Tasha sat back down at the table. Sonnjifa, the innkeeper, walked cautiously over. Her husband, the farmer, and the bartender had muttered their farewells and left quickly.
"I don't care what this is, and I don't want to know, but you two ... is this going to be trouble?" She did look afraid of the two seated, yet continued in a clear declaration. "Because we have full authority to hang here, in this village, got it? I have to wake up the watch for this?"
Azuyia stepped forward. "Ma'am, no. They," she indicated, "will take it elsewhere."
"Good. And you will be leaving at daybreak. Tab and room," she pointed at the bar. Before Azuyia started to follow her, Tasha tossed a purse at her and nodded.
Aethelweard had a horse in the Moraineton stables, rode at their pace. He had the Imperial bow and a full quiver of arrows on his back and a scramasax at his waist. Besides the saddle bags to his left and a compact hunting tent tied in a bearskin blanket behind his saddle, he had a stiff roll of canvas that ran from the horse's neck down to its leg on the other.
Azuyia was in a rotten mood from staying up all night in the public room, barely getting a wink leaned against the wall while Tasha and Aethelweard whispered. Sonnjifa had actually left them to theirselves and gone upstairs for the night, and they had returned just as the crack under the tavern door lit up slightly blue. Denthryd and Wystan, yes, had been allowed to slumber, and were in fine, bouncy form going back and forth about nothing (while wondering who this old guy on horseback was, accompanying them). They had gotten a brief note about it from Azuyia when she shook them awake, starting with their departure without an inn breakfast. When they had emerged out into the Moraineton street, a dozen solid-looking men and women in work tunics stood there with some form of steel strapped to their waist or back. Sonnjifa and Jarn also wore sashes of faded crimson.
"I will ride with you," Aethelweard once they had walked up the hills on the opposite end of the town, heading due north, "until we find you another place to stay. Might I say you're a little foolhardy to set out in such, ha, numbers weighted down with a dinner table on your back." He's got to be high born, they thought in their turns, that's a courtier's way of saying things, face held high, speaking without moving his eyes from the horizon. "Did you really expect to defend yourselves against two or three sabre cats like thaaat?"
Wystan and Denthryd trucked on through the day passing a bottle of something back and forth, enjoying heck out themselves as they walked behind the other three, Tasha and Azuyia on either side of the Guard. It would have seemed like the verbal tussling they had made their habit these months, particularly on raw mornings at a dead fire, had meshed with the omnipresent survival impulse, so let's just be merry and have done with it, no? They carried on into crass jokes and dormitory language, Azuyia stopping the entire caravan at one point to blow her top about asinine behavior and Tasha's unconcealed snickering. Aethelweard's presence foreshortened the comedy.
"We camp here," he pronounced, getting down from his horse and filling a water bag to hold to its mouth.
They had set their team record that day on foot. Nobody wanted to admit to the Guard that they were tired. For Tasha, it was the master's pride. She had been on forced marches, of a kind, in her day. Forty miles, no problem, she pushed down through her aching shins. Azuyia hit a half gill of skooma at noon, no questions asked, although discreetly behind a raised water bottle so she wouldn't have to deal with annoying questions. Feeling alright, there? No, you idiot! Not on a couple hours' sleep in two days and over sixty miles. She had also made plans for the evening.
This is not going to be for nothing, she thought.
Wystan and Denthryd, so it would go, enjoyed the first half of the day's hike. They merrily relieved themselves as the group pressed on without them probably a score, even once or twice getting into a footrace with the extant four stone or so rations on their back. It would be in late afternoon that petitions of one sort or the other would issue to the other three. Hey guys, uh, why this much ground today and wouldn't it be a good to camp there with water came the simple logic first, the unsubtle "I'm tired" second. Tasha would smile smugly through her sore feet, Azuyia let the moon sugar take her head on a secondary trek into the possibilities of new magic for the rest of the day. They laid out their trail blankets and with sighs of relief set down the heavy provision packs. Aethelweard, having a horse to carry for him, pitched a one-man hunter's tent, and walked off.
"Where's he going?" Wystan exhaled, pulling his boots off, wincing.
"Who cares, let's start a fire. I'm starving!" Denthryd limped from his blanket
The spot their leader had chosen was a clear patch of rocky soil on top of a hillock where the grasses weren't growing in more than sparse, low sprigs with some goldenrod and other weeds.
"I do hope," Aethelweard said breaking apart a hard biscuit, sitting with them next to the fire, "that you've been keeping three watches through each night?"
"Yes. We have," Azuyia answered shortly. She hadn't touched any food, sat staring at the fire.
"Good," he replied, chewing. "A fire on a hilltop out in the steppe. Your scent out for a couple miles. Get the picture?"
"We're not," Tasha began to say out of the corner of her mouth not puffing at the long mammoth ivory pipe, then staying silent. Denthryd and Wystan had exhanged a glance or two as they sopped the camp stew with biscuits and ate like dogs, gulped water before the taskmaster's reminder about trail sickness caused by overconsumption. Azuyia wasn't eating or drinking a thing.
"Hey," Tasha leaned over and snapped a finger in front of the Bosmer's face, "yoohoo. Zuyi?"
Azuyia got up slowly when the quick supper was ending and went to her pack, opening it to reach around inside. She walked back into the firelight carrying a shiny piece of metal in her right hand. "Okay, guard," she said with a clear, firm voice, "we're gonna talk." At this she placed the gold circlet inlaid with rubies onto her forehead and opened he eyes wide, staring at Aethelweard there on her feet. The other three noticed the change in him very quickly. His eyes went wide, too, locked on her. The two of them remained silent and motionless.
Tasha bolted up, the pipe dropping from her mouth on the ground. Wystan and Denthryd, full and almost falling asleep, perked up and watched lying on their sides. Tasha said nothing but paced slowly around their circle, all the way around, looking right at Azuyia and Aethelweard. She made a couple of circuits before stopping and taking a step backwards, standing oddly with her hands on the tops of her thighs and chin down toward her chest, mouth tensed. She, too, remained silent. The two reclining Nords had no idea what was going on, exactly, but it smelled like magicka. They did not move, either, just laid on their sides, watched, and waited. After a few minutes, the Guard exhaled sharply and sprang up. He shook his head. Azuyia calmly let her arms dangle by her sides.
"Yhhouu!" he hissed at her.
Azuyia smiled grimly at him.
"Stendarr!" he yelled, drawing his sax in his left hand, his outstretched right instantly radiating a shimmering translucent oval as tall and wide as he was.
Denthryd and Wystan remained frozen.
"Do you realize where we were? Do you," he yelled at Azuyia.
"In my spell, guard, where you told me about your post and that tomb."
"That tomb does not matter! It," he, having since dissipated the ward and sheathed the sax (which Tasha had noted was forged from solid silver), said to her and sitting back by the dying fire at daybreak, "is important, but NOTHING like what you have done with that," he pointed at her forehead, sitting crosslegged. Nobody had slept that night, again for Tasha and Azuyia, the latter having openly sipped another spoonful of skooma in front of an astonished Wystan and a worried Denthryd.
"Azuyia," Denthryd spoke up, having only listened as she, Aethelweard, and occasionally Tasha had gone back and forth in argument for at least an hour, "what exactly is that?" He had only understood fragments of their cryptic debate which sounded like it was being edited in front of the other two novices on purpose.
"I got it at the ReachCon, Den," she said in a monotone, staring at him oddly and still wearing the circlet, "while you two were ogling hot blacksmiths."
"Oh man, illusion."
"Yes. Illusion."
Wystan tried, "Hey Zuyia, what's so special about now? Why did you use it? Okay, we're in this together, hm?"
She turned, and the look she gave him and the much increased visibility of her facial features when the sun rose scared him. Denthryd let out a gasp. Azuyia's delicate, lightly earthtoned face had ever so slightly changed, a hardening in her cheeks commonly thought of as "chiseled" in attractive men and women, only this was a cold set of new lines around her cheekbones, jaw, both sides of her forehead. He held her face into his chest and motioned the others away.
"Zuyia! What did you do?!"
He was overtaken and let her push herself away from him. She was weaving a little in her torso, and her drifted a little side to side. He held her by the shoulders and drew in breaths, fighting tears. She passed out in his arms. Denthryd cried openly and held her, listening to her mouth for her breath. Before the others inevitably would come, he tore a strip off the edge of his wool blanket and wrapped it around her head. Azuyia had not fallen, but after removing her circlet and putting it in his own pack as she lay there, the most obvious change to her physiognomy made Denthryd's heart race and his hands shake as he fumbled with supplies. Under the jeweled band, in the spot directly under its central round ruby, he would discover a third eye in the middle of her forehead, opening and closing as her other natural eyes did. His mind raced as he held her. What do I do ... what do I do?!
Tasha spoke across the smoking ember pit to Aethelweard. "Do we need to lash her to your horse?"
He replied emotionlessly, "We are not going anywhere. No physician will have anything for her. Anywhere. I doubt that any of you would have the magic, either, and I am not drawing any attention to this at all. Is that clear?"
He heard a protest from Wystan and a threat from Tasha in his rushing ears as he walked over to his horse and unfastened the thick canvas roll at its right side, and walked back to stand with feet at shoulder's width and right arm extended. In his right hand he held the upper limb of a bow taller than he was, oddly asymmetrical with the riser set further down and a short lower limb.
"You're right to ask the question, bard," he said straight ahead, Tasha being slightly behind him and to his left as he fixed his eyes on Azuyia and Denthryd there on the ground, "I was not, in fact, hiding in some ranger's blind off in the grass. It was a tree off the Hjall River." Neither of the two protesting their delay could breathe the next questions on their mind. He had hit a bullseye at Tasha's feet from more than a mile. "So we understand each other, no? You will stay here, all of you, and make camp. We will keep our eyes and ears open. You two," he pointed first at Wystan, then at Denthryd just as long regardless of the novice's desperate state of mind, "will stow the damn booze and cut tonight's firewood. And arm your damn selves."
Tasha managed to speak. "Tell me, colleague," she attempted, "if you could kill all of us at the run, and we are nothing more than interlopers on your post, why? Why are you staying? Why not walk away?"
Aethelweard turned his head, and then faced back as he had been. "Because of what I saw while she was acting like a Guard Senior ridden from that direction!" He pointed north. "Because now I'm in on her little game, and they know!" He spat to his right.
"Who?! What are you talking about?"
"Those in this world who know when toys like that get into the hands of stupid children." He pointed out over the plains north. "That headband she's got uses magicka more comprehensive, deeper, older than some cheap diplomat's tricks. And how'd she get it?! You know?" He turned to Tasha.
"Don't look at me," she answered, nodding to Wystan.
"You?! Novice? Been digging around in other graves?"
Wystan, to say the least, was despondent and miserable. He had brought them there. "I ... know where she got it. Don't know who sold it to her, how much, where it's from, nothing."
"Oh that's brilliant, young man," the Guard backhanded, as if they were attending court.
"I know. We should have waited."
"To say ... the ... least," Aethelweard thundered at him.
"Yes. We should not have been there. It was adepts. I had no idea she had been buying or trading." He looked down at Denthryd, who was still holding the sleeping Azuyia in his arms and pressing his face to the top of her head.
"You may not want to hear this," the Guard Senior spoke to the campground, "but death might be preferable to what she may have in store for her."
They silently went about their camp chores. Tasha stood beside the Paleman in the early afternoon. Denthryd had gone off on a round of gathering and foraging with Wystan at her urging for safety's sake and his sanity. He hadn't eaten anything or had any water. The Heartfire days were not as intense, and the nightly chill positively balmy next to the steppe winter, nevertheless they had better mind their bodies in this turn of events if they had a hope of finishing the trip to Solitude. Azuyia had been out the entire time. Denthryd laid her out gently on the ground next to the cold firepit and spread a blanket over her, rolling his blanket behind her head after wrapping it in a strip of wool he cut ragged from his blanket. It had taken two or three convincings by Wystan for him to quit standing over her and leave to make their rounds.
"Now that the kids are asleep or off ... "
"Watch what you say, sister," Aethelweard growled.
"Hey. We did what you asked. Left the tomb alone. I was the one who pulled them away from it, okay? I didn't make it all the way from an island off the Northpoint coast when I was thirteen without learning the craft a long time ago."
"Then you know, like a mage knows, that you do not know. That there is an unlimited magicka out there."
"Yes," she replied emphatically, "and what's your point?"
"That she has meddled in the fabric of space and time with that device. It's powered by much more than adept machination, and intended for something ... important. How? How did such an item wind up with a," he scoffed, "county mountebank?"
"I don't know, man. That's something only she can answer. But you're not telling me. What did you see, and who are they that you refer to?"
Aethelweard turned and faced her, their boots nearly touching. "Like ... I ... said. There are those in Skyrim who know when this level of magic is invoked."
"Thalmor?"
"Among others. They're only the most obvious, politically most influential party. And they are here on the ground."
"So who, then?!"
"Need to know, Tasha Razrtip. I can say this: the Rift Sentinels maintain contact with these other groups, not the Thalmor, to be sure, no. We hunt those Altmer bastards any time given the signal. And others. Ancient orders. That's all you need to know."
She nodded, pondering, took a step away, crossed her arms. "And you saw?"
"I saw ... Oblivion."
Tasha's interior strut vanished. Oh Akatosh, I had hoped against hope.
Denthryd and Wystan sat with the older man talking while the fire caught that evening. Tasha had moved her blanket next to Azuyia and sat most of the past hour. The Bosmer had stirred, sat up incoherently, tried to say something within the hour, but weakly sank back. Tasha had lifted her head to sip water before the other passed out again. The bard lay on her side with her arm around Azuyia, watching her.
"You're a ranger battalion, then," Wystan kept the conversation going between the staid Guard and Denthryd, who was drinking silently from a wineskin.
"That's one way of describing us," Aethelweard replied. "We work exclusively in reconnaissance and long watch deployments. No line engagements, and no attachment to main armies."
"Your unit, the Sentinels. You all, heh, okay sounds stupid, stand guard?"
"Precisely," the older man drew from a pipe made from some sort of seashell.
Wystan was acting morale meister this evening. When he and Denthryd had returned from a long hike gathering any dry wood they could find, he saw Tasha for once curiously relaxed, contemplative. Aethelweard alternated between field maintenance like tightening lashings or shaving the frayed end of a belt, and Azuyia slept. No campfire tales this evening, m'boy, he thought to himself. Man this big sky goes on forever.
"And you've done that all your life?"
Aethelweard's tanned face shifted in what may have been a patient, silent sigh. "I began my service when I was a boy of seven," he pulled from his pipe and motioned for Denthryd to pass the wine, taking a slug and handing it to Wystan.
"It was the year Riften burned. My father, a loyalist, had fought with the jarl's guard against the rebels and watched the great city destroyed. While I was growing up, the ... recon-struction," he said, spelling out the last word deliberately, "required anyone not killed or imprisoned for treason. Father was not a soldier. He was ... a banker. Lost all of his wealth to looting."
Aethelweard stopped and took a draw of smoke.
"We all had to work, children even. A legion of medium infantry, the Seventh Blues named after the palace itself, was sent from Solitude to secure the immediate hold."
"My parents ... fought for the Seventh," Denthryd spoke up for the first time, "auxiliaries out of Eastmarch, southeastern mountain corps. Cheydinhal."
Aethelweard nodded at him. "Father enlisted me in the support teams since there was nobody else to look after me. I cleaned, swept, carried, whatever a small child could do in support of an encampment of five thousand outside the city walls. I didn't see much of him after that what with the reconstruction. He had been given a civic appointment by the jarl in recognition of his part in the defense. Sealed letters with a quarter or a half would arrive every now and then at camp. Heh," he smiled, "I had one of my first septims forged into the pommel of my enlistment gladius. Those legionnaires became my aunts and uncles. Teachers, guides. Then trainers. I was born with eagle eyesight. One of them told me to come to the practice range one day when I was nine, handed me my first light hunting bow. Damn thing was as tall as I was. Taught me to draw the string. I could shoot a year later."
"Wow, man," Wystan said brightly, knowing how he sounded, and still playing out for the campfire's sake.
Aethelweard continued: "From then until I was seventeen I shot target at the Seventh camp. Did some hunting out in the hold. Talked to anyone from another unit passing through the Riften area for any reason. I paid my way into the Seventh as an archer on my seventeenth birthday. For thirty-three years I went with the Seventh from one end of the country to the other and most major points in between. Had stays in Solitude, too. Some years were spitpolish drills, others we lived in freezing tents securing farmlands. Thirty-three years of shooting game for dinner, bears and wolves, even some cats. And raider bands. All that was easy. Then the Great War came." He stopped and took draws off his pipe, motioned for the wine, drank a few deep draughts. "When those bastarts had had done with all their arrangements, the Imperials and the Thalmor, what was left of the Seventh in Cyrodiil ... hm, I was one of them. Some frip tribune gave me a sealed commendation writ with his majesty's purple wax, supposedly, and I was told I could retire after thirty-eight years with the full veteranus honors to sit there," he exhaled, "in some boarding house and collect my stipend. Right."
Denthryd spoke up, looking at the fire. "What brought you back to the Rift? I mean, what of your father?"
"He had been dead for many years. No, I didn't stay in Riften long. Their ... attempt at putting a noble house back on the pilings that used to hold the old city ... the fresh cedar and redwood, plaster that I had seen go up as a boy was rotting even then. But enough. I had been told of a special force that had been designed and funded by a dying thane out in the hold east of the city on the road to the abandoned Castle Dawnguard. Cynward remembered the crisis behind the eventual rebellion in the Rift, had been friends with my father in fact. My father was also a thane of the Rift, although just a titled businessman really. House Engrettr – Meadowlaw, Cyward's line – had maintained lands in the hold for many centuries since the early days of Talos, a noble Nord family who had seen ambassadors to and from Morrowind. He foresaw what a war like the one with the Thalmor would do to Skyrim's soul. And he was right!" Aethelweard growled through his clenched teeth. "Based on his own service in the jarl's personal guard and communications with generals and legates all over the country, he formulated the plan for a new type of unit. It would draw exclusively from blooded veterans personally selected by the Guards General, the head of my cohort, from suggestions coming from all over Skyrim and even some from other countries. High Rock, Hammerfell, Valenwood, even Argonians and Khajiit. All of us have seen campaigns, and we all initially report directly to the head of our regiment for six months of testing. And we all are, to the one, archers."
"Testing?" Wystan asked
"Testing. After we are accepted and inducted, we join a squad, the largest field units the Sentinels maintain. They usually number twenty-four. We carry out, as I say, long-range reconnaissance and guard posting, and may be out beyond contact for years. The order is to stand post until otherwise instructed."
"Oh."
"What about that bow man," Denthryd motioned to the weapon on the ground next to Aethelweard as long as a sleeping Nord.
"Yumi. It's Akaviri. You won't find one or anyone who can make one in all of Skyrim."
"Like the arrows?"
"Yes. Those of us who live long enough, and pass ... who are promoted for our service move into a team. Those are four only. Can't really say more about what we do there other than there are teams in every jarl's service. After that? Heh, "the firelight caught a slight smile, "perhaps on to a pair."
"A pair," Denthryd asked, fiddling with the skillet and setting out some of his pack's larder.
"Two of us. A team outside of the national schema and assigned to ... " he turned to Wystan with a smile, "the College of Winterhold." This impressed on the novice. Denthryd stopped what he was doing, stood up, and listened as well. "By that time we are ranked Guard, above House Guard and they above Field Guard, not that anyone even walking in the doors gives a toss about rank and file at that point. Not like the parade. Once in you could tell the Guards General outright that an operational plan is balls and you'd get your time to speak. Heh, you've earned your stripes. It ain't about stripes at this point, lad. I was fifty-six by that point, 'bout average. Remember one youngster from a line Imperial cohort, the Colovian Mountain One, who went straight from the Great War to the Rift at thirty-nine when elected. Anyway if you're in a Guard pair you probably remember at least as much of the previous decades as the current archmage if he or she is human. Our contact with the general is concluded, and we follow orders that Winterhold specifically assigns. Things ... like monuments they don't want disturbed."
"I see," Wystan nodded. "You had introduced yourself to us as Guard Senior, then?"
"That's right."
"What does your ... rank mean, sir," Denthryd asked, placing the skillet on the edge of the fire and stirring the mixture.
"It means I was the one who survived the last hellstorm of the two of us, and I'm too blasted old to work with a new partner," he laughed and spat to his side. "Winterhold gives you your final post, and there you live."
The sky was dark, and these novices were hungry and distracted, so Aethelweard didn't get an eyeball when he made the hand sign, discreetly, as he packed more herbs in his pipe for a distract-forget cast he had learned so long ago it was like timing an egg.
And I am the only one, lads, so guess what?
