Breaking the Sword

Bare Dreams (I)

Elyse cursed the unlucky day she was born.

Complacent. She had gotten complacent, and now her bluff was called.

The chain rattled as she moved her manacled hands. No matter how she shifted and shook, she could not find a comfortable position on the hard, flat board that served her cell as both bench and bed. She figured, bitterly, that that was the whole point.

There was a loud dripping noise coming from somewhere very close by, and Elyse wondered if these sorts of places always dripped. Every jail or prison she had ever had the displeasure of knowing intimately had dripped. The perpetual rain probably didn't help any either.

Why had she thought delivering the governor of Darev's stolen correspondence would be profitable?

...well, likely it would have been, had she pulled it off. The real questions was, how had she thought it would be worth the risk?

Charmed by a pair of green-gray eyes and a winsome smile, that's how. This was the last time she did favors for strangers in bars. Particularly, she thought morbidly, if this led her to the hangman's noose.

It had begun harmlessly enough. She'd propositioned the man Merrick Olnair in the taproom of the Broken Sword, and he had responded with a business proposition. Elyse had thought it would be smart to have another job lined up for after she finished with the wizard, and she had of course already had dealings with his contact, the antique dealer.

Running information for their little rebellion had seemed like a fun diversion from her usual work. And the fee he had offered hadn't been insignificant. But she'd been set up. Instead of some Adalian spy, it had been a squadron of Imperials waiting for her to turn up in Mothersport with the incriminating letters.

Elyse was a thief by choice. She was accustomed to dealing with scum with no honor. Normally, she expected the worst of people. And yet she had misjudged the Olnair man by thinking he was being straightforward with her.

Something else bothered her too –besides her own stupidity– why set her up at all? Until that night in Darev, she was no one to him. What had he gotten out of it?

Giving up on sleep, Elyse sat up and looked to the small barred window at the back of the cell. A quarter of the full moon hung in the window's top right corner, but most of the stars were obscured by clouds. No real way to figure out the time. As a child she had learned to mark the days, months, seasons, by the turning of the world under sun, moon, and stars. After fourteen years of drifting, she hadn't managed to shake the farmer's attention to such things.

"Oh, lord, mama tried, but if she saw me now, she'd hang her head and cry," Elyse whispered into the darkness. It was some song she had learned in the ghetto of her childhood, the tune utterly lost to her.

Lost, she thought. Funny how one never thinks they're lost until they realize they don't know where they're going. Thieving had started as a lark, a way to break out of the destiny prewritten for her by her ethnicity and her parentage. How quickly it had consumed her life. After one gains a certain reputation, they can never be safe in honest work. That was what her uncle had warned her when he first took her on the road. She hadn't believed she would ever wish for honest work.

Of course, she reflected, honest work had the disadvantage of being work.

She heard the outer door of the jail-block open and a conference of male voices, but she didn't pay it much mind. She was taken by surprise, then, when a man pulled up a stool to the other side of the bars and sat facing into her cell.

"Hello," she said toward the dark shape, figuring there was no point in staving off inevitabilities.

The man struck a match, lighting a small candle so that his face was as illuminated as the moon lit hers. It was Merrick Olnair.