𝐃𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐎𝐍𝐁𝐎𝐑𝐍 | ❝Monsters don't get happy endings.❞
Rennen of Skellige was a cold-blooded killer, an assassin from the mysterious Dark Brotherhood. She liked to think that a life of blood and bruises was what she was made for, a life that was...
‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ CHAPTER TEN ☽༓･*˚⁺‧͙ the resurgence of rennen tuirseach
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OUT OF ALL THE ROOMS IN the castle, her favourite had always been the baths. They were made out of granite from Touissant, the water brought through pipes from the fjords north of the island. Twigs of juniper and laurel leaves floated on the water, the scent permeating through the entire room along with the steam from the hot water. And Rennen, with her aching muscles and grimy skin, allowed herself to sink.
Her skin began to prune, but she kept herself in the water and took in the room. It had not changed from what she remembered: the mosaics on the ceiling and the walls in different shapes and colours that made no sense to her, the boiler at the corner of the room, the sound of water against her skin with each movement of she made. The same baths as every other bathhouse she had been to, but the one in the castle was different. There was no one there except her, no whispered conversations at the other edge of the room for transactions in whatever they dealt.
Bathhouses and whorehouses were the same, the patrons thought no one would listen to their business transactions or their hubris words. The walls listened.
Rennen opened her eyes. For a moment, between the steam from the bath, she could imagine the bard sitting in front of her. He would have his arms spread by his sides, head leaned back while he hummed whatever tune wove through his head like the patterns of a tapestry. When something caught, something he thought was perfect, he would hurry to scribble it down in his messy writing that slanted. And he would smile, wide and brilliant because he would create something and he would share it at the next tavern.
She inhaled deeply and blinked, the image of the bard disappeared with the steam until there was nothing but the granite of the bath and the stone floors and the mosaic against the wall. An unsteady breath left her mouth as she stood from the bath and got out, her head swimming from the heat. She wanted nothing more but to fall asleep atop the soft bed that was hers as a child, but she could not. The castle, although she had been born and raised there, was a stranger with the sharp edge of the knife brushing against her skin.
One wrong move and she would end up bleeding.
She dressed in a simple white tunic and trousers that stuck to the skin but kept her warm, and then pulled on a yellow linen overdress with an open front and a leather belt around her waist with the dagger hanging to her side. The dagger was a weight in the seamless nothing that was her clothes, a reminder that even though her own clothes had been taken by servants to be washed and the clothes she wore were borrowed, nothing in Clan Tuirseach was given without reason.
Yellow overdress instead of the blue-green of the clan, the familiar colour that always resembled the sea in midday or the sky in early spring. No, the overdress was the colour of deep gold and the sun when there were no clouds in the sky. Brilliant. Shinning.
