Tempered by the Will

3 - Walls

This feels dangerous, Vica wanted to say as they stuck to the foot of the enormous stone walls that guarded the borders of the Capital. She didn't understand how they hadn't been caught yet. Weren't there guards patrolling the tops of these walls? She had never been to a big city before, but even the larger townships they had passed by had eagle-eyed sentinels posted in their watchtowers.

Well - Constantine not being caught, she could understand. As they moved over the grass, her footsteps as well as Bren's dragged over the blades and rustled with every movement, but Constantine moved like a ghost. If she didn't know any better, Vica would have thought that he was just a mirage moving in front of them. As silent as an illusion.

She felt the sudden urge to comment on his extraordinary stealth, but with another glance up at the gray stone walls that reached skyward over her head, she felt the desire to speak drain away again as quickly as it had come. In Constantine's presence, she couldn't defend herself with her magic, and Bren had explained that his specialty wasn't in violent displays to begin with. A weather mage, a seer; even without the anti-magic aura that locked him away from his spells, he wouldn't be able to defend himself from vigilant guards.

The slightest disturbance could attract unwanted eyes, and Vica wasn't so sure she could rely on Constantine to get her out of trouble anymore. Cold and hard and sharp, he'd become something she didn't recognize anymore.

She glanced up again. Still nothing.

The one upside to the lack of stealth was that at least she could hear Bren moving behind her. He was keeping up, which was a mighty feat considering that the slight man tired so easily. Indeed, those were light, panting breaths that she could hear behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder with a concerned frown.

His pale face was tinged with pink all over both cheeks, and the tightness of his jaw told Vica that he was struggling to keep his breathing as quiet as he could. He couldn't go on much longer, could he? They had spent the last couple of hours walking non-stop while moving at an uncomfortably swift pace; Bren couldn't maintain it for much longer.

She pulled in her bottom lip and steeled herself. What happened next probably wasn't going to end well, but she wasn't going to stand back and cower just because she was afraid of making Constantine lash out at her again. She sucked in her breath and then quickened her pace so that she was almost treading on his heels, and then she reached forward to tug on the back of his cloak.

Her fingers had barely touched the fabric when suddenly, she was staring up at his face: the motion was so sharp, fluid, and instantaneous when he whipped around that she didn't even realize what had happened for an entire half-second after he grabbed her by the wrist. Bren stumbled to a stop behind her and almost collided with her back, but she found herself unable to look away from Constantine to check on the half-elf.

His eyes were so bright, she thought. And it wasn't with a mischievous or excited light - he was angry. Why was he so furious all the time now? Where was the normal Constantine who never let anything bother him, not even the threat of death and dismemberment? This new personality he had put on with no explanation and no warning fit him like a coat of spiked mail, scratching and piercing her whenever she accidentally wandered too close.

To think that he used to insist she never stray far from him.

"It's Bren," she said, keeping her voice as quiet as possible. Her pulse was already slowing again; she was too accustomed to Constantine's anger to let it bother her overlong. She wouldn't let him get to her, not this easily.

"What about him?"

...He wasn't even going to look for himself? Vica furrowed her brow and pierced Constantine with a sharp glare. He was still being terrible to Bren as if he'd done something terribly wrong, despite the fact that she'd been the one to force the poor man to go along with her schemes that night on the hill. He might have come with her willingly, but in the end, it wasn't as if he would have had a choice.

Constantine was being unreasonable. If only she could slap the sense back into him, but she figured that would end badly for her. Even now, his hand was squeezing around her wrist tighter and tighter with each passing second that she continued to glare at him, and she knew that this was going to turn into yet another fight unless she did something to dam the flood right this second.

She hated this part. She hated ignoring his fury and pushing her demands on him, hated that she couldn't call him out on his veteran tactics of being a superb asshole. But she didn't have a choice. It was too risky here.

"Stop it," she snapped, and she tugged at her hand to try to pull it from his grip. He didn't let go. "We're practically running. We need to rest."

"Your friend needs to rest," he corrected her, and his voice was just as low as hers but far more acidic. "If he's not going to be much better than dead weight, I'll cut him loose right here."

She stiffened. Constantine made idle threats sometimes just to get a rise out of her - or at least, he used to - but this was not one of those times. She could sense the violence humming under his skin and surging into her body like an electric current, a killing wish -

"Get yourself under control," she said. "If you're trying to scare either of us, it's not going to work. Bren will just chalk it up to fate, and I -"

She paused, and Constantine narrowed his eyes at her.

"You, what?" he pressed, and she felt his fingers tighten around her wrist yet again. "What will you do?"

"I won't even be surprised, that's all," she finished, and even to her own ears, her voice sounded dry, maybe tinged with a little impatience. "You've threatened me enough in our time together, anyway."

"If I'd wanted you dead, you would be rotting on a roadside right now with wild dogs feasting on your corpse."

Vica's lips twisted into an angry scowl. "Make up your mind. Do you want to help me or not? You brought me here, but if you want to walk, I won't stop you. I can go my own way, I'm not going to beg you -"

"I'm not helping you even now," he said. "If you're going to go and get yourself killed, then I'm going to get my money's worth out of it and collect your bounty. Your friend's not part of the deal. I get nothing for him."

Her jaw snapped shut, and she stared at him in silence for a moment that felt far longer than it actually was. She couldn't think of anything just as callous to say, something that would come down with a slicing whistle to prove that she had no attachment to him either. Not anymore. Not after he'd drawn his line in the sand and proven to her which side he stood on.

"I'm fine."

Vica twisted around to look at Bren over her shoulder. He was still pink-faced and breathing hard, but he flashed her a wan smile anyway that had her feeling more at ease.

"Bren -"

"Shhh. We're not safe." The man pointed up the wall with a finger to his lips. "Constantine is right. We need to move quickly."

Vica sighed and turned to look forward again, stomach still churning with anxious adrenaline. She'd almost forgotten that they needed to stay quiet. What was it about Constantine that made her forget everything else around her? Irritating, frustrating, stubborn -

It was then that she saw his eyes flash a familiar feral yellow, but he wasn't looking at her anymore: he was glaring down at Bren just over her shoulder, and the hairs on the back of her neck rose in warning at the wave of hostility she could almost feel crashing out of Constantine. Without thinking, she grabbed his wrist with her other hand, but she didn't try to wrest herself free from his grip using her newfound leverage. Instead, she simply dug her fingers into his forearm in an attempt to force him to turn his attention back to her.

"Then let's go," she snapped. "Let's go get your money."

As she'd hoped, his eyes flickered back to her, and even though the cold anger in them had yet to fade, she would happily take on the brunt of it. Bren didn't deserve to get caught in the crossfire.

He released her wrist, all but flinging it down and away from him. The motion was so sharp that her own hand fell away from his forearm in the same instant; even if she had tried harder to hold on, she knew she wouldn't have been able to. Her fingertips tingled with the force at which he'd shaken her off.

And then he turned around to continue leading them along the city wall, giving neither of them any warning beforehand. Vica hurried to match his pace, and although she heard Bren huffing with exertion behind her, she resolved to ignore it for the time being. She had already made the mistake once of trying to intercede on his behalf, but all that seemed to do was expose Bren to even more of Constantine's hostility.

He would just have to stick it out, she told herself. She would try to make up for it later somehow, but right now there was no way to negotiate with Constantine and his temper.

Gods above, she would never understand him.

* * * * *

"What are you doing?" asked Vica.

Constantine didn't answer, and instead continued to run his fingers along the rough stone of the wall in a zigzag pattern. A few presses here and there, sliding along some invisible seam - was there supposed to be an opening there?

"Get back."

She obeyed without question, which was just as well because Constantine didn't seem to wait for her to get out of the way. Bren had kept his distance from the beginning, likely too leery of drawing the other man's attention to close the distance, and she shuffled back to stand by the half-elf while Constantine did his work.

She glanced up the wall again, praying that there were no guards currently patrolling the ramparts directly above. This didn't seem like it was going to be particularly quiet.

She was right.

Constantine pressed his fingers into the stone a foot above his head, grinding out particles that whispered in a clattering shower down the wall. There was a sound like - something moving, hollow, echoing. Like slabs moving against each other, Vica thought. She had assumed that the secret side entrance to the city would be a grate or unused tunnel of some kind, but it looked like it was nothing nearly so simple.

With a grunt, Constantine shoved the slab back at an uneven angle, revealing a hint of the dark corridor just beyond it. Vica's eyes widened.

"It must be designed to be opened only from the inside," Bren said quietly. "It seems we're lucky that Constantine isn't so limited."

She said nothing as they continued to watch him fight open the entrance, until finally he slipped through the gap without a word. She blinked, but then released a sharp sigh: of course he would do that. She moved forward to follow Constantine into the darkness with Bren at her side, turning sideways to squeeze through the uneven gap and earning herself a scratch on the arms from the rough stone for her efforts.

But she hardly noticed it. Her heart pounded in her chest as she entered the tunnel.

They were inside the Capital. She'd made it.