Fire Forged - Part III

[ilovetakahana]

Part III

Charles folds his arms and resheathes his knife and looks over his handiwork, and he allows a smile to tug the corners of his mouth slightly upwards. White linen, freshly washed and dried, ready to be cut up into bandages. He’s made sure to collect the right kinds of herbs and bark this time, and they’re neatly sorted into piles. Flowers in white and orange and red and purple, exhaling sweet scents into the air. Long wisps of grass and leaves, a handful of different types of seeds in black and deep green and white.

A footstep on the threshold; he turns and he lets the smile show. Jean pushes the door open a little wider and comes in, and in her arms she is carrying her daughter, wrapped snugly in a blue-and-yellow blanket. But for the happy light in her eyes she still resembles the soldier he met on that terrible night three weeks ago: the same long scar cutting across her face. The long braid of red hair, touched with grey at the temples. Her arms, corded with muscle and wounds long healed.

He remembers his first day in the hamlet with clarity: seeing Summers and Jean again. The bundle of warmth and light cradled in Jean’s arms, a child no more than six months old. His surprise fading away at the pride and love in Jean’s eyes, in Summers’s face, every time one of them looked at their daughter.

“Come for your usual visit, you two?” Charles asks kindly.

“And for some fresh air. Besides, Rachel hasn’t seen you yet today.” A low, hoarse chuckle, and Jean pushes back the cloth draped over her baby’s face. Bright green eyes, deeper than Summers’s. Rachel smiles, an easy, toothless child’s grin, and chuckles and babbles quietly to herself.

Charles snaps his fingers lightly over her face and those eyes immediately focus on him. Such innocence, such trust. She looks at him fearlessly even as he takes her from Jean’s arms, even as he drops a featherlight kiss over her brow. Her hand curling into a fist, flailing and catching him softly across his mouth. “Feisty, aren’t you,” he laughs, and he ghosts a fingertip over her upturned nose. He watches her attempt to catch his hand in both of hers, watches as she grabs at the cuff on his wrist instead and tries to pull it to her mouth, and he begins to laugh.

Jean smiles and sits down at the table, takes up the mortar and pestle. Her scarred hands sorting over the herbs and other materials laid out for her inspection. She tears a thick handful of leaves into pieces, starts to blend them with sure, practiced hands. “She likes you.”

“For some reason she’s never been afraid of my eyes. Does she respond the same way to the other mages here?” He repositions Rachel in the crook of his arm and starts rocking her gently, back and forth.

“Yes. That’s the gift we get from children. A welcome, and a kindness. Summers and I experienced it, too, when we first came to live here.”

“From the children?”

“And from their parents. From Erik, and from the other members of our company, when they were still here.”

“Hmm.” Charles bounces Rachel gently, thinks about Erik and his quiet manner, the way he often smiles at the younger ones in the mountain hamlet. Charles sometimes gets up early enough to see Erik off on his daily walk to the smithy - and it’s impossible to miss how the children flock to him, how their voices rise in a bright halo around him. Erik spends a few moments every night in whittling little toys and trinkets from wood; he listens, always sincerely, to the children’s stories and jokes. “Has he always been good with children?”

“As far as we know, yes - and like you, he seems to have an especially calming effect on Rachel.”

“A strange thing for the two of us to have in common,” he says, without really thinking about it.

“So you think,” Jean laughs.

It only takes a few minutes of happy wakefulness before Rachel yawns, her nose creasing into a thousand tiny lines, and then she falls back into a contented sleep. Charles kisses her again, lays his cheek briefly against hers. He places her in a woven basket by Jean’s feet, takes up one of the pairs of shears and begins to cut up the clean linen.

He struggles, though, and after the third failed cut he makes an annoyed sound, peers curiously at the blades. The edges are dull and grimy.

“Don’t put your eyes out,” Jean murmurs. “You’re no use to anyone blind. Didn’t Erik give you a knife?”

“I won’t - he did - and in any case these things were made specifically for cutting bandages. I think I’ll take these to be looked at,” Charles says, after a moment, and he looks up when Jean laughs quietly. “Yes? Have I made a joke?”

And he feels himself growing more and more confused and concerned when Jean puts both of her hands over her face, when he watches her shoulders shaking with silent mirth.

“They’re shears, Jean,” he says, blinking in surprise. “A simple implement, and at the moment they are not working as they should. So I will do the necessary thing and take them to the blacksmith to get them sharpened.”

“You do that,” she says, finally, and he watches her wipe her eyes. She’s still chuckling. “Off you go. And while you’re there perhaps you could ask Erik about the new armor he promised us. Yesterday he said he was almost finished.”

“I will.” Charles is baffled when he steps out the door. The fond light in Jean’s eyes, that look directed at him and not at her daughter or even at Summers. The sense of her contentment, the bedrock of her heart: justice, protection, life and love.

He has to be careful where he puts his feet; the mountains have been plagued with rain this week and there are patches of mud everywhere.

Erik has led him to this quiet little place to the distant east of the tower. The brigands who’ve taken Raven from him have been cutting a steady path of destruction, moving steadily southeast. “Moving in a wide circle,” Erik explained several times. “Centered on the remnants of an old citadel, supposed to have been some kind of palace and its outlying buildings. No one has lived there for years, as near as I or any of the others can tell, and no one knows why it was abandoned. The mountain folk who whisper about it think it’s a ghostly place.”

“Ghosts?” Charles remembers his own worry, his own fear. “No. Monsters. How very convenient for them.”

“Yes, and for us, as well, since we can use that same exact same ruse against our enemies. So, here we will stay, and plan, and prepare.”

Three weeks. He still wears a light bandage around his wounded wrist. He cleans the wound himself every morning, smoothes the salve over his skin - now he knows that Jean makes it, over the tiny fireplace in the house that he’s just left, and the making of it leaves a faint scent of pine and flowers even on the grey stone - and every day it closes is another day toward obliterating that hateful word. Outcast.

Three weeks, and it’s already a life that is far removed from the tower’s hardships. Water in abundance, and the freedom to heat it with his powers if he needs to, which he takes advantage of when he is washing the day’s dust away. The bed is still made of straw - it has to be, since this is the warm season in these mountains - but there’s so much of it that the bed is extremely comfortable. Someone puts dried flowers in it before it’s made up into the pallets, and he actually has a blanket to lie on, something close-woven and smooth against his scarred skin. A pillow beneath his head.

Three weeks of getting used to people smiling at him, of people being friendly, despite the inescapable warning written clearly in his face. People who know what his eyes must mean, and welcome him anyway. The women tell him he doesn’t need to hide behind his long white scarf, and the men nod grave greetings. Accepting gifts of clothing and food, and once, a nosegay of flowers. The children wave at him while he’s trotting about on errands, following Summers’s requests or Jean’s or Erik’s. He still has to remind himself to wave back, sometimes, because he’s learned that it hurts their feelings when he doesn’t acknowledge them. It’s different, and it’s so strange to him, and that must be a sign of how long he’d been sealed away in that oppressive tower. He’s too used to glares and fear and hatred. Three weeks, and he’s still disconcerted here.

A knife in its protective sheath hanging on his belt, when mages were absolutely forbidden from touching weapons. Erik and Summers have been teaching him the forms for fighting with it, are waiting for him to make progress so they can move on to two-knife techniques - but it also has so many other uses, and not just for self-defense, either. Eating. The daily work of gathering herbs. He remembers using the knife to slice his own sleeve into wide ribbons, because he needed a bandage for a little girl who had stumbled over her own feet. She had looked up at him and burst into loud wails, had clung to him for comfort. The pangs of compassion and dread in his heart as he tied off the bandages and held her close. A reminder of what he was missing.

Every night, now, before he falls asleep to the quiet sounds of Erik working at the table with knife and chisel, he tries to reach out to Raven - he sends her his thoughts, he sends her his warmth and his hope and his love. The same words, over and over, and always, at the end: Please be my sister when I find you, Raven.

He doesn’t let himself fall asleep until he’s said it.

He fetches up on a familiar set of stone steps and there’s a warmth in there that he knows almost as well as he does his own skin, that cries out happily to him. He sighs, soaks it in, allows himself a brief smile - and then he schools himself back into calmness, climbs down carefully into the smithy.

Erik is a silhouette against the blazing light of the forge. Metal glowing white-hot on the anvil, Erik’s arm coming down in a smooth arc, the clang of the hammer striking, so loud that it causes Charles’s teeth and bones to rattle. Sparks and the flickering flames, and he briefly glimpses the other man’s face - a new smudge of dirt on his cheek, the muscles in his jaw jumping - and again the hammer comes down.

He uses his abilities to read his surroundings, the metal being worked and shaped - and he reaches out to the fire, lets it roar joyfully and he gentles it down just a little. The fire is giving off too much heat and the metal is starting to rebel, is threatening to warp out of shape.

Clang, clang, clang.

Charles sits down in one of the corners as he usually does and closes his eyes. To anyone else these flames would be nearly unbearable in their roaring intensity. To him, the heat is more like a gentle touch over his skin, rippling its welcome around him, and he greets the fire with a smile. His cuff warms, and he simply redirects the extra heat into the air with a thought.

He can just barely hear Erik chuckling, his harsh breathing; he can feel him hard at work. Intentionality. Focus. Hands and arms in concert, creation and destruction at the same time.

Charles helps him as he always does, controls the fire so the metal stays at the right temperature. “What are you making?” He knows it’s a slightly belated question, perhaps he could have asked when he came in, but he’s still too busy, his mind working over the fire as Erik works over his materials.

Erik doesn’t answer, though.

Just in time, Charles reads the metal as Erik raises it over his head, scrutinizes it with his eyebrows pulled into a straight line of concentration. A long, thin form, and Charles reaches out a hand, palm facing out - and it glows white-hot. He distantly sees Erik nod his head in thanks - too much light, he’s blinking spots from his eyes. The hammer coming down in a final flurry of blows. It’s some kind of sword; he can sense the edge, he can sense Erik drawing the metal out, seamless and tapering. The gentle curve of the blade; its length; the fittings waiting in another corner of the forge. He can see them when Erik looks at them. Those will need a more focused and far smaller flame. He thinks of delicacy and of precious metals.

He thinks that when Erik decides to start working on the rest of that sword, he might ask if he could stay and watch.

In some distant corner of his mind he wonders who Erik will give the sword to.

And then he starts when the metal of the half-made sword shrieks, and he looks at Erik: his arm is submerged nearly to the elbow in a nearby barrel of water. The white-hot glow of the metal vanishes nearly instantly, fades and cools to a deep grey. Charles thinks of protest, of patience, and he looks at the fire and at the blacksmith. “Still working?”

“I am done for today, unless you have something for me,” Erik says, and he’s a little muffled as he wipes the sweat from his face.

“Just this,” Charles says, and he comes forward, offers the other man the shears. “I was going to use it to cut bandages, but the blades seem to have gone dull. Also, Jean asked me to inquire after the armor?”

“Finished. Summers will be by to pick them up when he can. As to the shears - why didn’t you use your knife?”

“Jean asked me the same thing; and I’ll give you the same answer I gave her. The shears still need sharpening.”

“True.” Erik grunts in amusement.

He follows as Erik motions him into another corner of the forge, someplace cooler with tables and long workbenches, where the tools were scattered over the tables, and he sits down as the other man readies a whetstone. Smooth, practiced movements. He watches Erik guide one side of the blade against the stone, and then the other. Imperfections honed away, the metal of the shears beginning to shine.

Erik squints at the blade, brushes away the shavings on the whetstone, repeats his movements for the other half of the shears. A drop of oil on the bolt holding the two blades together. It only takes a few moments, and he holds the shears back out. “Done.”

“Thank you,” and Charles smiles when their fingers brush against each other.

The dreams have not yet come back, but sometimes, when he’s falling asleep or when he’s just about to wake up, Charles sees a flash of blue-green eyes. A shadow standing over him, nothing threatening. A stern sort of kindness - familiar, now, and not unwelcome.

And yet he wakes up feeling guilty, knowing he’s settling in and mustn’t, not here and not now. Not while he imagines that his poor sister is still fighting for her heart and for her mind. He wavers between wonder and impatience and rage; he tires himself out in the early mornings, in a clearing well away and safely upwind from the hamlet. He spends hours there, thinking about his powers, trying to think like Summers and Jean: like soldiers, like people used to strategy and tactics.

Once or twice he’s let himself transform, pulled the white scarf around his face to hide his angry snarl, and he fights Raven’s captors in his mind. A fierce flame in one hand; his knife clutched tightly in the other.

He thinks of that terrible hulking mage. Eyes blue like his, and a power that frightens him the more he remembers it. He doesn’t have all of the details yet; he remembers sensing darkness around the man, more than just evil, more than just a desire to hurt. Terrible scars and welts and indecipherable script in black ink, reminders of cruelty all over his body.

Charles remembers thinking that at least some of those might have been self-inflicted, and here in the smithy, with Erik still looking at him, he suddenly drops his eyes and comes back to the present. He feels the fear and he tries to feed it to the flame in his heart - and if his shoulders shake while he’s doing it, Erik never says a word, never judges him.

He merely murmurs, “Have courage, Charles.” And: “Tell me.”

“You are so very different from my sister, and yet you are still so very like her,” Charles says quietly. “You and Raven. It must be some kind of gift.”

“What is?” Erik is still quiet.

“I’ve seen you talk to Summers, to Jean, to the other people here, and you encourage them,” Charles says. “That child we rescued, the one who fell over the cliff. You know what to say so they can continue. Through pain, through disaster, through their emotions. And Raven has always known how to do the same with me, right from the very beginning. I never had to say anything to her, it was something she always did by herself.” He suddenly realizes what he has just said, and he almost chokes as he hurries to correct himself. “Does. She does it by herself.”

Erik shrugs minutely. “You think it is something I do naturally because she did - does - so?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Charles, I will take that as a compliment.” And he gets awkwardly to his feet, because Erik is standing, is picking up his things and moving out into the late afternoon. “And perhaps we will find out that she is wrong after all. Perhaps it is still possible that I can learn new things.”

“I don’t understand.” And how strange that is, on top of all the other strange things that have already led him to this place. To experience entirely new things, to be able to say that and not be punished for it! “You are speaking about someone else.”

Charles hurries after Erik, back to the clearing where Charles spends his mornings. Some of the grass is still charred from when he had been drawing maps and thinking about attacks, but the flowers have opened and there are many fresh scents blowing in the breeze.

Erik shrugs his shoulders, and a pair of knives falls down into his hands. Longer blades with a slight curve; the handles worked in tooled leather and silver.

Charles watches, startled and mesmerized, as Erik drops into a fighting crouch. He moves in a rough circle, eyes fixed on some invisible opponent.

He explodes, suddenly, into furious movement, the knives out and flashing, rapid silver arcs. Slash and thrust and strike and parry, the sudden shift from attack to defense as he counters and crosses the knives in front of his face. He’s moving so fast that Charles strains his eyes to keep up with him. Erik’s feet, stepping surely, carrying him on a twisting path, into and out of his opponent’s defenses.

Suddenly Erik jumps backwards and as soon as he lands he’s rolling and flipping himself back to his feet.

Charles thinks that if he had been struck by Erik’s boots, he would have been brought crashing down to the earth, and perhaps that is the point.

Erik fights with a strange serpentine grace. No movement is wasted. His entire body is a weapon. He thrusts a knife forward, as if sinking it into his opponent’s heart for a fast and clean kill, and as he’s pulling it back he’s already flipping the blade so that it faces backwards, pressed safely against his own skin, and he’s clenching the fingers of that same hand into a fist, throwing a powerful punch. The foot that was moving backward to counterbalance the punch then comes up in an ascending circle, into a hard kick.

And Charles casts back to his plans of attack, imagines himself fighting like that: heat and fire and strength, grace and guile and the sheer indomitable will to win, and he mutters, “Interesting way to teach a lesson.”

“Well, that’s good, if this has worked.”

Charles stares at the slightly amused smirk on Erik’s face.

“Listen carefully. I was told this only once, and I in turn will only tell you this once,” Erik continues. “Memory is a powerful weapon, and it is also a traitorous one. A true double-edged sword. Memory can be what drives you forward, and memory can be that which holds you back. It can give you the strength to bury your sword in your opponent’s heart, and it can make you fall and bare your throat to your opponent.”

Charles smiles, after a moment, and nods. “Yes, that is logical.” He glances inside himself and he holds out his hand, and a flickering tongue of flame begins to dance around his fingers. “A better kind of weapon, is it?”

Erik nods, once. “Good; you understand faster, at least. She always wanted me to keep up, and she was always so impatient with me. But let us return to your lessons. Let me see how you do; show me your forms.”

Charles obeys and begins by dispelling the flame and dropping his hands. A deep breath as he draws his knife - soundlessly, now, he’s getting steadily better at it.

And then he raises his empty hand, clenches it into a fist as he brings it up over his heart. A flame crackling into life as he swings that fist down. The hand holding the knife flashing up into a defensive position. He stops just short of hurling actual fireballs because Erik is in the clearing with him, after all, and the wind is starting up and it will take him a few minutes to quell the fire if it begins here - but he tries his best to complete the form. Speed and precision, fire and steel, charge and retreat.

“Good,” Erik says at the end. Nods, and reaches out to tap Charles on the shoulder. “Too tense here, makes your knife hand move in restricted arcs. Breathe. I am not as good at instructing as she was, but that is excellent, for someone who could not even hold a knife to begin with.”

“You mention that woman again,” Charles says as he puts away his knife. He puts a little flourish into it, a trick he’s picked up from Jean, and Erik snorts. “And I am beginning to think that you have just been fighting her.”

“Yes. Well-reasoned.” Erik sits down in the grass. His voice drops to a deep, sad register. “My wife. A mage like you, someone who could move things with her mind. Practical. Kind. And a fierce fighter.”

Surprised again, Charles thinks back to the hut: the larger pallet Erik sleeps on, the four chairs around the table despite the small space, the neat arrangement of cooking implements near the fire. The blankets on the pallets, the slightly lopsided basket near the door. Did she make those items?

That one strange detail of Erik’s dress, something that had been off when they had met - Charles opens his eyes, points to Erik’s hands. “Those are your wife’s gloves. Too small for you.”

“Yes,” Erik says again. “All I have left of her.”

Charles knows he looks stricken now. “Dead...?”

“Murdered.” This third response is both broken and hard at the same time. “And you’ve fought her killer. The same...thing...that gave me this.” He pulls the collar of his shirt down, exposes a raised scar just above his heart. A long and jagged tear leading downwards, the edges stitched roughly closed.

The evil mage - it can’t be anyone else! Charles fights the rush of memories, the vicious attack on the inn, Raven knocked unconscious. He remembers himself screaming at her to wake up, screaming for her to save herself, before a terrible darkness came crashing down on him, before he heard Erik’s voice for the first time.

He recoils, feels the blood drain from his face, feels his hands go suddenly cold, as for the first time he remembers hearing his enemy speak, as he repeats the words in a horrified voice: “I will break her and I will cut out her heart. I will make her mine and I will send her after you.” The sheer glee in the enemy’s eyes.

“I can’t let that happen,” Charles mutters. He looks down, and his hands are clenched into tight fists; one still around his knife, one beginning to burn again. He dispels the fire from his hand and touches the silver cuff instead. “I won’t. I won’t.”

“I know,” Erik says, and Charles looks at him, waits for him to say more - but there are footsteps in the clearing and he drops into a ready stance, watches Erik leap to his feet and move to give him cover.

“Erik!” Summers, looking like he’s run the whole way to the clearing. “Charles!”

“Trouble?” Erik asks.

“A whole pot of it,” Summers says. “The reinforcements that you requested have just arrived. Erik, they look like they’ve already been through a war - and worse. I thought you sent Shaw to the western companies with a message for Logan?”

“I did.”

Charles tenses at the sharp bite in Erik’s voice.

Summers must know it very well, because when he answers it’s in nearly the same tones. “Then what is he doing back here, so soon? What could have made him move so quickly? Erik, Shaw is in a lot of pain. Wound in the shoulder; whatever attacked him nearly tore his arm off. Jean is attending to him and to the others now, but you and Charles had better come and help.”

As Summers leaves, Charles starts after him. “Reinforcements?”

“It would be pure madness, not to mention folly, to storm that citadel with only four people,” Erik says. “Even if one of the four was you, knowing you’re worth ten of us. I have no intention of getting you killed.”

Charles thinks about that for a few moments, as they hurry back down into the hamlet, and murmurs, “Strange. I feel exactly the same.”

Erik gives him one of those lopsided almost-smiles, an expression that lingers for only a moment before it’s replaced by something equally familiar: worry and fear, the constant lines around his eyes.

Charles winces for what he now realizes is Erik’s grief, the source of the regret always in his voice. A wife, fallen in battle. A comrade, a friend, a partner. Sadness beyond Charles’s own worries, pain and despair. He wonders about Erik for a long moment, for his long campaign and his fight for revenge.

He and I are so alike.

As they descend into the hamlet Charles sets aside one line of thought in favor of another: his mind is running through Jean’s inventory. How to tie off a bandage, when to change dressings, the amount of salve they already have on hand, the time they’ll need to make more. Dividing his time between taking care of the newcomers and taking care of Rachel.

Jean is barking out orders, and he and Erik and Summers rush to obey. Water, fires, food, shelter. The reinforcements have been in running battles with stragglers from their opponents’ forces, and the few mages among them have spent almost all of their strength in looking after their own.

He watches Erik talk to his soldiers, nods as Erik introduces him quietly. He tries to smile reassurance at Erik.

In the end, though, he has to work on other things, and Charles nods as Jean calls for him and places Rachel into his arms, as she sends him back to the medicine rooms. He pulls the freshly-sharpened shears from his pocket and starts making bandages, starts organizing the rest of their healing supplies. Pots of salve, jars of numbing and cleaning unguents. He sits with Rachel in her basket at his side, so he can keep watch over her. Simple and necessary work, something to quietly sink into. A foil to the intense emotions of the day. Rachel cooing to herself, a baby’s soothing murmur. He moves as swiftly as he can, uses his abilities sparingly, does what he is required to do.

When there is nothing left to do he picks Rachel up, covers her carefully in her blanket, and walks back through the deepening night to Summers’s hut.

A shadow standing in the doorway, holding his right arm stiffly at his side, covered in bandages for almost its entire length. More linen bulging at his shoulder, dark with Jean’s numbing unguent.

“Hello there,” Charles says. “I’ve just come to put Rachel to bed.”

The man sniffs and moves, and that brings his face into the light.

He is blind.

“You don’t smell like you’ve come from here. New, are you?”

“Erik brought me to this place - excuse me, please?” Charles steps past him, as carefully as he can, and he places Rachel in her bed, arranges a light blanket over her. There is a partly-shielded lantern next to the bed, and he snaps his fingers, calls up a tiny spark of flame at his fingertips, just enough to light the lantern.

“You’re from the tower, then?” the tall man asks when Charles comes back out of the hut. He is now sitting on the stone step, his face turned up, to the dark sky.

“Yes.” Charles sits down on his heels in the grass next to the man.

“And a fire-starter. I heard you snap your fingers. A characteristic gesture, don’t you think? To call up a flame as though striking a match.”

“I have always thought,” Charles says quietly, “that it was the other way around - that matches were created because people wanted to have that illusion of control over fire. To create it at will.” He takes a deep breath, and the night breezes bring him the scent of pine and distant wildflowers. “A pity that they fear fire so much, and that they cannot always be relied on to be circumspect. Fire can be used well, fire can be controlled - and yet they give in to their fear so easily, and run away when a fire merely threatens to burn out of control.”

“Humans can do that.”

“No. Not all of them,” Charles says, and he sighs and thinks of Raven. Of Erik. Of Summers and Jean and their Rachel. “And we have to work with those who do understand.”

“There aren’t a lot of them.”

“All the more reason to protect those precious few.”

The man laughs: a harsh rasp of amusement. “How can you sound so hopeful, then? You being a mage, especially one who works with fire. I’m guessing you’ve been through hell and back, and yet you still have hope. Not exactly a commodity at that tower.”

“It’s precisely because I have so little hope left to me that I must hold on to what I have left with both of my hands. With all of my remaining strength, howsoever little it might be.”

“And that is why you will live, Charles.” It’s Erik, and he’s walking up with a basket, covered in clean white cloth. Easy to pick out the details in the sparse light of the fires and of the dark lantern, which throws a muted light onto Rachel as she sleeps. He looks tired, and yet he looks satisfied. “This is Shaw.”

“I, too, escaped the tower,” Shaw says after a moment, his face turning toward him. Charles looks up, watches Shaw scratch his chin awkwardly with his left hand, imagines him with the telltale eyes. The mark on his wrist, effaced under the scars and the bandages. “I was raised there; left on the doorstep as a babe in arms. Twenty long years of being abused, of being struck again and again and then being ordered to redirect the force of the strikes in order to attack others. The cells, the collar, if I wouldn’t obey - and that often enough.

“In the end, I put my own eyes out. I didn’t want to keep following their nonsense orders. I didn’t want to become a weapon. Without my eyes I became useless to them. Exactly what I had wanted.”

“You became a weapon anyway,” Erik says, and he sets the basket down near Charles, hands out chunks of warm bread. He pulls out a tightly-wrapped cheese, a few bunches of grapes.

“At least I am now my own weapon,” Shaw says, and shrugs. “I can defend myself if I should be placed in a dangerous situation; and I can attack people who’ve put me in a dangerous situation. I don’t have to answer to anyone, and I follow whom I choose. I fight for myself and for those whom I choose to follow.”

“And at times you attack us because you perceive us as being idiots,” Erik says, dryly, and Charles ventures a smile into his own piece of bread, hearing the genuine amusement coloring Erik’s tone.

“Someone has to keep you and yours in line.” Shaw laughs again. “And don’t even get me started on Logan and his group. You should all know by now that I do what I do for your own good.”

“Does that include what happened to you this time?” Erik says after a long pause.

“Ah, well, that,” Shaw says, and he scratches his head.

The men’s voices a quiet whisper behind him; Shaw and his account of being attacked by wolves. Charles enters the house, checks on the sleeping Rachel, and then he picks up another lantern, lights it and places it at Erik’s feet. He smiles when Erik murmurs his thanks. When he sits back down he starts eating his piece of cheese.

“Were you even able to deliver my message to the western companies?”

“Of course, Erik, do you take me for a witless child?”

Charles covers a smile as Shaw sniffs in disdain.

“You can even ask Logan, since I walked in on an intimate, ah, encounter, just to deliver that message. Blood and all, mind you. I think I frightened him.”

Erik laughs, suddenly, a quiet snort and then a smile with all the lines in his face, and Charles has to keep smiling.

He feels his heart knock traitorously against his ribs when Erik turns and shares that smile with him.

Shaw coughs, once, and Charles turns sheepishly back to him.

“If I may be allowed to carry on,” Shaw says, though he clearly sounds like he’s fighting not to laugh, himself. “Logan said that he would send you a reply as soon as he had finished deliberating on it. He said he needed to consult with the other commanders.” A brief pause and Charles watches Shaw eat the rest of his bread, and then: “If even Logan has to sit down and think...what exactly did you tell him, Erik?”

Charles sucks a breath through his teeth when Erik pins him down with his eyes. “I gave him orders to prepare for an attack on the tower.”

He counts the heartbeats even as he notes the upward lurch of Shaw’s eyebrows, as he looks down at his own hands.

Erik sighs, and shrugs, and says: “But there will be time enough to discuss that; that’s not the most pressing concern. There are other battles to fight, more important ones, and I have too much to think about right now. You must be tired, Shaw, I’ll take you to your quarters. And you, Charles, go on and get some rest. You’ll be spending enough time at Jean’s beck and call as it is.”

“All right. It was pleasant meeting you, Shaw,” Charles says quietly. He doesn’t quite stifle the yawn at the end of it.

“Go on with you, then; I suppose I will talk to you again tomorrow.” Charles watches as Shaw puts a hand on Erik’s shoulder and is led away.

He steps back into Summers’s home to see how Rachel is doing - she’s sleeping on her stomach now, her breath coming in soft whistles - and then he totters away, and falls mostly into his pallet, with his boots still on.

The last thing he thinks of is Erik’s eyes, how the cloud of grief had suddenly lifted from them for a brief moment. Replaced by - amusement? Respect?

He turns away from the voice in his mind that whispers to him, gentle but inexorable: He is worried for you.

Only Raven worries for me.

No, and he’s never heard those voices so strongly before. How very wrong you are.

He sleeps, and he dreams of Raven braiding summer flowers into a crown. It’s a distant memory, from the first year they’d known each other.

In the dream, Raven suddenly ages before his eyes, from nine to sixteen - and now she is weaving a chain, white and red and purple flowers, dark green leaves and vines. She smiles at him; she doesn’t say a word; and he watches as her scarred hands tie one end of the chain around his wrist. She kisses his cheek.

He is expecting her to loop the other end around her arm, but she shakes her head and walks away, towards a man standing in the shadow of a pine tree. The rest of the chain in a fragrant heap at his feet.

And a shadow falling over him. No dread or fear. Just something faintly familiar, a shadow of belief.

Suddenly he wakes up, a harsh start, and he surprises himself even more when he rolls off his pallet and on to the stone floor.

He looks up, and Erik’s face is upside-down, leaning over him, concerned and amused. “Charles?”

“Erik.”

“You’ve hardly slept.”

“Dreams.” Charles shrugs and climbs back onto the pallet, but he sits up, regards Erik as he clears the table - three chisels; a piece of wood roughly the size of a fist, with its bark half-peeled off - and then pads over to his own bed. “But I barely know how to interpret this. It’s not like the others - I’m not sure that it’s really about the future, not like the dreams I more frequently have.”

“Oh?”

Charles stifles a yawn, stumbles outside to the necessary. By the time he returns Erik is lying in his pallet with his eyes closed, hands laced behind his head. Charles busies himself with peeling off his boots, but the question slips out anyway: “What are you planning to do, Erik?”

He nearly jumps when Erik replies. A quiet, introspective voice. Almost distant. “I had thought that it was time for me to take my vengeance on that...that thing, that mage. For her, and for myself.” Pause. “If you had asked me that at the beginning of our acquaintance, perhaps I might have had that answer.”

“And now?” Charles pulls his light blanket close. If he squints at the almost-healed wound on his wrist, he can almost see the green chains from the dream.

He still doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with the other end. How to understand the smile in his sister’s eyes.

Erik sounds sad. “I do not have an answer to that yet. I have been asking myself that question.”

It takes him a long time to fall back asleep. Images of Raven and Shaw and Erik chasing through his mind, their voices and their stories.

Take this, Charles. My brother. The only one who calls me dearest.

I put my own eyes out. I am my own weapon. The collar and the cells.

My wife. I carry on in my parents’ memory. A star to steer by.

To Part IV