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It was Lucia's fault. No one was going to say it was Lucia's fault, but it was.
She dared him. Mother would say he was too old to fall for dares, even though she knew just how to say them so he'd agree. There were those great big walls around the city, and really, who puts walls there if you're not supposed to climb them? And Lucia said she'd got that soft fall spell working. Which she had; when he fell off the wall, it didn't hurt.
It just dropped him right on top of a demon.
Lucia's standing over him. She's holding his belt knife.
"Who's asking?"
"Are you my brother? That is, are you being controlled, or are you some demon taking his form, or are you some other demon wearing his body like a coat?
"Whatever kind of demon I am, I'm the kind that gets headaches," he mutters.
Her grip on the knife tightens. "I'm not kidding. I didn't trust that guardsman who gave you that arrow, so I used my fiend-sight spell, and he was a fiend, and you were a fiend too. A worse one."
Eamon shuts his eyes for a second.
"Lu, you're being really brave. And I think that's great. But I want you to think about something for a minute. What kind of demon was the guard?"
"...a dretch, I think. They mess with infantry by setting clouds of gas on them, and their claws-"
"Great. Could you beat a dretch in a fight? Give you the knife, so it's fair."
"No. I mean - no. I don't even have cantrips like Susanna, and the knife wouldn't go through..."
"Great. Now, Lu, I want you to think really hard about this part. If I'm some kind of really powerful demon, what in the holy living fuck makes you think you could do anything about it?"
"Also," he says, smirking a little, "I don't think demons respond to death threats by annoying you about them."
He hugs back. Even though she's putting pressure on his wound - that just matters less than how much he needs this, right now.
"I'm going to get blood all over you," he notes eventually.
"Talk about your lost causes," she snorts, but she lets go; it sounds more like let go of me than any actual concern about her dress.
She brushes her fingers over his forehead and concentrates, and the wound pales back into the aching scar that it was before they fell.
"Thanks," he says, testing his range of motion. "The Sarkorians might've been wrong about you magic types after all."
"You know, I don't actually have to heal you. It's something I'm doing because I'm a nice person."
"Don't I ever."
She sits beside him. "...you don't know what happened, then. With the fiend-sight."
"...no. We're both missing time. I've got this chest wound, and I don't know where from. Anything that could've happened in a few hours might have. I might be some impostor demon, but if I am, I've got no way of telling and you've got no way to tell if that's even true."
"Lu, do you think the Prelate burned all those people because he was just that much of an idiot?"
"You're playing Hulrun's Advocate? ...in favor of setting you on fire?"
"No! But - a demon could make me say this. A demon could say this himself. Demons are good at what they do. Prelate Hulrun burned all those people because even though he had fiendsight and teams of interrogators and all Mendev behind him, he couldn't tell if somebody might be controlled by demons. And he decided that it was better to kill a hundred innocents than let a thousand demon slaves run around. And, you know. He was wrong. But. You don't know that I'm not enchanted, or even that I'm not a demon. I don't know that you're not a demon or enchanted by one, for that matter, but I've got less evidence than you have. I said you shouldn't kill me because it would be stupid, and because if I was a demon, you couldn't anyway, and - there's a lot of reasons not to kill me. But you shouldn't think I'm safe. I can't even think I'm safe."
"If you're not going to think you're safe, I think someone has to. And I don't see anyone else to do it."
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