He couldn't have asked for a better workspace. Long tables encircled the walls of the room, interspersed by shelves filled with every tool of his craft imaginable. A potion station pressed up against one wall, although he noted that the shelves beside it appeared to have been stripped bare of ingredients. The moment Sedgewick had stepped inside, the scent of paper and essantium shavings had swirled around his sore body. A cool scent with a hint of raw, electric power.

Now, he skimmed a finger across the black stone workbench in the center of the room and leaned back in his chair. Notches were carved into the stone so that clamps could be inserted for different sizes of rune discs. Pure light hit the polished surface from the large window in the vaulted ceiling above.

"This is what those who cooperate with me are rewarded with," Calrock had said when he'd first been brought here. As if a shiny new workspace was enough to buy off years of loyalty.

Sedgewick stared at the paper in front of him. He'd sketched a circle onto the paper and a few scattered lines of spell runes encircled the drawing. Brown ink dripped from his suspended pen. Five hundred discs of a spell powerful enough to turn the tide of a battle.

Ink splattered across the page, ruining the runes. Time. He just needed to buy time until he could escape. With or without his intelligence, Eldain would have to march on Creststone. If he could delay Calrock until the battle, then surely at least some troops would be pulled from the Black Obelisk to the main fortress. The fact that Kier was here seemed to indicate that soldiers were often shifted around. With fewer forces, and Calrock distracted, he stood a better chance of getting him and Rivian out alive.

"If you squint any harder, you'll damage your eyes." The door that had opened too quietly for him to notice clicked shut behind Bilara. A key scraped against a lock from the outside. Her tattered clothes had been replaced by a plain gray dress. The bruises on her face must have been magically healed because they'd vanished entirely, leaving behind smooth skin and arched cheekbones. Her knotted, ratty raven hair now lay down her shoulder in a neat braid still damp from being washed.

Sedgewick snorted. "You seem to have been off enjoying yourself."

Her ears slicked back menacingly. She stepped deeper into the room and leaned over the center workbench, dropping her voice low. "If the plan didn't require it then I would rather be the one playing the role of the filthy, stubborn hero than the primped doll returned groveling to her shelf." She wrinkled her nose. "Your smell fits your role too well."

Sedgewick scrapped his quill across the paper again, hiding whatever runes he hadn't already splattered over. "Your uncle seems rather happy to have you out. How did you convince him to make you the one who assists me?"

Bilara hoisted herself up onto the workbench and crossed her legs. A glob of ink had stained her gray dress, but she paid it no mind. "So you don't trust me anymore, hmm?"

"It was a rather fragile trust to begin with," he muttered, sticking his quill back into the ink and avoiding the gaze of her violet eyes.

"True." Bilara fell silent, but the weight of her eyes hung about his shoulders and pressed into his chest.

"What?" he snapped, finally looking up at her.

She tilted her head to the side. "He's hoping I'll seduce you. Oh, don't scoff, 'Master' Sedgewick. In a different life, I cleaned up rather ravishingly. And you falling madly in love with an Onryxian woman for showing you basic decency would make it much easier to get you to behave like a good boy. Calrock doesn't like messy work. He prefers his pawns cooperative."

Sedgewick snorted. "I've never been described as cooperative."

"Your eloquent negotiations proved that already." The woman tilted her head to the side and actually grinned at him. "It was rather fun to watch, actually."

"If you are trying to enact your uncle's plan, I'm afraid it will be a rather futile effort."

"Should he have sent Kier instead?" She raised an eyebrow questioningly.

"It has nothing to do with my preferences or lack thereof." The gender didn't matter so much as...

Dark eyes danced in his memory. The ghost of a soft hand brushed his cheek.

"Then why?"

He rose from his chair. The paper in front of him crumpled under his fist. "I'm afraid you haven't given me a valuable enough truth for that information."

Bilara's hand brushed his, gently plucking the paper from his grip. She smoothed it out and traced her fingers over the still-wet ink. "Most mages start from the edges of a spell and build on top of them inward. A few start at the center and work outward. You wrote incomplete runes in both places. Why?"

"Does it matter?" He pushed away from the bench. His feet dragged him restlessly across the room. He stared at the shelf in front of him but the sight of all that equipment did nothing to stimulate his mind.

"Humor me."

"It's already completed. The order I transcribe it doesn't matter."

"You've assembled a whole disc's worth of runes, where? In your head?"

He could hear the incredulous eyebrow raise before he turned to see it. "Yes."

"Fascinating."

Sedgewick grabbed another piece of paper blindly. He leaned over his work, the quill in his hand shaking uncharacteristically. That wouldn't do. Sedgwick stretched his hand and let out a breath. His eyes slipped closed and he focused only on how it would feel to channel the spell right now. The runes danced in his mind's eye, twisting into place like pieces of a puzzle. He discarded some and created others until finally, he felt he knew enough to begin writing. The spell came easier then. His hand skipped across the page, creating a line here, an arch there, a dot in between there. The weight lifted from him. Bilara's ever-present stare faded from his awareness and only himself and the thrill of his creation existed. Magic. Unchanneled, potential magic, but magic all the same. The one thing that never failed him.

It wasn't until the sound of a door closing jerked him from his work that he realized how much time had passed. Bilara set a tray on the only part of the workbench not now covered in his scribblings. She plucked a roll off of it and bit in eagerly. "Do you always starve yourself while you're working?"

"Focusing."

"Whatever." She waved her roll dismissively. "Now, would you care to tell me what you're actually making?"

The cramp in his wrist finally registered. "The spell. Obviously."

"No, you're not." She reached him faster than expected, her long, pale fingers curling around his wrist. "The rune disc that Calrock wants is explosive. None of these runes have anything to do with fire."

"There are other ways to create a burst of force—"

"Which are also not present. We are together on this, are we not? So tell me, Sedgewick. What are you making?"

And there was the dilemma. Did he trust her this far? Really? Sedgewick stared into the brightness of her violet eyes and tried to discern what thoughts lay behind them. She had no love for Calrock or Kier, of that he believed. But enmity of them didn't mean loyalty to him. And yet...

He pressed a finger to his lips. She released his wrist and he snatched up a piece of paper, scrawling a message on it. "Scrying orb confiscated. Contacting match?"

Bilara read the note before setting it ablaze with a nearby candle. "You'd need the specific runes of the other half," she said the words lightly but her look of understanding was weighted with deliberation. "Do you know those?"

He nodded.

She took the quill from his hand and wrote a note of her own. "Brilliance or idiocy. Impress me." Then it too went into the fire.

Sedgewick snatched a roll, devouring it in two large bites. Then he set to work. The runes were complicated, and most wouldn't have been able to recall the exact sequence, but Sedgewick had made that set of scrying orbs himself and once he sank back into his old spell, they came to him like old friends. Soon the paper copy was completed. "I'll need the essantium to carve it now."

"Not yet. Wait for Calrock to return to the fort. He may recognize what you're planning if he sees this. Kier won't. I'll say you're ready then."

"If I wait too long, they may be too far to lend any aid."

"He will know. If you trust nothing else about me, trust that."

"Very well. In this, you have my trust."

**********

Author's Note: What is this? An update after almost two years?

Long story short, after I realized there was no way this was going to be around 20k, I got stuck on a plot point. Then I felt SUPER burnt out on writing due to also finishing Magic's Memories around the same time I started this. I took a long rest from writing and have been writing shorts for random new characters since then. No promises as to whether this will be updated regularly again, but this chapter was almost done and I was in the mood for Young!Sedge so here we are (if anyone is still here).