Darn. 

Well. She doesn't have enough money to pay for a Sending, but she does have one more day to try contacting him. Maybe it'll work.

She checks the scrolls at the temple of the All-Seeing Eye before she leaves. They have exactly one teleport. They also have a scroll of Merge with Familiar, which it occurs to her she might need, if she doesn't have a better idea for getting onto the ship than sneaking on as a dragonfly. She doesn't technically need to bring her familiar at all, but if something weird happens and she gets stuck in Cheliax, she would very much like to have the theoretical ability to prepare more spells. She buys it, and heads home, and spends half the night doing the bizarre ritual where she burns the scroll and feeds the ashes to her dog. 

She goes to sleep. She can't even halfheartedly pretend that she's trying not to worry.

He's thinking about Naima. He hopes she comes. He hopes she doesn't. Ostenso isn't safe. If she tries to rescue him, they could easily both be damned, and that's not a risk anyone should run, least of all for him. He walked right into this. He should have known the letter was a trap. Charles-Alexandre would never turn to him for help – still blames him for his brother and sister – not that he doesn't blame himself. He barely remembers the day Gérard and Eugénie were tried – there were so many trials that last terrible year in Galt, and all of them almost exactly the same. He's sure he wouldn't have spoken against them if he hadn't sincerely believed them to be Chelish agents. He has no idea what he believes, now.  

He might as well be brutally honest (he's had very little else to do for the past twenty-four hours). He'd known he was walking into a trap. He could have done responsible thing and burned the letter, or given it to Shawil to investigate. But Gérard and Eugénie are dead, and can't be resurrected, and he'd been frightened of himself when he learned how easily he could forget about the people he'd killed, and he felt he owed something to their brother. 

And that brings him back to Naima, because this is really between him and Charles-Alexandre, and whatever happens, he should be willing to face it on his own. He doesn't want her to risk her immortal soul just because he's been a blind sentimental idiot. He doesn't want to die. 

She starts counting up the days again as soon as she wakes up. It's four days to Ostenso, and today will be the third day, which means - she'll very probably make it there first, if she leaves first thing tomorrow, but she doesn't know how precisele the four day number is, or whether sometimes it's just under that, whether the ship might arrive at night, if the winds carry it just so.

She knocks on the wizard's door at dawn, without having prepared her own spells. She acknowledges to his staff that she's aware that it's terribly rude to come at this hour, but she needs to see the wizard immediately. She is insistent. She might come off as slightly hysterical. It takes a little while to be let in to see him.

He keeps slightly different hours than she does, and has already finished preparing his own spells. No teleports. He has some hesitations about teleporting her to Ostenso - it's a dangerous place, after all, and most people don't want to be involved in a criminal plot in Cheliax - but eventually she convinces him that a member of her adventuring party is depending on her, and, well, he must have had adventuring companions in his own youth, before he decided to settle down and live off of the occasional teleport. He agrees to take her first thing in the morning, for the price of two teleports.

She spends the rest of the day looking through every magic shop in the city for a second teleport scroll. There happen not to be any. You can do the job with one, of course, but it's riskier, and she hates to take any risks, under these conditions. Asking wizards to make one is useless, now; teleport is a fifth-circle spell, and it takes two days of work to make a scroll of it. There is not time. She doesn't like her odds, here, but - she told Elie that she would come for him. That's what you do, when adventuring companions get taken by some threat. Even at risk to yourself.

She tries again to scry him. Once again, she isn't able to send messages. She hates that - he's going to notice the ship approaching shore and not know that she's working on coming for him - but she wasn't scrupulous about making it home by sunset, specifically because she wanted to scry him, and she is not in a position to try other temples for an unused Sending.

She goes home and sleeps. She wakes up at midnight and prepares her spells. And a few minutes after dawn, the wizard teleports her just outside of Ostenso. He is gone in another moment. She is alone in Cheliax with her familiar. She takes her headscarf down, spells herself to look like an old woman, and walks up the beach to the docks, where she checks the ships that are already here. None of them are his. He is not here yet. She is not too late.

She sits down on the shore and looks out at the water, waiting with one hand on her spell component pouch, hoping that nobody notices her.

He can feel it when the ship drops anchor. 

He wishes, not for the first time, that he could have been a martyr. Dying bravely for the revolution is one thing; dying stupidly for an aristocrat's revenge is quite another. What's really galling is that Charles-Alexandre isn't even wrong to blame him. He'd always imagined himself going bravely to his execution, head held high and spitting defiance. He can't even feel superior about this. It's a shame. 

He feels very small. It's not necessarily a bad thing. He is proud, bitter, mildly annoyed that in the grand scheme of things his death won't even matter. Soon – and in the grand scheme of things, a century or five or six is soon – his soul will be ground up into nothing recognizable. There's no point worrying about that distant other being just because it has some continuity with him. He thinks there's nothing in him that Asmodeus could use; he's always been proud of that, at least. 

He is – calmer than he expected, really. After four days – he thinks – with no sense of time, with the same thoughts turning over and over and over in his brain, it's a relief to have anything happen at all. Besides, there's a kind of clarity that comes with knowing that at any moment one might be damned to hell. One could live like that for years – he'd done it, and done some his best writing that way. It's the certainty of purpose, the conviction that accretes and strengthens when at every moment one is forced to consider that there is something greater than one's immortal soul. 

They come down, and blindfold him, and lead him to the deck. 

It's taken her longer than she had hoped to determine that the ship coming up towards shore is definitely the one she's waiting for. When she's sure, it's already closer than she wanted it to be, and she wonders whether she has enough time to get Elie out before the ship makes it to shore.

There's no time to come up with another plan, though. She merges with Wishbone (doesn't need to call him; he's seen the ship and come to her on his own). She looks around for a moment, doesn't see anyone immediately and obviously looking at her, and then turns herself into a dragonfly.

The spell lasts seven minutes. She doesn't know how to dismiss it before that; she'll have to wait it out and hope that seven minutes is not too late (or too early). She flits out over the ocean towards the ship.

Dragonflies can see incredibly well, for insects, but they're not as good at making out the specifics of faces. She figures that she can probably still recognize a man who's tied up. And she does, eventually, after a few minutes of searching the ship. But by the time she notices him, he isn't alone; someone has come in to move him.

Seven minutes. Maybe two or three left. She is so tempted to fly up to him and so afraid that that will get her noticed by someone else. She hangs back and follows them up to the deck. She'll be instantly exposed to everyone up here as soon as her transformation wears off. She'll want to be very close to him, she supposes, and ready to teleport right away.

She flits forward and lands on Elie's hand, the first time she thinks she can do it without his guards noticing. She doesn't know whether he'll have any idea what this means. But at least she'll be right where she needs to be when the spell wears off, in - it could happen any second now, really -

he does not let himself dare hope 

She wishes she could count down and prepare for it and she can't, she just has to hope that nobody notices her and wait as the seconds drag on and on and on and on and the ship makes noises that her dragonfly senses can't interpret but that she imagines must have something to do with being at their destination and all but ready to disembark -

- she tries her best to take inventory of how many people are how close to her, so that at least she doesn't have to spend a precious half a second figuring that out when she's herself again - 

He can't see. There are two men holding him and he thinks he can feel a knife at his throat, which is smart, that's how he'd do it, and then someone else reaches out and touches him and speaks a phrase he recognizes from a dozen public executions and he's not sure if he suddenly feels filthy because that's what Malediction does or if it's all in his head or if that's even a meaningful distinction for a spell which acts directly on the soul – 

And the dragonfly on his hand transforms into a person, which hopefully startles the person with the knife more than it startles her.

She doesn't stop to ask questions. She takes half a step to position herself so that she can get both the man with the knife and the man with a pentagram tunic, behind him, and then she runs a lighting bolt through both.

Well, he's gawping like a dead fish, which is probably insulting and she should get ahold of himself, of course she came, and he's just standing here like a useless lump – 

Stop. Think. Malediction lasts for one minute (and isn't it remarkable how much thinking you can get done under that kind of pressure), presumably Naima has some kind of an exit strategy, all he has to do is not get himself killed for about fifty-six seconds – 

One of the men behind him is still standing. He kicks as hard as he can – it's an awkward angle – and dives in the general direction the lightning seems to be coming from. 

The guy with the knife has crumpled, which leaves the one Elie kicked and the one who she's pretty sure just cast malediction, which makes him - at least as powerful as she is, and she can't say which of them is better prepared for this. 

The other guy is going for his unholy symbol. Because he's a cleric. An evil cleric who can channel negative energy. Right. Okay. She is suddenly pretty sure that she's not the one better prepared for this. 

She lightning bolts him again, in the hope that she can stop him before he presents his unholy symbol. This does not actually stop him, and in the next second she's both out of lighting bolts and very, very, very tired, like the life is being drained out of her. Which - is what's happening, actually.

The guy Elie kicked falls over. He is quite possibly dead.

There's nobody holding him – he stumbles, blindly, into a person he hopes past hope is Naima – 

She's pulling out the scroll and in the middle of casting teleport, because she can see the cleric working on channeling energy again, and she's not at all sure she'll survive it, and much much much less sure that Elie will - 

- she reaches out for him, because she is not expecting to be tackled, which is what actually happens - and she would be kind of embarrassed about that, if every other element of this situation weren't infinitely more important - 

- she tries to hold Sothis very firmly in her mind, and tries to keep her balance, and can't -

When they both hit the ground there are trees above them. Rainforest trees, with brightly colored birds sitting in them.

She is so tired.

She can't really think of any great things to say about this situation. It's not a great situation. After a moment, she sits him up as gently as she can, and undoes the gag and then the blindfold.

He's not dead and this doesn't look like Cheliax. He'll take it. 

He needs to concentrate – his spellbook is in the ethereal plane, where he left it, he needs it now – but he can't seem to string two thoughts together. 

Well. She supposes she should heal him. Probably won't take care of all of the negative energy damage, but she can get him most of the way better. Physically, anyway. She reaches out and does that.

"I'm sorry that took so long. I tried to contact you about how it was going to have to be at Ostenso, but - " This is probably a stupid thing to be babbling about. "I don't - I think this must be the Mwangi Expanse. Probably."

"Don't – you have nothing to apologize for. I was an idiot and you would have been well within your rights to leave me to face the very predictable consequences of my actions." 

and, after a moment – 

"Thank you for saving me anyway." 

- nod. "Of course. Uh. You're welcome.

"I have to say that this is not looking like a particularly great rescue attempt right now, though. I guess - it's not Hell. So."

"It's not hell and you are seriously underselling yourself."

- well that makes her feel a little bit better, even if they are still stuck in the Mwangi Expanse and probably going to die horribly within the week.

"Well. I suppose that's at least a partial success. But I don't actually have another teleport. - I guess I should see if I can get those cuffs off."

"Right, that – " He'd forgotten about them, actually, not being in hell is still really exciting"– I don't know the first thing about picking locks. Do these even have a lock? I can't see. They're nearly impossible to break, though, I've tried." If they can't get the shackles off he might have to get out of the Mwangi expanse on foot with no magic, and under ordinary circumstances he'd be more worried about that, but, hey, if they get killed by dinosaurs or lions of the gorilla king or whatever else they've got here he won't be going to hell so it's hard to get too worked up. 

"They have a lock, yeah. Probably not an easy one, but - we'll see what we can do." And she can start fiddling with that, and hoping they don't explode.

"Have they fed you in the last four days - "

Naima is wonderful. Of course Naima can pick locks. He doesn't understand why Naima seems so concerned, everything is perfect, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the birds are probably weird flesh-eating Mwangi expanse birds with teeth, isn't that fascinating, he's so lucky to be alive. 

"Yes, I definitely remember eating something at some point." 

"Well, that's good, anyway, I have a little food, but not a lot - I guess we can always detect poison on things, which probably makes gathering somewhat easier."

She's trying very hard to keep her voice steady. She doesn't want to look upset right now. There are lots of ways in which this situation is a much much better one than the one they were in a minute ago. It doesn't really make any sense to be upset that she didn't get the most ideal possible outcome. It's not like she regrets this choice. It was the right choice. Even if it kills them.

She takes a momentary break from fiddling with the lock to wipe her eyes, and vaguely hopes that Elie doesn't notice.

Oh, no, Naima seems sad. He doesn't want her to be sad. He doesn't want anyone in the world to be sad right now but it seems especially tragic if it's Naima. 

"You know, I've always wanted to visit the Mwangi expanse and just never got around to it. Once I have my spellbook I can get us phantom steeds, and then we just need to figure out which way is east. It can't be far – the wizard you brought the teleport scroll from, what circle was he?" 

"East is easy enough, you just figure out which way the sun is going. I think it's the basic fifth-circle version - which I guess means we must be pretty far to the north of the Expanse, there isn't that much of it that's within nine hundred miles of Ostenso. I don't think - it's surrounded by the Barrier Wall, right, so I'm not sure it's possible to hike straight east - I guess maybe we could fly over, but I bet they're too wide to fly over in one day, and I don't know if there's any food in them.

"I guess if we can't take the mountains we'd go south. Take the Ndele Gap into Nex, Nex is - fundamentally civilized territory, right - "