Chapter 1: Innocence Lost

When I was a child, an assassin saved my soul.

My name is Aventus Aretino, and I can't tell you exactly how old I was when I first met my savior. I could have been as young as eight or nine, as old as eleven or twelve. I had never celebrated my birthday, and my mother never told me how old I was. I suspect that I was at the middle of that range; I've always been big for my age, especially for an Imperial. Because of that, I sometimes suspected that my father might have been a Nord, despite my mother's assertions that he was an Imperial soldier who died in the war when I was very small. I never knew him, so I can't say one way or the other.

So let me say for the sake of the tale that I was ten years old when my mother died. Let me start my story with the end of my mother's life. It was almost a year between that sorrow and meeting my savior, but if I don't begin there, nothing else makes sense.

For the span of my childhood, however many years it might have been, my mother was my world. We were too poor to celebrate my birthdays, or hers for that matter, but she kept me safe in a city that was unfriendly to our race. While she was alive, I was never hassled or pushed around by the bigger Nord kids; I think the fact that a lot of their fathers were her customers kept them from being too hard on me. Of course, that same knowledge kept them from ever being my friends. No one wanted to be friends with a whore's son.

Yes, I knew what my mother did, what they called her. I didn't care. To me, she was the best, most wonderful person in the world. She wasn't a priestess of Dibella, just a common streetwalker without the religious protections of the church of the goddess of pleasure and beauty. We didn't talk about what she did, and she never brought her customers home, but the cruel whispers of other children and her late hours made me aware very early on of the price that was paid to keep bread on our table.

We didn't have much, but we got by. Whenever I could, I would help out around the house; keeping the place clean and reducing the amount of work my mother had to do was my way of showing how much she meant to me. I wasn't very good with words as a child, so I tried to show my love through my actions. I like to believe she knew how much I loved her, but it was always so hard for me to say the words.

I don't mean to imply our family life was perfect. There were days when mother would come home just before dawn and lay in bed weeping for hours. Sometimes she raised her voice to me, and I can recall her slapping me once—just once—but I don't begrudge her for it. Her life was very hard, I think, and raising a child as a single mother in a place like Windhelm must have made it even harder. Ultimately, though, I'll never really know what my mother's life was like beyond my place in it, and her place in mine. We never got to talk about these things before she died.

The winter before I met my savior was a hard one for us. Her business always dropped in the winter; Skyrim's winters are bad in general, and Windhelm's worse than most. Fortunately, she was canny enough to store up supplies for the winter, but the one that led into year 201 was even beyond a usual Windhelm winter. The snow and frozen rain shut the city down for days on end, and even the small bit of work she could pick up in the dreary cold months died off. It was midway through Morning Star when our food ran out, and mother had to begin braving the weather again to work whenever she could. She made enough coin to keep us in bread and cheese for a few more weeks, but by the beginning of Sun's Dawn she had started to show signs of being sick.

I know that there's no way a child as young as I was can be expected to take care of a sick adult. I know that the deep, wracking coughs that herald pneumonia mean that it's probably too late to do anything anyway.

I know those things now.

At the time, all I knew was that my mother was dying, and there was nothing I could do to save her. She tried her best to comfort me, to convince me that she would get better. I had almost started to believe it when I fell asleep at her bedside. When I woke up, her hand was on the back of my neck, cold and lifeless. She had died embracing me, comforting me even as she passed into death.

The next day or two are still cloudy for me. I remember weeping and screaming. I remember finally running outside in bare feet and huddling on the stoop of our poor home. I lay there, curled up and shivering in the cold, unable to even summon up any more tears because I was just empty inside. In retrospect, I think part of me wanted to die too. I laid there for hours in the overcast and frozen street, my skin turning blue, until I finally blacked out.

When I woke up, I was tucked into my own bed. A man was sitting next to the bed, a plate with an apple on it balanced on his lap as he read a book with one hand. I had hoped the whole thing was some sort of awful nightmare but when I looked across the loft to my mother's bed, it was stripped to the frame and she was nowhere to be seen.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," the older Nord man drawled, closing his book and setting it down on the nightstand. "You were asleep for three days, so you're going to feel pretty weak at first." In fact, I had been trying to sit up through his whole dialogue. My limbs were so weak that they wouldn't support me at all. Seeing my struggles, he leaned over and brought me up to a sitting position, my thin pillows propped behind my head to give me support. His hair was thinning and grey, and his callused hands were nearly as hard as stone.

"My… mother…" I managed to croak out through a cracked throat and chapped lips. He shook his head sadly.

"Naalia's with the Nine now," he murmured. "She was a good woman to have raised a boy so strong. Laying out in the snow like that? I've seen grown men die from less." He picked up an apple out of a nearby bowl and began to peel it with a long fighting knife. Even as sick and weak as I was, my mouth watered; we couldn't afford fresh fruit in winter, and barely in summer.

"Who… you…?" I demanded in my best voice.

"My name is… Angrenor Once-Honored. When I found you out there, I went for the city guard right away. We were worried that you had been attacked or something. It wasn't until we checked out the house that we found…" He coughed, almost decorously, and began to cut the apple into slices. "Anyway, one of the men went for Helgird—she's a priestess of Arkay—right away while I brought you in here." He leaned over and began to feed me very small pieces of apple. "When Helgird showed up, she finished with her rites and then asked me to do something for her.

"See, she couldn't be sure how your mother had died." I flinched at the word, and Angrenor had the good grace to look sheepish about it. But he didn't apologize for it; Nords rarely did. "Since I had carried you in, Helgird said that I had to stay with you until we found out if whatever your mother had is something we need to be worried about other people getting. And the best way to do that is to take care of you and make sure you get better. If you get sicker, I'm in trouble—which means you need to focus on getting better, for my sake if nothing else."

I wasn't sure why, but his words made me want to get better. If I was just living for myself, then I wasn't sure I wanted to keep living. But living for someone else? That made me want to live. Even if it didn't make any sense, it made me want to live.

For the next week, I drifted in and out of consciousness with Angrenor there whenever I woke up. Even though he wasn't supposed to leave, he had fresh food every time. On his bread and fruit and broth, I started to recover my strength. Finally, I was able to get up out of bed and move around. Angrenor smiled when he saw me walking on my own, but for some reason it seemed sad to me.

"Well, strong boy," he rumbled, "looks like you're doing just fine now." I nodded. "Just in time for the weather to start clearing up too." Now he definitely looked sad.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Nothing's wrong, not really." He sat down next to the fire and drank deeply from a dark bottle. "It's just… Aventus, now that you're well, we have to do something with you. You don't have any family in Windhelm, or anywhere as far as we can tell. You can't stay here." I sat back down heavily on the bed, my strength flowing away. "The jarl has decreed that as soon as you're well enough to travel, you're to be sent to Honorhall." My dumb expression must have prompted him to add more. "It's an orphanage—a home for children without parents. It's in Riften." He pulled a folded-up letter out of his tunic and put it down on the nightstand next to me. "Jarl Ulfric's steward, Jorleif, sent this let for you."

"But I don't want to-"

"It's not about what you want, boy!" he roared. For the first time, I was a little scared of my new friend. "It's about doing your duty and obeying your jarl!" He drank heavily from the flask again, and his words slurred somewhat. From time to time, he rubbed at his chest as though it hurt. "I used to be a great soldier until I took a sword through the chest… Now, look at me. Not fit to march with the army… We all have to do things we don't want to do." He face softened somewhat as he looked at me.

"I don't want to go," I pleaded as my eyes filled up with tears. Even as I said it, I realized that there was nothing to keep me here in Windhelm. Nothing but Angrenor, and he had made it clear that he wasn't going to keep me. I picked up the letter and held it futilely. I couldn't read, so I had no way of knowing what it said.

"Tomorrow, we'll go down to the Hall of the Dead," he said without acknowledging my words or my tears. "You can say goodbye to your mother, and then I'll let the guard know you're ready to travel to Riften. They might not be able to take you right away; the roads are still pretty bad. But they'll take care of you until it's time to go."

Angrenor stood up and walked over to where I sat. For a moment, I thought he would hug me, but in the end he only clapped one broad hand on my shoulder. As he turned and walked to the door, he paused for a moment.

"Don't be afraid, son," he said without looking at me. "At Honorhall, you'll be around a lot of other children. And I hear that the headmistress is a sweetheart. She's so beloved that her wards call her Grelod the Kind. That sounds nice, doesn't it?" With that, he swept back out into the city.

I sat there alone for a long time, thinking about what he said. He had called me "son," but so had a lot of the older men—Nords and Imperials alike—that I had known. Part of me had hoped that Angrenor really was my father, and that I could stay in Windhelm with him, but even as a child my mind was too practical for flights of fancy. My mother was dead and no one was going to help me anymore, except maybe this Grelod.

As the sun set on my last day in Windhelm for a long time to come, I packed my few meager possessions and began to look to the future. How bad could someone called "the Kind" be, really?

After the pain of losing my mother and my home—though once I had gotten one of the city guards to read it to me, I was comforted by knowing it would still be there when I was old enough to come back—the journey to Riften was actually a pleasant change. Angrenor did not come to see me off as a Stormcloak soldier loaded me onto a wagon bound for the city. I was disappointed, but I understood; he had already done more for me than most people would have, and I didn't expect more.

In First Seed, many of the roads south of Windhelm were still choked with ice and snow, but a few merchants were willing to brave the weather and potential dangers to be the first to come back with a wagonload of Black-Briar Mead. The wagon-driver, Fanar, had agreed to take me on as part of his south-bound "cargo" for a few extra coins from the city. He was surly and gruff but not unkind; he made it clear that he didn't want noise or bother on the trip, and in exchange for my quiet during the day, my evening meal would sometimes have a crusty sweetroll added to it.

After a pass through Kynesgrove, though, we were on the road alone together for the better part of two weeks. I didn't talk much, and neither did Fanar. I watched him work on the wagon, watched him brush the horses and check their shoes for rocks and set up a simple camp each night. By the fourth or fifth night, I was helping him with the chores, his grunt of approval all I needed in exchange. It wasn't so much that I wanted to be useful; it was just that I was bored. It feels terrible to say that I was bored only a pair of months after my mother's death, but I was a child—and I had done my mourning. I had mourned until it almost killed me. I had nothing left in me when I left Windhelm, and that emptiness was rapidly filled up by the sights and sounds of the road.

That trip, as unwelcome as it was, captured my young mind. I was seeing more of the world in a few days than I had ever dreamed existed. For the first ten years of my life, Windhelm had been my world. I had been outside the walls a couple of times, even down to the docks on errands or to play, but this was the furthest I had ever been from my home. Every day had a sense of wonder as long as we were moving; once we stopped for the evening, it became impossible to bear. The silence of my only companion and my own sense of uselessness were terrible things that threatened to plunge me back into the despairing place I had been in so recently.

Being useless was worse than being dead, so I made myself useful. From Fanar's grunted commands, I learned the proper way to brush down a horse and check for stones. I learned how to pitch a makeshift tent, how to find fresh water on the road, even a few simple snares to catch rabbits.

The first time I caught a rabbit on my own, I hadn't know what to do with it. It wriggled and struggled in the twine while I looked at it hopelessly. Fanar actually smiled as he reached down and took the rabbit aside to kill and skin it. Perhaps he thought I was squeamish, but I simply didn't know the proper way to do it. I followed him, and only after it became clear that I wasn't going to leave it alone did he pull out his short blade and dispatch the rabbit. I think something in how intent I was in observing the slaughter and skinning disturbed Fanar, because after that he showed me no more.

It isn't that the rabbit's death particularly interested me—it's just that it didn't disturb me either. I wasn't naïve enough to believe that meat came from nowhere. For some creatures to live, other creatures must die. Even at the age of ten I knew that basic truth, knew it deep in my bones. From then on, whenever we camped I caught, killed, skinned, and cooked my own rabbits. Still, Fanar's silent lessons stayed with me, to my benefit.

The weather grew warmer over the two weeks of our travel, not just from the season swinging around to spring but from our movement deeper into the Rift, a part of Skyrim noted for its hot springs and year-round temperate weather. By the time I arrived in Riften, I was back on my feet in more ways than one. I had fully recovered from my illness, if not from my grief, and self-sufficiency made my confidence grow. Fanar stopped his wagon off at the Black-Briar Meadery and loaded me up on one of the horses to take me into the city proper. The guards tried to ask Fanar for some sort of entry fee, but he flashed the steward's letter at them. They grumbled, but they stood out of the way.

In contrast to the bounty and warmth of the Rift, the city of Riften struck me as a cold place. The buildings were mostly run-down and wooden, unlike the solid stone walls of Windhelm, and the canal running through the middle of the city looked muddy and foul. There was a stink in the air, brackish water and rotten plants. The whole city stank of spoiled hopes and lost potential.

I did my best to avoid letting my relatively good mood become fouled by the sights and smells of Riften. Fanar had been kind to not make me walk the rest of the way, though I supposed his bonus pay for dropping me off would require a receipt of some kind. Finally, we arrived at Honorhall Orphanage, a large log-and-daub building just off the canal. Outside the front door was a young Imperial woman sweeping leaves and debris from the stoop.

Fanar stopped the horse and dismounted, helping me down from my seat almost gently. Keeping the horse between us and the woman, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a leather pouch. He scooped a dozen septims out and dropped them into my cupped hands, then folded my hands together closed over them. I looked at him with confusion.

"For helping on the road," he drawled in a gravelly voice. It was the most words I had ever heard him say at once. "Man should get paid for work. You hide that. Don't let anyone see it." He stood back up while I stuffed the coins into my pocket and patted me on the head.

We walked up to the young woman, who jumped slightly at our approach. She smiled warily at us but held the broom stiffly with both hands, as though she might have to use it to defend herself at any moment.

"You Grelod?" Fanar asked.

"Um… no?" She made it a question more than a statement.

"Got a kid for the hall," he grunted as though she had said yes.

"Oh, okay," she said, seeming to brighten up a bit. Her eyes turned to me. "And what's your name, sweety?"

"I'm Aventus Aretino," I responded immediately. My mother had always taught me to answer questions when adults asked them. This didn't seem so bad. If this girl was so nice, then Grelod must be even better, I thought.

Fanar got her to sign his paper, showing that he had delivered me successfully instead of just dumping me by the side of the road somewhere, then waved goodbye to me and took off once again. The girl introduced herself as Constance, and she opened the door to lead me into my new home. Inside, Honorhall was just as run-down and rustic as it was outside. Still, I could hear children talking, and they would be orphans like me. Perhaps I would finally have a home.

Constance led me to a large meeting room at the back of the hall, where an old woman was waiting, standing in a shaft of early spring sunlight. Constance murmured something about "the new boy" and then left in a hurry, leaving me alone with Grelod. She turned to face me, and I suddenly froze. Her gaze was like a snake, something cold and terrible, and all of my carefully hoarded confidence began to desert me.

"Aventus Aretino?" she asked in a shrill voice. All I could do was nod, my mouth open and my jaw slack. She nodded in return, as though she expected no better. In a pair of long, fast steps, she was an arm's length away from me. Faster than I would have thought possible for a woman her age, her arm came at my head and the flat of her hand struck my ear hard enough to send me sprawling onto the floor. I curled up in pain, clutching at my head.

"Lesson the first," she said when I could finally collect myself enough to look up at her. "When I ask you a question, you answer with words, not by bobbing your stupid head." She paused, looking thoughtful for a moment before she drove the tip of her foot into my stomach hard enough to make me lose my breath and see stars.

"Welcome to Honorhall, you little shit," Grelod sneered at me. "You're going to be here a long time."

…to be continued…