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“They got away!” Astrid called from the other room.
Wulf allowed himself a second to be privately relieved before he turned and followed Archmage Ikithon into the room. The scorch marks from the teleportation spell were still visible on the floor.
“I just missed him,” Astrid said.
Ikithon looked at the marks on the floor, and then he looked hard into Astrid’s eyes. She didn’t flinch away from him, or even blink.
Eadwulf held his breath.
“They won’t be foolish enough to come back here,” Ikithon said. He walked out of the room and waved for Astrid and Eadwulf to follow him. “We might as well go home and wait for word there. Oh, and..." He turned and looked at them with a small smile that made Eadwulf’s stomach drop like he’d missed a step. “I could use the two of your help with a demonstration for the students, later today.”
Wulf looked at Astrid. She stroked a lock of bleached blonde hair out of her eyes and nodded. “Of course.”
He followed her down the stairs and bit his tongue. Was hast du gemacht, Astrid?
~*~
That afternoon, they entered Trent’s favorite classroom at the Academy. Trent was already there, along with his three youngest students. Wulf knew their faces, but not their names: There was the human boy with brown hair, the redheaded half-elf, and the dark-skinned gnome girl.
They stood in front of the three children, uncomfortable but trying not to let it show, awaiting instructions from the Archmage. They’d demonstrated spells and techniques to Ikithon’s students before, but usually not until they were sixteen or so. This group was brand new, and each of them was only fourteen or fifteen.
Ikithon was looking at them with a dark hunger, too. Eadwulf couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew, somehow, that they’d gone to warn Bren, and was just playing with them before he call them out.
“Astrid,” Ikithon said calmly, “kneel down.”
Five sets of confused eyes turned to Ikithon. He looked back calmly, waiting to be obeyed.
“My opponents in the field aren’t usually kneeling down,” Eadwulf said, hoping to spare Astrid the humiliation.
“Who said this was in the field?” Ikithon asked. “This is more of an execution situation. It’s irrelevant to the point of this lesson, and it will be easier this way.” He looked from Wulf to Astrid with cold fury. “Let’s begin.”
Astrid knelt, as if pushed down by the force of his anger. She faced Eadwulf, but looked down at the floor.
Eadwulf stood over her and tried not to think about the last woman he’d seen in that position, but he couldn’t quite shake the image from his mind. It had been the “High Priestess” of that illegal cult in Zedash; that beautiful, pale redhead. Wulf remembered the terror in her eyes as Wulf approached, covered in the blood of her cult sisters. She’d begged for her life; said she’d convert or go to prison or take a public flogging or give Wulf anything that he wanted... Wulf hated when they did that. Wulf wanted nothing from heathens and traitors to the Empire. Surely they knew that it wasn’t Wulf’s decision anyway?
He’d washed her blood off his hands in Zedash’s Temple to the Raven Queen.
“Now hurt her, Eadwulf,” Archmage Ikithon said calmly. His eyes flickered to the blonde on the floor. “Astrid, don’t resist.”
Wulf looked up. “In what way?” he asked, his voice only a bit quieter than usual.
“Badly.”
Eadwulf flexed his fingers. He couldn’t draw his blade. Not on Astrid. He didn’t want her blood all over his hands and robes.
It was just another of Trent’s tests, and not the hardest one that Wulf had ever taken. Ikithon didn’t say to kill her, he’d just said to hurt her. They’d played this game before, though not for several years, and last time, Astrid had been the torturer and Eadwulf the one who’d pissed off the Archmage.
She would forgive him. He had forgiven her immediately. They were forever equally guilty. Wulf just had to hurt Astrid badly enough to satisfy Ikithon, and then he’d let them leave, and Astrid would forgive him.
Wulf glanced around, making sure that the Archmage and the children were a safe distance away. They were, of course.
He took a step forward and he held out a hand, palm open, just above Astrid’s head.
Lighting flowed out of his palm like water. Astrid jumped a foot into the air and keened like a bitch, then landed hard on her left wrist and rolled to the floor, pressing her face into the stone as her breath came in sobs.
Eadwulf winced, and glanced up at the Archmage in a silent plea for mercy. Ikithon met Wulf’s gaze immediately, and there was no mercy in his eyes. They were not done yet.
Wulf took a deep breath and fired another arch of lightning into the small of Astrid’s back. Her scream echoed through the room, and Wulf saw the little half-elf girl take a step back as the smell of burnt flesh hit them all.
She backed right into Ikithon, who shoved her back in line with her peers. She’d regret that later, but Astrid would ultimately have a much worse day.
Wulf looked up at Ikithon again, and now he allowed the emotion to show on his face. That’s enough, he said with his eyes, but not with his mouth. She is badly hurt.
“Keep going, Eadwulf,” Ikithon said firmly.
Wulf looked back at Astrid and swallowed hard. He just had to hurt her badly enough, and Ikithon would call him off. She’d forgive him later. It wasn’t like either of them could do anything else. It wasn’t like she was fighting him. He just had to hurt her badly enough...
Clearly, this was going to require a careful touch.
He dropped a cloud of daggers on her.
She didn’t scream this time. She just whimpered and grunted as the blades dug into her flesh, ripping her robes and exposing a patch of jet black skin where the lightning hit her. It was quickly covered by scarlet blood.
Wulf looked up at Ikithon.
“Again,” Ikithon said calmly.
Wulf looked down at Astrid, and tried to calculate just how hurt she was and how much damage he was likely to do with various spells.
He dropped another cloud of daggers, and watched as spectral blades ripped chunks of her flesh off. When he was finished, she was trembling and whimpering into the floor.
Wulf looked at Ikithon.
Ikithon looked back calmly.
Astrid sobbed in the background.
“Don’t tire yourself out,” Ikithon said. “Try a cantrip this time.”
“This time?” Wulf repeated. “Archmage, she can’t take anymore.”
Ikithon raised an eyebrow, and a chill ran down Eadwulf’s spine. “Are you not prepared to bring her back?” the Archmage asked, as if Eadwulf were sixteen and had forgotten his homework in his dorm room.
“Of course I am,” Eadwulf said. He swallowed painfully and realized just how dry his throat was. “You’ll let me?”
“Of course. Why would you ever think that I wouldn’t?”
Did Wulf believe Ikithon? Yes, he believed him. Trent didn’t have so many Vollstruckers that he threw them away over one mistake; especially when he couldn’t know that she’d let Bren get away on purpose. Even Wulf wasn’t certain.
Eadwulf walked over and knelt beside Astrid. She looked up at him. There was a far-away look in her eyes that Wulf knew well. She was in too much pain to think clearly, and she was ready for the darkness.
He pushed her hair out of her eyes, finding it wet from sweat and tears. He let his hand rest on the back of her head.
‘Matron,’ he prayed silently, ‘Please don’t take her from me. Not today. Not like this. Not here.’
Then he cast Shocking Grasp.
She bucked up against his hand, and then went limp.
“You’re doing well,” Ikithon said kindly, as if Wulf were a student who’d just successfully performed a difficult spell for the first time. “Shock her twice more.”
Wulf was no longer surprised. It may even have been better this way: to kill her outright and know the moment she was gone, rather than be left to watch her and guess.
The first time Trent had told him to deliver those final two blows, Wulf had been sixteen, and it had surprised him how much of a difference it had made. Unconscious but alive versus… dead. He could feel the moment it changed, every time.
Astrid was already unconscious. If Ikithon wanted her dead, she would die here. Fighting now wouldn’t increase Astrid’s odds of survival, and it would significantly decrease Eadwulf’s. He had to trust that Ikithon would let him bring her back. Ironically, killing her was his best chance of getting her out of here alive.
‘Bitte, Matrone, bitte.’ It wasn’t the first time he had prayed in this room. Begging for mercy or divine intervention in this classroom had been such a common occurrence in his teenage years that he thought of this place as his first temple. It was dark humor, but true in several ways. He hadn’t known what prayer and submission were until he spent time in this classroom.
Wulf felt calm, suddenly; the true calmness of death, fate, and surrender. However this ended, he would not thank the Archmage for this later; but he would survive it. He knew that as if the Raven Queen were whispering it directly into his ear.
He shocked Astrid; first once, then twice. The Archmage slammed something down on his desk at the moment of the second shock. Astrid’s body jolted with each shock, then went still as death beneath Wulf’s hands.
He looked away from her body, over to Ikithon.
“Not one second before I give you permission, Eadwulf,” Ikithon said. Wulf realized what Ikithon had put down on his desk: a small sand timer, counting out a minute from when Eadwulf had killed Astrid.
The sand was counting down to the exact moment when Eadwulf would no longer be able to revive Astrid.
Wulf forced himself to breathe and look away from the timer. With one hand, he grabbed Astrid by the shoulder and pulled her torso into his lap. With the other hand, he pulled out the diamond he always kept in his pocket and he pressed it to Astrid’s chest.
Ikithon didn’t object to him getting ready, but watched closely to make sure he didn’t actually start the spell.
Wulf looked back at the timer. At least half the sand was in the bottom.
He looked at Ikithon pleadingly, but Ikithon’s face was unreadable.
More and more sand spilled from the top of the hourglass. Wulf’s fingers dug into Astrid’s robes around the diamond.
There was so little sand in the upper part of the glass. Was Ikithon really going to let Wulf save her? He had to.
He had to.
Wulf decided that he would simply do it a moment before he ran out of time. He’d cast Revivify and immediately follow it with Feign Death, and hopefully the Archmage wouldn’t notice her awaken in the seconds between the two spells.
Fünf.
Vier.
Drei—
“Now,” Ikithon said.
Revivify spilled from his lips and the diamond crushed beneath his hand, and Astrid opened her eyes.
‘Thank you, Matron.’
“Quick reflexes are everything,” Ikithon said to the children as Wulf watched the last of the sand hit the bottom of the hourglass, “What a difference a few seconds can make.” Ikithon locked eyes with Astrid, but ignored Wulf entirely. Wulf had passed his test; apparently without earning praise, but at least he was spared reproach, for today.
“Students, come with me,” Ikithon said, waving for them to follow as he headed out of the room. “Eadwulf, get Astrid home and cleaned up. I want you both ready to go the moment I find Bren.”
“Yes, Archmage,” Wulf said, though he’d only barely registered the command. He could hear his heart beating in his ears.
The door closed behind the last of the students.
Wulf looked down at Astrid. Her eyes were open, but she still looked dazed. He pressed his hand to a bloody scrap of skin where a dagger had torn her robes, careful to avoid the actual wound, and he began to heal her.
She relaxed into it for a moment, then pushed his hand away as soon as she had the strength. “Don’t waste all of your healing now,” she said. “I’ve got potions at home, and we don’t know when we’ll be summoned again. I might need some of that later.”
He nodded. He’d used about half of his reserve of healing. It would get her home. Matron willing, they’d have time to rest before Bren turned up again.
Actually, Matron willing, Bren would never turn up again at all. Let him flee to Taldorei, far from Ikithon’s grasp.
Wulf stood, then helped pull Astrid to her feet. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Terrible,” she admitted.
“I can carry you, if you can’t walk.”
“There is no way you are carrying me across this campus,” she said, even as she draped an arm over his shoulder and leaned on him heavily for support.
Wulf tried to take a few steps forward, and Astrid struggled to limp along with him. It didn’t help that he was significantly taller than her.
“Your reputation would hardly be less damaged if people saw you walking like this,” he said. “We won’t get home until midnight, at your pace. We haven’t got that kind of time.” He got a hand behind her knees, and she was powerless to stop him as he scooped her up and held her bridal style. “I can’t teleport us, but I can cast invisibility and leave through the back gate,” he said. “No one will see you.”
She looked for a moment like she was going to argue, but he could see how tired and in pain she was. “Very well,” she said.
He cast invisibility and got them back to her house as quickly as he could, never once stopping or putting her down. He was strong, and she was not as heavy as she thought she was. She was asleep in his arms by the time they arrived. He dropped the spell as he opened her front door, and her servants in the entry room took one look at her and froze in terror.
“Bring food and a superior healing potion up to her bathing chambers,” Wolf told the halfling servant as he ascended the staircase. Her servants were familiar with him, and would obey him, particularly when their mistress was clearly incapacitated.
He climbed to the master suite and headed straight for the large, ornate bath she’d had imported from Marquette a few years ago. He sat her on the ledge and held her a moment as she woke up, and when she could support herself, he lit a fire in the fireplace and activated the runes that would slowly fill the tub with water.
“Would you like help undressing?” he asked her. He was a Paladin, after all. He didn’t simply rip a woman’s clothes off without asking, even if he’d seen her naked a thousand times before.
More than Bren ever had, at this point, which was not a point of pride.
She held her head in her hands and groaned.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” he said. He began to undo the various ties on the upper part of the robes, but as soon as he forced her to actually move her arm, she whimpered again and pulled away from him.
“There is an easier way,” she said.
That was true. They’d never raped anyone before, but they’d both undressed people against their will on numerous occasions, for better access to their skin while inflicting torture. That was different, though. Wulf did not have sex with heathens and traitors. This was Astrid.
Still, it was the easiest way to get her clothes off without irritating any of her injuries, and it wasn’t like she didn’t know what she was asking, even if she didn’t want to say it.
“It wouldn’t be worth it to repair these robes anyway,” Wulf conceded. He drew his dagger, and began to cut. Vollstrucker robes were designed to maintain their modesty in the face of all kinds of damage, so it required cutting a number of ties to get them free, but Wulf put the male version of these robes on every morning, and the female version was just slightly more complicated, in ways that were easy to figure out. He had her in her underwear before the tub was a quarter of the way full, and then it took three cuts on her bra and two more on her underpants before he could lift her naked body out of the discarded clothes and set her down in the water.
A moment later, the door opened and a servant walked in with a tray. The servant placed the tray on the tub’s ledge without looking at her mistress’ naked body, and immediately excused herself.
Wulf grabbed the healing potion and popped the top. He held it to Astrid’s lips, and she helped him tip it into her mouth at a comfortable angle. After sucking down the whole bottle, she sighed and settled into the rising water. She already looked much better. Her wounds jumped ahead several more weeks in the healing process, and the color returned to her cheeks.
Wulf stood and moved for the door.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
He paused. “First, to bed,” he said. “Then to the Temple. I think I owe the Matron more than my nightly prayers tonight. If we haven’t been summoned to hunt Bren by the time I’m done with that, I might stop by a brothel. It’s been a long week.”
Astrid sighed. She closed her eyes and let the hot water lap against her closed wounds, washing the blood away without dirtying the pool. There were runes in this tub to keep the water forever warm and pure.
“There is better comfort closer to home,” she said quietly. “My bed’s as comfortable as yours and as warm as any harlot’s, and the Matron will wait for you, won’t she?”
“She waits for us all,” he said. His eyes lingered on Astrid, on the half-healed knife wounds he’d inflicted on her. The burns, thankfully, were on her back, and already faded from black to pink. A darker pink than the old burns from Bren, but still, just pink. She wasn’t showing any signs that the water was irritating her. “I would hate to hurt you,” he said. After all this time, he didn’t really know any other way to apologize.
“Eadwulf,” she sighed, “hält die Klappe und hier kommen.”
Well, if she insisted.
He unfastened his own robes much faster than he’d cut off hers. He was more practiced in this motion, and he’d been afraid of hurting her.
Once he was naked, he climbed into the bath. It was warm enough to be comfortable, with a fire roaring in the fireplace, but not hot. Astrid had adjusted it to be gentle on her abused skin. Eadwulf’s muscles throbbed disappointedly, and he immediately felt guilty for it.
It was not uncomfortable, especially with the fire going. Eadwulf tried to relax.
Astrid shoved his head underwater. He could have easily beaten her in a fair contest of strength, but in the moment when he was surprised, she paralyzed him. Water flooded his lungs, and he couldn’t even struggle. The minutes dragged on and just when he was sure she was going to let him die, just as the blackness began creeping in at the edge of his vision, she pulled him up.
He sputtered and coughed, and eventually found a way to support himself on the slippery floor of the tub. “Fuck you,” he said as his coughs turned to laughter. “You almost killed me.”
“Fuck you,” she said, chuckling along with him. “You did kill me.”
“Nur für eine Minute,” he said dreamily. He couldn’t be angry with her. There was no arguing with his erection, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t killed her earlier that afternoon. This was how their foreplay went, as often as not.
He crawled toward him again, and he made no move to push her away or escape. He knew her body language, and murder was not what was on her mind. She’d had her revenge.
Her hand found his cock and stroked it to full hardness as she came face-to-face with him again. She straddled his thighs and rubbed her cunt against her cock without ever letting it inside of her. Relieving some of the pressure in her own genitals without offering Wulf any relief in turn.
“I had a plan,” Wulf promised, gazing at her with adoration as his lungs still burned and he rallied all that remained of his willpower to endure her teasing.
“You didn’t need it,” she said, rocking against him slowly.
“I was lucky,” he acknowledged.
“We both were.” That was true. Eadwulf’s plan had hardly been air-tight. If he’d defied Trent in order to revive Astrid, it was as likely as not that they’d have both died.
She mouthed the words she didn’t dare say out loud. It wasn’t a real confession. He couldn’t have taken it to Ikithon even if he’d wanted to, and he was grateful for that.
“I know, and I’m glad you did,” he said. He took a deep breath. “How far are we going to go with this?”
“You can cum inside of me, if you want,” she said. There was no shame between them anymore.
Finally, she showed mercy, drawing away from his chest so that she could line up to take in his cock.
He chuckled. “When do I ever not want to?” he asked, fighting the urge to thrust into her. He’d already taken quite enough power from her today. The least he could do was submit to her here. “But I was talking about other things.”
Astrid took all of him in in one thrust, her arousal providing more than enough lubrification. For all that she was in pain, she’d enjoyed holding him under water. She held still for a few seconds while she adjusted. Wulf was thick, and though he often found his own fun when he was away on missions, she rarely sought out other partners in his absence. There were only two men she wanted, and on the all-too-frequent nights when she could have neither of them, she contented herself with her own touch or no touch at all.
She breathed deeply, and he caressed the outside of her thighs to comfort her. He felt the slight bump of a wound that would soon fade into a scar. She would heal it, and all the others from earlier. She didn’t always heal her scars; she wasn’t an exceptionally vain woman; but she would heal these ones.
“There is only one way this can end, Wulf,” she said as she began thrusting her hips back and forth, pulling almost all the way off him and then slamming herself back down. He felt a little guilty about making her do so much of the work, but he had a feeling that she needed to be on top right now.
“Maybe,” he said, “but, as we were reminded this morning, timing is important.” He thrust his hips upwards roughly as she came down, impaling her until he hit her cervix and sending a jolt of pain through her insides, as well as through the sore muscles that had jerked at the sudden movement.
She winced, and glared down at him with no fire.
“We need to be careful,” he said, more diplomatically.
“I know,” she said.
They couldn’t control what Bren did, but scheiße. This left them in an unfortunate position with Ikithon, and while the choice between Bren and Ikithon was not hard, they wanted to make it on their own terms.
Of course, Astrid had her part in this. She’d admitted to plotting with Bren back at the Chateau. That had been the real meaning behind this exchange: Was she really planning to kill Ikithon now?
With that question answered, he allowed himself to focus on the building pressure in his balls. He chased his pleasure in earnest, meeting her thrust for thrust. His hands caressed her muscular thighs while hers went to his chest. Lightly, teasingly, her nails scraped over his pecs, parting his wet chest hair into neat little rows, then messing those rows up as he fingers came back up.
A manicured nail grazed a nipple just hard enough to make Eadwulf suck in a breath. He twitched beneath her and she grunted in response.
She looked down at him and smirked. “Should I rough you up a little?” she inquired, dragging her nails down his chest again. She avoided his nipple this time, but the fingers of her right hand curled and added more pressure, drawing two thin lines of blood across his chest.
He shivered, and that seemed to answer her question. She added scratches into the rhythm as she rocked on top of him—nothing that would leave scars, but she did draw blood and they both knew he wouldn’t use magic to heal them. He’d enjoy these for days until they went away on their own.
He tried to keep his skin above the water, not for fear of dirtying the water but because he was enjoying the sight of the blood, and he knew she was as well.
Once there was enough crimson blood for her liking running between his chest hairs, she quickened her pace, bringing the pressure building inside of both of them to a crescendo until they unraveled together at last.
She pulled off him and collapsed against his chest, staining her own breasts with the blood that was flowing down his. She tucked her head into his shoulder, and once again she looked as injured as she was.
She felt better, though. Wulf could tell.
Wulf felt better too.
He held her tightly and dipped them both under water, washing the blood away but lighting up his scratches with a fresh wave of pain. He drew in a deep breath and let himself feel the pain for a moment.
Then, without ever letting go of her, he shifted onto his knees and stood. She wrapped her thighs around his waist and held on, then dried them both off with a quick spell once Wulf stepped out of the water. Although she was quite capable of walking now, he carried her all the way to her bed and laid her down gently.
“You’ll sleep here, won’t you?” she asked.
He nodded. “Your bed’s as comfortable as mine and as warm as any harlot’s.” He flashed her a smile as he walked to the other side of the bed and climbed in.
He didn’t dress, and neither did she. They drew in close to each other, not quite cuddling but close enough to feel the body heat radiating from each other’s naked flesh.
Wulf was asleep in seconds.
~*~
He woke as dawn was breaking, at least eight hours after he’d fallen asleep. The bed was empty beside him.
He stood, and quickly located his own robes laid out over a chair. They’d been cleaned. Astrid’s servants were a good group.
He dressed, looking out the window to the edge of the forest where they’d often snuck away as teens. Trent had been a harsh task-master for fifteen-year-olds, but free time hadn’t been completely mythical to them, even back then.
Astrid and Bren had given each other their virginities in that forest. Wulf had always preferred to have his sex indoors, but he kept a stash of alcohol out there. If Ikithon had ever found out—They hadn’t exactly groped each other or gotten drunk in front of him, but neither had it ever been a secret—he hadn’t said anything.
Even Ikithon must have realized that he owed them that. He’d taken so much from them and forced them to grow up quickly. The least he could do was treat them like adults, and he always had, when it came to things like that: sex, drinking, Astrid bleaching her hair, Eadwulf dedicating himself to a goddess…
It was nice to exercise control over their lives, where they could.
Wulf walked downstairs and followed the smell of coffee into Astrid’s dining room. The pot was sitting on the table, still warm, so he poured himself a cup, dropped two cubes of sugar into it, and joined Astrid at the breakfast nook.
“Are you all healed up?”
“I am, thank you.” She smiled up at him. “You must have slept for over ten hours, Wulf.”
Wulf shrugged. “I needed the rest. No word from Trent yet?” he checked, though it wasn’t like Wulf would have slept through a message from Ikithon. It wouldn’t even have been the first time that Wulf woke up in the dead of night with Ikithon’s voice in his head, telling him to get to the Sanitorium immediately, prepared to set off on a mission.
“No sign of Bren yet,” Astrid said, which was the answer to the question Wulf had really been asking.
“Good.” Wulf took a sip of his coffee. There was a chopping sound in the other room as a servant began making breakfast.
For a minute, all was quiet. Eadwulf thought the silence was comfortable, but he realized there may have been more to it when Astrid looked up at him and asked “Do you think those kids are ever going to listen to me again, after our little demonstration yesterday?”
Eadwulf sighed. “While I’m sure that was humiliating, I doubt they saw it as weakness, on your part, to take those blows without fighting back. They’ve already started training in resisting advanced interrogation techniques.”
“Mmm,” she said.
“Cross that bridge when you get there,” Wulf said with forced cheerfulness. “It may not matter, depending on how things go with Bren.”
She glared at him with annoyance, not with anger.
“They’re nice kids,” Astrid said, looking down at her coffee. She spent more time in Rexxentrum, and she knew the students better than Wulf did. “They won’t be, when Trent is done with them.”
“We were nice kids once too,” Wulf said.
Astrid snorted. “Well, maybe you and Bren were.”
They laughed together until it hurt, then they got quiet. “They’ll survive,” Wulf said softly. “They’ll get older. Drink coffee. Have sex. Plot assassinations.” He enjoyed the bitterness of his coffee.
“Would anyone ever sign up for this if we told them the truth up front?” she wondered.
“As an adult, I’d like to say I would have,” Wulf admitted. For all that this work was often unpleasant and the training had been nothing short of torture, Wulf couldn’t imagine doing anything else with his life. “The Empire needs us, and it is true that others have been protected by our pain. I realize that now. But at 14?” He scoffed. “Not a chance. Teenagers are short-sighted.”
“Are those our options?” Astrid asked. “Lie to them and—what was Bren’s word?—‘mangle’ them for the Empire, or simply let in all of the horrors that the Vollstruckers keep at bay?”
Eadwulf shrugged. “Either way, I’m not going anywhere. The rest is for—” He met her eyes. “—those better suited to such decision-making.”
“There’s the rub,” Astrid said.
He sipped his coffee. “I think I helped mangle these three.”
She looked up.
“Yesterday.”
Astrid looked away, then gave a half-hearted shrug. “It’s a death by a thousand cuts. You didn’t make the first cut. I’m sure I’ve helped too.”
They sat in silence, thinking about the thousand cuts that had killed their own innocence. It was a bittersweet thing. Eadwulf did not hate the man he was today. He was proud of the work he’d done for the Empire and for the Raven Queen. Would it still be possible for him to do this work if he were a less broken man? Bren seemed to think so, but Wulf honestly didn’t know.
“Do you think Bren will turn up soon?” Astrid asked, trying to make it sound like an unrelated thought.
“Not if he loves me,” Wulf said. He drained the rest of his coffee and put the mug down on the countertop. “I still need to go to the Temple.”
“Tell the Raven Queen...” Astrid shook her head. “You’re the Paladin. You know what to say.”
He smirked. “I do, and I will say it.” Prayers to Raven Queen were simple. Wulf prayed that she would guide his blade and his magic. Wulf prayed that she would usher him to the afterlife, should he fall on the battlefield. Most importantly, Wulf prayed that death would claim those whose time it was to die.
It wasn’t Bren’s time to die. Neither was it Astrid’s, and it certainly wasn’t Eadwulf’s. Perhaps it was time for someone else caught up in this mess to die, though...