"Where have you been?"
It's the first words she says to him, thrown amidst a flurry of shuffling feet and the rush of charred, hot air. It's the dead of night, hours after they said they would reconvene, hours after he promised to check in, and Meg's tolerance has run out.
For what it's worth, Iaves seems to know it: even as he rushes in, dirt-caked, ashen men following behind, sweeping through the hideout like a wave of smoke, he grimaces.
"It was out there," he answers, side-stepping a clog of people, circling around the edge of the room, keenly aware of how she follows on his heels.
It is sometimes what they call that thing let loose on Solveigard since the Day of the Black Sword, the thing that swung it then and swings it now. The thing in the smoking armor.
"Did it follow you?" Meg demands, picking up the pace.
He glances back at her.
"It tried."
"I told you going there was a stupid idea."
He's not listening—or not listening well enough, moving at a clipped pace toward the back offices of the abandoned building, back to where the two of them have set up camp. It is becoming challenging, finding places that mad dog hasn't burned, or the Queen's spymaster has not found.
They are trying to smoke us out of the city, Meg thinks. Even if they burn everyone else.
"It was worth it."
Iaves enters the room, throwing his bag on the ground, turning to the basin in the corner.
"We have enough already. We don't need the extra—especially if grabbing it is going to put the beast on our trail."
She gives the bag a good kick as she sweeps past it, toward the fraying paper tacked to the wall, the scrawl of cartography and notations. She looks it over again, the plan, following the long, red line, tapping on the little x's strewn about it.
It feels like Ben, which is how she knows it's going to work.
"He's not on our trail and that's not what made it worth it," Iaves says somewhere behind her. "I checked the dead drop. There was a letter."
"From him?" Meg demands, wheeling around, watching intently as the Beast-caller plucks at the edges of a grayed envelope, unfurling the scribbled thing inside. She knows even from here that scratched, cramped writing, and she watches the minuscule twitches of emotion that flicker across his face. It's only read in the slight tightening of fingers against the paper's edge, the subtle flair of nostrils, the quiet twitch in the jaw.
"And?" she presses into the silence when his eyes hit the end of the scrawl.
Iaves throws the letter on the table.
"Where are the supplies?" he asks instead.
It's a hairline of irritation interrupted only by the way the lines of his back tauten, the way he goes ramrod stiff, feet up to head, which swivels sharp and jutting, to survey the room.
She points over to the joining chamber, to the makeshift storage room, and he marches over, pulling the door back, moving swiftly inside.
"What did he write?" Meg asks, leaning on a stack of cartons as Iaves digs through an open one, rifling with quick, tan fingers and darting, dark eyes.
His gaze flickers up, fixing on her.
"He knows who has it," Iaves says and something like a cold thrill runs through Meg. It makes her think of old things, of cries in the dark, and cold, sunken places. Perhaps this time things will go differently.
"Who?" she presses, craning forward to see what he searches for, but he pulls back, bringing two small blades with him.
"Jarles-resistant?" he queries, tossing one knife in his palm.
"So they say," Meg answers, cocking her chin toward the closed door behind him, behind which lurk the Brothers of Wren, among others. "You didn't answer my question."
He pockets the blade and his brow furrows for a minute before he glances back.
"Some old man called Olcay," he replies, picking up the conversation threads.
Olcay, it's not a name Meg recognizes, though there is something familiar about it. But Iaves has moved out of the room, into the next, and she has to trail him, like a child or a shadow.
It's only when he seizes the bag that she has an inkling of what he is doing, and she plants herself firmly in his way, barring him from his path toward the door.
"What," she demands, jabbing a finger at the rucksack, "is that about?"
And Iaves, knowing this was coming as surely as he knows his next breath, sighs, looking anywhere but at the small, sharp-edged woman in front of him.
"I have to go," he mutters.
"What?"
"I—" he gestures at the letter. "I have to go."
"It's not my idea," he retorts to a reproach she has not yet managed to get out of her mouth. "Ben said—"
"Ben said to abandon me here," Meg throws back, thrusting a finger toward the window and the red-lit night sky outside it. "In the middle of all of this, with that black dog loose, so you can go play hide and seek with some old man—"
"No!" Iaves interjects, face scrunching into a grimace, feet shuffling as if to determine how best to get around her.
"This is going to work," he echoes, gesturing at the map behind her. "And when it does, someone else is going to come to Urilong's aid. Dost, maybe, or one of her underlings."
He looks at her pleadingly.
"And someone has to cut them off at the pass."
"Then send someone else—the Brothers or one of Davelin's friends," Meg argues, flopping down on a cot, but he has that look on his face, that look he gets when he knows she's being ridiculous. When he knows that she knows that he knows she's being ridiculous, and the thought is so absurd, the gesture so familiar that for a moment she cracks a smile and so does he.
"We all knew this was coming," he says, and he sits on the bed next to her. "I don't like it either, but we knew."
He turns to her now, face lined in a weariness that wasn't there two years ago, before all of this, before losing Rex, losing her arm, the bow, the island...
It's strange not having Ben here, while they are talking about this. He's always there, always filling the room, the conversation, and something about this moment feels hollow without him. The words of purpose, inspiration, are lost between them, and Meg is reminded yet again that no matter how brilliant Ben is, he is blind to how important he is in all of this.
Always the optimist, she thinks, when it comes to everyone else.
That can't be said about the two left here.
"We might be apart, but we'll still have each other's backs," Iaves says, his elbow bumping her shoulder, the great giant heathen of a man that he is. "Three prongs working in tandem: Ben at the head, out looking for the bow; me up North, reaching out, securing the front line. You at the heart, solidifying the base."
"Together, one functioning body," Meg snarks. "Congratulations, you almost sound like Ben."
He flashes her a smile.
"Was it good? I've been practicing."
She shrugs.
"Passable. Needs more hand-waving."
His laughter is a bark, thrown back with canines glinting. This, this is what they need, what they had been missing since that last dark descent, since the island and all that followed, and Meg's heart twists because she did know this was coming, in a way. The heart and the hand couldn't always stay together.
"That's something to do on the road," Iaves is saying. "Who knows, maybe I'll be even better when I get back."
And Meg fidgets, hand in lap, feet dangling off the ledge of the cot.
"Well, don't get too good," she says in the end, glancing at the rucksack and the door and resolutely not thinking about it.
"Iaves just jokes about everything," she told a phantom once, "and you know what Ben is like—all steel and righteousness. He puts it all into his neat little boxes, rationalizes it all away."
Meg wasn't like that. Allayria hadn't been like that either. Maybe that was why it had been so easy for her to dupe Meg, to lure her into unwarranted trust.
It's lonely when you're the only one dealing with it.
And maybe a shadow of that shows on her face, because the one who would rather deflect than address leans over her, hand on her face, suddenly grave in a way she hadn't seen since that long, silent boat ride back from Lethinor.
"You know what to do," he says, pressing a kiss to her forehead, and she knows this gesture, knows what it means from watching him do the same to Rex, from that time she got him boots-up plastered on brandy and he rambled for hours about old Roften traditions. It means belonging. It means family.
Something is pricking at her eyes, constricting at her throat as he pulls away, his hand rest on her bad shoulder, no trepidation at the nothingness hanging below.
"We'll see each other again, at the end of this," he promises. "All of us."
"Before that," she demands, clearing her throat, blinking rapidly, and his smile is jagged-toothed.
"Give them hell, kid," he whispers.
Meg's teeth clench hard together as she watches him go, torn between a fierce, iron-hot pride and the words lingering at the back of her head, the words that won't seem to fade away:
We should not be apart.
A/N: I have a strange amount of affection for this chapter. I think its because we spend so much time in Allayria's head and Ben's obsessive one, that we forget this side's humanity, that there's love here, affection, trust, injured feelings. A heart, beating behind Ben's whirling brain.
Chapter notes: Meg's quote to Allayria is from Paragon's "Bodies."