Chapter 4 – Tav
Talven.
He jerks and sits up, heart hammering away at some nightmare he’s already forgotten. Except for her voice. Talice. It was as if she’d whispered right in his ear. He feels the side of his face, like he might catch her breath on it still. Gods.
The fire has burnt to embers. Next to it, Gale lies with an arm under his head, snoring softly. It doesn’t look like Tav’s abrupt waking stirred Lae’zel either. But Astarion holds himself up on an elbow, watching him.
Tav rises gingerly and makes for the trees to relieve himself. Everything hurts. He’s well-used to hours of walking, but not in the sun, with a worm wriggling inside his brain, little to eat and nothing but the hard ground to rest on.
Awww.
He jumps and turns—but there’s no one there. The two sleepers still sleep, and Astarion is still watching him, position unchanged, though his head is now inclined, possibly because Tav’s holding his dick. He laces himself. At least he didn’t piss on his boots.
Unlike that time when I dropped a frond on your head and yelled ‘scorpion!’
Panic grips him and he turns from side to side, looking for the source of the voice. It sounds like Talice, but it can’t be her. She’s dead, dead beyond any necromancy, he made sure of it himself. No. Someone’s impersonating her. Someone who knows about this particular instance of her bullying that he himself had all but forgotten. He’d been watering wild mushrooms in Mother’s garden, no more than fourteen and blissfully unaware of Talice (who had been over a hundred), sneaking up on him from the second-floor balcony.
Someone from Mother’s household, then. Someone sent to find him?
Someone invisible.
He gestures forcefully at the clearing between him and the camp but keeps his voice low as he incants, “Ostende te!” His magic is slow to respond, as heavy as his tired feet, and the glow that issues from the ground lacks its usual luster.
But he’s more worried by the fact that it shows nothing. There’s no one there.
“What is it?”
Tav flinches, raising an arm with a fire bolt already burning at his fingertips.
“No, no, no,” Astarion says, backing off with his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot! It’s just me.”
“I thought I heard someone.” Tav lowers his arm. “Someone else. Sneaking around.”
At once, Astarion’s posture shifts, his features sharpen, his ears slant at a new angle. He scans the night, sniffing the air and holding a hand over the hilt of his dagger. But by the time he completes the circle and turns to Tav again, he no longer seems alarmed. “Well. There’s no one here but us now.”
Tav’s hearing confirms it. That’s part of the problem: he only ever heard the voice. No footsteps, no breathing, no chafing of clothes. True, he didn’t hear Astarion approach him either, but that was because he was busy casting—and panicking. Already he wonders if his mind didn’t play a trick of him. Some… extremely vivacious remnant of his nightmare. Or a symptom of their disease.
“What’s this spell?” Astarion points at the ghostly filaments of magic on the ground.
“Fearie fire,” Tav says. Having company calmed him a bit. “It reveals invisible things,” he explains.
“Your sleeve’s on fire, darling.”
“What? Oh.” Tav shakes his hand. When that doesn’t help, he pats it down with the other, cursing under his breath. “Damn heat.”
Astarion takes a few steps closer, careful not to cross into the sigil painted by the spell. He peers into Tav’s face. “Are you all right?”
“Just a little… shaken.” Tav smiles sheepishly. His knees feel weak. Had it been some other voice, any other voice… he swallows. “Have you slept any?”
“Not really. Too much to think about. Today has been… a lot.”
The circle of magic fades away. Suddenly exhausted, Tav walks over to a fallen trunk and sits, groaning. Astarion stands a few minutes longer, looking up at the sky, then joins him.
“Do you believe the gith? That this creche of hers holds a cure?”
Tav shrugs. “It’s the best plan so far.”
It’s literally the worst plan.
He starts and turns around. “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“I thought I heard something.”
Astarion raises a perceptive eyebrow. “First the fever, then the hallucinations…” He reaches for Tav who, for a moment of sweet bewilderment, thinks Astarion would take him by the chin and… but no. He grabs a handful of Tav’s hair and pulls on it none too gently.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“Just checking. According to our gith friend’s extremely graphic description, your hair’s supposed to fall out next, followed by bleeding from unmentionable places.” He sniffs the air again, as if he can smell the progress of the disease.
Was that… a threat? Tav’s heart climbs into his throat. “You shivered throughout the evening yourself, your forehead glazed with sweat. She didn’t notice, but I did. Say nothing of this, and she needn’t find out.”
Astarion leans back, appraising him from a new angle. “Well, well.” He smirks, but Tav thinks there’s a nervous edge to it. “You do have a backbone after all. But worry not, darling.” He leans back in conspiratorially. “Your symptoms are safe with me. So long as you don’t sprout any tentacles, at least. And then… hm. How would you prefer to go? Stabbing? Poison? Strangulation?”
Tav stares at him, unsure if the question was serious. “In flames,” he mutters at last. It’s not so much a preference as it is a certainty: an inscrutable intuition he’s lived with since he was old enough to contemplate death, as deeply ingrained as the fire in his blood.
“Curious. Isn’t that a slow and painful death?”
“Not really. After your nerves are burnt, you stop feeling pain. But chances are, by then you’ve suffocated on the hot fumes already.”
“How utterly grisly.” Astarion giggles. “I like it! But I’m afraid it’s not a service I could easily provide. What would be your second choice?”
Tav takes a moment to think. “You came close to it earlier today.”
“Classy. Me, I’d go for beheading.” He mimes an ax falling across his good palm. “Swift and clean.”
“It’s only clean if you’re lucky enough to get a skilled executioner. Not one of my qualifications, obviously, but I’m sure Lae’zel would do a fine job of it with her two-hander. As for swift…” He shrugs. “I’ve seen men blink and twitch half a minute after their heads rolled off the block.”
“Truly? Hmpf. I must admit I haven’t witnessed many a beheading myself. In Baldur’s Gate, hanging is the capital punishment of choice.”
“Now that is a slow and painful death. Unless you weigh enough for your neck to snap.” Having relaxed a bit, Tav pantomimes wringing the neck of a fowl and makes a cracking noise that sends Astarion laughing.
“So well-versed in death,” he says, letting his slender fingers dip under his shirt and touch his collarbone. His voice drops. “I’m impressed.”
Tav holds his gaze, still too tense to trust his sense of humor. He’d received more than his fair share of eccentric flattery while being paraded from one noble house to the next like a prize stallion, but—
Oh! Oh! Like Char’vyrae Frerret! She said your skin was the shade of rothe liver marinated in milk. Remember? We laughed at it for a tenday!
He gasps. “There it goes again!”
But Astarion calmly shakes his head. “It must be the tadpole, my friend. Messing with your mind.”
Tav looks at him. “Have you been… hearing things… too?”
“You mean, other than reliving select passages from everyone’s abduction trauma?” Astarion snorts. “For all we know, you might be ‘hearing’ someone’s bad dreams.”
Or, I might be going crazy, Tav thinks sullenly.
It does run in the family, replies Talice.
He keeps his wits about him this time. It’s a voice only he can hear, of a dead person only he had known, and now that he thinks about it, he couldn’t swear he actually heard it with his ears. The entirety of the reference to Char’vyrae Frerret sprang into his mind fully formed, like the thoughts he plucks from the minds of others. Evidence is mounting that it’s indeed all in his head.
He tries to swallow through his dry throat and thinks: Hello?
“The sky is phenomenal,” Astarion says. It takes Tav a moment to understand and look up. He sees nothing remarkable. In his first nights on the surface, he was fascinated by the unfathomable height of the clouds, the glow of the moon and the steadfast glittering of the stars, but he has since gotten so used to the sight, traveling for months at night, that he almost never thinks of looking at it anymore. “You can’t see the stars this well from the city,” Astarion explains. “Because of all the lights.”
Tav recollects the first time he glimpsed Baldur’s Gate from the hills to the north. The city looked like it’s on fire, with every house and street and tower lit all night long. He remembers the street-lamps, and the front yard of the Sleeping Giant, as bright at midnight as it had been at noon. How he leapt from the window, and ran through the streets, and how he was pinned against a stack of crates and kissed senseless. Looking at Astarion, with his head thrown back and the long curve of his neck exposed to starlight, Tav recalls the terror he gleamed in his thoughts, and is struck by sympathy anew.
“I take it you’re not eager to go back,” he says softly.
Astarion looks at him. After a while, he shakes his head.
They stare at the sky in silence—both without and within, thank the gods—for surely an hour, because the triangle of bright yellow stars that always makes Tav think of the tip of a dragon’s snout has gone over their heads when a massive yawn nearly unhinges his jaw.
“You should sleep while there’s still time,” Astarion says. “I’ll keep watch. In case whatever you heard wasn’t all inside that pretty head of yours after all.”
Warmth creeps up Tav’s cheeks. “What of you?”
“I’ll be fine. What’s another sleepless night?” He giggles, and Tav can’t help but smile along. He wants to object further, but how can he? If he doesn’t get some rest, he’ll be unable to work his magic tomorrow, and something tells him he’ll need to.
“Thank you,” he says, rising. There’s more he would say. About being sorry for dragging Astarion into this mess, yet being selfishly glad to still have him by his side—but all he says in the end is, “Good night.”
“Sleep tight, and don’t let the tadpole bite.”
In the depths of Tav’s skull, Talice cackles.
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