Jacob gently pushed the heavy study door open, the light from the windows illuminating the dust dancing along the floor. Ethan Frye kept his eyes on the papers at his desk, wearily waving Jacob over to sit down. Jacob slumped into the chair, staring at the ceiling as the silence stretched on. He had debated even coming. A summons like this always meant a lecture.

"I need to speak to you," his father finally started, "because a man was found dead last night."

"Oh?" Jacob replied lightly, still looking up.

He was too angry and too drunk, and his blade slightly missed the main artery. Blood spurted wildly from the wound, onto the man's silk dressing gown and the expensive rug, soaking everything as he rasped under Jacob's weight.

"I need to know you weren't involved," his father said quietly.

The bastard grabbed a bottle lying on the floor and smashed it into Jacob's head, the glass shattering and expensive port slopping everywhere. As Jacob lurched sideways, the man shoved the broken bottle towards Jacob's face, missing his eye by less than an inch and slicing into his brow.

"Me?" Jacob spread his hands into a shrug. "I'm innocent as a lamb."

Temporarily blinded, Jacob leapt backwards, staggering towards the window where he'd entered. The man was thrashing on the floor, clutching at his own neck and rasping his last breaths. Jacob crouched forward and stamped viciously on the rich bastard's chest, satisfaction creeping through him as he felt ribs crunch under his boots and heard a desperate gurgle of pain. "That's for Polly," he hissed. He grabbed a pillow and tugged the cover off, quickly sliced it into a long bandage to wrap around his still-bleeding eye, and crawled back out of the window.

Ethan sighed. "You haven't been innocent since the day you were born."

Polly. He'd met Polly almost a year ago when she'd sidled up to him at the pub. "'Ello, lovey," she'd started by way of introduction, placing a wrinkled hand on his arm. He had assumed she was looking to ply her wares. The garish dress and cheap face paint explained her profession well enough.

"Not even believed by my own father," Jacob mumbled. "There's no trust at all in this family."

"I wanted to meet to one o' the famous Fryes," she said, snatching his drink and taking a swig before he could protest. "Never at any o' the village events, keeps to themselves, never even goes to church, or so they say- I'd never know as I never goes myself!" She laughed again at her own irreverence, and it was so infectious that Jacob found himself grinning incredulously.

"It would help if you gave me any reason to trust you." Ethan was peering at Jacob as though he wished that he could simply crawl into Jacob's head, discover the truth directly, and thus avoid this entire conversation. Father looked at son, a curious mirror, neither of them able to relax.

"The whole village is curious and I can't resist me a mystery. Tha', and I couldn't help but take pity on you, poor lamb," she leaned forward and gestured at him with his own beer. "You always look so awkward with the girls about here. Well, I tell you wot. I've decided I'm going to teach you wot's wot, for the very reasonable price of two shillins an hour."

Jacob pouted. "I've been a model of decorum, not that anyone gives me any credit."

His shock must have showed on his face, because she punched him in the shoulder. "Not like that," she said, as he rubbed his arm. She was surprisingly strong. "Don't look so disgusted, you'll offend a lady. I mean I'll just tell you, like. Talk about how babies are made, unless your Pa's explained?" His eyebrows rose towards his hairline, and she cackled. "Thought not. Seen him in the markets, he don't look the talking type."

"If only that were the case, and yet-," his father broke off and took a deep breath. "The man who was killed last night, Sir Edward Maule, was a local landowner and a powerful man. Does this sound familiar?"

"So I says to myself, Polly, that boy goes so awkward when a girl gets friendly, and that can only mean 'e's nervous, and if 'e's nervous that means 'e don't know enough, and that means a business opportunity for old Polly." She tapped her forehead and grinned, revealing a few missing teeth. "So you come by my rooms, I'm on the first floor above the White Hart. Come on Tuesday mornin'. Bring two shillins. I'll tell you all there is to know and I'll never breath a word about it to another soul." And with that, with Jacob not having said more than two words for the whole interaction, she wandered off to flirt with another patron.

"Never heard of him," Jacob mumbled.

The whole situation was so strange that he almost didn't go, but then it occurred to him that Evie and Father would have strongly disapproved. This, of course, was justification enough on its own. It was easy enough to sneak out; training at night meant keeping odd hours, so Father and Evie were usually sound asleep until past noon. Polly had opened the door delightedly. The room was cramped and shabby but neat, and she somehow looked younger without the face paint. She had served him tea in a chipped cup and poured a generous dollop of brandy in it for them both.

"Are you sure? Because his death has upset a lot of equally powerful people in the area, Jacob, and the Council is angry."

In that first visit, she explained how babies were made, how women had courses, and how they knew when they were pregnant. On the second visit, she explained the tricks of preventing pregnancy. The third, various ways that a woman can give a man pleasure, and the fourth, how a man can give pleasure to a woman. She was so baldly free of shame that it was hard to be embarrassed. Jacob found himself mostly listening, occasionally making a quip that would produce a hearty guffaw and a slap on the shoulder.

"Why would the Council even be involved?"

Eventually, Jacob started to offer little bits of information about himself. About his boredom in Crawley, about his frustration at feeling so useless and trapped, his distance from his father. At some point, several months in, Polly had declared that she had no more to teach him. As he left, unexpectedly disappointed that the visits were over, she said "bring a slice o' cake next week, we'll share. No raisins," and snapped the door shut.

"There are signs that the killing was done by an Assassin," Ethan replied.

The visits became a high point of his week. Polly had a way of mocking her clients that brought him to delighted laughter, and she appreciated having a good listener. He endured a bit of ribbing about it from the men in the pub- it was hard to visit a whore at 10 in the morning on Tuesdays without drawing comment, especially an older one who wasn't exactly beautiful- but he didn't mind. He just knocked a few heads together and they left him alone after that.

"What sort of signs?" Jacob said, trying not to sound too interested.

One visit not too long ago, she squared her shoulders. "Jacob, I got a question wot's been bothering me- look, normally when a boy hits a bit o' an age, 'e learns the ways of the world from his family, or a friend, or maybe 'e's seen enough farm animals to know wi'out askin'. Don't gimme that look, Jacob, I know you didn't 'ave those options," she said, wagging a finger at him. "But when a man can't learn from those and 'e's as 'andsome as you are, 'e usually finds a nice village girl wot's got a pretty smile for him, and 'e figures it out. It's not hard. So… Are you interested in the lads? 'S not as unusual as you might think"

"It might have been the shape of the blade or the style of the kill," his father said dryly, "but it was probably the fact that the man was in his study three stories above the ground, no doors or windows were forced, and none of the army of fifty servants saw a thing."

He choked on his tea. "Wait, no, hold on," he sputtered, "I don't really know if- I mean," he could feel his face turning red, conscious that he was close to a confession he didn't feel like making, "that's not why." She waited. He fiddled with his cup. "There's already someone," he started awkwardly, "a girl, but I can't…" He trailed off into silence. She squinted at him. "She married?" she asked. He shook his head. "Preacher's daughter?" He shook it again. There was a silence. "Not a bloody Papist nun," she snorted. Jacob didn't even dignify that with a reply. She drummed her fingers against her cup. "Have you told 'er you're interested?". "Can't," he mumbled.

"Well, like I said before," Jacob said, "don't know anything about it."

"That's tosh, you can always tell 'er," she said incredulously. "Jacob, I thought you were braver than this." Maybe it was the brandy she put in the tea, or the shock of already nearly having made one deeply private confession, or the fact that he'd never really had a friend before, but he found the words escaping his mouth before he even knew that he was doing. "Evie," he muttered.

"Perhaps," his father said, sighing again. "Nevertheless, for reasons that pain me, the Council's first thought in the face of a rogue assassination was you." Ethan's eyes settled on Jacob's brow. "How did you get that cut above your eye?"

"Your sister?" she whispered. He couldn't look up, terror curdling the tea in his stomach. She would be disgusted by him now. When he heard her stand and reach out towards him, he was sure that she was going to slap him and tell him to get out. Instead, he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder.

"Oh, this? Got it from Evie, when we were sparring."

"Listen, lad, sometimes we just loves who we loves and that's that." When he looked up, she was staring into the space above his head with a sad smile. "You can't let yourself feel bad 'bout wot you do, 'specially if you don't feel like you've got another choice. Hopefully you'll meet a nice girl and the whole thing will pass, eh? Now," she suddenly stood up and busied herself making another pot of tea. "Did I tell you about a travelling gentleman wot I had the other day? Oh, he dressed nice, but you wouldn't believe wot 'e liked!"

"Evie doesn't make mistakes like that," his father said, eyes narrowing.

Their visits continued on like usual and they never discussed Evie again. But then, a few weeks ago, he knocked and Polly didn't answer. He started dropping by at different times, but she never came to the door. He even started hovering around the pub where they had first met, knowing that she often looked for customers there, but there was no sign of her. The publican knew nothing.

Jacob shrugged for what felt like the eighth time in the past ten minutes. Maybe he was overdoing it, he thought, and straightened slightly. "It was my mistake. I overbalanced. She nicked my eyebrow. It happens."

After a few drinks last night, it finally occurred to him that he should try asking the other girls. A few of them were sitting in the corner, so he wandered over and asked if they knew where Polly had been. After establishing that he definitely didn't want to be a customer but would be willing to pay for information, the tallest followed him to a corner booth.

"You made a mistake," his father repeated slowly, incredulously. "You, my son, Jacob Frye, are admitting to a mistake without Evie holding a gun to your head."

"Polly's been recovering," the girl said in a low voice. "She couldn't go back to her apartment, wot with it not being no secret, where she lives. One of the other girls has been keepin' 'er, lookin' after 'er, trying to help 'er get better." Jacob felt a cold feeling start at the pit of his stomach. "Recovering from what?"

Jacob made a face. "It happens," he said again. "And you know what?" he said, looking directly at his Father, "maybe the dead bastard deserved it." It was the closest he planned to get to confessing.

The girl's face darkened. "We tries to look out for each other, we do, and a few weeks back this- this bastard- got a'hold of little Annie- she's one of the smallest of us, an' 'e were making 'er cry and scream, and Polly walked by, an' she flew at 'im." The girl's voice started to shake lightly. "This monster, 'e's done it afore, 'e never pays, and the girls are always a wreck when 'e's done. Just because 'e's rich and fancy, 'e thinks 'e can do as 'e pleases, and Polly, she'd 'ad enough. 'E didn't take kindly to that, and 'e let 'er know. Annie ran and found some of us. When we got to Polly, we thought she were dead."

"Maybe he did," his father said, "but it's the Council's decision to make. We are here to free people from tyranny and control and eliminate the Templars, not act as indiscriminate killers."

Jacob's breathing felt strangled. "Has anything- has anyone done anything?" The girl eyed him sideways. "No one does anything for us," she spoke slowly, as if he was too stupid to understand. "We're just whores."

"And what makes the Council so qualified," Jacob said bitterly.

"What's his name," he hissed, "who's this bastard, where does he live-"

"We live by a code," his father replied, a reply that Jacob had heard more times than he could count. "It must be followed."

"Edward Maule," the girl spat. "Big estate out past the mill, righ' near the big carriage bridge over the river. Lovely wife and kids. Good, god-fearin' man, pillar o' the church," she laughed with no humour.

Jacob leant forward and closed his eyes, resting his head on his hands, feeling the cut that was still throbbing beneath the bandages. This was not an argument worth having, not right now, he decided.

He left the pub in a fury, grabbing a horse and promising himself that he would return it later. Big house out past the mill, he thought, spurring the horse on. The son of a bitch would suffer for this.

Jacob stood decisively; the conversation was over. "I don't know anything about it," he said again, and started to walk towards the door. He felt his father hesitate and decide to let him go. There had been enough yelling matches before for both of them to know it wouldn't change anything.

The bastard had paid in blood, and it was worth it.

Evie watched Jacob stalk away from the study door, stomping up the stairs. She was about to call after him when she heard her father call her name. "Coming," she replied, giving up on asking Jacob how the conversation had gone. She was fairly certain that she could guess most of it anyway.

She made her way into the study and settled into the chair that Jacob had clearly just vacated, her eyes travelling over the piles of papers scattered across the room. Her father leaned back and pinched the bridge of his nose, looking more tired than she remembered seeing him recently.

She had spent the previous evening translating letters with her father from Latin, trying to track the movements of a precursor object that had once been contained in the Vatican. They had obtained two trunks worth of papers without knowing if their contents would be valuable; the original owner of the trunks had made it a lead that they couldn't pass up, even if it was a reach. As soon as they picked the trunks open, however, it became clear that there would be many hours of work before they knew if there was a payoff.

"Perhaps you should be in bed?" she suggested, and he just shook his head grimly.

The potential was so exciting that they even skipped the usual training and sparring, opting to work side by side, passing the dictionary back and forth. It was in these moments that she felt closest to him, working towards a common passion, eyes firmly set on a shared goal. When they took a short break for tea, he had even been forced to admit that she was becoming the superior when it came to Latin translation. She had eventually stumbled into bed full of satisfaction, her head spinning with declensions.

Her father looked towards her, brow furrowed. "Did you hear your brother go out last night?"

It was the early hours of the morning when a knock at her door dragged her from a deep sleep. She initially tried to ignore it, but it only grew more insistent. Eventually, she dragged her robe on while trying to rub the sleep out of her eyes. It could only be Jacob, she thought. God help him if he was drunk and wanting to brag about winning at a gambling again.

"He always goes out when there isn't a mission," she responded. That, at least, was true.

It was Jacob, but her heart froze when she saw him. He was slumped against the wall, the cloth held to his face covered in blood. He practically collapsed against her when she reached out in horror. She couldn't begin to imagine how much blood he had lost- it was everywhere, on his clothes, in his hair, down his face and neck.

"Evie, please, don't be deliberately vague. I'm in no mood. Did anything usual happen last night?"

He explained the situation in fragments while she used her wash basin to clean out his wound. She was relieved to discover that it was small and that most of the bleeding was likely to do with the location of the cut rather than its depth or size. He hissed when she used alcohol on the cut. She muttered that he should stop being such a baby, and he muttered that he wasn't, and the automatic nature of it almost made her smile.

"No, I didn't see anything. I know that Jacob left as usual, to go do whatever it is that he normally does without any regard for anyone, but I didn't hear him come back."

She couldn't pinpoint exactly when Jacob had started avoiding her, nor could she explain why he was doing it. She had spent a while trying to call after him as he left to skip training, left to ignore their father, left to ignore her. It hurt, but she was hardly going to admit that. So she ignored him back, and when it became too unbearable, she went to his empty room to enjoy the smell of him and remember happier days. Not that he knew that, of course. It was easier to be curt than to be vulnerable.

Her father looked at her for a long moment and she squirmed internally. Lying to anyone else would've been second nature, but lying to him was unfamiliar territory.

Once she basically understood what had happened and neatly bandaged the wound, she thought quickly, laying out all of the possibilities in her mind. "We could get Father-", she started, but Jacob had cut her off harshly. "No," he snapped, "he'd never understand." Evie chewed on her lip and tried to think. Jacob was already in so much trouble with Father and the Council. Despite her irritation at his lackadaisical attitude towards- well, towards basically everything- she didn't want him to be sent away or face serious repercussions. She wanted him to be nearby, even if he wasn't actually around much as of late.

She called on her training and became her calmest self. She raised an eyebrow at her father, challenging his doubtful silence. "What?"

"Here's what we're going to do," she finally said. "Did you leave anything back there?" Jacob shook his head. "I'm going to ride the horse back to the pub and walk back, I shouldn't be more than an hour. Strip out of those clothes and I'll take them with me- I'll bury them somewhere, there's too much blood to explain it away with a training accident. You're going to go wash at the well and get that blood off. When Father asks about the wound, I nicked your head in training this morning because you made a mistake."

He just shook his head. The next question was one she and Jacob had prepared for. "Did you hurt Jacob at training recently?"

Jacob immediately became petulant. "Why does it have to be me who made a mistake?" She started to twist around with a venomous look and he raised his hands in surrender. "Right, sorry, got it. It was my mistake." He started to strip and she turned away. It was a body that she had known well as a young child, but now, much to her shame, it made a flush start to creep up her face. She tossed him a blanket to put over his shoulders.

"I did", she replied easily, "yesterday morning. He leaned too far into a punch and I caught him right over his eye. It bled a ridiculous amount and he whined about it ruining his favourite coat for at least a quarter of an hour."

When she got back from her ride, he was sitting on the floor in her room, wrapped in her blanket and staring into space. He jumped as she opened the door, but relaxed when he saw her satisfied smile. "It's all done", she said, smartly pulling off her gloves and jacket. "Are you clean?"

"Why was your blade even out?" her father asked.

She knelt before him and ran her hands through his hair, checking to make sure that he had cleaned out all of the blood. She quickly unwrapped the bandages, already soaked through, and replaced them with clean ones. He sat patiently through her ministrations, looking sleepy and oddly contented.

"I see no sense in practicing if you don't do it properly, and I didn't think he'd be so careless as to get hurt" she replied, hoping he would accept that. "What is this all about?"

"All right", she finally said, "I think you can go to bed now." She stood smoothly and he stumbled to his feet, getting a little tangled in the blanket. He was still stripped down to his pants, she noticed, trying not to notice too much.

There was a short pause, and the tension suddenly leached out of her father, leaving him looking tired and worn out once more. "I'm sure Jacob will tell you." He shifted back towards the desk and reached for a clean sheet of paper, saying, "I need to write a letter to the Council."

He made it to the door before he remembered her blanket. He wandered back and held it out to her, which made it much more difficult not to notice that he was in his pants. She kept her gaze determinedly on his face as she accepted the blanket, aware that he moved his hand to her arm instead of dropping it.

Evie understood that to be a dismissal and she stood to leave.

"Thanks for cleaning up after me," he mumbled, looking uncomfortable. She rolled her eyes. "It won't be the last time, I'm sure." There was almost no warning when Jacob leaned in suddenly, his lips a hair's breadth away from hers. Shock froze her onto the spot and she closed her eyes instinctively. When she opened them moments later, heart in her throat and anticipation coursing through her veins, he was gone.

As she reached the door, her father called after her, "remember, Evie, don't let your feelings compromise what it means to be an Assassin. The Council is necessary."

When she got back into bed, the blanket smelled like him.

"Of course," she responded. "I won't."

It was wrong, of course, but it was worth it.

Notes:

Fic title is the title of a poem that is a part of the medieval collection Carmina Burena. It was set to music by Carl Orff in 1935 and 1936 (it's part of the same collection as the much more famous 'O Fortuna').

English translation:

'In the wavering balance of my feelings
set against each other
lascivious love and modesty.
But I choose what I see,
and submit my neck to the yoke;
I yield to the sweet yoke.'