Completed Knives in the Dark

[Lyssia D'avore]

She did not adjust herself when he shifted his position. She was beyond caring about comforts, her limbs weighted with lead and her neck a boneless thing that could support no weight. Sleep threatened, but she knew she needed to stay awake; falling asleep thousands of feet up was a bad idea, Elijah or no, and the more pressing concern of slipping off into unconsciousness and never returning a bigger threat than that.

She she lay back against him, unable to support her weight, and watched the clouds roll by below. Terror of heights was something that had no claim on her, then. Not much of anything did, truth to tell; her mind was curiously foggy and blank, even the recriminations of what had happened, what she had done, and all the rest of it only managing to break above the fog periodically before disappearing into the mists again.

She shifted against him when he spoke after long, uncomfortable minutes of flight spent fighting to stay awake. "Hmm?" She blinked a time or two, trying to engage her mind, to lift herself from that fog. "For what?"

She sounded confused. Looked confused, although the Pegasi captain could not see that from his angle. What possible reason did he have for being thankful? He would not have been placed in harms way had she not finally decided to bring him into this whole mess, and something deep in her twisted at the thought of putting this man in the same gallows she herself had been fitted for. "I have...brought nothing but trouble," she continued with some difficulty.

 

[Elijah]

Couldn't the woman just ever take a compliment or a simple tiny bit of gratitude? He bit down on the inside of his cheek to stop himself from snapping. She was tired, he was tired, it was no time to have a more nuanced discussion. Then, when they did have the energy for such a discussion, Elijah would probably be wise enough to keep his mouth shut so that he didn't suffer the sharp edge of her tongue and leave feeling about two inches tall. He took a deep breath in and closed his eyes when he let it go.

"For healing me - even though I stand by what I said. It was foolish when you left half your blood back on that roof," she couldn't see his scowl but he made sure it was present in his tone. Gypsy banked a little to catch a warmer air current and gave a soft snort when a wisp of cloud got up her nostrils. Eli loosened his grip in her mane to run a hand down her neck and give it a good pat. If Lyssia wasn't as light as a feather they would have had to make stops but he reckoned they could make it in one long trip.

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

Too tired to argue; there would be time enough for that later, if she lived. He, at least, was as safe as he could be for the time being. Unless Adora decided to send other Pegasi after him on the moment, but even as tired and as difficult as it was to think right now...she doubted that the Bursar would do something as curious as that. Some things would raise too many questions, and there were other ways to go about burying problems without putting oneself in the firing line.

Swallowing her protests, she settled back against his chest, wincing at the stab of pain in her back. Likely, she was adding another layer of blood on his shirt, but at least his blood wasn't flowing anymore. "You're welcome, of course," she said faintly.

She couldn't think of anything else to say. In fact, despite all of her best efforts, she could not keep sleep from stealing her away; too much blood loss, too much pain, and too much stress from every thing that had come down the road over the last weeks, all of it collapsed on her shoulders like a ton of bricks. A few minutes later, she had drifted off and lay boneless against his chest, pallid skin reflecting the morning light.

 

[Elijah]

Fuwei, Southern Territories

The clouds gave way to the lush rolling forest of the southern territories below. From such a high vantage point it barely looked like more than a dark green smudge that grew thicker and richer the quicker they descended. Birds took flight from the thicket below at the sight of the pegasus descending and Gypsy took great glee in racing them through the warmer currents. The rain must have travelled up from the region because whilst the lands were bone dry, petrichor permeated the air. Elijah took a deep breath and used it to rouse himself from the half slumber he had settled into the the last few hours.

Most people would have missed the slight dent in the thicket below but Gypsy's wings suddenly dipped and she took them down lower. Through the trees the ramshackle tower appeared. It was a small, squat thing for a tower. It certainly didn't seem to provide much militaristic vantage any longer until, that was, the Pegasus turned and revealed the perfectly cleared gap through the forest to the river beyond. There wasn't an inch of the body of water the tower couldn't see; any attack by sea here was useless.

Gypsy's hooves made a satisfying clattering noise as they hit the stonework atop the tower and Elijah's boots thudded down soon after. Two lanky looking guard rushed onto the roof.

"Get the medic," the Captain barked as he carefully slid Lyssia into his arms and headed for the door. One of the lads rushed off whilst the other made their way to Gypsy. Eli didn't protest; the two brothers knew him well enough by now to know that his horse came first. Instead he quickly took the deteriorating stairs down further into the tower, stopping two floors down where the rooms looked as though the were functional. He strode past two doors and then opened the third to reveal a cold but large bedroom taken up largely by the bed in the centre. "Here we go," he said softly and laid her down with surprising tenderness.

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

Echoing voices, indistinct and distant. Here, time held no meaning, and the grey light conveyed no sense of day or night.

Lyssia stood upon a vast plain that stretched into the indeterminate distance in every direction. Cold, black sand gleamed beneath feet she could not see, twinkling like dark velvet with chips of glass or diamond strewn upon it. No clouds, no blue sky; stars in their hundreds of thousands dotted the sky overhead, and while the sand was black, the vast emptiness above was abyssal. Points of white stood out against that inky darkness.

She had no body. Her perspective was defined, but what she was...was not. She could look around at this dead world, and see dunes of black sand marching off into the distance (had they been there before?). Dark mountains rose on the horizon, and a singular black tower stabbed into the inky darkness of the airless void, sepulcherral blue light dancing in its windows. Some enigmatic presence seemed to radiate its will from that place, and Lyssia found herself shivering, desperate to avoid the attention of whatever dwelt within.

You do not belong, child, something whispered in her head. Whispered, to it at least; it was like the voice of some goddess in her head, and she wanted to shriek at the pain.

Dead world, ghostly plain, ephemeral tower all vanished together.

***

A gasp of pain, as awareness returned. Pain followed quickly behind it, and the movement alone was enough to nearly make her black out again. Rolling onto her back proved to be a mistake, too, accompanied by further pain that went beyond all reason.

The place she eventually became aware of was different. She could vaguely recall the flight from Dornoch astride a pegasus - Gypsy - and little more before that. A fight, on a stormy night. she sat up, feeling a bit woozy, and looked at herself. Arms wrapped in bandages, spots of blood still managing to seep through. The stab in her shoulder she did not want to think about, nor the slash across her back. She didn't really want to think of any of it, to be honest.

With a start, she felt at her chest. The papers were gone, and panic began to rise in her. Wherever she was, someone had taken her shredded clothes and they had taken the papers she had been shredded to protect with them. A glance around the cold, stone room showed no other occupants. Elijah? Tossing back the covers and kicking her feet over the edge of the bed, she had to fight a wave of dizziness; the chill in the air set her to trembling, but it was not enough to slow or stop her. Of course it wasn't; Elijah had the right of it, she was as mule-stubborn and free spirited as they came.

Tottering barefoot across the room, she looked at the sparse furnishing for her belongings, and found nothing. Panic rising bit by bit, she set off to find Elijah, or someone who could fill in the missing bits of her memory. Ignoring the pain was not easy, but she had grown used to hurting these last couple of years....and so she bore it.

 

[Elijah]

Lyssia would come across a scarce number of people; a maid here who dropped into a curtsey and hurried on before she could be asked a question, two guards outside of a door who said nothing but barred her entry if she tried to get inside, and a scrappy looking lad who smelt as though he had come up from the stables in search of food. It was the latter who helpfully pointed her in the direction of where Elijah was.

Despite her healings he had had the medic of Fuwei check him over to ensure there were no injuries that had gone unattended. The plump gnarly woman who was the towers only healer had grumbled about magic and how herbs were the only true way to heal but she had given him a full bill of health. At least until he had collapsed from exhaustion and slept for twelve hours straight then nearly eaten the tower out of house and home. When Lyssia found him it was in what passed for the Great Hall.

There were not many people in here despite it being high noon and odd souls slipped in and out in drips and drabs. Eli was sat with a group of four other men with their heads bent together talking in low, gravely voices in between spoonfuls of soup.

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

A linen shift proved to be little protection against the chill in this place, although a touch of fever certainly did not help. It was still cool, as summer had not yet begun to bake the land. She would have thought were she not arrow-straight focused on what she had suffered so much to protect.

Unlike Elijah, magic healing was ineffective on her flesh, and so whoever was in charge of ministering to the wounded in this place had been forced to utilize linen thread and sew her up. Herbs and tinctures to try and stave off infection were the best that could be mustered, when a very powerful healer would need to be employed to overcome her natural resistance to magic.

It was difficult to maintain the dignity of her lost station, dressed as she was and as pale as death warmed over - pale but the flush in her face. The people who moved through the tower, offering their honorifics were not necessarily ignored, not so much as not seen. There were not many, which was good as far as she was concerned, in so much as she felt like being concerned about anything. A barred portal, under armed guard, stirred some interest. She thought to challenge the men barring the way, but no amount of bearing would overcome the fact that her face was known, and her fate as well.

Daughter of a traitor. And now, quite likely, an insurgent to the Dynasty. She could not imagine that Adora would do anything less than declare her and Elijah as rebels against the Dynast herself, projecting her own traitorous thoughts onto them, using them to obfuscate and mislead any who might have otherwise suspected her.

It made her head hurt, to think about it. Already, the task set before her had been galling and difficult; now it was nearly impossible. It seemed the entire world was stacked against her.

She paused drifting to a wall of the corridor to lean against it and rest, and think. And studiously avoid thinking about some things, like the filth on her hands that made her fingers stick together. The sour, coppery scent of blood lingered on the air...but they were figments of her mind, and not real. What was real was the plight before her.

She moved on after catching her breath, padding along the corridor as regally as she could given the circumstances, until she arrived in a wider room, the arched entrance from the hallway she had come up unimpressive, as the hall itself failed to wow. He eyes scanned the room, glassy and tired, until they circled back and locked on the man that had brought her out of Dornoch.

 

[Elijah]

The hushed conversation ended abruptly when one of the men looked up and spied Lyssia standing in the doorway. Elijah was the last to raise his head to see what it was that had brought the conversation to a sudden close and he didn't look at all surprised to find that it was her. His eyes lingered on her a moment before casting her away and returning his attention to the stew and chunk of bread in front of him. Clearly, he had far more important things on his mind. A few more things were exchanged in clipped and vague words before the four men each rose from the table and filed out past Lyssia. Only one of them - the youngest, though that still had him at twenty years Elijah's elder - gave her a nod that might be termed as friendly.

In front of the Captain on the table as well as the bowl, were the documents he had taken from Lyssia's bloodied clothes as well as a cleaner, crisper version. A copy. It had been scrawled over and marked in a very neat and concise hand, the same hand which filled another sheet of parchment - a letter. Not yet sent if the lack of folds suggested anything. Elijah was reading it over once more with a crease between his brows.

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

There was the feeling - the intense feeling - of not being wanted there, right then. It might have been her addled mind playing tricks on her, but the looks from all but two of those present were not entirely friendly. Even the two that did not strike her as being indifferent at best and hostile at worst could only be said to be such by a stretch of the imagination. She was unaccustomed to Elijah of all people only giving her a momentary glance before returning to whatever it was he had been doing, and it stabbed at her that it was so for reasons she could not understand.

Not that her tired mind and feeble frame did not conspire to populate a hundred competing reasons for it. Stepping aside to allow the others free passage - she had the fleeting impression they would just walk over her if she didn't move - she leaned against the door frame for a moment before striking out across the room.

She slowed as she drew close, noting what lay on the table before him. The stains stirred something in her that made her distinctly ill, and made her arms itch more incessantly than they did already. Unconsciously, she wiped them repeatedly on the thick linen shift she wore. The papers she had pulled from the K'ionte manor lay there, soiled with...with...

She couldn't think it, couldn't think of the word, and did not want to recall the events of that night. The sickness in her gut grew stronger from even circling round that mental abyss.

She just stood there, tangled hair and sickly pale face alight from the windows in this place. Elijah was there, right before her....and she couldn't think of what to say, what to do. The same recriminations circled in her head as had the night that fate had dropped on them like a ton of bricks.

Dry washing her bandaged hands without being aware of it.

"I'm...I'm sorry," she said feebly, and turned unsteadily to go.

 

[Elijah]

Most people who knew Elijah - his family, his comrades, and the rare few people he would call friend - would have recognised his look and behaviour for what it was. The Captain was stuck. It didn't happen very often; it was what had helped him rise through the ranks. But when it did? He lost himself in the problem turning it this way and that, hoping that somehow by turning the problem on its head he would find the answer. As a result his very few social skills went completely out of the window. As did his ability to remember to eat and take care of himself which was why the bowl in his hands was one of the first meals he had eaten in the last few days.

"You should eat something before they force you to too," he said distractedly and spooned a heaping of stew into his mouth. When she didn't move right away he pushed a chair out with his foot and then frowned once more at the piece of papers in front of him.

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

Alas, their acquaintance had not been long enough for the diminutive woman to know at a glance what was going through the Captain's mind. Not especially since she did not know her own mind, right then; there seemed to be something broken inside, something she could not put a finger on.

She turned back at his words, confusion writ large on her face. Somewhere in her heart, she felt that there was animosity between them. For her dragging him into a problem that was not his, for ruining the life he had laid out for himself in Dornoch. Recriminations piled atop themselves in her mind, and they created a kind of pain she was vaguely familiar with.

The death of her brother. The end of her family. These things stung in a similar way. For reasons beyond her, she felt that she had wronged Elijah, and that Elijah, too, would slip away. What made it worse was that she personally felt it was deserved, a result of her own personal flaws and failings. Weakness, cowardice, an inability to act on her own. The proof of that was right before her: a man who may have just ended his career, and possibly life, just because she could not keep her business to herself.

"I am sorry...to bring you into this," she said again softly. There was a tremulous fragility in the words, as if she were spun glass held together by little more than spider silk. She looked at the papers and the blood stains, and felt sickness stir in her belly. Memory came, and with it a decided desire to not eat anything. "I am not hungry," she added, a twist to her lips at the sourness in her belly giving truth to the words.

 

[Elijah]

"Hm?"

Elijah's brows were knitted together when he looked up at her again. His bushy brows might have given him the look of annoyance but in his eyes there was nothing but childish, innocent confusion. Looking at her for more than a second would reveal the shadows more clearly under his eyes and the burst blood vessels around his pupil. Signs of his lack of sleep were more obvious from that point on; unkept hair, the shirt that had been worn and not taken off since someone had given it to him to wear. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose to clear his tired vision.

"Lyssia, I don't intend on saying this over and over again until I am blue in the face so mark me now and mark me well. You have nothing to be sorry for. What you did was bring a case of treason and a plot to hurt High Imperialness, to the Captain of her Guard. That is my job. This is my job," he sighed and let his hand fall.

"Now sit down and eat something, you've been in your bed for three days. You can't tell me that even your species can go that long with nothing whilst trying to heal itself."

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

"I'm not hungry," she repeated. There was a sickly cast to her face, and it had little to do with the injuries she was recovering from - at least, little to do with the physical ones.

She could still feel the hot blood washing over her hands, her face, seeping into the dress she had been wearing. She could still see the shocked look in the man's eyes as she put his own knife deep into his chest. Into his heart, snuffing out the candle of his life in an instant. The heat on her hands and face still burned; how could blood be so hot? So hot, so slick. The smell...

If it was even possible, her face grew a little greener. She tried to cover this - ineffectively - by stepping forward and taking one of the oversized seats that had been vacated by the unfriendly lot of men that had just left. Even in her own sorry state, she could see that something was weighing heavily on the Captain. In her current state, though, she had difficulty putting a finger on what. She couldn't even identify her own problems, so it came as little surprise others were beyond her.

"I need to eat," she said woodenly. "But...if I do, I will simply vomit it back up." Everywhere, all over him, all over the room. Even the notion of food made her feel more ill. She did not try to dwell on it; not the fact, not the why. She continued to rub her hands on the shift as though she were wiping something off of them.

"You have not rested," she said suddenly. Not a question; a statement of fact. Deflection from her own sorry state, likely, to turn the topic of conversation away from...

...she groaned, and had to swallow her gorge savagely.

 

[Elijah]

Elijah grimaced and pulled the sheets of paper out of any potential projectile vomit path.

"And you need more, you got out of bed too early," he chastised and then forced himself to look at her properly. She did look awful; a green tinge clouded her skin, and she had that feverish cloudy look in her eyes the young recruits did after their first battle. At least they had been trained to take up a sword though; Lyssia had taken a life in defence. With no preparation for how that would feel. He'd been a fool and left her to dwell in her own mind too long. He sighed and drew his rough hand down his face in one long sweep. Too many plates to keep on turning and so little time. He'd spent enough of it dawdling and thinking - he needed to act. With a subtle nod to himself he scraped the chair back and stood up.

"I'll have Mary bring some food up, come on," he slid a hand under her elbow to offer some assistance in getting up. Elijah was in no way about to make the same mistake as he had before so long ago and try to carry her to the bed even though he thought she might not be able to make all those stairs. As they walked his voice eased in to a more soothing tone.

"What you did back there was necessary for your own survival, Lyssia. If you hadn't of done it, you would be dead and probably me too. We're alive because of that."

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

She grudgingly accepted the offer of support without any intention of doing as he said. She would eat when she didn't feel sick to the stomach, and she would feel better once she could stop having the same vicious moment replay itself over and over again in the back of her head.

So much more to that moment, that singular moment in her home on a stormy night.

"I..." She trailed off before getting beyond the first syllable of her own sentence. It was difficult to put to words the feelings she had; the maelstrom was too much, truth to tell, for her to parse through. She stopped walking, and looked to the ground.

"It...it was so easy," she said. There was disgust in her voice, and a wealth of pathos as well. "Too easy. I...I thought it would be harder to...to...to kill someone," she struggled to say. "He could have..."

That was all that it took. Putting to words one of the myriad things that had been running through her head since that shell-shocked moment in her office. She spun away from Elijah and put a hand to the wall, and heaved and retched. There wasn't much to evacuate from her belly, blessedly, but bile and acid; after what seemed and eternity, she drooped against the wall, spittle and acid running down her chin. Her sides ached, and her belly threatened to continue to violate her.

"I...am alive," she managed after a minute. "I am alive...but I shouldn't be," she said with a sob. "I am the only one...the only one left, and I am t-t-too weak to carry this b-burden," she managed through further sobs.

 

[Elijah]

Ah, Kress.

Awkwardly, Elijah put his hand upon her back and rubbed. Her size versus his meant his hand almost took up the entire span of her back but he hoped the weight and warmth was more comforting than it was threatening. He wasn't used to people being bigger and more intimidating than he, but he worked with enough - more than enough - women who reminded him of it daily and harshly. Any one of them would probably be far better placed to offer comfort to Lyssia than he was but he was all she had for better or for worse. Just why did it have to be crying? He grimaced to himself and tried to copy the soothing sounds of shushing he had heard women use with their crying babes.

"You're not alone," that, he could at least say with conviction. Empty things about how the death wouldn't haunt her for years to come would be a lie and any comfort he might give her that he deserved it would most likely fall of deaf ears given her current state. But he could help ease that sense of loneliness. With a tenderness people thought a man his size uncapable of, he gently pried her from the wall where she clung like a limpet, and turned her into his chest. His arms wound around her, engulfed her, as though he might shield her with his own body from every ill that troubled her both physically and mentally. "Lyssia, that's the one thing I can and will promise you. You aren't alone, and you never will be again."

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

She lost herself to tears, the the release of the maelstrom within her. His touch on her back drew neither ire nor remark, and when he pulled her into an embrace - her, drowning in his arms and in her own tears - she pressed her face into the breadth of his body. In some undefinable way, she felt...safe, here, enclosed within this common-born soldiers' arms. There was no dwelling on it, for now at least; there was only her on one side, and the pain and mistrust and sorrow and loneliness on the other, and he standing betwixt.

And so she cried, great heaving sobs that only helped to make her eyes more bruised. But, like some poison in the blood, some of the darkness in her soul seemed to leech out with the tears. It wasn't perfect; some stain of the sin she had committed remained, some thing that would likely haunt her for the rest of her life...but the gnawing, gaping emptiness within her had shrank at least a little at his admission.

All of this for dragging him into trouble, his duty or not. That guilt could not be assuaged so easily, in the same manner as for other things she had done...or not done.

"You c-cannot mean that," she said as the tears slowed. "But...I will take it to heart, nonetheless," she sniffed, pushing away to look up at the towering behemoth with tear-streaked face and red, deeply underscored eyes. Her expression was...difficult to read, which was just was well. She couldn't read her own mind, just then, either.

 

[Elijah]

"I do."

It had been a rather awkward few minutes for the Captain stood in that hallway. Soldiers cried, of course, a man would have to be dead inside not to every now and then. But those tears were solved with drinks or shared stories of anguish not to act as a wall against which to cry. She felt so fragile in his arms as she sobbed, her tiny body trembling against him feeling as though it might break. He wanted only to hold her closer but couldn't bring himself to out of fear he would break something. A few people passed them as she cried and caught his eye. The soldiers gave him an alarmed amount of sympathy and hurried on, casting glances around them like there were likely to be more tiny women in need of hugs, and the maids and cooks merely gave him an approving nod.

Elijah just felt like a lemon.

He brushed a tear from her cheek and wished he could do more than offer a shoulder to cry on.

"I mean it, Lyssia," he brushed a snotty strand of hair behind her ear and offered a tired smile. "Now, why don't we get you to bed. Some more rest is what you need."

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

I mean it...

No words to that, no answer. Only some fragile emotion that she did not understand, fluttering inside her chest like a butterfly. Delicate, beautiful, and as enigmatic as the stars in the heaven, if not quite so bright. She held his eyes for a moment, and then looked away abruptly.

Some things could not be examined too closely, not now at least. For now, he provided some kind of stability in a world that seemingly had little to none. Entwined as their lives had been these past months, she could still not define the relationship between them. Perhaps that was for the best.

She nodded slowly, ignoring the throbbing in her arms. "I do not know what I need," she said softly, and meant it. "But you...you look as tired as I," she added. She looked to the papers in his hands meaningfully. "What...to make of those?" She stepped away from him, something like regret evident on her face - and seemingly there without that face's owner even being aware of it. Unsteadily, she turned to head back the way she came, bare feet slapping against cold stone inelegantly.

 

[Elijah]

Elijah just about stopped himself from hiding the pieces of paper behind his back when she looked at them like some naughty school boy caught with an incriminating drawing. Still, he let out a relieved sigh when she didn't launch into a fiery demand to know what they were about. She had to have recognised the documents she had killed for - not least because there were specs of blood still on it - but because she had studied it so much. Dutifully he trailed after her and kept his mouth wisely shut on the matter. It was like walking a tight-rope. If he tried to divert the conversation to something else too soon she would know he did not want her to know about the contents of the other piece of paper.

It was a good thing silence was his specialty.

He only spoke when he shut the door of her room quietly behind him. The soup was waiting for her on the bedside table which made Elijah give a soft snort of amusement.

"Mary might be 90 but she is quick."

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

She did not miss the fact that he had not answered her question about the documents, but she was simply too tired to fight about anything right then, or at least that was her thinking on the subject. Her arms throbbed abominably, now, as did her chest. Never before had she taken such wounds as they, but she rather imagined that they would be slow to heal, assuming they did not fester and turn on her her.

The sight and smell of the soup was not appealing in the slightest, and she turned away from it without comment. "Wasted effort," she replied in a quavering voice that clearly laid out, in unspoken cues, that she was not going to eat so much as a bit of it. "I do not...feel particularly well," she added. The cast of her skin no longer held that tinge of being about to sick up on the floor, but she was still pale as a sheet.

"Three days," she said faintly as she clambered up to sit on the edge of the bed. Truthfully, she was grateful to be off her feet. "I was down that long?" Before he could reply, she shook her head as though to dispel some thought - some dark, unwelcome thought - and grimaced.

"What of...what of the documents?" What of the pieces of paper I killed to protect? What of the documents that has put a price on my head? "And what what of the city? Has...has there been aught about...?"

 

[Elijah]

"Not publicly."

Elijah settled himself down in an old rocking chair that had sat dormant and untouched in the corner of the room. The cobwebs which had clung to it he gave barely a second glance and tugged his rumpled jacket a bit tighter as though to ward off some chill or other though the room was pleasantly warm thanks to the lit hearth. His eyes studied those flames as they leapt and danced for some unknown master and puzzled over his next words. She had a right to know, of course, but he didn't want to distress her to the point she couldn't find sleep.

Only one of them needed to be cursed like that.

"I received a letter from the Dynast saying I could return as long as I brought you with me for questioning," the way he said questioning suggested it definitely would not be the type of questioning one did over a cup of tea and with a sympathetic ear. He raked his eyes away from the fire to look towards her. "I am just drafting my response, explaining the evidence I have in my possession."

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

She paled at the thought of returning to the city. He thought of it as not being over a cup of tea in comfortable quarters; she thought of it a considerable bit more darkly than that. For one, she doubted she would ever make it to any questioning. The Bursar and her associates would see to that; Elijah had little more protection than she did, other than being capable of defending himself by force of his own arms.

"I would rather Oban than return to Dornoch," she said faintly. And meant it. "There is literally no way the Dynast could protect me from those elements that would see her....gone." And no reason why she would wish to, given that I am daughter to a supposed traitor. Her world had shrunken noticably in the last few weeks. The only person she knew she could trust sat in this room with her now.

All else were suspect. Now, after the events at her home, all else were stained by the black suspicion of paranoia. That paranoia had included Elijah before the fight in the townhouse; that was how strong her fear had been. That her trust had won out over the fear was a remarkable thing; her desire to shield him from the grim world of politics scarcely less.

She let out a tired breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding on to. "And that is...assuming that she believes a word of this tale. Adora is not some random churl. Her family has been among the most prominent supporters of Erdeniin since not long after its founding. Why would she believe the words of some commoner over that?"

It hurt to admit that she no longer held any title. In truth, she was being overly kind to herself; most commoners would have better standing than she, and that without the current predicament and accusations.

 

[Elijah]

"She doesn't, and she won't," Elijah said bluntly and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. Under his chin he twined his fingers together and brought his brows down into a serious frown. As always he was not a man to mince his words. It was partly why he preferred not to say anything when he recognised a person was tired. With him they got the whole of a situation or nothing. Lyssia had asked and, though he was reluctant, he would give her everything she demanded. Honesty, unfortunately, came hand in hand with that.

"But she will listen to me. I've been her Captain for ten years, Lyssia, and a soldier since I was 18," he had saved her daughters life and her own more than most people knew. As much as he liked to keep up the secrecy of the Dynast and keep up pretences the pair were not that closely linked, the truth was they were. She even, when the advisors had gone, turned to him for the things she hadn't heard or had missed in the subtlety of tone.

"I just need to make sure it is worded right."

 

[Lyssia D'avore]

"I am not sure a letter will suffice," she said. She sounded...so tired. This was a realm that Elijah was not accustomed to, or at least she thought that was the case. She had been trained from a young age to assume the mantle of a House that was now only so much dust floating on the wind; politics were a heavy dose of the teachings to absorb, and for good reason.

"The Dynast does not act alone," she said, drawing upon a lesson taught to her decades before. Sometimes it was easy to forget that she was older than she looked by a wide margin, and that there was a great deal of training administered in those dusty, sheltered years. "No ruler acts alone, and too many of the people that hold keys of power are corrupted by this...this farce," she said, disgust in her voice. Disgust, and sadness.

She was minded of a cursory lesson long ago. A ruler requires keys to power, for no ruler could rule alone. It did not matter if it was a totalitarian rule; did not matter if it was just or not. One person could not personally oversee every aspect of governance, and so there were those who carried the keys to power. A portion - a large enough portion - of the nobility had swayed away from the Dynast for reasons unknown, but likely to do with greed. Greed born out of lust for money, power, or both.

"Even if she believes you, she will be powerless to excise the corruption on her own." She sighed tiredly. "It infects the military, the nobility, and the merchant classes. How far does it run?" She lifted a bandage wrapped hand to indicate the papers so guiltily handled by the Captain. "By those, it runs deep indeed."