"What was the face for?" she asked in a low voice as they started the trek back to Whiterun.

"What?"

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "When Esbern said we needed to go to the College. You made a … " she waved a hand, puzzled, "face."

She was a sharp one, Urzul.

"I don't like the college."

"I do not know many that do."

"Yes, but I'm a wizard. So my reasons for not liking the college are different from your average magic-hating Nord who is afraid of being turned into a skeever."

"I did not know this was a common Nord fear."

Why did he bother?

"Look, perhaps you could make this trip by yourself? I'll stay at your lovely house in Whiterun and try to think of new ways to stop you getting killed by dragons."

"I pay you to fight with me, not lounge in my house and eat my food."

She had him there.

He rubbed his face. "They might not like seeing me, that's all. I didn't leave on the best of terms."

"You were a student there?"

"I was. For a while. I left."

"Why?"

He seriously considered shooting her with lightning. But she had proven remarkably resistant to magic over time - unusual for an orc, or maybe it was just all that blasted dragonbone she wore.

"There was an argument. Over some Dwemer artifacts. It seemed prudent."

"Will your presence stop us from getting what we need?"

He sighed. "I don't see why. We probably only need to see Urag in the Arcaneum - he knows more than the rest of them put together. I could… keep my head low…"

"I need to know if this is going to cause trouble. Farkas is better now, he can rejoin me, or I can take Lydia…"

He bristled. "Of course it won't cause trouble, what do you take me for? I'm not stupid the dispute was with Arniel and I'm sure he's not…"

"Then it's settled."

She stalked ahead of him, leaving him fuming for a few minutes before he realised he needed to catch up with her. Not that she was in any danger. In all their weeks together she'd only ever been seriously injured by dragons and usually only shown it once the thing was dead and she was busy sucking its soul out, or whatever it was she did to get those words she killed things with. But it would be just his luck for her to get killed the one time he didn't keep up with her.

His sense of luck was with him today. She'd turned a bend in the road to come face to face with a frost troll - bad luck that he hadn't been using detect life, bad luck that she was obviously distracted and bad luck that this frost troll was cannier than most and had managed to knock her hammer out of her hands in the first rush of attack.

He hated frost trolls.

Urzul, for her part, didn't seem too fussed to have lost her hammer. She was grabbing for the troll's claws, using her head as much as her arms to batter at it. One of the spikes on her helm (which he'd only recently worked out were dragon's teeth by the nine — she had dragon teeth on her head) scraped across the troll's neck, troll blood spurting on the white snow beneath them as the helm was ripped free and he caught a glimpse of her face, lips curled in a snarl around her fangs, as she swung her weight to pull the troll between him and her.

He shot it with fire. Dangerous with Urzul so close, but fire was the best thing to fell the thing quickly. The bastards were so quick to recover from other injuries. The troll screamed and Urzul wrenched it around again, shouting that word at it, the one he could never hear properly because it made his brain bounce around in his head.

The troll was blasted away from them, and Marcurio followed up with two more fireballs, the smell of burnt fur and flesh sharp in the clean cold air.

The burnt flesh smell was too close for comfort.

Ignoring the troll he rushed to her side. Sure enough, the gap between her gauntlet and her pauldron on her left side was a charred mess of green and red. Not too serious, but enough to be causing her a lot of pain.

"My hammer," she said, nodding towards the tree.

"Can wait," he replied, shoving her down on the snow and scooping up a handful of it to press on the burn. He felt tension leak out of her as the snow took the edge off the pain, before he called forth his healing and started the process of fixing it.

"Your spell hit me," she said.

"And the troll too," he pointed out. "You're still alive. It isn't."

"Perhaps I should put more fire protection into my armour," she mused.

"You're beginning to be addicted to enchanting," he said, smiling. It was true. When he'd first met her, she'd had some rudimentary enchantments, and a large collection of soul gems that had little to no use. Although her restoration and destruction magic was dreadful, she did seem to have a knack for enchantment - he guessed it was because her weapons and armour tended to be made by her. On their first trip to Whiterun he'd shown her how to use the arcane enchanter in Farengar's quarters (slimy bastard, he never noticed when people used his things at the College either, although he claimed he could tell when someone had interfered) and unleashed a monster. She'd acquired a startlingly large array of enchanted weapons in the time before he'd met her and she seemed to take great delight in destroying them to add to her knowledge.

"Badly made," she'd said. "The enchantment is wasted on these."

She'd destroyed glass weapons worth more coin than he'd seen in his lifetime, ancient nord war axes that should probably have been in a museum and… dwemer artifacts that had made his eyelids twitch and his hands clench.

But then she'd forged him an axe and enchanted it for him and he'd never liked a weapon more. He touched it as the last bits of his magic faded and she flexed her arm, nodding at a job well done.

"If the dragons followed the rules and only breathed fire I'd agree with you. But that one yesterday breathed ice. Hardly fair."

Her lips twitched in what he recognised as her version of a smile. It'd taken him a while to recognise some of her facial expression, because, well, fangs, but she had a remarkable array of them, most of them centering around her nose, which was, if one could get past the purple tattoos and the obvious scarring to one side of her face…. kind of cute and button-like.

He refused to admit that he'd just had that thought, instead getting to his feet and brushing snow off his knees.

"I hate trolls," he said.

She looked towards the corpse and nodded. "We should strip the fat from it," she said. Marcurio groaned. Alchemy was her other obsession. He'd had enough of prying the eyes out of dead sabre cats and finding new and interesting ways to store falmer ears… ears by the nine! to last him to the end of his days.

"Hate to tell you, but it's probably all been melted by my fire spell," he said. She glared at him. He shrugged. "Can't have it all, you know."

She grumbled as she got to her feet, but to his relief didn't decide to check if he was right. He hated trolls, and he hated skinning them, and he hated carting around her various squishy ingredients, even if her potions were getting better and it saved him from having to use quite so much restoration magic.

He preferred fireballs and lightning.

"I suppose it's more important to reach the college in time," she said, and his shoulders slumped.

He'd almost managed to forget where they were heading.