his mouth pulling into a grimace. Fear mixed with anger at the fates, at the knife on the ground pointed at Lucie, at the look in Gwyn’s eyes. He was sick of encountering murderers, tired of judgment, of being the villain.

Rasha’s words rang in his head, turning his fear into white-hot steel. His blood began to pound to the same beat as the war drums called on the Stalhúð shores, beaten against shields and yelled to the rain so that Geirr could hear in the wartorn skies.

In the ruins of Hagia's destruction, Rasha had told him, "You can't save everyone you wish to." It had killed him that day, left him worthless and empty.

His grip tightened around Lucie. He would protect her. No matter the cost.

He didn’t intend it, but his spears answered in kind, and half of them swiveled to aim at Gwyn. She returned the gesture with a grimace of her own, her fingers arcing towards the sword at her hip, and the air grew tense, maddeningly rife for battle.

The thief on the ground wrenched the spear free, fueled by the same song and the adrenaline of blind panic in the face of death. “Fuck.....fuck!!” He shivered, clawing at his pinned cloak at his throat. With a violent ripping of cloth, four more of those swirling, coalescing balls of light hovered in the midst of the woods between the four of them, and when they went off, chaos, pure chaos, erupted.