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When Leiland Jr. is seven, all he wants to talk about is wyverns. Wyvern coloration patterns, wyvern behaviors in flocks, wyvern behaviors in the wild, wyvern eating habits; if it’s wyverns, he’s interested.
If it’s not, he isn’t.
Leiland, stalwart defender of the young Lord of Shadows that he is, is not particularly equipped to converse on wyvern hunting patterns.
Sitting on the throne in the Bloodkeep, the child is entertained by Sokhbarr’s tales while Lilith acts in her position as regent, listening to reports from her brood and dealing with territory disputes and a small skirmish between the forces of Valduz the Unbearable and Gytha the Vicious. Not a war, not yet; she’s assured Leiland of as much.
(There hasn’t been a war since the forces of good mounted their great offensive; Leiland doesn’t miss it, none of them miss it, it’s just. Well, it was something to do beyond nudging elements in the dark. Maybe some of them miss it a little bit.)
“Leiland,” his godson pouts, on the seventeenth day of his interest in wyverns, “you don’t seem interested in the wyverns. I know a lot about them, y’know.”
“I can learn more if you wish it, my lord,” Leiland says, sweeping into a kneel. He does not want to learn more about wyverns. He does not want to hear another word about wyverns until the day he is lost to the void.
The Lord of Shadows regards him for a moment, before stiffening as dark energy begins to glimmer in his black eyes. “I do not wish for you to do so,” he intones, “I have a task for you.”
“Anything you wish I will—”
“You will rectify an old wrong. Find and slay the halfling Galfast Hamhead, who has defied me for too long. Each breath the creature takes is an insult to me.” He sags a little, smiles as every shadow in the room lengthens. “It’s your birthday present!”
“I-I am grateful, my lord,” Leiland says, stuttering slightly. He does not... have a birthday?
He has hunted Galfast before. Six times since Leiland Jr.’s coronation, in fact, he has hunted her, each time a failure. It is not that he is nervous; he remains as determined as ever to see his revenge through. It’s just... he might be slightly tired of losing.
---
“Think of it as another chance to succeed, Leiland,” Maggie tells him as they go through the armory. She hefts a greataxe, absently testing the balance, but keeps her eyes on his back. “Everyone believes you can do this, I promise. Don’t make me a liar by doubting yourself.”
“That’s what you said the last time,” he sighs, pulling a sword from an ancient scabbard.
“ You have released the spirit in this blade,” the sword screams, filling the room. “Obey my will or suffer the conseq—”
Leiland re-sheathes the sword. The screaming stops, as a strong hand comes down on his shoulder and turns him gently around.
Maggie reaches out with her other hand, axe consigned to some table or weapon stand, and grips him by both shoulders. “Stop being so hard on yourself,” she insists, looking him dead in the eyes. “This is a gift, I promise. Maybe once you’re done Leiland Jr. will be out of his wyverns phase. No one likes wyverns forever.”
He laughs a little. “Sokhbarr does. What if he doesn’t need me any longer?”
Maggie shakes her head, something fierce in her eyes; her hands are warm, he can feel them all the way through the metal of his armor, so they must be near-burning. He remembers, as he so often does, the crater she had risen from with the baby in her arms, the way she’d named the Lord of Shadows after him.
“Even if he didn’t,” she says,” and he will, you’re my friend. I need you.”
He glances away, and she shakes him a little.
“You’re so much better at believing in yourself now,” she reminds him. “Hamhead’s a sore spot, I know, but you can believe in yourself for this too.”
She releases him, frowns a little at the warp in his pauldrons. He feels himself smiling a little, a rush of arcane energy sweeping over his form and setting the armor to rights.
“Want me to bring you anything?” he offers. “Souvenir?”
“Nah, just the usual—a shadow of evil moving across the land, a few extra nightmares. Oh, wait, if you find any more of that cider they make from the souls of oathbreakers see about getting a bottle; I can send some gold with you—”
“One bottle, no gold needed,” he promises, stepping back. “We’re still evil, aren’t we? I can just take it.”
---
The truth, he muses while he packs, the truth is that Leiland is as close to happy as he’s ever likely to get, visiting Efink under the ‘Keep and keeping in touch with Lilith’s children and dealing with Sokhbarr and J’er’em’ih; it’s just... it had been a mistake to let Lilith look at him so sharply over their last tea, an accident that she saw something like loneliness in his eyes. Too perceptive by far, their regent.
(She’d set her cup aside so gently, barely a clink against the saucer. “Leiland,” she’d said carefully, “you know, it’s alright to be... discontented.”
He had laughed, a flower shriveling in a nearby arrangement. “I’m perfectly happy. I have a purpose, guarding and killing dissenters and such; I promise you I am not missing anything.”
She had regarded him calmly, evenly; it was an expression he’d seen her take with Jessa and Jason and her other children a hundred times over. You are telling me the truth, it said, but I am right and you are wrong.)
He’s the last of his kind, you see—the only Pactwraith remaining. Leiland Jr. hasn’t the desire to make any more, and it’s. Well. He’s not lonely, he’s very satisfied with his work in the grand pursuit of evil and serving the child-emperor of dissonant whispers, how can he have time to be lonely, but. Well. Ahem.
He blinks a few times, hand clenching around his second-best cloak of darkness.
There’s a soft tapping at his door; when he opens it Keldrial the Librarian is there, glancing around nervously.
“Are there books in here?” she hisses, before visibly pausing. “Oh, I have a message for you. Not a message from a book, though the books do whisper, you know how they whisper—”
He interrupts her. That is the best way to get through these conversations. “What is the message?”
Keldrial gives a violent twitch. “The oracle,” she hisses, “the boatkeeper, the one-who-sees-all, all but what is in my books, oh the books—”
“Thank you,” Leiland tells her, because he may be evil but he can still be polite. He then heads for the stairs that descend and descend, through six newly constructed secret passages, past a hall of screaming ghosts and a hall of ghostly screams, to the fountain of blood in the depths of the keep.
“You weren’t going to say goodbye to me?” is the first thing Efink says. Accuses, really. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
“Let me die,” Olag moans from his corner, but neither pays him any mind.
“Ah, but you did notice,” Leiland says. “You notice everything; of course I knew you’d notice.”
Leiland had, in fact, forgotten that she would notice. Maggie would take their conversation in the armory as a goodbye and Lilith and Sokhbarr wouldn’t mind him ducking out with little fanfare. Efink, he hadn’t considered how personally Efink could take things like that; it must be something about being stuck in the fountain of blood. She can see everything, does see everything, but she can’t physically go anywhere. It makes things like long revenge journeys a little... sensitive for her.
“Well, I suppose I can forgive you for it. Not everyone can have my foresight,” she continues. “But you’d think you’d be a little more mindful—I’ve had a vision, you know.”
“Let me die,” Olag groans again.
“Hush, you. Now,” Efink tells him, eyes rolling back in her head. The blood swirls around her boat, the scent of it thick in the air. “Small footsteps, ducking out of sight; the usual sneaking about. A feather and a friend of ours, a golden mask and a broken crown.”
“That is very,” Leiland pauses to let Olag’s latest cry for death fade. “Efink, that is not very specific.”
“It’s not always specific! I cannot demand that the powerful forces of evil show me what I want.”
Leiland looks at her. She looks at him.
“Well, I can demand to see what I want,” she allows, “but the forces of evil were feeling petulant today.”
“Goodbye, Efink,” he says, turning to leave. “Thank you for the vision. It’s good to have a starting point for the search.”
“Goodbye,” she calls after him, Olag letting out a wail of misery.
Ah, the sounds of home.
---
And so Leiland rides the night winds and moves with the dark clouds, sharp and hunting and not at all worried that he’s lost the regard of a child and not at all lonely, until he sees a castle above a floating city where a ship is moored. The ship is docked a high balcony, and Leiland wraps his best cloak of darkness around his shining armor and continues on foot.
It’s not that he’s nervous to see Markus, of course, it’s just that he wants to... he wants to take in the city. That’s something people do.
(It’s been five years since they’ve been face-to-face, when Markus had left Kale Stoop and come to the Bloodkeep to work out a new contract with the Lord of Shadows. Well, with Lilith, but in Leiland Jr.’s name.
It’s been two years since they’ve spoken, hissing through sending stones as they both approached a castle; Leiland to kill a wizard who’d taken it into his head to preemptively strike down the new Lord of Shadows, Markus to ‘develop a stimulus package,’ where develop meant steal and stimulus package meant a wizard’s treasure. They’d missed each other by inches—Markus slipping out with the last valuable tome just as Leiland struck a death blow to the wizard and brought the castle crumbling down.
“Just like old times,” Markus had laughed into the stone, and Leiland had imagined the grin under his mask, had imagined his mask, had imagined everything about him as the ship quickly vanished into the sky. “Stop by when you’re in the neighborhood, and we’ll find another castle to destroy.”)
At the top of the city gate, in a nest of gleaming gold, John Feathers pauses his preening to watch a creature of shadow and darkness approach. The grass paled as it passed, turned gray and curled inward; the guard at the gate shivered, eyes going wide.
“W-What is your business in Kale—”
“Leiland?” John calls out, incredulous. “Leiland!”
Swooping down to greet the man, the giant eagle ignored the flinch from the guard, well used to it. “Nice cloak, man, very fear-inducing.”
Beneath a swirling hood the color of a moonless night, Leiland smiled. “Your suit,” he says, referring to the black denim suit that John’d had specially commissioned from the denim smiths of Utharandeep, “it, ah, suits you.”
There’s a moment of profound silence, the only sound the slight rattling as the guard trembles in his armor, before John lets out a scree of laughter.
“The boss said the same thing! You’re here to see him, right? Come on, come on, I’ll take you up to the castle. We can, ugh, walk there.”
“We could fly, but I really do want to take in the city; I’m looking for the halfling, and any word on the street could be useful.” And it might give me time to decide what to say, Leiland doesn’t add.
---
On an easy walk, around three hundred yards from the eagle and the wraith at any given time, Galfast Hamhead makes pleasant conversation with a variety of Kale Stoop residents. She gives gardening tips to the greengrocer. She trades stories with a musician. She buys a hand pie.
She considers a variety of silvery windchimes, considering what might look nice in Miss Longfoot’s window. The breeze tugs at her hair and makes the windchimes jangle cheerfully.
(Leiland catches a smell on the wind, somehow; cornfields and wildflowers and good, rich soil; he turns his head to follow it but the wind changes direction and the scent is lost. Now he is sure—somewhere in this city, his greatest enemy is hiding.)
Galfast buys a windchime and wraps it in a clean bandage to muffle the sound, tucking it into her pack alongside the maps she’d come here for; things about the elven lands, things about the stars. Honestly they weren’t that interesting to her, but Drova loves things of this sort.
The shopkeeper wrings their hands, casting an anxious glance up towards the castle, and Galfast mentally curses herself for getting involved.
“Mx. Silvershape, now,” she says after the package is stowed, “would there be anything you need help with?”
The human across from Galfast plasters a weak smile on their face and shakes their head, but Galfast has never been one to be fooled by a brave face.
“You see,” Galfast continues like they hadn’t denied it, “I’m a big believer in making new friends—and you do seem like a friend in need.”
“Does that make you my friend in deed?” they ask, going for joking but ending up sounding a little desperate.
“Exactly,” she grins, hand going to the handle of her trusty frying pan.
This is how Galfast ends up ushered into a secret basement meeting beneath a butcher’s shop, where good people give each other fearful glances.
“We’ve got to get the mask,” a young man in servant’s livery insists, the urgency coming through in his hushed voice. “Never seen the king without it, have we? It’s gotta be magic.”
“I’m no thief,” Galfast says firmly. “Well, not professionally. I have been known to do a bit of thieving for a good cause. The crowns of evil kings, and such.”
“But you’re not a thief.”
“Definitely not,” the people in the basement shift a little, some twisting their hands and some faces falling. Galfast sighs. Why can’t they have a problem to be solved with blunt force trauma?
“No, I’m not a thief. But I’ll steal the mask for you, all the same.”
---
The entryway to the castle of Kale Stoop is grand, all pillars of granite and rich tapestries on the walls. There’s a wide staircase, a portrait of Markus in his mask at the top of it. There’s a crown as well, set on his head, and a scepter in his hand; neither are the focus. It’s a very nice portrait—there was work, there, in the gleaming reflection of some light source on the mask.
Leiland only has a moment to take in the portrait, though, because Markus appears at the top of the staircase.
He looks well, Leiland thinks first. And then, how do I speak to him? He’s not my sovereign.
"Kingship suits you,” is what he offers, with a gesture up at the portrait. “You've gotten dramatic, St.Vincent."
Markus laughs once, the sound of it hitting Leiland in the chest. “My most loyal subject is a giant eagle and I built him a giant golden nest, then I built him another one. I’ve been on this level for a while.” There’s power in his voice, authority.
Leiland swallows, mouth unusually dry.
The thing is, the thing is, Markus is wearing the mask. The portrait behind him is wearing the mask. There is no reason for Leiland to recall his face, the slant of his jaw and the fire in his eyes as the floor crumbled away around them. There is no reason for the slow thud of his heart to be so loud in his ears, no reason at all.
(Unless, of course, in the five years since they’ve seen each other and the two years since they’ve spoken, Leiland has thought of him rather often. Embarrassingly often. Often enough that he’s fed a dozen unfinished letters to the fireplace in his room, each effort to say I want to see you without sounding like a fool deemed a failure. Often enough that Lilith offered to make him an ambassador to Kale Stoop, for all that the Lord of Shadows did not have something so diplomatic as an ambassador.)
The two of them stare at each other for a while, Leiland taking in the golden light of the sun reflecting on the unmoving mask. Neither speaks and the moment stretches, hangs—
John Feathers gives a slight cough into his wing. “Our friend Leiland’s here on a mission from his boss, majesty. He said those halflings have been seen around here.”
Markus barks out another laugh, descending his grand staircase. Three feet from Leiland he stops, speaks: “I might know something about that. Couldn’t give it to you for free, though.”
“Not even for an old friend?”
“The young Lord of Shadows is hardly my old friend. He’s not old at all.” He looks at Leiland, the flash of his keen eyes visible beneath the mask. “You’ve been working hard.”
“What?”
“It’s a lot of work, cementing a child’s rule over the forces of evil. You seem tired.” Markus speaks with great confidence, completely at ease with the shadows beginning to bristle at the edges of his vestibule.
“I can assure you I am not,” Leiland says, stung.
“Good. Then you can stay for dinner.”
Thrown, Leiland replies, “What?”
“Stay for dinner,” Markus repeats. It does not sound like an invitation. “The only person who ever has anything interesting to say around here is Feathers, and he’s busy this evening.”
At that, John Feathers sketches an interesting bow and steps his way out the grand doors, taking to the sky before they’ve even closed behind him.
This is not the way Leiland saw this reunion going, if he’s being perfectly honest. He wants to, to—he wants to say yes to the ambassadorship, who gives a damn at the sympathy in Lilith’s eyes; he wants to send the first letter, the second, the twelfth; he wants to chase down the ship as it takes to the sky, not for the books but for the pirate; he wants to cross the room five years ago and say stay, instead of biting out a terse goodbye—there are so many things he wants.
““I want to, sincerely,” he says, meaning dinner the hundred other things, “but I really must continue the hunt—”
“Hah! But you want my information, don’t you? So stay a day, take some leisure. We can share a meal before my people rise up in rebellion.”
“What.”
“Come on, Leiland,” Markus leans closer despite the emptiness of the room, almost confiding. “You’ve been through the city, you’re smart. I know you can see a rebellion coming a hundred miles away. They meet beneath the butcher in the western quarter every other Tuesday.”
He refuses to speak any more of it, shooing Leiland into an ornate room where he can rest from the road, like he needs rest. So really, it’s just not the right time to get into any potential feelings Leiland may or may not have. That’s why he doesn’t bring them up, if they exist.
(They do, he knows, because he falls back onto the bed thinking of the sun playing along the edge of Markus's mask, the shadow of his fucking chin underneath it when he turned his head; it’s love, he despairs, it must be love if the sight of someone’s chin is enough to resurrect the butterflies in your undead stomach.)
---
Galfast slips in through a gate left open by the groundskeeper, a door left open by a kitchen maid. She wends her way through the castle halls, up and up and up, to the dressing room of the king. Soft steps, soft steps and sharp eyes, she makes her silent journey.
No one stops her, even if a butler definitely caught a glimpse of her hair and a servant setting gold dishes at a long dining table absolutely heard her stumble.
(She passes a door at the top of yet another staircase, leans against it to catch her breath a moment. Leiland, hands over his face as he bemoans the situation, doesn’t hear a soft creak of the wood.)
Galfast finds the mask that everyone knows is magic, on a stand in front of a mirror. Nothing really looks enchanted about it, in her opinion, but it’s what the people want. She slips it into her pack next to the windchime and ducks out of the room just as the door of the connected bathroom opens.
Returning from his bath, Markus blinks at the empty stand. He feels himself smiling, looks up and sees it in the mirror for the first time in a while.
Soon, then, he thinks, and chooses an outfit he can fight in.
---
He comes down to dinner unmasked, sword at his side, and Leiland cannot bear to look at him.
It’s too much for him, really, the quickly-fading sunset leaving the room lit only by a gargantuan fireplace, orange light playing off the dark wood of the furniture, the gold cutlery. What is Markus thinking—does he always eat this way? Is this unusual, something for Leiland?
Markus, cutting into his dinner, sees Leiland’s eyes flicker over once, twice. The sunset outside and the firelight within the dining room play against the silver of his hair and Markus, taking his golden goblet in his hand, begins to entertain the idea of stealing Leiland.
(He should’ve made it a condition of his contract with Lilith, he thinks, or stopped that night at the wizard’s castle, held for one more moment and swept the man up onto his ship.)
“You seem distracted,” he says, leaning closer. He’s sat Leiland at his right hand at his giant table, completely fucking with any protocol. There’s nobody around to make him stick to protocol anyway.
Outside, the sun has disappeared completely. Leiland is gleaming, fork trembling slightly in his hand.
“Concerned with the hunt, Leiland?” he asks, lowering his voice a little more just to make the other man sway closer.
Leiland swallows, nods, and Markus gets up and walks around the table. Behind him, almost too close, Markus gives a soft laugh. “Something wrong with my face?”
On his own knife, Leiland’s grip goes so tight he’s surely bending the gold handle. He swallows again, tilting the knife slowly, so slowly; Markus meets his eyes in the reflection of the blade and smiles.
Leiland pushes back his chair suddenly, turning and catching Markus's collar in one gauntleted fist, taking advantage of the other man’s stumble to avoid the chair to secure his grip. “Stop playing with me,” he hisses, eyes burning strange and silver-blue.
Markus lets out another laugh, a little delighted. “So there is still fire in you,” he says, “I’d wondered; it’s been so long since I’ve seen it.”
Leiland makes a frustrated sound, pushing him away. He seems an instant from going for his sword, doing something rash. The air around him crackles a little, the dim corners of the room going fully dark.
“We could fight,” Markus offers, slipping into a duelling stance. They could fight.
“I didn’t come here to fight you—”
“Come on, Leiland! Aren’t you bored, aren’t you itching for something to happen? Too long on a throne making you lose your edge?”
“I’m not on a throne,” he says, each word coming through clenched teeth. Still looking away, even as he takes the wind from Markus’s sails. “That’s your problem.”
The adrenaline that’s been building in his veins for a fight starts cooling, shifts into something else.
“Leiland,” he murmurs, and the change in his tone makes Leiland’s silver head twitch. “Come on,” a shiver, now. “Come on, look at me. Look at me.”
He does, shadows in the room fading a little, he does turn his lovely face and look at Markus, who crosses the short distance between them and puts his warm hand on the back of his neck. When they kiss it’s messy, Leiland’s mouth strange and cold and Markus impatient, wracked with wanting and the last dredges of adrenaline.
“I’m stealing you,” Markus mutters when they break so he can breathe, almost a growl. “I’m stealing you.”
---
They don’t hear the first explosion, but they do hear the second one. Looking out the huge glass windows, into the dark, well. The castle gate appears to be blown inward, and people with torches are making a glowing column as they pour onto the royal grounds.
What the fuck do you pay guards for, Markus wonders, if not literally this situation. Too bad I fired them all last week.
“Would that be the rebellion, then?” Leiland asks, hair askew.
“Guess so.” Markus reaches for his sword.
“Well, we’d better get to putting it down. You can’t let them just overthrow you, you know, this is an important aspect of kingship.” Leiland is—Leiland is teasing him.
Markus looks over his city, looks at the people marching on his doors, thinks of the last time he and John had to sit down and address legal codes and tax codes and all that other bullshit.
“Ah, fuck it,” he says, turning to Leiland, whose eyes have gone wide. “You’re hunting Hamhead—you’ll need transportation. And you know a captain.”
“Are you not the king here, Markus?” Leiland sounds incredulous, but he thinks there’s something like happiness there too.
“King-in-exile is a pretty sweet title. I figure I give it a couple months, let ‘em celebrate being on the good side and winning over the evil tyrant, and then return to power once they’re complacent.” He grins, a little breathless with the possibilities. “Gives me time to refill the royal coffers, too. Look at me, Leiland; you know I miss being a pirate. Why not have me along?”
Leiland raises an eyebrow and Markus kind of wants to bite him. That is a thought for later.
“This sounds like me stealing you,” he says, arch.
“Come on,” he says, pulling Leiland in the direction of the balcony dock. “I put you on my ship and you think you’re out-pirating me?”
“We’ll see.” Leiland feels himself smiling.
Glass is breaking and people are shouting as they slam a battering ram into the ornate castle doors. Galfast Hamhead ducks into a crate that’s just been loaded onto the fancy ship over at the top of the castle, eager to get out of the bustle of revolutionaries. John Feathers carries his last suitcase of suits to the gold nest at the top of the main mast.
They sail until Kale Stoop is nothing but an ember in the distant sky.