Wildroses
Well-Known Member
Notes: A short story, showing how 'With Friends Like These' went down for one of my characters. Inspired by a non-smut prompt on Skyrim Kink Meme, it was an experiment on my part to see if it was possible to write a self contained short story for a character in which I knew an awful lot of her past and future. I'm still trying to decide if I managed it or not.
Darkling woke up very, very slowly, her mind so fogged becoming conscious was a battle. It terrified her, bringing back memories of not being the Master of her own body and being a helpless prisoner inside her own mind. When she did finally managed to sit up, shaking off the last vestiges of what she could now identify was a drug, Darkling was so relieved there was no possibility of deathly cold hands rearranging her clothing and hair to expose her neck she wept.
“Sleep well?” an amused, feminine voice asked, further easing Darkling’s mind. The owner of the deathly cold hands had been a man.
“What?” Darkling said, taking in her surroundings. She distinctly remembered falling asleep in her own bed at Lakeview Manor. Now she was sitting on a dusty floor in a small, dark room. What little furniture she could see was stained with something Darkling suspected was blood. Clearly the place had been long abandoned. “Where am I? Who are you?” As she spoke, Darkling spotted the owner of the voice who had asked how she’d slept. It was masked woman sitting on top of a bookcase, clad in a tight red and black armour. Darkling was reasonably sure she’d never seen her before in her life, but she couldn’t be certain. Years of having her mind psychically overwhelmed on a regular basis to keep her docile had damaged her ability to recall her early years. Darkling hadn’t been the name she was born with, but it was the only one she remembered. She had several memories of her old Master referring to her as his “little Darkling” in reference to her hair. Very few Altmer had jet black hair. Darkling had a memory fragment which made her suspect her hair colour had been the feature which first grabbed her Master’s attention when he was hunting a suitably attractive thrall.
It was then Darkling’s memory of the previous day, before she’d gone to bed returned in full, filling her with panic. She hadn’t been alone. It had been Lucia’s first night in Lakeview Manor. After she’d wolfed down the three bowls of venison stew Darkling had placed in front of her and had a bath to get several months of accumulated dirt off her skin Lucia had fallen into the deep sleep Darkling recognised as only possible when you are on a mattress underneath a roof after months of outdoor living. Sofie had been a little harder to persuade into bed, the excitement of getting that longed for sibling they’d so recently believed impossible making her disinclined to sleep. A wild glance around the small shack only eased Darkling’s mind for a minute. There were three bound figures behind her, all of them adult sized, and she couldn’t see child sized shapes anywhere, unless they were in the chest or barrel. As she wasn’t bound, Darkling walked over to confirm both containers were empty of human children before screaming at the mysterious woman: “What did you do to my daughters? Where are they?”
“Does it matter? They’re…”
“Yes. It. Matters,” Darkling hissed, letting her hands curl around the hilts of her dagger and sword. Even though she had taken both weapons off before she’d gone into bed, Darkling had woken up to find both had been belted back to her waist. It was starting to occur to her that there was really something very strange about this whole situation. People normally went to a lot of effort to keep kidnap victims immobile and unarmed, not the other way around. There are four of us and I’m the only one free. Why am I so special?
It was hard to tell in the dim light if the woman could even see Darkling was gripping the hilts of her blades so tightly her knuckles were white. Perhaps she could because the next words out of her mouth were: “Still in that big house unless they wandered off somewhere.”
Darkling’s relief was tinged with unease. There was no way of knowing if she was telling the truth and even if she was meant both little girls would be waking up in a house in which their new Mama was inexplicably gone. Lucia had lost one mother not long ago. She’d only known Darkling less than a day but had spoken happily of having a real family again. Would she consider her disappearance as the loss of another mother? And as for how Sofie was going to feel Darkling was afraid to contemplate. Sofie had told Darkling her father had been a Stormcloak soldier who had one day left and didn’t come back. Initially Darkling assumed he’d died in battle, but after the fourth time Darkling had tucked Sofie to sleep in a soft cosy bed for the night and woken up the next morning to find her asleep on the hard wooden floor in front of the door, where it would be impossible for Darkling to leave the house without waking Sofie, she began to wonder if her assumptions about her Nord daughter’s past were accurate. Now was the first time ever Darkling had managed to leave Lakeview Manor without first spending ten minutes promising Sofie she’d return.
“But what matters is that they’re both warm, dry…and still very much alive. That’s more than can be said for Old Grelod, hmm?”
There was silence. When it became obvious the woman was expecting Darkling to react in some way, she ventured: “Who?”
“Grelod the Kind.”
“Who is she?”
“It’s no good pretending to me you don’t know who she was…”
“I’m not pretending,” Darkling said. “I have no idea who Grelod the Kind is.”
“The woman you murdered. Remember now?”
Darkling shook her head. “Was I with a Redguard man when I murdered her?”
“It’s no good trying to pretend it wasn’t you who killed her …”
“I wasn’t trying to pretend I haven’t murdered anyone. I was trying to narrow the possibilities. If I wasn’t with a Redguard man then I must have killed this Grelod in the last few months.”
Darkling’s kidnapper said nothing. Her body language reminded Darkling of her old Master when victims didn’t take conversations the way he had been planning when he was playing one of his games. Eventually Darkling was forced to say: “I still need help narrowing down the possibilities.”
“You seriously don’t remember Grelod?”
“No. I’ve killed a lot of women in the last few months. Who was Grelod? Was she a bandit? Necromancer? Rogue Mage? Falmer? Do Falmer even have names?”
“Grelod the Kind ran an orphanage in Riften until you butchered her inside it.”
Realisation finally dawned. “Oh! Her. Was her name seriously Grelod the Kind? She was the second unkindest person I’ve ever met!”
“Oh, but don’t misunderstand. I’m not criticising. It was a good kill,” the stranger said her voice becoming more assure as she spoke. Possibly she felt better now the conversation was following her personal script again. “Old crone had it coming. And you saved a group of urchins, to boot. But there is a slight…problem.”
“I was drugged then taken away from my house and my children and you think the problem we have is slight?” Darkling muttered. She wasn’t sure if Astrid didn’t hear her or just pretended not to.
“You see, that little Arentino boy…”
“Who?”
“Oh, not this again,” the woman snapped. “The kid who paid you to murder Grelod!”
“But nobody paid me to kill Grelod.”
That made the kidnapper pause. “Then why did you kill her?”
“My daughter wanted a playmate, so I took her to Grelod’s orphanage to adopt one. Grelod assumed I was here to give her Sofie. When I told her I was Sofie was my daughter, she said an elf had no business raising a human so Sofie wasn’t going anywhere. I told Grelod she couldn’t stop me leaving with Sofie. Grelod said she could and dragged Sofie into this little room with shackles. I killed her as she was snapping one around Sofie’s wrist.” It had been one of Darkling’s more difficult kills, although not because Grelod had been difficult to kill. Quite the reverse, the stupid woman had turnd her back on Darkling while she was trying to chain Sofie and wasn’t even wearing armour. What had made it hard was killing Grelod in such a way Sofie wouldn’t end up covered in her blood.
“Huh. Well, regardless, Aventus Arentino was looking for the Dark Brotherhood. For me and my associates.”
Darkling opened her mouth, but before she could say anything woman snapped: “We’re a faction of assassins, and even if you don’t know who Aventus is or we are, the problem remains. Grelod the Kind was, by all rights, a Dark Brotherhood contract. A kill…that you stole. A kill you must repay.”
And then everything made sense to Darkling. Her kidnap, being in this abandoned shack, the three bound figures, the care that had gone into arming her with familiar weapons and the stranger’s body language when Darkling didn’t follow her script.
“No. No, I’m not going to play your game. I’m not belonging to anyone ever again.”
“We aren’t…”
“Don’t you dare tell me we aren’t playing a game!” Darkling hissed, running a hand down the length of her hair, past her hips. “I used to belong to a vampire. My hair was short when he found me. I was his for long enough for my hair to grow to this length. He played enough mind games for me to know one when I see one. Once you manipulate me into killing one of them I’ll be yours forever. You’ll always be seeing what else you can make me do and holding what I did over me to make me dance to your tune.”
The woman was briefly quiet. “This vampire played a lot of mind games on you, did he?”
“No. The games he played with me were always…physical. He wouldn’t play his mind games with me because wouldn’t risk giving me free will. He had to play mind games with others. And he played a lot of them.”
“You do know not all vampires are evil? Some are quite nice.”
“My Master wasn’t one of the nice ones. He was the most unkind person I’ve ever met” Darkling was the one who fell briefly silent this time, trying to banish memories. There were some more recent ones she wished were as vague as her early ones. “Why don’t we just skip to the final round, Dark Brotherhood assassin? Tell me what you are really after.”
“My name is Astrid. Why don’t you call me that? Less of a mouthful. Alright, I will tell you what I’m really after. You. I’m hoping to officially extend an invitation to join my Family. The Dark Brotherhood. You’d make a fine sister.”
“You want me to be a professional assassin? Why?”
Astrid laughed. “Why, she asks, moments after admitting she’s killed more people than she remembers. Don’t try to pretend you aren’t familiar with the concept of accepting money to kill people. You haven’t been discreet. I hear not a single mage survived Fort Amol and a not a single bandit survived Lost Knife Hideout. Jarl Siddgier refused to sell you that pretty house by the lake until you killed his embarrassing bandit connections. Everybody knows why the East Empire Company no longer worries about pirates attacking their ships. There’s a captain in Windhelm who has been bragging to everyone he meets about the example that was made of his ex-sailor’s bandit camp. Not to mention to Butcher of Windhelm.”
“I didn’t get paid for killing all of those people, just some of them. Windhelm’s steward was too cheap to pay me for dealing with his serial killer.”
“And that, my dear, is why you should join my Family. We can ensure you are always paid when you kill.”
Darkling twisted her lips, trying to think of a polite way of declining. One did not wantonly annoy professional assassins, especially ones who knew where your little girls slept. We’ll have to move somewhere else. Sofie will be disappointed. She thought the lake was so pretty. “Thank you, but I don’t need money anymore,” Darkling said, surprised at how well she kept the burning hatred for Astrid out of her bland tone. “My Master hadn’t been gone long when I killed everyone in Lost Knife Hideout and Fort Amol. I was just after food at Fort Amol and somewhere safe to sleep at Lost Knife. It was clear the only way I was going to get them was if everyone else was dead. Even when I was getting paid to kill it was only because I wanted to buy a house. Which I have done.”
“I’m not just offering you a job, Darkling, I’m offering you a family. I don’t just want to be your Leader, I want to be your sister. There’s a reason you went to such effort to live in the middle of nowhere with a couple of brats who didn’t have a better alternative to yourself. You find it very difficult to get people to like you, don’t you?”
When Darkling didn’t say anything, Astrid continued: “You don’t have to answer, I know. People who kill well and often are never liked. That’s why you need to join the Family. We’ve always welcomed those shunned by society. Wouldn’t you like to live with people who’d accept you for who you are? You can.” Astrid gestured at the three captives. “All you have to do is prove to me that if I order you to kill, you’ll obey.”
“But Astrid, I have a family now. Those two girls you took me away from. I should be heading back to them soon. I imagine they are quite upset right now.” Darkling had been edging over to the door as she spoke. It was locked, which disappointed but didn’t surprise her. “Can I please have the key?”
Despite her very best efforts to be as polite as possible, Darkling could tell Astrid was fuming. I shouldn’t have tried to be polite. Astrid didn’t want my politeness, she just told me she wanted my obedience.
“Certainly I’ll give you the key,” Astrid replied in a silken tone which made Darkling slowly take her hand off the door knob to place on her sword. As taking possession of the key would have involved stepping closer to the now silken-toned Astrid, something Darkling felt was extremely bad idea, she didn’t move from her spot by the door. “If you aren’t willing to pay the debt you owe the Dark Brotherhood, I suppose we’ll just have to collect it ourselves later. I should warn you though, elf, that once you walk out that door, there’ll be some… interest on the debt you owe the Dark Brotherhood. Two young lives would balance old Grelod’s nicely.”
Darkling considered not speaking until she was sure her voice wouldn’t shake, but decided not to bother as Astrid would probably mistake her rage for fear. “I suppose that means you have told the other members of your assassin family where the three of us live.”
“Of course.”
There wasn’t much distance between the door Darkling was standing by and the bookcase Astrid was sitting on, one leg hanging carelessly down. By the time Astrid realised her veiled threat had not had the effect she expected it was too late. Darkling had already crossed the distance and unsheathed her sword. If it had been mortal in origin Darkling may not have been able to cut through Astrid’s armour as easily as she did, but Daedric artefacts tended to be stronger and sharper than mortal ones. Astrid retaliated but wasn’t quite fast enough. Darkling saw the blade coming and stepped away, the blade slicing open her cheek instead of her throat.
“By Sithis I’ll see you dead!” Astrid screamed as she staggered off the bookcase, favouring the thigh Darkling hadn’t sliced open. Darkling just laughed as she backed away, causing the wound on her face to bleed more. “You idiot. I told you what happened to the last woman who tried to take a child from me but you made that threat anyway.” She knew full well Astrid was a dead woman limping, if not walking. Even if Astrid knew any restoration magic, it was too late for her to heal her torn femoral artery or replace her lost blood. All that was left to do now was make Astrid’s death as painful as possible. “Do you see this sword, Astrid? Its name is Dawnbreaker. The Daedric Prince who gave it to me told me to use it to purge corruption from the dark corners of this world.”
Astrid was fading fast, and now she as well as Darkling knew it. She’d given up trying to walk and was hunched over in a rapidly expanding puddle of her own blood. “Well…done…” she gasped out. Darkling ignored Astrid’s words, slowly walking closer. “I didn’t understand her at the time, but I do now. She must have known I was going to hunt down and murder every member of the Dark Brotherhood I can find. You really shouldn’t have told them where my daughters live.”
Astrid raised her head, allowing Darkling to fully appreciate the fear in her expression. “No…wait…” she cried, too late. Darkling was already swinging Dawnbreaker downwards, ensuring Astrid was die while feeling first, worst moment of impotent horror as she realised everyone she loved had just had a death sentence pronounced. One of the things Darkling had learnt from years of watching her Master playing his games was that not all pain was physical.
Freeing the other three captives was surprisingly unrewarding. Darkling wasn’t sure which of the three was worse. The woman was surprisingly aggressive for someone who had just been kidnapped. Darkling’s Master would have greatly enjoyed playing a game with her. The other human was certainly grateful, but from the way he kept promising not to mention this to anyone made Darkling suspect he thought she’d been the player rather than fellow victim of the game, which rather spoiled the effect. As for the Khajiit, despite being appropriately grateful, he was the one which most alarmed Darkling as the way he asked her to cut his bindings indicated he’d been aware a game was being played. In Darkling’s experience, people who could recognise when games were being played could only do so because they had won them in the past. Losers rarely survived. Darkling was on the verge of killing the Khajiit for mere prudence before he indicated he wanted to go separate ways and pretend they had never met.
After that Darkling only stayed long enough to strip Astrid’s corpse. The dagger Darkling decided to keep after realising the enchantment on the blade was so strong it had damaged her cheek beyond the ability of a restoration spell to fully heal. A blade like that could be useful in a fight, and she certainly had fights in her near future. This was why she also took Astrid’s armour, despite the damage. Getting to a place where she could kill the rest of the Dark Brotherhood may require a disguise.
But killing the Dark Brotherhood had to wait for now. First, she had to get back to Lakeview Manor. Her daughters would need to be moved before the Dark Brotherhood realised she’d taken Astrid from them and decided to retaliate in kind.
Darkling woke up very, very slowly, her mind so fogged becoming conscious was a battle. It terrified her, bringing back memories of not being the Master of her own body and being a helpless prisoner inside her own mind. When she did finally managed to sit up, shaking off the last vestiges of what she could now identify was a drug, Darkling was so relieved there was no possibility of deathly cold hands rearranging her clothing and hair to expose her neck she wept.
“Sleep well?” an amused, feminine voice asked, further easing Darkling’s mind. The owner of the deathly cold hands had been a man.
“What?” Darkling said, taking in her surroundings. She distinctly remembered falling asleep in her own bed at Lakeview Manor. Now she was sitting on a dusty floor in a small, dark room. What little furniture she could see was stained with something Darkling suspected was blood. Clearly the place had been long abandoned. “Where am I? Who are you?” As she spoke, Darkling spotted the owner of the voice who had asked how she’d slept. It was masked woman sitting on top of a bookcase, clad in a tight red and black armour. Darkling was reasonably sure she’d never seen her before in her life, but she couldn’t be certain. Years of having her mind psychically overwhelmed on a regular basis to keep her docile had damaged her ability to recall her early years. Darkling hadn’t been the name she was born with, but it was the only one she remembered. She had several memories of her old Master referring to her as his “little Darkling” in reference to her hair. Very few Altmer had jet black hair. Darkling had a memory fragment which made her suspect her hair colour had been the feature which first grabbed her Master’s attention when he was hunting a suitably attractive thrall.
It was then Darkling’s memory of the previous day, before she’d gone to bed returned in full, filling her with panic. She hadn’t been alone. It had been Lucia’s first night in Lakeview Manor. After she’d wolfed down the three bowls of venison stew Darkling had placed in front of her and had a bath to get several months of accumulated dirt off her skin Lucia had fallen into the deep sleep Darkling recognised as only possible when you are on a mattress underneath a roof after months of outdoor living. Sofie had been a little harder to persuade into bed, the excitement of getting that longed for sibling they’d so recently believed impossible making her disinclined to sleep. A wild glance around the small shack only eased Darkling’s mind for a minute. There were three bound figures behind her, all of them adult sized, and she couldn’t see child sized shapes anywhere, unless they were in the chest or barrel. As she wasn’t bound, Darkling walked over to confirm both containers were empty of human children before screaming at the mysterious woman: “What did you do to my daughters? Where are they?”
“Does it matter? They’re…”
“Yes. It. Matters,” Darkling hissed, letting her hands curl around the hilts of her dagger and sword. Even though she had taken both weapons off before she’d gone into bed, Darkling had woken up to find both had been belted back to her waist. It was starting to occur to her that there was really something very strange about this whole situation. People normally went to a lot of effort to keep kidnap victims immobile and unarmed, not the other way around. There are four of us and I’m the only one free. Why am I so special?
It was hard to tell in the dim light if the woman could even see Darkling was gripping the hilts of her blades so tightly her knuckles were white. Perhaps she could because the next words out of her mouth were: “Still in that big house unless they wandered off somewhere.”
Darkling’s relief was tinged with unease. There was no way of knowing if she was telling the truth and even if she was meant both little girls would be waking up in a house in which their new Mama was inexplicably gone. Lucia had lost one mother not long ago. She’d only known Darkling less than a day but had spoken happily of having a real family again. Would she consider her disappearance as the loss of another mother? And as for how Sofie was going to feel Darkling was afraid to contemplate. Sofie had told Darkling her father had been a Stormcloak soldier who had one day left and didn’t come back. Initially Darkling assumed he’d died in battle, but after the fourth time Darkling had tucked Sofie to sleep in a soft cosy bed for the night and woken up the next morning to find her asleep on the hard wooden floor in front of the door, where it would be impossible for Darkling to leave the house without waking Sofie, she began to wonder if her assumptions about her Nord daughter’s past were accurate. Now was the first time ever Darkling had managed to leave Lakeview Manor without first spending ten minutes promising Sofie she’d return.
“But what matters is that they’re both warm, dry…and still very much alive. That’s more than can be said for Old Grelod, hmm?”
There was silence. When it became obvious the woman was expecting Darkling to react in some way, she ventured: “Who?”
“Grelod the Kind.”
“Who is she?”
“It’s no good pretending to me you don’t know who she was…”
“I’m not pretending,” Darkling said. “I have no idea who Grelod the Kind is.”
“The woman you murdered. Remember now?”
Darkling shook her head. “Was I with a Redguard man when I murdered her?”
“It’s no good trying to pretend it wasn’t you who killed her …”
“I wasn’t trying to pretend I haven’t murdered anyone. I was trying to narrow the possibilities. If I wasn’t with a Redguard man then I must have killed this Grelod in the last few months.”
Darkling’s kidnapper said nothing. Her body language reminded Darkling of her old Master when victims didn’t take conversations the way he had been planning when he was playing one of his games. Eventually Darkling was forced to say: “I still need help narrowing down the possibilities.”
“You seriously don’t remember Grelod?”
“No. I’ve killed a lot of women in the last few months. Who was Grelod? Was she a bandit? Necromancer? Rogue Mage? Falmer? Do Falmer even have names?”
“Grelod the Kind ran an orphanage in Riften until you butchered her inside it.”
Realisation finally dawned. “Oh! Her. Was her name seriously Grelod the Kind? She was the second unkindest person I’ve ever met!”
“Oh, but don’t misunderstand. I’m not criticising. It was a good kill,” the stranger said her voice becoming more assure as she spoke. Possibly she felt better now the conversation was following her personal script again. “Old crone had it coming. And you saved a group of urchins, to boot. But there is a slight…problem.”
“I was drugged then taken away from my house and my children and you think the problem we have is slight?” Darkling muttered. She wasn’t sure if Astrid didn’t hear her or just pretended not to.
“You see, that little Arentino boy…”
“Who?”
“Oh, not this again,” the woman snapped. “The kid who paid you to murder Grelod!”
“But nobody paid me to kill Grelod.”
That made the kidnapper pause. “Then why did you kill her?”
“My daughter wanted a playmate, so I took her to Grelod’s orphanage to adopt one. Grelod assumed I was here to give her Sofie. When I told her I was Sofie was my daughter, she said an elf had no business raising a human so Sofie wasn’t going anywhere. I told Grelod she couldn’t stop me leaving with Sofie. Grelod said she could and dragged Sofie into this little room with shackles. I killed her as she was snapping one around Sofie’s wrist.” It had been one of Darkling’s more difficult kills, although not because Grelod had been difficult to kill. Quite the reverse, the stupid woman had turnd her back on Darkling while she was trying to chain Sofie and wasn’t even wearing armour. What had made it hard was killing Grelod in such a way Sofie wouldn’t end up covered in her blood.
“Huh. Well, regardless, Aventus Arentino was looking for the Dark Brotherhood. For me and my associates.”
Darkling opened her mouth, but before she could say anything woman snapped: “We’re a faction of assassins, and even if you don’t know who Aventus is or we are, the problem remains. Grelod the Kind was, by all rights, a Dark Brotherhood contract. A kill…that you stole. A kill you must repay.”
And then everything made sense to Darkling. Her kidnap, being in this abandoned shack, the three bound figures, the care that had gone into arming her with familiar weapons and the stranger’s body language when Darkling didn’t follow her script.
“No. No, I’m not going to play your game. I’m not belonging to anyone ever again.”
“We aren’t…”
“Don’t you dare tell me we aren’t playing a game!” Darkling hissed, running a hand down the length of her hair, past her hips. “I used to belong to a vampire. My hair was short when he found me. I was his for long enough for my hair to grow to this length. He played enough mind games for me to know one when I see one. Once you manipulate me into killing one of them I’ll be yours forever. You’ll always be seeing what else you can make me do and holding what I did over me to make me dance to your tune.”
The woman was briefly quiet. “This vampire played a lot of mind games on you, did he?”
“No. The games he played with me were always…physical. He wouldn’t play his mind games with me because wouldn’t risk giving me free will. He had to play mind games with others. And he played a lot of them.”
“You do know not all vampires are evil? Some are quite nice.”
“My Master wasn’t one of the nice ones. He was the most unkind person I’ve ever met” Darkling was the one who fell briefly silent this time, trying to banish memories. There were some more recent ones she wished were as vague as her early ones. “Why don’t we just skip to the final round, Dark Brotherhood assassin? Tell me what you are really after.”
“My name is Astrid. Why don’t you call me that? Less of a mouthful. Alright, I will tell you what I’m really after. You. I’m hoping to officially extend an invitation to join my Family. The Dark Brotherhood. You’d make a fine sister.”
“You want me to be a professional assassin? Why?”
Astrid laughed. “Why, she asks, moments after admitting she’s killed more people than she remembers. Don’t try to pretend you aren’t familiar with the concept of accepting money to kill people. You haven’t been discreet. I hear not a single mage survived Fort Amol and a not a single bandit survived Lost Knife Hideout. Jarl Siddgier refused to sell you that pretty house by the lake until you killed his embarrassing bandit connections. Everybody knows why the East Empire Company no longer worries about pirates attacking their ships. There’s a captain in Windhelm who has been bragging to everyone he meets about the example that was made of his ex-sailor’s bandit camp. Not to mention to Butcher of Windhelm.”
“I didn’t get paid for killing all of those people, just some of them. Windhelm’s steward was too cheap to pay me for dealing with his serial killer.”
“And that, my dear, is why you should join my Family. We can ensure you are always paid when you kill.”
Darkling twisted her lips, trying to think of a polite way of declining. One did not wantonly annoy professional assassins, especially ones who knew where your little girls slept. We’ll have to move somewhere else. Sofie will be disappointed. She thought the lake was so pretty. “Thank you, but I don’t need money anymore,” Darkling said, surprised at how well she kept the burning hatred for Astrid out of her bland tone. “My Master hadn’t been gone long when I killed everyone in Lost Knife Hideout and Fort Amol. I was just after food at Fort Amol and somewhere safe to sleep at Lost Knife. It was clear the only way I was going to get them was if everyone else was dead. Even when I was getting paid to kill it was only because I wanted to buy a house. Which I have done.”
“I’m not just offering you a job, Darkling, I’m offering you a family. I don’t just want to be your Leader, I want to be your sister. There’s a reason you went to such effort to live in the middle of nowhere with a couple of brats who didn’t have a better alternative to yourself. You find it very difficult to get people to like you, don’t you?”
When Darkling didn’t say anything, Astrid continued: “You don’t have to answer, I know. People who kill well and often are never liked. That’s why you need to join the Family. We’ve always welcomed those shunned by society. Wouldn’t you like to live with people who’d accept you for who you are? You can.” Astrid gestured at the three captives. “All you have to do is prove to me that if I order you to kill, you’ll obey.”
“But Astrid, I have a family now. Those two girls you took me away from. I should be heading back to them soon. I imagine they are quite upset right now.” Darkling had been edging over to the door as she spoke. It was locked, which disappointed but didn’t surprise her. “Can I please have the key?”
Despite her very best efforts to be as polite as possible, Darkling could tell Astrid was fuming. I shouldn’t have tried to be polite. Astrid didn’t want my politeness, she just told me she wanted my obedience.
“Certainly I’ll give you the key,” Astrid replied in a silken tone which made Darkling slowly take her hand off the door knob to place on her sword. As taking possession of the key would have involved stepping closer to the now silken-toned Astrid, something Darkling felt was extremely bad idea, she didn’t move from her spot by the door. “If you aren’t willing to pay the debt you owe the Dark Brotherhood, I suppose we’ll just have to collect it ourselves later. I should warn you though, elf, that once you walk out that door, there’ll be some… interest on the debt you owe the Dark Brotherhood. Two young lives would balance old Grelod’s nicely.”
Darkling considered not speaking until she was sure her voice wouldn’t shake, but decided not to bother as Astrid would probably mistake her rage for fear. “I suppose that means you have told the other members of your assassin family where the three of us live.”
“Of course.”
There wasn’t much distance between the door Darkling was standing by and the bookcase Astrid was sitting on, one leg hanging carelessly down. By the time Astrid realised her veiled threat had not had the effect she expected it was too late. Darkling had already crossed the distance and unsheathed her sword. If it had been mortal in origin Darkling may not have been able to cut through Astrid’s armour as easily as she did, but Daedric artefacts tended to be stronger and sharper than mortal ones. Astrid retaliated but wasn’t quite fast enough. Darkling saw the blade coming and stepped away, the blade slicing open her cheek instead of her throat.
“By Sithis I’ll see you dead!” Astrid screamed as she staggered off the bookcase, favouring the thigh Darkling hadn’t sliced open. Darkling just laughed as she backed away, causing the wound on her face to bleed more. “You idiot. I told you what happened to the last woman who tried to take a child from me but you made that threat anyway.” She knew full well Astrid was a dead woman limping, if not walking. Even if Astrid knew any restoration magic, it was too late for her to heal her torn femoral artery or replace her lost blood. All that was left to do now was make Astrid’s death as painful as possible. “Do you see this sword, Astrid? Its name is Dawnbreaker. The Daedric Prince who gave it to me told me to use it to purge corruption from the dark corners of this world.”
Astrid was fading fast, and now she as well as Darkling knew it. She’d given up trying to walk and was hunched over in a rapidly expanding puddle of her own blood. “Well…done…” she gasped out. Darkling ignored Astrid’s words, slowly walking closer. “I didn’t understand her at the time, but I do now. She must have known I was going to hunt down and murder every member of the Dark Brotherhood I can find. You really shouldn’t have told them where my daughters live.”
Astrid raised her head, allowing Darkling to fully appreciate the fear in her expression. “No…wait…” she cried, too late. Darkling was already swinging Dawnbreaker downwards, ensuring Astrid was die while feeling first, worst moment of impotent horror as she realised everyone she loved had just had a death sentence pronounced. One of the things Darkling had learnt from years of watching her Master playing his games was that not all pain was physical.
Freeing the other three captives was surprisingly unrewarding. Darkling wasn’t sure which of the three was worse. The woman was surprisingly aggressive for someone who had just been kidnapped. Darkling’s Master would have greatly enjoyed playing a game with her. The other human was certainly grateful, but from the way he kept promising not to mention this to anyone made Darkling suspect he thought she’d been the player rather than fellow victim of the game, which rather spoiled the effect. As for the Khajiit, despite being appropriately grateful, he was the one which most alarmed Darkling as the way he asked her to cut his bindings indicated he’d been aware a game was being played. In Darkling’s experience, people who could recognise when games were being played could only do so because they had won them in the past. Losers rarely survived. Darkling was on the verge of killing the Khajiit for mere prudence before he indicated he wanted to go separate ways and pretend they had never met.
After that Darkling only stayed long enough to strip Astrid’s corpse. The dagger Darkling decided to keep after realising the enchantment on the blade was so strong it had damaged her cheek beyond the ability of a restoration spell to fully heal. A blade like that could be useful in a fight, and she certainly had fights in her near future. This was why she also took Astrid’s armour, despite the damage. Getting to a place where she could kill the rest of the Dark Brotherhood may require a disguise.
But killing the Dark Brotherhood had to wait for now. First, she had to get back to Lakeview Manor. Her daughters would need to be moved before the Dark Brotherhood realised she’d taken Astrid from them and decided to retaliate in kind.
