“I’d write about their deaths, if it held any meaning at all.”
-Unabridged journals of the Imperial Scribe
Aster was a bad negotiator.
It wasn’t a lack of oratory skills or a shortage of wit, per se, but on the fact that he usually resorted to one strategy. When it comes to negotiation, Aster usually bet on losses. The side with most to lose will always be the side that needs to double-down, and the last to figure out which party is which will be the one to die.
(Perhaps dying didn’t normally occur in negotiations, but Aster operated on the principle of high risk and high reward. After all, what higher risk is there, other than loss of life?)
At the moment, however, Aster was caught between figuring out where they stand. He didn’t dare acknowledge the hostage in his hands, nor did he dare pay attention to the scrambling scribe somewhere around him.
He set his eyes on the archers.
“Nobody move,” he ordered, “or I’ll kill this girl faster than you could shoot.”
Archer could feel the tension in their bows, yet not a single archer dared to notch an arrow. That was their first mistake: if this girl was as innocent as she seemed, then a whole den of ‘bad men’ would not have bothered to restrain themselves from killing her.
It was a gamble, but if this girl could keep those arrows at bay for this long, then perhaps she could help them on the way out.
“Sir Aster,” the girl pleaded. “Please, listen to me–”
“Shut up.”
Her figure trembled in her grasp, and Aster swore he felt some of her tears trickle down on his hands. “I know I lied, and I’m sorry! But if they see this–”
“The leader will be speaking to you!” One of the men yelled. “Don’t hurt her!”
“I don’t give a damn about your leader!” Aster shot back. “We want out—”
“Sir, just kill me.” The child whispered, gripping Aster’s arm. “Before they come out, please, please just kill me —”
No. No, don’t say that.
Aster pressed the knife harder against her throat. “I said, shut the fuck up!”
“Aster.” Florence’s voice rang in the clearing. He stood a few feet across Aster, “You’re hurting her, put Helen down. You’re not killing anyone, much less a child. I forbid it.”
Aster whipped towards the scribe, hysterical. “Oh, you forbid it? Shall I serve you some tea while I’m at it, Your Highness? I’m doing this for us–”
“Three.”
“--this kid lied to us, the least she could do is be our ticket out–”
“Two.”
“--besides, you wanted to leave her last night! So don’t act like you’re suddenly a saint now–”
“One.”
The counting made little sense as Florence suddenly barreled into them, dauntless and all rage. It was so unexpected that Aster lost his balance, fell to the snow, and lost his grip on his two most important bargaining chips.
The child fell into the snow with him, with the knife just a hand’s grab away.
“You fucking idiot!” He screamed. “You just got us killed–!”
From where he lay, he could see the archers prepping their bows and readjusting their aim. Then, the view was suddenly replaced by Florence hovering over him, pinning him down.
No – covering him.
How dare you?
In front of him, the scribe had closed his eyes and waited for the arrows to hit. At that moment, Aster didn’t know whether he should scream or cry or punch him.
All he knew was that whether it was through tens of swords or his own body, His Highness truly knew how to drive a person mad.
“Florence Dominique Sibylla, if you don’t get off me right now—”
A sharp, crisp sound cut through Aster’s threat, echoing from the cave.
Slowly, two figures emerged from the darkness: first, a man dressed in a large overcoat, and then a lady dressed in furs – all sporting the same splash of freckles in Helen’s face, her dark hair, and an innocent face that made for a good sheep’s clothing.
But unlike Helen, their eyes held a kind of hunger that no sheep could ever hope to hide. Merchants, nobles, and especially assassins like Aster were no stranger to it.
“What a touching scene,” the woman crooned. “Perhaps you two would sell better as a package deal?”
The said package deal glared at each other.
Oh, to be lumped together with the likes of you!
***
Watching the mighty fall was literally the best part of Aster’s job – until his turn came.
He had botched 22 assassination attempts, was shoved into the empire’s highest security prison until they remembered he was rotten in their cells, and was executed in the most boring, anticlimactic way possible. Even now, in his supposed second chance at life, he faced the humiliation and sting of being betrayed by a child – something that old Aster wouldn't ever be caught dead doing, because old Aster wouldn’t even bother in the first place.
Still, none of it came close to his current situation. Not only was he lumped together with his archnemesis, the bandits had literally thrown them in together at the same prison cell, knowing full well that they would likely rip each other apart the soonest.
“I hate you,” he told the ceiling. Behind him, quite literally tied against back, was his target audience. He hoped his voice was loud enough to reverberate across the cave.
“Likewise,” the target audience responded.
And that was that.
They had no words left for each other following their shameful capture. In the past few hours, Florence had bargained that he fetched a better price compared to that ‘filthy rags of a man’, while Aster had spent his time pleading for another cell, even death, just to avoid being in the same room as His Highness.
The leader of the bandits – Helen’s mother and father – had only scoffed.
“Some envoys you both are,” the father said with clenched teeth. “No money, no food – has the empire run out of money?”
Envoys, Aster pinched Florence through their binds, making sure that the scribe was paying attention. They thought that the two of them were envoys, which meant that either some of those had passed by recently, or they had information.
“They must be working overtime,” Florence said, “if news of the capital’s recession hasn’t made it all the way here. The empire doesn’t have enough money to send envoys around!”
“The empire doesn’t,” the mother agreed. “But His Highness does.”
Aster felt Florence stiffen behind him.
He’s a scribe sent to record everything that transpires here, General Ettore said.
But the bandits specifically said ‘envoys’, which meant an entirely different job. Envoys do more than just transcribing.
“So?” Aster interjected. “What’s an envoy supposed to accomplish in this wasteland anyway? You’ve seen it, we barely have anything. You can sell us, but we doubt we’d fetch a decent price–”
“Sure,” the father said. “Each of you could barely feed us a day or two. Four days, if we sell by package.”
A sour taste welled up in Aster’s mouth. He’d been worth millions back in the day, and to think his market value had dropped to this extent!
“However,” the mother added, “one of you had a nation’s worth of treasure on his head. We just need to find out which is which, then we’ll see if we can sell you separately, as you both desired.”
Since then, the two of them hadn’t spoken to each other aside from curses and grunts. Once every few minutes, Aster would express his hatred of Florence, while the scribe would simply throw out halfhearted responses, or a flimsy attempt to get him to shut up.
It was as if there was something more important than the two of them being captured and set up for an auction. More important than the mission too, given how little he cooperated and offered solutions to their predicament.
At some point, Aster had grown sick of it.
“So we’re really just going to sit here?” He called out.
It was hard to tell how much time had passed, but if his stomach was accurate, then it must be afternoon already. They didn’t even get to eat lunch.
“Your plan was to kill a child,” Florence said. “Forgive me if I have to take a while to trust your judgement.”
“We needed leverage. You thought I'd go through it?”
“You expect me to believe that you were acting?”
“Yes,” Aster said solemnly. “The same way you expect me to believe that you’re just a scribe.”
Silence.
And then:
“...I’m not an envoy.”
“...”
“...but His Highness did send me here.”
“...”
“...I swear on my life that I have no other purpose than to serve as a witness. I don’t have anything on me that’s worth that much of a bounty. I mean, I wouldn’t have left the General if that were the case!”
“...you didn’t want me to come with you. That’s suspicious.”
“I hate your guts! Of course I wouldn’t want to go with you!”
“You were ready to kill me when I asked why you were following the army. That’s suspicious.”
“Everything is so fucking suspicious to you. I could just breathe and you’d call me a traitor.”
“Because you are. All nobles are traitors.”
“...that is true. I’d kill all of them if I could.”
Upon hearing those words, a wave of realisation hit Aster just as hard as he hit the ground. In his mind, he heard a conversation spoken a lifetime ago, between two prisoners damned by the same man bound to Aster right now.
What would his cellmate say, if he found Emperor Sibylla like this?
“But you said before you come from a family of nobles.”
“Indeed. So?”
So you killed them too?
“You’d kill your own blood?”
Aster couldn’t see the expression on Florence’s face, given their positions, but he imagined a certain, familiar coldness to his expression – one that the empire would come to fear in the near future.
“Of course,” Florence said simply, like he was simply discussing the weather. “Is there any problem with that?”
Something sour and disgusting rumbled within Aster’s stomach. As someone who’d been forced to kill his kin out of mercy, it felt like a huge injustice that people like Aster should exist. When his mother and sister died in his hands, Aster had hurled his guts out for months and destroyed himself for years. Florence, however, seemed more than happy to sell out his family, and even had years ahead to declare his intent to kill them.
At first, he suspected that the scribe was lying about being half-commoner to gather sympathy. However, the more spoke about his family, the more he made it clear that the sympathy was not wanted nor needed. At all.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Aster told him. “I don’t know what they did to you, or how bad you had it, but death isn’t something you play with, scribe. You don’t get to write names and have them crossed out of life so easily. It stays with you – that first kill. Even more so if it’s family.”
Especially if it’s family.
Much to his surprise, Florence simply laughed.
“You’ll be surprised how easy it is to erase people,” the scribe whispered. “Whether by knife or by ink.”
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