“Sanguinisui, come along.”
Amma’s feet began to take her forward, and fear flooded her features.
He led her slowly for a moment, waiting for the magic to dissipate before his next question. “Now, tell me, what naughty thing have you done here, Amma?”
“It’s…complicated.” Her breaths were coming shallowly as her eyes pinged over his shoulder and back to his face.
Damien knew they were still too far off to be properly identified. “Let me guess: you’ve stolen something, but you’re quite sorry about it, and perhaps you didn’t even mean to, but you justhadto, and when you’re caught you’ll be all quivering lips and fake tears to avoid whatever unjust punishment is levied against you.”
“Something like that,” she said, eyes glassy already.
“This doesn’t seem the sort of place that would take your hands for your thievery, but whatdoyou suppose they’ll do to you?”
“To me?” She swallowed, and then her eyes found him, sharper and with a new kind of fear, one he was much less familiar with, tinged with something like compassion. “Awful things will happen, Damien.”
His next step was hesitant, and then he brought them all to a stop. “As interested as I am in watching you pay for your crimes, I’m quite a bit less interested in being caught up in all that myself.”
If she said the guards couldn’t see her face, then so be it: he wouldn’t let them.
Still with his back to the gates at the base of the hill and with the two of them hemmed in on either side by the knoggelvi, Damien slid his dagger from its bracer and sliced his thumb on the blade before sheathing it again. He dragged his bloodied finger over his bottom lip and began to feel the changes crawling over his own face as the spell took hold, then moved a step closer to Amma.
It occurred to him then, he had never cast this spell on anyone else. Illusion was difficult enough, innate to most infernal beasts, but something a blood mage had to learn. It could be quite draining, but for Amma he would of course do it.
He silently chastised himself for becoming so pathetic and stepped closer to her—she would need a smear of his blood as well for it to work. The cut on his finger was already healing, and the longer he contemplated how her lips would feel against his own if he chose to share his blood that way instead, the more likely he would have no choice but to find out, but then he came to his senses and pressed his sliced thumb to her bottom lip.
She didn’t pull back, though her eyes, already doe-like and wide, went even wider. He let his finger drift to the soft edge of her mouth, whispering in Chthonic. He could feel the changes taking hold in himself, his hand cupping her chin for a moment until he saw the changes happening in Amma’s face as well. Her hair darkened, her cheeks thinned out, eye shape elongated, and in a moment, she was the spitting image of a woman he’d seen in Elderpass.
“Branson?” she said in her true voice, strange coming from a wider mouth with thinner lips.
Though he wasn’t any shorter and his clothes had not changed, he concluded he had accurately taken on the visage of that barkeep in Elderpass, the one Amma had flirted with to get them information. The slice on his thumb already healed, he took a hand to his face and briefly touched the scar still raised across it—as usual the magic worked on everything but that. “You can lose the hood,” he said casually, turning from her and leading them to the gate.
They were predictably stopped and looked over by three of the most pompous soldiers Damien had ever laid eyes on, but at least they weren’t Holy Knights. He smiled with Branson’s face, odd forcing such a pleasantry on even with someone else’s features, but when he thought about how easy it would be to arcanely kill these fools for daring to stop him at all, the smile was injected with an easier sort of sincerity.
They asked his business in Faebarrow while a third guard greeted Amma with a bit more politeness. She wasn’t doing well to hide her fear, and so Damien put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. “Just looking for a new place to settle down.”
The two soldiers gave one another knowing looks while another rifled through the pack strapped to one of the knoggelvi. It was then he saw one of them had an extra marking across his chest. While they all wore the same sigil, a strange creature with the head of a lion and the body of a fish, the landlocked Faebarrow’s inexplicable crest, he assumed, this one also had the holy mark of Osurehm on a patch on his arm. “And nothing to declare?”
Damien’s eyes flicked to the man’s pommel, and could see the faint, radiant glow about it. So, there was a mage amongst them. “Only our loyalty to the realm.”
Two of the soldiers gave him a solemn nod, but the third narrowed dark eyes at him. Apparently serving one’s god close enough afforded one the power to suss out sarcasm no matter how well it was disguised. Then there was a snap and a growl, and a fourth soldier pulled back after trying to pat Kaz. Up on all fours, back rounded, the rat-like dog was snarling from the knoggelvi’s back.
“Ah, that too,” said Damien, reaching up and grabbing him by the scruff of his neck to hand off to Amma. She clumsily took Kaz, and both were so surprised that neither could do anything too stupid in front of the guards. “My wife’s. It’s evil, but what can you do? She loves the thing.”
At this, even the knight marked by his god cracked a grin, and the knoggelvi, the imp, the thief, and the blood mage were allowed to pass into Faebarrow.
Silently, they wandered into the town, and Damien turned them down the first open road away from the gate to find an unpopulated nook along an alley. The illusion that had been begging to dispell itself was dropped, and Damien breathed a hefty sigh. His skin went uncomfortably tight as his features shifted, and he had a moment of dizziness that quickly passed. Illusions were close to infernal arts, but they were a different kind of mage’s game, and Damien had really only learned the spell to ultimately infiltrate the court at Eirengaard when the time came.
Amma prodded at herself as well, feeling the discomfort again but knowing what it was. She inhaled sharply then, like she’d been holding her breath the entire time, setting Kaz on the ground and pressing her own fingers to her lip where his blood had been but was now gone.
“You protected me,” she said, eyes roving the ground and then up to his, big and bright and blue again.
“I protected myself,” he half-lied. “And I need those hands of yours on the off chance some overzealous merchant or dignitary actually does want them as a trophy for stealing their…what was it?”
She shook her head. “It’s not…I can’t explain it.”
Damien chuckled, leading them back toward the main road. “Can’t or won’t?”
Amma pulled her hood up again, looking shiftily over the street as they entered into it. “Don’t want to.”
