Just FYI, this is also posted on my ArchiveOfOurOwn account too. Same name, same story. Enjoy. And don't forget to comment please.
Seven people gave her pause that night and only one of them was able to walk away with their head still attached to their body.
That man stood a full head taller than her, was easily twice her weight, at least two years older than she was, had hair the color of the Rift's auburn autumn leaves, eyes green as spring, and an accent she couldn't lay her finger on.
Brynjolf of the Thieves Guild.
An irritant whose help was only accepted based on the combination of his insistence to do so and the fact that he was one of Delvin's boys.
He laid hands on her only but once.
That was once more than she allowed most people to lay hands on her.
Not even Nolas Macro had managed the same, and the Listener had been missing two fingers at the second knuckle for an entire month before the Keeper came with the Night Mother. Three full months before that insufferable Imperial was exposed to be the Listener.
Now, the Listener was buried under half a hill in the Sanctuary's former dining area.
It would have taken a week just for a team of miners to dig far enough just for her to be able to peel his corpse off the stones and bury him too, but he didn't deserve such a fate, not after he nearly botched his task in the murder of Gaius Maro in Markarth and then proceeded to betray Astrid's trust when she ordered him to kill Cicero in the sanctuary of Dawnstar, a task that she saw to completion with the proof of the jester's head for her true matron.
As reward for her victory and his failure, his bonus had become hers, and the token sapphire, marked for the seer Olava's favor, weighed almost heavy as it lay hidden between the folds of leather pressed against her gut.
Only she and a few surviving gifts she took with were all that remained of the Dark Brotherhood.
No more would she kill in the name of Sithis now that he had so blatantly abandoned them.
No, this last murder would be in the name of her family.
Inexhaustable, she pulled herself back into Shadowmere's saddle and the tireless horse stormed over the corpses of the fool highwaymen who had dared to try to stop her.
Volunruud called to her like an eerie whisper, the sky turning pink on the edge of the horizon as her breath turned to fog before her when she finally dismounted by the standing stones of the barrow.
Shadowmere would be there when she came back.
They were all they had left after all.
Descending into the tomb, she followed the southwest path as she had before and found the place where she had met Amaud Motierre once before, Astrid too angry to allow the Listener to go, and carefully, she combed over the room.
The fool had left his Black Sacrament laying out in the open as it had been when she first met him, a chest with the flattened bedroll of his bodyguard shoved in, not the plush thing she had seen that the Breton had no doubt lounged on for long hours while he waited for the arrival of the Brotherhood, no doubt taken with, and the urn which only held ash within it.
Ah.
But his bodyguard had not burned a receipt all the way, through the smudges of the charred parchment she could still see the inked edge of Whiterun's famed banner.
And with that small scrap of a clue, she retreated.
By high sun, she would be at the city's gates.
And Amaud Motierre would find that it was not Sithis who demanded a soul, but Reignhart Frostfang, in fair trade for the steep price her family had paid.