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 A faint tickling around the back and side of her sweaty neck. A pause, a moment of excruciating stillness before it resumed in earnest toward the edge of her jaw, a tiny scuttling of tiny, pointed feet. Then, a smack that left her neck stinging as if burned, a frantic buzzing that mocked her surer than the supercilious tossers at the high society parties of her youth ever had. Scowling, she examined her palm in the murky, twilight. No blood or ooze marred the gray kidskin of her gloves. Just the glossy smear of sweat tinged brown with a fortnight’s worth of road-dust. She bitterly swiped it on her thigh.  

 “Son of a fucking whore ,” Tatiana muttered.

The buzzing bastard resumed its maddening orbit of her head, darting in and out with every vexed swat, seeming to fire back a contemptuous, “Son of a fucking you.”

 A scowl hooking her mouth, Tatiana sat soft, slouched, and quietly indignant in her saddle, legs loose at Gideon’s sides. Normally, and until the last hour when the stamina draught had worn off, the piebald destrier would’ve gleefully exploited her exhaustion, taking any and every opportunity to toss her off or snap at what little grass spitefully endured the waterlogged hell that was Blackwood. He was of northern stock, though, elegantly built but muscled for heavy cavalry, and heat drained him more than her; his half-white head drooped as he plodded down the muddy road at a mindless jog, dinnerplate hooves splattering muck this way and that. The stuff smeared his legs and the white splashes marking his belly, blurring the stark contrast between them and the rest of his ebon coat. He stopped prancing, chomping his bit for a gallop, and snapping at the flies and mosquitoes that had hounded them since Bravil; he did, at least, still lash his tail at them, and never balked at her cues.

 Part of her almost thanked the particularly fat fly that, unlike its dead brethren, had evaded her swats for the last five miles. Many things irked her and Gideon—and seemingly many more than usual, of late—but no matter how the hierarchy shifted as her life’s tides ebbed and flowed, no matter what hovel or banquet hall they swept her into, greedy insects ranked always in the top three. Top five, when treading particularly nasty waters. Without the annoyance to steel her, she suspected she might’ve slumped to the ground in a weak, sweaty heap.

 Right into the tepid, algae-skinned marshes clogging the roadside.

 She glanced down at the dark, stagnant waters, choked with forests of bulrushes and bulbous trees coated in curiously colored mushrooms. The thought of the stuff seeping into her black, spiked daedra-hunting armor, soaking her gambeson, breeches, and socks. The visceral images of slimy leeches wriggling in under her collar, of a snapping turtle making broken twigs of her shins, spurred her mind along as physical annoyance spurred her body. She stifled a shudder. Couldn’t decide if it was born of disgust or the first flush of a fever. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Blackwood knew a thousand ways to die, each filthier and nastier than the one that came before it. But she wouldn’t have to suffer there much longer, she reminded herself, stare fixing on the yellow light faintly flickering amongst the tangled knots of boulders and vine-laden trees ahead. The smoke hanging over the woods like a dirty brown pall ahead promised fire, food, and people, too. Considering the fact that no one with half a brain settled in the armpit of Blackwood, and the light was perfectly still and steady, she neared not a parasitic will-o-the-wisp, but  The Wisp , a weeping sore of a roadhouse with beds of questionable cleanliness, food and drink that stank suspiciously like moldy swamp water, and floorboards that squeaked and sagged a touch too much for her liking, seeing as the place stood on stilts ten feet in the air. She hadn’t seen it since the Oblivion Crisis almost three years prior. And she hadn’t cared to return without a torch in one hand and a bucket of oil in the other. Depending how the night unfolded, she might yet grab her flint and firesteel.

 But however they fortified her against the heat, she faintly knew her cares no longer mattered. She was the Listener to the Dark Brotherhood, newly anointed in the blood of her fellows and blessed with their Night Mother’s favor. Tatiana had been a useful, if dangerous tool in Martin’s and the Blades’ hands during the Oblivion Crisis. Now, she was the hand, blade,  and  ear of the Dark Brotherhood’s unholy matron, the only deity that ever turned so much as a pitying or proud glance at her. The Night Mother had demanded she come  alone  to The Wisp. She’d expressly ordered her to leave Lucien, her Speaker and now lover, behind to continue refitting the Cheydinhal Sanctuary and recovering from his near-death at Applewatch.

 And what the Night Mother wanted, She got, one way or another. One bucket of blood or an ocean’s worth.

In a way, Tatiana thought as the singular light seemed to split, and The Wisp’s squatting silhouette oozed into the gloom ahead, perhaps that was as much a blessing as a curse. It meant helplessness, true, in the sense that she could fail purely on the whims of an implacable—and in her eyes, capricious—goddess who spared no child the rod and who mercilessly culled the spoiled, undeserving, and incompetent. But it also meant surety. She’d coasted into idle isolation after the Oblivion Crisis, finding neither purpose nor pleasure in rigged arena fights and hunting nuisance game, straggling daedra, and any men and mer whose mere existence vexed her; no matter how bloody her kills or how often she claimed them, each was a smaller victory in an ever-deepening war.

But in the Dark Brotherhood, in the Night Mother’s service, she had work and bloody pleasures aplenty. She  would  have them until some miserable death claimed her, Umbra’s madness eroded her mind, or the Night Mother wearied of her as so many others had. Whichever came first. Until then, Tatiana would Listen when called and obey. Even if it meant trudging to the ass-end of Cyrodiil. The Night Mother had granted her and Lucien a few months of idleness to recuperate from the carnage at Applewatch and the ritual pleasure of dismembering Mathieu Bellamont for his treachery, if only to prepare the Sanctuary for the new recruits that would inevitably come to darkness. Listeners didn’t traditionally take contracts, but the Cheydinhal Sanctuary was gutted—by Tatiana’s hands, nonetheless—and people still prayed for the Dark Brotherhood to excise the tumors from their narrow, pointless lives.

 All that paperwork must’ve been piling up for Her to risk Her Listener on a job, Tatiana thought, swatting another fly from her face.

 Still. Bugs and bogs aside, once astride Gideon with the wind at her back and a scarlet sunset on her face, she’d been glad to put the north and all its secret horrors behind her—the recurring nightmares of the Purification and Lucien’s mangled body hanging from Applewatch’s rafters, the lurch in her chest when she so much as thought of the vacant Sanctuary and all the love and loyalty that could’ve been. She’d happily aided Lucien in his recovery—only through the Night Mother’s power and Tatiana bargaining for his life had spared him of bleeding to death or dying of anemia—time and familiarity had not blunted the knives of guilt and shame she held to her throat. Every moment in Farragut’s cobwebbed labyrinth, every glimpse of the red, puckered scars slashing Lucien’s left shoulder, cheek, forearm, and down across his stomach, were cold, slimy stones flipping in her gut, reminders that he’d nearly died as much for her oversight as his own. Reminders that Antoinetta Marie, Gogron, and most of the Black Hand were dead not merely because she’d followed her orders like any good, mindless little Silencer, but because she had not been alone in her own head. In the moments of their deaths, she’d smiled. Shuddered with pleasure at their blood on her hands and face, seeming to soak into Umbra’s ebon steel. The shift in the Dead Drops’ tone and handwriting should’ve leapt out at her like a boldfaced headline. An astute Silencer, a  worthy  Listener, would’ve immediately alerted Lucien.  Without Umbra clouding her mind, perhaps she’d have noticed something else to turn the Black Hand on Bellamont’s trail even before the Purification was necessary. She wouldn’t have needed to become Listener. She would’ve been rational enough to argue for Lucien join her in hunting him anon. For safety in numbers under her Champion’s mantle.

Glacial air lashed her face and knifed through the joints in leather armor, though Blackwood’s air was dead-still. Gideon flinched, head shooting up and nostrils flaring. A voice scraped through her skull, harsh as steel on bone, bristling with the hoarse hatred that met her in the mirror on so many sleepless nights. It was her. And yet it was not her.    

[ good gods, clouding your mind? i brought you clarity. power! the abilities of countless killers you’re dim wits couldn’t have grasped after decades with the finest tutors! did you forget why a pathetic city-thief like you survived the oblivion crisis? do you remember who gave you strength as you fled anvil with bellamont’s journal? none of that was you. or your precious night mother. it was me, Tat. it was all me, you fucking ingrate ]  

Iron knuckles seemed to grind into the backs of her eyes, pushing, pushing,  pushing  until she swore they’d burst in her sockets. Tears spilled down her face, pulling burning sweat and dust into her lashes. She blinked furiously, refusing to bow to Umbra’s lash by pawing at them. The Umbra spirit had given her power. Preternatural agility and strength. Carved the inside of her skull with martial and tactical knowledge it had seized from all its previous bearers. She knew and relished that—loved the weapon for it. But with every pang of its hunger, it devoured more of her until she satisfied it. And even then, when the fog parted and she returned to her senses with blood on her hands, it did not always return every memory it held hostage. Some murders and battles, she remembered with astounding clarity. Others were shrouded in mist. Others still left empty chasms in her mind, and headaches when she sought to explore them. After Applewatch? It no longer seemed a fair exchange.

 Since bonding with Umbra, she’d collected and filled over a hundred black soul gems. Beautiful cuts of smoky crystal that tingled in her hands, stolen from necromancers’ cashes and merchants who dealt occult artifacts. They held the souls of some of her favorite kills, remembered or now-forgotten—peasants and nobles, bandits and priests, innocent and guilty. All she hoarded under lock and key in Benirus Manor’s renovated cellar. By default, people were as flies to her, and she’d thought no more of the collection than she did of her trove of claimed blades and stolen jewelry. But as Lucien bled out under her meager healing abilities, as an infection from his slashed intestines poisoning him with every stuttering heartbeat, Umbra’s  voice had purred that she couldn’t heal him. She was too late. Too weak and untrained besides. Letting Umbra kiss his throat and trap his soul in one of the pretty gems in her pack was her only option. Trying to heal him would kill him. Killing him would keeping him safe and alive with her forever.

Tatiana spat on the roadside, mouth dry and tasting of acid and bile. She’d thrown Umbra aside as if it had burned her that night, and not seen it the same since. It, by increasingly hostile tone, had not seen her the same either.

When She chose her as Her Listener, the Night Mother had warned that she’d be tempered. Tatiana hadn’t understood fully what that meant at the time, but as days dissolved into weeks with Lucien, a disquieting hunch tugged her collar when she looked at Umbra or when its name and temptations slithered through her mind. So, at Lucien’s suggestion, she’d begun trying to wean herself off its magics. Carrying it less and less. Riding out its urges like one rode out a skooma craving or fever. When the Night Mother broke Her silence to call her to arms, she’d been able to leave Fort Farragut with but a transient wave of existential dread and hatred. Thoughts of wielding Umbra in earnest again, even briefly, had gone down like a mouthful of bad clams—cold, slimy, and churning in her stomach. But what choice did she have? What was the viper without its fangs? Dead. And, again, how fitting that Blackwood seethed with a thousand ways to die.

[ a thousand ways to die but a thousand more to kill. or did you forget that too, tat? ]     

She gasped and winced as icy pain sliced her eyes; the flood of tears only burned and blurred The Wisp’s glowing windows into the night’s senseless navy and black. Ceding, she ground the heel of her shaky hand into one eye, then the other. The pain became a throb of steadily mounting pressure. “No,” she muttered. “No, no…”

 [ good. see that you don’t. lucien would hate to see what you become without me ]     

 With that, it pain ebbed to a dull ache. Then, to an empty nothingness that dizzied Tatiana. She halted Gideon, yanked off her vambrace and wiped her eyes on her gambeson’s sweaty sleeve. “Void help me,” she whispered to the dark.

 Only the drone of nightjars, crickets, bullfrogs, and a splash of bog water answered.

 Gideon whickered softly and bent his neck to lip her knee. No pain, melancholy, or spectral threat could’ve stopped her tiny smile. She patted his neck appreciatively, arm heavy as a fallen tree, and shoved her forearm back into her vambrace. They walked on into the murky night. Gideon, at least, would never fail her. 

After another half hour, they arrived. Perched atop stilts to avoid flooding and hungry trolls, The Wisp loomed over a stump-dotted clearing like a gallows, its high, railed porch strung with six ropes. They were used to hoist crates and barrels of food and dry goods from its monthly supply shipments, as she recalled. But as she reined Gideon to a halt by the rope-and-plank ladder, all she saw were waiting nooses.

Lucien and Belisarius and Banus and Arquen bound behind them. A shadowy shade of herself tying them up.

The vision vanished with a blink. But it had not been a trick of exhaustion, heat, or even swamp gases that often disoriented weary travelers. Her left hand had unconsciously slipped to Umbra’s hilt; the grip formed to her hand as seamlessly as ever, but the tendrils of purple and ebon mist caressing it were no longer like the gentle fingers of a lover or the cool currents of a stream in high summer. They were thorny vines cutting invisible scratches through her gloves and gauntlet. Drawing blood, drinking it in. Binding her tighter, tighter, tighter still…

 She licked her chapped lips, whimpering in a quiet panic when she couldn’t bring herself to open her fist. As if they had at last melded together as not even she, Lucien, or any spirit of the Void could.  Night Mother, please, I beg you, preserve me…  It was a desperate, feeble prayer. The stuff of abused waifs and starving urchins.

 Whether She answered Tatiana’s plea or the Umbra spirit sought to toy with her ever-more fragile mind, her fist opened. Though stiff as wooden rods and aching with cold in the joints, they quavered like leaves in a thunderstorm. Throat chafing as she swallowed, she dismounted. She sank deep in her knees to absorb the impact, for she was small enough for a teen’s palfrey and Gideon neared eighteen hands. Her boots plunged into ankle-deep into muck, and if she hadn’t grabbed her stirrup, her jellied legs would’ve buckled and pitched her backward. Gideon, Void bless him, stayed statue still. Panting softly as the world spun, she patted his shoulder. “Good boy,” she whispered.

 He snorted and nosed her shoulder as if to say he knew.

Lazy hillocks meandered up behind The Wisp, their apex a lumpy plateau with a long, low building crouching atop it, trimmed in a fence of high, sharpened stakes. Greasy torches, their tar crackling like old knuckles even from here, flanked its gated entry. Tatiana took a bracing breath before leading Gideon up the muddy track spiraling toward it. Knees rubbery and head disconcertingly light, she paused to hunt her breath halfway up, leaning against one of the massive, vine-laden trees supporting the soggy hillside. Gideon nuzzled her cheek.

“Not much farther,” she said, more to soothe herself than Gideon, and pushed on.

Blackwood was no place for horses. Or men or mer. Or anything more than salamanders, mosquitos, or vapid, shit-stained trolls and the fleas that infected them. Yet The Wisp’s stable eked some semblance of equine comfort from the soggy landscape. Comprised of a four-stall barn on a brick foundation, a muddy corral, and a raised, enclosed platform to store hay and grain, it was at least organized. Six tawny mastiffs lifted their heads as she led Gideon through the open gate. Each was a knot of muscle easily the size of a child’s pony. Troll-hounds, Tatiana thought with a fresh surge of adrenaline. She made a concerted effort not to look at the beasts as thunderous growls and deep, whooping barks burst from them. Each one could’ve snapped Gideon’s foreleg. The iron bars that held them were as thick as her forearm, as she recalled, and oiled well against rust, but she had no wish to linger or rile them. She’d seen the carnage such dogs could unleash in the arenas and on minotaur, boar, and troll hunts. She stifled a shudder, boots squelching in the mud as she shifted uneasily in place.

 Gideon, however, watched them impassively. As a war-trained destrier, he knew how to fight alongside mastiffs—and kill them, armor or no.

 From the boxy barn’s shadows emerged a sturdy man in his mid-forties with a bushy brown beard carpeting a weather-beaten face. Mud slathered his leather blacksmith’s apron and heavy boots. A ball of mage light trailed after him. Tatiana resisted the urge to squint against its harsh, scintillating light. Curious, she thought. Stablehands and horsemasters, like herself, often had little care or aptitude for magical study.

 His teeth, crooked, but clean, cut a bright crescent in his beard as studied Gideon with genuine appreciation. “That,” he greeted amiably, “is a fine horse, ma’am.”

 “Thank you,” she said automatically, appraising him and his stable as steadily as he appraised her stallion. A buckskin was tethered just inside, nipping contentedly at a net of hay hanging from a post. Common grade stock, but its golden coat was clean, and its black main and tail were combed. No discharge glistened around its eyes or nose, and its ears swiveled to listen to the dogs and the slop-slop-slop of the ostler’s boots through the mud. Alert, but not on edge. Good signs.

 “Handle stallions often?” she asked.

“No,” admitted the man. “But I’ve worked ten years in a timber camp with lots of mean-spirited mules just a bit smaller than him. Respect them even in discipline, they respect you. You don’t beat them, but you can’t let them stomp on you and all that. ”

She nodded sagely. Timber camps were barely better than mines, as far as treating the horses and mules that worked them. Bad places made bad things of good animals and people. “Then you’ll be right at home with him. He bites and kicks until he gets a measure of you. Watch the cleats in his shoes. But respect him, and he’ll respect you.” She reached up to scratch behind Gideon’s ear. “Don’t respect him, and he’ll take your fingers. Hurt him, and  I’ll  take more than your fingers.”

 The man chuckled under his breath before cautiously approaching and blowing a slow, steady breath into Gideon’s nostril. Gideon snorted and stamped, then mellowed and nudged his shoulder curiously. Tatiana smiled. That the man knew how to properly greet a horse heartened her. As she passed him a few fat gold septims, she recalled the timid, battered stableboy in Bravil. What had become of the money she’d slipped him? Had her pitying gesture gotten his skull caved-in by the brute of a horsemaster or some pimple-faced tough that caught him cutting down an alley on his way home? She’d murdered Ungolim that night, then nearly gotten herself killed by Lucien for what, unbeknownst to her at the time, had amounted to high blasphemy in the Dark Brotherhood. Between begging ignorance and tracking down Bellamont, to exhausting herself tending Lucien and being anointed Listener, checking up on disadvantaged children hadn’t exactly made her to-do list. Good impressions at a livery foretold a good journey, one of Cloud Ruler’s Blades had often said. That night in Bravil had opened a pot of rotten, reeking worms and oily muck. Hopefully, this fellow and his shed-passing-as-a-stable boded better.

 A thought occurred to her as he pocketed the coins. “One more thing, quick as you please,” Tatiana said as she slung her bulging pack and saddlebags over her shoulders; good impression or no, she wasn’t leaving her belongings anywhere. The stablemaster looked back, idly patting Gideon’s neck. She served her lie with casual curiosity and a subtle cant of her head. “You look a little familiar. How long have you been here?”

 The man chewed his cheek a moment. “‘Bout three years? Give or take a few months.”

 “No, can’t be you, then…what happened to your predecessor?” When he squinted at predecessor, she clarified, “The ostler before you.”

 “Ah. Dunno, really. I left the timber camp to come south and help my pa. I got word they needed someone who knew horses out here and they hired me on the spot. I heard the last one went off in the swamps and never came back. They found one of his shoes, I heard. Nothing else.”

 “Oh. Gods keep him, then...” Tatiana shook her head, face schooled to perfect pity as satisfaction bloomed in her chest. Bless trolls, the stupid, ravenous beasts. Gideon leveled her a wicked look, his icy blue eye catching the magelight like steel in moonlight.  Bless  you , especially , she thought. Nothing dragged corpses quite like an ill-tempered destrier.

 She bowed in farewell and picked her way back down the hill. She skidded a few times, heart lurching and hissing curses as she caught herself on vines and overhanging boughs. By the time she climbed The Wisp’s creaky rope ladder, her bags were boulders on her shoulders, her limbs shook, and the world swirled around her. She knocked back her last stamina potion. Thin as water, its notes of honey and clove lingered in her mouth as she stowed the empty bottles. Renewed strength swept through her. No longer did breath catch in her lungs, and no more did her head seem poised to float off her shoulders. She’d left home with ten and given all but two to Gideon, for the heat drained him more than her, and she'd rather suffer in his stead. Knowing the effects were temporary, she’d waited as long as she could to take this one. Whatever happened, she had to resupply in Leyawiin before heading home.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Tat. You really thought you’d need to avoid a mage in the arse-crack of Blackwood? she thought, cursing her decision to wear her mundane leathers. Wear the cold-enchanted set next time and kill anyone who senses you from afar. And have Gid’s breastplate enchanted.

Despite her second wind, she didn’t enter with her shoulders back and nose tipped slightly in the air as she would’ve elsewhere. Complacency or open hostility were common shields in seedy places like The Wisp, declarations of I’m Dangerous, Too, So Leave Me Be. Such warnings worn by a small, bedraggled woman in spiked, steel-reinforced leather? It would've been an  invitation. Brought knives out to humble and abuse someone obviously overplaying their worth.

 With or without Umbra, Tatiana knew the drawbacks and advantages of her sturdy, compact build against larger, stronger, and in many cases, more foolish, adversaries. And she knew that  always  she preferred to attack the unprepared and pantsless—to bring blades to fistfights, so to speak.

 So she exaggerated her slouch and dragging feet as she crossed the square dining room to the sagging excuse for a bar in the back. The place couldn’t have packed the house on a holiday; only a pair of swamp-green argonians huddled at a table by the grease-papered front window, too engrossed in the map pinned down by tankards between them to care for a slip of a woman in absurd armor carrying weapons she probably didn’t know how to use. She noted the curious russet markings on the backs of their heads—interlocking, slashed diamonds disappearing beneath their leather jerkins. Egg-mates? Scale-dyeing in allegiance to a gang, perhaps? Interesting, but not noteworthy, for now.

 A sinewy, rat-faced man with short black hair polished knives behind the bar. He didn’t buy a penny of her façade. The gloomy, grimy Wisp still stank of swamp water, stale ale, sweat and piss, and over-stewed slaughterfish. Its inkeep still did, too, and hadn’t seemed to have replaced his greasy brown apron, shirt, or cracked spectacles since her last visit. His beady eyes narrowed below pinched brows, thin lips trembling in a twist of rage and fear.

 “You!” he hissed, knobby knuckles white on his rag and knife.

 “Me.” Mildly disappointed but not surprised that he remembered her, she abandoned her façade. Huffed an impatient breath through her nose. “Charmed that you remember, Vico, but I won’t be long. I’m just meeting someone here for a bit of business. Room 3.”

 “How could I not remember you? You murdered my son! I know it was you! He never went off on his own.”

 The argonians ceased their whisperings. But Tatiana did not look back. Did not signal weakness or fear or hostility that might hook them. They had no weapons on their laps, belts, or table. Vico, poor as he might be with that warped kitchen knife, did. “Trolls are insatiable and irascible—always hungry and mean, if those words were a bit too much for you. Everyone in Blackwood knows that. Regardless, I’m sure you still possess the equipment to make another brat,” she drawled. “The problem rests more in your lack of a broodmare to bear it.”

 A purple vein erupted at his temple, a muscle feathering at the corner of his stubbly jaw. He gestured at her with his knife. “Mind your tongue, harlot. Or you’ll pay for it.”

 “With what?” she challenged, burrowing into the ashes of old, familiar fires, thunder in her storm-blue eyes. “My life? You’ll stick me with that sad little butter knife? You want the Champion of Cyrodiil to bleed out on your floor for a crime she wouldn’t dream of committing? I believe we have witnesses, and I imagine any reward the Elder Council and Leyawiin might offer for information on my death would far outweigh any gold or sleazy information you might be able to provide them. Isn’t that right, gents?” She stepped back, just out of his reach and half-turned to the argonians. They studied her with a mix of shock and fear. Then scarpered with their map and were gone before the coins they left stopped clattering. Smoothly, she turned back to Vico. “Thought so. As we were saying, I’m meeting someone in Room 3. Time sensitive and private, so if you please-,”

 “My son was a good man!”

 Still with that tripe and gritted teeth. It never ceased to amaze Tatiana how the ties between family, friends, and staunch allies blinded them to the most obvious faults and sins. Now a muscle feathered in her jaw. As if straining against the ropes of a galleon, she resisted the urge to draw Umbra. Ignored the goad of its vicious whispers and flashes of the man’s throat slashed in a cascade of beautiful, beautiful scarlet…

 She exhaled slowly, gaze sharp as her Blade of Woe, its Void-blessed steel silent but just as hungry as Umbra’s. In a glacial whisper, she said, “Your oozing twat of a son tried to drug my food, then rob and do gods-know-what-else to me. His bones could rattle out of whatever troll cave he wound up in, and I’d kill him again—and far more slowly than the first time. If you miss him so dearly, I could reunite you quicker than you could get that butter knife anywhere near me.”

 Black mist slithered around Umbra’s scabbard, frigid malice radiating from it like a bowl of frost salts, and the metallic tang of blood filled her nose. She never knew if it was simply the spirit’s magical aura or if others could smell it, too. But it worked on Vico as on so many others. His rock of an adam’s apple lurched as he licked his lips, the beginnings of sweat like oil on his pale, wrinkled brow. He backed to the wall of tin-bucket liquor behind him. Fear strangling his bravado.

 Ah, cowards. Paradoxically an amusement and disappointment. She hefted her saddlebags, ignoring the dull ache in her shoulder. “As I said. Room 3. Do not approach. I will know if you do.” She wouldn’t unless the floorboards creaked, of course, but he didn’t need to know that. He nodded obsequiously and hurried to retrieve the argonians’ mugs and plates.

 Tatiana waited until Vico had brought the greasy dinnerware back to the bar before striding down the short, cramped hallway off the dining room. Dingy, moth-eaten curtains hung limp over the papered window at the end, yellow as jaundiced flesh in the sickly lamplight. The Wisp boasted four rooms for let, each smaller and scabbier than the next, but Room 3 was, as Tatiana recalled, the smallest and scabbiest. She’d overnighted in it last time, as it had been the cheapest, and she wasn’t paying anything more than absolutely necessary in such a dive. She bit back a grimace as she gave the splintery door the Night Mother’s five prescribed knocks. Three diffident ones answered. Tatiana lifted the rusty latch, but the door hadn’t opened two feet before smacking a matchbox of a bed on the other side.

  Seems they at least upgraded from the folding cot… she thought. Rolling her eyes, she readjusted her baggage and squeezed in, the coarse wood scratching her saddlebags and clutching her cloak as they rasped across it. The latch clicked back into place.

 Last time, the corner room had stunk of onions left too long in the sun, and a spritz of cheap perfume that merely soaked its injury in insult. Now, it smelled of oily fried fish, and beneath that, hints of bread too sweet and fresh to have come from The Wisp’s oven. Fat tapers on a shelf above the bed fully illuminated the place—the sliver of a bed dressed in ratty brown blankets, a table wedged in the back corner, tattered, muddy half-boots on a rag just inside the door, and a wobbly, three-legged stool occupied by…surely not who she was supposed to meet.

 The woman who shot to her feet was unarmed and clad in a dress the color of spoiled mustard; flour and old chocolate stains smeared her rolled-up sleeves. Reed-thin and barely out her teens, Tatiana guessed, by the innocent softness about her lips, eyes, and nose. Freckles peppered her pale, perfectly forgettable face, and smears of dirt disguised a smattering of pockmarks on her cheeks and chin. Her chestnut hair, cut short at her jaw and secured by a leather braid around her brow, clashed with her dress so badly Tatiana wondered if she was colorblind. Dirt outlined her broken nails. Bandages hid her hands, stained faintly at the palms. Burns or blisters, most like. However incongruous with one seeking another’s death, hers were not uncommon characteristics, in Tatiana’s experience; innocence was a fine mask for wickedness, and one she herself wore well and often.

 The girl’s gaping, doe-in-mage-light stare, though? That was no act. She  was  terrified Tatiana would bleed her like a suckling pig.

 --probably because Tatiana’s hand jerked to her Blade of Woe as soon as she stood. But Tatiana didn’t yield for her comfort. The Night Mother had given her a name, and She wouldn’t lead her wrong. Not after all she’d done for Her. You can’t have the wrong room, she snapped at her herself. Not even you could muck up so badly. Not even if that faded blue 3 had peeled off the lintel.

 “Tell me your name, girl,” she ordered with quiet authority.

 “Wh-who’s askin’?” the little bumpkin stammered, high and quavering like a cornered bird. Her eyes glanced wildly between the spikes of Tatiana’s daedra hunting armor and the blades at her hip.

 “A business associate. Newly acquainted and arriving on behalf of our dearest Mother.”

 The last three words popped her like needles, fear flowing out and away. Exhaling dramatically, the woman slumped back onto the stool. “Dibella’s garters, ma’am, I thought you was maybe a guard after me for-, never mind. I thought you’d be in robes like in the stories, and this place just gives me the right willies, it does. I mean, you can clearly handle yourself, but out here without the city under me feet, I feel a bit like a pie sittin’ on an open windowsill.”  

 Ah. A talker. Joy. “Do I  look  like a guardsman?”

 “Well. No, now that I look at you. But you still look like you could snap me over your knee.”

 Tatiana snorted. “Having established you’re a mouse before a viper, give me your name.”

 “Elina Pike, ma’am, an’  ever  so glad you’re here, honest as day. I got here this mornin’ an’ been worryin’ my horse’ll end up in the soup if I stay much longer. Not to mention what that leery barman might do to me. And those lizards out there look at me just as funny.”

 The argonians had loitered there all day, only to flee like spooked colts when she challenged them? Had they been waiting for her? Had her so-called tempering begun, the first fire about to kindle? Begrudgingly, she shelved her paranoia to focus on more immediate concerns.

 “Now that he knows you were here to meet me, I think he’d scrub your shoes.”  The leather of her gloves creaked as her fingers relaxed into a casual drape over the Blade of Woe’s pommel. For all Elina’s insufferable effervescence, hers was indeed the name the Night Mother had whispered, chill as winter. Whatever trouble the argonians could bring, this was no trap, no mistake, and no simple slip of a baker or fisherman’s daughter. Elina was neither simple provincial nor ingénue. Those dainty, wounded hands, thumbing a cracked button on her dress, had stabbed a clammy heart while she pled ancient, unholy verses for the Night Mother’s favor. Many people yearned for their enemies’ deaths. Few harbored the will to dirty their hands. And fewer still had hearts black enough and stomachs tough enough to perform the diabolical ritual needed to hire the dirtiest hands of all.

[ does she remind you of your precious Antoinetta Marie? soft and deliciously sweet and rotten to the core? ]

 Shut up, she thought. But the Umbra spirit’s voice chilled the back of her neck. Tatiana had  loved that irony about Marie.

Bolting the lock, Tatiana dropped her bags on Elina’s bed. She remained standing. There were times to equalize unspoken power and authority during negotiations, and this was not one. “Whatever your regrets in your choice of meeting place, Ms. Pike, you prayed to my Mother, and She sends me in answer,” Tatiana began, the words dry as ash in her mouth. Having witnessed and been blessed in the flesh by the Night Mother, she now accepted Her existence and immeasurable power. And bad things happened when she disappointed or riled gods. A Speaker should’ve handled this  Lucien should’ve handled this. Not her. She scrambled to remember the proper words, falling on formality as she always did when her footing shook. “I am Her lips, hand, and blade. Where, whom, and how should the latter strike?”

 “R-right. Sorry. Well, I, I need you to kill my best friend—uh, former best friend, miss. Rana Aloise.  Lady  Rana Aloise now, I guess. We worked for a baker in Leyawiin, shared a little apartment together. It was nice. Very nice.” Quick as a switch being thrown, Elina petulantly crossed her arms and legs, face tightening. “Then she got hitched to some no-good tosser from the rich part o’Leyawiin and ‘s like her whole world emptied out save for him. She moved out as soon as they met. Now it’s just, ‘Oh, hi, Elina, gods I miss you! We need to catch up!’ An’ when I want to do the catchin’ up, she just talks about how lovely her beau is and how much fun they ‘ave and how wonderful he is in the sheets. Gives me knots in my guts, ma’am, true as blue. She never asks how I am anymore. Or what I’ve been up to. We barely talk at all, but we been bosom friends for years. Without her, I…I don’t have no one else.” The girl teared up, choked back a sob, and mastered herself with a flutter of lashes. A brave mask, if a cracked one. “Would you rather have a cup o’water held just out of reach, or have nothin’ at all so you can start looking elsewhere?”

 Twisted logic, and to a sensible person, a ghastly overreaction to something as simple as a fading friendship. But it was logic Tatiana understood. The logic of a heart so bruised it believed only pain and destruction could birth liberation and new life. The logic perhaps of one harboring unrequited or regretfully hidden affections. Empathy softened her brow—but only just. She was painfully alone, too, aside from Lucien. Most of her comrades in the Imperial City had distanced themselves from her when they married, and all of them, friends, family, and Thieves’ Guild allies deserted her upon her arrest before the Oblivion Crisis. Languishing in prison, wishing for their deaths was sometimes all that warmed her in that miserable filthy cell. The scars eventually scarred over after her escape, stiff and tugging at the edges. With their deaths, she’d sworn she could finally relinquish what had been and stop agonizing over what hadn’t. She didn’t care how absurd it was to wish for such things.

 Images of her twin sister, Tatiana’s sneery, broken mirror, flashed through her mind. Their wicked parents who taught them that  everything,  even love and gentleness, had a price that wasn’t always worth paying. Tatiana tamped them all down. Those were wounds that hadn’t healed. That could only be healed with humiliation and slow, agonizing deaths.

 She regarded Elina like a filly ready to bolt—calmly, steadily, and softer than before. “In my experience, friends aren’t friends if a cock or cunt can come between them.”

“Exactly! She never much liked me if she could just…turn away like that. It’s…” She chewed her lip a moment before meeting Tatiana’s gaze again. Vulnerable and bruised, seeking connection. Validation. Comfort. “It’s good someone understands.”

 Part of Tatiana plead for to give it to her, the tiny, disgustingly human part that her father, Umbra, and butchering her fellows at the Cheydinhal Sanctuary hadn’t strangled. Ignoring it, she coolly lifted her chin. “I understand quite well. But I want to ensure you understand what you are potentially inviting by hiring us. The kill and immediate risk will be mine, but if others knew you two were close, you may be questioned at the very least. Possibly suspected, unless you have coin enough for me to take specific precautions against such outcomes. Whatever you choose, whatever may or may not be done to you, be aware that so much as a whisper against the Dark Brotherhood will be returned to you as a scream, and it will be the last thing you hear.”

 Elina’s perfect little nose scrunched piggishly. “You know what someone’s got to do to…summon your fellows. How can you think I doubt any of this? I got the bones and the flowers and dagger and all those candles. You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to get that heart. I said all the magic words. I felt that…tinglin’ in my mind, the hair on my arms bristlin’. I’m not cut to be a killer. A bit of beef blood in the pot turns my stomach. But I  don’t  do things without thinkin’. I want Rana dead, and you’re not supposed to care.”

 “Sometimes I’m curious, but ultimately, I don’t give a shit why our clients want people dead. All that matters is whether or not they can pay and if they understand the repercussions of betraying us.” Tatiana tilted her head slightly, lank tendrils of hair flopping away from her temple and cheek. “I have a one-eyed cat at home, Elina. Do you know how I got her? Took her off some ratspit farmer who happened to be going to the lake I camped out on to drown her. For brevity’s sake, know that the Imperial Watch never found all his pieces. My last kill wasn’t even a contract. One of my colleagues and I butchered him like a fattened calf and fed his parts to slaughterfish. So when I say I’ve killed men and women for looking at me wrong, believe me.”

 Paling at Tatiana’s words, Elina cleared her throat; the stool creaked as she shifted and thumbed her buttons again. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but we never met. Honest. I dunno even where a place called The Wisp is.” A beat, a gulp. It wasn’t the best act, but far from the worst. “I’ll be dumb as a doorpost even if they throw me baby-naked in the stocks all buttered for the flies.”

 Tatiana bit back a sneer at that image. “For your sake, I hope so. What payment can you offer? Sithis demands souls, but His children demand more tangible compensation.” Elina faltered, gaze dropping to the floor like a dead bird. “Or are your pockets empty and my time wasted?”

 “I told you. I don’t do things without thinkin’.” Steel flashed across her round, brown eyes as she snapped a cracked button on her stomach; half clattered to the floor. The sound seemed to snap something within her, too. She slouched, glowering at her hands a moment before fishing through the battered satchel on her table. When she produced a filthy suede coinpurse, her bluster had blown out and left a weary, wounded girl in its wake. She proffered it with a heavy sigh. “I’ve got fifty gold pieces and my gran’s brooch. ‘S got a few diamonds and a sapphire in it, she said. She’s dead, so I don’t think she cares I, um, took it back from her. I’m sorry it’s not much. But I don’t…I didn’t know where else to turn. Like I said, blood makes me very very queasy. Poison sounds…risky. And with him being a noble, I’d be cooked if it didn’t work and they nabbed me.”

 Cooked like bread forgotten in the oven. You can’t touch a nobleman without being one. “Do you care how it’s done? Is discretion required, or would you want a scene to be made? What of her husband?”

“Not really. I don’t think I have enough for both of them, but maybe that’s okay. He’d to suffer without her. I’d like that.”

 “Keep thinking like that, and maybe you’ll have a better job than stirring batter one day.”

 “Oh, no, miss. I love my job ever so much. Mr. Thames, the baker, he has a cute retriever that sleeps in the shop. It’s quite nice there.”

 Averting her eyes, Tatiana set her jaw against the faded memory of Antoinetta Marie’s smiles, absurd laughter, and gentle touched. She counted the coins and held the little knot of scuffed enamel leaves and gems to the candlelight. The brooch, in her well-schooled opinion, would fetch several hundred Septims from the right buyer even if the sapphires were colored crystal, for the trio of tiny diamonds did in fact appear genuine. The purse held twenty-nine Septims, not even a quarter what a decent Speaker would charge for a beggar. Lucien and the others would’ve scoffed and demand she do better, for a nobleman’s wife was a far riskier target than a tavern cook, trader, or stablehand. Hazard pay, for starters. Perhaps something to cover emergency bribes or materials for a disguise. The Dark Brotherhood was as much a business as a cult, but both needed ample coin and resources to survive. Funds to maintain or repair lodgings and armor, issue and maintain bribes or pay allied specialists, and the like.

 But bookkeeping was not Tatiana’s job. Sanctuary heads and Speakers handled such matters. The latter also decided contracts’ prices. Listeners merely upheld the Night Mother’s direct orders and passed on Her wishes. Anything else, they could do or delegate at their own discretion. Perhaps the Night Mother should’ve sent Belisarius—or Banus, for he led the Leyawiin Sanctuary—but She hadn’t. She wanted her here.

 Eyes seemed to open somewhere in her spirit. She didn’t want her there simply to accept the job for the Family. She wanted her to take it.

 Of its own accord, her left hand slipped to Umbra, though she knew there was no space to effectively use a longsword in the room. Though she’d insisted she didn’t care about clients’ motivations, she did care about Elina’s. And against her better judgment, she  let  herself care. She’d worn Elina’s slippers. Suffered silently and alone. Disregarded. Dismissed to second or fourth or tenth place by those she’d loved too much. This was her test, somehow, and she’d pass it her way. Not her father’s. Not Lucien’s.

 After the Purification and Applewatch, the brooch more than hired her knives. It would look lovely on one of her spring cloaks anyway. But killing for pleasure rather than simple duty? Reclaiming some semblance of power in her life? That would’ve driven her to take it for free. She’d slip a thousand of her own Septims into the Brotherhood’s coffers if she’d had to.

 Umbra’s hilt became ice as baleful mists caressed her hand with something akin to pride. Flickered like dark fire as blood and splintered skulls and breaking necks filled her mind. Pretending to weigh the purse a moment, she tossed it up and snatched it from the air, then hitched it to her belt. “Elina Pike, consider your contract accepted. Now, tell me everything you can about your little problem.”

aka first christmas with the lizard twins and black hand corporate party

references (thank you @lucien-lachance)

This was in J'Ghasta's house, aka our first Black Hand contract sent by Mathieu instead of Lucien. If you happen to pick the very hard lock on this keg, you'll find this inside

All of his Black Hand gear!!