Red Right Hand: The Sky of Daytime Dies Away

• Posted by ilanisilver August 7, 2018 - Filed in TSC: Skyrim - 1,267 views

   

  

   

  “…and then I woke up, and there was Aerin. I was lying in a clearing outside Mzinchaleft, and he’d healed the worst of my injuries. I owe him my life,” Mjoll said matter-of-factly, twisting a few grapes from their vine and popping them into her mouth. Davius frowned. She felt beholden to that self-righteous prig? Unacceptable.

   

  “And I’m glad you’re still with us, and decided to make Riften your home. So I owe Aerin a debt as well,” he said. His eyes met hers, and he waited for the blush to rise to her cheeks before taking a drink.

   

  You don’t want to think about Aerin anymore, do you? No. Think of us, out here on the lakeshore. Nirnroot singing in the purple dusk, leaves falling around us like shining golden coins.

   

  Magic.

   

  He couldn’t have chosen better if he’d had a year to plan. And he didn’t; he hadn’t wanted to wait another day. With that in mind, he took what he knew of Mjoll – she loved Riften, and wanted to see it at its best. Well, this was it.

   

  The basket he’d packed carried the essentials: fresh, warm bread, crisp apples, delicious salty bacon, grapes, and the best wine he could find – taken from Maven Black-Briar’s personal stores. Davius let her think she was doing him a favor, and why not? He was feeling magnanimous. Besides, he knew that Maven knew he could have it any time he wanted, anyway.

   

  Yes, his plan to ‘astonish’ Mjoll had come together nicely – dinner, good conversation, and what was promising to be a perfect sunset – except for one unfortunate detour into the wonder that was Aerin. But Davius feared little on that score. She shared a house with the man. If they’d not become more than friends in all that time, they weren’t liable to. The field was open, as far as he was concerned. And if Aerin proved too much of a distraction, well.

   

  There were ways of dealing with such a thing.

   

  “So I get why you’re here in Riften,” Davius said, and tore a crust from his bread, tossing it into the lake. Bubbles surrounded it, followed by the snout of a hungry river betty. “You told me how you got here. But where are you from? Where’d you grow up? What was your life like, you know, before you took up adventuring into sword-eating Dwemer ruins?”

   

  “I grew up on a farm in Hjaalmarch, near Solitude.” Mjoll grinned and held out her hand for a crust of bread and tore it to bits, watching more fish come to the surface for their own dinner. “Lucky, peaceful childhood – running in green meadows, flowers in my hair, churning butter with my mom. I remember, my brother and I had these wooden swords – our dad made them – and we’d play bandits, and…”

   

  Her smile faltered, and her voice trailed off into a heavy sigh. “That ring you brought back…my mother gave it to me on a trip to Solitude. We used to go by ourselves and sit on the beach, on the rocks. Watching waves come in, ships…”

   

  “Are your parents…”

   

  “Dead. Natural causes. If sadness is a natural cause, I guess.” Her eyes gleamed like dewdrops on spring grass, and her voice sounded choked. “I shouldn’t…”

   

  “If you want to talk about it, then, it’s something I want to hear,” Davius said, and was almost surprised to realize he meant it. Talk about dead parents might not be romantic, but Mjoll feeling like she could open up to him boded nothing but good. “It’s your life, Mjoll. Part of you.”

   

  “You might be sorry you took me on, you know.” Mjoll sniffed and wiped at her eyes, the corners of her mouth lifting in a halfhearted attempt at a smile. “I was thirteen, and my brother almost twelve. Dad had gone to the Solitude markets. Bandits. They took everything. Threatened Mom. ‘If you have anything hidden and don’t tell…’ you know the routine. My brother, he was so angry. He grabbed his wooden sword and –“

   

  Davius didn’t need to hear what came next. Molten anger burned through his veins. “You don’t have to keep going. Fuck. I’m sorry.”

   

  They sat in silence for long minutes, watching the sun sink below the lake. Mjoll wrapped her arms around her knees and shivered. “I know. I…it was so long ago, but sometimes I can hear it. When it’s quiet. That sound a blade makes when it-“

   

  He crouched in the dark alcove. Damn Stormcloaks…how long did it take to walk down a godsdamned hallway? And then – boots scratching on stone. The whoosh and flicker of a torch. The dagger clenched in his palm.

   

  And the rip of ebony on flesh.

   

  Davius jumped at Mjoll’s broken, choking sob. “Well,” she said, swiping at her eyes again, “there’s nothing I can do for them now. But what I can do for others – Riften – I mean, there’s just so much that needs done, and-“

   

  “There is,” Davius said. He swiveled toward her and nodded, feeling the conversation getting back on track. “And I want you to know I’m changing things. In the guild, in the city. I know how you feel about it, but it’s different now than it was under Mercer – the old guildmaster, I mean. He was just…”

   

  Davius let out a long whistle and lobbed another crust of bread far out into the middle of the lake. “Anyway, my guild isn’t full of bandits or marauders. Those who can’t abide by the rules will leave. I want to make Riften a safe place. For us. Where people who haven’t had the best life can find a family. Maybe, a place where veterans like me can-”

   

  “It’s not a secret I’m no fan of the Thieves Guild. You’re breaking the law, of course,” Mjoll said, frowning and biting her bottom lip, “but…”

   

  “But?”

   

  “I admit Riften is better since you came back.” Mjoll shook her head, and her frown turned into a too-bright smile. “Let’s not talk about that today. Not anymore. I want to hear about you, before the war took you away. What were you like? Little Davius in miniature guild leathers?”

   

  “Hardly,” he said, and picked up an apple, tossing it from hand to hand. “I apprenticed at the stables, if you can believe it.”

   

  “I can’t.”

   

  “Ask Hofgrir.” Davius swore under his breath, bobbling the apple and letting it fall to the ground. Of all the stupid things to bring up. He could damned well see Mjoll going to the stablemaster for stories of him as a boy. And if she did, that would mean she was interested, and all to the good. But what she’d find…

   

  “No, actually, don’t. He won’t have good things to say.”

   

  “Why?” Mjoll snapped up Davius’s apple and took a bite. “Were you a terrible stablehand?”

   

  “No. Horses…I could always relate to horses. In a way maybe I couldn’t with people. But I, ah…his daughter and I-”

   

  Mjoll blushed and gasped, pausing with the apple halfway to her mouth. “He caught you with his daughter? I can imagine most fathers –“

   

  “What? No, not that,” Davius said, feeling heat sear his temples, “that…well, that would have been dealt with handily, by my parents, if not hers. No, we were…close. We made promises. And I left her. The war was the reason why, but it was me who did the leaving.”

   

  Davius glanced at Mjoll’s face and saw sympathy there, in her furrowed brow and pursed lips. His eyes burned and he looked out across the lake, dark now under a moonless sky. She’d wanted more lighthearted conversation, and this certainly wasn’t it. But once he’d begun to tell the tale, he couldn’t stop.

   

  “And – and worse, I told her I’d come back. I swore it, Mjoll. But, I just couldn’t. I did things. Things I couldn’t...I wrote her and told her to move on with her life. She’d waited for me. For years, and I just told her to…move on. So she did. Married a rancher in Whiterun Hold.”

   

  A wolf howled in the distance, and Davius suppressed a shudder at chills creeping up his spine. “I’ve killed, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. I’ve lied and cheated. Stolen things – valuable things, beautiful things. Wicked things. But what I regret…what I really regret? Taking those years of her life for myself, and wasting them. It was the most cruel, selfish thing I’ve ever done.”

   

  He glanced over at Mjoll. Her face looked like marble in the glow of a nearby patch of nirnroot – cool and pale and utterly inscrutable. When he’d first started babbling about his past and mentioned Hofgrir, he wasn’t sure why, and just added it up to nerves. Courting jitters, saying the wrong thing. It happened. Not to him, of course, but Mjoll was special-

   

  A blast of heat shot through his heart, and he knew – Mjoll. It was just…Mjoll. He couldn’t hide from her, not something like this. If she knew his deepest, darkest secret and still chose to stay, maybe...

   

  Davius watched Mjoll throw her apple core into the lake and wipe her sticky hands on her leggings before swiping at her eyes. “Everyone has regrets, Davius.”

   

  Well, she didn’t tell him to leave, or to jump in the lake. That was something. “Even Maven Black-Briar?”

   

  He’d meant it as a joke, a tension breaker, after their too-serious conversation, but Mjoll rested her chin on her knees and sighed. “No, not her,” she said, and looked up at him, a sad little half-smile on her lips. “Not her.”

   

   

   

  “So, ah…you sure you want to be involved in this?” Davius looked over his shoulder at Mjoll, crouched behind him on the docks. She’d come to him two weeks ago with rumors of a skooma operation headed up by a Dunmer named Sarthis Idren, in the warehouses just outside the city. At first, Davius had thought her source’s tale typical of Riften’s career beggars – exaggerated to draw the sympathies of people like Mjoll – but the more he listened, the more Wujeeta’s story rang true: sounded like this Sarthis Idren was running a tidy little scam.

   

  Mjoll brushed a dragonfly from her ear and nodded. “Wujeeta came to me, remember? If this scum is targeting the poor to get them hooked on skooma, I want a piece of him. And I can swing a sword as well as you. Better, maybe.”

   

  Davius grinned into the darkness. The past month had been fun. More than fun. Their lakeside picnic hadn’t been spoiled by gloomy conversation or Davius’s confession, and the morning’s wee hours had found them still there, wrapped up in a blanket and sharing story after story. He’d not wanted it to end.

   

  And it hadn’t, not really. He and Mjoll spent much of their spare time together, back on the shore, or at what had quickly become their corner table at the Bee and Barb. On those rare afternoons where Mjoll successfully eluded Aerin, Davius joined her outside the gates – hunting or fishing or clearing the woods of vermin. Once, he’d even brought Mjoll down to the Cistern and introduced her to Brynjolf and Delvin and Vex.

   

  That meeting was exactly as awkward as Davius feared, and if Dirge hadn’t embarrassed himself by challenging Mjoll to a fight (which he lost, and lost badly), there might never have been another. But kicking Dirge’s ass seemed to work as an icebreaker for everyone involved, and they’d stayed long into the night drinking mead and playing cards. Mjoll even tried her hand at the guild’s training chests.

   

  She was terrible at picking locks. But, as Davius told her, grinning over her twentieth broken pick and frustrated scowl, perfect people are boring.

   

  And boring, Mjoll was not.

   

  Even the Aerin situation had resolved itself. Mostly, anyway, and Davius hadn’t had to lift a finger. Aerin had done himself in – he’d cornered Mjoll the week before, demanding she stop ‘fraternizing with the enemy,’ and since then, relations between the two friends had been decidedly chilly. Aerin should have known better than to order someone like Mjoll around. As for Davius, he was happy to lend whatever warmth he could to pick up the slack.

   

  And now, they worked together to rid Riften of a dangerous element. Just how dangerous, Davius wasn’t sure, but he’d spoken to Maven Black-Briar about the rumored skooma den and got the distinct impression she was well aware of its existence.

   

  Dangerous, indeed. If the Black-Briars were involved, he’d have to step carefully. He’d taken almost everything from Maven, everything but her court, and even that she held at his sufferance. She knew it as well as he did, and a defeat like that could leave her desperate to save what was left of her influence in Riften. If Sarthis Idren really was on her payroll.  

   

  But Mjoll was right – Sarthis used skooma to target Riften’s weakest and most vulnerable, getting them hooked on the expensive drug. And when they weren’t able to pay – and he knew they wouldn’t be able to pay, it’s why he chose people like Wujeeta in the first place – he’d take everything they had. Or conscript them into servitude, use them to do his dirty work and get them all killed, most likely.

   

  That didn’t line up with Davius’s vision for Riften. Sure, he ran the Thieves Guild, but he knew what he was, and went into work every day with a clear head and the will to choose. Someone hooked on skooma, though? Someone with no money or power? No family? Sarthis made sure his marks lacked agency, lacked the freedom to choose anything other than a cage – either one of Sarthis’s making or one of iron, below Mistveil Keep. Or, if all else failed, a wooden one, six feet underground.

   

  Davius didn’t draw many lines in the sand, but that was a big one. Maybe the biggest.

   

  The warehouse door opened, and several armed men walked out – two, Davius noted without surprise, wearing purple livery – and Davius crouched lower. Shift change, just like he’d seen every night of the last two weeks’ surveillance. Mjoll tapped Davius’s shoulder. He nodded, and as they’d planned, crept along the side of the building toward the back entrance. Mjoll would wait a minute or two before heading in the front. Davius thought of what awaited him inside and grinned, once more, into the darkness.

   

  The game was on.

   

  

   

  Mjoll crept around yet another corner of the warehouse in annoyed wonder. She’d searched nearly every room and hadn’t seen one single thug, and no sign of Sarthis. Or Davius.

   

  The back entrance lay just around the next corner. Worry gnawed at her gut. It was too quiet; she’d heard nothing but her own padding feet the whole time she’d been inside. Mjoll started to wonder if they’d gotten bad information, when she heard a voice – still and calm and almost…playful.

   

  Davius. There he was.

   

  “…give you the whole song and dance, you know the one. ‘Don’t let me see you ‘round these parts no more, my man.’ That’d be alright, yeah? I mean, your crew’s dead, your operation in shambles. I could just...leave you alive so you could turn tail and run. Live to fight another day, in some other hold, even.”

   

  Mjoll started in disgust and held back a gasp. Surely Davius didn’t think to let anyone go free? She peeked around the door frame and darted back – Davius held Sarthis with a dagger at his neck, and a dozen thugs and Rift guards lay at his feet. He told her he’d scouted out the warehouse, that Sarthis’s crew would be evenly distributed throughout. How was that possible if they were all…here?

   

  “But if you belong to Maven,” Davius said, his voice silky and low, “you’ve got Maven’s money. You’ll set up nice and pretty somewhere safe, give her time to lick her wounds. And I can’t let that happen. Can’t leave a crown on the table.”

   

  Mjoll breathed a sigh of relief. They’d planned to turn any surviving thugs into Mistveil Keep, but the way Davius had spoken…

   

  She’d only doubted him for a second, after all. Maybe two. Mjoll waggled her fingers around the hilt of her sword and took a step toward the doorway. A floorboard creaked, and she stilled. Had her step made the noise? She wasn’t sure, but she noticed Davius tense and glance her way. After what seemed like an hour, he shrugged and turned a grin back on Sarthis.

   

  “You’re not going to kill me, fetcher. Why would you? I’m worth more to you alive, Maven will make sure of it.” Mjoll heard the smirk slide across Sarthis’s face and wondered at his bravery. Or stupidity, given the bodies of his colleagues strewn across the floor and Davius’s remarkably unmussed appearance. “Besides, if you were going to kill me, you’d have done it already. Why all the drama?”

   

  Mjoll thought she heard a noise toward the front of the warehouse. A shuffle. And what about that creak…

   

  More guards, maybe? She’d just turned back toward the docks when she heard something else – a soft ripping sound, followed by a spluttering gag and a crash of metal on wood. She whirled back around and stood in the doorway, breathless and frozen to the spot.

   

  Davius held Sarthis against the wall, his hands sticky with blood streaming from a gaping slice across the Dunmer’s throat. He dragged the tip of a gleaming ebony dagger down Sarthis’s chest.

   

  “Because honestly,” Davius said, staring into Sarthis’s bulging eyes and giving him one more shove against the wall, “it’s the most fun I’ve had in ages.” Davius jammed his dagger up under Sarthis’s ribs, and twisted, before yanking it out and letting Sarthis fall.

   

  The elf was dead before he hit the ground.

   

  Mjoll did gasp, then, and red blooms of shock and anger colored her vision. She ran into the room and struggled to draw breath, her eyes shifting from Sarthis’s ruined body to Davius’s ghostly-pale face.

   

  The ebony dagger slipped from Davius’s hand and fell with a dull clatter to the floor.

  

   

  Art Credits: Riften Sunset by lupusmagus, DeviantArt.