"Where did he go off to, anyway?" Didier asked, sitting across from her by the crackling fire.
"I don't know, Timothee didn't tell me," Élise said. Arno was off somewhere, Élise did not know where. Timothee had not said. That was standard Templar practice, much like with the Assassins, to not spread information about operations unnecessarily. What was remarkable they trusted him as much as they did, to let him go off on his own like this.
"He really has earned Chobat's trust, hasn't he?" she said.
And yet still she had not confessed her feelings, even when Timothee so trusted his loyalty to the Templar cause. Maybe -
"Bien, it benefits the Assassins, their fight against the Illuminati I mean, to have him keep coming back. We have all the juicy secrets to supply him, since most of the Illuminati used to be us."
That was a pragmatic, actually disappointing way of looking at it.
Sophie, a cup of hot tea in hand, sat down next to Didier to join them by the fire.
"You won't believe the stories coming out of Vendée," she said.
"Bad?" Didier asked.
"They're drowning people in Liore by the thousands! Republican Baptisms is what those monsters are calling it! Calling the Liore River the National Bathtub!"
Sophie was pretty reserved, it took a lot to get her this spirited.
"Christ," Didier said, shaking his head.
"Women are being tied to trees and raped, babies carried away on bayonets like trophies!"
This was what had replaced the aristocracy Élise once saw as the root of all France's evil.
Didier just grunted, looking into his lap.
Élise meekly proposed, "Maybe if the Assassins hear of these atrocities, they'll extend their truce."
The wind howled outside. Neither said anything, until Didier looked up. But not to address her point.
"You know I was always impressed the cruelty the Godly could enact. But it seems nothing compared to the wrath of the Godless."
She knew the old world had often been a hideous place too. The slavery of the Caribbean, the burning of heretics, the tortures of the Inquisition. Jacques De Molay had spent his final days tasting fully of Christendom's cruelty. But the barbarity of the "enlightened" may have finally surpassed it.
She thought back to what Robespierre had told her in her cell:
"Virtue without terror is impotent. And you've spawned a new impetus for terror."
How much of this was her fault?
No, one man's death, even Marat, could not bring out such monsters in the people of France.
Though it had certainly helped.