Archive of Our Own ^beta

When they told the stories, hushed and reverent, they said they lost the Giantkiller the day Saint George the Dragon Slayer hit the cold mountain ground and didn’t get back up.

Jack had hit the unforgiving stone too, knees crashing down, the palms of his hands scraping on grit, breath rasping in his lungs, but Liam had dragged him up and thrust the child George had been carrying into his arms. They had limped home, stunned, but Jack would always feel like he had left himself there with George’s cooling body.

Very few people were at the funeral. Gathering too many lynch-pins of the smugglers and their helpers in one spot was a bad idea, and in any case George had kept her friends few and close. The Rangers raised a toast as they stitched wounds, because they wouldn’t abandon people in need for the funeral of even the dearest of friends.

Bea wept on Liam’s shoulder again that evening, while Bidi curled on his lap, miserable and safe. Jack stared hollowly at the fire, late into the night, and the next morning he was gone.

Liam did not follow. He stared at the empty bed, the untouched sheets, and stood in the doorway to the bakery looking out at the mountains. He wanted to go, to drag Jack back home, but instead he closed the door with a sigh and a shaken head. Bea was already hard at work, eyes red rimmed and breath hitching in her throat. Bidi had cried herself to sleep when she finally understood that auntie George wasn’t coming to say goodnight, ever again, and had done so every night since.

Liam wanted to go after Jack, drag him back home to mourn with the rest of their family, but if Jack had been able to bear the heavy silence of the bakery he would still be curled up by the hearth.
“You stay safe, Jackie. You come home, someday soon.” He whispered to the unforgiving peaks, and closed the door.

Jack didn’t know where he was going until he was there, the Graves’ keep casting a dark shadow on his still face, the rain slipping coldly down his neck. He had no plan, no intention, and perhaps that is why the Seeress didn’t see him coming until he was already in the plush halls.

It seemed so easy, too easy, but then this time he wasn’t exactly thinking of getting other people out safely. It was too easy - the keep wasn’t supposed to be breached by any vigilantes, not with the Seeress at the centre of her web.

The Seeress was looking elsewhere, at her father busy in his private workshop, the inattentive guards, the way her baby brother’s hands were trembling as he took the too heavy bag from her with a shaky attempt at a smile. For an hour, that otherwise unremarkable night, the Graves mansion had gaps in its defences, just big enough for a small boy to slip through silently - or a very lucky slightly taller one. For an hour, the Seeress had eyes only for the bright centre of her life.

Jack crept through plush halls and gilded rooms, cat quiet, a blazing light if you were one of the few with no choice but to see. He couldn’t hide from the Seeress, but luck and slightly less skill than he thought he had got him past everyone else.

The universe loved Jack Farris, so when he hesitated at a split between two hallways, one with the Seeress and her brother clinging to each other’s hands at the end of it, he decided without knowing why which route to take. Now that he was in the keep he felt aimless, but his feet led him inevitably to the one place he was familiar with.

The cells were empty, because they had kept them from being filled just days before - Jack blinked at the empty space, because it felt so much longer ago. It felt so very long go that Jack had been keeping watch in a different stone building while Liam picked the locks and George padded down the rows of cells, figuring out which held people they could save.

The cells were empty but the basement workshop was not. The Seeress, back perfectly straight and eyes perfectly dry, realised the Giantkiller was there when she turned her attention to Dadlus, down in the lab, checking he was still at work, wasn’t wandering out on a walk that would have to be intercepted, and found the hollow drifting that meant he was dead. She saw the unmistakable blaze of gold and ice ran through her veins. He had been in the same building as Sam.

She hiked up her skirts and ran, calling for Spider, for the guards, as she felt heat bloom in the dark depths of her home. Jack was already slipping away, hands splattered red, eyes stinging in the smoke, but the Seeress cared more about not letting the fire spread than catching him, then. She cared more about distraction, about making sure no one went looking for what else the Giantkiller may have threatened, went to check on Sam and found the bed made and a few of his favourite books gone.

Jack was almost stumbling when he found a stream and realised, distantly, that his hands were streaked with blood. He vomited into a bush and scrubbed them clean. He told himself fiercely that the man had deserved it, that he hoped the fire spread to destroy more than just the machines and cells, but he was lying. Once the body hit the ground it had just been another life he’d ended. The Seeress, her father and her right hand man weren’t the only lives in the keep.

Another day, Dadlus may have lived. Another day, he may have had time to stutter about coercion, blackmail, family back home who would weep, who were threatened, long enough to wring pity out of Jack - but the Dragon Slayer had fallen and George hadn’t gotten back up. Jack thought, distantly, that he’d left all the best parts of himself there with her on the cold mountain stone.

The universe loved Jack, so his foot landed just left of an unremarkable patch of mud on a narrow path. His arms windmilled and he narrowly avoided tumbling down the side of the hill, but he unknowingly avoided the alarm trap the runaway Sam Graves had carefully laid to make sure he knew if anyone was coming - carefully, but without consideration that someone may not be walking on the path itself.

The child looked up, eyes wide, sparks spilling from his fingers, rain pressing his hair flat, as Jack rounded the corner. They both froze. Panic was white noise in Sam’s ears, detachment and lack of sleep a mist in Jack’s mind. He blinked, and stepped forwards, hands out, and stopped as the kid shuffled back.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay - I won’t take you in, don’t worry - I -”

Sam peered at him suspiciously, dread curling in his chest. This wasn’t weeks of travel away, months of something like safety, a shock of red hair in an Academy dorm to squint at then dismiss as coincidence. This close to home, the youngest Graves was still warily looking out for redheads with swords. The Giantkiller wore the mountains like a cloak, and the gears leapt into smooth motion in Sam’s mind.

He had a long way to go, alone - but if he was with the Giantkiller - if he was with the local hero and his own private nightmare, who would bother him? Who would question him? Who, really, would even look at him? And if they were caught then there was a ready-made alibi for his father, because mayor Graves could hardly blame his young son for being kidnapped, and of course the Giantkiller would lie about what had happened, wouldn’t he…and Sandry always, always knew when people were lying.

Trembling with terror and only trying to hide it enough to be noticeable, Sam clutched his sodden pack and peered suspiciously up.
“You - are you the Giantkiller?” Jack smiled, soft and pained where a scant few days earlier he would have been bright and bursting with it.
“Yeah, kid, that’s me.” He was still frozen, comforting hand outstretched. Sam noticed in a detached sort of way that there was blood under his fingernails. “But just call me Jack. What’s your name, kid?” Sam looked up at him with wide eyes, and let his voice shake, just enough to show he was trying to keep it steady.
“Grey. Sanders Grey.”

Jack smuggled them out, down mountain paths and through Bea’s checkpoints. He tried to send messages back to Bea and Liam, but he ended up with blank paper and burning eyes every time. Eventually he just asked their last contact to pass on that he was headed south and would let them know where he wound up. He said to tell them that he’d be back.

Grey listened, eyes fixed on the page ahead of him, Sandry’s stern instructions that she couldn’t know where to find him ringing in his ears. He heard the Giantkiller’s voice hitch when he said to tell Bidi he’d bring her back a toy dragon, and wondered if that was how his name sounded in his sister’s head, soft and vulnerable.

(When the message reached the bakery, Bidi wrinkled her nose and said she’d rather Jack brought her a real dragon. Bea finished the batch of bread she was baking, then went out to talk to George’s grave and pass on the message that he was alive and well - this would never be a habit of her own, talking to her ghosts, but she wasn’t doing it for herself.

Liam laid his head on the table and cried, because he’d been waiting to be told Jack had done something reckless and that he’d have to bury his brother deep under mountain soil next to his second sister before the first snow had settled over her, because he’d been waiting to be told that Jack would never come home. He wasn’t sure if he was sobbing with relief or grief.)

Jack got them out of the mountains, Grey tagging quietly along, letting himself flinch at shadows and burying himself in books. Once they hit the lowlands Grey started thinking about where to go next, and Jack fleetingly entertained the thought of taking the kid home to the Rambly House.

It was Grey who decided to go to the Academy, and the idea struck a chord in Jack. They had a four day argument about it - Grey didn’t need a babysitter (didn’t want the Giantkiller anywhere near), and Jack was only mostly sure he wasn’t going just to keep an eye on Grey, was seeing George hit the ground and thinking if only I’d been better.

Grey’s acceptance came back silver, and he ran fingers over that coveted colour while Jack raised his eyebrows. Grey sniffed at him.
“I’m not interested in throwing sparks around. I want to read, and that’s it.” Jack shrugged and shoved his own acceptance letters into his bag. He hadn’t had the Rangers on hand to help, but it turned out that if you read your rough draft out loud Grey would start correcting your sentence structure without seeming to notice.

He watched Grey fail to get any brighter, any less weighed down, as they made their way to Rivertown. His heart ached and he wanted to force the Seeress to witness what she did to children, to understand what he was still so very sure she didn’t see. Grey didn’t notice this, because Grey had his nose in a book where he could safely ignore the fact that the likelihood of getting shot of the Giantkiller was getting slimmer and slimmer every day.

When they were led to their shared room by a patient, resigned Rupert, Grey had a very quiet panic attack that he wasn’t quite able to hide from Jack.
“I don’t want - I don’t want to be reminded, every day!” He let Jack think he didn’t want the fear chasing his heels, rather than a third of his childhood nightmares asleep on the bunk above him.

Jack dropped his bedroll on the top bunk and hovered, dithered, dropped comfort that only made Grey’s throat constrict more. Eventually the sage stormed out - muttered that he wanted to see the library and closed the door quietly behind him - and Jack stared blankly at the ceiling the whole night through, thinking about all of the children he hadn’t saved.

Grey was skittish, wary and guarded, living in the library even more than he would in a world where he thought his gangly roommate’s name and hair were just a coincidence. Jack spent his spare hours convincing Nurse to let him help stock her cupboards, and badgered her cheerfully for advice and tips when things were quiet.

He fell into fights as easily as in any other story, and bandaged up trembling Sages and Guides, ignoring all of Heads’ lectures. He took to eating with some of them, too, a lanky boy nicknamed Weeds and a quiet girl called Heather. He asked them about herb lore and helped quiz them on the plants he’d grown up seeing. They eyed him a little suspiciously, but he never seemed to last a week without getting at least one new bruise from his attempts at protection, so they pulled their trays out of the way to let him join their table.

He tried to befriend Grey, but the kid almost flinched whenever he looked in Jack’s direction so he stopped, heart aching. When they were assigned their study group in their second year, Grey said nothing, just kept reading while Jack dithered over something that felt like an apology and ran a thumb over the line that said Laney Jones, Mage.

They weren’t friends, exactly, but sometime between meeting and settling down into the wooden benches at Sally-Anne’s Jack had grown familiar with Grey’s sarcasm and the difference between his chatter and his distraction. Grey had stopped snickering at Jack’s snark and blithe remarks to maintain a mask, and started snickering because while he was still wary he’d begun to stop being afraid, and Jack’s sense of humour matched his.

When they slipped quietly to the back of the room, after gunshots had split the air, Grey didn’t miss the way Jack stood slightly in front of him the whole time and very carefully excluded him from any conversations about what they should do. He listened to Jack plan, argue Rupert around, lecture their bleeding year mate to distract the wounded boy, and could easily imagine the scene in a cold mountain cave. He wondered what nicknames Jack assigned to Spider and Sandry, to keep track of them, to fit them into neat categories. It didn’t occur to him that Jack would call them by names they’d earned for themselves, the names they claimed and answered to, the same way his sister spat Giantkiller like it was a curse.

Jack started playing vigilante in the streets of Rivertown, and Grey buried himself in his books and pretended fiercely that he couldn’t hear every discussion his study group had about the obligations and ethics of saving people.

Rhones called Jack in after class to discuss his essays, constructive critiques and abstract discussions. Jack read over every red pen correction with a frown, and told himself he was just used to being the underdog, to not having the luxury of waiting and of not taking risks. But that was why he was here - because they’d leapt into trouble and George hadn’t walked back out. He didn’t want to take risks, anymore. He wanted to know everyone he led into danger would still be there the next morning.

(Professor Merris scoffed at Jack’s extracurricular questions, scowled and grumbled and shook his head, but around the edges of his gruff dismissals he dropped answers. Jack roomed with Grey, and had lived in George’s warm shadow for five years; he knew how to listen to academics, how to ask questions that sent them off on informative tangents, how to file away the relevant points while letting the rest of it wash over him.)

When Leaf told him a month into the academic year that he’d found another combat spec to teach him more self defence than Jack had been able to drill into him around getting his own bruises, Jack frowned and fretted while Leaf rolled his eyes and made his own plans. Leaf hadn’t gotten the combat spec’s name, and Jack’s opinion probably wouldn’t have been swayed if he had - Francis had scowled and scowled at Jack for weeks already that year, unimpressed at the way he pulled a bouncy Guide into fights and frustrated that the taller Forest boy seemed both so unaware of the role of a combat spec and determined to live up to it, all at once.

Leaf chattered away until he was fed up of their posturing and glared them both into apologies. Red rapidly reevaluated what proportion of Leaf’s bruises were due to Farris leading him blindly into things. He still felt Jack was largely to blame, but he grudgingly admitted that the kid clearly couldn’t be kept out of trouble by anything short of sitting on him. A few weeks into their practice sessions he muttered this to Jack, and got a blinding grin in response. After a thoughtful pause, Jack sighed.
“We probably out to teach him some grappling so that no one tries it, actually. I’m no good at it, though.”
“I know, I’ve seen you try. C'mon, Farris, you can join the class if you ask nicely…”

Jack brought in more of his bullied and wary. Trembling Weeds, who still looked like he expected Jack to turn on him most days, taciturn Heather, the bubbly sage Laney roomed with who tracked them down by dint of following Laney (who, admittedly, hadn’t tried very hard to lose her tail). Red grumbled and frowned and dropped his books down next to Jack’s plate at breakfast to talk over the old navel battles they were studying with an aching undertone that Jack carefully didn’t question.

Caught by slavers in a careless moment, Grey went still and pale even before they tied an Elsewhere crack under his chin. He shuddered miserably and tried to plan, to think - if they could, Spider and Sandry would set him free before his father saw him but - what if - what if - he tried to think what he’d say, his excuses and lies, but mostly he was listening for a commotion outside. He wasn’t surprised when it came, and he hated it. He hated that somewhere along the line, he’d learnt to trust that Jack (the Giantkiller) would come for him when he was in danger. Later, feigning sleep in his bunk, Grey tried to map it out - where had resignation become acceptance, become reliance. Where had his careful wall of ink and paper crumpled to let a red headed bruiser slip inside?

When Jack suggested Grey go with him to the Rambly house that winter, he said yes, because good little victims wanted to stay in sight of people they trusted, and Grey was so very good at being who he was supposed to be. He watched the way Jack walked, quiet and soft, and tried to match him, remembering creeping like a ghost over plush carpets after nightmares. The Farris Home was noisy, overflowing, and Grey hunched his shoulders. He didn’t like Jack - he didn’t - but he listened to looming Farris sons laugh about throwing him in the river and he remembered late night debates about defending anyone who needed it, remembered his sister taking his hands tightly in hers and telling him he wasn’t allowed to protect himself.

(He didn’t tell Jack he would keep his brothers from throwing him in the river, though. He kept his eyes on the page in front of him and told him with a sniff that if they tried Grey would be safely elsewhere, where they wouldn’t splash his books. Jack grinned and told him cheerfully that he would expect nothing less, and it didn’t sting - it didn’t.)

Jack didn’t write home with any regularity, but he wrote to the mountains more than he did to his mother. His pen skittered over news, over the words ‘Laney is here’, and left gaping holes in all of his stories. He told them all about the sharpshooter mage, who was something fierce and a force to be reckoned with, but he didn’t tell Liam that it was his baby sister. He wasn’t ready for his worlds to collide like that. He wasn’t ready - he’d have to explain, he’d have to tell her about George and the way that Liam had wept, and - he couldn’t.

He listened to Laney talk about her brother, his smiles and his easy grace and the way he was always singing, and Jack didn’t tell her that he already knew all of this and more. Jack knew what Liam looked like when he kissed his wife on the forehead in the mornings, the way he crooned old desert lullabies to his daughter, the way he grimaced through broken bones and anti-Mage wards and carrying the still breathing dead out of cells so that they could fade under open skies.

Laney didn’t. She had watched her brother walk away when she was eight, and she didn’t think there was anyone else in the world who could miss him the way she did.

There was a way Red had in class, of sounding both wistful and furious at once, whenever the topic of seafaring privateers and coastal defences came up. He was a coastal boy, he’d mutter bashfully if pressed, warily when Clement asked him cheerfully if this was a particular interest - neither Jack or Red had anything much to do with Clem outside of schoolwork to know that this was his friendly, inquisitive chatter not mocking or needling - so Jack wasn’t too surprised when Red confided that he was one of the Dreads, one late afternoon in the soft light of the stables, their students holding their own below.

Jack rather thought he might sound a bit like that when they covered the mountains - bandits and dark caves, steep valleys walls and villages that had no Bureau protection, the vigilantes that the Academy dismissed and revered by turns. He had written an essay on the Giantkiller in his first year, feeling odd and lost in his own skin, scrawling out in ink and fumbling academic phrasing about legacy and heroics. It had come back covered in ink, and he’d smiled wryly to himself over every suggested correction.

In his second year they studied the Dragon Slayer instead, and Jack barely slept for three days, hunched over his desk making every ointment and poultice he knew the recipe for. They had gotten sidetracked into a fierce debate about whether the latest hero to bear the name could really have been a girl, and a Forest boy couldn’t claim to have local knowledge. They talked about the Slayer as though she was theirs to claim, and he wanted to scream that killing a dragon had been the very least part of her. He dreamt of ashy soil and hills of white flowers for weeks, soft gold curls scattered on a dusty wooden floor and over cold mountain stone.

The mountains were far away, now, on the horizon where even their shadows couldn’t touch him - but the Seeress could. Sam Graves had written a curse for his big sister, once, given her something to protect herself with and not thought about it since. She hadn’t used it for all of years she’d had it, because her father wasn’t a fan of mages and she didn’t want to risk him asking her where she had come by a custom written curse. But the Piper was still stealing people away from her grasp, the Giantkiller was still out there somewhere, and it had been over a year since Mayor Graves’ son disappeared from even her sight.

She set it loose and smiled with cold satisfaction, and in a distant city her baby brother watched Jack fall with a curse he knew every vicious line of buried under his ashen skin.

Sam watched Jack go twitchy and tense, after, and he could guess why. He didn’t ask for confirmation, because Grey was just a scared mountain runaway, not a boy who knew the Seeress’ list of targets by heart. He didn’t want to hear the Giantkiller’s fears, or the way Jack would try to hide them from a kid he still felt he owed protection. He was hunched over a book when Jack slipped out to see the Rangers, and asleep when his roommate slipped out of the Academy gates for what he planned to be the last time.

Laney caught up to Jack as he was leaving, bag slung over his shoulder and heart heavy. She demanded to know where he was going, and the words caught in his throat - Bea and Liam hadn’t written, not since before his friends hauled him to Rue’s fury and her healing, and he hadn’t yet managed to tell Laney he knew her brother. He wanted to scream it at her, that it was Liam who may be dead or dying, but he hadn’t told her and he still couldn’t bear to, even now. He was lucky, Rue had told him, the universe on his side and letting him slip safely through danger. He couldn’t bear to tell Laney about Liam because he couldn’t bear to tell her about George, about a bullet that had slipped past him and caught her on the ricochet. They hissed at each other in the darkness until light bloomed in the back alley streets they’d spent a year helping to protect.

The fire demon was fierce, harsh, and terrible. It rippled with Elsewhere gold, and all Jack could think about was the time George had told him about her dragon. Not spending months in the mountain with it, or carrying its weight on her shoulders every day since, but the way it had poured gold over her in a waterfall, the most deadly, beautiful thing she had ever seen.

George had loved dangerous, graceful things. She had read everything she could about dragons, their species and their habits. She would wax poetic about wyverns and the mating dance of rocs, the elegance of the traps laid around the slavers’ camps, the way you got potatoes and belladonna from the same family.

The demon roared, and Jack lifted his chin in defiance. His ribs ached and there was blood trickling sluggishly down his face, and he couldn’t see any beauty here. He raised his sword, and knew (Jack had always known) - he was of fire, and George had been burning wood.

Jack threw himself after Grey and burned away the last of his luck. He slept through his first ambush, weeks later, and thought he knew why Grey was going quiet and shaken in a way that was different from the pallor Elsewhere cracks would put in his skin. Spider hauled them into a keep Jack had last seen when he left the mountains for the first time, and in every nightmare since. The Seeress leaned forwards in her chair to smile at him, cold and dangerous.

Cassandra spat all of his half-healed wounds open, dripped acid into them to fester, and though she didn’t mean it to be, it felt like a kindness. For the first time since George had died, Jack felt like his skin fit.

Grey broke them out, guilt a heavy weight in his gut. He didn’t have to pretend to his big sister that he had known who Jack was, because he had. He did have to pretend he’d brought her the Giantkiller as a gift, but he didn’t lie when he’d said he’d thought it the safest way to travel. He told her that the Giantkiller thought of him as a brother, and the truth of it felt like it burned his throat.

He wasn’t quite certain if he was going to save them or not until his feet led him down to parts of his home he’d never ventured into.

It was Laney’s cell he went to, no bag other than his own over his shoulder. He didn’t think to open the other cell doors, but when they checked they were all empty anyway - the loss of Dadlus and his machines had been something of a setback for the Graves family business and capacity was still considerably reduced. Security was considerably increased, but even the Seeress couldn’t anticipate Laney Jones and the tricks up her sleeves.

They stumbled after Jack over paths even Grey didn’t know, and crested a hill above a nondescript mountain village. A child with dark skin and bright eyes cannoned into Jack, and Laney froze on the threshold. Jack did too, shoulders hunching miserably. There were wards pressed into the bakery that Laney knew, but that wasn’t what had caught her breath, stolen it away and left her feeling inches shorter and years younger. She was staring at the man sat at the table, a neat if travel worn bandage on his arm and a casual grin she still knew better than the practised upward crease of her own cheeks.

Jack slipped away to the graveyard, after Liam’s first quelling demand to know what his baby sister had been doing within arms reach of the Graves’ in the first place. He sat with his back to Georgie’s stone, and remembered the blisters on his palms from burying her. Rupert followed him after a discreet interval, a spare hat and gloves in Jack’s size from the cupboard in Bea’s empty spare room stuffed into his pockets.

He paused by the monument in the village centre, first. The Dragon Slayer had been a renowned strategist. Rupert had hero worshipped her from the first story May brought back from the mountains, and had read books about her (and her predecessors) over the years since. His second year essay had been a thing of academic beauty, with a lifetime’s avid research behind it.

He’d known that Jack was the Giantkiller thanks to Thorne and his lack of subtlety when it came to extortion, and had spent the weeks since quietly piecing the threads together with every part of Jack he had met. It wasn’t until he was standing in the cold watching Jack curl around himself by a nondescript grave that he understood - the Giantkiller had been Saint George’s right hand man, but Jack had been her best friend.

Laney was bitterly furious with Jack, and Grey was skittish, but it was Rupert who eyed the stories they were told and the gaps in Jack’s life, and wondered if he had been a substitute for someone. He said nothing, but it dogged his steps all the same. Jack had promised him he wasn’t redundant, true, but then maybe that was simply another way of saying there wasn’t an alternative. Rupert wasn’t sure not being redundant because you were a replacement was much better.

But there was more at hand than his quiet insecurities. There were bigger questions than the foundations of a friendship. Rupert was a hero, and there was a job to do.

In the years Jack had been gone, Liam had found an ally.

They hadn’t told Jack about the latest siege at Challenge - Liam hadn’t been there, in any case. Liam had been gasping in the throes of an Elsewhere storm, the anti-Mage wards around him unnoticed, and what little space in his mind that wasn’t on the pain was thinking I wonder if I can pick the lock myself again, because it was better than thinking about how Bea would weep, when they told her the news.

When a chipped mug had been shoved into his hands he’d taken it, and found numb tea bitter on his lips. When the storm passed, the lock on the door to the slavers cart was broken, and they were slumped against one another. Word had been sent to Spider that the Piper was caught, and he had joined them on the road. There was no long limbed figure amongst the dead.

(The Seeress saw many things, but even she didn’t see everything. Spider told her one of their teams had been killed on the road, and he wasn’t lying.)

They hadn’t told Jack about this either, but Liam met his broken, accusing glare steadily. There had been mages vanishing into the keep, true, but there had been blind spots in the guards’ positions, odd anonymous warnings, and numerous doors with shoddy locks, too. Liam had seen too many children die to turn away help, even from the hands of those he hated.

The mountains felt less like a homecoming, in this world, and Jack sat quiet at the table in Bea’s bakery, feeling adrift in more than the way the butter dish was kept in a new place on the counter and Bidi stood with inches of unfamiliar height.

Or maybe this was his homecoming. Maybe this was George, crying into his shoulder by a white covered hill, the buried ashes of the only place she had ever called home. Maybe this was what he had left, a room he no longer knew in the dark and a ghost in every corner. Maybe this was what he thought of, now, when he said home.

Even after years away, Jack could fall in sync with Liam at the snap of a twig. He shouted for Jones to handle a sniper and flinched from a gunshot on the wrong side of him. Laney was tight lipped and cold, and Liam wasn’t much warmer. Jack avoided their eyes and searched the bodies in aching silence, until Laney hauled out the bile the Seeress had hissed about girls who followed him, who trusted him, about girls who fell.

Jack shot back to his feet, grief and rage burning in his chest, and Laney flinched. Every broken word on his tongue faltered, because Laney had never flinched - not from Things in the Dark, at Elsewhere fires or Spider’s grip. She wasn’t supposed to look at him like he was something that would hurt her.

But he had. Laney did not make friends easily - she had trusted her secrets and vulnerabilities into his hands, and he had not done the same.

They stepped beneath the trees of the Hood’s Forest, to Little’s cheerful welcome and their rough camp, the non-nonsense cooks and the laughing archers, and Jack broke the arm of one of the Merry Men as he made his way between fires.

He had called out to the Giantkiller, their turncoat Bureau Man. He had leered at Laney, a foreign girl who had little Jackie wrapped around her finger. He had said something about her replacing the Slayer, another girl to meekly follow the Giantkiller, and Jack had missed whatever he said next because the rage was a roaring in his ears.

Rupert dithered while Laney frowned, unsure how much of Jack’s rage was in her defence. Liam disapproved but understood. Grey’s eyes were wide in his pale face, as Little grumbled and scowled at them until he got the full story.

This was what he had thought of, when he heard Giantkiller, throughout his childhood. A redhead with blood on his knuckles and a fierce scowl, a violent bruiser who would lash out as soon as breathe. Grey hadn’t realised that he had stopped thinking like that, that when he thought Giantkiller nowadays he meant bare feet even in winter and the sharp scent of numb tea smuggled into a shared room, books carefully closed when he fell asleep over them and blankets dropped over his shoulders, a lanky boy making sure to step in front of him whenever danger came into the room.

Mayor Graves’ son pressed his back to the comforting bulk of a tree, eyes wide, and pretended furiously the shaking in his hands was for the scene before him, and not at the collision of worlds he could feel brimming on the horizon.

Rupert was dithering, but there was a cook who needed a hand bandaged and a decent healing salve, so he peeled off to help her. She’d burnt it badly, when the ruckus started. It scared her, because her other arm dripped gold, constantly, and the thought of having to rely on that one for long wasn’t comfortable - if nothing else, spilling magic into food was a terrible idea. Rupert dug out the burn salve Jack had made and that Grey had packed. While Little placated and asked everyone’s side and rumbled his disapproval to both parties, Rupert wrapped careful bandages and frowned at the shuddering cramps running up the woman’s other arm.

He had never seen a mage leaking magic, so he didn’t know to be surprised that she was so stable, that the way it was constrained to one arm was still considered a miracle. His skin crawled at the gold dripping to the forest floor, but he gave his best friendly smile, the one few people could tell wasn’t coming easy to his face, and reached for her arm to smother it with the cream Rue had taught him to make to ease muscle pains. She flinched as his fingertips smoothed through gold, and he murmured absent, heartfelt reassurances.

When she pulled her glove back on and thanked him, he stayed sat by the fire, feeling worn. Liam dropped down next to him, and passed him a bottle of water.
“You’ve never seen anything like it, huh?” Liam leaned back on his elbows, looking up at the stars. “It’s been better, since someone showed up with instructions for a serum to stabilise them, a year or so back. But still -”

They were in Challenge, days later, when the Merry Men sent word that one of their escaped mages had gone completely stable, seemingly overnight. Liam and Jack turned to Rupert, eyes wide, and Rupert flinched away. Mages had been dying in the mountains for years, and he could see the weight of them on Jack’s shoulders before he even opened his mouth. He was talked into visiting the infirmary, leaving peace and stability in his wake, then sat up that night staring at his fingertips until he made himself lie down to sleep so that he would get a good six hours.

He would spend a lot of time staring at his fingertips, in the months to come; wondering at the hidden power in them, watching the way the backs of his hands lightened slightly over time as he went weeks without sun, tracing the ink-filled whorls of his fingerprints and reminding himself every morning of who he was (he was many things, he knew, and one of them was strong enough to live through this).

When they broke into the Graves’ keep, Jack was frantic with fear for more than just Rupert. Sarge had scared their sage until he ran, and Jack hadn’t been able to go in search. He’d been watching Grey go twitchy, loud in the way he had of hiding in plain sight, ever since they got to the mountains. He couldn’t blame the kid for wanting to run, if his secret had just gotten out and he was afraid of the consequences (Jack was right, but also so very wrong). But he also knew how keen the Seeress’ sight was, and she had seen Grey. They’d never let a prize that good go, so it was up to Jack to make sure they didn’t have the chance to capture him at all.

Spider led them through the passageways, his authority clearing rooms and halls. They destroyed the machines that had been repaired and reconstructed. Dadlus had been smart; he’d made sure that some of the finer construction details were only stored in his head, not on paper or other people’s minds, so that he wouldn’t be redundant. The Mayor had been able to rebuild, but he hadn’t been able to figure out the capacity overflow (yet) - they’d had to space the machines out so that they didn’t combust, so they had fewer than the last time Jack was there with fire in his hands. Liam blew the trigger on his sister’s careful spell work, and Laney went in search of the private laboratory Grey had sketched onto the map he’d left them.

The Seeress was delighted with the prize she found skulking through her home, until she realised her brother was in the keep too. Laney didn’t know - she didn’t know who Sam was, and she didn’t know who was waiting further down the hall, gasping on the floor, trying so hard to do the right thing.

Grey hadn’t turned back, when he’d heard the explosion on the horizon behind him. He hadn’t known until his old home was once again throwing its shadow over him what it was he was going to do - bind his father with ropes of gold and tell his sister to run, now, leave it all behind while she had the chance? Warn them, let himself be wrapped into his father’s loving arms, his sister’s approving gaze? Warn them but free Rupert, too? Summon gold to his fingertips and wait, find out if the Mayor’s son was still his beloved child when he had fire in his veins?

He hadn’t known. Maybe that was why Sandry hadn’t seen him coming. She faltered on the doorstep, if you were one of the three who knew her well enough to tell, at the sight of her baby brother curled on the floor, blinking gold from his vision. She saw the flares of fury around Laney’s tense shoulders and thought good, that’s three of us here who want Sam to make it out alive.

When Jack burst in, she watched everything in him shriek defiance at the way her brother was pleading, and thought, that’s four.

Laney barely cared that it was Grey’s father they were trying to stop, except for how it affected him. She had other priorities, here, and she didn’t have years of this quiet struggle to fuel her hatred.

Jack didn’t know, so he didn’t know to care whether he was making a kill shot or not when he raised the spare pistol Laney had found in Challenge’s supplies for him for any reason other than for the sake of finding Rupert. Maybe Grey’s coldest thoughts were right, and he wouldn’t have cared anyway. He cuffed Spider and the Seeress to the stair-rail so he could bind Laney’s burnt, bleeding wrists. Grey’s fingers twitched like he wanted to pour healing fire into her, and he flinched at the absence of the long-feared power at his call. Cassandra’s eyes fixed on the motion, startled, and watched the way the Giantkiller didn’t even twitch. Something like jealousy was curling in the back of her throat.

When Jack turned to her, Grey went cold, their father’s body just feet away like something out of one of Sam’s oldest nightmares. Sandry looked at Jack with a level gaze, and prayed that whatever the Giantkiller did next her brother wouldn’t call that burning attention to himself.

Thorne had been circling Jack and Laney since the fish shop incident, and Jack hadn’t been sure what to make of it. He sort of hated the Bureau, all of their snobbery and the way they forced vigilantes to watch their backs for threats from both sides, the way they valued badges and paperwork over saving lives. But he was directionless, lost, and Thorne spoke as though there was still a chance for good in him.

Laney wasn’t looking for direction. She was looking for power, and even if he made her skin crawl she knew the quiet branch was her best chance to have it - and that had been before Rupert vanished in a cloud of stone dust.

Jack didn’t trust Thorne, and he didn’t trust himself either, but he trusted Laney. He signed his forms and then hid on the wall around Challenge for an hour until his eyes stopped burning, because he could still remember being ready to follow George anywhere she went.

At the Academy, many people had noted Jack’s apparently instinctive tendency towards kindness. It was, to many of the students, unexpected to find this in someone who wore red around his arm. But Jack listened, memorised people’s favourite drinks and offered a shoulder when homesickness, exam stress, or pettiness had all become too much.

Very few had seen the brittle desperation behind it all. Rupert had, because Rupert also spent much of his time and energy trying to make sure everyone in sight was happy and healthy and safe. Neither Laney or Grey had thought this was anything built, because neither of them were good at kindness themselves.

Laney was good, but she wasn’t kind. She watched Jack bring warm cups into the office every morning and her thoughts were of alliances, reputation, the politics of co-workers. In the quiet of her little apartment room, she shuddered at her own callousness and tried to hear Rupert in the back of her mind.

Grey was waking up to the idea that kindness was an option for him, now, that he had a barbed tongue but he could choose not to let it scar. He had known so little of it, before the Academy, and he had eyed it warily. From the Giantkiller it was a danger; from everyone else it held the risk of debt, of gratitude, of attachment. He watched Jack, now, and he was studying it. He was weighing every action and was trying to calculate how far this kindness would go, when Jack finally learnt who he had been sharing his home with.

Jillit Chu saw through the veneer almost immediately - perhaps because she first met Jack as a creature of fury breaking through a door, heedless of the guards and their frenzewood darts, the resignation on Rupert’s face. Perhaps because she lived under so many layers of facade herself, it was easy to see it on someone else. Jack showed her how to fix the coffee machine in the break room, all bright grins and open palms, and she saw the fragile edges to his smile. She couldn’t risk everything to pass messages or reassurances, but she took to catching Jack in the break room, briefly, to chat about nothing and learn how he took his coffee.

She already knew the answer, because by then Rupert had told her all about his friend’s sweet tooth, but she waited until it was reasonable for her to know and then pressed warm mugs of hot chocolate into his palms on cold mornings, when he had picked up coffees and teas for that day’s round and forgone to get anything for himself, because he only had two hands to carry them all, and most days Jack didn’t think he really deserved to feel warm.

She would make Rupert a steaming mug of coffee to carry carefully down to the hidden lab, and even if she was the only one who knew who had lifted the mug down from the top shelf and obligingly hit the button, it was something. It was a kindness, even if at the end of the day it was a kindness only to herself.

Laney and Jack shared paired desks at the Bureau, and in the evenings they shared a dinner table with Mayor Graves’ son, even if Jack didn’t yet know it. There had been some discussion about whether Laney would get her own place or not, but she had decided to share a two bedroom flat with the boys. She trusted Jack, but she also didn’t want Grey to be on his own when the secret broke.

Thorne sent them to the mountains, again and again, and everywhere they went people hissed old hurts at Jack, abandonment and lives lost, names he’d never known and nightmares they’d never woken up from. Jack opened and closed empty hands, stricken. We were never able to save everyone he said, and she knew him well enough, now, to see all of the fractures under the words.

It was Laney who hissed back, Liam who talked them round, Bea who brushed them aside to speak with her sister in law and brother at arms as though the complainer wasn’t even there. Jack curled his empty hands in his pockets and leant into their warmth, their defence, and tried to tell himself he deserved it.

Thorne sent them after slavers, and they filled their spare moments with repairs and ferrying supplies, searching for a missing hero. He sent them after a growing power hub in St John’s Port, and Marian Hood shook her head in disgust at Jack and his new shadow.

Mari had hated the Giantkiller since Robin fell to the forest floor, since she had stood by a pyre in the muffling snow and walked away with that cold wrapped around her very bones. She had liked the Slayer, her steady hands and her grim realism, respected her losses and her choices, the space she was carving out for herself in a world that had pushed her out of her home.

Jack she had thought was just a kid playing at heroes. She had thought he should go home, because he still had one.

She spat bile at him and his empty hands felt heavy, weighed down. Laney drew herself up in her chair and hissed back, because Jack wouldn’t, never in his own defence. People told Jack that Georgie had died because of him, and on all but the kindest days he believed them. Mari flinched more from his mute acceptance than Laney’s furious defence, but shouts from below cut off whatever she might have said next. Marian Hood hated the Giantkiller, but she trusted him with her sick - they had spent a summer together at Challenge, after all.

Laney stayed at Jack’s right shoulder until he was kneeling by the first of the sick, when she frowned at the glimmer of magic lacing the man’s blood. She recognised the feel of it - when they got back from the mountains, she had spent a long evening in a warded library room with Grey, learning every elegant line of this curse. She muttered to herself over it, hidden in a back room to check her theory could be twisted into reality, and came out with her hands burning gold with fire her brother had sung out of the mountain sky for her to wrap around her limbs.

She sent a runner for Grey when they moved to Wen’s, because Mari had cut off half of her stores and she needed her battery pack on hand, and there were too many mages and hedge-witches in the room to risk opening rifts. He arrived with handfuls of Jack’s best home fever remedies, wrapped in the clean cloth pads he kept for icing bruises after a rough trip to the mountains or sparring on the practice courts. He called fire into the world without trying, holding patients still while Laney twisted her hands to make it look like she was the one squeezing it out of thin air. Jack ferried water and cups of smelly tea, cold compresses and spare blankets, and kept an anxious eye on the pair of them.

He knew most of the helpers, from weeks of helping out on afternoons when he could skive off desk duty thanks to his excessive overtime every other day. They were usually a cheerful bunch, but they were pale and grim faced now, with friends and strangers alike gasping for breath on the straw strewn floor. Jack closed his eyes, and saw red splattered across a similar floor, a bricklayer dying - dying when Jack stepped carelessly away from his still breathing form, even if he hadn’t known it. He opened them, and refused to let his hands shake as he ladled out tea.

Someone pushed a glass of water into his hands. He twisted to see who it was, but it was no one he knew. She gave a one shouldered shrug.
“Last thing anyone needs is us helpers collapsing because we forgot to hydrate. Drink up.” He forced a smile, and did as he was told. He moved aside to let her reach the carefully laid out remedies, and watched as she measured out drops of fever reducer with a steady hand.

“You’re pretty used to this, huh?” She raised an eyebrow, and he scrubbed a hand through his hair, nodding at the row of bottles. “Takes practice to use those pipette tops that quick. Most people would have lost half of it over the wood by now.” She nodded slowly.
“Hm. Well, I’ve certainly spent a lot of my life around remedies of some sort or another.” She finished her last cup and restoppered the bottle. “What’s your name, doc?” Jack grinned, picking up his own tray.
“Not a doctor - don’t have the patience for that long at school. Just got a lot of practical first aid experience. It’s just Jack, ma'am. You?”
“I go by Ann. Nice to meet you, just Jack.”

On the way home from Wen’s, exhausted and successful, a woman stepped into their path. When she told them that Rupert was in the city, Jack and Laney traded glances, but it was Grey who scowled and muttered,
“We know that.” Jack shot him a startled look, then gave Laney something approaching a glare. She looked coolly back.

Jack had wanted to leave Grey out of it, and he had been fracturing at the edges with it. Laney hadn’t bothered arguing, but she had spoken to Grey one day when Jack as at Wen’s. He had turned his pen over and over, then told her about Thorne’s blackmail. The research he had wanted help with. He had asked her not to tell Jack yet, and she had listened because that was about his own safety, his own happiness, and she was not in a position to criticise other people for having secrets.

Grey was rolling his eyes and muttering, and Laney was coldly angry that it had taken so long for Rupert’s mother to find them. Miz Eliza just smiled, because she didn’t particularly care what they thought of her so long as they loved Rupert. She went around old friends and contacts, seeking information on the kinds of tricks that could make someone unplottable, the kinds of wards that would make a room forgettable. She sat at their little kitchen table and watched, mapped out the jokes and pauses, catalogued the expressions her son had written about in precise detail.

The next time Jack went to Mari’s, there was a faintly familiar woman waiting for him. Ann had been asking around too, and when she’d heard through the grapevine of the streets that other people were asking the same questions, she’d gone to Marian. She pulled out a notebook, full of questions. Few of them had answers.

She pushed an ID card at him and asked him to read off the name, even though she’d been through this often enough that she was pretty sure the forgetting was universal, and watched his expression twist as he realised he couldn’t remember what he’d just said. He looked at the name again, and paused.
“You…go by Ann?” She shrugged, not surprised that he remembered her exact careful phrasing.
“It seemed better than introducing myself as Anonymous.”

Weeks before, a woman had woken in an alleyway, and she hadn’t known who she was. She had half opened her eyes to check she wasn’t in immediate danger, and pushed herself up to sitting when she saw that she was definitely alone.

Her muscles were stiff, suggesting that she’d been laying there for some time. Her upper arms ached in a way that told her they were badly bruised and one eye was swollen almost shut, suggesting that whoever had out her there had faced something of a fight for it, but probably not as much as she would have liked. Her forearm had been itching, in a way that she couldn’t imagine was linked to her current predicament unless she had some kind of allergy.

Did she have any allergies? She didn’t know, and there was a deep pit of fear behind the thought, a sense of being in a particularly viciously surreal dream. All she knew was that she had a lot of questions. She pushed herself to her feet, taking stock. She ran a hand over her itching arm to soothe it.

“Why?” She had whispered to herself, and gotten no answer.

She had gone to the back streets, after the first three days she’d spent at the soup kitchen (Wen officially didn’t take lodgers, but he sometimes threw straw pallets down in the loft for people who needed them and took payment in peeled potatoes), because she knew what she needed but not how to make it. The market healer Wen had directed her to had taken a shine to her, and had enlisted her help with preparing some of her wares in exchange for the hormones and blockers Ann needed. So long as she didn’t think about what she was doing, her hands moved with practised ease.

Three weeks in, Ann had mentioned the itching on her arm, and the salve Annie gave her turned a funny colour on contact. Annie had scowled and thrown together other chemicals, and they had watched as words formed in the same handwriting as the notes in Ann’s notebook, neat blocks of script.

Rupert up to something. Farris and Jones suspect? Thorne asking questions.

Annie had a list of people who knew her trick for hidden writing, and she chased all of them down to see if they knew her new assistant, but none of them recognised her.

Four weeks in, she met Jack, but she didn’t know his name was Farris until he walked through the door to Marian’s House one day and Much bellowed it across the room in delight.

Five weeks in she arranged a meet.

When she showed him her transcribed notes, he went still. It was shock, but there was a coiled undertone to it - rage, maybe, restrained and just waiting to know if it should be directed at her or not. She watched him warily, because he tried so hard to be kind, but she could see the desperation in it, the way it cracked around the edges.

“It was written on my arm. I think from before I forgot everything, though of course I can’t be certain. But if I’m right, according to me, you know something.” He grinned, but it was a poor imitation if his usual cheer.
“I know lots of things, Ann. I went to the Academy and everything.” She snickered.
“I’m not one of your anti Bureau buddies, Jack. I don’t care where you learnt what you know.” She nodded at the ID card still in his hands. “Assuming that actually was mine, I was a Bureau student once upon a time.” He turned the card over in his hands thoughtfully, but he was eyeing the notes as well. He ran a hand through his hair, exhaustion stark in the slump of his shoulders, and started talking.

She filled another page of notes in a careful hand, and none of it was familiar.

Laney ported into the Bureau record rooms and came back with the news that there was one name she couldn’t read, and dates of employment that matched the ID card, assuming Ann had studied for four years and taken a job at the Bureau straight out of college.

They planned and pooled resources, and broke into the Bureau one spring day. Rupert had already broken himself out, leaving unconscious guards and a lab tech who was going to have a very bad day behind him. They ducked in and out if the forgetting field, and Ann scribbled notes down on what they saw, what Laney, Jack and Grey were muttering frantic recollections about. If she had been in this hidden lab, she didn’t remember it - but there was a spare lab coat on the hook, too short to belong to the man sprawled on the floor, and when she checked there was a security pass with a name she couldn’t read in the pocket.

They found Rupert in the corridors, arms full of boxes. He had a shadow, a slim mountain born woman with her own set of boxes, and Jack blinked at them.

“Um. Found a friend, Rupe, or are you just really convincing when it comes to paperwork?” Laney grinned, bright and bursting with relief, but whatever jibe she’d been about to make was lost when she narrowed her eyes and fired smartly at an approaching guard as he turned the corner.

They ran, through corridors only half of them knew, and Laney was the last through the window, their sharpshooter standing guard. She fell rather than jumped, and Jack dragged her the rest of the way through the shattered glass into their getaway car. He tore strips from his shirt to wrap around the wound in her arm, and Grey twisted away from the well meaning hands keeping him back to wrap shaking fingers around her elbow.
“There’s magic in this - it’s all - it’s all twisted up - I can’t fix this!” He was breathing in short, static gasps, and he flinched from the reassuring hand Jack dropped on his shoulder. Rupert’s friend watched with an impassive calm that Ann, watching, recognised as a well perfected mask.

They drove out of St John’s Port with the dawn, and none of them looked back.

Sez slammed Laney into the wall when she walked into Sally-Anne’s, and flinched at the muted whimper of pain she made. In the months of broken hearted fury, Sez had never thought of Laney as anything other than fiercely defiant when they met again. Jack and Grey reached for Laney as she sagged, but Rupert got there first, one shoulder under her good arm as cold sweat broke out across her brow. Later, he would bury his face in Sez’s shoulder and feel settled, but right now he had a friend who wouldn’t stop bleeding, who was falling limp even as he tried to hold her up.

The story spilled out as they waited for Rue to tell them if she could draw the curse out. Rupert gave Jack a deeply unimpressed look when he realised that no-one had thought to tell Sez, and by extension anyone who needed to know, that he was probably still alive. Jack shrugged helplessly.

“We thought it was safer. We - I didn’t dare say it, Rupe, even when it was just the three of us, because we didn’t know.” He sighed and shook his head slowly, a weight on his shoulders lifted, even if a new one had replaced it. “We didn’t know.”

The exhaustion had been waiting to hit, weeks and months of desperate searches through slaver outposts, of gaps in conversation that they stumbled into silence around, muted meltdowns at two am when they realised that no one had restocked the cupboards with granola bars. Rupert didn’t remember if he had felt the gaps of their absence, but he felt the exhaustion pulling at his bones too. His mother ferried him off to the spare bedroom Sally had set up, while Jack and Grey recounted details of the search and escape to Sez until she shoved them in the direction of the store cupboard turned two person dorm. Ann and Rupert’s friend Cass had already curled up in the other room, under layers of blankets knitted by hedge witches over the years.

Laney lived, but at the cost of her arm up to the elbow. Jack stared at the bandaged stump lying neatly on the bed spread as she slept on a haze of painkillers and felt his own fingers twitch in sympathy. Grey scowled at a book next to him, pages unturned for the past ten minutes. Someone called Jack from upstairs, and he pushed himself to his feet with one more glance at Laney. Grey curled up smaller in his chair, the book a shield in front of him.

“Don’t you dare make this about you, Giantkiller.” Jack paused, half turned away. he rarely heard his name spoken like that, something bitter, outside of the mountains and the people who’s losses he hadn’t been able to save. Someone called from upstairs again, and Grey twitched towards the sound, eyes not leaving his page. “Get your guilty wallowing done with now, before she wakes up and has to waste her time telling you it wasn’t your responsibility.”

Jack wasn’t there when Laney woke, but he stumbled down the ladder as soon as the news reached him, eyes wide. Laney had pushed herself up to sit tall, face the steady calm mask she wore when the world was falling apart around her. Rupert was sitting, back perfectly straight, in a chair by the bed, unsure what to do and hating it. Apologies were sitting bitter on the tip of Jack’s tongue and he swallowed then down, sat on the edge of the bed and started a detailed recounting of every entertaining insult Rue had dropped at his feet over the past days until the tension drained from the air and Laney started to snicker.

By the time Thorne caught up with them Laney was walking with her shoulders back and her arm precisely bandaged. He shook his head sadly at the sight and talked about what wonderful promise she had shown, and Jack’s hands curled into fists in his pockets. Laney just blinked, slow and bored. Few people were allowed to see her open wounds, and even before he dared touch their hero Thorne hadn’t been one of them.

At Jack’s side, Ann gave a quiet, scoffing snort, and Thorne scowled at her before Sez drew his attention back to herself because there was something big hiding up her sleeve and she knew how to play an audience. Laney admired the gold shields as they rose with professional interest, and Cass averted her eyes from the glow pouring through Sally-Anne’s windows. Miz Eliza made a considering noise from where she was re-reading notes from her latest dig, and watched from the corner of her sharp eyes at every hidden twitch the girl suppressed.

In the days after Rivertown declared itself an independent entity Jack walked the streets compulsively, lists of defences and shift rotas echoing in his head, and buried all of his spare moments in helping Rue prepare medicines. This would not be Jack’s first siege, and he knew the price of safety.

The Stable Loft crew burst back into their collective orbit, fingers smeared with ash from fire demons and closing rifts. Laney carefully didn’t curl her good hand over the bandaged stump to give herself something to cling onto, and poured over records with Gloria and Weeds, searching for patterns and trying to remember where every rift she had torn open and closed had been. Jack tried to map it all out but mostly saw lists of casualties and damages, so banished himself to help Sally Anne peel potatoes instead.

Red and Leaf slipped in and out of the fish shop, not joined at the hip except for how everyone thought of them as a pair. Jack grinned at them from his corner booth, where he could see the whole room, and tried not to think about how not long ago he would always have taken the seat opposite, so that George could keep watch over his shoulder, her back pressed to sheltering wood.

Red would go down in the battle and be carried home by his crew, but it would be Jack who saw the way Leaf’s face froze when he walked into the crowded room and felt that empty space echoing at his shoulder. Leaf would curl by the infirmary cot for hours, eyes on that shallow rise and fall of wounded ribs, all of the words he’d never said caught in his chest. Jack wouldn’t be there to see Red fall, but he’d be there to watch Leaf pick up the pieces.

But they didn’t know that, then, didn’t have a list of names for graves and another for checkups. Rue coiled bandages and stockpiled medicines, Sez and her generals poured over maps and plans, and Academy kids told themselves this was what they were for, excited stories of the heroics to come - and none of them knew, no matter how hard they tried, how much they would lose.

Rupert and Ann were patiently picking apart the forgetting field, decoding Rupert’s notes and piecing together a prototype rememberer. Grey helped them sometimes, and the rest of the time poured magic over the prosthetic Laney was trying out. She glared at him the first time he reached for it, gold spilling from his fingers, but he scowled and muttered about something he’d read, about wanting to be useful. He shaped magic over it to be warm and to help it fit snugly, and she watched with eagle eyed attention in case she ever wanted to replicate what he was doing.

They gathered for the first attempt of the rememberer. Ann pressed her hands to the wooden table as static filled her head, remembering the way they looked against smooth lab benches amid drips of sickly gold, the polished stone of a kitchen counter and the comforting press of a cat around her heels, the rickety wood of a market apothecary bench and the clamour of voices, Annie brushing a hand over her growing hair and teaching her how to make what she needed - and then they faded again, and she was staring at the familiar backs of her hands on a fish shop table scratched and worn with years of use.

Cass watched the bubbles of gold bursting on the other side of the room, and breathed out something that could have been a sigh, if she could afford to show such weakness. Grey stumped his way over to her later that evening and bluntly asked why she wasn’t helping with the forgetting field. Jack twitched towards the question, unsure if he should steer his friend into a less aggressive line of question when he wanted to know the answer too. She blinked long and slow.

“Maybe I don’t need to remember where I was, or what happened, or why they decided I could be erased.” He frowned.
“Don’t you want to know why you were there?” She shrugged, an elegant motion, and he scowled, because Grey hated answering questions but he also hated it when people didn’t answer his. “Who are you, anyway?”

The siege went on. Jack helped Leaf and Red train their new recruits for long afternoons, while Laney checked over their handfuls of firearms meticulously, and set up muffling wards with magic Grey pulled out of the air for her to practice shooting with her remaining hand in the evenings.

Her aim had always been better with her left, but her right seemed to shake a little, now, whenever it curled around the butt of a gun. She raised her arm and flinched from a blow that didn’t come, fighting an impulse to curl her hand close to her chest, to shield it. The curse had dug deep, bitter and toxic, a blight twisting in her veins, and the memory of it crept down her spine now. Jack wouldn’t have seen it, except soon after she was back on her feet Laney had cornered him to tell him, unprompted, that it hadn’t been his fault.

Grey had told Jack not to make this about him, and he looked at the firm gaze and level chin, relaxed shoulders and bandaged stump tucked neatly in a jacket pocket, and understood. Guilt was choking him, and he didn’t believe her, but he squeezed her shoulder gently and didn’t protest it.
“I know, Lane. But I wish I’d been able to do something, we all do. So - tell me. If there’s something I can do, just tell me, okay?”

Laney stole him away him one evening to teach him how to feel the walls of the world, because this was something she had earned, and even if it turned out she couldn’t tear the world open again she could still do this - she could still teach someone to hold fire in their cupped hands. When they figured out that her precise cuts weren’t the cause of the rifts springing open across Rivertown, Jack would be the first she told - Rupert busy with schedules and Grey grumpily napping after pouring fire into the wards. He pressed his shoulder to hers, and grinned.
“Laney Jones, mage. You know, I hear she’s the lady of the lake reborn…”

She would port them both out the next morning (after she told Rupert, and checked Jack’s schedule) so that they could breathe in the cool mountain air, the warm mix of baking bread and wood smoke on the breeze as they walked over the rise to the Bakery. Jack’s shoulders dropped, a tension he hadn’t known he was carrying reflexively released. Laney pulled the neck of her jacket closed, shivering, but her stump didn’t ache with the cold, the polished wood and leather always comfortably warm against healed skin.

When they got back, laden with snow cookies and lists of potential allies from Bea (Liam gave them both hugs that cracked their spines and Bidi tucked crayon masterpieces in their pockets), Laney would start asking around for who had shown a talent for weaving the rifts closed, for those who didn’t have fire at their fingertips and ached for it. She had made this, and she couldn’t lose it.

She had done it and people knew, now, that it could be done. They had more of a starting point than she’d had, a stubborn child pressing her hand against the desert sky until she felt something under the palm of her hand, so she had to teach them how to do it right, safely, how to ward it so you didn’t pull in every scrap of magic around you, every mage who didn’t have something to shield them.

Grey curled his fingers around the spine of his book and looked at the ink splattered over them. When they went to break Rupert out, Ann had suggested they pack up anything they wanted to take with them - they had known they were unlikely to be heading home anytime soon. In with Laney’s pack was a locked briefcase, untouched since they ferried it in from Miz Eliza’s van. He stared at his fingertips for hours, and the next day he asked Laney for the key. His father had built these machines, and Thorne had been building them too, in his hidden research department, because he knew it could be done. Everyone in the mountains knew it was possible, so maybe it was up to Grey to show them how to do it right.

The first blows against the golden walls of Rivertown came on a day like any other - Jack was on watchtower duty on the side by the Academy, and the world shook as disguised mages struck the barrier. It held, splintered but still standing, and he pushed himself to his knees to take sight. One of the attackers went down, a bullet in his legs and Jack fell with him, palms hitting wood and breath gasping in his lungs.

He remembered hitting the ground so many times in a lab he could now remember, frenzewood in his veins and Rupert just feet away, Ann - Jill - looking upset and sorry, a mug he remembered her asking him to lift down cradled in his friend’s palms.

He remembered Cassandra Graves, slow smirks and poison dripped in open wounds, the Seeress and her dark web, a girl sitting straight backed in an inn, talking about freedom, about choice, her every movement polished and her masks not yet perfect.

“Who are you, anyway?” Grey had sniped, and she had watched the bubbles burst around him as she told him, because the Seeress had never forgotten - and Jack remembered Grey, eyes soft, talking about how he’d chosen his name to keep his sister close.

In the mountains, the nightmares had a name and face, now. Bea reached for the edge of the table, cold recollections settling back into place. Liam buried his face in his daughters hair until the shudders passed. He had met the Seeress just once, and she had smiled coldly as she estimated his value, how many days he would last, how much his life was worth. She had murmured that it was a pity his sister was powerless, and he had stopped thinking about how young she looked, this teenager with an iron spine and dark, empty eyes.

(In Saint John’s Port, Spider did not pause as the memories washed over him. He kept walking, brisk but unhurried, down the main corridor of t he Quiet Branch. He walked out into the street and disappeared long before Thorne, glaring at incomplete blueprints and failed prototypes as Jeremiah sweated nervously, even knew to look for him.)

Grey wasn’t in Sally-Anne’s when the field fell, so it was the Seeress Jack saw first. She turned to him, tall and controlled, and hissed that if he dared hurt Sam she would see him burn. She watched everything in him shriek defiance at the thought, and flinched. She saw everything, or nearly everything, but she hadn’t understood - she didn’t understand that someone could look at either of her father’s children and see them as anything else. She didn’t understand that his fury was at the continued deception, not the first frantic lies. But she understood this - the Giantkiller would rather burn than see anything hurt Sam, so what was the point of her, here?

When he slunk into the fish shop that evening, Grey was hiding in the hunch of his own shoulders. He didn’t know who he was looking for, or who he was expecting to find waiting for him, but it was Laney who dropped an arm around his shoulders as he came through the door, smiling politely at everyone who turned to stare to tell them to mind their own business. Grey leaned into it, this steady promise that someone had his back. Jack twitched in his direction and Grey flinched away, watching the way Jack froze, hand outstretched. Grey remembered crouching in the rain, staring at the Giantkiller like he was a nightmare made real.

Sandry was waiting in the room he shared with Jack, something soft and fragile in the way she said his name. Grey buried his face in her shoulder and for a moment let himself pretend that she was just his big sister, that there weren’t other people who would have felt this like a blow.

In the night, Wren came with a knife and a handful of elsewhere cracks. She didn’t want to hurt Grey, she didn’t, but she had lived so long with this fear. Taking away the name and face had done nothing for the terror, just made it something that couldn’t be touched, couldn’t be outrun. Her daughter was too afraid to sleep, now, after weeks spent running carelessly past the Seeress every day.

Jack was asleep downstairs in the infirmary, because he hadn’t wanted to disturb Rupert when he realised that the Seeress had fallen asleep in the room he shared with Grey, her brother curled up with his head resting on her lap. He slept lightly, so he heard the stairs, the creak of a door. He padded up into the main room to see what was going on and heard the low hum of voices, but he didn’t hear Grey gasping for breath. He dithered in the dark room, unsure, unease rolling in his gut, and when Wren came back down the steps she faltered. His eyes flickered to the knife still in her hand, and dread curled in the back of his throat, sharp and sour.
”What did you do?“ She shook her head, slow, and made her way down the last step.
"Proved that I didn’t need to be afraid anymore. Tell the kid I really am sorry.”

He heard the street door close as he ran for the landing, skidding to a halt as the last elsewhere stone skittered over the floor. He picked it up and the glow spilled through his fingertips, lighting his slow way back down the stairs and throwing stark shadows on the floor.

The bedroom door clicked open again, soft, while Sam was still shuddering himself back to breathing. The Giantkiller slipped in, guilt and sorrow twisting through every hunched inch of his shoulders, two mugs in hand. He pressed one into Grey’s trembling fingers, and left the second on the table between the beds without a word, honey and chamomile warm on the Seeress’ tongue.

Jill asked Laney to take her along to Saint John’s Port when she and Jack went to rally support for the fledgling independence of Rivertown. She wanted to see Marian and Much, who had had no memories resorted in a flood of information, and to send word to Annie, who had, and to see if someone could check on her cats and make sure her sister knew to feed them - she didn’t dare go herself, because Thorne knew where she lived and Jill wasn’t about to fall into that trap so easily.

Marian glanced dismissively at Jack and listened passively to Laney, face a mask. Jill watched the gears turning, weighing up decisions, the cost of support and the values she cared about. Jill had never known Robin, but she watched the tilt of Marian’s brows and wondered if he hadn’t been a fair bit like Farris. She wondered if Marian didn’t like Jack because she thought he was a fool, or because she was wary of falling into another burning cause.

When Marian turned to her to demand what had brought her into this fight, to scathingly ask whose pretty words and charming smile she’d fallen for, Jill told her.

She had been a young woman looking to make a difference, and Thorne had offered one up on a silver plate - even if the difference he’d wanted wasn’t what she’d built. She had seen a dying boy, a mage burning gold in an underground laboratory, and she’d carved herself in two to try and save him. She had been saving them for years, and when Thorne got suspicious he hadn’t even deigned to speak to her, to ask why, just had her removed. She suspected he had partly just wanted to see if he could, and thought that she was disposable enough to test it on.

She also told Marian about the curse, the plague that had spilt into the water of St John’s Port and brought Marian’s people to the brink of death, because Jill understood that Marian wasn’t interested in burying her heart in anything other than the world she’d built for herself out of the shadows of this town. Ann hadn’t known why there was a ghost of anger twisting in her stomach as she ladled medicines and water in a soup kitchen turned sickbay, but Jill knew the Bureau’s research facilities, knew where their waste pipes came out. She knew exactly how fragments of a curse could get so easily into the water only their poorest drank from.

Jack was subdued, when they got back to Rivertown, brittle and trying to hide it behind a sunshine smile. Jill dragged him out to find herbalists to gossip with, trading not recipes and notes, and there was something desperate in the way he thanked them for their time.

Frustrated, thwarted, Thorne struck at the Giantkiller’s soft spot, a peaceful little bakery in a valley shadowed by darker things, and he was striking at Laney’s too - they would wonder, for years, who he had been trying to hurt. The Giantkiller, for not falling for Thorne’s pretty words? Or Laney, for smiling like she meant it and pretending she was bought in, another stray brought in from the cold, keeping her own counsel under smooth words and careful eyes.

Laney and Jack ran for the mountains through fire that burned gold, and the dragons got there first, Liam’s anguish and Bidi’s fury calling them like a beacon. Bidi cheerfully translated the dragons’ crooning while Liam smoothed shaky, soothing circles on her mother’s back and planned what to do next. Jack smiled, relief still so fresh that it almost hurt, and flinched when she told him his name. Laney frowned at him, and he avoided her gaze by looking at his hands. They were clean, aside from a smear of yellow crayon from helping Bidi colour, but they felt heavy with old battles, old losses. In his mind, they dripped red, stained in the whorls and creases.

They knew this would be the spark to tinder, Thorne nothing but blackened bones and his Bureau after revenge. When Laney stalked out to speak to Shay, spine straight and ready to tear the Elsewhere open into an escape route at the drop of a hat, she was somehow not surprised to find a familiar gangly figure waiting for her. She wrinkled her nose, but she wasn’t about to turn down an ally she knew Shay would listen to, not with all of the lives behind the golden wards depending on her.

Laney had been supposed to be a peacekeeper, her mother’s daughter weighing arguments and speaking calmly, building safety with every perfectly stitched tent, but it was Rivertown mud that caked her boots not desert sand when she sat down to negotiate for peace. Listening over the comms, Jack heard Shay’s startled breath a moment before Spider dropped a greeting, a casual declaration of whose side he was on.

Then he had no more time to listen, as Laney spat out crimes and deceptions that went deeper than security, because there was mage light and gunshots and he thought the roof of his station might actually be a little bit on fire. The golden wall before him shuddered and splinters and he swung down the ladder, because if anyone got through it would all go downhill fast. A bullet caught him in the leg as he set foot on the street and he went down.

Someone stepped over him, scooping one of Laney’s old pistols off the floor where it had fallen from his grip, and for a moment the Seeress met his eyes before she was took precise aim, three shots and three cut off voices from outside. Jack pushed himself up a s best he could, and Cassandra was trembling, her hands clenched around the butt of the pistol, staring out through the shimmering wall.
“I made Spider teach me, when my father said it wasn’t…ladylike. I wanted to - I wanted something I could do, if they ever came for Sam.”

Hissing in pain, he tore his shirt to pieces for a rough bandage, something that would hold long enough for help to come, and he hauled himself to his feet, dragging himself along to the breach. Cass was darting glances at it, and he jerked his head, an old exhaustion pulling at his bones.

“If you’re going, go. I’ve gotta close it up either way, so pick which side you want to be on.“ She slipped through, and he ignored her when she held the gun out to him. He met her gaze, cold and placid the way it had been when they were younger, sitting across from each other in an inn with imperfect masks.

"This isn’t forgiveness,” he said, and she blinked, slow and startled. He swallowed. “But I don’t know how I could ever make you pay for what you’ve done, and I know it would hurt Grey as much as you. The kid deserves better than that. I promised I wouldn’t hurt him.” He reached for the feeling of fire on his skin, and when he looked up she was gone. The world was going grey around the edges, blood loss taking its toll, and he rested his head back on the repaired shield wall and waited for help to come.

He was out of the Infirmary cot early, carried in before the ceasefire and flooded with gold by a trembling Grey. Rue shoved a pair of crutches at him and barked directions as the wounded came in, and he was almost used to the awkward hop required by the time Jill stumbled in on one side of a limp Red. Jack lurched toward them, almost falling, and Rue snapped at him to leave it to the professionals. He took over looking after Weeds, the way he had years ago after hauling the boy out of the way of a bully’s next kick, so he was in the room when Leaf clattered in, an empty space at his shoulder and a blindside he rarely thought to check. He watched Leaf take stock, the way he went still, the desperate, shallow gasp for breath, and remembered stumbling through the bakery door, hands stained red and a crying child clutched in his arms.

As the rubble settled, Laney produced a file of careful notes that Spider had slipped into her hands as they parted ways after talking Shay around - Bureau records of names, addresses, locations, and a fair few he’d added himself, in a clinical report, people the Spider had seen stolen away and done nothing about, because he’d been weaving a web to bring it all down and he couldn’t lose the Graves’ trust until he was ready. Jill ran her fingers over the list of names, and went to pack a bag. Jack tagged along, leg still stiff and sore but no longer on crutches, because he thought they should have an extra sword on hand, because he thought he owed it to all of the the people he hadn’t been able to save.

Jill was breathing steady, a weight she had carried for years lightened even if it could never be fully discarded. Some things you never leave behind, and she knew better than to try. But she had come full circle, the girl who tore herself in two in hopes of saving a life and failed, sitting across from a family who’d never known what happened and listening to every story they could give her.

She set off the next week, with promises to write, and Miz Eliza gave her the address of her home in the desert in case she was travelling that way. Miz Eliza didn’t have much day to day need of the kind of biomedical chemistry Jill worked on, but she had time for anyone her son counted as a friend. Liam and Bea rattled into Rivertown not long after, Bidi perched on her father’s lap, and swept them up into a road trip to the desert. Jack had heard about the dunes and the endless sky for years, was familiar with the taste of the thick tea Laney had pretended she didn’t miss until she found someone who had the correct spices tucked away and was willing to share.

He sat sprawled in the backseat of the van and listened to Rupert and his mother talk about digs, childhood adventures and the bustle of markets. He sat in the cooling sand around the fire to hear Liam sing, one voice in many, watching the faces around him for the pieces of his friends he recognised there, thinking about all of the parts of himself that he knew were built from other people.

Jack asked Laney to port him up to the mountains, when they were back home, to a hill covered in white flowers he had visited just once before. She offered to stay and didn’t push when he asked her to go. He sat on a rock to ease his aching leg and tried to give voice to everything he’d never had a chance to say, but it caught in his throat and all that hit air was sobs, salt drying on his face and his shoulders shaking, bowed with grief.

The sun was setting, gilding the flowers red, when he pushed himself to his feet to head back down the road to meet Laney. He had a list of ointments to make for Rue and a promise to meet Rupert at lunchtime to look at flats big enough for four, a timetable for Leaf’s fledgling police force in his pocket in case he had the chance to swing by and give out advice. There was a weight he’d picked up in these mountains that he would never set aside, but there was a path before his feet as well.

He woke early the next morning, wrapping a hedge witch spelled blanket around his shoulders and making tea as quietly as he could so as not to wake the others. He curled his palms around it as he sat by the window, watching the grey dawn sky turn gold with the sunrise.