4E 194 Early Morning Star Near Fletchersgate, west-central Falkreath
Tatiana Meda Rutila had requested half a day alone in the Collegium to gather her thoughts, so the cooks and cleaners were given the time off in town to do as they pleased. Today she would become the Domina, the master mage, there in Southall for real. She had wanted the place cleared of eyes and walls scrubbed of ears for a least one discussion with her new, junior associates.
Tatiana was seventy-five. She hailed from no special family distinction in the ancestral clans of the eastern Cheydinhal mountains of Cyrodiil. Folk from those parts were stoic about their duties to the Empire. Far enough removed from the marble halls and riviera scene, their society's hallmarks were the strong roots of family and association in the network of hamlets and townships, and had not changed much after the Great War. As such, Tatiana's name was only the singular common name for a peasant born to underclass parents, a plebeian with a praenomen to City society. Her father had been a trapper and sometime soldier in the mountaineer cohorts, lots of archers and knife fighters, her mother a general laborer in their tiny mountain village with a few huts clustered around a storehouse and a forge. Tatiana was backwoods hardscrabble, a highlander, and so was not bound by lineage to a mountain thane or jarl (to use the Nordic) and found it easy to leave and enlist with Main legions in Imperial City, ship off.
The Great War had come when she was herself an expert in healing and destruction, one of the Emperor's two-fisted auxiliaries on the front lines not too far back from the first pila. After the war she had been granted an audience with the Emperor Titus Mede II along with others of her rank and file. Recognition for Tatiana's particular service at Red Ring, the major concluding engagement of the conflict with the Aldmeri Dominion, was a place on the rolls of the emperor's own family, the gens name of Meda, along with the cognomen of Rutila honoring her as the Red.
A decorated veteran with the royal name could expect choice postwar opportunities. Since that time she had spent most of two decades expanding her repertoire past the first and ten (and triaging the results), leading Tatiana all over Tamriel to discover new dimensions in travel, seeing, and appearing. A little over a year prior she had received word from Winterhold expressing the desire to expand the College's reach across Skyrim and perhaps make the diplomatic gesture to all Nords. She was content with the travel her life had thus afforded her, and was not unmindful of her great fortune at still being alive. The move to Falkreath may be my last, she had thought, and I want to pass on what I know for reasons less worldly, or at least in a different sphere.
In the afternoon she walked to the front doors of the Collegium and pushed one open gently. There were the magistra, the lower adept in charge of ushering novices chosen from the field of candidates, and the centuriana who would patrol. Magistra Raynu, an 89-year old Bosmer orphaned at birth and raised by adoptive Nord parents, listened intently to the words of her long-sought mentor.
Centuriana Ulia Swain, 40, was arriving with over twenty-three years' service in the XIV Southern Legion, the last eighteen of which had also been as personal housecarl to Cenric Eodsbury, thane of Fletchersgate's lands.
"And where is our colleague," Tatiana asked.
"Haven't seen 'er," Ulia said casually.
"Well, then, would you be so kind as to go find her highness and tell her we have a meeting?"
Taking orders didn't phase Ulia at this point, not a prima ordina in the I Cohort who dined at a lord's table. The subject of her next task was the new adepta for instruction, a Nord born in the Valenwood forests of the wood elves.
Earlier that week Ulia and Cenric had been arguing in his study.
"You want to do what?!"
Ulia took a breath and rolled her eyes. "I want ... to help out ... at the new ... college, Cen. I'm bored as hell."
"That's stupid," he shot back, "there's plenty to do here! I need you here!"
"No, Cen, you have plenty to do. I stand here all day, walk your damn carpets, listen to you bitch about your tough life while you sign bills."
Cenric had worked with Ulia so long that any pretense of liege disapproval with her tone would have been comical, and besides, she was right. He just liked having her around.
"You have your own house guard plus twenty of my own I Cohort here in minutes. You don't ... need ... me."
He started to say something, and Ulia waved her finger at him.
"Uh-uh, no. Not this time."
"Fine, go," he closed his eyes and leaned back on the edge of his same desk, "play mage and all that.
"You know where I'll be, right up the road? I'm not leaving the hold."
His eyes opened, and he looked at her.
"I'm just giving myself a new assignment. While there's peace."
"Yes," he agreed.
Ulia found Juo next to the stream where the novices fished downhill from the college. The centuriana had developed the eyes and ears (and nose) for troop behaviors, and something the magistra had said at the Cock and Bull Tavern in Fletchersgate told Ulia this hellion peacock had a few of the ways to go with the outfit. Juo Objulilla Fiolitan, alchemical synthesis of four cultures and master mage at 24, lay on the grass with a smoking twist of dried elve's ear to her lips.
"Ahem!"
Juo blew out a cloud and crooked her vision up at Ulia.
"T'sup?"
"You realize the new domina and magistra are waiting in chambers for your worthiness to appear."
"Shhyeah," the young expert snorted and stretched.
Ulia squatted down with her hand on the sword pommel. "And you plan on gracing your new employers some time today?"
Juo coughed and forced a yawn.
"Well?"
"I have ... plenty of gold ... and all over the world, might I add," the adepta smiled with her eyes closed. "I don't need ... that."
Ulia stood up and crossed both duty and economy off the list, coming to another item. "Are you really an expert mage, miss," the officer smiled as she looked out beyond the glistening brook over the wildflower fields, and to no quick response.
"Better believe it," Juo said as she tossed the charred leavings, standing up and looking Ulia in the eye, "and I'm not under your jurisdiction." The last bit came with squinty sneer.
"No," Ulia said calmly with her hand on the end of the baton tucked in her belt, "but Mistress Tatiana still holds a tribuneship in the Main. I suggest you remember that when you go shooting your mouth off about either the Legion or the Empire, unless you think you are eminently irreplaceable," she concluded with a grin.
"Fiiiiine!"
4E 170 Mid Year 12 Mondas After 11pm
Her turn had come at the head of the line.
"Name?"
"Ulia ... Swain," she answered the veterana, stepping forward from the tent entrance.
"Birthday," the figure in field plate asked without looking up, scratching an iron stylus across the page.
"Um?"
The officer looked up at her. "Your birthday?"
She felt her face go hot. "Ssss-seven, Second Seed, 153, ma'am," she managed to answer. The stylus dropped. Nothing but a husky chuckle from behind the desk broke the humid night. Ulia could only stare into her smiling face as the legionary sat back with her fingertips touching, and more than the summer heat trickled down both of her temples.
"And why," the recruiting officer for the XIV Southern asked with a smirk, "do we need another camp lizard, hm?"
"I ... "
The officer shook her head slightly and exhaled through her nose as she pushed the heavy wooden command chair back, stood up, and walked around the front of the desk, leaning against its front edge with her steel greaves and arms crossed. She looked in her fifties. Her face retained traces of a sharp Cyrodiilic nose, now crooked undoubtedly from fighting, in a sunburnt visage with scars on cheeks puffed out from salty living. As she smiled, Ulia saw multiple gaps in the teeth between blistered lips. This woman is an Imperial, she repeated silently, do not smile or cry.
"You can work the camp," the officer said while running her eyes casually up and down the young Nord, "as a washer or a cook, or," she chuckled slyly, "selling whatever you like. But you are not joining the army. Next!"
"But ... ma'am! I mean, officer ... I mean," Ulia stuttered.
"Out," the officer yelled, pointing to the tent's entrance.
"I have something! For the Legion!"
At this, the veterana dropped her head slowly and put her hands on her hips, walking with gaze back up directly in Ulia's eyes and stopping with toes nearly touching. She said nothing.
"Um ... heh, I have this," Ulia pulled a quilt purse.
"Are you trying," the older woman said quietly, slowly, without taking her eyes off Ulia's, "to bribe an Imperial officer?"
"No," Ulia shook her head, keeping her eyes up, "no. I was told that if I had a contribution to make to the Legion ... that I could enlist before I turned eighteen."
"And who ... told you ... that," the officer asked coolly, "hm? Where you from, girl?" She craned her head to the right and motioned inwards over Ulia's shoulder with her right hand.
"Mm-my farm is," she got out before having her left shoulder bumped from behind. An unshaven Nord man in dirty smith's frock appeared.
"In other words, Second Seed second-squirt, you don't know anything. Get out," she ended with a brusque hand-toss towards the camp.
Another hour or so of interviews went on inside the tent of the campidoctor, the drill instructor and recruitment officer for the fourteenth legion of the southern corps. Ulia had taken a seat on the grass in the shadows near the tent, just inside the nearest brazier's firelight. Her stomach ached with hunger. She had sat in a crowded wagon full of sweating commuters for ten hours in the sun earlier that day, and had had only a hasty couple of tavern eggs and piece of bread with a mug of watery lager at half past four that morning, the last of five days from her family's homestead east of the Falkreath capital. The wagons had followed the inn trails a day north, then stayed in a group on the northwestern trade highway to the south's most expansive set of Legion installations. In order to save money for her enlistment, Ulia had slept in a barn, two empty stable stalls, and a root cellar in exchange for chores, mostly washing dishes after the taverns cleared. Last night, she tried to smile as she shook an ant off her hand, it had at least been a little saddle soaping. Like I'll ever be cavalry, she thought. She had only the gray wool trousers, undyed cotton smock, and well-oiled riding boots that she wore other than a staghorn-handled field knife and the 25 gold septims from her parents.
The last potential emerged from the tent and took position in a rough square of those remaining from the initial line of some dozens that had formed earlier that day. About one in five had walked off dejectedly, stomped off, or just disappeared into darkness since she had been waiting in line. Ulia stood up quickly and rushed to the edge of the group just as the campidoctor walked out into the night.
"So youuu," the officer began with a loud pronunciation of the second word, abruptly stopping as her eyes moved to Ulia. This time there was no smirk. "You! I told you to leave!"
"Yes ma'am," Ulia shouted, stepping forward and performed the best at-attention that she could imagine. This drew a few snickers, yet not too many. The veterana had a darkened haft in her right hand, and tapped its end on her left palm to dead silence. She walked over to Ulia.
"You have something for the Legion, huh? Let's see it."
Ulia felt her lower back tighten. She let her eyes drop a moment and drew in the quietest breath she could as she held out the coin purse, looking back up at the officer's eyes. The campidoctor was walking towards her. Do not smile or cry.
"Well-well," the Imperial said with a singsong as she grabbed the purse and weighed it, tossing it up once, "you can buy us one new pugio." As fast as she had turned to seemingly walk the length of the group's first line, she whirled back around and drove the end of the truncheon into Ulia's stomach with both hands. The girl from hold farm country fell to her knees and inhaled hard, eyes bulging. The officer just as quickly brought the haft down across her shoulderblades hard enough to knock her on her face.
"You don't buy your way into the Legion, bitch!"
Ulia's vision completely blurred. She fought for breath and tried to push herself up, then felt another stab through her eyes and a ripping pain on her spine as the officer stomped her back with a hobnailed sole, and her face hit the ground. All Ulia could do was hug her stomach, pulling in breaths, restraining the sobs that had started. She didn't receive another blow, and the officer's feet did not move from where she stood a couple paces away. She could taste the blood running down her face from her nostrils as she involuntarily spat on the grass. Ulia heard nothing but the white buzz of the last minute. Her gasps for air became more drawn out, and she pushed herself from hands and knees to a single knee, then stood upright. She could barely see the campidoctor.
"What's it gonna be," the form barked at her, slapping the end of the haft on her palm.
Ulia stood up straight and drew in her last gasp. "The Legion, ma'am," she replied firmly through tears.
The form walked closer and became the hardfaced officer. "Hear that," she yelled with her eyes in Ulia's, "she's our first name! What's your name, scrub?!"
"Uuu-uli-aa Ss-sw..."
"Aha, no!" The officer paced up the first line staring into each of the other sets of eyes. "I don't think so. You," she stopped again toe-to-toe with Ulia, "are a whore."
Up until now, that type of language had only been used in moonlight gossip or her parents' admonitions about the cities. Like many of her kindred in the countryside, her family made little use of politics but remained faithful to traditions such as harvest and meal blessings. Her mother had insisted she and her six siblings learn the rites to the goddess and apply them, especially Ulia, her fourth of seven children born during the Second Planting celebration on the cusp of spring and summer. Kynareth, she had told Ulia, was watching your birth and has given us good fortune and family.
"No, ma'am," she said with the firmest voice she could muster.
"We," the Imperial said with the end of the haft pushing Ulia's chin up, "will call you Lizard, 'cause that's what you are," her voice lowering to a menacing rasp.
Ulia looked her in the eye, speechless, could not have spoken if she tried.
"So first ... Lizard ... I am doctor."
"Yy ... "
"What's that?" The haft pushed back towards her throat.
"Yes, doctor," Ulia said quietly.
The older woman's eyes narrowed, and she pulled away. She walked past a few other recruits, stood in front of an oak-sized man in sleeveless miller's tunic tapping her hand with the truncheon.
"You!"
A woman in a maroon worker's dress motioned for them to walk through the open door. Ulia followed the other women from the recruitment class into a room with rows of beds and tables on either side.
"This," the young Nord announced to the group, "is the women's barracks for your class. You will sleep here when not in the field."
She turned, and walked towards another door at the end of the long room. The beds were plain, sanded timber frames with scarlet woolen blankets tucked perfectly into the sides and end. Each had a two-drawer night table of the same wood. The gray stone floor was as smooth and shiny as the pitted and worn furniture and roof beams. Ulia's group followed the her through the door.
"Here," the ordinary turned in a suddenly warm room, "are the baths."
She walked the length of the room past three stone pools sunken into the timber-floored room. Stopping at the middle of the three, she motioned to the arrangements of decorated ceramic flasks, linen hand towels, and curved bronze implements of some sort.
"You are to bathe yourself. Thoroughly. Start," she pointed behind them, "with the caldarium. Soak in there first. Next," she indicated the middle pool again, "the tepidarium. Wash yourself before you get in. Use the oil, then a strigil ... like this," she mimed the bronze piece up and down her arm, the same from shin to hip. "When you are clean, get out and wipe yourself down with a towel." She sauntered to the edge of the third pool. "Then relax in the frigidarium. Questions?"
Ulia had until this day bathed out back of her family's stables. All year, the tin basin held either well water or rain. In her life she had a handful of times washed in warm water inside a building, like that time the family went to the capital for a Second Seed festival and crammed into two rooms at the inn. There they had an indoor tub of some interesting metal that could be filled with water from the hearthfire for coin. Since it was her birthday, mom had given her a hot bath. She still had the flower garland that she wore that night to the feast, a box by her bed back at home. The Second Seed gown she wore for her eleventh birthday had supplied part of that coin purse's patchwork.
The intense heat of the first pool was a shock. Ulia gritted her teeth and slid down into the water, sat on the ledge built into its sides. The pools were big enough for all sixteen of the women to sit with plenty of room. She felt her heart rate increase and wondered how long they were supposed to "soak."
In their turns the women's class got out of the caldarium and stepped into the middle pool. Ulia found this one much more tolerable, although still quite warm. The lady from the camp had been sitting on one of the wooden benches that ran the length of the room on both sides, and got up to stand over them when they were all in the tepidarium. She gave out a curt remark or two, pointed. The oil was strangely scented, that is, it was at all scented. Ulia had never bathed like this before. It smelled ... like the forest? She did not know.
They all sat in the last, cold pool. Smiles and looks of satisfaction all around, this was what every woman present had probably known all her life, melted snow and rainwater, well water, mountain pools and rivers. Ulia let herself dissolve momentarily in the familiar cold water and tried to breathe through her clotted nose.
The woman who had led them in clapped her hands and had them follow her into another room at the end of the baths. There, they were issued crimson duty tunics, undergarments, and oiled leather bracers.
"What about our shoes," one had asked when all the size adjustments and trades had been made.
"What about them," their leader asked.
They were brought back to the barracks and told to remain while the ordinary disappeared out into the camp. Most flopped down and let out a satisfied exhale almost immediately. Some talked a bit, sat on the edge of the bed. The woman appeared at the barracks door again shortly.
"I," she announced, "am the medica for your training. Each of you will receive a physical examination, and I will fit you properly with boots. You," she pointed to a sleepy recruit nearest, "to the baths," she motioned.
When it came time for Ulia, she found the medica seated at the far left end behind the pools next to an open cabinet. She had never had a physical, and found the woman's questions uncomfortable, and then there was the exam. Dressed again and seated on a stool, she had her feet examined last by the stolid woman.
"Had problems with corns or ingrowns?"
"Not that I know of."
The medica, kneeling at her feet, looked up at her. "I think you'd know if you had," she said and smiled, "just a standard question like the rest of them. We need," she continued, handing Ulia two pairs of tawny woolen footwraps, "to make sure your feet are up to it, above all else. Well," she laughed, "almost all else." She held a studded pair of legionnaire's boots against Ulia's shin. "Here, try these on. You have to make twenty miles in the morning."
The darkness broke with torchlight.
"Quar-TERS!"
Ulia slid her feet to the floor and pushed them into the boots as fast as she could. Through a couple hours' sleep she made out the campidoctor and two other, younger female legionnaires in full armor walking the aisles between beds and shouting.
"Get your sorry ass out of bed, scrub," she heard next to her as one of the new trainers pulled her dozing neighbor out of bed by the lapels and hit her across the face.
"In file!"
All sixteen stood blearily facing forward. They were led out of the barracks to the expansive camp's exact rectilinear forum and shouted into a line next to two lines of male recruits, all receiving the knuckle from legionary men until the campidoctor called time.
Received
Office of Jarl Skald the Elder
4E 170 Sun's Height 09
Falkreath
Posted
Eodsbury Courier Company
Western Highway Lakeview Station
4E 170 Second Seed 11
Hi Ma and Da! I'm at the Lakeview House for bed and breakfast! We got in from the northern road just after sundown, lots of stops to pick people up along the way. When we finally got out, my legs were so sore! I just wanted to sit on the sand next to Lake Illinalta, it's sooooo beautiful in the evening. It was funny. I got chased by this big crab that came out of the water! When I yelled, two of the folks from the wagon came running down the hill, and one hit the crab with a sword! I said thank you, and looked at the thing. Ugh! They took it away and cooked it for dinner at the inn. Butter and spices, yum! You can see the Manor way up the hill from here, such a huge house, I wonder who lives there? Anyway, my candle is almost out and I need to go to bed. I can't wait to join the Legion. I want to come home in the crimson. I want you to be proud of me.
Love,
Ulia
They stood in a square.
"The essence of the Legion," the campidoctor shouted as she paced in front of a table at the center of the camp forum, "is organization. There is a reason why small outposts can manage countries. Organization. The same throughout the Empire. You can count on every last camp in this," she motioned expressionlessly toward the horizon, "country to have the same layout and equipment." She walked down the front file. "See that?" She indicated with a bemused curl to her lips, and walked to the other end of the file, pointing with the truncheon that Ulia's class had learned about at the chow benches, a legate's baton stripped of its silver wolf head and gilt decoration. Marca was her name, a porter had let the class know sotto voce, and she had won that baton defending the legate in battle. The wood had originally been the color of natural timber.
"Gather round!"
She stood behind one of the long ends of the plank table with her hand on the baton, resting its end next to the arranged equipment. The class of sixty recruits jostled for a view in a multiranked semicircle. On the table, one like the refectory ground for their century long enough to seat thirty a side, was a parade ground polished display. There were three distinct grades of armor, several types of weaponry, and shields. The table also displayed an assortment of pouches and rucksacks, belts, as well as the boots and bracers they all had worn since the first night.
"You have until dawn to learn their names. Now line up!"
A bald legionary stood next to a chow table chair and waist-high metal stand with a couple sets of shears and razors.
4E 170 Sun's Height 02 10:58pm
"We will get," the campidoctor shouted at the century class, "to more equipment drills later. But now it is time that you take your ... oath."
The women's section had been hustled to their barracks by a centuriana and told to line up in file facing the door to their baths. She disappeared into that door, and they waited at attention.
Some time later the door to the barracks opened behind them and they heard the campidoctor's voice walking down their file.
"You," she snapped her finger behind her as she was just passing the head of the line.
When Ulia walked into the baths, she saw the campidoctor standing next to the frigidarium with the centuriana behind a chair and a smoking brazier. She walked up, and the campidoctor took a step forward.
"Are you ready to swear your oath to the Legion, Ulia Swain?"
"Yes, doctor."
"Then raise your right hand and repeat after me ... "
Upon my honor I do swear undying loyalty to the Emperor, Titus Mede II and unwavering obedience to the officers of his great Empire. May those above judge me, and those below take me, if I fail in my duty. Long live the Emperor! Long live the Empire!
"Good, scrub," the veterana said, snapping her fingers at the chair, "now sit and take down your tunic."
Ulia felt a leather strap pushed against her mouth.
"Bite down," the centuriana behind her barked, and Ulia took the strap in her teeth as she had her arms pulled roughly backwards by the wrists.
Marca slid a long iron handle out of the brazier, a white-hot flying dragon in a diamond motif at the end. "Legion for life," Ulia heard as the scream erupted from her throat through the belt in her teeth, the skin just below her left collarbone steaming and the iron clawing down through her heart into the last reach of her living memory. She woke up in the frigidarium, head against the stone lip above the bench. When she realized where she was, the burning on her chest lashed out and she gasped. Ulia held her hand to the burn, and was pulled out by both elbows. The medica's face appeared as she was placed in the chair next to the brazier, and her arms again pulled back. A frigid sting shot through her collarbone and she involuntarily jumped up to be pushed back down by the shoulders.
"Stop," Ulia's teared eyes saw the medica's round face, "we need to cover the salve so you can march tomorrow."
4E 197 some time in Sun's Dawn prior to the commencement of Southall's fourth year
"Thank you, that will be all," the thane of Fletchersgate wearily waved the guildsman away, putting his thumb and forefinger in his eyes. His carl walked the last visitor to the double doors of the hall just after seven p.m., the Sun's Dawn snow blowing in. She growled some orders to the guards and turned to shut the doors behind her, walking up the worn Cyrodiilic wool carpet to the steps up in front of the chair.
Ulia had been the carl for Fletchersgate since chosen by the jarl of Falkreath for the young thane Eodsbury after her successful tour in Cyrodiil, and had lived in his service the past twenty-one years. They were only a year apart in age, she and Cenric, the youngest of eleven children from the House Eodsbury, vassals to Falkreath and hereditary castellans for one of its towers. She had been allowed by the XIV Southern to remain on active reserve as centurion after her service in the war. The brass recognized the value in allowing their own to serve in the courts of minor notables nationwide, this giving the dragon a presence, eyes and ears in every new freehold with a timber mansion at its crest whenever a jarl handed out a ceremonial axe to a young worthy, coins not necessarily jingling out of earshot for that one. The invariably young carls, not long from the dragon, would most likely not foreswear the heady mix of torchlight induction, four months' training with almost no sleep, three a.m. wakeups for a beating in the barracks or a supplemental forced run until they puked in the breakfast line. City Main knew what it had done by allowing the Nord jarls to pick from its junior ranks— they would have friends for life in every mead hall in Skyrim.
Ulia had been on duty with when word came that the jarl was showing up the next morning for a surprise inspection of the line. Standing there in file, she had been plucked from the XIV junior centurions for medium infantry by the jarl's secretary and told to report at the new Fletchersgate manor house. Mmmm ... lookit youuuu, her honorable commission had started, yet she still had the cohort behind her and an Aldmeri bronze on her belt, so he had dismissed her with a yawn, and that was the last she would have to do with nobility outside of the Fletchersgate fief.
Nevertheless, she had stayed all these years in with Cenric. He was married to his wife Ainn within the year of his naming, and the carl had bent her knee as honestly as the entire wedding gathering, and for some years to follow. Ulia had been born on a ranch homestead in east-central Falkreath, fourth of seven, no particular political or religious leanings other than her mother's insistence that they invoke the goddess. Her mother and siblings had managed a herd of cattle, and her father took endless rides to the XIV Southern fort selling contracts for jerky by the wagonload. They were not anything close to rich merchants in their farmhouse built over a century prior, but they were healthy among a land full of strife and disease. Ulia took to the boys' games more than thrilling at the merchant coming through town with lace, and had once broken the nose of a self-proclaimed badarse in the fields at the end of her short schooling by the village priest of Mara. When the first signs of the Aldmeri were coming, she had left home on her seventeenth birthday to sign with the Southern.
Between her staid Falkreath blood and the encounter with a smarmy jarl, Ulia had remained unmarried, rising in the XIV to centuriana by nineteen after surviving a death march through the Alik'r desert on her first assignment. She was no prudish devotee to Mara's tourist tokens. There had been lovers in the ranks, fun in town when on leave. Yet she had quietly told the bronze dragon pendant she kissed every night and draped over her sword by her cot, I will only ever love this, my place and my honor, duty, discipline.
Fletchersgate had been founded on the Hammerfell border by Cenric's family, a minor player in the triangle of Elinhir Redguards and Falkreath City, and he named thane of the surrounding lands. She had always noticed a quiet resignation in her employer's goings on, a fatalistic long gaze in the flawless execution of fief ceremony, business, law, pleasantry. Like countless others across the country you might imagine, she had at least once imagined what the life of wealth and importance like his might feel like, and this tireless routine she observed from her post at the wall disillusioned her after a while. Cenric had very little time to himself. From the moment she stood her post in the atrium on the first floor of the civic building (he had no illusions; this was no palace) at five in the morning all throughout the day, she for years never saw a single individual trait in him. He had never read a popular book in front of her, only sat at all hours at the desk carved out of an Argonian tree trunk there in the second floor offices, scanning documents, signing, making decisions for the omnipresent couriers, soldiers, entreaties. Yes, she had thought on occasion as she unfastened her duties at midnight, sitting on her cot with a slug of brandy, I am just fine with this part of it, thank you, and with that slept well each night.
Cenric got up from the oversized wooden chair and walked down the side of the provincial dais towards a meeting room. He made no motion to her and said nothing. He looked tired. She waited a moment and then followed him into the room.
"Shut the door," he said directly, leaning on the planning table with his back to her.
She did so. He turned much more quickly and sprang at her, pressing his lips on hers. She shoved at him and pushed his body, jerking her arms as he gripped above both of her elbows and wrestled her towards the table. As he pushed her torso, she kicked at his thigh hard enough to have him stumble backward, regaining her stance, and lunged at his body with her shoulder lowered. He beat at the tops of her cuirass and pulled at her hair as they impacted with the wall. She separated from him and spread her arms at her sides with hands flexed, hunching over with bent knees to hit him in the chest with another move. He hit the exact posture as she was holding, pulling the circlet from his head with one hand and throwing it to the side. She loosened one buckle at the side of her bouilli armor. They ran at each other again.
Ulia had by no star thought she would ever end up with Cenric. She had not exactly despised him on meeting her new thane, that day, but had not thought anything more of him than the figure head of her service minutely more important than that of a ranker out in the mud. Years had gone by. He at first attended business as well as ceremony with the young Ainn and they looked the timeless portrait that would go on the Imperial City walls, and maybe mausolea to boot. The Aldmeri war actually brought a flush of pride and energy to this particular fief, one not so hit by the destitutions many localities suffered and helped by its brand new building financed by the Eodsburys. For a golden moment she thought she was living in the bardic traditions themselves, a just thane with his beautiful family at the top of the hold, crops growing, trade increasing.
The years went by, though, after the war and the euphoria of a peace treaty and the local parades faded. Business resumed. Then the politics got nasty between loyalists and dissenters, and a bitter stalemate settled over the national discussion for over two decades. Ulia pressed on in her service to Cenric and his family. He, too, rose before dawn and worked until night. His children grew up, went into politics, divinity, and the Legion cavalry. She didn't kid herself, though, there were plenty of songs in the taverns about the one who just happened to be there.
The two of them found themselves alone, Ulia due to the way she had handled earlier service and avoiding lasting connections in her young doings, Cenric from the demands of a fief. He and Ainn were all but separated, living in the building for appearance's sake. The housecarl had more than once been privy to comings and goings by this or that young man in the servants' hallways behind the official rooms, and had of course kept a stone face, risen before dawn, put on a sword. Ainn had lovers, and Cenric never showed any emotion other than tiredness and gravity with the passing years. He had been a handsome, young man when she met him. Now she saw a much older man with a dim light in his eyes.
"We can't keep doing this," he said to her for the umpteenth time as they lay there on the thin wool over hardwood in the meeting room, and he wasn't letting his arms go from around her.
"You say that," she muttered, rubbing his chest.
"What'r we gonna do, Ulia?"
She didn't hear the next few words. All she thought about was how strange it was to find him, now, after all these years. What indeed, Cenric.