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1.
“We could have stayed the night in a tavern,” Gideon despairs. The giant rat at her feet opens its horrid maw to gnaw at the hem of her pants; she kicks at it, batting the flat of her greatsword across its slimy snout. “We passed one, barely four miles back. We could be eating breakfast right now.”
Palamedes blinks. There’s a spot of crust at the corner of his eye that he desperately wants to scratch away—unfortunately, his hands are currently filled with coils of dandelion-yellow flame, and the last time he burned his cornea off, it took a full week for his vision to return to normal. He focuses, and sends the roiling ball of fire towards the rat nearest Harrow, who is slightly preoccupied building an armor of spectral bone icicles around her chest.
“Sausages,” Gideon bemoans, stabbing her giant rat directly through the gelatin of its eyeball. Blood splatters out in a sludgy, wine-red arc. How she can think of eating breakfast with the smell of rancid flesh and burnt hair so permeated through the air is a mystery Palamedes thinks he might never solve.
“Next time,” Harrow snaps, primly, “you can front the gold for all of us to stay in an inn.” She lays a gloved hand on the singed rat before her, and it rots away in seconds, skin sloughing off crumpled, decaying bones. “And if you speak of meat again, I will vomit all over you, and I won’t even be sorry about it.”
The morning had gone something like this:
Palamedes awoke with a leisure that was rarely afforded to him. There was a warmth surrounding him, spread around his shoulders like softened butter, concentrated by his temple. Languid with sleep, he turned his face towards the source of that cozy heat, pressing his nose to it. It wasn’t until his makeshift pillow shifted beneath him that he realized what he was actively snuggling into was Camilla’s thigh—Palamedes shot up, sniffling to full awareness, heart thudding one-two-three decisive beats against his ribcage.
Luckily, Gideon and Harrow appeared to be preoccupied with something over by the cooking pot, a few meters away—it was the low bubbling that had woken him, Palamedes noted, and it smelled divine—and Camilla only sent him a look of fond amusement, reaching a hand out to straighten what he was sure was some atrocious bedhead. “Careful with that fire,” she warned their companions, plucking his curls into some semblance of order. Palamedes tried not to list into the touch, despite how nice it felt—Gideon and Harrow always sent him these looks, like, you pathetic smitten idiot you are fooling absolutely nobody, the likes of which he did not feel up to receiving and compartmentalizing, at the moment. “The merchant we saw yesterday told me the giant rats around here have learned to follow smoke.”
Gideon halted before their campfire, mid-poke. “Really?” she intoned.
Harrow, who Palamedes loved, but had the tendency to be a teensy bit of an egoist, scoffed. “Rodents of unusual size?” she asked, dry. “I don’t think they exist.”
That, of course, was when the first of those wretched creatures leapt from the brush, sinking its horrible, carrot-shaped teeth into the questionably extant meat of her shoulder.
Harrow did not scream, but Gideon did—and then they had all sprung into action, Palamedes throwing his first of many healing spells of the morning her way, Camilla unsheathing her double-edged blades and burying them in the meat of the creature’s neck. The rats swarmed. There were not enough of them for Palamedes to be seriously concerned, but there were certainly enough for him to wish he’d had more time to wake up, to put all the parts of his brain back where they belonged, to slide the sense-memory of Camilla’s fingers on his scalp into a tightly sealed box for future consideration.
Now, with a hand still full of maple-flame, Palamedes scans the battlefield, born of their campsite like blood from a wound. There’s Gideon, a whirl of muscle and sinew, cleaving through monstrous creatures as though they’ve been laid out on her dinner plate—and Harrow, a solid twenty feet away, draining moisture from their enemies until they slump to the ground in dehydrated skin-sacks. But where’s—
“Hey!” a voice sounds from directly behind him—echoing, imbued with a magic signature more familiar to him than even his own. Palamedes spins, just in time to watch the vicious, poison-tipped teeth of the nearest rat fall away from his side. It turns towards the warrior who had compelled it to duel. “Warden,” Camilla calls, shifting her stance. “The double tap?”
A savage grin crosses Palamedes’s face, and he nods. When Camilla dodges the rat’s bite, and holsters her sword between its ribs, he reaches out, feels for the metal atoms among all that organic matter, and pushes. The blade glows red-hot, and the rat squeals, writhes, before keeling over. Palamedes releases the spell just in time for Camilla to pull the sword free, the wound instantly cauterized, the shining metal free of viscera.
“Thank you,” Palamedes says, because he knows it will make Camilla roll her eyes.
She does, of course, lips twitching into the tiniest of smiles. The graceful motion of her strides towards him sends something inside his chest clattering. Nudging his shoulder, she murmurs, “Pay attention to your surroundings, Warden, and you won’t have anything to thank me for.”
A trio of rats approaches, seemingly not having gotten the message from the vacuum-sealed, burned, stabbed, and otherwise desiccated forms of their kin. They stumble blindly over each other, teeth bared. Palamedes laces his fingers together, stretches them forward, feeling the light burn in his overwarm shoulder blades. He looks dead ahead at the sun creeping over the tree line. “Now that is a lie,” he says.
2.
One of the many lessons Palamedes learned from his mother was that of the Party. A Party, she told him, when he asked her the most important thing for an aspiring adventurer to have, is a group that comes together to embellish each other’s strengths, and eradicate each other’s weaknesses. It is composed of those who have sworn themselves to each other, to make themselves greater than the sum of their parts.
Even at the age of nine, Palamedes took her definition to heart. When he and Cam set out to travel the realm, he ensured that the companions they kept had complementary skill sets—really, though, it’s only recently that he’s begun to understand the line about being greater than the sum of their parts. He thinks of his mother when he and Camilla complete the double tap, when Harrow provides crucial magical insight towards his latest potion, and when Gideon slams through a door with a lock none of them can pick.
He also thinks of his mother on the rare occasion her maxim utterly fails him.
Palamedes stares down at the strip of leather in his hands. It feels… nice, and sturdy—smooth, when he runs the pads of his fingers across its surface. There are leather loops sewn neatly along the side, along with a couple longer, thinner pockets, presumably for knives. A little stiffer than Cam’s, but perhaps that’s just because it’s new, and needs to be broken in?
As an alchemist, Palamedes usually finds himself in need of the most groceries—herbs to experiment with, parchment to jot down notes upon, various spell components Harrow pretends not to mooch off of him. Thus, in the name of expediency, he’s fallen into the role of the group’s shopper. He keeps track of their collective gold, and all of their respective expenses. This hadn’t posed a problem until that morning, when Gideon asked him to “grab her one of those things Cam hangs her little daggers and grenades off,” because she “wanted to try it out.”
Palamedes knows his lack of knowledge surrounding the value of martial weaponry and its associated trappings is a weakness—a weakness that feels decidedly un-eradicated, hovering alone in the shop like a deer in the middle of the road. But it’s not like he can leave empty handed. If Gideon thought his mistaken reference to learning sword fighting from a book was hilarious, she would never let him live this down.
It’s one bandolier, he thinks, a little hysterically. What could it cost, ten gold pieces?
The man at the counter of the shop has been zeroed in on him for five minutes. He’s looking at Palamedes in a way that suggests he knows just exactly how far out of his depth Palamedes is, which he hates, on principle. “Any questions?” he asks, just slightly pointed.
Palamedes sighs, resigning himself to being utterly swindled. He makes his way over to the counter, resting his hand holding the leather down on the treated wood. It’s slightly sticky, pulling against the skin of his forearm. “How much for this?”
“Three gold,” the man says, promptly, and—that’s less than Palamedes was expecting, actually. Which, in turn, makes him more suspicious. The merchant’s face betrays absolutely nothing, so Palamedes sighs, reaching towards the back of his belt for the coin purse.
“Oh, come on,” Camilla says, appearing over his shoulder. Palamedes thinks he might have never been more grateful to hear her voice in his entire life. Casually, she folds her hand over his, raising the bandolier up to her scrutinizing eye. He takes a moment to pray, directionless, that she can’t feel the way his pulse races beneath the skin of his wrist. “That’s a total robbery. Unless this thing lays diamond eggs, we’ll pay five silver for it.”
The merchant narrows her eyes at her, grumbles something that sounds a lot like What is this, a sting? “Nine silver, and I’ll include a thimble of polish for it.”
“Deal,” Camilla says. She tilts her head to Palamedes, and he hurries to extract nine gleaming silver pieces from the coin purse. The shopkeeper accepts them with a nod, holding out a small tin container to Camilla, whom he seems to have assumed to be the person in charge, which—is fair. “Thanks, have a good one,” Camilla announces, throwing an arm over Palamedes’s shoulder, lightly steering him towards the door.
“Do not tell Gideon, please,” he mutters, as soon as they’re out of earshot, leaning down to speak lowly against her ear.
Camilla gives him a look of perfect innocence, all wide eyes and barely parted lips. “Why, Warden, I would never.”
“I can haggle.”
“Undoubtedly, Warden.”
“I just—need to know what the item is worth. Or have any frame of reference for it.”
“Indubitably, Warden.”
Palamedes narrows his eyes. “Are you agreeing solely to appease me, Camilla Hect?”
Camilla’s gaze flickers over to him, and then back to the stretch of marketplace ahead of them. “Inconceivable, Warden.”
Sometimes, Palamedes finds himself actually physically dizzy to look at her. Smooth hair shining glossy in the noon sunlight, dark eyelashes smearing across her cheekbones when she blinks, the faint spot of sunburn blushed across the bridge of her nose. It’s moments like these, when her cavern-clay eyes alight with amusement, when her mouth twitches up at the corner, revealing the edge of her sole asymmetrical dimple, that make the breath flee from his lungs. Want curls itself like a fishhook around his sternum, giving sharp, upward tugs.
“You alright?” Cam intones, turning back towards him, brow twitching in concern.
Palamedes nods, swallows. “Just a bit dehydrated, I think,” he says. “Where did you leave Gideon and Harrow, and what are the odds they’ve already gotten into trouble?”
Camilla snorts. She jerks her chin towards a bar on the other side of the marketplace—if Palamedes focuses, he can hear the low rumblings of some kind of nonsense, decidedly from that direction. “I don’t wish to gamble on it,” she says.
“Well,” Palamedes says, holding an arm out. Camilla slips her hand around the crook of his elbow. “Let’s go fetch our Party, then.”
3.
“It’s a nice room,” Camilla says, mildly.
Objectively, Palamedes agrees. It’s more spacious than they’re used to, beautifully wrought windows he’s already cast Alarm on, impressively ugly blue plaid-patterned wallpaper that’s only just begun to peel at the edges. It smells nice, too, a mixture of soft floral soaps and the warm bakery aroma drifting up from the floor below. The problem, though—
“I guess we—might as well take advantage,” Palamedes says, haltingly. Referring, of course, to the room’s distinct pair of twin beds, separated by a side table and two extra meters of scratched wood flooring.
The room is nice because Gideon booked it, and she is easily swayed by the promise of an included continental breakfast. The beds are separate, Palamedes assumes, because she and Harrow are still pretending they aren’t sleeping together, and have projected this insecurity onto he and Camilla, who share a bed very platonically and normally.
“Sure,” Camilla agrees, not sounding terribly convincing—then again, neither did he, and she didn’t call him out on it. So maybe this is one of those rare things they just aren’t going to talk about.
They get ready for sleep in companionable silence, the type born of a love and familiarity older than Palamedes’s earliest creations. Even moving around Camilla serves to relax some taut thing deep inside him, such that Palamedes thinks he might actually fall asleep when he crawls into bed.
This, of course, is a folly of the highest order.
Not that he doesn’t try. Palamedes lies very still, eyes neatly closed, noting academically the lack of pressure around his calves and waist and arms. He recites the ritual components for the Identify spell, and then the verbal and somatic for Purify Food and Drink. He goes through the alterations he can make to the various infusions in the bag beneath the bed. He blinks, stares up at the ceiling until his eyes adjust to the dark, and then turns to look at Camilla.
She’s facing away from him, the curve of her back illuminated by the thinnest strip of dimmed moonlight, motionless as she only ever is in deep sleep. Palamedes watches the minute rise and fall of her chest for a long moment, decides not to analyze how that makes him feel, and instead slides deftly and silently to his feet, snatching the bag from under his bed.
He makes his way out onto the communal terrace, looking out at the town they’ve chosen to stop in, silent in sleep. Then, stifling a yawn, he begins to sort through the scrap bits of material in his bag, snapping his fingers gently to wake the magic in them.
He’s barely four minutes into constructing a new pair of Sending Stones when footsteps approach from behind. Palamedes doesn’t startle. He would know the sound of her movement underwater. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” he murmurs, glancing up at Camilla. “I apologize.”
Camilla settles down gracefully beside him, pressing lightly into his side. “You didn’t wake me,” she says. Then, she nods down at the mess of pebble grit and loose magic in his lap. “What’s this?”
Palamedes clears his throat. “Attempting to alter the spell on the Stones,” he explains. “I’m trying a workaround for the word limit, because that’s already such a fuzzy concept across dialects, so—if you work a Comprehend Languages into the space between specific verbiage and larger, more metaphorical conceptualization, like magical shorthand—”
Humming in agreement, Camilla settles her head against his shoulder. Palamedes continues, cracking two distinct puzzles just by explaining them to her. By the time he’s done, his cheek has come to rest against her hair. He can smell the sweet-spiced vanilla scent of her shampoo, can feel the low noises of acknowledgement she makes, as the line of her throat brushes against his shoulder. The stillness of the night has settled within him. He yawns, aborted.
Camilla blinks, straightening—he feels bereft of her contact for only a moment before her arm winds around his waist. “Let’s turn in,” she suggests. By now, Palamedes is truly far too sleep-heavy to disagree.
They make their way back to the room. Palamedes immediately notices the change—the two twin beds have been pushed together, the nightstand shoved dismissively out of the way, blankets stretched over both mattresses. A liquid warmth fills his chest, gratitude as golden-yellow as blooming dandelions. Immediately, he collapses into bed. When Camilla climbs in next to him, he curls around her, resting his face in the crook of her neck. She stretches her legs out with a small noise, and then tangles them between his, closing the soles of her feet around one of his ankles.
If asked, Palamedes would say they started sleeping like this so long ago it was difficult to remember, but that’s not quite true—he still remembers the first time it mattered. She was thirteen and two months, and he was twelve and eleven, both of them newly sworn to the service of the Library. He’d woken from some discomforting dream, and she’d been there—his paladin, his forever protector, as he was hers, from the moment they’d been old enough to lift swords and spin magic. She had soothed his trembling breath, and then pulled his head against her chest, the closeness a function of comfort instead of necessity. “I’ll wake you if anything happens,” she had whispered, which was true, because even with the Alarm spell cast he was a horribly slow riser, and she slept lighter than air.
For eight years—and change—it’s been more than enough, to hold her close nearly every night, to feel her heart beat its methodical rhythm. Palamedes blinks into the hollow of her collarbone. He wants, with a ferocity that has since ceased to be surprising, to press his lips to that divot of skin, to feel her pulse beneath his mouth.
He doesn’t. He lets his eyes flutter closed, and falls asleep as easy as the setting sun.
4.
“So, you’re an artificer?”
The woman currently hovering over the barstool beside his is—pretty, by someone’s standards. There’s a gossamer elegance to her delicate features, her long, blonde hair. Beneath that, though, the twist of her mouth hovers somewhere between condescension and predatorial. The gaunt line of her cheeks is unpleasantly familiar. In a pub front so crowded with livelihood and motion and breath, she is a decided spot of desaturation.
“I haven’t met very many, is all,” the woman continues. “True intellectuals, in my experience, tend to go for wizardry, given the flexibility of the study. Ianthe, by the way.” She holds a hand out—so pale her blue veins stand out like ink scribbles on parchment, with long, manicured nails.
“Palamedes,” Palamedes says, shaking her hand, which is unsurprisingly very cold and a bit clammy. He’s trying to remember where, exactly, this conversation began, but he’s at least two drinks in and the stuff is making his head a bit fuzzy.
Ianthe mouths the four syllables to herself, raising an eyebrow. She hasn’t let go of his hand. The nail of her pointer finger twitches upwards, presses ever-so-delicately against the inside of his wrist. “What brings you to this side of the river, Palamedes?” she drawls.
This, as Harrow might say, is the nightmare scenario. On sheer, panicked instinct, Palamedes shifts his gaze around the room, flickering around until he finds Cam. She’s more towards the back of the pub, and, from the look of it, currently hustling some mercenaries at darts. Palamedes goes to send a Message her way from under the table, but before he can even flick a finger out, she turns, and meets his eyes.
Camilla takes in his current predicament with a rare and unreadable set to her mouth. She tilts her head—he gives her the barest nod. “My Party’s getting ready to set out for the mountains tomorrow,” Palamedes says to Ianthe, who doesn’t seem to have noticed his drift in attention. “There’s tale of some rare abjurative artifacts—”
“Interesting,” Ianthe says, in a tone that says she might indeed find it interesting, but whatever she’s about to say is more interesting and should therefore take precedence. “So, what you mean to say is that you’ll be staying at least the night.”
“There you are,” Camilla announces. She slides in next to him, wraps an easy arm around his waist, neatly dislodging Ianthe’s grip on his hand. And then, with a slight widening of her eyes—is this okay?—she leans towards him. Palamedes, without thinking, angles his chin closer. With one soft movement, she plants a kiss on the corner of his mouth, as sweet and effortless as if it’s something they do all the time. Palamedes’s heart catches so violently in his chest that he barely hears her low, “Doing okay, baby?”
“Oh, that is so sad,” Ianthe relents, rolling her eyes. She turns to a finely dressed bard, who, in the interim, has come to stand beside her. “Babs, play D—”
Whatever song she’s requested of the bard, Palamedes doesn’t hear. His ears are ringing, playing those two syllables in her drink-rough voice over and over again. “Fine,” he finds his mouth saying. “Good. You?”
Ianthe must still be looking at them, because Cam noses against his temple, humming noncommittally. “Kind of tired, honestly,” she says, breath warm on his ear.
That part, at least, isn’t a lie—Palamedes can see it in the slope of her shoulders, can hear it in the slight drag of her vowels. “Darling,” he murmurs, shifting slightly to cup her face in his hands, an indulgence on which he will absolutely blame the drinks he’s had, if asked. Camilla shivers. He strokes a soothing thumb over her cheekbone. “We can head out, if you like.”
For a moment, the entire world narrows to this: Camilla’s lidded eyes, the deep brown of speckled shells—her lips, slightly parted, lips which he now knows feel softer than down feather—the relaxed line of her brow, the edge of that sole dimple coming into view as she gives him a tiny, radiant smile. “Sure,” she says. “Let’s go.”
Dimly, Palamedes hears the bard mutter something to the tune of Is that allowed?, but he doesn’t bother to look, sliding easily off of the barstool. “It was nice to meet you, Ianthe,” Palamedes says, because he’s not rude.
“Oh, likewise,” Ianthe drones, waving them off.
They exit into the cool night air, Camilla’s arm still wrapped easily around his waist, his own arm curling over her shoulders. She bumps her head companionably against his chest, a sign of nonverbal affection she’s picked up from Harrow, who Palamedes sometimes thinks was polymorphed from a cat into a human being. After a few minutes of aimless strolling through the muffled streets, they come to a rest at the door of their current lodgings. “She seemed nice,” Cam notes, blandly.
They glance at each other for a moment, and then burst into ridiculous, furtive giggles. “I think she tried to neg me, Nine Hells,” Palamedes gasps, wiping tears from his streaming eyes.
“Part of me honestly expected her to unhinge her jaw and swallow you whole,” Camilla says, barely more composed than he is.
“Well,” Palamedes says, “thank you for the rescue, Cam.”
Camilla smiles, and it takes him instantly back to that moment in the pub—the way her mouth had felt against his ear, when she’d called him baby. His heart clenches in on itself, a strained and strange and sweet kind of pain. “Any time, Warden,” she says.
Palamedes takes a long breath in, and lets it out, slowly. He folds that feeling neatly and files it away.
5.
“Oh, for the love of Kelemvor’s wretched belt,” Gideon espouses, pulling her horse up by the side of the road.
“What, Nav?” Harrow snaps, stiffening—an impressive feat, considering how stiffly she was already sitting, due to her general distaste for horseback riding. She also declines to complain about the vain use of Kelemvor’s belt’s name, which Palamedes knows is a great effort on her part, and hopes Gideon appreciates. “It’s just a felled tree.”
Gideon runs a hand through her hair, sighing. “Actually, it’s a trap, my adumbral overlord,” she bites, gesturing towards the obstacle. “Not for us, mind, since we can just trot around it, but the caravan about forty minutes out will have a much tougher time.”
Palamedes and Camilla share a look. In her gaze, he reads amusement for the phrase adumbral overlord, mild impatience with their setback, and a firm determination he knows is mirrored on his own face. They’d left the city before the caravan, but they passed by while it was still being packed up. There are children aboard.
“Well,” Camilla says, hopping neatly off of her horse. “Let’s do some cleanup, then, shall we?”
Upon hearing this, Harrow tilts her head up towards the sky, as if to ask patience from some unseen deity. As she does so, the icey bone structures of her Armor of Agathys crystallize into being around her torso, just in time for the first round of arrows to hail from the bushes.
By now, the four of them are practiced enough at fighting alongside each other that the beginning steps are done almost unconsciously. Harrow grasps the charm around her neck, Misty Stepping onto a perch in the trees, far above the ground. Palamedes reaches out with both hands, channeling a modified cube of Faerie Fire on both sides of the road. Six figures crouched in the bushes, split in groups of three, begin to glow with heavenly golden light.
The slope of the road means that aside from Harrow, their enemies have the high ground—Gideon’s sent their horses galloping off, out of the way of crossfire. Palamedes is, admittedly, not a huge fan of this setup, but they’ve been in worse scrapes.
They get to work.
Harrow lets loose a volley of ice from her closed fists, spattering one side of the road with hail so cold it smokes in sublimation. Gideon charges towards the frozen archers, pulling the shield from her back to smack one of them across the face. Palamedes winces. They all try to deal nonlethal damage to other sentient beings, but that guy definitely has a concussion.
He and Cam take a moment to crouch behind the minute cover of the fallen tree before taking on the other bandits. Palamedes squints, pulling the requisite protons and electrons from the molecules in the air to create a mass of grease beneath the feet of the other archers. Cam’s daggers glow with holy light—she slashes out, cutting one of their foes in a thin line across the chest, stabbing the other blade into the shoulder of the one beside him. The bandits reach for her, one making contact with her shoulder—Palamedes sends a hefty rock catapulting his way, knocking him out cold. The others slip over the grease, sprawling out prone on the forest floor, before scrambling away.
After a few more moments, Harrow and Gideon return to the felled tree—Gideon is frowning, shaking bits of ice from her clothes and hair, but otherwise they look relatively unharmed. “Absolute amateurs,” Gideon says, shaking her head.
Palamedes looks to them, and then to Camilla, stomping to wipe the grease off of her boots. The danger has passed, but he still feels like—like there’s a wrong thing, here. Some gut notion that won’t let him relax. He turns to look the way they came.
An arrow whistles neatly through the air. Palamedes snaps his head around. His brain barely has time to register the thin metal object’s trajectory towards his chest before it thuds into flesh with a low squelch.
“Warden,” Camilla gasps, breath hitching around the arrow pierced newly through her neck. She sways towards him, and crumples to the ground.
1.
A few things happen in quick succession.
First—an inconceivable, white-hot mess of panic and rage screams into being within Palamedes’s chest. Without tearing his eyes away from Camilla, he reaches an arm out. A large hand of shimmering, translucent force shoots from his outstretched palm, slamming into the last remaining archer with impossible speed. It knocks him ten feet clear, back into the brush.
Second—Palamedes follows his paladin down. The wound looks—bad. He turns his gaze to her face, instead. Her lips are red with glazed blood. She mouths something, but he can’t make it out. His vision swims—he scrubs a sleeve over his glasses, but it doesn’t help.
“It would have pierced your heart,” Harrow notes, faintly.
It did, Palamedes thinks, with a desperate and fervent pain.
On the edge of his periphery, he sees Harrow shake her head, coming back to herself. “Sextus,” she says, sharply. “I am going to take the arrow out, and you need to be ready. Are you ready?”
“Do it,” he says. His voice sounds distant, far-away—someone else’s command, perhaps. But when Harrow moves and Camilla writhes, wheezing a high and whistled noise, he steadies. Reaches, deep down into himself, where the wellspring of power sits, so carefully cultivated by years of study and practice. Takes hold of it in one shaking hand. And pulls.
Everything is light, and heat. Atoms, moving too fast to see through. Power rushes in bullet waves through his hands—hands that have held her, never carefully enough. It’s not any spell he was ever taught. Nothing he learned from a book. Nothing he’s seen.
Gods, she would have his head for it.
Around them, the grass shoots up by meters, wildflowers blooming and stemming recursively. Bouquets of yellow dandelion petals mature into seed-heads, and explode in a shower of wisp-thin achenes. Palamedes keeps pulling and pulling, even after Camilla goes still and calm beneath him, even after hands grasp nervously at his shoulders. “It’s okay, she’s okay,” Gideon is saying, but the words might as well be Abyssal, for all they register meaning in his overwrought brain. Palamedes exhales one last pulse of sheer distilled life from shaking fingers before his vision wavers, slips, fails.
The last thing he hears before he tips over and faints is Harrow’s shrill, exasperated voice: “Oh, the pair of you deserve each other, you absolute and utter idiots.”
Palamedes wakes feeling raw as an open wound.
It’s curious—he tries the usual trick of poking around his own insides, sending little waves of Cure Wounds wherever he needs them, but even thinking about evocation magic makes his chest feel scraped apart. So, he settles back against the—the bed, soft mattress, cool sheets. Head propped up by at least a few pillows, which means Gideon’s still around, somewhere.
Slowly, like peeling open an orange, Palamedes blinks his eyes open. The room he’s in is smaller, sparsely decorated. There’s one window to his left, through which sunlight streams, the color of early morning. He’s swathed in clean white linen—still in his clothes from earlier, though, thankfully. And to his right—
Camilla sniffles, nose twitching, in the stage of sleep just before she wakes. Her neck, when he gathers enough courage to look, is a smooth plane of tanned skin, no wound anywhere to be found. Her eyes flutter open, and for a moment, they simply look at each other. Then, she says, “You look like shit, Warden.” Her voice is gravelly and rough and hers, and he could very nearly cry with it.
“He went into mana shock saving your life,” Gideon proffers from the doorway, because she is a total menace with no regard for his well being.
“Did he,” Cam says, expression—unreadable. Well, it isn’t unreadable, necessarily, it’s just that—Palamedes is, all of a sudden, so desperately afraid to try, for fear of what he might find there. Or what he might not find.
Gideon leaves, closing the door behind her. Slowly, like a flower blooming, Camilla reaches out, grazing a finger over Palamedes’s wrist. She draws back, but he catches her hand. Before he can even think about it, he draws her hand to his mouth, pressing a firm kiss to the knuckle of her second-right finger. “God, Cam,” he murmurs. “I’ve never been so scared in all my life.”
“I wasn’t,” Camilla says, simply. “Knew you’d save me.”
Palamedes stares. She meets his gaze, and in the clear blue light of morning it seems like everything else in the world falls apart. Every worry he’s ever had about pushing too far or asking too much is washed away, rendered infantile and unimaginable in the face of her absolute trust. He leans in, brow raising—is this okay?—and she meets him there, presses forward to kiss him.
Her mouth is dry, and cracked, and she tastes a little bit like the blood that had burbled up from her teeth while she died under his hands, and still every cell in his body comes alight with it. She fits a strong arm over his waist, pulling him closer to her, and he goes, trying to be at least a little smooth about it—judging by the way she laughs against his mouth, he guesses his movement was more of a scramble. Regardless, once curled over her he applies himself, reaching up to cup one of her cheeks, sucking at her bottom lip, delving in with his tongue when she gasps.
There’s so much to learn, here—the noises she makes when he runs his fingers down the side of her ribs, the way she shivers when their tongues curl together, the soft sigh of breath when he threads a hand through her hair. She arches into him, taking a moment to stretch her legs out before tangling them between his. That small, familiar detail warms him all the way through to his toes.
Palamedes doesn’t realize he hasn’t been breathing until Camilla draws back, and the need for oxygen reasserts itself. “There we go, Warden,” she commands, amused. She combs a hand through his hair as he takes a long, needling gasp. And—he can sink into that hand all he wants. Her nails scratch lightly over his scalp, and he lets out a low sound, tucking his chin over her shoulder. “Don’t want you asphyxiating on me.”
“But what a way to go,” he quips, nosing over the line of her jaw.
Camilla hums, taking his face in her hands, bringing their foreheads close. She nudges their noses together, mouth curving into that small and breathtaking smile. “I promise you,” she says. “Neither of us are going anywhere.”