He was sixteen when he began seeing his father in the mirror.

Facial hair had come late for Bishop as most signs of manhood. He was still a pipsqueak while his bunkmates shot up like weeds, turning from little boys to grown men seemingly overnight. He was self conscious, changing for bed and after exercises, though his small stature and high voice kept him nonthreatening to the girls across the hall, and they let him sit in with them and listen to their tales. Sometime during his first year at the Circle of Blades, Arky Trovo had turned fifteen and arrived, escorted by her mother. "It's that or the brothels," she said to Master Ygrellin, the half-orc leader of their sect, "I'd rather she sell her sword arm than her pussy and Gods know they're the only two things she has." Arky looked not the least bit concerned, and announced that relished the thought of learning to use her little pen knife properly. During that first year year, more nights than not, he snuck in to trade stories and news of the old neighborhood after lights out. More than once he'd dozed off in her bunk, and on days off he went with her to see her parents and brother, who'd enlisted in the army.

He felt distant, even when he had Fray were sitting side by side at the Cuckoo just like they'd always done. It got worse for awhile when his regiment was sent to fight in Neverwinter and he returned two months later with an arrow in his leg that was taking too long to heal in the germ-ridden camp. They sipped their ale, their eyes travelling over the white and black roses in the bosoms of the women who worked there. They didn't talk, but they knew, old men before their eighteenth birthday.

At the Circle, classes took up some of the day - reading and writing for those who had not had the privilege of learning as children, the Theology of Cyric for those who had. Bishop had always found religion a little boring, but the time he'd been caught doodling pictures of wolves in his notebook, Dayven had taken the quill pen he was using and put it right through his hand. Arky patched him up, and he healed, but he'd learned his lesson.

He was an apprentice for longer than most, having come to the Circle before his fourteenth birthday. For whatever reason, an assassin would have to be seventeen before being allowed to be a journeyman and work independently. It wasn't care for a boy of tender age - far from it, Dayven handed a crossbow to Bishop when he was fifteen and pointed at the target. Bishop loosed the bolt automatically, and fled before he could hear the screams of the woman he'd hit. It was probably fear that a little boy would lose his nerve. In any case, Bishop had learned more than most just by virtue of having been schooled for longer. It got so he could find anybody in the whole city of Luskan with only a name and a piece of their clothing. The other apprentices called him the Bloodhound. He pretended not to like the nickname, but secretly he glowed with pride.

Eventually, manhood came for him, dropping his voice to a throaty, raspy baritone and sending him through multiple sizes of uniform in only a few months. The girls stopped talking as soon as he came into a room. Arky stopped talking to him altogether, avoiding his gaze. By his sixteenth birthday, he was taller and broader than all but a few of his companions. And shaggier.

"Circle of Blades don't wear beards," Dayven said to him one day, "Gives the enemy something to grab on to, slit our throats. So take this blade and either do that for them - or shave the damn beard." He obeyed. He knew the punishment for disobedience. It took Bishop a few weeks to learn to get the hair off his face without cutting himself, lathering up his face in the mirror above one of the stone basins he and the other boys washed in. Then, one day, after wetting his face in preparation, he looked back up at himself, and flinched. The amber eyes, the high cheekbones, square jaw. He hadn't seen that face since it belong to a man about to break his nose. He was five years old and the man in the mirror had a belt of a piece of wood or… he had to run. He backed away from the mirror, and fled from the room, gathering his tunic in his hands and tugging it on in the hallway as he ran.

Arky came around the corner just as he went around, and he barreled right into her, knocking her to the floor. She hit the ground rolling and sprang up like a cat - evidence of her training, her hand going instinctively to the knife at her belt.

"Cyric's right ball," she cursed, "Watch where you're bloody well going you great oaf."

"I'm sorry," he croaked out.

Her expression softened, "What happened Kyr? You look like you've seen a ghost."

She hadn't said his name in almost a year. He looked her in the face as he hadn't in a long time. She was still wiry thin, but she'd grown tall for a woman, and her features were now distinctly feminine. Nobody would mistake her for a boy anymore. He felt his face go hot.

"I… it doesn't matter, nevermind."

"Hey," she said gently, "It's all right, I'm not hurt. What happened?"

"I saw myself in the mirror," he said. Gods how stupid does that sound? Why do I care if I sound stupid in front of Arky?

"Guess I'd freak out too," Arky said, "If I looked up and saw that looking back at me."

He chuckled, "How charming you've become, Ms. Trovo." It felt good, back to joking with her, letting her insult him, like whatever had come between them since they'd both grown up hadn't happened.

"Look, they're not going to like you going out there with half an inch of stubble on your cheeks. Come on," she said, taking him by the hand. Her hand was narrow in his, but the fingers just as callused. He didn't protest as she led him back into the washing room.

"You know my initiation is soon," she said, "After that they're sending me out to be journeyman to Ben, I'll be back outside."

"Ben?" Bishop said, impressed. Ben Cutter was a legend in the Circle of Blades. By day he ran a respectable barber shop in the district uphill from the Docks. His legend came mostly from the fact that he'd managed to keep the place open for a good twenty years without being caught or taken out. Legend had it, a mark of his had sat in his chair one day, and Ben had cut him with a blade so thin that the man walked all the way home before he even noticed the wound. The poison took another day to do its work. "So whose dick did you suck to get that job?"

"Well I guess we know how you got where you've gotten, but to answer your question, some of us have actual talent," she said, "The point I was trying to make was that I'll have to be able to cut hair and shave a man's face if I'm to last, and take over his shop. So how about you sit down. You get your face cleaned up and you don't have to look at it."

"And let you put a knife to my throat?"

"You want Dayven to put a hole through your other hand?" Arky said, raising her eyebrows, "I would take your chances with me."

It was oddly soothing, letting her scrape the blade against his chin and cheeks. It reminded him of when Kyla used to cut his hair, snipping slowly and carefully, making sure it was even, so nobody at school could take the piss out of him for having a shoddy cut. Arky was also slow and careful, cupping his chin under with her hand. When she was satisfied, she took his hand in hers and put it to his own cheek. He felt smooth skin for the first time in what felt like forever.

"Thanks, Arky," he said, looking up to meet her gaze. She looked away, and he saw color rise in her cheeks.

"You know that's not my actual name, right?" She said.

"What?" He responded incredulously, "We've known each other for eight years, how is your name not Arky?"

"It's short for Kantarkaya," she said, "It's Amnese."

"Huh!" He said, "That sounds like a woman's name. I did always wonder that."

"I am a woman," she said, "After all."

She patted his cheek softly, and left the washroom.

The next several hours were spent in the depths of the deepest sub basement. Some priest of Cyric mumbled some bullshit about embracing the madness, that the world needed to be cleansed, and the cleansing had to be done by them, by celebrating destruction and deception. Bishop hated that part. He didn't care for deities to begin with, and he especially didn't care for the way that some among the assassins slavered and spoke in tongues over a God that was really only some thief from Zhentil Keep. He also didn't like that the most religious among them seemed to revere him, Bishop, as some kind of holy man. He wasn't quite sure what he'd done, but the devout assassins always nodded to him in the hallways and let him pass first, despite the fact that he was but a lowly apprentice.

Over the next several months, the bunkroom he slept in emptied out. There was talk among the Circle of Blades that the Hosttower, the amalgamation of mages that they technically worked for - though there was plenty of independent contracting among the brotherhood - was planning something large and that their funding had been cut. Apprentices were being rushed through their initiations so they could be put to work, carrying out private jobs for the nobles of the city to plug holes in the rapidly sinking ship. Bishop had been doing that all along - he had realized what bad shape Dayven was in the first time he'd handed him a crossbow and told him to put a bolt through a prostitute's neck. He'd done it, and the one after that, and the one after that. After that he'd switched to a short bow he had more control over, leaping over rooftops, making sure that the arrow found its home. He held his tongue about these little transgressions, though he knew most of the profits were going to feed his master's addiction. That wouldn't last, though, the higher-ups were already eyeing him, wondering when he would turn seventeen already so he could be of use to them, not just the wretched Dayven. By the Fall of his sixteenth year, he and Arky were the only ones left. Her birthday was then, close to the Harvest Festival, and she was old enough to be a journeyman. Bishop had another half a year.

She came to his empty bunkroom the night before her initiation. She'd picked a border town to sack. She didn't care particularly, and picked the one that her mistress, the elfin assassin Shian-hai, had suggested. Bishop was lounged out on the bottom bunk, reading a text about the flora of the Mere in Neverwinter, getting ideas for some nefarious poisons he could brew if he could just get his hands on the right flowers and leaves.

"Like old times, huh Kyr?" She said. She was the only one who still called him by his first name, he realized. All the others were dead.

"Without four other whispering giggling girlfolk around, but yeah, I suppose," he said.

"Girlfolk as will cut your balls off and make you eat them, if that's what you mean by it," she said, reminding him of his place. She had seniority of him just by virtue of being born six months earlier, and he probably should not forget it.

They stayed there, him in the bunk and her in the doorway, the silence grating and awkward for a long moment.

"Look," she said, her voice thick with something, "I have to…" she stopped, "I guess I …"

"Well spit it out," he said.

He really wasn't quite sure how the next sequence of events transpired. In his memory, years later, she was standing in the doorway one second, and in the next, she had disappeared from there, and reappeared in his bunk next to him. While she stood in the door, she was his friend Arky, the little wharf rat who'd had his back when he was just a kid from the docks, wiry and cutthroat and perpetually damp. When she'd appeared in his arms, her honeybrown hair loose and spilling over his face as she kissed him full on the mouth, she was someone else. Someone he didn't know, or maybe someone he did know, and just didn't realize was there.

Oh that's what that's about, he thought.

She broke away. "Oh Gods," she exclaimed, putting her hands to her face, "I'm so embarrassed. I'll go…"

"No…" he croaked, finding his voice, "I just… I didn't think it was like that."

"So it's not?" She asked.

He thought a moment. He knew he liked girls, he just never really thought of which girl. It wasn't as though one were just as good as another or anything like that, he'd just always assumed Dayven would take him to a brothel on the night before his initiation and he'd get that part out of the way with whatever doxy at the Cuckoo's Nest was available. Come to think of it, the only girl he'd really thought about was Dayven's wife. Word was she'd been whoring on the docksides too, and he always got a little flutter of glee at what perfect revenge it would be for all the beatings through all the years. To forever be able to say, "Oh yeah? Well I fucked your wife."

But it wasn't Addie'd that sewed im up after the thing with the quill, it was Arky. Arky had been there, closing his wounds, and he'd been there, holding her good hand while bonesetter shoved the bones of her bad one back into place. Hell, it was Addie who'd let him come to this shitty place. And it was Arky who was here, all soft skin and brown curls, in his bed. He'd liked kissing her.

So he did it again. He tangled his hands in her hair and kissed her back this time, not quite sure what he was supposed to be doing, but figuring that it was something most every person did for the first time once, and trusting his instincts.

The last conscious thought he had was Oh, she's done this before, before he completely lost any kind of words for the next fifteen minutes or so.

The next conscious thought he had went something like, Oh Gods, Fray is going to be so pissed…. He chuckled out loud at the thought of the fist fight he and her brother would have to have at some point. She lifted her head from his bare chest and looked at him.

"What's so funny?" She asked nervously.

I shouldn't say it, I should just keep my mouth shut. His better nature failed him. "I'm never going to lose an argument with Fray again," he said.

She looked like he'd slapped her. Shocked, and then angry. She leapt from the bunk and started rummaging in the bedclothes for her clothes.

"No, Arky, I didn't mean it like that," he protested.

"Then what did you mean it like, Kyr?" She demanded, pulling up her breeches, "You give more of a shit about my dirtbag brother than me? He's not the one who-"

"Arky, stop. Come back," he insisted, "It was stupid. I shouldn't have said anything. I'm an asshole."

"You got that right," she countered, pulling her tunic over her torso without bothering with the corset she'd been wearing under it, "But I'm glad you did, glad I know exactly how you feel. Men are all the fucking same, thinking with your cock until it's satisfied and then not a godsdamn brain in the body."

"I'm sorry!" He shouted, "OK? It was stupid. I'm stupid. Don't go."

"Whatever," she huffed, heading to the doorway, "And don't worry. If you knocked me up I'm going to kill it."

She slammed the door. He flinched at the sound.

She'll calm down in the morning. I'll apologize again. Then everything will be OK. I'll visit her at the barbershop with an armload of roses or whatever the fuck it is women want. Everything will be fine.

He waited outside the gates of their compound the next night, hoping for word of the band that she and Shian-Hai had led to burn the Neverese town of Lanton. Two others of their number, Master Ygrellin and a drow woman named Esangi, waited with him, eager to congratulate the new journeyman assassin. His heart leapt a little when he saw the black cloaks at the end of the street, looking for Arky's willowy form among them. But when they drew closer, he saw that they were four, not the six that had left, and when Shian-Hai pulled her hood back, her face was grave.

"What happened?" Ygrellin demanded, the tusks curling from his lower lips making his voice sound fierce.

"We burned it," Shian-Hai said.

"But?"

"Two militiamen surprised us. Arky and Ranthyn took arrows. Neither lived," she said, matter-of-factly.

What happened next, Ygrellin utterly losing his shit and throwing Shian-Hai clear across the courtyard, the shouted discussions about what exactly the fuck their organization was supposed to do without a new journeyman, was a blur in Bishop's mind. He retreated from the courtyard, down to the sub basement, where he seated himself at the foot of the statue of Cyric.

"So what now?" He asked the statue, knowing full well it was just a slab of granite and would not answer him, "What's the fucking point?"

For the first time, he felt the Mad God might be right. Everything was not going to be fine. Nothing was going to be good, ever again. Every tiny sliver of hope he had had since Kyla's death was squelched, over and over and over again. The world really was a stinking heap of midden just like in the teachings.

Well fuck. I guess I really am just a bastard, just like my old man.

He looked up at the statue of the God again. "Well, I guess I'm in the right place."