Chapter Text
When the gith’yanki asks your name, you say the first thing that comes to mind: “Tavvendish.” You add, “Tav, for short. I know it’s a mouthful.”
“The pronunciation of your name,” she snaps, “is not of any concern to me. Our priority is escaping this ghaik monstrosity.” She grabs your forearm. “I am Lae’zel, of Creche K’liir. There is but one way to pronounce my name. You will call me Lae’zel. Now.” She turns and points. “We go.”
There’s another woman on the ship: a half-elf named Shadowheart. She appraises you with a tight mouth. If there’s something odd about your name, she doesn’t mention it. But, as you two wander the beach, she doesn’t have to: it reads in her eyes, in the way she watches you with suspicion.
You try to make conversation. “Where are you from, sister?”
“Do not use your wood elf customs on me,” she replies. “I was not raised with them. ‘Shadowheart’ will do just fine.”
You roll your eyes. “I am from the Gate,” you say pointedly. “Where are you from?”
“I am also from the Gate." Shadowheart pauses to flip a corpse over; she digs through its pockets, finds a few gold pieces, and pockets them. She offers no further information, and neither do you.
Truthfully, you were on your way home for the first time in ages. You brought your latest batch of Lesser Harpy Spider antivenom with you.
Fox’s Keep took half a tenday to reach from the southern Gate. It was day four, and unseasonably hot. You were due to stop in neighboring Cliffside Keep that night. By suppertime, you would sit in front of a hand-hewn wooden table, courtesy of your wood-working family. Twenty-four hours from that, you would be in your childhood bedroom in Fox’s Keep.
You carefully lined your eyes in blue. All you had for reference was a hand mirror that shined sunlight directly into your eyes. Prior visits had sparked rude comments about your skin: prying questions about being tired, or overworked, or disheveled. You knew to make up your face now.
You looked down at the ground and waved a hand over the blue eye paint, willing it to dry without smudging on your browbone. A pretty face didn’t stop the comments, but it at least quelled them. You could always switch the topic to your work if they didn't stop. You did, deep down, like the eye paint on you; if you had to make these damnable visits to your old keep, supplying them with medicine against those woods, you would at least look good doing it.
A shadow darkened the sky above you. You looked up.
And then—
There is a dagger at your neck and a hissing voice in your ear.
“Do not move,” it says. “And don’t make a sound. I don’t want to cut that pretty little throat of yours. Do we understand each other?”
His dagger presses directly into the space where your tattoo cuts down your throat. You swallow and feel its keen blade against your flesh.
You nod at the sky.
“Good girl,” murmurs the voice.
Where is Shadowheart? you think. Your heart races. There is a pale hand at your sternum, a leg wrapped around yours. You know how this dance ends, have borne witness to it dozens of times. You want to say something cutting— that you are finishing your monthly blood, that you are a witch, that you will slit his throat for the courtesy— and yet you cannot move, your body obediently going still for what you know is next.
The man adjusts his grip on the dagger. “You were on that ship,” he says. “I saw you. You are going to tell me everything. Nod if you understand.”
He is drawing this out. You nod.
“That’s a good pet. What were you doing on that ship? Talk.”
“Taken,” you wheeze, trying not to cut yourself in two on the dagger.
“From?”
“Cliffside— Keep—”
“You’re a-ways from home, little woodling.” The dagger presses incrementally deeper. “Why?”
So the Nautiloid had crashed somewhere new, after all. Just how far was far?
You lick your lips. “—visiting—my old keep—” A bead of sweat trickles down your brow, seeping into your eye. It stings. “—I— I bring medicine—”
“You’re a healer?” The man’s tone changes: it is now tentatively hopeful. The dagger eases, just the slightest bit; you can turn your head to face him.
“Opposite—” You look up into his face. The man’s eyes are a strange, ruby-red; you’ve never seen anything like it. “I make antivenom—poi—poisons, usually—”
Someone makes a distressed noise behind you: Shadowheart, back from scavenging. “Unhand her at once!” she snaps.
“Stay out of this!” the man shouts at her.
Something in your brain squirms— gives—
And suddenly, the dagger is gone from your throat.
You feel like the tadpole will bore its way out of your skull from your left eye socket. The man yelps with pain. You can sit up, but your head pounds, and you fall back down on the dirt.
Memories spill into your brain: the acrid smell of liquor, flesh-on-flesh, the laughter of a full tavern. The moon is full and bright, and you are so very hungry—
And then it’s gone. You open your eyes. The sun shines brightly above you.
“What the hell was that?” the man cries. He holds his head, face creased with agony. “And what,” he snaps at you, “did they do to me?”
Shadowheart reaches down to you. You take her hand, and she hauls you to your feet in one swift pull. “To us,” she says. “Lucky you. Looks like you have a tadpole, too.”
You cough. “With Lae’zel, that makes four of us.” You watch the man as, scowling, he stands and dusts the dirt from his breeches. He's maybe your height, and you are not a short woman. Perhaps you could've thrown him off of you.
Shadowheart raises her chin defiantly. “I’m not entirely sold on keeping the gith. For all we know, she could be dead.”
The man’s voice: “A gith, you say? This just became interesting.”
You pick up your brimmed hat from the path; it’s faintly crumpled. A shame: you had saved for months to buy it. “Provided you keep your daggers in your pockets," you say to him, "You can come along, too. We should stay together.”
“Tavvendish,” hisses Shadowheart. “Really?”
Meanwhile, the man laughs beside you: a floating, haughty sound, like wind chimes. “And what makes you think I want to come with you?”
But before you can speak, he shakes his head. “Let’s start over. My name is Astarion.” He smiles; he reminds you of a particularly sated cat. “Who might I be speaking to?”
Your stomach drops. Was it only elves on that blasted ship? you think.
“Tav,” you say, and you brace for his reaction.
But Astarion doesn’t comment on your unusual name. The other man takes your hand and merely bows again. “Charmed, my dear.” He kisses the back of your hand.
His lips are ice-cold.
You snatch your hand away and, when Astarion turns to Shadowheart, wipe it discreetly on the back of your robes. You reach down for your pack and staff. The tips of your ears burn.
Shadowheart does not offer her hand to Astarion. “Shadowheart.” And then, to you: “We should keep moving.”
Astarion gestures to the path. “By all means,” he says. “Lead the way.”
The wreckage teems with corpses and reeks of old blood. Intellect Devourers skitter around your ankles, whispering join us join us join us join us in reedy voices that make you feel vaguely ill. You put your staff through one. It squeals, like nails on stone, before going limp. As your new companions explore around you, you dig out your scalpel and split the Intellect Devourer in two. You excise the grey, slimy cerebellum and wrap it in wax paper from your pack.
You hear Astarion scoff at you from across the room. “How vile.”
You glare at him. “Sorry for making the best out of a bad situation.”
He leans against an empty mind-flayer pod, making a show of examining his nails. “A poisoner,” he says idly. “I’m sure drinking that swill,” and here he twirls a finger at the Intellect Devourer blood on your hands, “will make anyone sick.” He picks at something underneath his thumbnail, the very picture of chilly disinterest. “Tavvendish, was it?”
“Tav is fine—”
His eyes flick up to yours. “Duly noted, Tavvendish.”
You feel your hackles raise. You can’t tell if he’s making fun of your name, but his smug attitude makes you feel suddenly, terribly violent. Anger, familiar and horrible, rises up in your gut.
Astarion raises an eyebrow and smirks.
You stand, brandishing your staff—
A piercing whistle comes from the cliffs above you. Shadowheart’s head is just visible over its lip. “There’s another path up here,” she calls. “It has signage. We may be near civilization.”
Astarion shouts back up to her. “We’re coming,” he says. “Just as soon as the witch is done dissecting everything.”
You make a fist— twirl your pointer finger— aim it at Astarion—
Shadowheart interrupts before you can finish casting Fire Bolt. “Quickly, then! The sun is already beginning to wane.”
You scowl and drop your hand, thwarted. Astarion widens his eyes at you, like your second brother when he gets what he wants. “You heard the lady,” he purrs. “Let’s go.”
You tromp up the hills behind him, keeping a purposeful distance. Astarion is blissfully silent; whatever energy he had before, he must now direct into huffing and puffing up the cliffside with you. Orange dirt nests under your fingernails, turns your palms the color of ripe apricots.
Astarion reaches the top before you do and offers a hand down. You ignore it.
Now at the top of the cliff, you sigh with relief. Why had you packed so much for such a short visit home?
Astarion’s feet tap impatiently in your eyeline. “You lied, by the by,” he says above you. “You are from Fox’s Keep, not Cliffside.”
You wince. So Astarion had seen into your brain, just as you, presumably, had seen into his.
What exactly had Astarion seen?
And what did you see?
You reluctantly get to your feet. Rusty dirt clings to your robes, far beyond the capability of any Prestidigitation spell. You’ll have to change into fresh ones as soon as you’re able. Shadowheart places a stabilizing hand on your back.
“It’s rather a long story,” you say. “I’m not exactly— Fox’s Keep is my mother keep.”
Shadowheart lets out a little huh next to you, but she doesn’t say anything more.
You continue, “I live in the Gate, currently.”
“Oh?” Astarion leans in towards you. “And what keep do you belong to there?”
“I don’t—” You sigh with defeat. “Have one.”
Astarion gasps and presses his fingers to his lips. “Oh, my,” he says, the very picture of Upper-City shock and awe. “An exile. I’ve never seen a wood elf expelled from her keep.”
You scowl at him. “I am no—”
“Hellooo!” calls a male voice. “A little help, please!”
“Baldur’s Gate,” said your Nana with a sneer, “is a dirty, unsafe city.”
Yes, you replied, but at least there aren’t ten potion-makers to a block there, and that earned you another night of screaming and slammed doors. You lied awake all night, tears drying on your face, listening to the grandfather clock tick away in the hall.
Baldur’s Gate, at least to you, represented opportunity: It was a place where you could be anyone.
Anyone but… you.
You're fascinated by the wrong things: flowers blooming and dying, an asp sinking its fangs into a squealing rabbit, mushrooms glowing in the dark. Nature beckons to you as death beckons to the weak with an open palm. You learned Knock just so you could dig into the library's forbidden texts: necromancy, mind control, poisons. You withstood the resulting beatings from the Bookkeeper family with pride.
Inspired by the many encyclopedias you read, you taught yourself how to milk venom from a viper. It was a thrilling day when you finally encouraged a Golden Asp to latch to a milking jar. You had felt something tender crack open within you, watching those first clear drops slide down into the glass below. The venom sparkled in the sunlight.
Your family, the Carvers, is one of wood-workers: both of your parents, and your Nana and Papa on both sides, and your great-grandparents before them. Your mother is a furniture-maker from Cliffside Keep; your father, a maker of wooden hunting decoys from Fox’s Keep. The two had fallen slowly in love during regular visits to trade. They had expected a son when they had you; you were given a masculine name anyway. You have seven younger siblings, two of which are identical twins: good luck for wood elves, a sign of a fertile and happy marriage. Your interest in alchemistry— in something other than wood-working— soiled that.
“What would an alchemist’s family name be?” your mother sighed at you one afternoon. Your newest sibling dozed in her arms. “Poisoner? It’s a hideous profession. Don’t even think about it.”
The problem was that you couldn’t stop thinking about it.
You argued with your parents, your grandparents, your siblings. You resented the forced time in the workshop, sanding down wood furniture until your arms and abdominals ached. When you were unable to trance, you drew what you found growing in the forest: snakes and spiders and insects crawling in the grass. You found a snake’s nest one afternoon, the eggs already hatched and abandoned, and you sat next to it for hours, dutifully sketching your findings. You taught your friends simple cantrips, little tricks to make them gasp and giggle.
One of your sisters stole your notebook from your shared bedroom and, laughing all the while, showed it to your parents. Then the parchment and ink was taken away, and you were given more useless wood to sand. You beat her about the ears for this, and when she cried for your parents, they took away your candles, too.
I hate this place, you thought one night. I hate my stupid boy name and I hate stupid wood and after my Trial I’ll start my own keep someday, someplace far from here, and I’ll learn all the spells I want.
You wished, fervently, to be given a girl’s name at your Trial. You resolved to beg the Wood Mother for one, if needed. Tavvendish was a child who was doomed to varnish wood for eternity. This new elf, you decided, this adult, would be an alchemist, and she would have a pretty, feminine name.
The week of your Trial couldn't come soon enough.
And then it arrived.
Gale is sweet and talkative and gods, you hate him already.
“A fellow scholar!” he chirps at you, clasping his hands together with excitement. “Two wizards are better than one, or so they say.”
Lae’zel dusts herself off from the cage she was just in, as if your party hadn’t had to rescue her. You dig through the trapper's belongings with her, looking for anything useful.
“There’s balsam growing there,” you say over your shoulder to Gale. You point at a few scraggly flowers growing along the path. “Would you mind?”
Gale— the idiot-- happily obliges. He produces lacquered scissors from his pack— oh, you definitely hate him— and, with clinical efficiency, begins snipping flowers. “Have we an alchemist on our hands?” he says. “I’ve got some mushrooms gathering dust in my pouch. I might give them to you to extract.”
Astarion calls to you two from over a tiefling’s bloodied corpse. “Oh, don’t touch her, Gale. She’s covered in goodness-knows from the Nautiloid.”
“You don’t say?” Gale calls back to him. He smirks at you, wagging the scissors in your direction. “A thrifty one, then.”
How in the realms had Astarion heard you two? You ignore him and address Gale instead. “I have some supplies in my pack,” you say, “but certainly not enough for five individuals. And most of it is…" You teeter your hand back-and-forth. "Toxic.”
Gale sighs. “What a shame.”
The deceased have some drow poison and a few meager healing potions. Something is better than nothing, you suppose. You pass a healing potion to Lae’zel, who accepts it with a terse nod.
Gale’s shadow falls over you, and he offers the balsam flowers with open palms. His trimming is immaculate; you admire the bulbs for a moment before dropping them, one by one, into your pouch.
“I can’t help but notice,” Gale says slowly, and you tense. “You’re a wood elf, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” you say stiffly. You stand up.
“How fascinating!” Gale tucks his hands behind his back, the very picture of polite curiosity. “Your kind are rather reclusive, as you know. I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of talking to a wood elf in Waterdeep.”
You could kill him.
Gale leans in. “What keep are you from, may I ask?”
You sigh. “Can everyone stop asking me that?”
Gale takes a step back. Hurt flits across his face, quick as lightning. In the next moment, it’s gone. He gives you a little bow. “My sincerest apologies,” he says, and he sounds genuine. “I don’t mean to pry.”
You sling your pack over your shoulder with a grunt. “Fox’s Keep,” you say, guilt lancing through you at the name. “It was my mother keep. I live in the Gate at the moment.”
“Fox’s Keep!” Gale trails after you. “Excellent strawberry wine. Some of the finest and sweetest I’ve tasted.”
Astarion, Shadowheart, and Lae’zel are several steps ahead of you on the path. The road trudges upwards at a steady thirty-degree angle. From beside you, Gale wipes sweat from his brow. Your pack clinks with glass bottles.
“We certainly do love our wine,” you huff.
“I heard you all have trades,” he says. “What is your family name?” Before you can answer, he laughs and shakes his head. “Look at me, prying again. The curse of an academic.”
“Carver.” You stop at the side of the road to examine a bushel of Autumncrocus, hoping Gale will get the hint and leave you alone.
He doesn’t.
“Wood-workers?” he asks. “A noble profession.”
You cut the stems with your paring knife. “Mm-hmm.”
He squints up at the sky. “So how does a wood-worker get into alchemy?”
You shove the Autumncrocus directly into your robe pockets and start back up the path. “By disappointing her family,” you spit over your shoulder. “That’s how.”
Gale is blessedly silent after that.
There is an overturned fruit cart in a clearing up ahead. The produce looks ripe enough, and it doesn't smell of rot. Gale suggests-- annoyingly-- that your party takes a break to eat and regroup.
The five of you idle in the clearing, overlooking the Nautiloid. You are desperately thirsty, but who knows how the Nautiloid has polluted the Chionthar below? Better to drink the juice from some bruised oranges.
You remove your leather hat. At least it's a pleasant day to be kidnapped— illithidnapped?— tadpoled? You squint down at the wreckage. The Nautoloid’s tentacles splay across the valley, like a lazy teenager lounging in the sun. Smoke rises faintly from the wreckage. The site, despite everything, is almost...peaceful.
“What,” Astarion asks, voice dripping with disdain, “is that?”
You turn to him. He’s already crossed the clearing to stand close to you. “What’s what?”
He reaches for you and—
Drags a finger along the bridge of your nose.
Along your scar.
You freeze.
“This wretched thing,” he says, watching the path his cold finger takes. The scar arcs over the bridge of your nose, then splits in two over your right cheekbone; he takes the path down to your jawbone first.
You can’t move. No one’s ever touched you so blatantly before.
Well—
Not since—
Astarion is still talking. “It ruins your lovely face,” he sighs. He returns to where the scar bisects on your right cheek. He traces the other line this time, the one leading to your right earlobe. “Pray tell, what happened to you, poor thing?”
You move your mouth, but no sound comes out. You keep your arms rigid at your side. Shock keeps you planted in the dirt, though every part of you wants to run.
His hands are so cold.
When you don’t respond, Astarion clicks his tongue. He-- finally-- withdraws his hand and puts it on his hip. He tilts his head to the side. “Cat got your tongue?” he asks you, eyes deceptively wide.
“You know it’s rude to touch other people without asking?” you choke out.
He barks out a harsh laugh. “Don’t I ever, darling!”
He steps in. Astarion is a close talker, you realize, the worst kind: you go cross-eyed trying to follow him. “But really,” he says, and you can smell his breath, smell how vaguely chemical it is, “I must know. Did someone hurt you?”
You take a step back. Astarion follows.
You growl at him, but Astarion’s smirk widens.
Finally, you relent: “I tried to cast Witch Bolt,” you sigh, “and it backfired and cast on me.” You do a tiny, sarcastic curtsey. “And now I have a Witch Bolt across my face forever.”
“A Witch Bolt for a witch,” he says with obvious glee. “At least people know not to come close again.”
“Indeed,” you snap. “Everyone but you.”
Astarion rolls his eyes. His smirk widens. “Don’t be cross, my dear. I think it really suits you.”
You wince and shoulder past him. “Thank you for calling me wretched, brother.”
“Oh, come now!” he calls after you. “I find it quite interesting!”