[Fan fiction] Shadows and Sunlight Omnibus B
This is the second half of the story so far in Shadows and Sunlight, click here to go back to the first half.(http://community.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/80tNf8re-fan-fiction-shadows-and-sunlight-omnibus-a)
The Whispers of Dreamsilk Inn rises above the other taverns in the Torchlight Quarter of the old city. Built entirely of ironwood from the primeval ranges deep in the Freljord, the inn was founded nearly as long ago as the Rookery. Heavy black slats, worn with centuries of rain and wind, wrap a frame as square and orderly as a footman's bed. The thatch is the youngest part of the building, and it's damp and moldy enough to have been flopped over the inn for at least a decade or two.
The Inn was known for many things throughout Valoran, none of them appropriate for a prospective Grand General. But Jericho Swain and his attendant Nightraven Guards still were seated at a table in the only brightly lit area of the common room.
Sarah Fortune had changed from their meeting earlier. Her bleached blouse hung loose, draped over her narrow shoulders like a shawl. Scooped low, a half dozen jewels and shimmering chains glittered on her chest. She wore a bandoleer around her waist like a belt, but her pistols weren't in attendance.
"General, I'd like to introduce you to my exo, Barret Greyme."
"Executive officer, she means, sir," Barret doffed his extravagant feathered cap and bowed. "We are honored to serve you, Grand General."
"Do not presume," Swain intoned.
Sarah shushed the sailor, shooing him away to take a seat next to Swain. "He meant no offense. We are genuinely honored. Most of our rarest items were recovered by Barret. He specializes in impossible recoveries."
"You mean grave robberies. Or thefts," Jericho chewed on a stick of angeldrop gum. He offered the 'tovian-branded tin to the captain. She shrugged and declined the candy. "Your most exotic wares are the most intriguing. We have an agreement then, on the grail and the crystal scepter? And my right to first refusal concerning any future," Swain exaggerated a cough, "recoveries."
Sarah barked a laugh. "With the weight of gold you're paying, you get right to first refusal for most anything we have."
Barret perked up. "There is one more item the general might be interested in."
Sarah snapped her fingers. "You left it aboard the ship, didn't you? I know what you're thinking. The general won't be disappointed," she finished, turning her gaze from Barret to Swain . "Go on then, get it."
Barret froze, staring at the back of her head. He grumbled, walking away from the table towards the entrance of the common room. A Nightraven runner slipped in as he left. The newcomer apologized to Sarah, taking Jericho Swain aside with a flurry of whispers. The old man's face twisted, grim set.
He returned to the pirate hunter. "We all make plans, captain. Sometimes, those plans must allow for slight adjustments. Like, for instance, if your opponent acts rashly, or at the very least, more quickly than you'd anticipated."
"Uh huh," she nodded, pushing her glass of wine around on the table.
"The nephew of one of my grandsons, I don't expect you to know him. He's been playing with a new kind of toy I showed him, although he hadn't spotted the serpent's nest inside. Still, he was bitten. I'd expected it to come much later. And a court martial," Swain tsked. "Marcus du Couteau overreaches. But I'll adapt."
Sarah leaned back, pruning her nails with a dented table knife. She tossed it aside, examining her cuticles. "I understand. We'll wait for you."
"Avail yourselves of anything you desire. I can have Warren prepare lodging in Ebonclaw, should you require it?"
She stood up as he rose to his feet. Her eyebrow arched, she held out her hand. "I hope we won't be waiting that long," she said.
"Marcus is a reckless man on occasion. Those daughters of his. A pity his seed never took root as a son. I merely need to forestall the trial. The meeting should not take long. I have no time for folly," he said, seizing her in a military embrace.
She clasped her hand around his frail forearm, mimicking his gesture. "Our last item might help with that," she added, half under her breath.
He mused. Without saying another word, he bent his head acknowledging his puzzlement and interest before his retinue swept around him and out the door.
Nestled between two bustling commercial districts, the Ebonplume Gardens are said to have been where the first Raven raised the outcast infants, feeding them blood from the nearby battlefield. Whatever the gardens had been, they became a muddy squalor filled with scampering children and shrouded cutpurses.
The only sign the Gardens had once teemed with exotic flora was a lone Ionian goldenwood, bent twisted in its shrine, its wide roots crushing the stone and spilling into the nearby walk. The shimmering leaves rustled in the wind as Darius and Katarina ducked between two unsavory merchant stalls.
"You should listen to your father," Darius repeated as they walked, their steps in tandem. "You shouldn't have attacked Anton."
"Trying to sound like him, nikiya?" she asked. "Darius, you would have done the same had it've been your soldiers."
"I might've," he confessed, reaching out to stroke the silk sign advertising a whorehouse. A puddle of robes that might've been a beggar eyed him, wary. "Had it been. It wasn't. And there's a reason I soldier on the front lines and you skulk about the shadows. You're supposed to know which targets to focus."
She stopped them, fixing Darius with her glare. "This one deserved it, to me if no one else. His loose morality is a perversion of the blood. A blight on Noxus."
"Save it, nikita." Darius raised his hand to her. "You've never been one for propaganda. You serve Noxus in your own way, but it'll never involve flying her colors."
"Fine." She resumed her brisk walk back towards the du Couteau manorhouse. "He's a loathsome, slimy nit of a worm."
Darius jogged to match her pace. "Now I believe you. But you've made more trouble than you know. Tensions between your father and the General have never been higher," he explained. She frowned at the way her father's equivalent title was ignored. There was only one General in the Noxus Darius served. "Your father cannot be seen to go light on you."
Katarina laughed, reaching her hand up on Darius' shoulder. "He explained that part. I wish I'd finished the job if I'm going to be punished as if I had."
"Maybe don't mention that," Darius tried to interrupt their walk again. She forged ahead. "At the court martial," he added, grunting to catch up to her.
She whirled on him, spinning the dirt beneath her heels in brief cyclones. "I'm so glad you said something," she mocked, drawing out every syllable, "that was going to be my opening statement."
The sky smoldered on the faintest edges of horizon, but beneath the stars the city slept bathed in black. Miss Fortune turned away from the great bay window that overlooked the rest of the Torchlight Quarter of Noxus. She sat down on the bed, curling around a velvet-wrapped pillow and stroking the ornate gilded hourglass Barret had brought back from the ship.
"How many nephews do you think General Swain has?" she asked her executive officer, who was perched in a nearby chair, reading a dirt-stained tome with yellow pages.
"At least as many as me," he replied without looking up from his book.
Sarah sat up, "Wait. How many nephews do you have?"
"Nine. I've got four brothers, one sister. Admittedly, six of the nine nephews are my oldest sister's. She's got eight little ones."
"Blood, I would never do that to myself. He's got to have at least a dozen then, right? He shouldn't have seemed so worried about one of them."
Barret finally marked his place in the volume resting on his knees and looked up at Sarah. "Well, Swain doesn't have any brothers or sisters. One half-sister who married a viscount who had a son by a twopenny jenny who had a son they named Anton Jericho, after his incredibly distant and unconnected by blood relation."
Sarah Fortune glared at him. "So he has one nephew? That's less than you have."
"Ah, but Swain does have uncles and aunts by marriage, who have children, some of whom are boys. More nephews. But not technically Swain's."
Sarah went back to ignoring him, admiring the golden bauble. "Thanks for the reminder why I shouldn't care a squid's fart about the Noxian court or her bloodlines."
"I'd have thought I was reminding you of why you should. Jericho Swain hadn't so much as acknowledged the boy's existence with a visit before now. He'd never mentioned him in public before."
She wasn't impressed. "There's a lot of things I don't mention in public."
"You aren't a general in the Noxian military," he said, finding his spot within the book and resuming his position on the chair.
"Thank the sea gods for small favors."
Barret stood up, leaving his book on the chair's cushion. Sarah raised an eyebrow. He shrugged, "I think I should investigate."
She nodded, holding up the hourglass. "I'm sure this'll convince him to return for at least one more visit. If you're sure it's real."
"It's real, captain."
"That's what you said about the last dancing boy you sent back to my cabin. Remember how that turned out?" she challenged, sipping from an gem-studded chalice.
Barret frowned as a knock sounded at the door. He stood to answer it.
Sarah couldn't see who was in the hallway, but she heard a young woman's voice.
"A raven came today, for Miss Fortune," it said. Sarah set her goblet and the hourglass aside and lept to the door.
"Just so you know, most people don’t call me that when I'm around."
The dancing girl blanched. She proffered an apology without looking Sarah Fortune in the eyes.
"Ignore her," Barret pacified the frightened woman. "What was the message?"
"Don't ignore me," Sarah interjected, "tell us the message, and don't call me that again unless I've had more than a few more drinks."
The dancer curtsied, an awkward movement in a short slit skirt. "J.S. requests an audience in your chambers at first light. To take possession of the trinket," she read from a missive scrawled on a sheet of tattered goatskin.
Sarah seized the note and shooed away the barmaid.
Barret grunted and shook his head, "He would call it a trinket."
"I call it a trinket," Sarah muttered, turning the bark over to see if anything else had been inscribed. "It looks like a trinket."
"So long as he's willing to pay poundweight in gold coins, you can both call it whatever you want."
Sarah beamed, cradling the hourglass. "I shall name it," she paused, considering. "The Unwieldy Cylinder of Forbidden Knowledge."
"When I say whatever," Barret said, coughing, "I mean anything but that."
With most of what little she owned still stuffed in a senior dorm back at the Sinister Blade, Katarina's wing of the Du Couteau mansion was sparse. In a space likely intended for a spare bedroom, she'd set up a series of targets on swinging chains and pulleys for throwing practice. Katarina, Evanie and Darius sat around a chopped-up, crooked wooden table.
"So does your brother have anyone," Evanie mused, "special, in his life?"
Darius didn't bother pretending to be comfortable. "I wouldn't say that. No."
"I bet he gets a lot of--"
"Darius," Katarina interrupted. "Do you have to sit with us the entire day? I can't imagine you don't have more important things to do than babysit."
"Do any of your plans involve seeing Draven?" Evanie jumped back in the conversation before Darius could say anything to Kat. "We could come with you." She picked at a splintered divot in the table, clearly failing at not seeming overeager.
"I keep telling you, Katarina. This is more serious than you are willing--"
"To admit?" Katarina cut him off. "I'm serious. She's the one you can't take serious," she said, pointing at Evanie. Darius looked at the younger noble. He shrugged.
"She seems bent on meeting my brother. I think she's serious."
Katarina frowned as Evanie lit up the dim practice room with her ridiculous smile. "As a kidney strike," she mumbled.
"But, you're right," Darius said.
"You do have plans with Draven?" Evanie asked.
"What, no," Katarina replied for him. "You have something else to attend to?" she asked, her eyes pleading with the Noxian commander.
"I do. Your father is sending along another guard to watch you. Someone you know."
The door to the room swung open and Talon Karven emerged from the corridor. He swept his razor-tipped cloak behind him and bowed.
"Evanie," he nodded before focusing his attention on Katarina. "Kat," he bowed again. "Your father told me what you girls have been up to." He looked back over at Evanie, who was staring as if she hoped her furrowed brow would cow the Crimson Elite shadowcloak.
"How long were you waiting at the door to make that entrance?" Evanie challenged, Katarina broke out laughing, a sound like sharpened steel.
Talon ignored her, taking a seat next to Darius on a stool with three legs. The fourth had been the victim of an unexpected duel against an armed attacker. He'd switched to the stool after Katarina took away both his swords.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Talon finally responded. He turned toward Darius.
Katarina seized Darius' hand. "You don't need to leave him with us. We can handle ourselves."
"Or I could go with you," Evanie chirped. "Check in with Draven. There's a court martial. Could need an executioner."
Talon's jaw slapped against his chest. "You say that with Kat in the room?"
"Not for her, idiot."
Darius cut off their squabbling. "Lady du Couteau, I must attend my other duty. Talon will watch over you. Please, for your father's sake, try not to kill anyone else."
"I will," Katarina placated him.
"Shouldn't have invited that guy around then," Evanie mumbled, her thumb jutting out at Talon.
"I really dislike you, you know--" he started.
"Thank you, Darius," Katarina said, her voice a wedge in Talon's mouth.
Evanie issued a command, "Say hello to Draven for me."
"Dai luta, Darius." Talon declined his head, raising two fingers to his brow. Darius returned the salute and left with a curt bow for Evanie and a longer bow for the lady of the house. After he'd gone, Evanie pouted.
"Are we going to sit in here all day?" she asked.
"No," Katarina said. "I need to figure out what my father is planning. And what I'm going to do if he goes through with it. And I need a bath."
"We could, I'm just offering, ask him?" Talon proposed.
"Why don't you go ask him?" Evanie batted her eyelashes until her eyes glistened, nearly tearing up. It had an effect on Talon. Just not the one she was going for. His expression pleaded for reprieve from Katarina, but Evanie spoke up. "Are we going to the bolt hole?" she asked her friend.
Katarina nodded.
Talon protested, "I told you," he went on. "Boltholes are for rabbits."
