The wizard looked dreadful. Like whatever hungered in his chest was carving its way deeper, hollowing him out. That tattoo, with its black veining, reached for his eyeball like it anticipated popping it out. She watched him studying his own mirror image just the other night and tell Shadowheart that it was merely some study in vanity, but it was clear to Carrow that he was inspecting the damage.

"Carrow," he said carefully. She regarded him with irritation and continued to fold the clothing she had been letting dry by the fire. "Please. I know you have the gloves. It is imperative you let me have them. For all our sakes."

"Is it? The last two items the cleric gave you haven't seemed to help. What makes you think the gloves will?" her tone remained flippant. Certainly, he might blow them all up. He might not. Regardless, she didn't like his tone. His gaze hardened into steel. He put a hand on hers, stopping her from her laundry. Carrow raised an eyebrow at the wizard and, for a split second, she considered blasting him backward with crackling eldritch light.

But then, she'd already seen what happened when he died. His preemptive little construct and its minutia of instructions. An exercise in futility. Still, didn't she enjoy a little futility? That's what this entire quest was, wasn't it? Follow that drab little rich boy around while he played hero in some vain attempt to remove their slugs?

"What will it cost me?"

She narrowed her eyes at him.

"You know how pacts work, don't you? You like to make deals. I will make you a deal. You give me the gloves, and I will give you whatever you like," he said. The side of her mouth twitched. She did like when he begged. Almost as much as she liked the unnecessary firmness of his hand on hers as he prevented her from completing her task. Her jaw clenched at that thought, and she wrenched her hand away from him.

"It won't work," she said. "But fine. You'll owe me. And when I call in that favor, if I get so much as a dark look from you, that little orb in your chest will feel like mild congestion." She dug around in the pile of laundry she had been folding and retrieved the leather gloves. They were perhaps the most valuable artifact the party had found. The only person who understood that would, of course, be Gale.

She held them up to him, and he took them carefully, holding her gaze. His brown eyes were steady, commanding - and they were tired. Still, he was putting up something of a fight. Carrow could appreciate that, even if she found the man, at best, a dreadful bore. She huffed. "Well, aren't you going to eat?" He looked from her to the gloves hesitantly, as if she had placed a curse on them. Carrow smiled at him expectantly. She hadn't done anything to the damn things, and even if she had, his orb would eat that up, too.

Gale's jaw clenched, and he pressed the gloves to his chest. They glowed violet, and Carrow could feel the Weave unravel, the orb violently pulling threads of magic from them. As she watched, a memory gripped her. The face of a boy with starlit eyes, weeping tears of violet. Carrow grimaced and turned away from the procession. She didn't know why she continued to watch after that first time, when Shadowheart had given him the amulet. Foolish.

Gale took a deep breath after he'd absorbed the last strands of magic from the gloves and dropped them, inert, onto the ground before her. She looked back at him and met his eyes, scrutinizing the unease which still lingered there. A further taunt caught in her throat, and died.

"You're right," he said quietly. "The Weave isn't satiating the orb like it normally would."

"I did tell you," she said, though her voice was less goading than it ordinarily might be. Usually, she would be the first to rub salt in a wound, but Gale appeared already beaten. There would be no fun in that.

"I have to look into this," he said.

"Perhaps you should pray," she couldn't resist calling to him. Carrow glanced briefly upward, as if she might see his beloved goddess, hovering somewhere. "Cow," she muttered, gathering the folded clothes and finishing her inventory of the day's loot.

Three days later, he woke, sweating, from a cruel dream. His entire body felt as if it might be consumed by the orb in his chest, and he lay there for a moment, limbs shaking from pain. Gale realized he may actually be paralyzed. Usually, he could channel threads of his own magic into the Weave when he was desperate, rationing between magical artifacts, but he couldn't seem to reach his magic at all. It was like it was just gone. "Please, Mystra," he whispered, bidding the prayer to his lips as panic perched in his throat.

The white-hot hunger of the orb persisted, that black energy wrenching and tearing at him. But he continued to pray, as if it might will the orb the magic it desired.

For a moment, he thought he saw her. His goddess, her endless, astral gaze smiling down at him. But the expression wasn't warm, it was nothing but impassive. Gilded in disappointment. It was as he last saw her, cold, clinical. As if he were some apostate rather than her Chosen. "Gale," she said. "Gale," she repeated. "Hold still." She leaned forward, pressing violet palms to his chest. Might this be it? Might she be rescinding her punishment?

But she did not take the orb, she only pressed. Harder and harder, and as she pressed and the pain grew nigh unbearable, her visage changed.

Her face was now framed in dark, wild curls, and her eyes were no longer starlit but maliciously green, her pale skin luminous in the vein of moonlight that cut across her face. Her features grew sharper, more critical. And broken, as so much of her face seemed to have been. Horrible scarring done by thin, sure strokes had been carved into her cheek, all the way down her neck, disappearing beneath the collar of her linen shirt. Gale blinked and took a deep, freeing gasp as he realized it was Carrow on top of him, speaking something in Sylvan. Her hands glowed soft and red as she finished her spell and sat back, still astride him.

"There," she said, catching her own breath and scrutinizing him. "I doubt that will last long, however."

"What did you do?" His breathing was ragged, and his limbs felt cold and sluggish, as if he were waking up from a long and artificially prescribed slumber.

"I hexed you. Well, I hexed a ring and dropped it in, to be precise. Takes doing when you aren't there to guide the threads in," she said, gesturing at the tattoo on his bare chest and making no move to get off him. Either she was comfortable there, or she'd forgotten where she sat. Gale was not precisely bothered by the warmth of her, in all honesty, but his head pounded, and he let himself fall backward onto his pillow.

"You put a hex on a ring and fed it to the orb?" he repeated, ruminating on the idea as he stared at the linen ceiling of his tent.

"Yes. I tried feeding it a spell, but spells burn up too quickly, as I'm sure you know. With the hex, I can maintain concentration. For a little while," she told him.

"So the Weave will only trickle in," Gale said.

"Should trick it into feeling fuller longer," Carrow said. Gale sat up again, bracing himself on his elbows as he looked at her, profoundly awed by the idea. "No, don't look at me like that. I'm not helping you - I'm helping me. I don't need your hideous brown puppy dog eyes." He grinned at her, sitting up straighter as he absently gripped one of her legs in admiration. She looked down at his hand on her thigh and then back at him, a flash of irritation in her eyes. Unfortunately for her, the relief he currently felt far outweighed his concern for impropriety.

"You are studied in magic," he remarked, remembering their brief foray into civil discussion almost two weeks ago. He'd asked, and she'd evaded the question by saying her patron granted her significant powers. She shrugged, unmoved.

"I used to be."

"And you gave up your study for… power?"

"I had plenty of power," she snapped. He was slightly surprised by her tone. Carrow was never nice, rarely even diplomatic, but she also never lost control. The closest she had come was during that aforementioned conversation. He'd pressed her then, too. Carrow did not like talking about herself, that much was clear. She drew her eyes to his and hovered a finger over his chest. He could see the faintest strand of the Weave connect from her finger to the orb, as if she meant to end her hex, a thinly veiled threat if he continued to pry.

"Were you a wizard?" he asked, feeling bold.

"No," she said, finger wavering. "I've come to collect on your debt, Gale." She said this softly and with finality.

"It appears my debt has grown more strings," he said, reaching for her threatening hand and closing his own hand around it. To his surprise, she did not pull away. She smiled at him that cruel, broken smile of hers, which, perhaps, should have left him even more unsettled. But it didn't. Shifting beneath her, he leaned forward. "You were a sorcerer." Her smile wavered, and the scars that decorated her face appeared a shade or two lighter.

"I need you to help me kill an old woman," she told him. "Ethel." He attempted to remain impassive, per her initial warning that should he balk at her demand, she might make his life even more difficult, but it was difficult not to. She is on top of you with what amounts to a knife at your chest, he reminded himself. Instead of arguing, his jaw clenched, and he gripped her quickly about the waist, pushing her gently but firmly off his lap. Carrow did not fight him on this, though she did appear somewhat surprised.

"Do not take this for protestation, but why must we murder an old woman?" he said. He hadn't even thought about Ethel in weeks, they had been far too busy fighting gnolls, spiders, and goblins to consider the woman's earlier invitation.

Carrow readjusted herself and sat perched on her knees. She let out a breath like she was incredibly put upon by the question and shook her head. "Because I would prefer not to have to make a deal with her. Contrary to your earlier estimations, I do not like making deals. I need something from her lair. We will leave first thing in the morning. I've persuaded Astarion to go with us as well," she said.

"Lair?" he prompted, then registered the word Astarion, and he could not help but balk. "Need I even ask how you persuaded him?"

She smiled at him. "He seemed excited to see the demented old bat in her element." His eyes dropped to the usually unblemished side of her neck and saw that it now bore two little holes. Gale didn't know why, but this annoyed him more than the fact that she'd asked him to assist in murder. He pushed that thought from his mind and met her eyes.

"I will help you get what you need, but I won't kill for you," he said.

She ignored this and leaned toward him predatorily, her hand held out before her as if she gripped a leash. "I can only hold this spell off and on, you will need to pick up your own slack in the meantime. Don't let it get so dire again." Her hair had fallen and obscured the unblemished side of her face so that only the scars were shown. In the moonlight, she appeared positively feral.

"Who did that to you?" She blinked at him, surprised by the question. She smiled, and he knew she was about to lie. Carrow always smiled before she lied.

"My father was very upset with me. He tied me to a carriage - " she started, but as her deep green eyes held his, he felt a squirming pressure against his eye. The question had weakened her resolve, and the tadpole knew it, it begged to make that connection. He hesitated only a second before he bid the tadpole to connect, and surprisingly, that connection held.

Carrow gasped, gritting her teeth as Gale pushed into her mind.

He was in a cellar filled with boxes. His face burned painfully, and a man hovered over him. His expression was that of clinical focus, callous and unmoved by the pain he was causing. The knife in his hand was simple but beautifully engraved. For some reason, he knew it was a gift. A gift the man used to carve her face. "It didn't have to come to this," he told her.

Carrow struggled to sever the connection but stopped abruptly. Gale wasn't the only one seeing things, it went both ways, this connection and her curiosity got the better of her. The memories shifted.

Gale felt panic and hatred and terror, such potent emotions which he had never known, as he struggled, powerlessly, against iron shackles. Before him, in an ugly infernal circle, sat a tiefling boy with violet streaming down his cheeks bearing runes similar to the scars on Carrow's face. They weren't tears, but magic, pouring out of him into the circle. Gale screamed, pulled on his chains, trying anything, everything, to get to the boy -

The connection was severed. Carrow stood up and looked at him with what could only be described as pure hatred. For a moment, he thought she might actually kill him. Instead, she said in a measured tone, "First thing tomorrow morning." And she left.

Carrow spent the night staring at the ceiling of her tent with wide eyes, refusing to sleep, refusing to think, and, occasionally, refusing to breathe. Eventually, though, all of these things came to her. In fact, sleep she was grateful for. An excuse to drop her hex. He would have to bleed his own magic into the orb for a time.

Not that she minded siphoning hers. It wasn't hers anyway.

She awoke only two hours later to Astarion shaking a bottle of wine at the flap of her tent. He flashed her a sharp smile as he peered inside. "Care for a morning pick-me-up, darling?"

He was happy. Sated. Actually, he appeared to be jubilant, as if he thought that he had managed to convince her of something rather than her simply needing him for a task. Silly vampire. Carrow sat up and rubbed the exhaustion from her eyes, yawning before she reached for the bottle. She glanced out of her tent flap and saw Lae'zel getting in a few practice swings against a tree. She wished she'd had some sort of leverage to convince the gith'yanki to come with them.

She would have been invaluable.

But she had asked and been rebuffed, even after Carrow had insisted the crone might have a cure for their problem. She supposed she could have convinced Wyll to come by merit that Ethel was a hag, but then she would have had to bring Wyll. Carrow glanced at Shadowheart, eeking out those last idiotic prayers to her foul goddess, and considered the prospect. The cleric could be useful. She went back and forth on the matter before shaking her head.

It didn't matter. Astarion and Gale would be enough. Carrow took a long, distracted swig from the proffered wine.

"You appear to be warring with yourself, my dear," Astarion said. "And, while, ordinarily, I would never be so foolish as to ask you of all people to share, you are our impetus for this bizarre little venture…"

"Just trying to figure out if I should invite Shadowheart," she said.

"I thought this was meant to be covert," he replied, offering her a hand and pulling her out of the tent.

"I like keeping my options open," she said.

"Which is why we're taking the wizard," Astarion replied, jerking a thumb to Gale. Carrow swallowed as she looked at the man, the scars on her cheeks burning. She felt nauseous as the previous night came back to her. He'd seen everything.

Not everything, she reminded herself. He had no context. He knew nothing but that she'd been part of a ritual. But if she knew Gale, he'd have come across such a ritual at some point. He'd piece together what it had been. In spite of her best efforts to obfuscate the runic scarring on her face and neck, those memories had been clear.

"You look lightheaded, I didn't take that much blood last night - are you alright?" Astarion said, a hand on her shoulder. She waved him off, the touch only proving to irk her further.

"I'm fine. Make sure you've got everything you need. Bring those fire arrows we found," she told him, tearing her gaze from Gale.

An hour later, Gale, Carrow, and Astarion were on the road east, toward Ethel's humble abode. As luck would have it, the bitch was traveling on the road. A pair of men searching for their sister were confronting her. And, for a moment, Carrow considered attempting to kill her there - using the men as fodder if need be, but that would be foolish.

Ethel would likely run, she would go home and fortify the place. She would never get in.

No, Carrow needed to surprise her in her lair. So she played along.

"Yes, run along, leave the poor old woman be!" Astarion had chimed in. He appeared content to follow Carrow's lead on this, though Gale remained unusually taciturn.

"Oh, thank you, petal," Ethel said. "Please, weren't you coming to visit me? I promised to look at those pretty pearls of yours, didn't I?" The hag tapped the side of her head. Carrow smiled wanly, nodding.

"I've got a few things I'd like to gather from this area, and then we were headed there," she promised. "I also wondered if you might have some cream for -" Carrow gestured to her face.

"Ugly business, that," Ethel said, "I've got a lotion that should fix you right up!"

Carrow gave her a broad grin. "We'll be along in an hour or so!"

The woman toddled off as Carrow pretended to be picking some mugwort with her fierce bodyguards. She stuffed the unneeded plant into her bag and watched Ethel continue on, squinting her eyes as she tried to shake the illusion from her vision.

"She's a hag," Gale remarked as they took their first few steps into the swamp. "You knew immediately, didn't you?"

"My patron is fey. I know them when I see them," she said shortly.

"A hag! Damnit, you said we would just be robbing an old woman," Astarion said, looking betrayed.

"Did you think I would let you feed on me just for your assistance in robbing an old woman?" Carrow said, raising an eyebrow at him. Honestly, she doubted he would have lifted a finger had he known that it might be more challenging.

"Well, I didn't think it would be a walk in the park - but this is… ugh," he said, looking around. It appeared he'd managed to shake the illusion as well.

"What is it that you need from her?" Gale asked.

Carrow had hardly spared him a glance since they'd left, but she looked at him now. She smiled. "Just her grimoire." Gale looked unconvinced, expression hinting that he might be considering calling down a fireball. It was not the first time he had looked at her like this, brown eyes smoldering with irritation.

"I told you, I need her dead. Or, at least, out of commission for a time. The why doesn't matter - she's a hag, that should soothe whatever moral qualms you may have had. Additionally, it appears that she's stolen someone's sister, so we may as well use that distraction to our advantage," Carrow said. Astarion did not appear soothed in the slightest, which wasn't surprising. The whole event would only be inconveniencing to him. But she'd left their bargain open-ended. Should he continue to prove useful to her, she would continue to offer him her blood.

Gale would only be persuaded by the idea that this hag may be killing someone should he quibble further, as she doubted he still needed her to help him sate the orb. She'd given him an idea of how to trick its hunger; she was certain he would figure out an alternative to her hex. To that end, Carrow felt blessed that Ethel proved to be so illustrious, as she doubted that she would have been able to kill the bitch on her own or even with Astarion alone. Gale was her muscle, and he knew it.

Astarion let out an audible groan as he trudged forward into the murk of the swamp. Gale's steps were slow as he motioned for Carrow to follow. "Your instinct appears to be to lie," he said as she walked past him. "Even when you don't need to." She paused and chanced a glance at him. "Just be honest with me," he continued, tone almost reassuring. She expected to see pity in his eyes, Carrow knew that he had pieced together some of what he'd seen, but what she saw there was far worse.

Compassion.

Her jaw clenched, and she felt bile rise in her throat.

"I'm going to want at least a liter tonight," Astarion called from ahead of them. "And a foot rub."

She sat upon a bony stool in the bowels of Ethel's lair, combing through letters while Astarion tinkered with the many "lotions and potions" scattered about her shelves and sideboard. Ethel wasn't dead, but she would be struggling to crawl out of the abyss Gale had blasted her into for quite some time.

If only Carrow had managed to find some hag's bane.

It didn't matter, she thought, this was a good start to minding her debt. And Ethel's letters hinted at the whereabouts of her sisters. One of these letters alluded to a deal with a pair of deep gnomes and the other a tiefling near a place called Reithwin. Several of the letters were signed 'M' and several others 'P.' Another mentioned something about a Lord Gortash in Baldur's Gate. Carrow didn't know why she kept that, but it seemed important, and she added it to the pile. She tied the bundle of letters together with a string before tucking them into her pack, eyes flitting to Gale, who appeared to be inspecting a staff among Ethel's many dark playthings.

He had a cut above his eye, and his rugged face appeared more gaunt than it had that morning. Of course, none of them had gotten out of the fight unscathed. Carrow's shoulder had been displaced by one of Ethel's masked minions. Astarion had guided it back in prior to the fight with the hag, but it hurt like hell. Not to mention the lingering effects of the dark magic they'd all been hit with at one point or another. Shadowheart would be very put upon once they got back to camp.

"I'm surprised," Gale said, holding up the staff to get a better look at it.

"About what?" Carrow replied, sitting straighter on her stool.

He looked at her. "You saved Mayrina."

"I didn't. I used the bitch as a decoy," Carrow said, scowling. She had used up a scroll of Create Water to put the fire out - though she had a feeling that the hag never actually would have killed her. Or, at least, there had probably been some sort of contingency. A baby fresh from the womb is priceless. To a hag. Gale lowered the staff and cocked his head at her. "I don't wonder if we shouldn't have put her out of her misery," Carrow continued, turning back to Ethel's desk.

"She's in pain," Gale said.

"She's a selfish cunt who deserves to have her throat slit," Carrow said, attempting to mask the emotion in her voice with flippancy. "No man's worth the life of your child." Astarion dropped a bottle, and it crashed to the floor, its contents eating into the stone. Carrow's eyes cut to him, and he let out an awkward laugh.

"It slipped," the vampire said before coughing.

"Then you saved the child," Gale said, unperturbed by the disruption.

Carrow opened her mouth to argue further, but then something stopped her. Gale's words earlier. Just be honest. She huffed, glancing at the floor where the potion continued to sizzle and burn.

"I saved the child."

Her limbs buzzed with irritation, as if honesty were something she could be allergic to. What she didn't understand was why Gale kept pushing her. The colder she was, the more critical, the more cruel, it usually steered people away from her. Aside from Astarion, who, admittedly, seemed to be treating her as some kind of umbrella or shield. But Gale poked and prodded and argued, no matter what malicious thing she lobbed at him.

She wished she'd ignored his hand floating in that portal.

"I think we're done here. Let's get back to camp."

"Excellent plan, you still owe me a foot rub," Astarion said, practically skipping to the door. Carrow frowned at the back of his head as if he'd backhanded her.