ii: The Attempt.
I awaken quickly, like I used to all those years ago, mad with panic, cloaked in a chill sweat drying on hot skin. Nemilsanë— where is she?— I slide my hands beneath the pillow and clasp them around the hilt. The feeling of the worn leather against my fingers is like the sweet forest songs, the relief of swimming in icy water, and there is only an instant to savor it in.
Dust. The cave smelled of dust and age.
The dream lingers, as dreams are wont to do, but I slip from the over-stuffed mattress to the floor, and the bite of the cold nips at my skin. Awake. I have to be awake. There is someone by the chest— my things, my equipment, my most prized possessions. No! No one must have them. They are mine, mine alone, the only material objects I allow myself to have on the lonely nights and the long journeys, and more than anything they are my stories. My memories. They cannot be taken from me.
Light fills the room in a brilliant bloom of blue, blotting the figure crouched by the chest out of sight, and against the black of my closed eyes I can see patterns of strange blossoms and twisted shapes from the mangled dream.
When the magic fades and everything grows dark once more I see the outline of her in the dying embers of the fire the innkeeper's daughter had stoked for me. The chest is gone. Reamed in orange and taller than me half-a-head, the thief is like a figure from the dream I woke from, with cruel lines to her face and ill-will burning strong in her scarlet eyes. So much hatred in one so outwardly beautiful. She is here to kill me, or to help in it.
"You rivven will all die!" she hisses and lunges forward, daggers flashing from the sheathes at her hips, and we fall to the ground in a tumble of limbs and leathers, her in crimson assassin's finery and I in my nightclothes, and I feel the bite of her steel at the soft skin of my ribs. Too easy. She thinks wrongly, and moves too clumsily.
She curses me in the tongue of the drow and I knock one blade from her hand. A spark of magic opens my palm and Nemilsanë is lost to me, clattering to the ground to be kicked under the bed, and she begins to drive the remaining dagger home. I am pinned beneath her weight.
Dry— we are so deep, far beneath the skin of the earth, and there is no water here. Not one drop. Oppressive. Stifling. Dead.
I can still taste the metallic tang of the dream-cave in my mouth as I twist her wrist up and to the side, straining further and further until I hear the crack Father told me to listen for when he first taught me to defend myself without iron to help me. The thief screams, agony shearing the highest notes of her voice into a helpless whimper, and she is exhaling when I slide the point of her own blade beneath the cage of her ribs, stopping only when I feel the fiber of her heart tearing on its wicked edge. The steel nicks a rib and she shudders against me, talking in blood and gasps.
Dress a thief all you desire in a killer's garb: they will never be one.
The drow girl dies in my arms with the ties in her thick white hair loosening and spilling into my hands. I close the accusing, staring eyes, and think that perhaps, somewhere, there is one in this life that had known her as beautiful and was no stranger to her smile. I wonder if they expected she would breathe her last here, in a mockery of an embrace, her blood spreading on a well-polished wooden floor, making like garish black-red flowers in the flickering firelight.
Perhaps not.
Two heartbeats have passed since the thief met her end when the door is flung open and the golden light of the inn spills into the room, bathing it all— the grim scene in every detail— in an unbecoming radiance.
The innkeeper's daughter stands in the doorway, silhouetted in yellow, flaxen hair shining.
"Gods!"
Gods, yes. Gods indeed.
