The archer and berserker are sitting against the fat bole of an old oak; the berserker stitching a rent in one of his tunics, and the archer stretched out in a more relaxed posture, reading one of the penny epics that dramatise — or more often wildly fabricate — the exploits of adventurers across the realm.
A shadow falls over them, and they look up into Malia's smile.
"I've been corresponsing with a fellow wizard," she says, twitching the folded letter in her hand to illustrate, "on an interesting matter. I have need of two lovely assistants."
"This is not how volunteering works, Malia," the archer says, tucking a dry leaf between her book's pages and extending a hand to be helped up.
"I'm busy," the berserker says plaintively.
"Two lovely assistants," Malia says. "Besides, you're of particular importance to this question."
"Oh, no," the berserker says, heartfelt, tying off his thread. "What terrors are you unleashing today?"
"Well, I have it in mind that if you folded a man correctly, you could have him wield twice the weapons," Malia says blandly. "Or the same, twice at once, really, but you don't care for the details."
"Why would a man need need any more than one in each of his hands," the berserker says, scowling, and Malia lets out a low, evil, filthy laugh.
"Ah," the archer says. "I don't think she means...."
"In what world would I let you sorcel my bridemaker?" the berserker says, in a tone bordering on scandalised, covering his crotch with both hands and his half-mended tunic, and Malia laughs again and loops her arm around the archer's waist, pulling her close.
"My second lovely assistant is necessary to help me test the outcome," she says.
"It would be very impressive to watch a man learn to wield two weapons at once," the archer says, and giggles as Malia nuzzles behind her ear, muttering some wizard-speak of the kind that sensible folk learn to fear, like arbitrarily generalisable, actually.
The berserker looks up at the two of them, and heaves the terrible sigh of a man who knows he's doomed.
"It's not permanent, aye?" he says warily.