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damies-emmerly · 7 months

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Tortall or Emelan AU? :D //please feel free to ignore it if it's too vague and makes no sense but i just really want to imagine Rachel swinging a broadsword.

[Tortall AU here; Emelan AU is here. For those of y’all who don’t know Tortall, it’s a sword-and-sorcery-and-feminism saga that paved the way for everything from Hunger Games to Graceling.]

From the second she touches him, Cassie knows: this is no true bird.

He’s magicked, she thinks, or changed in some way. He looks like an ordinary red-tail, to be sure. But it’s not just the waves of spells wrapped around him — the very feel of him is off somehow.

It doesn’t matter. This is still an injured hawk.

She pulls him gently into her arms, where he shivers against her chest, too weak to resist. She doesn’t know why Aldrea needed her to find this bird so badly, but she can tell already that he’s important.

“I’ll need to get a better look at this wing,” she says to herself.

Immediately the bird shifts, holding out the limb for her inspection.

Cassie feels a chill over her entire body. Silently she revises her estimate from “bespelled hawk” to… something else entirely. Something far stranger.

He’s badly hurt. That much she knows with certainty. There’s a knot of twisted ligament swelling on the second joint of the wing she now holds. And there’s some other, deeper hurt. It’s there in the way he trembles weakly in the warm air, in the way he was hopping along the ground when she found him, too uncoordinated to fly.

“All right, then,” she says, fighting to keep her voice steady. “We’re going to need to wrap you to support the joint.”

The hawk that’s not a hawk tilts his head to watch as she closes her hands around his wing, but he makes no attempt to move away. Fighting down a nauseous surge of fear at the sheer unnaturalness of it all — fighting down a million questions — Cassie begins to bind the bandage around him, hollow bones shifting beneath careful-preened feathers and skin.

Later that evening, when the bird is stable and has managed a little food, Aldrea borrows a bit of Cassie’s magic. And then she borrows a lot of Cassie’s magic. Cassie explains, more than once, that she doesn’t have the Gift.

Aldrea just shrugs, and says, “Me neither.”

And then they both go back into that place that’s no place at all, reaching for the animal mind and the second mind underneath. Oxidized-copper fire flows between them. Cassie hears voices that have no sound. At the end of it all, there’s a human lying on the cot between them, naked but for the too-small splint that now wraps a sprained wrist rather than a twisted wing.

Cassie sleeps, after that, and hopes to wake having dreamed the whole thing.

***********

“What are you?” Cassie asks the hawk the following day. Now that he’s wearing the shape of a young man, he can speak to her in human words. She knows that it’s a terribly rude question, but she also doesn’t know of a better way to phrase it.

“Funny,” the hawk says, grinning at her. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“I’m just good with animals. It’s why Aldrea hired me to help with the ponies. But you…”

“Tobias.” The hawk sticks out a hand. “Call me Tobias.”

She frowns a little as she shakes his hand. “That’s not the name Aldrea told me to call you earlier.”

Tobias shrugs, the motion birdlike even in human shape. “It’s the name the hork-bajir gave me, and I prefer it. You ever met any hork-bajir?”

“Met? No.” Cassie shifts in place. “I killed a few, several nights before in the north woods. They came after the ponies, and…”

Tobias is watching her intently. “You were in the trees at the time, and you were still able to fend them off?”

“The Immortals have a… feeling, I suppose. Or they give me one.” She finds herself struggling to put it into words. Two-leggers are so hard to communicate with sometimes, given their over-reliance on language. “A sickness comes over me, and I can always find its source. The only other time I ever felt it was just before a rabid bear attacked our town.”

“Ah.” Tobias turns away, but the intensity of his stare doesn’t lessen; he just looks like he’s contemplating something at the middle distance of his mind. “Yes, that’d make sense. A rabid bear. Good grief.”

“Other than them, the only Immortals I’ve seen were some leerans far off in the sea,” Cassie says. “I’d never seen any at all, before traveling with Aldrea.”

“Hork-bajir are kind, when they’re not… sick. Not rabid.” Tobias smiles faintly. “A group of them helped me out after a bad situation a few years back, and I guess I helped them out in turn. Their leader, Toby Hamee, adopted me as one of her siblings. That’s where my name comes from. Plus—” Tobias strikes a snobby pose, chin tilted up and hair thrown back. “I need a proper name like Tobias Fangor if I’m to impress the other raptors.”

Cassie laughs. He’s not a proper hawk, and not really a proper anything, but he’s beginning to grow on her anyway. “It’s humans that need impressing with names,” she points out.

“Humans,” Tobias says, rolling a sparkling russet sphere of magic between his hands to demonstrate, “are not that hard to impress. Even if one is a lousy hunter.”

But she won’t be deterred forever. “How do you do it, though? Change shape like an andalite?”

“I’m a mage, that’s all,” Tobias says. He flares his handful of Gift, tossing it into the air with a dozen of its fellows before disappearing them all, as if in demonstration. “I was one of the first in a while too long on curiosity and too short on common sense to try shapeshifting. But more people probably could if they were willing to take the risk.”

“Risk?” It’d have to be a big one, to quell this longing in her chest.

“You need one spell to turn yourself from a human to a hawk, and another one entirely to turn from a hawk to a human. That second one, obviously, must be performed when one is already in hawk shape, with no conjuring circles or spoken words for aid. And if one lacks the necessary concentration to perform the spell with mental workings alone…” He laughs at himself. “You saw. I’d been stuck long enough to be just about getting used to the taste of raw rabbit when you and Aldrea found me.”

“Could you shapeshift me?” Cassie asks.

“Oh yes, almost certainly. There’d be no turning you back once I did, so you’d be an animal forever, but you really can get used to raw rabbit after a time.” Tobias says it casually, but she can see his twitch of smile.

“In that case, no thank you.” Cassie stretches out her fingers, wiggling them in front of her. “I happen to like reading books and eating from plates and using my two-legger skills to make medicines.”

“What shape would you take, if you could choose?”

“Did you have a choice?”

Tobias thinks about that one for a while, expression dreamy and distant. “Yes and no. It was the shape my magic took, but that shape wouldn’t have formed if not for all I’d studied about hawks already.” He chews his lip, still considering. “I wasn’t born wanting that shape. It was Toby, and the other hork-bajir. They worship the old giants, the dinosaurs, the ones whose bone-shapes we find in the stone, and the giants were somewhere between hork-bajir and birds. I wanted to use talons like those, to live in the trees like they did, and that shaped the magic too.”

“But if you really wanted to, you could’ve taken on a different shape?”

“Oh, probably.” Tobias shrugs. “But I wanted hawk, and so my magic wanted hawk. You haven’t told me what shape you’d want.”

Cassie sighs longingly. “Horse, one of the ones bred to run forever. Or wolf. I wouldn’t say no to flying, although I’d rather be one of the water-hunters like an osprey.” She tilts her head back, laughing at herself. “Hork-bajir too. Bat. Leeran, or dolphin, or both. One of the leviathans, the ones that sing. Shark, mole, bear, viper. Kraken. Cockatiel. Dragonfly.”

“Oh, well, if that’s all.” Tobias laughs as well. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“I don’t have the Gift, so it’ll never happen. Might as well dream big.”

“Are you sure?” Tobias is back to looking straight at her with that full-intensity stare. “Not about the Gift. About…” He squints at her. “Aldrea said that the wolves who sheltered you after… your family. That you kept up with them, and became part of the pack even. Are you sure you were on two legs the whole time?”

Cassie feels her face grow hot. “I’m a person. I’m human. I only lost track of that the once.”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I was only curious.”

“And you?” Cassie asks. “What you said about the spells… Are you a human who turns into a hawk, or a hawk who can sometimes be human?”

Tobias opens his mouth, and then closes it. He cocks his head in thought.

“Don’t encourage his woolgathering,” Aldrea calls, stomping over with an armful of firewood. “He’ll be insufferable all day, now that you’ve gone and…”

Cassie never finds out what she’s gone and done, because that’s when over four dozen horses — glossy, armored, well cared-for — pour into the clearing in sharp formation. The patrol fills the whole meadow, coming to surround Cassie as the horses all rush to greet her. Most take turns to nuzzle close to Cassie even as she rises to stroke them, sniffing at her skin and gently lipping her hair.

They’re enormous, beautifully strong. Cassie can feel the sturdy little ponies’ envy at their powerful cousins even as the herd surges around her. Cassie reaches up to greet them all in delighted awe, barely even registering the full squadron of knights using them as battlemounts and pack carriers.

That is, until the lead knight dismounts — and pulls off her helmet. It’s a woman leading the squadron, a woman with flowing golden hair.

“You’re the king’s champion!” Cassie blurts, registering the grizzly-bear emblem on the knight’s shield.

“And you’re the girl who saved our Tobias.” Sir Rachel smiles at her.

Cassie bobs into a curtsey, a little late. “I only helped, dame.”

“She also has a gift for understatement, it would seem.” Tobias steps up next to Cassie. “I’d be dead if not for her.”

“Glad you’re not dead, then. Shall we?” Rachel says to Tobias. She gestures at one of the tents a porter has just finished assembling at the far side of the clearing.

Together they begin to walk toward the tent. Cassie stays with Rachel’s horse, but Tobias turns and beckons to her. “You’ll want to hear what Cassie’s sensed about the Immortals,” he tells Rachel. “It fits well with my own findings.”

After a second’s hesitation, Rachel nods. Cassie runs to join them.

The porter holds open the tent flap to allow Rachel and Tobias and Cassie inside — and then, to Cassie’s surprise, he follows them in. Her bafflement only grows when Sir Rachel becomes the one to take up guard just inside the entrance to the tent, while the porter sits at the field desk in the middle of the space and looks up expectantly at Tobias.

“Cassie,” Tobias says, “Meet the King’s Spymaster, Lord Baron of Pirate’s Swoop. You can call him Marco. Marco, this is Cassie, the most powerful wild mage I’ve ever seen, and possibly the key to peace with the Immortals.”

“Are you all that, then?” the Lord Baron asks in a lower-class Corus accent, folding calloused hands on the desk in front of him.

Cassie, feeling utterly off-balance in this world where knights could be women and hawks could be humans and people with Marco’s peasant-like haircut and clothes could have so many titles, settles for curtseying again. “I don’t think so,” she says. “I mean, I hope. Sir. My… Uh, Lord… Your highness..?” Blushing at her own rural manners, she curtseys yet again.

“‘Your highness,’” Marco says, grinning, and Cassie realizes her error too late. “Been a while since I’ve heard that one. Should really bring it back, now that you mention it.”

“If you so much as think about it,” Rachel says, voice dangerously sweet, “I shall be forced to fulfill my duties to Jake through assassinating you. And I do know where you sleep.”

“Per the wishes of my beautiful and terrifying wife, call me Marco,” the baron says. He’s still got the expression that suggests he’s enjoying some private joke, but Cassie has no inclination to try and laugh along. She senses that this is not a man to be trifled with, even before one takes into consideration his choice of romantic partners.

“You’d best do as he says, or his head will fill with even more air until he’s as dreamy as Tobias,” Rachel says.

“Hmm?” Tobias glances around, having apparently missed everything they just said.

“How’s the weather wherever you are?” Marco asks.

“Oh, yes, I was just thinking about that. Given the increased presence of storms around certain of the Immortals…”

“Tobias.” Marco reaches out and taps him in the middle of the forehead, the sort of thing that seems deeply stupid to do to a mage that powerful. “Aldrea says you were bespelled. Are you all right?”

Tobias smiles. “Seriously, I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine now.” He spreads his arms. “There’s no trace on me, is there?”

Marco shakes his head. “And you should know by now I never do anything seriously. Everything I say is sarcastic or a lie, including this statement.” He winks at Cassie. “Think about it.”

“They have a way to control people now,” Tobias says, effectively bringing down the mood. “A new type of Immortal.”

By the door, Rachel stiffens. “Control?”

Tobias looks at Cassie. “You said when the hork-bajir attacked, they felt rabid.”

“I…” She opens her hands, a helpless gesture. “They felt like the rabid bear I encountered once. A deep wrongness. It made me sick to my stomach to feel them, and I knew they were coming from a long way off.”

“That wrongness has a name,” Tobias says. “The disease isn’t rabies. It’s yeerks.”

“An Immortal that can infect other beings?” Marco leans forward, looking Tobias over so intently he almost matches the mage stare for stare. “One that can get inside them and change their behavior?”

“I’m clean.” Tobias looks back at Marco, and Marco becomes the one to break his gaze away.

Marco must have Sight, Cassie realizes. Another of those strange little magics she knows almost nothing about. The same class as whatever it is she does, when she simply knows where an animal is hurt even before she looks. Wild magic, Tobias called it, and she makes a note to ask him later what he meant.

“You’re clean,” Marco says. “As you ever are. Filthy with Gift, as always, making the rest of us look bad. But you’re all you, for my sins.”

Tobias smiles. “They tried to infest me, of course. I panicked and shapeshifted. After that…” His gaze drifts over Marco’s shoulder. “About what you’d expect, a great deal of effort to try and make me change back. Standard emotional manipulation spells, that sort of thing.”

From Marco’s and Rachel’s expressions, Cassie can guess that there’s nothing standard about what Tobias is describing. And that the horrible, hobbling layers of spells saturating his mind when she’d first found him — just like the brace around his wrist — were leftovers of whatever they did.

“It all fits, when you think about it.” Tobias doesn’t seem to notice anyone else’s reactions. “The strange raids the gedds and taxxons and now even hork-bajir have been making on peaceful human settlements. The sudden proliferation of Immortals in this realm, most of them violent. Ax’s hints about what the andalites are doing, and not, to keep the peace here.”

“These yeerks.” Marco truly does look serious now. “They can control andalites? And humans?”

Tobias nods.

“And Ax didn’t see fit to tell us this because…?” Rachel demands.

“He might not’ve known,” Tobias says.

Marco nods. “And he might not’ve cared.”

“You know that’s not true.”

Marco blows out a breath. He twirls his quill between his fingers, a sharp angry motion. It’s not all like the way Tobias cheats at juggling, with tiny touches of his Gift to keep their eyes on the balls that stay in the air and away from any he might drop along the way. Instead there’s real skill there in the careless way Marco makes the pen disappear and reappear without any apparent effort or thought.

“Ax is an andalite,” Tobias tells Cassie. “Stranded here in the mortal realms when the rift closed. He’s happy to help out in exchange for interesting new foods, by his own definition of what counts as food, but he also has his own loyalties. And we should respect those loyalties.” These last words are said with a pointed glance first at Rachel, then at Marco.

“Tobias thinks he’s halfway Immortal, one foot in the human world, one talon over there,” Marco answers in the same tone. “He stays inside with his books, never mind the work it takes from the rest of us to keep the walls of the library from falling in around him.”

“Stop it, both of you!” Rachel snaps. “This is a waste of time.”

“The point remains,” Tobias says. “That most of the Immortals — the ones we’ve been seeing, anyway — are being controlled.”

“Hork-bajir being used against humans.“ Marco spits on the floor, a way of wielding off ill luck. “Goddess shield us.”

“I’ll second that,” Rachel murmurs.

*********

Two weeks after her arrival in Corus, Cassie finds out the hard way what they mean.

The surge of adrenaline drags her out of her bed and into the night before she is even fully awake. She gasps at the air, sick and shaking. She feels the badgers and horses and bats rush at her from all around. And she feels them too. The Immortals who are sickened with parasites, somewhere nearby.

They come from underground. She isn’t expecting that until it’s almost too late.

Four, five, a dozen enormous worms explode from the earth, running on a hundred legs each. She can’t say what they’re doing here but she has already strung her bow and begun firing.

To her horror, the first worm she hits splits open on impact, and its fellows converge to begin devouring its flesh. She’s distracted by watching. Doesn’t realize she’s surrounded until it’s too late.

She turns, and they’re all around her. There are so many now, too many to see clearly. But she can feel them.

The nearest worm rushes her, mouth open — and falls.

It’s in pieces on the ground. A different Immortal, this one graceful and fast, has landed between her and the front line. Cassie stumbles back, watching as the new being swings a scythe-like tail with speed almost impossible for the human eye to follow. A second worm goes down, a third, a fourth. Just like that.

Leaving the Immortal to guard her back, Cassie pivots and notches another arrow. She fires, and fires again.

There’s a break in the line. Magic of midnight purple wraps one of the worms and drags it back, then a different Gift in brilliant gold lances forth and explodes it entirely. Rachel gallops forth, her body and her horse gilded by magic. She charges among the worms, lance drawn, golden Gift surrounding her weapon like sunlight. Soon she and Cassie and the blue immortal have formed a semi-circle, struggling to hold the hordes at bay.

Cassie can see other fighters in the far distance, Aldrea and Marco and the indigo Gift-user who must be the king, trying to get through to them.

“Could really use… Tobias… Right about now,” Rachel pants. She’s on foot, beheading the centipedes and striking off limbs with an enormous two-handed greatsword.

Cassie finds Nutmeg, presses her hands against the horse’s flanks. «Find the hawk who rides like a man,» she says in Speech. «Please. Now.»

Nutmeg takes off, running hard for the humans’ quarters.

Cassie loses herself in drawing and shooting, in desperate calls of «Keep back!» to the beasts who might otherwise come to her aid. She loses track until the sky suddenly goes white.

A brilliant instant of daylight shows the figure that cuts across the sky, a burning meteor of russet-brown magic that sears the ground below and clouds above with a catastrophic tidal wave of his will. Lightning arcs from the earth and sky, converging on the dark-robed figure, and Cassie only has time to draw a sharp breath before Tobias releases it in all directions at once. Fifteen of the immortal worms die in an instant.

The unnatural storm builds as Tobias wills it. The air releases its power, and he channels all it gives him into a cataclysm of raw energy. Enormous wings of pure magic cloak him, his mere human body rendered minuscule by the scale of the forces he wields.

It’s over in seconds, once Tobias arrives.

Some of the worms retreat. Some stop to eat their fallen comrades. Some stay, and those who do all die.

Rachel withdraws her sword with a schlurp from the nearest worm. It’s the last of them; the pasture has fallen still.

Tobias drifts lightly to the ground. He yawns, running a hand over his mussed hair.

«You are well?» the blue-furred immortal says to Cassie.

He’s probably asking because she’s is staring at Tobias with her mouth open. “I’m not hurt,” she says slowly. “Are you…?”

The immortal gives a strange little salute with his tail blade. «I am Ax. Rather, Ax is the closest human tongues can come to saying the first syllable of my name. You are Cassie of the horses.»

Cassie nods, head spinning. “You’re the one who was stranded here?”

He smiles, or she thinks he does. It happens only with his eyes. «I am doing my best to study your species, so that I will have many interesting stories to report back to my fellow andalites.»

It’s enough to snap Cassie out of her daze. There are horses and birds hurt all around her. She runs to the nearest wounded horse. This power, this connection she does not fully understand, pours from her to begin the desperate struggle to knit flesh and restore blood.

Cassie staggers away from the roan stallion the moment he’s stable, turning to cup both hands under a wounded bat with a gasp of prayer. And then another bleeding horse, and then a broken-legged doe. When her own magic runs short, Tobias crouches down across from her and pours pure power into her veins until she once again brims with her own yellow-green fire.

“What are you?” Cassie cannot help but ask all over again.

“Tired,” Tobias says crossly.

She smiles in spite of the blood that coats both their hands. “Are you all right, anyway?”

“No.” Tobias finishes reattaching the saw-whet’s wing with an impatient gesture. “I was sleeping, and now I’m not. And I hate owls.”

“He doesn’t meant it,” Cassie tells the saw-whet. Of course the little bird cares nothing for the strange hoots of two-loggers, only that the pain and the desperation of being trapped on the ground are gone.

“I do so.” Tobias straightens up, grimacing as his knees crack. “Anyway, we’ve done all we can here. Figuring out whether those taxxons were yeerk-controlled or just hungry will be tomorrow’s problem. For now, let’s just get back to bed.”

Cassie hooks her arm through his, and offers no argument.

********

The horses are murmuring to each other about an unfamiliar two-legger, when Cassie steps into the barn the following month. The human is in the stall at the far end. Cassie startles him when she yanks open the door, causing him to spin sharply and almost fall.

“You’re not one of the ostlers,” she says, smiling.

“Um, no.“ The man sticks out a hand. "My name’s Jake."

"Named for the king?”

Jake chuckles. “A few of them, yes.”

She appraises him: dark hair, simple but well-made clothes, confident voice. “What are you doing in here?”

He blushes so completely, rubbing a hand along the back of his neck, that she halfway regrets the question. “I’m, uh, hiding from my duties in the palace?”

She considers. Manservant, perhaps. Maybe even one of the ones who’s also the son of a lesser lord. “If you’re going to stay, you can muck out stalls with me,” she says. Calling his bluff.

But Jake nods immediately, and he takes the shovel that she offers.

He’s not half bad, making up for what he lacks in skill with no shortage of enthusiasm. Cassie gets the manure to a manageable level in less than a third of the time it normally takes her, with his help, even if it came at the expense of his formal clothes.

“You’re the one teaching Tobias, aren’t you?” Jake asks.

Cassie starts the pump, letting him rinse off the worst of the muck before doing so herself. “I’m his student, not the other way around.”

“That’s not the way he tells it,” Jake says. “I was hoping… Have you seen him around?”

Cassie knows what he’s talking about. Ever since the Carthacki delegation arrived at the palace three days past, Tobias has been in hawk shape more than human, even more distant and thoughtful than usual. He’s spent most of the last few days perched on a beam in the barn, preening feathers with a thoroughness that worries Cassie — sometimes he’s not straightening, but yanking them out entirely.

"Not in a while,” she says.

Jake nods grimly.

Whatever he’s about to say next gets interrupted when one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting comes sprinting across the parade ground. She skids to a stop long enough to drop into a curtsey so low that her hair brushes the ground. "Begging Your Majesty’s pardon, but Sir Rachel has requested your assistance with the Carthackis, Sire.“

Jake sighs. "Sir Rachel is a perfectly good diplomat, no matter how much she might dislike it.”

“I was asked to impress upon your gracious person that it is Lord Marco currently entertaining them, Your Majesty.”

Jake says several things in close succession, all of them unbefitting of royalty. And then he turns, gives a hasty bow of farewell to Cassie and the lady, and runs for the palace. Hopefully someone will do something about the fact that he’s covered up to the knees in horse dung before he gets in a room with the diplomats.

Cassie feels a mental presence, and a second later a familiar weight settles upon her shoulder.

“That…” she says to Tobias, staring after Jake. “That was…?” And then she gives up, gawping in silence.

Tobias presses his head against her cheek so that his magical voice comes through. «Welcome to Tortall,» he tells her. «I’d say you’ll get used to it, but I’ve been here four years and I never have.»

#I almost didn't read this because of the length #but i did anyway and it's worth it #long posts from good writers are always worth it though #animorphs

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