Who: Azabeth Kordura, Black Matthew (NPC), drunken bar patrons (NPCs) Where: A roadside tavern somewhere between Redcliffe and Denerim When: 9:45, several days after Arlessa Valeré Kordura's death Summary: A certain thief is up to her old tricks, but an unexpected encounter with an old friend leaves her contemplative. Rating: T for some language
There were many things about Denerim that Azabeth dearly missed - the main of which were Valeré, even now cold in her grave, and Lalin, who could have sheltered her if she'd just been more careful about running to Lelahai - but one of the things she did not miss was being recognized. There came a certain point in one's skill and reknown when nicking purses and playing cards for money became impressively difficult, because it seemed to Az like every country bumpkin fresh into Denerim from the Anderfels knew what it meant to have a redheaded woman smile at you in a bar.
Not so on the roads west of the capitol, and while that made for easier pickings, it also made for exceedingly boring evenings. Even if she felt like banging her head against a brick wall until she knocked herself out, Az wasn't going to complain, so long as it kept food in her belly and the authorities off her back. She wasn't exactly in a position to be whining about her current lot in life, after all.
The Anchorite's Knitting was a rather average inn and tavern in all the ways that counted: size, patronage, quality of ale and food, intelligence of staff. The rooms weren't anything to get excited about, little more than closets with pallets of straw ticking on the floor, but given the choice of a door that locked or a hayloft that didn't, Az knew she would rather risk a few fleas than the depredations of either fellow pickpockets or a drunken stranger's wandering hands. She'd gotten more than one offer that night, in fact, to share those tiny mattresses with beer-reeking farmers and travelers who didn't know any better - and Az merely smiled at them all in her best come-hither expression and asked if they might wager for her affections on a game of Wicked Grace.
A few of them had even taken her up on the offer. It was refreshing, to be able to pay her bill without having to resort to cutting purses.
Her latest 'customer', a fool newly separated from his money, was just clearing away from her table in the back corner of the common room when he sauntered through the door.
Azabeth was impressed with herself; when he strode up to the recently-vacated chair opposite her and plunked himself down, all lanky limbs and boneless grace, she did not launch herself across the table at him, or flee out the nearest window. She did, however, set down the deck of cards, eyes blazing with ill-hidden fury, and smile in tones brittle and bright, "Would you like a private game, ser?"
"And let you get me out from the public eye, little bit? I think not," laughed the man. Black Matthew was a name not very well known in the west, but in Denerim he was spoken of in the same hushed and reverent tones as the House of Crows, and was not, to the surprise of those who had met him, the twelve-foot tall monster that his legend painted him. He was instead lanky and nondescript, dark-haired and dark-eyed, neither handsome nor ugly, not tall nor short, ageless in a way that meant he could have been anywhere between his twenties and fifties. The biggest clue to his identity, aside from sheer plainness, was a series of ingrained black stains in his fingertips that looked almost like ink, and indeed, his most common guise was as a scribe or librarian. Azabeth knew better. She doubted his mere touch was poison, at least for the moment, but that did not mean she couldn't be careful - or wouldn't refuse to let him handle her deck.
His smile widened a touch in the corners when her hands went protectively to the cards. "Will you deal me in, then? Is your favorite vice yet Wicked Grace?"
"How about a reading instead?" Effortlessly, she came up with a gilt-edged trump, a black-cloaked death's head wound about with both poison and roses, signifying Death. It was thrown down between them like a challenge, fury blazing in her eyes, Matthew's face edging towards laughter. He had always found her amusing, for some reason, as if she were a kitten roaring at a tiger.
To his credit, Matthew kept his killing hands well clear of the card; instead he folded his forearms together, blackened fingertips peeking out over his long shirtcuffs, and leaned forward to set his elbows on the table. "You know," he said, in conversational tones, "there's quite a bounty on your head back home."
"Come to claim it?" Said sweetly, as if she were full of flirting and thoughts of ale and a warm bed, but there was an undercurrent in her voice, steel and venom and fierce vicious fear. Matthew laughed in the face of it, leaning backwards, shaking his head and hooding his dark eyes.
"Hardly, little bit. I'm too old for such foolishness." He unfolded his arms, set his palms to the table, fingers splayed. Azabeth was hyperaware of his every motion, her eyes locked to his fingers and her hands still upon her cards; Matthew was quick, as quick as she or better, and it was circumspection that made her cautious of him, not paranoia. "The new arlessa is furious. Telling anyone who will listen how you slew the woman who raised you as her daughter, in cold blood, no less."
Thrice-damned Lelahai, may she burn forever in the Fade. "Quick to enjoy the luxuries of rank, isn't she?" spat Azabeth, a seemingly innocuous phrase turned to acid in her throat. Matthew tilted his head, seemed to nod very fractionally.
"Personally, I believe it a case of the lady doth protests too much. Valeré was always so very careful." He turned over one stained palm, produced a gold coin seemingly from thin air - a trick he had taught her, once, long ago when things had been different, when she had been young and eager and he had been in the employ of the Kordura arling - and she shook off those memories like snow mantling about her shoulders, snatching back her card as the coin rolled across his fingers. "For all the good it did her, in the end. But neither of her daughters inherited her patience."
"You could have done something. Prevented this. Valeré trusted you." The source of the river of her anger, but he was already shaking his head, the coin making revolutions of his clever digits.
"Anything I could have done would have been too little, too late. You know that."
She didn't want to hear this, didn't want to dwell on hopeless Valeré, who had sheltered and taught and loved her when the woman who brought her into this world couldn't have been bothered to do exactly that. "Why are you here, Matt?" There, it was on the table between them, in the open; Black Matthew flipped the coin into the air with a shiiiinggg and a sinuous movement of his wrist, snatching it from the air before it could hit the table, then opened his tarnished fingers to display that the coin was, indeed, gone.
"If I found you already, Azabeth," he said, very quietly with a certain serene sobriety in his black eyes, "others might." A slight shrug of his right shoulder; she knew the gesture for the warning it was, and sought to dissect the crowd beyond it, spotting after three scans of the tavern a man at the bar who was more than mildly interested in a redheaded card-shark. Something cold and heavy knotted in the pit of her stomach when the man locked eyes with her, and seemed in far too much of a hurry to search the bottom of his tankard again. "No professional," Matthew added, pulling his hands to hide them beneath the table, something that made Azabeth worry as much about his presence as that of the hunter at the bar. "Merely a lucky amateur, and an unsure one at that. Rumour travels quicker than lightning, in Ferelden, but redheads are common."
She stood from her chair; Matthew clucked his tongue. "Gently, little bit." That one phrase was enough to bring back years of training, of learning at the hands of the master thief across from her, enough to steady her wobbly knees and light a cunning, sultry smile upon her face. Her step transformed from a sprint into a saunter; she canted her hips, shifted weight to the balls of her feet, and leaned over the table as if giving Black Matthew a view of her decolletage, though the gesture was in fact all for the man at the bar, who watched her with growing uncertainty.
"No contract on me? You swear it?"
"On Valeré's grave," smiled Matthew, gesturing dismissively with one upraised hand. "Go. I make no promises for your admirer at the bar."
"Oh," grinned Azabeth, eyeteeth sneaking into the corners of her mouth. "Leave him to me."
His pockets were bound to be full, and she didn't much like the Anchorite's Knitting anyway.