Chapter 11: Springtime for Children

I was one with the darkness. I moved through the night, hunting my prey with the stealth and skill born of months of training with the Dark Brotherhood—an elite order of assassins with a history stretching back centuries. My mentors had taught me weapons, infiltration, and more in their effort to shape me into a living tool of the Dread Lord Sithis and his mouthpiece in the world of Mundus, the Night Mother. Our Unholy Matron received prayers of vengeance from the betrayed and the aggrieved, and through the auspices of the Listener we received her commandments.

My current mission had not come from so exalted a source, though it was from close at her left hand. No, this mission had come to me from the Keeper, a position considered second only to the Listener herself. The Keeper's holy task was to preserve the physical body of the Night Mother, an ancient and withered corpse that had originally been housed in one of the Brotherhood's sanctums in Cyrodiil, the cosmopolitan heart of the Empire. After the war with the Altmeri Dominion, however, Cyrodiil had begun to purge the Brotherhood's ranks, forcing the Keeper to evacuate the Night Mother's corporeal vessel from its original tomb to the northern reaches of Skyrim.

To be chosen as Keeper, an assassin had to show total devotion to the Dark Brotherhood and to the Night Mother. He had to be skilled at his profession, yet willing to retire his blade in order to spend all of his time seeing to the defense and consecration of the Night Mother's body. I understood the level of competence and skill and loyalty that was required of the position.

I just didn't really understand how all of those things applied to Cicero.

Since his recovery from pneumonia after New Life Day, Cicero had been a lot more bearable to be around. He was having more good days than bad, it seemed; he was less mad and more coherent. He had even been able to participate in the mage poker game the Brotherhood had put together to celebrate Hecate's thirty-third birthday. It was hard for me to believe that the Listener was so old—almost twenty years older than me!

Despite his improved behavior and demeanor, he was still something of a motley-clad lunatic. He talked to himself, he sang morbid songs he had written as a hobby, he told bad jokes… Actually, a lot of his jokes were pretty funny, especially the one about the woman who looked like a horker. That one always cracked me up, even if it made Nazir look like he was considering breaking the Fifth Tenet.

I just had a hard time reconciling the jester who wandered around Sanctuary in a half-aware daze with the lethal assassin I knew he could be. I had seen Cicero's speed and strength; he trained me almost daily in armed combat and unarmed defense. Along with Meena, the only non-human in the Brotherhood, he helped make me competent at the arts of stealth and infiltration. When I joined the Brotherhood, I could barely walk across a bare floor without making enough racket to wake the dead. By the time the weather started to warm in First Seed, I could slip a sweetroll from the kitchen without drawing Nazir's notice.

Sometimes, though… Sometimes I would find Cicero standing alone in a hallway, staring into space, his eyes rimmed with tears. Or arguing with people no one else could see. If I tried to talk to him when he was acting like that, it was even odds whether he would laugh it off as a funny joke or fly into a screaming rage and storm away. I had learned to fear Cicero, even as I grew to care about him as a surrogate father.

Not that I was supposed to think of him that way, of course. In the Dark Brotherhood, we were all supposed to be brothers and sisters before the Night Mother, with the Listener as eldest and most responsible sibling. I had never quite been able to get that right; more often than not, I thought of Hecate as my adoptive mother, and Meena and Nazir as my aunt and uncle. Babette was my sister, though I wasn't sure whether she was older or younger than me. I might have thought of Cicero as just another crazy uncle if it weren't for Hecate's relationship with him.

Between Cicero's relationship with the woman who had saved my soul—and probably my life—and his vaunted position as the Keeper, it was hard to say no when he asked for something. Also, I owed him a fairly large sum of money after borrowing against a future contract payment to buy Hecate a New Life Day present. Even more than all of that, I admired and respected the jester—as an assassin and a family member, if not as a sane member of the human race. I cared about Cicero, and even pitied him a little.

So when Cicero had started asking me to run errands for him, it hadn't been in my heart to say no to him—no matter how petty or bizarre those errands might have been… which is how I came to be running through the forests around Dawnstar in the middle of a cool spring night looking for an animal whose appearance I barely knew. Cicero had said that finding the creature was vital to my training and not to come back until morning if I couldn't find it. Nazir had been talking about a "new stage" to my training for a few weeks now, so in the hopes that this might be it, I gladly agreed.

That was the beginning of my hunt for the elusive beast called the snipe.

My training schedule had slacked off a bit since New Life Day, so I actually had more free time as well as energy. I had just started fishing again as well, but after dinner each night I made sure to set aside some time to play with Babette. I still felt bad about doubting her stories about life in the old Sanctuary at Falkreath, despite her obvious affection for Pavot, the ice wolf cub I had gotten her as a combination New Life Day and apology gift. So whenever I had time in the evenings and she wasn't too busy with her alchemy, we would find something to do together.

Most nights we played games that didn't involve too much running around. I had enough energy now that I didn't immediately collapse into bed after gulping down my food, but I was usually still sore and a little dragged out. If Babette had been more willing to switch to a normal schedule we could have done more active games, but she was insistent on maintaining her nighttime hours. Privately, I thought that it was a little childish to stay awake all night and sleep during the day just because she could when everyone else kept more-or-less normal hours, but after my mistake during New Life Day, I wasn't about to say anything about it.

Babette had taught me about a dozen card games that could be played with two people, and had been the person who explained the basics of mage poker to me so I could play with the others on Hecate's birthday. I had still gone out first, but I blamed that more on my small starting stake and Hecate's clever plan to cheat than on any poor instruction on Babette's part. We had also tried out chess, a board game that Babette seemed fond of. Unfortunately for both of us, I just didn't have a head for it; I kept forgetting what pieces could move in what way, and finally Babette had just gotten frustrated and switched back to simpler games.

Hecate's birthday party had marked a complete break in my training. Nazir was busy dealing with Brotherhood business, which mostly meant being cooped up in an office most of the time, and Hecate and Cicero had gone up to Solitude to celebrate Heart's Day, a holiday for couples in love. That left just Babette, Meena, and myself, and Meena rarely deigned to play with us "kittens." On the few occasions she had broken down and participated, she had proven to be a bad winner and a bad loser in equal measure; she also seemed happy to keep herself entertained outside of Sanctuary much of the time.

Babette was the opposite of Meena when it came to entertainment. Getting Babette to even consider leaving Sanctuary for anything but herb-gathering was almost impossible. Even during the week Hecate and Cicero were gone, she preferred cards to tag. I wondered occasionally if poor Pavot was getting enough exercise, laying at his mistress' feet all day long, which was where he was almost every time I saw him.

"Come on, Babette," I whined for what felt like the hundredth time. "Pavot's going to get fat if we don't take him for walks. And it's still light enough out that we won't get lost or anything!" Babette glared at me with red-rimmed eyes, her mouth downturned in a frown of long suffering patience.

"It's bad enough that you woke me up early," she complained groggily. "But go outside while it's still light out? Forget it."

"Why not?" I pressed. "It's a beautiful day out. Much warmer than last week." In fact, it was still a lot colder than I liked it outside, but getting Babette to leave Sanctuary more often had turned into something of a crusade for me in the days that Hecate and Cicero had been gone. I had finally begun to suspect that Babette wasn't like other girls my age—and not just because she was an alchemist and an assassin at the tender age of twelve or thirteen. Her behavior was as bizarre as Cicero's in its own way.

"I don't like the glare," she snapped. "The light hurts my eyes. Especially when I've been woken up early." At that, she stared at me pointedly. It was true that I had tried to wake Babette up earlier than usual, but I had been bored out of my mind without training to do or people to fish for. And I didn't feel right taking Pavot out without Babette's permission. Since I had to wake her up to get her permission anyway, I had figured it was better to try and get her to come out too than just take her dog and run.

I gave Babette my best puppy-dog look, but she wasn't having any of it. I sighed and propped my back against the wall of her bedroom.

"Don't pout," she chastised, finally sitting up in her bed. "It's unbecoming."

Babette clutched her blanket to her chest with one pale hand, her dark hair cascading down the back of her nightdress and pooling on her pillow. She rubbed the back of her other hand across her eyes and made a jaw-cracking yawn. Babette's teeth glinted in the light spilling in from the hallway, seeming unnaturally white and sharp in the glow of the lanterns. I blinked a couple of times but when I looked again, everything seemed normal. Just shadows playing tricks on me, I supposed.

"Look," she finally said, "go on outside with Pavot. I'll catch up with the two of you after I've gotten a little more sleep. I stayed up too long this morning working on potions and I just want some rest."

"Okay…" I replied, even though I knew she was lying. It wasn't like when I had assumed she was lying before either; I had gotten up right after dawn to grab an early breakfast, and Babette had been nowhere near her laboratory. Still, after the previous debacle, I couldn't justify calling her out on it. I could only believe that she had a good reason for not wanting me to know why she felt the need to sleep almost ten hours and claim to still be tired.

"Do you want me to lay out any food for you?" I asked before I gathered up the ice wolf cub. "Nazir isn't cooking tonight since Meena is out of Sanctuary, but he put aside some cold cuts for us. I ate most of what there was already, but I can get him to put out more for you. Really, I don't see why he put out so little to begin with…"

"No, thank you," she said primly, beginning to lay back down. "No need to bother Nazir on my account. I'll just get something quick out of the cold chest when I get up."

That was another thing about Babette that I found unusual. In the nearly four months I had lived with the Dark Brotherhood, I couldn't remember ever seeing her eat a meal. I knew she had to eat, of course; everyone had to eat. But between her odd hours and her unwillingness to let others put themselves out for her sake, I couldn't recall actually watching Babette take a meal even once. I had seen her carrying empty dishes out of her room, or scrounging around in the kitchen occasionally, but never actually eating.

It was almost like…

I tried to shake the thought out of my head as I took Pavot out through the Black Door and into the evening sunlight, but it wouldn't leave me alone. As we played, I hated myself a little for still thinking unsupported nonsense about my best friend. Hadn't almost getting killed by a frostbite spider after New Life Day taught me anything? I had promised that I would be less hard on Babette in the future, and here I was thinking of her as a liar again, in deed if not directly in word.

Because it almost seemed like carrying empty plates and rummaging around in a kitchen without getting any food were the actions of a person who didn't eat, but who wanted others to think she did.

My first errand for Cicero had been simple enough. About two weeks after he and Hecate returned from their trip to Solitude, I had been playing in the main room with Pavot and Babette, which mostly consisted of throwing things for Pavot to fetch while Babette and I played cards. I had been a bit worried after bringing the wolf cub into Sanctuary that he might mark his territory the way wolves and dogs usually did, but Babette had shown herself to be amazing at house-training the small animal quickly.

Honestly, my biggest worry had been the wolf cub marking the Night Mother's coffin. I could easily have seen some horror befalling the poor little beast for having an "accident" on the Keeper's territory. Fortunately for everyone, Pavot wouldn't even go within eyeshot of the Night Mother's coffin; he would just stop at the doorway and shiver before slinking away with his tail between his legs.

About an hour after dinner, in the middle of a hand of cards, the Keeper came wandering into the main hall, looking more distraught than I had ever seen him without weeping or screaming being involved.

"Excuse me," he said politely enough, "but could poor Cicero have a moment of the boy's time?"

"Can it wait until after this hand?" I asked. I was on the verge of beating Babette at a game, and that was rare enough that I wanted to savor it. Cicero cocked his head slightly, looking down at my hand.

"Oh, but you'll never win with that hand!" he exclaimed. "You'd have to be bluffing!"

Babette smiled viciously and I sighed, laying down my cards in defeat. I couldn't tell if he had done it on purpose or just didn't know any better. After his canny win during the mage poker game I was leaning toward the former, but I really just couldn't tell with him.

"It seems the game is over!" he said gleefully, clapping his hands together. "Now that you're not busy, would you mind helping poor Cicero with his terrible, terrible dilemma?"

"Sure." And I meant it too. I didn't think it was an emergency, or Cicero wouldn't have been so mincing about not wanting to interrupt a card game. But I really did want to help. It made me feel like a part of the family to do favors for the others, like when I helped catch fish for dinner or caught rabbits for Meena.

"Wonderful!" He clapped his hands together again, more energetically this time, as though applauding a performance. "It seems that poor Cicero has forgotten to pick up nails for the shelving he is building for Mother's tomb. With all of the bother and befuddlement of the past few days, it simply slipped from my addled brain! Would you be a dear and run into Dawnstar to pick some up for me?"

"I suppose I could do that," I said. It would be good to go into town anyway. I had too much nervous energy now that I was back in physically good shape, and running to town and back would be good exercise.

"Excellent! Splendid!" Cicero danced a slight jig that made me smile. He pulled out a coin pouch and pushed it into my hands. "There are a few extra shiny, clinky coins in there for the boy to get himself something sweet while he's in town. Don't feel the need to rush back! See the sights! Young people should take their time to smell the mountain flowers!"

I laughed and stood up to grab my boots and coat before leaving. Cicero could be funny—even frightening—but he was never anything but generous. When I went to get my things, I saw Babette sitting at her alchemy lab with Pavot at her feet and a scowl on her face.

"I'm going into town," I told her. "Do you want to come with me?"

"No, thank you," she replied primly without looking at me.

"Well, do you need anything?" I really had hoped she would come with me into Dawnstar, but I hadn't actually expected it. Babette was a real homebody.

"I'm fine," she said, though her cold tone indicated she was anything but.

"Are you okay?" I pressed. Normally, I wouldn't have pushed, but she seemed to have gone from enjoying herself to angry even faster than normal. She couldn't be that mad about me skipping out on a card game when she had already won four hands in a row, could she?

"I just can't believe that you're letting Cicero turn you into his errand boy," she said in a way that made me feel about six inches tall.

"I'm not an errand boy…" That sounded lame, even to me. "I just want to help."

"By doing something Cicero could easily do himself if he weren't fobbing it off on you," she retorted scathingly. "He's just giving you make-work." She looked up at me, piercing me with a gaze that seemed far older than her years. "Cicero is playing you for a fool. I just hope you realize it before everyone else does." Her words chilled me, but I shook it off and left without saying another word to her.

As I trudged through the evening chill to Dawnstar, Babette's words haunted me. I couldn't imagine why Cicero would want to run me on errands if he didn't really need something. He seemed to like me… didn't he?

No, I told myself. It was just Babette being negative, the way she was sometimes. Nazir had been telling me since I started my training that it was important to contribute in whatever way we could, even if it didn't seem glamorous or glorious at the time. All of us had jobs to do outside of just killing people; it was a part of keeping the family running. Nazir was our Speaker, a position of prominence in the Dark Brotherhood, and he still cooked food for everyone. Hecate was our Listener, our connection to the Night Mother. Babette made potions. Cicero looked after the Night Mother's corporeal form. And Meena…

Well, most of us were useful outside killing people.

I really didn't mind running errands for Cicero if he needed my help. The fact that I still owed him more money than I comprehended for Hecate's New Life Day present was also a contributing factor in my willingness to be helpful. I had asked Nazir how much the daedric bow had cost once, and he had only laughed for a straight minute.

I promised myself that I would pick up his nails, grab something small for myself since he had insisted, and rush back to Sanctuary, just to show him how enthusiastic I was about the whole thing.

The darkness was my ally. That was what Nazir had always said, anyway. Honestly, with allies like darkness, I wasn't sure I needed enemies.

Despite my general lack of woodcraft, I had actually improved at tracking and hunting in the months since I had joined the Dark Brotherhood. Still, I was looking for an animal I had never seen before in a forest in the dark. A small amount of light filtered in through the forest canopy from the twin moons, which made getting hit in the face by branches and tripping over roots only a persistent annoyance instead of a constant hazard. By an hour past sunset, I was scratched and muddy. I was just lucky that Second Seed was warmer at night than when Cicero had started me on these stupid errands.

How did it get to this?

"Just a small favor," Cicero would say gleefully. Then I would agree, get on my boots and cloak, and go hunting for whatever it was he needed. Over two months of that had turned it from a one-time favor into an almost constant stream of small tasks. It seemed like three or four times a week, after practice, fishing and dinner, Cicero would need me to do something. The tasks had started out innocuous enough—small supplies that would only take me a short time to pick up and run back—but they kept getting increasingly bizarre.

Like fetching carrots from Dawnstar market since Nazir had "forgotten to buy them," only for the carrots Nazir had bought earlier to turn up later, hidden in a basket somewhere in Sanctuary.

Or the time that Cicero informed me that Pavot had somehow gotten past the Black Door without me or Babette knowing about it, and we had spent four hours looking for a lost wolf cub. As it turned out, Pavot hadn't gotten outside at all; we found him sleeping comfortably in an unused closet, gnawing on a soup bone.

Or when he had assigned me extra "stealth training" that consisted of hiding in the bushes along the road to Dawnstar and waiting for someone to spot me. It had taken me until almost midnight to realize that he hadn't told me what to do if no one spotted me.

The damnedest thing was that I kept agreeing to his idiotic tasks. Whenever I would try to refuse, Cicero would whimper and whine in a way that made me feel like I had stomped a kitten. He never mentioned the septims I owed him directly, but every now and then he would say something that would make me feel like a heel for borrowing so much money and then being stingy about doing little favors.

"Isn't it best family should help each other?" he would ask pitifully. Then he would look at me with his amber eyes watering as though he were about to break into tears, and every bit of resolve I had would disappear. I just couldn't refuse to do a favor for a member of my new family—especially not one who looked like he could break into tears if I said no.

Every time I went out, I invited Babette along. Her refusals had gone from short and terse to bitter reprisals for "playing the fool for a fool." As the weeks dragged on, I kept asking her to come with me more out of stubbornness than desire. On nights I got back to Sanctuary in time to hang out with her before bedtime, she would be mysteriously "busy." Any time I did a favor for Cicero, I could count on not getting to spend any time with Babette afterwards—and very likely, earning myself a cold shoulder or angry words.

What was even worse was that I had no idea how much of it was intentional on Cicero's part. Even before he had started exploiting me for free labor, I had seen him sometimes burst into tears for no good reason, talking to himself in the halls of Sanctuary, and raving at people long dead. Whenever he got like that the others would avoid him for hours, except for Hecate, who would try her best to calm him down at such times. She couldn't always be there, though; as the Listener, she had other responsibilities that sometimes took her out of Sanctuary, or just kept her busy inside it.

Cicero had been having more good days since the new year began, and I had decided that I had to help keep him calm too. Hecate looked so upset whenever Cicero was having one of his fits or whatever they were, and seeing Hecate upset made me upset too. I wanted to spare her pain as much as I could. And I liked Cicero; he was funny and a good fighter.

And he clearly loved Hecate.

That last one was a point in his favor… but for some reason whenever I thought about it, it almost seemed like a problem. I knew that he loved Hecate, and I understood why. She was so amazing that it was easy to love her. I just didn't understand why she loved Cicero so much. He was unreliable, pushy, loud, and quite insane. He had a lot of good qualities—as a brother in arms, and as a sibling in the Dark Brotherhood. I also didn't understand why, since they loved each other, that they weren't married. Hecate had seemed almost horrified at the idea. Did that mean their relationship wasn't as close as I thought it was?

I was so distracted thinking about Cicero and Hecate that I didn't see the corpse until I tripped over it.

When I fell, I thought it was just another root, albeit a larger one than before. I started to curse my luck before I realized that whatever I had tripped on was too soft to be a root. As I pulled myself up into a crouch, my eyes adjusted to the shadows enough to make out a body-shaped lump. I scrabbled away from it on all fours, barely remembering to pull the flanged mace I kept on my belt whenever I left Sanctuary. After the incident with the frostbite spider, I didn't go unarmed outside my home anymore.

After confirming with a few indelicate taps that the person on the ground was indeed dead and not coming after me anytime soon, I gingerly crawled closer and flipped the body over without touching it. The corpse was that of a middle-aged man dressed in heavy hides and furs, his face unshaven and his hair long and greasy. A few feet away from the body was a rusty-looking iron sword; it looked like he had dropped it while struggling with an attacker. His eyes were wide open, staring sightlessly in death, and his mouth was full of dirt and leaves from being dropped face-down onto the ground.

The worst thing was the throat wound. It looked like his throat had been torn out by a vicious animal bite. I knew enough about weapons at this point to realize that no blade or club had inflicted that wound; only teeth could have opened the side of his neck and crushed the windpipe at the same time. Whatever it was that killed this man had done it with a savage power that looked like it had also snapped his spine in addition to ripping his throat apart. Something about the site bothered me, but I couldn't quite place it.

With a savage burst of intuition, it came to me. My fear of blood hadn't been triggered by looking at the wound. Ever since killing Rolff Stone-Fist, blood had bothered me a lot—to the point where I would only use blunt weapons. Nazir had begun refurbishing Sanctuary's torture room in preparation for some sort of special training to remove my squeamishness, but that wouldn't be ready for another month. In the meantime, the idea of blood still bothered me.

The body hadn't frightened me when I examined it because there was no blood. A few drying smears clung to the dead man's armor, but the wound itself had only a few clots sticking to its ragged edges. The man's throat had been laid open by a savage attack, but there was almost no blood on his clothes, none on the ground around him, none on the leaves nearby—none at all.

Where was all the blood?

I knew that I still had a lot to learn about tracking and woodland survival, but I was still pretty sure that I wasn't incompetent enough to miss pints and pints of spilled blood from a gaping neck wound. I decided to risk some light and pulled out my flint and tinder to light a small fire. Once it was going well enough that I could light anything from it, I checked the dead man more thoroughly. Months in close proximity to the Night Mother had killed the last of my nervousness around bodies, so searching him was just a task like any other.

The man's inventory of worldly possessions was woefully small. He had a rusty iron knife, a half-eaten apple, and a pouch with less than a dozen grimy septims. The coins I kept; no sense letting good money go to waste. Judging from the man's general dishevelment and weaponry, I figured he had to be a bandit. No great loss there.

He also had a torch crushed into the ground under him and a sooty mark on his chest from where his weight had smothered it out before it could burn him. He must have been carrying it when he was assaulted and his body fell into it. I lit it off the small fire, then stomped the fire out. The torch would be useful in looking around for signs of whatever had done this. Maybe it was the snipe I was hunting, though I wasn't sure that Cicero would send me out after a truly dangerous animal.

I didn't manage to find any blood or a snipe, but I did see something that chilled my own blood. My heart froze into a solid lump of ice when my eyes happened upon a familiar shape in the bushes about a dozen feet away. I prayed to the Divines I was wrong as I walked closer and brought the torch down and confirmed my worst fears.

There, pushed in among the brush, was Babette's flower basket.

My mind raced as I tried to figure out what it was doing out here, shoved into the bushes less than a stone's throw from a dead man. Judging from the way the leaves had been trampled, there had clearly been a struggle here. The basket was pushed deeply into the underbrush; I had only seen it by a chance reflection from the torchlight. All at once, the answer came to me. I felt stupid for not realizing it immediately.

Babette must have followed me out here and been kidnapped by bandits! Damn it all to the Void! I hadn't bothered asking her along this time because I didn't think she would enjoy hunting, so naturally she would have followed me out to be contrary. Had Pavot managed to overpower one of her attackers? I wasn't sure how much damage a half-grown ice wolf could do to a man, but that still wouldn't explain the missing blood.

The blood was a mystery that would have to wait until later, I told myself. So was the mysterious snipe, for that matter. For the time being, I had to employ every ounce of woodcraft and forestry at my disposal to track the fiends that had kidnapped my best friend and somehow rescue her from their clutches before… something bad happened. I also wasn't sure what a bunch of bandits would do with a twelve-year-old girl, but it had to be something nefarious!

I made a mental note to thank Cicero later for teaching me the word "nefarious."

Searching the ground around the corpse closely, I was able to make out a faint set of tracks in the soft earth. After determining that they were mine, I expanded my search a little more widely. It took longer than I was really comfortable with to find shoe marks that were clearly not mine. They seemed a little small for a powerful, armored bandit, but I could only guess that their owner was light on his feet. Steeling my nerve and extinguishing the torch to avoid notice, I rejoined the shadows and moved through the forest.

I was on the hunt.

It had been around an hour of tracking, by my loose estimation, when I nearly stumbled into the bandits' camp. I was so occupied with following the tracks, which had become more numerous and clear as I traveled, that I managed to miss the sounds of men talking until I was almost on top of them. I dropped into a crouch and crept closer, finally seeing the light from a campfire up ahead through the trees. I breathed a sigh of relief; a campfire made it strictly amateur hour.

One of the things that Meena had taught me about stealth was the importance of not spoiling your night vision. A campfire might make you feel safer on a dark night, but it made you a clear target for anyone out in that darkness and ruined your ability to see them sneaking up on you. It made it pretty easy to see anyone within the circle of your firelight, and basically impossible to see anyone outside it.

The bandits numbered half a dozen rough-looking men and women wearing armor in varying degrees of disrepair and carrying a motley assortment of weapons. A single patched tent was set up against a low outcropping of stones. The campfire was about ten feet from the tent and surrounded by rumpled bedrolls, while a pot of bubbling stew hung over the fire from a metal spit. A butchered deer carcass was strung up in a nearby tree attesting to the origin of the meat. Nazir would have been so disappointed; you never stewed deer meat unless you had fresh garlic to go with the venison.

Maybe I spent too much time with Nazir, the more I thought about it.

Sitting among the lounging bandits, holding a bowl of stew and looking utterly terrified at her new companions, was Babette. She was wearing a torn dress and her hair was uncharacteristically matted with dirt. Her face was filthy, except for the tracks cut into the muck by her tears. She looked unhurt but more scared than I had ever seen her before. At least they hadn't gotten around to doing anything "nefarious" yet.

Four of the bandits were just sitting around the campfire, telling dirty jokes and laughing it up, a fifth was passed out inside the tent with a jug near his hand, while the last lazily patrolled the edge of the firelight to keep an eye on the area. He chewed a chunk of dry-looking bread as he walked, and his unfocused gaze made me confident that I could walk right through his field of vision without him seeing me at all. Honestly, given how disorganized this lot looked, I was surprised they were keeping a watch at all.

I put together a basic plan. Given my own poor planning ability and Nazir's commentary about plans rarely surviving contact with the enemy, I kept it simple. I would wait until all but one of the bandits went to sleep, arrange a distraction for the last one, then sneak into camp and sneak back out with Babette. They wouldn't even know I had been there until they woke up and found their hostage gone. Once the two of us were back in Sanctuary, I would report it all to Nazir, and the others would punish the bandits for setting up shop so close to the home of the Dark Brotherhood. I considered just killing them all in their sleep, but I wasn't confident that I could manage to kill five adults silently while still getting Babette out safely—and Babette was my priority.

Fortunately for me, I considered patience a virtue, so I wasn't particularly bored as I waited for the bandits to finish their repast and bed down for the night. In fact, I felt fairly excited; watching people from the shadows was a crucial element of my training, and I was doing it successfully under field conditions. It was an empowering sensation. Finally, after they had passed around what felt like their tenth bottle of cheap booze and run through the same off-key drinking songs as often, they started yawning and drifting to their bedrolls.

One of the women took the uneaten bowl of stew from Babette and dumped it back in the pot, which now hung over glowing coals. She dragged the poor girl to the nearby tent… and then came back out a few moments later, leaving Babette alone in the tent. I was a bit confused, but it would work to my advantage. Since the tent was pressed up against a rock outcropping, I could scale the rocks from the other side, drop into the camp, and enter the tent through the rear. Also to my surprise, the lone bandit showing any amount of preparation just crawled into his bedroll like the rest of his companions. They didn't even leave a guard on duty while they slept.

This was going to be easier than I thought.

Once the bandits were snoring, I crept around the side of the outcropping and hauled myself up its broad flank. I took my time ascending the gentle slope since it didn't seem like Babette was in any imminent danger. Better to be cautious if I had the time for it. Once I was at the apex of the pile of stones, I flattened myself and crept forward on my belly to take a look into the camp. Everyone was still sleeping so I slowly reversed my body and began to let my legs over the edge. Suspended by my hands, my feet were still six inches or so above the ground when I let go, so I was worried that the noise of my landing might wake one of them up. Fortunately, my body was completely concealed by the tent; I didn't hear even the slightest grunt to indicate someone had noticed me.

Taking out my hunting knife—I might not have liked edged weapons much, but they were useful for more than killing—I slit the rear of the tent open and let myself in. I put the knife away so I wouldn't scare Babette and crept toward the bedroll at the center of the tent. The interior was pitch black, so I moved even more slowly and carefully than usual.

It was only luck that I didn't scream when someone grabbed me from behind. Luck, and the powerful hand that was slapped over my mouth.

I grunted in surprise and started to move to try the hand-to-hand maneuvers Cicero had taught me to throw off a grappling opponent when a knife touched the side of my neck. I immediately stopped struggling and went limp. Whoever it was, they had me dead to rights. I had miscalculated the skill of these bandits and it was going to cost my life.

"Aren't you a little short for a bandit?" Babette's girlish voice whispered in my ear. I felt my eyes widen in shock and the knife dropped away from my throat. I turned to the direction of the attack, ready to defend myself in case it was some sort of trick. I could barely make Babette's face out in the darkness, but I could see her well enough to know that the expression on her face was one of annoyance rather than gratitude.

"Babette!" I exclaimed in an excited whisper. "You're okay!" She shushed at me with the hand that wasn't holding the knife. I dropped my voice further. "I came here to rescue you."

"I don't need any recuing," she hissed at me. "How did you even know I was here?"

"I found your basket in the woods near a dead guy," I responded. "It looked like he'd had his throat torn out, so I thought you might be in trouble." I paused a moment. "How did that guy die anyway?"

"You say his throat was torn out?" she said, asking a question in response to my question. "Maybe… Maybe a vampire killed him."

"A vampire?" I asked. "Aren't vampires evil?"

"And assassins aren't?" she snapped.

"I suppose you have a point," I conceded. "I guess you're lucky you weren't around when that guy got killed. It still doesn't explain how you wound up out here." Babette sighed, exasperated.

"I was out gathering herbs for potions when the bandits found me," she explained. "I pretended that I was lost in the forest and that my parents would give them a big reward for finding me. They were going to keep me overnight before sending a ransom note. Not that any of them would ever have woken up to do it."

"You were going to kill them after they took you in?" I asked, more shocked at her duplicity than the idea of murder. She snorted at my naivety.

"Divines above, Aventus! They're bandits! They weren't helping me out of the goodness of their heart. They were going to hold me for ransom." She paused a moment. "Honestly, I'd be surprised if they weren't planning on taking the ransom money and then selling me to a slaver anyway."

"You sound like you don't like them very much," I offered.

"I don't know them," she sniffed, "just their kind. This isn't the first encampment of bandits I've wiped out." I occasionally managed to forget that Babette had been in the Dark Brotherhood longer than I had. Her cold tone was a chilling reminder that she had killed more men than I had.

"Sorry…" I said it even though I wasn't really sorry at all. "I was just out hunting snipe for Cicero when I saw your basket, and I thought you might need help." Babette's face scrunched up strangely, and she clapped a hand over her mouth. It took me a minute to realize she was laughing. "What's so funny?"

"You were…" Before she could finish the sentence, a snort of laughter escaped her. She slapped her hand over her mouth again as fast as she could, but both of us turned toward the tent flap when we heard one of the bandits' lazy snores turn into a confused sound of wakefulness. We looked at each other wide-eyed and scrambled for the hole I had cut in the tent, rushing outside and quickly scaling the rocky outcropping behind it.

By the time we had reached the other side of the stone outcropping, I could hear the bandit shouting the rest of the camp awake. Babette and I poured on the speed, running into the dark forest as fast as our feet could take us. She took the lead, grabbing my hand and pulling me along behind her. She never seemed to trip on a root, run into a branch, or even stumble in the dark. I was hard-pressed to keep up with her as she virtually flew through the forest. After a double-handful of minutes passed without me being able to hear any sounds of pursuit, I let go of her hand and slumped up against a nearby tree to catch my breath. Babette didn't seem winded in the slightest.

"By Sithis!" I swore once I could get a word out. "I didn't know you could run that fast!"

"I wouldn't have had to if you hadn't shown up and ruined my hunt!" she snapped.

"I thought you were in trouble," I snapped back, feeling my temper rise and my face burn with embarrassment. "Besides, you were the one who laughed and woke them up. What did I say that was so damned funny?"

"Cicero sent you on a snipe hunt," she said, as though that explained everything. At my uncomprehending look, she sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose with finger and thumb, as though she had a headache. "Aventus, a 'snipe hunt' is a prank that older people play on younger people. It means a search for something that isn't real. Cicero played you for a fool. Again."

I gaped at her, not wanting to believe what she said. Why would Cicero send me on a pointless errand? Then I realized that if this errand had been fake, what about all of the others he had sent me on?

"Why would he…" I began lamely.

"Who knows?" she interrupted. "Maybe he's just insane and taking it out on you. Maybe it's 'training' in his demented mind. Maybe he just wants you out of Sanctuary because Hecate is embarrassed about having sex with him while you're home." She paused a moment before muttering, "I wish she had that same courtesy for the rest of us."

"Sex?" I asked. "Like making babies?"

"Oh gods," Babette exclaimed, "don't tell me your mother never had the talk with you."

"She didn't really get a chance to talk to me about that sort of stuff," I said softly, looking down at my feet. She had died before we got a chance to talk about any of the really important things, and I could only suppose that this was one of them. Babette laid a hand on my shoulder, and when I looked up her face was softer.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to bring up your mother."

"It's okay," I lied. "It doesn't hurt as much anymore. I just can't believe Cicero would lie to me like that."

"He's unreliable and overly fond of bad joke," Babette said sympathetically. "I told you he was playing you for a fool. Maybe next time you'll listen to me."

I nodded, feeling my shame curdling up in my belly as she took my arm and began to lead me back to Sanctuary. Cicero couldn't be trusted. It was a hard thing to admit considering how much I liked him, but Babette had just shown me how badly I had been misled. What bothered me more was the idea that if he could be so duplicitous with me, maybe he was also misleading Hecate in some way. Maybe her love for the jester was based on false pretenses. Maybe…

But there was no more to the thought than that.

Babette and I walked back to Sanctuary arm in arm, enjoying the cool spring night with the full moons riding low in the sky. All the way back, I mused about how none of my new family were quite what they seemed to be. My anger at Cicero festered the whole way home, but something new was joining it, a sensation I didn't have a name for. I felt the need to become an adult, to learn all the secrets that adults kept from children. I wanted to go on my first contract, to be big and strong, to not be the "new kid" that got sent on snipe hunts.

As we emerged from the forest onto the shoreline that ran alongside Sanctuary, silver moonlight spilled onto the waves. Babette's eyes sparkled in the cold light, and her pale skin seemed to shimmer with the reflected light of the sea. I could almost see how pretty she would become when she grew up. She leaned up against me as we walked; I didn't blame her for wanting to be close, considering how cold she felt. It was springtime in Skyrim, but it was still chilly, especially so close to the sea.

The Black Door loomed before us and I thought about the course of my life since joining the Brotherhood. The spring was well on its way to summer, but the seasons couldn't turn quickly enough for me. Spring was a time for children—and neither Babette nor I were really children, not inside where it mattered. It just hurt waiting for my body to catch up to the things I knew I was capable of.

"What is life's greatest illusion?" the Black Door rasped.

"Innocence, my brother," I responded.

Time couldn't pass fast enough for me. I wondered if Babette felt the same way.

…to be continued…