Chapter 8: Paved With Good Intentions
I was still fuming by lunchtime, and the others could tell. Aia and Jorn were content to let it be, but Ataf had started to grow brave again. Ever since he had learned my secret—one of them anyway—he had been backing off more, but my foul mood was starting to bring back the nosy boy I had met my first day of class.
"Everything all right, Aventus?" he asked directly. I was tempted to blow him off, but Ataf had done me a favor recently, which made me reluctant to just dismiss him.
"I just don't like lessons that glorify tyrants," I replied, "or their lieutenants."
"Professor Gemane didn't mean anything by it," the Redguard boy insisted. "As bards, we have to learn neutrality, even if we don't like it. Picking sides can get you killed during wartime. As long as we keep up a public air of being neutral, regardless of our actual feelings, we can go anywhere we like. No one would violate tradition by hurting a bard any more than they would a messenger."
"It definitely lets both sides spy on each other more easily," Aia said airily.
"What do you mean by that?" I asked.
"You really hadn't considered it?" she responded with her own question. "I swear, Aventus Aretino, you're a remarkably direct sort of person."
"What Aia means," Illdi interrupted, seeing my face darken, "is that she thinks pretty much everyone uses bards as spies in wartime." Jorn and Ataf looked at her with the same kind of disbelief that was on my face, until she blushed and shrugged, seeming to wilt under the attention.
"I thought bards were supposed to be neutral," I said, feeling my anger leaking away at this turn of the conversation. It was shocking, but rather interesting at the same time.
"They're supposed to seem neutral," Aia clarified. "Bards are people, and people have opinions about politics. But by coming from an apolitical tradition, bards can claim rite of passage through even the worst battlefields without too much fear. And while they're there, if they should happen to see troop movements or numbers…" The Imperial girl shrugged broadly, feigning an innocent demeanor.
"Even if a general were paranoid enough to turn bards away from their borders," Jorn mused, "that would tell the other side something."
"I think this is all just speculation," Ataf said, shaking his head. "Reputation is everything to a bard. Being caught doing that sort of thing even once would kill a man's reputation—and worse, stain his whole profession." He shook his head again. "No, I don't believe it. Bards are supposed to have a professional code of ethics—a bard's honor, I guess you could say."
"So naïve," Aia said with a smile. "The only real difference between an honorable man and a dishonorable man is that the honorable man never got caught."
"I wouldn't say that Ataf is being naïve so much as you're being cynical," Jorn told her, his mouth turned in a sharp curve downward. I found it interesting that he had been willing to listen to Aia impugn the honor of bards, but seemed offended when she suggested that honor itself was an illusion.
"I still don't see the point of the exercise," I said, trying to turn the conversation away from becoming an argument. "Diana Dragonborn and General Tullius are heroes. Ulfric and Lydia are traitors. That's the whole story."
"Unless you're a Stormcloak," Illdi said. "Then you'd think that Ulfric Stormcloak is a noble hero rebelling against an unjust empire, and Lydia Stormblade is the Dragonborn."
"But we know that Diana is the true Dragonborn, of course," Ataf said quickly, knowing that this was one of my sensitive topics. "She appeared in court and Shouted and everything."
"Were you there?" Aia asked. "Did you see it yourself?" Ataf grudgingly shook his head. While I knew the truth, I couldn't very well admit it. More to the point, Ataf was wrong—Diana hadn't Shouted to the court, though she had certainly threatened to. "Then it could just be Imperial propaganda. Oh, I'm not saying it is, of course. Just that Professor Gemane has a point—truth depends very much on where you're standing. You can only see the words on a sign from in front of it. From behind, it just looks blank. It's the same thing with people."
"I suppose," I grumbled. "I just don't understand how the people supporting Ulfric can be so wrong."
"Aventus," said Aia with another of her inscrutable smiles, "I'm sure they would think the same thing about you."
My head hurt and my stomach ached. I continued to nurse hot tea while I ordered a mug of mead for Runa. The serving maid looked at me sidelong now that Nelkir had left. He had been paying for the drinks since we arrived, and his little outburst before he ran off had the staff in a bad mood. Even the other customers were giving us sidelong glances now, wondering what I had done to piss off the person that had been buying their drinks for the last hour. Just to assure the waitress of my good intentions, I pushed a few septims onto her tray before she left.
"I don't know what you did to piss that guy off," Runa said, taking a pull from her mug, "but I'd watch my back. Anyone who winds you up that much is probably out to do worse."
"Thanks for the advice," I said in a tone that indicated I wasn't interested in any more. "We're not here to talk about my personal problems."
"I suppose not," she allowed with a magnanimous nod. "We're here to talk about much worse stuff. Like how you failed all your friends at Honorhall Orphanage."
"Grelod died," I hissed, speaking low and leaning across the table. "I swore I would get the Dark Brotherhood to kill her, and I did. I kept my promise. I kept my promise so well that I wound up being one of them."
"And believe me, I'm grateful," Runa said, leaning in with fierce eyes. "The day I saw that crone's broken body lying bleeding on the ground was the happiest day of my life. I thought that the Nine had come to answer my prayers." She drank deep, as if to quench the fire in her belly. "Then I realized that the Nine hadn't had a damned thing to do with it."
She shook her head and drank again, trying to drive away the shudders that wracked her. Part of me was glad to see that I wasn't alone in being scarred by my time at Honorhall. I still shook like that sometimes when I thought too long about my time there, and Runa had been there far longer than I had.
Part of me wanted to kiss her until the shaking stopped—until it stopped for both of us, as though kissing her would drive away the darkness and the fear.
I blinked rapidly to clear away the image of kissing Runa and drank more hot tea. I didn't know where the sudden urge to kiss Runa's rose-dark lips had come from, but I tried to convince myself it was just a passing fancy. She was pretty and we were close together and it was dark and I was still a little drunk. That was all.
That had to be all.
"Don't tell me that Constance turned out to be evil too," I said, trying to recover the thread of the conversation. Constance Michel had been Grelod's much-abused assistant. She did all the grunt work of running the orphanage and was even sometimes kind to the children, when she could get away with it. She drew as much verbal abuse from Grelod as any of her underage charges, and took it all with the complete serenity of a woman with a truly broken spirit.
"No, nothing like that," Runa replied. "Constance was never cruel to us, not like Grelod had been." She paused with a slight smile on her face, almost wistful. "Actually, with the old bitch dead, things improved in Honorhall a lot. Constance made sure we got lessons in reading and math, we started getting fed regularly, and she took the chains out of the punishment room. She threw them in the river while the kids stood around her, like a ceremony or something."
I smiled a little bit at the thought of it. I had been in those chains twice during my time at Honorhall—once for speaking out of turn, and once for crying. The first time, I had been in them for two days with no food or water. The second time, it was longer; I might have died if Constance hadn't snuck water in to me at night while Grelod slept.
"The thing is," Runa continued, her face turning sad, "we should have remembered." She drained the last of her mug as though trying to drown the bad memories. "Constance was kind, but she never went against Grelod directly. New kids came to the orphanage, kids that had never known how bad things were. Constance kept them separate from us—from the ones that had been there when Grelod was alive. It was like we were being quarantined, like we were sick.
"Then those kids started being adopted out. They would come for a while, then Constance would find families for them and they would leave." She paused, her eyes distant and haunted. "One day, Samuel went right up to her while she was laying out cookies to bake and asked her if she was finding families for us. Do you know what she told him?" I shook my head. "She said, 'Why would anyone want you?' Then she went right back to making cookies like nothing had happened."
"What?" I asked, disbelieving. "Did you get her to explain what she meant?"
"No need for explanations," Runa said sourly. "I understood. After what Grelod did to us… we were tainted. Different from other kids. Samuel and I were already thieves, and Hroar had started beating up kids for their toys. Some of the other kids that were still there when you left were worse. There was one boy, Francois. His parents left him at the orphanage, but he always insisted they would come back. After Grelod died and his parents still didn't show up… One day, he found a cat with a broken paw near the orphanage and brought it back. At first we thought he wanted a pet, but…" She gulped heavily and gestured to the serving maid for a refill.
"You don't have to-" I started, but she interrupted me.
"We found him later that night with the cat tied up to a post in the orphanage yard. He was throwing rocks at it and laughing when it screamed." I felt sick at the thought of it. I might have killed a dozen or more men and women, but the thought of hurting an animal without cause still made me nauseous. "Samuel and Hroar beat him half to death, and he just laughed the whole time."
"Sweet Mother," I breathed, making sure to stay quiet enough that no one else in the Winking Skeever could hear me. I didn't swear by the Night Mother often, but this felt like a time for it if ever there had been one.
"So you see," she continued with false cheer, "Constance couldn't dare let any of us get adopted, not with that sort of behavior. She was just going to keep us on at the orphanage until we turned sixteen, then turn us out without anywhere to go or anyone to give a damn. We didn't deserve that, didn't deserve to be treated like garbage because of what Grelod had made us. Even from the grave, that horrible bitch had her hands around our necks."
"Gods, Runa," I said, laying my hand over hers. "I'm so sorry."
"I told you that you'd be saying that before the night was over," she smirked. I couldn't help but laugh at the way she said it.
"I suppose you did at that," I allowed.
"For being right," she said with mock cheer, "you can buy me another drink." I looked at her mug and saw that the last refill had already gone. I hadn't even noticed her draining the mug.
"Fair enough," I allowed, gesturing to the waitress for another round. I had wanted to sober up, but now I only felt like getting drunk again. "All of that is pretty horrible, Runa… but I still don't see why you blame me."
"You said you'd save us, Aventus," she said darkly, casting her eyes down. "Not just that you'd kill Grelod, but that you'd save us all."
"I thought killing Grelod would save you all," I replied desperately. "I nearly died myself trying to get in touch with the Dark Brotherhood."
"I guess sometimes murder doesn't solve all the problems," she retorted.
"Well, it solves enough of them," I said with a hard edge to my voice. It was hard enough hearing Runa's story, but hearing her say aloud the very thing I had been fearing for months was almost too much.
Ever since I had accidentally killed Vigurl Deep-Water, part of me had been wondering if being in the Dark Brotherhood was really what I was meant to do with my life. I was good at my job—more than good, I had to admit. I was excellent at my job. But my teachers had always said that I had too much honor to be a good assassin, and my sense of right and wrong had nearly gotten me killed more than once. After I killed Vigurl, it nearly made me kill myself through slow starvation and despair.
It still felt good to deliver the Night Mother's judgment to the unworthy, but I wasn't blind to the other things we did. We took contracts just for money sometimes, thanks to Nazir's extensive network of spies and contacts. By tradition, most of a client's fee went to the Brotherhood itself, while a hefty portion went into the assassin's pockets. I was, by most people's standards, independently wealthy at the age of fourteen. I didn't have any expensive habits and didn't travel, so I had saved most of the money I had earned in the last two years. I could take what I had earned and buy a not-inconsiderable estate with it—if I cared for such things.
The Listener—Diana Dragonborn to some, Hecate to others—had sent me to the Bards College to gain the skills I needed to be a better infiltrator and killer. I understood now the value of the things I was learning here, how they would make me better able to blend into the background and kill with impunity. I hadn't expected to start enjoying my lessons—which led me to wonder if maybe I could develop the skills for a life outside the Brotherhood. It hadn't been much more than an occasional surreptitious fantasy until I had met Dagny…
The truth was that Runa was right: there were problems that couldn't be solved by murder. I just had to decide if I was right too—that enough of them could.
Runa and I talked well into the night, drinking and catching up on what we had been doing in the years since I left Honorhall.
Right about the same time that Hecate was running off to the Throat of the World against the Night Mother's wishes, Runa had been escaping Honorhall with Samuel and Hroar in tow. It hadn't been difficult for them; Constance didn't keep the same level of paranoid control over the children as Grelod had. As far as Runa knew, the guards had never even been informed of their departure. Constance must have been happy enough to have the problem solve itself.
The three of them had been living in the Ratways, the tunnels beneath Riften, and sneaking out at night to steal food and clothes from the shops that lined the canal. They had only been at it for about a month when they got caught—but not by an irate shopkeep. The man that found them had called himself Brynjolf, and he had been a member of the Thieves' Guild. Brynjolf had explained that all theft in the city was the Guild's to regulate and control, and that they could either join the Guild themselves or get the hell out of the city.
"He was nicer about it than that," Runa laughed, "but that's about what it came down to."
Given the alternatives, the three of them had joined up with the Thieves' Guild. The coin was poor and the accommodations unpleasant—like Hecate, I wondered how anyone could live in a sewer and still respect themselves—but they were free. I knew what it meant to be starving but free; freedom couldn't fill your belly, but it made the sting of hunger less.
"What happened to Francois?" I asked, wondering if he had recovered from the darkness Grelod had beaten into him.
"No clue," she responded casually. "We didn't keep track of anyone else in Honorhall after we left. Hroar and I figured that anyone who didn't have the guts to save themselves probably wasn't worth saving." She looked down at her mug and blushed slightly, slurring her words slightly from too much drink. "He even talked about you having more balls than the rest of us put together. I think he would have been proud of the man you turned into."
"Would have been proud?" I asked dumbly.
"He got killed a few months back," she said with a coldness I hadn't expected. "Dumb bastard was on a simple housebreaking job. He managed to get in and out without a hitch, but just before he got back to the Ratway, his pack slipped off and spilled everything he had snatched right in front of a town guard. He panicked and bolted. Guards didn't even try to take him in."
"Is Samuel still around?"
"Yeah," she responded, her face relaxing a little. "We partner up sometimes. He's still back in Riften, though. This was supposed to be my first big solo assignment."
"Sorry I screwed it up," I told her with genuine regret.
"More apologies means more drinks!" she shouted, holding up her empty tankard to catch a serving maid's attention. I sighed; while I was independently wealthy, most of my money was back at Dawnstar Sanctuary and the coin I had brought with me was largely tied up at the Imperial Exchequer's office. I touched my rapidly emptying purse and was suddenly grateful that Nelkir had been picking up the tab earlier. He still had a lot to answer for the next time I saw him, but his generosity had saved me some trouble.
"I think there's still a way you can make it right," she continued after her mug was refilled.
"I can't give you back the lute," I told her. "Not after all the trouble I went through to find it."
"Hey," Runa responded defensively, "I went through a bit of trouble here too. And it's not like you have a real use for the damned thing."
"Your assignment was just to deprive Erikur of his prize, right? Let him know he couldn't cheat the Thieves' Guild?" She nodded, her lips pressed together tightly. "Then you've already done your job."
"Bringing back the lute will net me a nice bonus, though," she pushed. "With as little coin as the Guild's been bringing in lately, every bit helps." She thought a moment, biting her lower lip in a way that I found thoroughly distracting. "On the other hand, there is something you could do if you really want to help me out."
"I'm listening," I told her.
As Runa explained her plan, I found myself grinning like an idiot. Both of us were giggling madly within a few minutes, drawing a few sharp looks from nearby tables, but we didn't care.
It was going to be glorious.
I woke up with a sour taste in my mouth, and one of my feet was cold. As I pried my sticky eyes open and rolled onto my back, I saw that I was laying on my dormitory bed, fully dressed except for one boot. I scanned the room dumbly, finally seeing the rogue footwear pushed up under my desk as though I had sat down to take it off, then stumbled the rest of the way to the bed and just flopped into it before passing out.
Bright light was streaming through the window, and I suddenly realized that it had to be after noon already. I sat bolt upright, completely awake, then immediately laid back down as my head swam and bile rose up into my throat. My head ached like someone was pounding it with a hammer, and the light was stabbing into my eyeballs. I clenched my eyes shut and concentrated on keeping my stomach steady.
Just as I was feeling well enough to sit up, the door swung inward and admitted Ataf, who was carrying a covered tray. He looked at me with something like sympathy before setting the tray down on my desk and wandering over to sit on his bed.
"Brought you some lunch," he said, pulling his shoes off. "I figured you could use something light, so I grabbed some soup and bread." A few moments before, the thought of food might have made me sick, but the smell of broth made me realize how hungry I really was. I got up, sat back down to pull my remaining boot off, then got up again and stumbled to my desk.
"Thanks, Ataf," I managed to croak out before uncovering the tray and breathing in the broth's steam.
"I also told our teachers that you were sick," he continued. "Do you even remember coming back this morning?"
"No," I replied honestly. I really didn't remember how I had gotten from the Winking Skeever back to the Bards College. The last thing that was clear to me was giggling with Runa over mugs of ale the night before. I touched my fingers to my lips briefly; had she kissed me at some point? I couldn't recall.
"I've been on a few benders myself," Ataf said in a tone almost admiring, "but I've never seen anyone as drunk as you were when you came in this morning outside a Redguard wedding. You woke me up, you know."
"Sorry about that," I told him as I started drinking the soup. "I went out drinking with Dagny's brother, and things got out of hand…"
"Who's Runa?" he asked. My blood ran cold and I nearly dropped the bowl. "You were muttering about some girl named Runa when you came back."
"Just an old friend I ran into," I said. It was even sort of true. "Did I say anything else?"
"Something about your mom, I think," Ataf replied, his teasing tone disappearing. "You really miss her, don't you?"
"Sometimes," I said. "My real mom died a long time ago, and I've never been away from my adopted family this long before."
"Well, I covered for you this time," he said, changing topics. "You're off classes for the day to recover. Try not to let it happen again, though." He tossed me his class journal, and I barely managed to catch it. "Our morning notes are in there, and our assignment for tomorrow." I flipped the journal open and turned to the most recent entry, scanning it as quickly as my aching eyes would allow.
"We're supposed to talk about the origin of 'The Age of Aggression'?" I asked, not sure I was reading the prompt correctly.
"More precisely, we're talking about the ways that songs and poems can change based on the performer," Ataf corrected, "and we're using 'The Age of Aggression' as an example. Something about historical context and blah blah blah."
"Seems dumb," I told him.
"Maybe," he laughed, "but Gemane's expecting serious discussion, so be ready to get your head in the game."
"Thanks again, Ataf," I told him as he began to pack up to head back out for the afternoon. "You did me a solid, and I won't forget it."
"That's what friends are for," he smiled.
As he left, I couldn't help but wonder if he was right. In my experience, real friends were few and far between. Ataf had helped cover for me missing morning classes because I was hung over. He had lied to people on behalf of our supposed friendship. Would he be so willing to help me if he knew I killed people for money? Or that I was in a cult of Sithis-worshippers? That I was hung over because I had spent the whole night drinking with a thief?
Would he cover for me if I had killed someone last night and come in covered in blood?
Sometimes, I wondered if everyone had secrets like me, and the only thing that let people care for one another was dishonesty.
I was too sick to do anything most of the day, but I managed to stagger out of the dormitory toward the evening hours.
After assuring Professor Six-Fingers that I was heading to see a healer and would be in class bright and early the next day, I wandered toward Proudspire Manor to see if I could explain to Dagny why I had missed our date, but one of the servants informed me that Jarl Balgruuf and his children would be out for the night. I assumed that Irileth would be with them, so I asked the maid to let them know I had stopped by whenever they came back.
After that, I was pretty much stuck for anything to do, so I just meandered back to Proudspire and sat on the back porch in the cold, not even letting Jordis know I had stopped by. Pavot came trotting up to me—how he had gotten out of the house, I wasn't sure—and laid at my feet, sensing my pensive mood.
I still felt lousy—physically and emotionally—and the idea that Dagny hated me now was churning me up inside way more than I would have thought. After all, she was just some spoiled nobleman's daughter who had taken me under her wing more to spite her brothers than because she actually cared about me.
Right?
Honestly, I wasn't sure anymore. Until Dagny had kissed me, I thought she was just using me for some political thing that I didn't really understand. I wasn't dumb enough to believe that she was genuinely attracted to me out of the blue. But then she had kissed me, and suddenly I was more willing to believe it—especially with Nelkir's reaction. If Dagny were just stringing me along, I don't think her brother would be so keen to ruin things between us. That meant she probably actually liked me.
But did I like her? I mean, I knew I liked Dagny's company, but the idea of something long-term with another person had never really occurred to me. Did I care for her the way she cared for me? And what was the way she cared for me? And what about Runa? I couldn't deny I was attracted to her, and that we had a bond that had been forged in a deeper, more painful way than with Dagny.
I absent-mindedly reached down to scruff Pavot behind the ears and had to jerk my hand back suddenly when he growled and snapped. My eyes widened in shock for a moment, worried that I had done something wrong, but then the ice wolf just laid his head back down and acted like nothing had happened. As I rubbed my fingers, I thought about something Babette had said to me a long time ago, not long after she first adopted the ice wolf.
"An ice wolf isn't a dog," Babette had told me. "Even if he likes you, he'll never be completely tame." She had rubbed Pavot's belly then, laughing as the pup's blue-black tongue lolled out in happiness. "A dog is a slave. A wolf is a partner. You have to give him space when he wants it."
I also remembered that Pavot had never bitten her fingers—not once. Maybe he had just recognized a more powerful predator when he saw one. He would have been doing better than me; I hadn't realized Babette was a vampire right up until she came out and told me, which came along with propositioning me to become one of them myself. Refusing had put her into a snit, indirectly leading to my supposedly temporary exile in Solitude. I certainly had a way with women—every one of them I had ever cared for was indifferent, insane, or impossible to get along with.
Sitting there in the cold, I watched the sun go down in the west over the Sea of Ghosts. As night came on, I wondered if all of my worries were a dog's worries. I was well-fed, well-kept and living in a cage. The cage door might be opened in a couple of years to let me out, but would I still be a wolf when that time came? Or would I have become too civilized to live in a wolf's world anymore?
My family—the Dark Brotherhood—were wolves, no doubt about it, so I had been raised by wolves, raised to be a wolf myself. Now I was expected to live like a dog so I could blend in among sheep better. The problem with wearing a mask, as Nazir explained to me once, was that the longer you wore it, the harder it was to take off. Eventually, if you weren't careful, you became the mask—and everything under it was just gone.
I wanted Dagny in my life, but part of me feared that she was just another layer of the mask I was wearing. If I added enough layers to that mask, I would forget myself. What use would I be to the Brotherhood then? There would be no place for a dog in a wolf's den. At the same time, was being a dog so bad? Wolves starved, they got hurt, and they died young. Wolves were hunted. Dogs were well cared for and admired.
But Runa was a wolf too—and she wouldn't want a dog. She had joined the Guild and I had joined the Brotherhood, but our paths had been so similar that we had fallen right back into being friends. She understood me and I could be myself with her. Even if I could leave the Brotherhood, it would be a part of my life that would always be a secret to Dagny. I could be honest with Runa—completely honest.
While I lay sick and dying some months back, when people thought I couldn't hear them talking about me, I had heard things that I hadn't understood at the time. Meena had said that I lacked conviction—the quality of character that allows a person to do things against their own conscience and not be broken by it. She put it in a different, more insane way, of course, but that had been the gist. I realized that my inability to pick between Runa and Dagny—to pick between the Brotherhood and a life outside of it—was proof that Meena had been right.
It took until the last dregs of sunlight vanished for me to decide that I couldn't make a decision. There was nothing to be done about it tonight either way. I sometimes missed my "adopted mother" in situations like this. Hecate might not always make the best decisions, but she at least knew how to make them.
Picking myself up and carefully petting Pavot—making sure that I was respecting his space this time—I headed back toward the Bards College. I had a lot of homework to do, and the next few days were probably going to be very annoying.
The next several days of class were annoying and unpleasant, punctuated by brief arguments with my friends over politics. Looking forward to the weekend was the only thing that let me focus on my work at all.
The only thing I heard from Dagny over the next few days was a brief note, delivered by a school page, that she would be dealing with family issues all week and wouldn't have any time for me until Loredas. I suppose it was better than getting nothing at all, but it was damnably quiet about the things I wanted to hear—that she didn't hate me, that she still wanted to see me.
Runa was as good as her word and didn't try to contact me at school. We both knew the value of maintaining a secret identity, and people being able to connect a pretty, leather-clad Nord girl with Aventus Aretino, the prospective bard, was bad enough without giving them a potential reason to connect me with a member of the Thieves' Guild. The fact that Nelkir had seen us together, however briefly, was also worrisome. I was still too angry to even consider trying to talk to him about it, though.
Each day of class drew us closer to the culmination of our last assignment before winter break: Professor Gemane's stupid point-of-view exercise. We had spent almost a week talking about the historical importance of bardic neutrality, and how that influenced the development of certain songs and poems. Particularly, he talked a great deal about the ways that politics forced music and poetry down certain paths. It had actually been sort of interesting up until he started waxing poetic about the innate heroism of the Stormcloak Rebellion.
"You always look so mad when Gemane starts talking about the Stormcloaks," Ataf commented during lunch on Fredas. "You'd think that Ulfric had kicked your puppy or something."
"I don't like bullies," I told him, somewhat sourly. "He has an incredible power that some people can only dream about, and he used it to murder his king. That makes him the villain, not the hero."
"Is killing a king always wrong then?" Jorn asked, scratching his chin. "I'm pretty sure that most of Tamriel would have rejoiced if someone had managed to take down Pelagius the Mad before his time."
"Or Queen Potema, for that matter," Illdi chimed in. We all looked at her; it was rare for the quiet Nord girl to voice a strong opinion about politics. She blushed before continuing, "I'm not saying what Ulfric did was right—I'm from here in Solitude, after all, and High King Torygg was a good man—but we Nords have a long tradition of settling 'right' and 'wrong' with violence, so it's hard to judge him. He's too big for regular people to judge."
"Too big?" I asked, not understanding. "No one is so big they're above right and wrong."
"What about the Dark Brotherhood?" Aia asked. I nearly choked and quickly drank some water to cover my panic as she continued. "The Empire purged their ranks a generation ago, but they were supposed to be 'beyond good and evil.' One story I heard back in Cyrodiil was that there used to be a statue of a Lucky Old Lady in Bravil, and if you prayed there for relief from life's misfortunes, the Dark Brotherhood would come and save you from them."
"The Dark Brotherhood are soulless murderers," Ataf snarled with far more vehemence than I would have expected from the normally mild-mannered youth. I looked at him with hurt eyes, but his expression only tightened further. "Don't tell me you believe in Aia's nonsense, Aventus?"
"Nonsense?" Aia said, offended. "Why, I never-"
"That's right," Ataf interrupted. "You never think about anyone else but yourself and your stories about how awesome life is in Cyrodiil!" Seeing Aia's face flash with hurt, Ataf opened his mouth to say something more, but then seemed to think better of it and simply walked away from the table.
"What was that about?" I asked once he was gone.
"Ataf told me that his oldest brother was murdered a couple of years ago," Jorn said quietly. "I guess he thinks the Brotherhood was behind it."
"By the Eight…" Aia muttered. "If I had known…"
"If you had known, would you have responded to Ataf's question differently?" Jorn asked, his voice carefully neutral. She looked away from the white-haired boy, managing to look abashed for the first time since I had known her.
"Ataf asked Aia out," Illdi whispered to me, learning in close. "He's probably still a little hurt from her saying no."
I nodded but stayed quiet, wondering if it was true that Ataf's brother had been killed by the Dark Brotherhood. Had my family taken someone from Ataf's family? Worse than that, I knew that if we had, he had probably deserved it. It was true that we sometimes took jobs for base coin rather than from prayers to the Night Mother, but in my time as an assassin, I couldn't honestly say we had ever taken a contract on anyone truly innocent…
In a flash, I realized that this was what they had all been trying to tell me about Ulfric Stormcloak. I had never doubted in the Night Mother's role as the silent voice of vengeance—or the Brotherhood's role as her servants. Our task was holy. But from outside, I could understand how people would see us as monsters, criminals, and worse. Was that how Ulfric Stormcloak felt too? Judged as a criminal for behaving in a way he saw as righteous?
The question haunted me for the rest of the day.
After school was out, I packed a few things for my weekend away from campus and noticed that Ataf was apparently already gone. It was unusual for him to leave the dormitories on the weekends, and I found myself hoping that he was okay.
The quick walk to Proudspire Manor was uneventful, but as I approached the front doors, I happened to see Frothar and Dagny standing on the front porch of their home, obviously waiting for someone. I supposed that it had to be Nelkir, and my face tightened at the thought of running into him. As I came up, I raised a hand and waved at them. Frothar smiled pleasantly and waved back, but Dagny turned away from me, turning her nose up slightly as she did. I could almost hear her sniff of disdain from thirty feet away, and my heart sank.
I dropped my hand limply to my side, and Frothar turned toward his sister, covering his mouth with a hand. I couldn't tell for certain, but his eyes made it seem like he was laughing. I felt my cheeks turn red as I turned away and started walking for Proudspire's stair. Before I could unlock the door, I heard footsteps behind me, and I turned, settling into a defensive stance. The last thing I needed today was Frothar trying to pound my face in for "disrespecting" his sister.
To my surprise, it was actually Dagny standing there, looking flushed and annoyed. I glanced over at Frothar, but the eldest son of Jarl Balgruuf was studiously ignoring the situation and carefully studying his manicured fingernails.
"Hi," I managed to stammer out, feeling immediately stupid for not being able to say anything wittier.
"A couple of weeks without seeing me and you completely forget how to talk," she replied, putting her fists on her hips. "I swear, Aventus Aretino, how did you ever survive before you met me?"
"Not very well," I admitted. For some reason, her flushed look became even deeper, and I suddenly realized that she was actually blushing.
"I was going to let you sweat until tomorrow," she said, stepping closer, "but when I saw how forlorn you looked, I realized it would be needlessly cruel. Like picking on a helpless animal."
"I'm no one's dog, princess," I said with more heat than I intended, but instead of recoiling from me, she only stepped closer.
"That remains to be seen," she replied before laying both of her hands on my chest and leaning up to press her lips against mine. I rested my hands gently on her hips and enjoyed the kiss until she leaned away.
"I didn't intend to stand you up," I told her. "Nelkir-"
"Oh, I already know," she interrupted. "When you didn't show up, my first thought was that you were hurt or something. Then Nelkir showed up late, reeking of ale and spinning a long, loving tale about how he happened to see you while he was out drinking—happened to see you enjoying a drink with a pretty Nord girl, brown-haired and wearing leather." I groaned internally and frowned, which only made Dagny giggle.
"You know I would never intentionally-" I started, only to be interrupted again.
"Of course you wouldn't," she said with a crooked smile. "You're too dependable by half, not to mention simple." She sighed and shook her head. "No, I've been Nelkir's sister long enough to know when he's trying to wind me up. It didn't take long to get him to admit that he lied to get you away from me and took you out to get you drunk."
"That's pretty much how it happened," I admitted.
"Well, I pretty well scoured his ears with my scolding," she told me. "He just laughed until I threatened to go to Father about it. That shut him up."
"Why would your father care?" I asked her.
"He's good friends with your mother," Dagny told me. "If he found out Nelkir was corrupting the Dragonborn's adopted son, he'd be good and mad about that. He might even take Nelkir's allowance away. That's more fearsome to him than almost anything else." She looked up into my eyes and smiled again, more genuinely this time. "Honestly, I half think that Father is planning on marrying me off to you to cement his friendship with your mother."
"But we've only known each other a couple of months," I stuttered.
"That's longer than most of my cousins knew their husbands before they got married," she laughed. "Nords don't believe in wasting time, hadn't you heard? Arranged marriages, even less so." She backed away a step and made a show of looking me up and down. "Still, I'm not sold on the idea of marrying you yet. You're going to have to give a better showing than you have been lately if you want my approval as well as Jarl Balgruuf's."
My jaw was hanging open, which made Dagny laugh uproariously before darting in to kiss me on the corner of the mouth. She reached up and pushed my chin until my teeth clicked together. I blinked rapidly to try and understand what had just happened as she danced away. Once she was back on her own porch, she linked her arm through her brother's and the two of them began to laugh. Frothar waved to me once as they began to walk away, and I managed to lift one hand to wave back.
Once they were gone, I found my fingers tracing their way up to where Dagny had kissed me, a spot that still tingled from the touch of her lips. I still didn't understand women at all, I concluded. Rather than try to figure it all out, I went inside and made my way to my room. I had work to do tonight, after all. Still, I couldn't help but feel a tiny thrill at knowing Dagny didn't hate me.
Marriage, though? As if I wasn't confused enough already…
It was time.
The frigid Skyrim night had closed in around Solitude, filling the streets with damp mist and puddles of half-frozen slush. The sky was as dark as the Void; clouds covered the stars, and the moons were in their darkest phase tonight. The streets would have been pitch-black save for the moving torches of city guardsmen and the occasional lighted street lamp.
Putting out the lamps around Thane Erikur's house had been easy enough. People underestimated the value of the sling as a weapon, but I had found that the ability to hurl a small missile with great precision was an invaluable tool in the arsenal of an assassin. Standing in the shadows of a nearby alley, I had simply waited until I heard Runa's all-clear whistle before using the leather strip to put a rock through each lamp's housing; the one time the lamp didn't go out immediately, the damp and drizzle did the rest of the job within a couple of minutes.
Once the night around Erikur's home was as dark as we could make it, giving us plenty of forewarning if any of the city guard approached, Runa and I made our way to the side door of the house. My previous entry strategy had been based around the need to break-and-enter if necessary, as well as not having a lookout; having a trained thief with me improved my options from "forced entry" to "quiet forced entry." I gave Runa a boost up onto the raised veranda, then climbed up with her help.
Runa quickly picked the lock while I kept watch. She mumbled and cursed about the lock's difficulty, even breaking a pick off and having to dislodge the metal nib before continuing. Given how shiny and new the metal looked, I could only guess that Erikur had beefed up his locks since the last time we were here. Finally, she managed to get the lock open and we slipped inside just as a torch-carrying city guard came around the corner.
We hunkered down inside the house, waiting until the guard's pattern carried him down the street, before moving on. I was fondly reminded of two-man jobs I had done with Garnag, and I briefly wondered how he was doing up in High Rock. I made a mental note to write him a letter soon before returning to the present and focusing on the job at hand.
The two of us ghosted through the house, efficiently scouting each floor. We quickly discovered how deep Erikur's paranoia had gone since the last time we had been here. Across the hall from his trophy room, one of the guest rooms had been converted into a makeshift guard room. Three burly-looking guards were sitting around a table, playing cards with the door open; occasionally, one of them would stand up from the table, grab a lit lantern, and patrol the hall. We had no idea how frequent these guard patrols were, but we didn't need to—Erikur's valuables weren't our goal tonight. Instead, we hid ourselves until the first guard passed our hiding place, then quickly made our way to Erikur's master bedroom.
The door was locked but not barred. This was where all of our planning could fall apart; if the lock was too difficult for Runa to get open before the house guard came back through, we'd wind up having to kill at least one person tonight—maybe several. Strangely enough, my usual reservations about killing anyone who got in my way weren't as loud as normal. The thrill of breaking into a house with a half-baked plan and violence in my heart had dispelled most of my worries.
I wondered, was this what Cicero felt like all the time?
Fortunately, Runa was able to get us past the lock silently, and we slipped into the sleeping thane's bedroom. His snoring made far more noise than our footsteps. Runa relocked the door from inside, then the two of us moved the heaviest dresser in the room to block it. If all went well, the guards would never know we were here at all, but better to be cautious.
Once all the preparations were in place, I threw the window open, letting in a cold breeze. Erikur turned over in his sleep and shivered, finally waking to a pitch black room. He muttered and looked in the direction of the open window. My better night vision told me that his face was confused, as though he were trying to remember why he had left the window open.
That was when Runa lit the bedside lantern.
Erikur's eyes went wide and his mouth went open to scream. Runa jammed a rolled-up sock into his gaping mouth and put the tip of her dagger under his chin.
"None of that now," she said pleasantly. Erikur continued to scramble away from her, as though he could climb up the headboard of his bed and fly away. She roughly grabbed the back of his neck and held him in her vice-like grip. When he finally stopped struggling, she let go of him. "We need to have a conversation, so I'm going to pull the sock out of your mouth—but if you scream…"
He nodded rapidly but shallowly, trying to keep his double chin away from the sharpened point of Runa's knife. His eyes continued to be wide and fearful, but he was showing remarkable control for a man who had awakened to a murder threat.
"You tried to cut the Guild out of a deal, Thane Erikur," Runa said menacingly. "We don't much care for business partners who try to cheat us."
"I don't know what-" he started to say, before Runa laid a finger across his lips, shushing him like a patient parent. It chilled my blood; how many times had I seen Grelod make that same gesture right before knocking a tooth out of a child's mouth with her gnarled fist? Instead, Runa just patted him on the cheek once he fell into quiet again, and I quickly recovered my nerve.
"Don't bother lying," she commanded. "We know."
On my cue, I stepped out of the shadows, letting the lantern-light spill across my red-and-black armor, the black hand of the Dark Brotherhood prominent on my breastplate. Erikur's mouth went wide again, and Runa only kept him from screaming by jamming the sock back into his mouth. His nightgown went dark at the crotch and I grinned under my concealing cowl.
This was going to be fun.
…to be continued…