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“I don’t think we’ve met,” Theo said, “you’re the Shadow, right, I thought you were a man, but then some of the stories—well, I guess if you’re a magician you can be anything Aric wants, can’t you, that must be fun—”
“Being in shock is no excuse to flirt with my partner,” Aric said. “Also, Em, his name’s Theodoric Ravensson, and he still thinks a shiny gold-and-ruby sword with fake runes is somehow useful.”
“It’s a luck charm!” But Theo’s eyes remained shaken, harrowed, behind the ordinary banter. He looked down into cider, steam, murky depths. “And maybe it worked. I don’t know how I got off that mountain. I just remember running. Falling. Trying to escape.”
“You’re sure,” Aric said, “it wasn’t the storm, or some sort of confusion hex, like—”
“I know the fucking difference!” Theo jabbed a finger at him. “And yes, I remember the mage at Ardeth, and I know what that fucking felt like. This was real, Aric.”
Ardeth had been bloody. Hired magicians on both sides of the siege. Aric had been younger then, and Theo younger still.
Theo looked it now: pale behind the steam from his mug, bruises from frost and stone rising to the surface under those bronze-and-copper good looks. He swallowed hot cider, breathed, “They screamed. At me. At us. The sounds, the voices—the fucking ice, I’ve never been so cold…you didn’t find Rilla, did you?” His voice knew the answer.
Aric glanced at Lythos, who’d been pouring congratulatory cider for the men who’d brought Theo in; Ly came over, and, to Aric’s question, said, “No, they said they just found you, at the base of the hill. Was someone else with you?”
Theo shut his eyes, opened them. “Rilla the Nightlady—Aric, you knew her, didn’t you? A little?”
“Not much. She was going by Rilla Ebon, back then.” Tall and competent and equally good at wielding her favorite broadsword or seducing other people’s wives, as far as Aric recalled; he’d been too new to mercenary work and the wrong shape to interest her, though they’d both been hired as escorts for that baron’s daughter on the way to the girl’s wedding. “She wouldn’t be the type to panic.”
Em, practical even while spent from magic and wrapped in a blanket, inquired, “Why were the two of you in the pass?”
It was a good question. Aric raised both eyebrows at Theo.
Who sighed. “Frotha of Elynd paid us to find out how feasible an attack on Silverscarp would be.”
“Through that pass?” Aric said. “It wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t do it, with those guard towers. They keep putting up new ones.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Theo said, “you’d be running around doing epic fucking deeds, killing an ice-wyrm, rescuing a princess, making the rest of us look like we’re not keeping up.”
Aric let that go. “So you were doing reconnaissance?”
“Reconnaissance. Finding vulnerabilities. Should’ve been simple.” Theo paused for more cider. Like many mercenaries Aric had known, he tended to bounce back: if not outright dead, he’d count another day’s survival as a win, and carry on. It helped that he was younger than Aric by a good five years. “You know, the sort of normal human job you barely do anymore. Too busy riding around with a witch, fighting magic, being a fucking hero.”
Theo hadn’t said it with force, but abruptly one of Em’s daggers quivered in the table an inch from his hand. “Talk about Aric more.”
“We’re friends,” Theo protested, saucer-eyed. “Aren’t we?”
“More or less,” Aric agreed, accepting another blanket from Lythos, tossing it onto Theo’s shoulders, putting his arm back around Em. “He’s always been an idiot.”
“Hey,” Theo said, indignant; and then shivered, sloshing cider.
“Emrys saved your life,” Aric said. “Be polite. Em’s not a witch.”
“Well, then, the fucking magician who enchanted your sword, by which I mean both your blade and your cock, obviously. Which I mean in a friendly way.” Theo eyed the dagger. “Where do I find a terrifying and gorgeous magician of my own? Is there another one?”
Emrys leaned over to reclaim her dagger. Her grin was fleeting and real. “There might be. But you’d have to have something worth enchanting.”
“Can I be next,” Theo inquired plaintively, “when you’re done with him?” and tipped his head toward Aric. “He is getting older. And I’ll give you ruby necklaces and pearl earrings.”
“Payment from all those jobs we have to save you from?” Aric said. “Why in all the hells did you agree to go on a scouting mission in this weather?”
“Needed the money, didn’t I?”
Aric sighed.
“It’s not as if I like Frotha of Elynd,” Theo said. “Or, for that matter, Lady Matilda of Silverscarp. I don’t actually care if Frotha invades, unless he’s planning to pay me to help. He won’t have to, though; Silverscarp is more or less cut off from everyone, now. No trade, no supplies, nothing’s getting through that pass, the lake’s frozen over, and they’re on their own up there. They’ll starve before spring.”
Em looked up at Aric; their eyes met.
