A/N: I took a short break from my other work to toy around with my two favorite characters in my new favorite game. I'm not sure whether or not to continue or leave it for what it is. I don't know if I made this clear or not, but this is set in the five months between Haytham's stealing Braddock's plans and the actual attack. Let me know what you think with a comment! Thanks so much for reading.
Disclaimer: All of the following characters belong to Ubisoft. I neither own, nor claim ownership of anything referenced or utilized in the following.
Whatever phantom compulsion it was that guided my steps that horrid torrential morning would not be denied nor delayed. I lacked reason or excuse for my endeavors, of that I was only vaguely aware, as I traversed the precarious white plateau of the countryside on horseback. The poor beast brayed desperately for relief of my incessant command as I coerced him forthwith into the tumultuously abstract face of the nearest pike, but still I jerked my heels and slowly we contended the geographical leviathan. I had long since been deprived of sensation throughout the entirety of my body, and was tragically growing accustomed to the numbness of my skin, of the disconcerting dullness of my complexion when subjected to the cold of the American frontier. I tried to ignore the pleading whisper redolent in some cavernous nook of my mind that advised I turn back for Boston. I had already gone too far.
I couldn't easily identify the innate desire that drew me and my steed up the cliffside that dawn, only that I was conscious of its presence, no matter how inconvenient or confounding. I'd have denied it, but I knew for certain it was that woman. She hadn't summoned me and certainly would not, under any concurrent circumstances, and that fact alone motivated my drastic attempt at initiative. There wasn't an iota of personal gratification to be garnered from rising before the sun and scaling the side of a blizzard wrought mountain, and my awareness of my own absurdity only frustrated and impassioned me ever more.
I cinched my jaw and grimaced as my teeth gnashed crudely against one another, coiling my unfeeling fingers around the chafing reins constraining the pinto's pleading jowls. I empathized silently with the stallion, and chided myself for the force I exerted with a stiff tug of my arms. Nevertheless, we absconded what had to have been miles of unforgivingly frozen and jagged rock and dunes of multiple feet of snow, being pelted violently with sleet and plagued by frigid gales thrashing carnally about, directionless. I was more gracious, I think, than ever I had been before when we approached the peak and the terrain began to level.
The vengeful caterwaul of the icy maelstrom receded slightly as I spurred my horse through the white ravaged timberland, my eyes keenly scouring the immediate topography for any signs of settlement. My efforts were rewarded only with disparagingly dense fog and an abundance of precipitation, as I had anticipated. Every inch of my incrementally suffering flesh supplicated that I abandon the ill-conceived expedition and take shelter a few miles in precedence, but my incorrigible stubbornness disallowed the thought to sully my mind for even an instant. Onward, we stalked.
Time collapsed and transmuted itself meaninglessly behind my eyelids with every blink or extensive period of dormancy. My skin was parched, injured and bleeding in a number of particularly exposed regions, my face for certain. I was no longer reminded of the ardor I was imposing upon my mount with every footfall of his mighty hoof, as the anxious and miserable cries perished with the upturn of the wind. I remained vigilant, despite the improbability of fair fortune, and cursed my heart for its unmistakable missteps whenever the thought of the woman resurfaced from the depths of my restless mind. Somewhere between the rural outskirts of Boston and this damned mountaintop, I had fabricated that my intentions were purely strategic in nature – regarding the skeletal plan of attack we'd all dreamed up only days before. I was a rather shoddy liar, but even in my haste, I had myself convinced.
How many seconds, minutes, hours, or combination of the lot elapsed before I was finally roused from my autonomous stupor, I hadn't an inkling. All I knew, in that infinitesimal moment of clarity and consciousness, was that the voice that called accusingly out into the frothy ether of the tempest belonged to her. I wasn't any less of an impetuous and inconstant man for what I'd done, but the contentment that soon set alight my entrails and incited a fractured grin to my certainly wounded visage curiously made it all inane. I loosened my vice grip on the reins and peered imploringly into the snow as the unintelligible contralto cries grew louder, more comprehensible.
"Come no closer," I managed to decipher from the obtrusive ambiance of the storm, then suddenly, "Kenway?"
She was near. I found it frightfully instinctive to subdue myself, and thusly pressed my lips into a firm and tepid line, though the drum of my heart fell out of measure as she approached me. She was enshrouded in the burnished hide of a mammoth beast slain – a grizzly, I gathered – and held a gentle hand over her eyes like a visor against the snowfall. Each step she took required that she protract either of her gangly bronze legs out of the ground and plunge back in, consumed to the hip in unimaginable cold. Still, she advanced.
She poised a hand upon my horse's muzzle and gazed up at me with distant tawny eyes. "I thought you would be gone from here."
"It was my intent to review the map." I lied, and made victims of us both.
Her typically rather harsh brow pinched slightly in rejoinder, ascribable either to linguistic misunderstanding or the ridiculousness of my request and the perils withstood to fulfill it. She always seemed to have a pensive quality, though, regardless of expression or sentiment. The young woman slipped her hand from the steed's convulsing nostrils and along the bridle, tugging it free of my fingers and taking them into her own. She set a manageable pace for the direction in which she had emerged from the haze, but I interrupted her before she had fully submerged her foot into the snow. I pressed my gloved fingertips against the croup of the fatigued creature and exerted a great deal of my handicapped strength into dismounting it, taking gauchely to my feet in the inhospitable thickness of the snow.
"Zi-Ziio, you needn't escort the both of us that way. Here, I can walk." I uneasily assured her as we fell into step. My gait, being significantly loftier, proffered advantage over her diminutive stature, but I tailored my steps to better accommodate her.
"The camp is not far." She replied, glancing first to me and then to the stallion ambling in her wake. After a few moments of pervasive whispers of the wind, she returned her passive eyes to my frame once more, apprehension knotting her brows. "Your horse is exhausted."
I chuckled haplessly, glancing down at my hands as they coddled one another in vain. "As am I. I pushed him too far this morning, I'm afraid."
I felt her exploratory gaze scour my person, and coughed against the residual restriction of my throat. Abandoning the short-lived effort of coaxing the sensation back into my fingers, I relocated my hands, one instinctively to the hilt of my sword peering from the brim of its sheath and the other along the nape of my neck. I glanced abruptly to my flank, purposelessly surveying the otherwise undisturbed white coated coppices for fear that my eye would wander to meet that of the woman beside me. I had executed all that she had asked of me over the tumultuous course of our association and gained her allegiance, but little else. She never claimed to trust me and, though I knew better, I expected it.
"It was unwise to make that journey alone," she said some time later, and I could hear the smile manipulating her ample lips purely by the jaunty inflection of her voice. "Especially without something to protect your face from the wind."
"Am I amusing you?"
I absentmindedly relegated my fingers to my cheek, still naught for sensation, and promptly recoiled from it with a hiss. The flesh there seared under the ginger touch of my buckskin glove long after I'd cordially retracted my hand and I festered quietly for a few moments, listening vacantly to the reverberation of Ziio's laughter. After the endearingly girlish carousal diminished, the breeze drove my gaze to her, and my mouth roused into a weak smile. She did not look at me for a short while as she allowed her eyes to lie dormant, the specter of her snickering hinging a simper of her own upon her lips. I was quite abruptly set at ease.
She stirred to awareness with a lingering languor, and immediately she met my eyes. The humor had fled, but the vitality remained. "I can attend to you once we reach the camp, do not fret."
I found it increasingly difficult to divert my attention. "I would greatly appreciate it, thank you."
We did not exchange many words for the remainder of our trek through the brush, and those that we did were sparse and conversational. Though I hadn't a proclivity for pleasantries, something about her – this astute and remarkably adept native – only further enveloped me in her irrevocable gravity. My stare had taken shelter in her countenance, my smile contingent upon the infrequent glint of the sun against her flesh and my heart palpitating with every glimpse of her austere eyes in my nebulous direction. Even as I sidled by inches with the sole intent of being beside her, I was assured of my innocence. I was there for the map, and nothing more.
The musky scent of burning mosses and sequoia fibers pervaded the frigid air cavorted about us in the clearing we had approached, and Ziio confirmed my unspoken presumption with a nod. She flicked her tongue deftly against her teeth and produced a sound that incepted sport in the horse tethered to her steady hand. They trotted on in tandem through the throng of tree trunks and frosty thickets of greenery and I tailed closely behind. The rhythmic and spirituous murmur of buckskin doldrums flooded the small ring of tents and makeshift shanties occupying the space before us, unscathed by the blizzard due to the dense canopy overhead and clamorous otherwise with sounds of construction, talk, and the remote din of community.
To my astonishment and chagrin, the camp carried on with the nonchalance of civilization and functionality. It did not misrepresent the base chores of routine in Boston, with men toiling away with tools – no matter how crude, women dressing game for preparation and crafting items of pragmatism. There was rationale, a structure unrehearsed, and society amongst those people. I had never heard or witnessed anything of its kind, especially regarding the natives. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I was intruding upon a private paradigm, very much disparate from myself and others like me.
"Are you coming?" resounded Ziio's rhetoric from a few paces away.
I felt the flesh crease on my forehead as I cast my attention to her, brows reeled upward in surprise. She continued along the outskirts of the encampment, towing my horse along behind us as I reached her within a matter of steps. She glanced almost expectantly up at me as my presence disrupted her seclusion, perhaps sensing my awe.
"This is your village, then?" I posed my query guardedly.
She shook her head with a modest chortle, unlike the bout of laughter she had succumbed to en route. A smirk teased my lips ever still. "No, no. Kanien'keha:ka is very far from here. This place is only temporary until we begin the assault on Braddock's battalion. Most of us are slave refugees. Others have been scorned by him and seek only retribution for what they have lost."
"Surely your people will join you when we do make our move."
"I will not ask anything of them that I can do myself." And she was cold again.
The woman had since released my steed and allowed him to canter idly only after she caressed the grove of his chin and grazed her forehead tenderly against his muzzle. She dallied not in watching the mighty creature traipse about, and instead pinched the fabric of my ulster betwixt her thumb and forefinger, guiding me by the arm into the aperture of a nearby thatched roof lean-to. I bowed my spine and shrunk into my shoulders to avoid a collision with the wooden beam impressed into the hut's frame. She released me while I assessed the state of her dwelling with a probative eye, one hand relieving me of my tricorn hat out of autonomous courtesy.
Ziio took to her haunches in the center of the room, cupping her hands about her lips and channeling air betwixt them with the objective of eliciting a sizeable flame from the rudimentary hearth before her. I wrinkled my nose as the arid fumes of smoke captivated the hut, but was thankful for the warm glow of the pyre that exuded soon thereafter. She gradually rose to her feet and shed the downy cape drawn across the slight slope of her shoulders and allowed it to pool on the earth beneath her.
"Thank you," I rasped solemnly as I drew nearer to the fire and withdrew my hands from their deerskin cloaks.
She disappeared into an indiscriminant corner of the hovel and I heard her maneuvering at a dogged pace with utensils and what I imagined to be a tribal tonic or something equally as dubious. The maddening clamor of her ministrations came paused, however, a few moments later and I liberated a sigh from the depths of my chest. I had reclaimed my hands from the frost and muscled my way through the sensational lethargy that took them afterward.
"Did you still want to go over the map?" she asked.
I weighed the ramifications of the honorable response, the one that would most appease the Order and legitimize my navigation of the mountainside. I swallowed dryly upon the fallacy as well as the obligation it entailed; pondered carefully how I would most desire the remainder of the afternoon to transpire, and what I would have to compromise for, ever in the favor of my ideology. I pursed my lips and exhaled gruffly through my nostrils before pivoting on my heel.
"No." my voice was strained and I lectured myself intrinsically for my folly. My only fault was that I was ambitious and wholly unrepentant for it.
I steeled myself in anticipation of further inquiry, but was pleasantly met only with the crackling simmer of the small licks of flame contained by a roundel of obsidian and gravel. I reclined on the soil, perching one foot before the fire and allowing the other to fall slack beside it and supporting my mass with the palm of one hand. I hooked my chin over the knee of the extended leg and watched the fluid blaze dance over and about itself, relishing in the heat radiating from its golden core. Ziio paced quietly across the squalid ground and eventually ensconced herself beside me, legs folded over one another and petite frame swiveled to face me directly.
My brow wadded defensively. "You've a reason for staring at me, I assume."
The woman groused incomprehensibly under the veneer of a sigh, skulking toward me on her knees and taking my jaw in her hand. In the other, I noted, she bore a primitive basin and a rent stretch of cloth. She flexed her fingertips against the grain of my jowls and directed my face to her, adjusting her vantage point to better surmise the severity of the raw wounds marring my cheeks. Given a few moments of study, she soaked the cloth in an amalgam of liquid and foliage and applied it to the plane of broken skin. My flesh burned with the immediacy and alarm of manifold pinpricks, but I did not acknowledge it.
She no longer graced my superficial injuries with her honeyed eyes, but deliberately sought my own. Her expression distracted from the detriment and irritability it had once beheld and became inscrutable. I tried in futility to derive rationality and ventured forth a number of centimeters, as though clarity might offer insight. Her busied hand stroked the opposite hemisphere of my face with the medicated fabric poised between us. Between my rampant thoughts and the depleting proximity between the woman and I, I realized my heart had carried off without me. The ceaseless thrum of the loathsome muscle against my chest wracked my entire body, drumming away at my ears and smothering even the subtlest of sounds from attracting my attention.
"Ziio," I said, deafened.
With the thinnest of movements, she rid us of the decidedly small chasm between our frames. She embraced my neck with the latter of her hands, thumbing gently against my mandible as her lips collided spectacularly with mine.