4E 200 Rain's Hand 01 First day for the 200 class of Southall Collegium
She had spotted an open seat at the far opposite end of the open-sided refectory in off the college barley and cabbage fields. Walking down the first of two wooden tables with benches that ran within a couple footsteps of the overhang before the plains grass, she passed the edge of the first and slid into the seat at the far side of the second. It was plough time, and she had been assigned to work with a group turning soil at roll call, grateful that this foreign blanket wrap was so big on her since she could wear a layer of fitted woolens under her tunic and trousers. The snow may have mostly melted, but that wind blowing across the plain was bracing to one occasionally finding her mind in the humid trees much further south.
How did they manage to settle here? So cold! And look at those with their shirts off after work, taking barrel baths out in the open. Must have horse's blood, the lot of them.
The tables hummed with light talking amidst the somewhat restrained table manners. Magistra, the all-purpose taskmaster, stood over them with her hood thrown back near the door to the college proper, walked slowly around the tables, gave the look to the audibly crude joke or projected belch. It was just the first morning after a night induction to the novitiate for thirty-six candidates. She had made a single statement about expected decorum the previous night, one sentence followed by a question. There were people from the entire continent and all walks of life, all levels of society having only their general level of entering literacy in common, so Raynu had intoned in her rich mezzo the sentence all novices would find on the covers of their blank book of parchment sheets, provided with an end table next to their cots. All novices are to comport themselves respectably and respectfully as representatives of Winterhold. There had been no sarcasm at this one.
"Do you understand?"
Aside from beginning her managerial duties over this year's brood, she was starting their training, silently, by listening for complaints or whining. They had not been the only ones coming in from all over the continent to petition Winterhold's new regional school in the center southern quadrant. One hundred and twelve bright, young people had crowded around the front door of Southall Collegium to be handed shovels, mops, scrub brushes, brooms, rakes. There they had been left almost completely on their own aside from the magistra's appearance at the door before dawn to open the building, then once more on her rounds to see them out at nightfall.
They had spent the winter staying in whatever spare room or cellar a local family might have and they cooked, cleaned, minded children for their board while tradespeople went out to the tavern after a day's work. Some candidates had spent the winter in groups of hunter's tents. Each morning before dawn they were sure to be waiting at the door of the college, ready to continue spreading silage in the fields, polishing and repolishing every wood and metal surface of the rooms inside, shoveling the frozen gravel path to the door from the cart road three or four Cyrodiilic miles away.
Last night the adept had announced the beginning of the 200 class by reading off the names of thirty-six applicants chosen to stay, so this morning most were running on a dizzying first stay in the dormitories where they would live for the next six months. Instructing them regally to follow her to the women's and men's quarters in their turn, she unlocked the deep armoires in each and passed out neatly-folded new novice's robes and hoods. Most of the candidates had so thoroughly exhausted what money they had brought to their intern labor that the robes were the only passable clothing they owned, thrown over torn and patched worker's frocks and trousers.
This breakfast was also by far the best meal most had eaten in half a year. Every candidate had gotten some form of the admonishment against imposing on local folk and their supplies during a candidacy. Farmers, smiths, and butchers were not to be asked for a sort of boarder's honorarium, as it were, from the food that families spent the clear months producing, selling, and preserving for the next winter. You are to perform service for any family nice enough to have you and take what you are served, so some had literally subsisted off bits of hardtack and utterly bland stews they made from meat trimmings. The ones out in camps had feast days any time someone appeared with a deer or fish. The Collegium provided no food for their workdays. These advices from older novices and adepts whom prospects had prodded, plied with spirit, even paid in gold came as part of the establishment's public relations drive in a country not altogether sympathetic to their expanded program. Candidates found that while some Nords didn't give them looks upon hearing about their businesss in the area, a noticeable percentage were a little rude, some even hostile in their remarks.
First day! Azuyia put the tin platter of scrambled eggs and hashbrown potatoes covered with beef gravy down on the table with a tankard of thick ale, sat, took a long draught, the whole place lit up with the energy. She was a wood elf, short for her kind and likewise thin. When the magistra had started to hand her an oversized robe, then started to pull out another, she had insisted on the one she was now wearing (to a shrug on the magistra's part). As her family tended to live to the outer end of a Valenwood life, generally at least two centuries but by reckoning several forebears probably the not unusual three, she was at sixty-three physiologically the same as the group she saw around her and at a similar point in her lived experience. Two or three times the number of years, she had said to a Nord the first time asked about Bosmer lifespans, just means you watch things two to three times as long, something like that.
"Morning!"
She beamed at the Nord man sitting across from her, then savoring the first bites of farm breakfast. He had a loaded plate as well, but hadn't touched his food, sat there sipping at his tankard and talking in a low voice to the Redguard man to his left. Those two are a contrast, she thought. Aside from the subtle differences in visage and hair texture, the Redguard's skin was flawless mahogany to the Nord's freckled almond. He's been outside a lot, this one, she thought, and from the size of him not a scribe's son either. The Nord took up half again as much of the bench across from her as the wiry Redguard, and sat a head taller. Nords all tended to be healthily proportioned, the women and the men, even so she wondered how this one had avoided being pressed into an infantry center with a warhammer shoved in his hands.
"Morning, Bos," he said convivially, although without smiling. She had expected the usual jabbing about her ethnicity even here, and had grown to know the difference between a friendly high-five and blatant Nordic racism. So she jabbed back.
"So where ya from, Northman?"
At this her imposing fellow novice cracked a grin. "Eastmarch, little fishing village on the river near Windhelm. Snowmill," he chuckled and took a draught, exhaling, "and we never had a mill," laughing, clunking the tankard back down. He started to eat his biscuits and eggs.
"Oh really," she continued to smile sweetly, this being the first morning's impressions, yet recalling the advice of her grandparents before leaving. Among the Nords, watch out for the ones from Eastmarch, they had told her, most of all Windhelm City. They don't ... like ... elves. "Thought I might have heard a northeastern accent."
He eyed her a moment, then saying, "It's out in the boondocks, sis, quite a few clicks from the city. I'm definitely not Windhelm, if you catch my drift."
"Oh, I hear you. I'm Azuyia. Azuyia Aciaea, from Greenheart. Near the southern coast."
"City girl?"
"If you will. Cities look ... a lil different in our trees, but hey, yes."
He extended his hand as he got up to take his plate to the bins near the building door, something Nord men did not so very often do for a female Bosmer, that one she had seen since coming to Skyrim. She shook hands with him feeling the hard palms and thick calluses between his fingers, and on his thumb.
"Denthryd Saltersson. Seeya inside," he said shortly, raising his tankard as he walked to the bins.
4E 122 late Hearthfire evening
Raynu stopped under the single oak tree in the expanse of wheat fields. The Rain's Hand wind tossed her friend's lovely hair across her face. Cylanna had caught up to her after they had been running around the through the wheat. Raynu felt something pressed into her hand, and just as she was looking down felt a kiss on her cheek, then her friend ran off towards the village. Her hand clamped tight. She stayed out past nightfall, pacing around the tree with her fist closed. Raynu opened her hand, raising her open palm to her face. It was a little statue of Mara carved from translucent white stone.
4E 135 Rain's Hand 23 Middas Night
Raynu's Journal
Wish I could give back to them as they give to me. Today we had honey cakes and singing because I was born thirty years ago. It's so hard to say anything any more. I don't belong here. My dearest sweet C. grew a long time ago. I wonder what to do. It hurts to think about it.
Raynu got out of her bed after staring at the ceiling for several hours. They had called up, her parents, and she said nothing. The sounds of breakfast downstairs were long past and everyone had gone out into the fields. She sat on the edge of the bed and wiggled her toes on the cool wooden floor. Across the room her clothes from last night were in a heap. She got up and and methodically pulled the trousers and shirt on, wrapped her feet, pushed them in her favorite lambskin boots. Today, too, Raynu put her loaded knapsack on her back by both straps after buckling a blade harness by its strap across her body and belt around the waist, wore the field knife da had given her for chopping brush and protection out walking. She opened the door of her bedroom and walked down stairs, and out to the wheat fields.
She had only one destination in the village left to think about, and walked down past the five farmhouses that made up a place with no name. They lived several miles from the nearest boarding house or merchant's square. It was five families with their crops, animals, and lives. Raynu had never even been far down the wagon road.
Knocking on the door lightly, Raynu stood and waited. It was late morning and most were out in the fields in with scythes. Hrald had waved to her from a dairy stool when she walked by. In a couple of minutes the door opened. Cylanna had her infant son, born just a few weeks ago, wrapped in a cloth at her shoulder.
"Ray, come on in," she smiled warmly, patting the baby's back and walking over to a chair by the fireplace. Coals glowed slightly in the daylit room, the shutters thrown open to the street. "Have a seat," she said, smiling at her son as she lifted him away from her shoulder and held the back of his head in her palm.
"Hi, Cyla. Just wanted to come by."
Cylanna was a handsome woman almost Raynu's exact age. They had been toddlers in the fields those past years ago, grew up running around together. She had reddish-brown hair cut to the the nape of her neck and pulled behind her ears after parting on the side, a hairstyle so common to Nord women with busy lives. Raynu remembered how it had been in the middle of her back when they were teenagers, had thought of the Nord girl like a much an older sister, the way she talked and told her about things. She wore a dress entirely one piece that had a simple hole for the neck, a shirt that extended down to her wrists and ankles, one piece of triple-stitched thick cotton dyed the color of deer hide in the vats of herbs and roots folk had always ever used. She wore low fur shoes on her feet. Raynu had watched her soft face acquire the typical Nordic definition to the jawline and cheeks.
"Happy birthday, by the way," she said, without looking up from the baby, "sorry I couldn't be there. Rolf had a humor, fussed and spit up every time I fed him, needed to stay here quietly."
"It's fine, C. I need to talk to you, though," Raynu said with her hands in her lap, shoulders drawn in a bit. She had always felt a little funny with her arms and legs so different and long, not looking anything like any of the other girls. For that matter, she was the only one in the village like her.
"What is it, love," Cylanna then turned her gaze on the Bosmer.
"Don't say that," she responded plaintively.
Her friend stopped for a moment, looked at her. "Is something the matter?"
Raynu sat there looking at her.
"What?" She looked back down at baby Rolf.
"It's just that ... these birthdays. It's everything, C. I've been thinking."
Cylanna got up holding the baby carefully, kissed him, and lay him gently in the wooden crib with rocking legs next to the fireplace. This done, she turned with her eyes still down at him, then on Raynu, and sat back down with a straight back.
"I'm listening," she said.
"I need to go, Cyla."
"Go? Where?"
"I think you know what I'm saying," Rayu said, shifting. "I need to leave."
Cylanna's mouth tightened and she nodded a little. "I was wondering when you'd come around to this. You've been off for a while now. Your parents ... "
"They aren't my parents."
"Ray, don't say it like that. You know they care the world for you, we all do. We always will."
"What's there for me here, C? Everyone has something and someone. You have Hrald and six beautiful children, ma has da. We all are so blissfully happy," she gestured bitterly, "cutting grain and making flour all year. I can't take this any more." Her friend sat there and waited. "I know I'm not being right. I should be happy. But I'm not. I ... need more. I can't be alone like this."
"You are not alone, Ray," Cylanna replied steadily, "I will always be here for you."
"Cyla ... you remember why I'm saying this."
"Yes."
"I want you to know that ... I'm truly happy for you and Hrald. He loves you."
"Thank you, that means a lot to me. I realize it wasn't fun for you, and ... that it hasn't been fun these years. We are," she sighed, leaned back a little wearily, "a village of twenty-six. Traders don't even know we're here unless we start a bonfire," she laughed.
Raynu leaned back as well. "Yeah, I have been wondering what it's like out in the country, heh, I mean in different parts of the country. We are definitely country," she smiled.
"From what I hear, life could be a whole lot worse," Cylanna leaned back completely, rocked, stared up at the ceiling. "I mean, you've always had the wanderer's soul, but I, too, have thought about what it may have been like, you know, if it weren't Hrald. Would I have stayed? I don't know."
"It's just, hm. I'm Mer, Cyla. I'm the only one here, for starters. I've never seen another Bosmer before."
"I know. I've always wondered when you'd talk about this."
"Ma and da told me a long time ago that there are plenty in Skyrim. They told me that I should go out and meet them."
"You should," Cylanna replied. "I think it would really help, this way you are feeling."
"You know that's not it."
"Please don't. Not now," she said, shaking her head as she continued to rest it on the chair back. "We can't go back in time, Raynu."
"That's another thing. I look at you, and I see you when we were there, and I still feel like that, but there you sit with six children. The way you talk. It's taken me the last couple years to start understanding. I still don't understand."
"It's because I won't live to be two hundred years old. Or three hundred. Ray," she sat up, "thirty is a lot different for a Nord woman. I've given birth six times. Hrald is thirty-seven and has killed. We have seen almost half of a normal life already, maybe more. A lot of people around here don't ever even get as far as we are now."
"Don't say that!"
"It's true. With any luck we'll have twice again as much time to live, or more, but here we can't think so much about things. I mean that with all my heart."
Raynu's eyes teared, one of the few times they ever had. She turned her head and wiped at her face. "I still feel like that day. It's like time hasn't moved for me at all," she sobbed, felt Cylanna's hands press her head against the front of her dress. Raynu cried and hugged at her waist.
She turned one last time a ways off in the wild grasses beyond the wheat fields. Her adoptive parents were still visible, waving. She waved, and turned back to head south. It would be the last time she saw any of them.
4E 146 Last Seed 01 Fredas at lunch Imperial City
Raynu's journal
Had an interesting experience this morning. Was out in the farmers' market up near the smithies. On my way to get greens, took that alley near the laundries. Was talking with a tanner at the corner when some guy tries to cut my purse, felt it right as he was through it. Tanner yelled too. I ran after him and got him real good on the arm. Ha, took *his* purse. Made ten in gold for it. He ran away and I let it go. Tanner told me he'd help if I wanted to look around, I said no. Just wanted to get fitted. He said the ten plus another 40 would get me a field set if I helped with the scraping, so I went ahead and did it. Going back tomorrow for more. Anyway, found something with the septims that filcher had on him. Gonna ask A about it.
Atia had closed the tavern at midday as usual so she could clean after the previous night's tenants and make food to serve in the evening. Raynu came in through the delivery door out back with her key, walked upstairs to the main room and set the sack of onions and sheaves of fresh parsley on the work table next to the stoves.
"Wonderful! Get a chance to talk with that Mia about some flowers, hm," she poked.
"Spare me," Raynu scoffed, putting on her apron from a peg there next to the table, taking a knife and slicing an onion, "she's all thrown about some oxbrain in the scribner's guild." She stopped to pick up the parsley and cradle it in her arm like a florist, holding her hair up with the other hand and sticking her chest out. "'Oh, Piso, say that again," she affected two octaves high and swooned her neck.
The Redguard grinned and pushed a cutting board of carrots into one of the stew pots. They worked steadily at slicing vegetables and then mutton and beef cubes for the stews, and then skewered a lamb roast on the spit and rubbed it with spices before starting the slow cook. Raynu washed tankards and plates in the bin of water while Atia wiped tables and mopped the floor.
Later, they sat for a glass of Bruman white and talked at one of the tables before opening for the evening.
"Mistress," Raynu said, "I didn't tell you but I almost got robbed this morning."
"What? Were you hurt," her benefactress asked with a furrowed brow.
"No, but he was," she beamed, "introduced him to Venta." That was what she had been calling an Altmer knife she had acquired, as long as an issue gladius with a finer, harder edge and much faster at the draw.
"Well good, filia." Atia had gradually taken on much of her identity from selected Imperial speech and general living over the years since she emigrated from Hammerfell. Raynu did not mention it, and had felt these past few years since coming to work and stay at the inn that their both being foreigners gave them a common language in itself, among the many expatriates residing in the center of the Cyrodiilic empire.
"There was this, though," Raynu pushed the mysterious coin in front of the older woman. At this, Atia pushed back from the table and said something very quickly in a tongue the Bosmer did not recognize, but by the force she gave it was not pleased with what she saw.
"He had thisss?!"
"Yyyeahh ... in with his cash." The coin was about twice the size and thickness of an Imperial gold septim, the standard unit of currency against which much of the Tamrielic continental economy was measured. It was struck from steel or something like it, had the same design on both sides, too, a skull missing the lower jaw in its center with a skeleton leaned up against its left edge. "Where's this from, anyhow?"
"It's from nowhere, it's from death! You need to get that out of here now!"
"Mistress ... what are you talking about?"
Atia had gotten up and taken off her apron, walking quickly upstairs. Before Raynu could follow her, she threw herself down the steps and landed on her feet.
"Take this," she pressed a silver pendant in her hand, old by the dings and dark creases and inlaid with a central piece of amber, "Put this on when you wish to walk briefly unnoticed, and get your things. Now!" Raynu flushed, backed slowly away from her and walked down to her room in the cellar. Returning with her single haversack and cloak, she set the entirety of her possessions down on the table and sat again in the chair next to Atia. Her employer and friend of eight years was staring with a quivering lip at the coin. When Raynu sat back down, she pushed it in front of her.
"Ati ... a? Tell me what to do."
"That," the Redguard told her, "is a Sithis mark."
"What's that?"
"It's an assassin's coin, a killing contract."
"What?!"
"Yes, daughter. Your attacker was hired to do someone in, and not you. If it had been you, he wouldn't have bothered with your purse." She looked somberly at Raynu. "They sell those ... things, the ... main organization. The ones who sit in the shadows everywhere, pouring blood on their dead god ... Sithis." She barely whispered the last word. "This is what they let loose in the arcade ends, places people go to get things done cheaply where you have to know what and who to ask, see? If you know someone sells these, then you can buy a death for a price. You buy a death, and it sits there until some scum asks for the contract, not long here. The buyer of the mark," Atia continued with eyes a little glazed, "pays the dealer for a death, gives specifics I would guess, information for the kill. Addresses, descriptions, names, affiliations. The contract sits there until it's picked up by a thug."
"Dibella love," Raynu gasped out.
"He, or she, takes the coin with the information, and then brings it back to the dealer with some trophy as proof it has been done, and from there receives payment minus the middle. News gets to the buyer, and the coin sits with the dealer for a new mark. See, both the dealer and the buyer are wondering now, and then there's the organization behind these doings out there in the market. You've broken the chain, child, this is a death bought and paid for. Someone will be looking for their lost contract so it can be fulfilled."
"The thief?"
"No. The buyer. That one in the street is gone already. The party who bought that kill will sooner or later know it's missing."
"But ... Mistress. This city. How would anyone know where to find it?!
"Anything of Sithis calls out to Sithis. It's not about being seen and heard in the street. That coin will call it on you, and here."
"Who?"
Atia drew in a breath. "The Dark Brotherhood. The group whose name you must never utter. You have to go. I'm sorry."
