Things to Do in Markarth When You're Dead, Chapter 1

• Posted by ilanisilver April 18, 2018 - Filed in TSC: Skyrim - 1,597 views

  

  

   

  “Are you serious, wizard? Women in Markarth actually like that mumbling oaf? Are they deaf?”

   

  “Possibly, child,” Calcelmo replied, and chuckled under his breath. Sidonie clenched her fists. During his angsty (and lengthy) babble about his feelings for Faleen, she’d forgotten he was a centuries-old Altmer. In his worldview, she’d be little more than a spring chicken. It still rankled. She had enough sense not to set her cap over someone who didn’t know she existed, didn’t she? So much for age and wisdom. “But they are not blind. And Faleen…”

   

  “You don’t think she likes someone like…him?” Sidonie bristled in her friend’s defense. Faleen never spoke of men, and Sidonie certainly didn’t volunteer such a topic. Their lunchtime conversations usually centered around their careers – Faleen served an infuriatingly naïve jarl who had no idea where his best interests lay, and as for Sidonie? Well, the escalating Civil War, angry dragons, and an impending apocalypse tended to take up most of her time. She simply had none left for romance.

   

  But Sidonie had no doubt that if Faleen were to set her sights on a man, Yngvar the bloody Singer wouldn’t even register in the periphery. A hairy, hulking bear who spoke in monosyllabic grunts and got his jollies intimidating everyone who crossed his path? No, surely her friend had more refined taste. Better taste.

   

  “No! They are friends, only,” Calcelmo insisted, but a lingering wistfulness in his tone had Sidonie questioning the wisdom of bringing Yngvar in at all.

   

  “I’ll trust you, you crazy old Mer,” she said, running her fingers through her blonde curls. She’d spent the morning practicing an idea of Calcelmo’s – utilizing spells and magical weaponry to amplify the effects of her Shouts – and probably looked like a banshee. Especially since she’d used the infestation of frostbite spiders in the anteroom of the Dwarven ruins as her targets. Her fingers grazed a piece of webbing stuck in one of the tangles, and she yanked it free and tossed it to the floor. “But on your head be it, if you’re wrong.”

   

  

   

  She saw Yngvar from a distance, leaning against a stone wall near the stream running through town. Calcelmo was right, she had to admit: he was easy on the eyes. If she could get past the dismissive slant in his gaze, or that belligerent jut of his jaw. A few drops of misty rain blew against her cheeks, and she brushed them away and shivered, but not from the cold.

   

  Run as far as you will, lass. Your past will always follow.

   

  She shivered again and old memories gave way to one a little more recent. Yngvar once again lounged against his wall, but the steel of his armor glinted under late-afternoon sun.

   

  “Bloody enough for you, outsider.” It wasn’t a question he’d snarled from his perch next to the sun-drenched, sparkling stream. More a threat. Or a warning. He’d caught Sidonie at a bad time – she was already on edge after her long journey from Solitude and the less than warm welcome she’d received at the gates. She backed up a step and met the man’s eyes with a matching frown. The corners of his mouth twitched up in the tiniest of grins. “You got a little something there,” he said, brushing his cheek with the side of his thumb.

   

  Sidonie followed his gaze and swiped at her own cheek. The wet, red smear on her fingers brought bile to her throat, and she knelt to wash her hands and face in the stream. “Well, since a man was just killed right in front of me by a Reachman –  a people your jarl has sworn are under control – and since no one acted like it was in any way out of the ordinary, I’d say yes.” She rose to lean against the opposing wall and looked him up and down, cataloguing his worn armor and scuffed boots. Pretty, shining sword, though. She ripped the wax seal off a bottle of wine with her teeth and took a long, quenching sip. “Yes, it’s plenty bloody enough. Who the fuck are you, then?”

   

  “Name’s ah…Yngvar,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Y-Yngvar the ah…Singer.” The honorific fell off his tongue like rocks rolling in sticky mud.

   

  It was Sidonie’s turn to smirk. She cut her eyes back down to the steel at his hip. Long fingers caressed the hilt, playing around the pommel like it was a prized lute rather than a weapon of war. Ysmir’s beard, the titles men gave their blades these days.

   

  “Well. Yngvar.” She straightened to her full height – unremarkable, even for a Breton – and looked down her nose at him, a technique she’d perfected under the watchful glares of Dirge and Delvin and that traitorous shit Mercer Frey down in Riften’s sewers. Yngvar had them all by a head, maybe two, but even he seemed to sink into the stone at his back under her haughty blue stare. Good. “It’s been a pleasure, but I’m expected at Understone Keep. Maybe you could point the way?”

   

  He never got the chance. A wandering palace guard heard her request and tripped over his boots racing to serve as her personal escort, probably hoping to insinuate himself into the jarl’s good graces. Sidonie was fine with it. She’d not figured Yngvar as a good conversationalist anyway, and that opinion hadn’t changed over the year she’d been in the city.

   

  All she really knew about him boiled down to his job: housecarl to the Silver-Bloods, charged with the protection of Markarth’s richest family. Sidonie’d been assigned by General Tullius to do what amounted to the same thing: Legion liaison, charged with the protection of Skyrim’s richest stronghold.

   

  It hadn’t been near as arduous a task as Sidonie’d dreaded. Though the Legion and the Silver-Bloods postured like hyenas on opposing sides of the Civil War, Thongvor and his crew snatched at any opportunity to woo power to their side. And nothing in Skyrim radiated power like the legendary dragonborn.

   

  As such, she’d been forced to spend countless hours in Yngvar’s company. He had nothing to say to her, and what little he grunted to anyone else was rarely more than thinly-veiled threats or empty braggadocio. Try as she might, Sidonie couldn’t imagine what Calcelmo was thinking. How could such a man coax any self-respecting woman into his bed? Well, once he opened his mouth, anyway.

   

  She rolled her eyes to swirling gray clouds above, imagining Yngvar’s room. Animal heads mounted on every surface, surely, and swords. Of course. Some of them artfully bloodied so he could gaze up at them and say, in that ridiculously deep voice of his, “blood and silver, love. Blood and silver.”

   

  An image of Yngvar lounging on a fur-covered bed pranced through her mind and she shoved it away. Even in her head, he proved insufferable. The nerve. How dare he lie around in her daydreams wearing no clothes?

   

  She approached him and took a deep breath. Cool, misty raindrops seemed to sizzle on her hot, undoubtedly flushed cheeks, and she hoped Yngvar wouldn’t notice.

   

  “What…ah,” he began, and let his voice trail off. His gaze roamed over her blue mage robes and lit on the staff she carried on her back.

   

  “Just came from lessons and didn’t want to go all the way up to my room to unload before going out,” she said, nodding back at the staff and jiggling the apothecary satchel at her waist. “It’s weird to me, too. Calcelmo likes to remind me I’m a little long in the tooth for a beginner.”

   

  Yngvar huffed out a sound that might have been one of amusement, and crossed his arms over his chest. He uncrossed them, and placed one hand on the pommel of his sword instead, his fingers curling and uncurling over its jeweled hilt. “Well, what can I do for you?”

   

  Sidonie narrowed her eyes. What in Oblivion had him so jumpy? She shrugged it off. If she’d had to exist at the mercy of the Silver-Bloods, she might be jumpy too. “It’s Calcelmo. He asked me to talk to you.”

   

  “That old wizard?” He snorted and crossed his arms back over his chest, his steel gauntlets dull in Markarth’s afternoon gloom. “What does he want with me? Someone to clear out his precious ruins again? I’ve already told him once, I don’t do that any-“

   

  “No,” Sidonie said, shaking her head, “although your willingness to assist your fellow man is touching, as always.”

   

  “I don’t see you jumping in there to battle spiders and godsforsaken living machines.”

   

  “As it happens, I took care of the spiders this morning, but that’s not what this is about.” Sidonie looked down at the ground and wedged the heel of her boot between two loose stones. “I’m…well, I’m on a mission, sort of…”

   

  Sidonie blushed. She wasn’t sure how to broach the subject at all. Why hadn’t she planned her explanation on the way there instead of gamboling like an idiot down memory lane? And imagining Yngvar naked, a tiny, sing-song voice teased from some sadistic corner of her brain. Her blush warmed, and Yngvar leaned in closer.

   

  “A mission? What mission?”

   

  She mumbled something under her breath, and he leaned in even closer. “What was that? I didn’t quite catch it.”

   

  The dusty leather scent of his armor tickled her nose. He smelled good. Some sort of hair oil, maybe? Sage and rosemary. Sidonie exhaled and screwed up her eyes, hating herself for listening to Calcelmo’s lovelorn moaning in the first place. Problem was, she wasn’t the only one who’d listened. Mara herself had taken pity on the ancient Altmer and appeared to Sidonie in a dream, asking her to help bring Calcelmo and Faleen together. As a personal favor.

   

  Sidonie could do nothing but accept. Before her dragonblood had awakened, and she realized who she was and all the cosmic implications of her heritage, she’d have written off such a dream as the worst sort of wine-soaked hallucination. No more. She’d no more deny the personal request of a goddess than she would cut off her right hand, but it still sounded stupid when she said it out loud. “Mara,” she said, and lifted her chin. “I’m on a mission for Mara.”

   

  Yngvar backed up and stared at her chest. Sidonie flinched, and brushed her robes with a hand, her silver and ruby ring catching on the sleek fabric. She swore under her breath and made a mental note to talk to Ghorza up at the smithy about repairing the setting. “I don’t have a bug on me, do I? What is it?”

   

  “Mara?” Yngvar bent to retrieve a bottle of wine at his feet and peered at the curve of her neck. “But I don’t see a…”

   

  He took a long pull from the bottle and gave Sidonie a pointed look. “You know what I mean.”

   

  “An amulet?” Sidonie snorted. If that’s what he assumed, maybe the truth wouldn’t be so hard to explain, after all. “Sweet Dibella, no. Not for me. Mara sent me to talk to Calcelmo, because he’s in love with Faleen. And Calcelmo sent me to talk to you, because you and Faleen are-“

   

  “That. Old. Dog.” Discomfiture forgotten, Yngvar laughed long and loud, his head thrown back and his wine bottle lifted in salute. “You know what? Good for him. Good for them both. They could both use a little warmth in their lonely lives. I can’t imagine anything colder than spending all your days and nights in Understone Keep. At least out here, there’s sunshine to heat up all this stone. Some days, at least,” he said, glancing up at the thickening clouds.

   

  Sidonie cocked her head to the side. He hadn’t questioned Mara’s appearance at all. What’s more, had she ever seen him smile or laugh over anything that didn’t involve someone else’s misfortune? The idea he could find joy in something other than his beloved pastime of cracking skulls was…disconcerting at best. And what was he prattling on about? She lived in Understone Keep and it was fine. Just fine. “What do you know about the cold? Or about loneliness? From what I hear-“

   

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” he said, and crossed his arms again, tapping the green bottle against his bicep. “Problem solved.”

   

  Sidonie closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. The conversation had clearly gotten away from her. “Um, so. Do you have any idea what Faleen might like? What Calcelmo could do to try and catch her eye? Mara’s in on it, so it must not be a lost cause.”

   

  “It’s not. Faleen’s not as stoic as she appears. I happen to know exactly what will get her toes curling, if you get my drift.”

   

  “Yngvar, I don’t think anyone could miss your drift,” she said and paused, waiting for him to continue. He only stared, his lips slowly curving into a smirk. Gods. Mara, specifically. What was She thinking, putting this asshole in the center of Her plans? “Well, what is it?”

   

  “Well, you’re Faleen’s friend, right? Does she ever talk about romance? Love? Any of that?”

   

  It was Sidonie’s turn to laugh. “When would we have time for any of that, either of us? There’s too much to fight out there,” she said, motioning to the gates. She fixed him with a pointed look of her own. “And in here.”

   

  “Right,” he said, rocking back on his heels and helping himself to another sip of wine. “You don’t sleep or eat or rest. You never spend time alone that could be spent in a more…enjoyable fashion?”

   

  Sidonie sighed and picked at the loose threads on her robes. Why she was still talking about this, she had no idea.

   

  Faleen. I’m putting up with him for Faleen.

   

  “Well, getting to know someone and making sure he’s-“

   

  “Some might say you think too much, the both of you,” he said, grinning. Sidonie wasn’t sure, they’d not said this many words to each other all year, but she got the distinct feeling he was enjoying himself. She held her hand out for his bottle and he passed it over, watching her as she drank. “Well, turns out, she talks about romantic stuff with me. And Faleen – get this – my girl likes poetry. Songs. Too bad we’re not each other’s types. I can ramble off mushy verse in my sleep.”

   

  “What? How? What would you know about poetry?” Sidonie passed the bottle back. She wanted to add ‘since you can barely string three words together that aren’t about fighting,’ but held her tongue. If she wanted his help, sacrifices had to be made.

   

  “We’ve known each other for a year or so, you and me, right?”

   

  “I wouldn’t say known, but-“

   

  “Keep it,” Yngvar said, rolling his eyes over the bottle as he lifted it to his lips and brought it back down without drinking. “I’m surprised you never asked why I’m called ‘the Singer.’ Weren’t you at all curious?”

   

  “I ah,” Sidonie said, and blushed again, “I thought it was what you called your sword, to be honest. Men like to name their…blades.” She smirked and stumbled back a step, the look on Yngvar’s face nearly comical. “Hey, what…”

   

  His eyes rounded, and he seemed to inflate, fuming, and shook his head in time with a low, wry chuckle. Sidonie couldn’t help but marvel – was he offended? Housecarl to the most corrupt family in town, a man who spent his days insulting everyone who crossed his path, and her misinterpretation of his honorific was where he drew the line?

   

  “It’s not my blade, Sidonie,” he said, and heaved a rumbling sigh. “I’m a bard.”

   

  Sidonie raised her eyebrows halfway up her forehead. “Are you serious?” She could swear he was serious.

   

  He nodded. “Well, I used to be. I was good, too. But I, ah…let’s say...got a little too involved in a lover’s quarrel and had to leave Solitude for a bit. While I was waiting for the coast to clear, Thongvor made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Good pay, good terms, and if any disgruntled suitor wanted the best of me, I’d be within my rights to beat the shit out of him. I’ve never looked back, but…”

   

  It was Sidonie’s turn to lean in closer. His confession didn’t shock her. Skyrim was rough country, and when she’d been younger, the pull of easy money on her own terms promised one thing: survival. She’d not meant to join the Thieves Guild after all, hadn’t planned on living a life full of questionable morals and vice. But once Riften’s perpetual golden autumn – emphasis on the gold – caught her in its sultry grasp, she hadn’t looked back either. Not for years. “But?”

   

  “I still write the occasional poem,” he said, and nodded, tapping a finger against his bottom lip. “You know, I have something that just might work. I wrote it months ago for a woman I met in…Morthal. Yeah. But I could tweak it, and it would be just right. Interested?”

   

  She twisted her mouth in a grimace, waiting on the other shoe to drop. Damned if Yngvar would do such a thing for free. “How much?”

   

  He grinned. “200 septims.”

   

  Accept, my child. Trust me.

   

  Sidonie gasped and choked on a rush of dusty air. Whether the exorbitant sum or Mara’s voice whispering in her ear astonished her more, she wasn’t sure. She hacked and coughed, leaning over with her hands braced on her knees.

   

  Yngvar pounded her back and grinned again, offering her his bottle. “Can you really put a price on true love, though?”

   

  Sidonie took it and drank long and deep. Giving up that much coin required liquid courage. “Apparently you can. But I know nothing about poetry or matchmaking, so I’ll have to take you up on it. When can you have it done?”

   

  “Inspiration has found its mark, never you fear,” he said, a strange spark lighting up deep green eyes in his tanned face. Funny, she’d never noticed his eyes were green. “Meet me here tomorrow after the council meeting.”

  

  Notes: art by Tjota, DeviantArt, and inXile Entertainment.  And no, of course that's not really Yngvar, but there's no good Yngvar art, and I can't deal with the in-game stills with the hair that looks like chewed-up taffy. And it seems they made less of an effort on the non-follower NPCs. I don't know, but this is how I picture Yngvar while I write. Rawr.