Love and Bounty

Chapter Three: Single-Minded Killer

How could anyone stand this weather?

Each snowflake that fell upon Deeja's scales pin-pricked into her flesh like the fingers of a frost atronach. Even with the furs she bore upon her shoulders, Skyrim's relentless chill settled deep into her very bones. With any luck, that hapless Nord would die sooner rather than later.

She, along with Sharai and Iscraah, met up with the other Blackbloods and set upon the site as if it were a swamp rat in a bog-beast's jaws, hunkering down on both sides as they watched the bandits toil. Rather than assist them, the red-haired Nord that must have been their captain stood over them and spoke with a proud and booming voice:

"Not much farther now. Put your backs into it! This is a good haul—plenty of coin if we just hurry."

Something about him was familiar. Nothing suggested that he was once a Blackblood, for there were no black tattoos of veins snaking up his throat from his collarbone, but his disciplined bearing and brutish appearance implied a long and successful career as more than just a bandit.

"I heard one of that red-haired Nord's men call him Einar during a previous run," Iscraah whispered, crouched with her elven bow standing vertically in hand. "He looks tough."

"I've seen tougher," Sharai muttered with a snide snigger. "Looks like he's compensating for something with that big sword of his, yeah?"

Iscraah tittered and leaned a little closer to Sharai, the Redguard's steel armor rapidly accumulating snow and ice. "Maybe for the one between his legs."

The two women giggled between each other, but the unbearable cold that afflicted Deeja began to wane with how her blood boiled at their senseless chatter. This was why they weren't friends—this was why they would never be friends.

"Knock it off," she hissed, her tail swatting the snow behind her without making a sound. "And keep it down. We can't risk being spotted. Or heard."

Deeja turned her attention back to the bandits, and before she knew it, an arrow whizzed from the bushes and flew toward the Nord captain's throat.

The arrow grazed the side of the captain's neck, and with a pained cry, he gripped the wound with a gloved hand as the blood ran dark between his fingers.

"Drop your shovels!" he shouted, fumbling for a bottle strapped to his waist. "Arrows—arrows from the east!"

The wearied bandits threw their shovels down and took up arms, drawing blades and axes and shaking the snow from their shields. The men, mer, and beastfolk under the captain's command turned their eyes to the east just as another arrow whistled through, its head sinking deep in the slit pupil of an Argonian sorcerer among them.

"They're in the pines!" one of the bandits cried.

The captain tore the cork from the red bottle in his hand and downed the contents in just a couple of gulps. "Find them and kill them!" he seethed, hurling the bottle into one of the pines as he drew his greatsword. "NOW!"

Was that... the Nord?

One after another, the arrows flew, in steady but deadly rhythm. Some plunked against bandit shields, but others sank deep into their flesh, tearing sinews and piercing their throbbing guts. Those who suffered death-blows spat and bled in the snow while the living scanned the trees for the arrows' exact source.

All the while, the captain scowled with his greatsword at the ready, taking cover behind boxes and crates as the bandits with shields advanced toward the treeline and the ones with bows returned fire—but they didn't return fire for long. With each arrow fired, another archer met their grisly end by the bite of a killing arrowhead.