Chapter 6: Autumn Leavings
By Frostfall, my life had fallen into a peaceful routine. Rain or shine, I was on the docks to fish and run messages. Since midsummer, I had even convinced the Argonians to start letting me help out with loading and unloading ships for a few coins. It wasn't glamorous or even steady work but it supplemented my fishing enough to let me occasionally eat fresh vegetables along with my fish. I wasn't worried about going broke suddenly and starving anymore. I was even shocked to find that my small pile of septims was growing rather than shrinking.
Waiting for Torbjorn Shatter-Shield to come back to Windhelm had replaced my previous ambition of waiting for the Dark Brotherhood to come and fix my life. Some nights I found myself wondering about how passive I had become, but the truth was that I had only been proactive about leaving the orphanage because my life had been on the line. Months of solitude and waiting had taken away that drive, replaced it with caution and passivity. Now, I was just counting out the days until the next thing came along.
The thing that came along was nothing I could have expected.
One afternoon in early Frostfall I was on my way home from the docks, whistling a bright tune and feeling the jingle of coins in my pocket, when I came around a corner and came face to face with a big group of Nord kids. I knew them all, though I hadn't seen most of them since I had come back to Windhelm. There were maybe seven of them all told, ranging from a year or two younger than me all the way up to a few years older. The oldest and biggest of them was Haakig, who was maybe fourteen but nearly as tall as a grown man.
"Hey, Aretino," Haakig said conversationally as I took a step backward and gaped. We had never been friends—Haakig used to make fun of me when I was younger—but some of his crew was kids I knew, that I had played with only a couple of years ago. I saw Lasskar and Vigurl Deep-Water, twin brothers with blonde hair and impish face; the three of us used to play tag in the streets around the Stone Quarter. Behind them was Haakig's long-time toady Saeda, a reedy and pimple-faced youth with all of Haakig's height and none of his width. The rest I didn't know by name, but they were all Nords—and unless I missed my guess, all of their fathers were off with the Stormcloaks.
"Haakig," I said, keeping my tone as neutral as possible.
"You haven't been around much," he continued, peaceably enough. "Heard you got shipped off to Honorhall by the steward. Guess you got back into town."
"Guess I did." Were they going to report me?
"Funny thing is, we had to hear that from Grimvar." I wondered if they had been hanging out together, or if Grimvar said something after they beat him up. I really didn't know where this was going. "I didn't believe him at first. I mean, surely Aventus Aretino would have come to see some of his old friends if he were really in Windhelm."
"If I knew I meant so much to you, Haakig," I said, beginning to weary of the verbal jousting, "I would have come to see you right away." His face tightened as the Deep-Water brothers snickered behind him, but he quickly composed himself.
"I heard the reason you didn't come see any of your old friends was that you been busy. Heard you been down on the docks, helping the scale-skins steal our daddies' jobs." So it was going to be that kind of conversation then. I wasn't really surprised, except maybe that it had taken them so long.
"If you father wants a job that badly," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on his, "I'm sure they're hiring. There's never enough bodies to get everything done…" He stepped in and grabbed me by the shirt collar before I could finish. His face had gone from pretend-friendly to genuine rage faster than I could follow.
"My father is off in the Reach," he snarled, "fighting the good fight. And while he's away, those green bastards are taking his job!" I goggled for a moment, more confused than hurt despite the knuckles digging into my collarbone. Did he expect the work to stop while his father was away? Or did he expect the Argonians to not do the only thing they were allowed to do to make a living? Haakig dragged me a few paces and slammed my back into the rough stone wall of the alley. He leaned in close enough that I could smell his mead-stained breath when he spoke.
"My momma can't afford to feed my baby brother and me on her washing up for the Shatter-Shields," he growled at me. "I figure you're stealing my daddy's job, you can help pay for our meals. Hand over what you got, or else."
Haakig's attempt to be frightening was almost laughable. I had been alone on the road with bandits, bears, and dragons for months, survived sickness and loneliness, and stolen my mother's bones for a dark rite. After the beatings I had received at the hands of Grelod the Kind, anything physical this petulant teenager could do to me would seem like a warm embrace. Still, I had to take a moment to think about it. Not because of fear—but because of pragmatism.
My survival in Windhelm had been based around one simple principle: invisibility. Not literally, like I had heard mages could do, but the subtle art of being beneath notice. Adults ignored children who didn't make a fuss, and children ignored other children who weren't part of their social group. By not playing with other kids, I had made myself invisible to them. By not needing adults, I had become invisible to them as well. I had managed to gain the attention of an adult without raising a fuss, which turned out to be a good thing for me—but now I had managed to gain Haakig's attention from the same thing, which was less so.
The only money I had on me was my day's pay, a few measly septims. When I started getting paid, a kindly Argonian woman named Shahvee had advised me to never keep more on me than I needed. That same advice had come from my assassin a few months earlier, so I was already in the habit of hiding my money under the floorboards in my house. So submitting to their demands wouldn't cost me more than a half-dozen coins… and the knowledge that they could do it again. If giving them everything I had now would buy them off permanently it's a price I would have paid gladly, but I wasn't naïve enough to believe they'd leave me alone in the future.
I also had to consider escalation; would paying them off now keep them from escalating up to violence in the future? Would it even keep them from beating me up after I gave them the money? More than likely, they would take my coins, claim that it "wasn't enough," and beat me anyway. I had seen how their kind worked before. I wasn't afraid of being hurt, really, only of losing days of work from injuries.
More than any of that, though, more than logic or reason or pragmatism, something in me stirred. I remembered standing by and doing nothing when Suvaris was being bullied by the Nord men. A fiery feeling built up in my gut at the idea of letting these self-entitled bastards run roughshod over me just because of my blood. And I had earned those septims, Divines damn their eyes! I would rather be beaten than give up something I had earned with my own hands.
I didn't know where my sudden ferocity had come from but some of it must have leaked through into my eyes, because Haakig suddenly let go of my collar and took a step back. He rallied quickly and straightened himself up. I sketched out my next few moves in my head as fast as I could manage. If I did any of it wrong, I would wind up getting beaten to a pulp.
"Well, you dirty Imperial?" he spat the word like a curse. "What about it?"
"Haakig," I said mildly, drawing myself up to my full height, "if you want septims so bad, why don't you go down to the dock to get a job yourself? I'm sure they could use your fat head for an anchor."
Haakig screamed wordlessly and his fist came tearing through the air toward my face. The others all leaned in slightly to watch me get my teeth knocked in. At the last second, right before his knuckles connected with my nose, I let my knees unlock and dropped below his swing. Haakig's vicious war-cry turned into a bloodcurdling scream of pain as he shattered his hand on the stone wall behind me, but I didn't give him a second to recover. From my crouched stance, I leaned forward on the balls of my feet and stood up again as fast as I could. Haakig's swing had put his face forward of his chest, so the crown of my head went straight up into his chin. My skull crushed his teeth together hard enough that I heard something break and I saw stars myself.
That was the moment I learned that head-butts don't help anyone in a fight.
My head ached like someone had dropped an iron kettle on it, but I couldn't afford to take the time to let the hurting stop. While the others were still goggling over what had happened, I put both of my hands on Haakig's chest and pushed him into the Deep-Water brothers. They all went sprawling down together, and my first step away from the wall was right onto Haakig's stomach. His breath whooshed out between his cracked and bloody teeth as I used him as a springboard to launch myself onto the nearby stairs. The rest of his gang was still staring at him instead of me by the time I rounded the corner and started ascending to Windhelm proper.
I was about halfway up the stairs when I heard Haakig's gurgling cry of "Get him!" and the sound of feet pounding on stone after me. That cold, angry place inside me seethed that I should have taken the extra second to kick him in the face while he was down, and then I was too busy running for my life to worry about should-have-done. I didn't glance back as I ran, but the huffing and puffing growing closer proved to me that Haakig's voice still had enough authority to get at least some of them to chase me.
My house was only a few streets down once I mounted the top of the stairs, but I didn't run for it. The time it would take me to get my door unlocked and open would be the time they needed to catch me. Instead, I took a left and tore across the Stone Quarter at full speed. I dodged among merchants, visitors, and horse-drawn wagons on their way to market. The bigger boys had a harder time moving through the traffic, and I heard them get cursed at by passersby more than once.
About halfway across the Stone Quarter was a stone platform on which stood an iron brazier that was kept full of burning coals at all hours of the day and night. A rag-clad homeless woman was warming her hands over the embers, her tired and lined face showing a lifetime full of sorrows. I skidded on the cobblestones, took a sharp turn around the platform, and virtually threw myself to the ground on the other side of it. With any luck, the big oafs would go thundering right past me, then I would be able to double back and get to my house without any trouble.
No such luck. I heard the thudding footsteps stop right on the other side of the platform, close enough that if one of them took three paces forward they would see me. I heard Haakig's wounded, wet voice drift down across the crackling of burning coals.
"You see a li'l runt come froo 'ere?" Did you see some little runt come through here? he was trying to say through a mouthful of broken teeth.
"Spare a coin for an old woman?" the beggar replied. I heard a sharp sound of flesh on flesh, and I could almost mentally see Haakig slapping the woman's hand away.
"You see 'im or not, you ol' crone?" he demanded.
"He went that way," she said in a plaintive tone, though I couldn't see which way she pointed. "Just a moment ago."
"Come on!" Haakig shouted at his cronies. I tensed for a fight. When I heard them running the other way, I was surprised. I didn't relax, but I carefully leaned out from my hiding place to see their backs vanishing down a side street.
"They're gone now," the old woman croaked. "They were rude. I didn't like them."
"My thanks, old mother," I said as politely as I could manage. I rummaged through my pockets until I found my septims and pressed two of them into her rag-covered hands. Her old face lit up like I had dropped a fortune into her lap.
"Divines bless your kind heart!" she cried as I took off toward home as quickly as I could manage. It felt different to give money to someone who needed it than to have it taken from you by force, I mused as I ran. I thought about the Dark Brotherhood, how they wouldn't put up with this kind of treatment. I enjoyed a brief fantasy of coming in through Haakig's window one night with a knife and threatening him until he wept for his mother. But I was no assassin, no dark-clad avenger. I didn't want to kill anyone… Did I?
Somewhere deep inside me, a boiling rage was building. I had managed to escape them this time, but what about next time? I hated that I had gotten away only to have to worry about a "next time." Death was a final solution. If you killed someone, they would never come back to hurt you again. Murder solved problems. The fact that I had summoned an assassin to kill Grelod proved that there were other people who believed the same as me.
Still, Grelod had been a monster. Haakig was just a bully—a boy not much older than me. She had been hurting people a long time and wouldn't stop until someone stopped her. He was still young enough to change. Haakig might decide that getting hurt wasn't worth his time. That I was beneath his notice.
Yeah, and horkers might fly.
As I ducked and weaved through alleys on the way back to my house, I nearly ran right out into the courtyard that separated my home from the Gray Quarter. Fortunately, I caught myself up short at the end of the alley and took a moment to look around. My instincts proved to be right as I saw one of Haakig's cronies, a boy about my age with a harelip, crouched down behind a rain barrel, trying to look nonchalant as he watched my front door. Haakig was more cunning than I thought.
I thought briefly about just jumping the watcher, but my "success" against Haakig had been based entirely on surprise and it had still left me with a rapidly growing knot on my skull. I wasn't yet self-assured enough to think I could anyone in a fair fight. Instead, I quickly searched the alley and found a loose cobblestone. I waited for the watcher to be looking right at the door, then chucked the rock as hard as I could into another alley. Then I ducked behind a trash bin and peered out between the wooden slats.
Sure enough, the clatter of the stone and shriek of an alley cat drew the boy's attention. He rushed toward the source of the noise, and I darted across the courtyard to my door, fishing my key out of my pocket as I ran. I spared a glance at the boy as the door opened—he was still searching the alley for signs of me—and rushed inside. Rather than slam the door behind me, I closed it as quietly as I could manage, then locked it again from the inside. I darted up the stairs to the small room above them and looked out the window cautiously. Sure enough, my quick thinking had paid off, and the sentry was apparently unaware that I had made it past him. He returned to his "hiding" spot and continued to watch the door.
I didn't light a fire even though it was cold. Instead, I hooded a lantern, covered myself in blankets, and ate a meal of cold bread and cheese while re-reading A Kiss, Sweet Mother. Give it enough time, I figured, and they would give up. I would be a little more cautious while I was out—only travel while there were adults in sight, move with groups, keep my head down. In only a few months at most, I would be leaving Windhelm anyway—and maybe as soon as the end of the month.
As I slowly lulled myself to sleep with the Night Mother's prayer of vengeance, I was content. I had dodged the worst they could throw at me, and in a few days at most, they would forget all about me.
By the end of the week, I was beginning to realize that I didn't really understand people at all.
The morning after my little escape, I got up well rested and barely aching at all from using my head as a weapon. I ate a small breakfast of cold bread and cheese, then grabbed my fishing line and got dressed for the day. I walked down the stairs, opened the door, and found myself shocked into total paralysis when I saw Haakig's gang—minus their leader—milling about on the far side of the plaza. One of them looked right at me as I stood there, and only the sight of the Deep-Water brothers hoofing it toward me at top speed broke my paralysis. I slammed the door as hard as I could and threw the locks just in time for Lasskar (or maybe Vigurl) to thud into the other side.
I leaned my back into the door and braced my feet against the floor—as though there was any chance at all that I could hold the door against them if they managed to break it down. Fortunately, they didn't even try. After kicking it a couple of times, I heard one of them say, "Hey, Aretino."
"What do you want?" I asked, as though the answer weren't "to kick your face in."
"Me and Lasskar," Vigurl said, "we don't want nothing. But you hurt Haakig pretty bad, and he wants your hide."
"Not my fault he started a fight he couldn't win," I said before I could catch myself. To my surprise, they both laughed out loud.
"True enough, little man," Lasskar added. "You knocked his teeth out, right and proper. Problem is, Haakig's our friend. And friends stick up for each other."
"Six on one?" I asked, my back starting to go chilly from leaning on the door. "Real fair of you."
"Fair ain't got nothing to do with it," one of them said. I could no longer keep track of who was speaking at what time. Even with my eyes on them, I could only ever tell Lasskar and Vigurl apart by the thin scar Lasskar had over his left eye. "Someone hurts one of your crew, you hurt him back. Haakig lost face-"
"Ha!" the other one interrupted. "Lost face! Because you knocked his teeth in!"
"Shut up," the first one said mildly. "You cost Haakig respect, and it's up to us to beat it out of you. You don't let that sort of thing slide when you're with a crew."
"Well, then," I responded with more bravado than I felt, "I suppose it's a good thing you're out there and I'm in here. Not like you can break the door in without the guards getting involved, even nowadays."
"Stay in there as long as you want, little man," Lasskar (or Vigurl) said with low menace. "You have a house, but we got all the time in the world."
With that, I heard their footsteps retreat. I thought it might be a trick at first but after ten minutes of standing stock-still, waiting for the faintest trace of noise, I decided that they had really left the door. I climbed up to the loft above the door and risked a look out the window. The group of them were back to hanging out across the plaza, casually standing around or sitting on crates and barrels. Saeda was eating an apple when he noticed me watching them, then cocked back his arm and threw what was left of it hard enough to bounce off the glass and rattle the pane. I jerked away from the impact in surprise, and I could hear all them burst out laughing.
Fine then, I fumed to myself. I knew how to be patient. I had locked myself away for months while I was waiting for the Dark Brotherhood to contact me—alone in a house with a corpse and a book, starving and half-mad. Now, I had money, I had food, I had peace of mind. It would be easy to wait them out.
By the end of a week, I was starting to remember what it was like to feel desperate. I had been out of the house a handful of times, but always at night. During the day, whenever I would have been working or fishing or shopping for food, I would look out the window and see them waiting for me. It wasn't always all of them; more often than not, it was just one or two. Still, I didn't fancy my odds when it came to a straight fight against bigger and older kids.
Once or twice, I was almost tricked into coming out while they were waiting for me. I would look outside and not see them, but right before opening the door I would get a nagging sensation of danger. Instead of ignoring it, I went back upstairs and waited; inevitably, within a few minutes, I would see one of them hiding in a crowd, or casually leaning on a wall just out of my normal field of view. Then I would go back to sitting on my bed and reading the only book I owned.
After the second time that happened, I waited until nightfall to try and slip outside. Fortunately, there was a curfew in effect because the jarl was worried about crime for some reason. I had heard rumors about a girl getting killed, but I didn't know much more about it than that. If I got caught after hours, I would probably go back to Honorhall; if one of them got caught, their mothers would hear about it, which wouldn't do well for any of them. If I hadn't been able to slip out to the docks at night to go fishing, I probably would have run out of food much sooner.
The night was more my friend than theirs, but it still kept me from replenishing my fresh foods or spending any of the money I had. And every minute I was out of the house, I was worried that one of them had been waiting and gone off to get the others—that they were creeping up on me, just out of sight… I spent more time looking over my shoulder than watching my line during the few hours I was able to get out of the house and go fishing.
For a few days, I considered going to the Argonian assemblage at night and asking them for help. I had gotten along well enough with the Argonians that I worked alongside down on the docks, and at least one of them had apparently recommended me to Torbjorn Shatter-Shield, but ultimately I decided against it. While they might be able to help me, I didn't want to risk Haakig's gang harassing them too. Well, no more than they probably already were. No, bringing them in wouldn't help me in the long run, and might well hurt them.
I was also very worried that I might miss my meeting with Torbjorn Shatter-Shield. What if he came into port and saw that I wasn't on the docks? Would he decide that I had become lazy and decide not to take me? Worse, would he come looking for me and find out that I had lied about who I was? I tried not to let it bother me, but my whole future seemed thrown back into disarray because of one moment of forgetting to be invisible.
During the days I was cooped up, I thought a lot about the choices that had brought me to the state I was in. Finally, after a whole week of being trapped in my own home, I came to an epiphany. Haakig was back with his friends for the first time since I had hurt him. Looking out the window, I watched the seven of them standing together, laughing and sharing food, and for just a moment I envied them.
Haakig was missing teeth, showing their still-bloody gaps when he laughed, and I felt a terrible hatred building up in me—not because he had tried to hurt me, but because he was surrounded by people who cared. I had spent the last year convincing myself that I was okay alone, that I even liked being alone. Watching them now, I realized that while the first part of that might be true—I had gotten pretty good at taking care of myself, after all—the second part was definitely a lie.
The truth I had spent so long ignoring was that I was terribly lonely. Now, I couldn't pretend anymore. Seeing how well the seven of them worked together, even if it was at something as petty and awful as bullying, it made me miss the other kids back at Honorhall. Knowing they had mothers to go home to at night made me miss mine. They could play games, and watch each other's backs, and fight together—the way I imagined the Dark Brotherhood would be.
They were friends.
They were a family.
And I had nothing but an empty house and a few septims and a half-promise from a man I didn't know.
That was when I started crying. I wept for myself now, for how little I had and how much I envied the things that Haakig and his friends took for granted every day. By the time I was done crying, I had made my decision. Come the morning, I would go to the city guards and turn myself in. I would say that I was sorry for running away and ask to be sent back to Honorhall. I had my vengeance; now it was time to do my civic duty and go back to the orphanage. I would leave a note for Lord Shatter-Shield admitting the truth. If I was very lucky, he might even forgive me and agree to take me on once I was old enough to sign for myself.
It would be nice to see Runa and Samuel and Hroar. I wondered if any of them had been adopted while I was away. If so, good for them; I would make new friends with the new kids. With Constance in charge of the orphanage, there was even a chance I would be adopted. It wouldn't be like having my mother back, but it would be nice to have someone else take care of me for a while…
And I drifted off to sleep.
That night, well after midnight, I came awake convinced that someone was in the room with me. The fire had long since gone out, so it was fairly chilly and dark. I held perfectly still and controlled my breathing, letting my eyes adjust to the near-blackness. Had Haakig gotten the lock open somehow? A floorboard creaked. Someone was definitely in the room with me.
Then that someone stubbed her toe on the edge of my bed and cursed out loud. I sat upright in my bed; there were no girls in Haakig's gang. Tentatively, I called out.
"H- hello?" I said. "Is someone there?"
"Sorry about that," said a familiar woman's voice. "I didn't mean to wake you. Well, I was going to wake you, but I didn't want it to be-" She paused. "Never mind. Turn your eyes away. I'm going to get some light in here." I did as I was told, and when I had adjusted to the new light from the lantern, I was ecstatic to see its bearer. Sitting in a chair next to my bed, gingerly rubbing her right foot where she had stubbed her toes, was my assassin.
"You came back to check on me!" I exclaimed. It wasn't really a question. She promised that she would check up on me, so I knew she would do it. I had always known in my heart that she would come back to see me again someday, but I hadn't thought it would be so soon.
"Well, I came back for more than that, if you agree." She looked at me intensely with her bright blue eyes, long dark hair falling across her shoulders in an unselfconscious way. The lantern light made her seem somehow severe, more than she had ever seemed while we were discussing the death of a human being.
"Aventus…" she said, and the room's windows rattled briefly. I looked at them, wondering if an autumn storm was rolling in. She paused again, sighing deeply; she seemed like she wanted to say something but didn't quite know how. She continued finally, quieter now—quiet enough that when she got the words out, I wasn't sure I had heard her correctly. I asked her to repeat herself and leaned closer.
"I said, 'Do you want to come with me and be an assassin?' It would be a tough life, Aventus, and-"
"Yes," I said as quickly as I could, once I was sure what she was asking.
"Don't you even want to know-"
"No," I interrupted again. "You're a family, right? And you kill bad people?"
"It's not that simple," she said, frowning slightly. "There are rules, training…" She shook all of that off and fixed me with a stern gaze. "But all of that is secondary. There's really only one thing you have to do, Aventus. If you want to join the Dark Brotherhood, there can't be any negotiation about it."
"Am I going to be an assassin?"
"Yes," she said somberly. "You just have to prove you can kill someone for me."
"And then I'll have a new family?" I asked. She nodded again. I looked her in the eyes and said the words that changed my life. "I want to be a Dark Brotherhood assassin. I want to help people like you helped me."
Her face scrunched up for a moment, like she had been hoping I would say no. Or maybe she had just been expecting me to say no. The truth was that from the moment she had asked the question, there was no choice at all for me. I had dreamed of it for months on end. There was nothing in the world that I wanted more than the two things she offered me: a family, and the chance to bring other people the same justice that I had sent to Grelod. She stood up and held her hand out to me. Without a moment's hesitation, I reached out and took it.
Murder could solve so many problems, after all.
…to be continued…