Chapter Text
Ms. Curnow was nice, Emily decided.
Not that her other teachers had not been nice, of course. The daughter of the Empress had only ever met the best scholars of the Isles.
She had been instructed in everything from algebra to music. Some of her teachers had been dusty and stuffy, like old and crinkled yellow paper. Others had gotten impatient with her, when she had sulked through the more boring lessons or doodled in the corners of her essays.
But her regular teachers had all been nice, and she had liked them. Teachers whom Emily did not like never came back to see her. Those whose company she enjoyed had stayed. In that, her mother had never shied away from expenses. She had insisted she wished Emily's mind to grow unimpeded by fear of overly strict tutors...
Her mother had...
Her mother...
On the keys, Emily's fingers faltered.
"My lady?" Callista said.
A fog seemed to tear open before her eyes, a dense, grayish billow between her and the waking world. Emily looked down and saw that her hands were shaking. Nothing too overt, but a fine tremor that rattled down to her wrists.
The piano keys were a bit uneven, yellowed with age. The strings were slightly out of tune. But Emily enjoyed it anyway, there in the parlor of the Hound Pits Pub, where it stood on slightly wobbly legs.
To Callista, Emily said, "I just lost my place," although it was a lie, as she knew this song quite well.
Ms. Curnow might not have known Emily for long, but she was attentive and thoughtful. Her brow furrowed a little as she studied her. Emily struggled for a smile.
There it was again, the stumbling block that she kept catching her thoughts on, like calluses snagging on soft fabric. Her mother. The sunlit pavilion, the blood on the dusty stone floor.
But no. Not now. Emily took another resolutely deep breath, though it stuck in her throat like a half-chewed honey cake.
She was having her lessons. It was late afternoon, and she was having her last music lesson of the day, and there was no need to think of anything but the dancing, twirling notes printed on the sheet music in front of her, the gentle swish of Ms. Lydia's broom from somewhere, a low murmur of voices that drifted down from upstairs.
"Happens to the best of us," Ms. Curnow said. The pause had stretched long, but she didn't seem to mind. "Start over from here?"
Emily saw where she tapped her finger. Just a few measures before her favorite part of the song, the one where it swung up and out in a jaunty dance. Callista must have seen how she liked that part.
Yes, Emily had always liked her teachers. But Ms. Curnow was nice in a way they hadn't quite been. She did things like this for her student: pointing her to her favorite part of the song, saving the music lesson for last, as a treat, because she knew how Emily enjoyed it.
The keys felt sticky under her fingers. Emily started anew.
The song was a dance, and to Emily, it sounded like a fairytale. There was just something about it that told a story of exotic wild landscapes, winding paths through gnarled rock formations or pretty flowering gardens.
It was a pretty song, Emily thought, one that twirled and skipped across the keys like a flat stone tossed to bounce across the still surface of a lake. It required a firm but elastic touch of the keys, with the little dot that was printed above each new note.
Though it sounded like the light-weighted twirling of a young dancer across a polished wooden theater stage, it was quite an ordeal to learn. And she was not even learning the proper version. Ms. Curnow had rewritten some sections for Emily's small hands.
Still the song had frustrated her, and at first her attempts had sounded like the trod of heavy boots across that same theater stage. It had been something she'd had to work at.
Emily pushed the pedal down. A chord rang out loud over the rest, as the melody rose and rose, and was chased to its highest heights by her other hand, the dancer's laughter in the sun as her strong legs swung her up.
The melody was followed by its own echo. Emily let go, whipped her hand over and crossed her wrists. But the heel of her palm bumped into the keys at an angle, and her right hand produced not a light accompanying chord, but a dissonant jumble.
She huffed out a breath. Before Ms. Curnow could speak, she released the pedal. It smacked back into the wood with a clang.
From the top of the page, Emily started again. It would not do to get discouraged—she had spent far too long on this piece, was far too familiar with its pitfalls. This happened all the time: Emily would swing too wide while bringing one hand over the other, or she'd focus too much on the moment of crossing and muddle up the part leading up to it.
This time, she went slower. There went the pedal, and she felt the shift of the aged mechanics inside the piano as the strip of cloth was pulled from the strings so they could ring out freely.
There went her hand, again, crossing whipcord fast over the other. This time, the chord rang true. Her heat beat a little quicker, and there was the next chord, dissonant only until the melody joined in...
She made it flawlessly through the trickiest section, the one attached to her favorite, where her fingers had to fit neatly inside the space between some black keys. Then the song flowed back into its main motif, and the pedal felt warm under Emily's foot, the old sticky keys bopping and dancing under her fingers.
"—and do not forget to practice your scales," Ms. Curnow said to her, when she had helped Emily stack the sheet music back on top of the instrument. "I know it's tempting to just play the dance again and again, but you must remember to hone your technique."
A pause. The swish-swish of Ms. Lydia's broom sounded inordinately loud. Then Callista flicked her a slightly startled glance, and added, "My lady," an afterthought, scrambling to catch up.
Emily nodded quickly. She did not mind that Ms. Curnow called her by her birth name far too often, and almost never curtsied to her anymore. Perhaps she assumed that they were friends now, and had no need anymore for such trappings of courtesy and status.
"Well," Ms. Curnow said. She brushed a piece of lint off her trousers and stood. "I will grade your essay. Run along, if you like. You're free for the day."
She smiled, relieved, that Emily had not pouted over the honorific, or threatened to have her head chopped off or whatever it was that the simple folk thought of their regents.
Ms. Curnow was very kind. Emily liked her neat, unadorned clothes. But she was... Well, she was a commoner, was she not, and that meant it must've been quite outside her usual schedule to tutor an Empress' daughter.
Emily didn't care about the lack of curtseying, or the often-missed titles. Callista slept beside her in the tower, and her quiet breathing was a comfort, an immediate reassurance when Emily woke damp with fear-sweat under her night clothes and stared in confusion at the unfamiliar cobwebbed ceiling.
For all that she grumbled about their shared bedroom, the arrangement made Emily feel giggly and young. It reminded her of when she'd still been young enough to sleep with her governess in her bedroom. A rotund, ruddy-cheeked woman she'd been, with a lovely singing voice and a sudden, loud laugh that had always erupted boisterously and without warning.
Her mother had picked her, and they had become fast friends. Many a time had the governess helped Emily raid the kitchens for sweets, and her mother had let them, never scolding. Instead, she had swung past Emily's rooms on her way to the council chambers, decked out in her stiff finery, to steal a little apple tart for herself.
Her mother—
Her mother was dead.
Sunlight fell into the room. It painted bright stripes on the cracked and dusty tiles. Muffled through the wall came the ticking and puffing of Mr. Joplin's machines. Perhaps he was inventing something new. By the shelves stood Wallace, methodically wiping out a glass.
He wasn't looking at her. He had days when he rarely looked at anyone but Lord Pendleton. Ms. Lydia had her back turned to her, too. Still, Emily felt as though they were both perking up, like they had heard her thoughts catch like a scratched audiograph and were just a moment from turning around.
A great fist had taken hold of her lungs. It was squeezing, squeezing. A wave of heat rushed down her back, beaded up a cold sweat on the back of her neck...
The hallway was quite cool. Emily's next breath rushed in, and she coughed half of it back out, struggling to master her thudding heartbeat. But it was easier to breathe in here. Emily pressed her palms to her heated cheeks. Could these ice cold hands belong to her? They felt like somebody else's hands, stiff and shivering.
Sometimes it was right there. Sometimes it was far away, and faded to a distant roar like the crash of the tide against the shores. And then it came back.
Every time, she tried to stop herself from wondering once more if it was real. She knew it was. She wasn't a small child, she didn't need to be reminded gently, again and again, like a weepy toddler.
But sometimes... It just seemed so impossible. Her mother was... well, her mother, and the Empress besides. She would not just die.
Jessamine Kaldwin was tall and willowy, decisive in her council rooms and gentle when she told Emily her stories at night and imitated the voices of pirates and gallant knights. She was perhaps too lenient with her daughter. But sometimes she got angry, and when she did, the little wrinkles around her eyes seemed carved of stone.
She was the Empress and she was kind and fierce and she was Emily's mother. She was not supposed to just die.
Slowly, Emily walked up the stairs. Her feet felt heavy. It seemed an age ago that she had sat at the piano with Ms. Curnow. The pub was quiet around her. The pipes clanked in the walls. The distant conversation in the second-floor hallway was still going on, a low murmur.
Corvo was not in his bedroom. The attic was faintly warm from the winter sun. The smell of the river came in more strongly up here, a briny, mildewy scent. The floor boards creaked even under Emily's small weight.
From Corvo's windows, she could not see the spires of the Tower, or even the other side of the river. She couldn't see the way the light faded slowly into dusk, and into sunset. Her mother had loved sunsets.
Corvo's bed was neatly made. A slim book lay arranged on the night stand. The walls were plastered with advertisements, glossy paper that proclaimed the pub the most entertaining bar in all of Dunwall, a yellowed print praising the Golden Cat's attractions.
Emily took a slow look around. Cobwebs dotted this room, too. They seemed to be everywhere in the pub, no matter how much dusting Cecelia and Ms. Lydia were doing. But other than the dust, the room was quite bare. If Corvo stored his weapons here, he had stashed them neatly away.
Perhaps he'd used to leave his gear lying on the table, and only shuttered it away when she'd arrived. Emily huffed quietly. Corvo was so fussy about his weapons. Always watching Emily's little hands when they strayed too close, guiding her to stand on his right side, away from the pouches of ammunition, when they walked together.
He needn't have been so careful. She wasn't stupid. She knew not to touch his crossbow, a thing of wood and strange machinery that she often itched to explore, or even the sword he carried.
She sat at the desk for a while and watched the dust motes dance through the light that fell in through the dusty windows. Breathing came even easier up here. Perhaps the air was thinner. The thoughts of her mother had thickened the air downstairs, a noxious cloud of memory, and she had had to get away from it.
Emily swung her legs under the chair. She listened carefully for her heartbeat. It was still tripping and unsteady. Light streamed through the room, but it could not reach the dusty corners by the door, or the silent, cloth-draped lumps of old furniture.
In the farthest corner, the shadows seemed to move.
That was nothing unusual. The shadows were always moving here. They shifted when she looked away, and bore entirely different shapes when she glanced back.
Sometimes Emily wondered if the snatches of darkness were traces of all the commoners who had been evicted from the district. Perhaps they had all died of the plague by now, and now their ghosts were haunting them.
Her governess would have let out her booming raucous laugh at that. She would've ruffled Emily's hair, in a manner entirely unbefitting her station, and assured her that there were no such things as ghosts. And if there were, she'd have said, with a twinkle in her eye, the both of them just had to sing Emily's nursery rhymes loudly enough to chase them off.
By the wall, the shadows shifted. They congealed in a reddish wash of dark, gilded by the sun. Emily's feet froze under the chair, and she stared, blinking, at the aged wood paneling. Moving shadows...
A different image rose in front of her mind's eye. The long shades cast by the stone pillars that held up a domed stone ceiling. Black-clad men dissolving into shards of darkness, blood spattering the sun-warmed tiles of the pavilion—
Emily was halfway down the stairs before she had quite realized that she was moving. She did not run, but strode quickly, her little feet making almost no sound on the steps.
She hated, hated the dark. It had been so dark—first with those horrible masked men, and then at the Golden Cat—and she had grown to resent it. Things bred in the dark. She wanted candles, she wanted light.
The room above the sewers was windy and cool. It smelled of heated metal and the steam that puffed up from the machines. Their gears chugged along in the basement, pumping up water from the Wrenhaven or whatever they did. Carefully, Emily crossed the walkway. If she looked down, she could see the machines, through the slits in the metal beneath her feet.
From the metal balcony came a clang of swords.
Her heart jumped up into her throat again. It was like it had been bobbing up and down all afternoon, crawling up in a startled frenzy and then dropping. Now, it pounded hard once more, each beat shuddering through her.
For a moment she stood frozen. But then her feet had carried her across the room, and she was out on the balcony.
She leaned over the railing and stared out into the yard with its heaps of rusted metal and rubble washed up by the river. No soldiers from the City Watch were in sight. Instead, Corvo and the grim one, Admiral Havelock, were circling each other on the short, winter-withered grass.
For all his thick-soled boots, Corvo was light-footed and fast as always. When she'd been younger, she'd used to hate seeing him practice, because she'd thought he was truly fighting duels to the death. Then her mother had explained to her that Corvo, as Lord Protector, had to hone his skills.
Now, it was almost a nice thing to watch him. Her racing heart slowing, Emily braced her arms against the railing. The metal was cold even through her clothes. But she didn't move away. The chilly sting made her feel more real, like she was truly there and not still in the stairwell with the shadows.
Corvo ducked under Havelock's swing and kicked at his ankle, trying to unbalance the tall man. Havelock's sword came down, a brilliant arc of reflected light. It was met by Corvo's blade in a neat parry. The crash of steel on steel echoed across the yard.
For a moment, they separated. Corvo spun away, his sword held at a defensive angle. Admiral Havelock wiped the back of his hand over his brow.
Emily smiled suddenly. She fumbled her ribbon out of her hair. "Sir knight!" she called, just like in the fairytales. Her voice echoed a little in the courtyard. "You have my favor in this fight!"
On a light breeze, the ribbon fluttered down. The red cloth twirled in the wind, pulled down by the greater weight of the white bow.
Corvo shaded his hand over his eyes to look up against the pale winter sky. He caught the ribbon in his big palm. Havelock said something that Emily didn't catch.
Corvo glanced up at where she stood. His dark hair was in disarray, his clothes rumpled, but he was the picture of gallant courtesy as he bowed to her.
Emily giggled. She ruined her own play-act of a courtly lady by waving to him, enthusiastically. Corvo tied the ribbon around a strap on the shoulder of his coat. The white bow caught the light like a little beacon.
In the end, Emily could not say whether her favor had brought him luck, or even who won. It was just a training session, after all, not a real duel. The two clashed and parted, again and again.
Havelock fought with brute force and a deadly focus that almost looked like he anticipated Corvo's movements before he made them. But Corvo was fast. He was a little shorter than the admiral, leaner, but so very quick.
In the end, they parted and shook hands. Even from this distance, Emily saw that they were both breathing hard. Her red ribbon was like a brand on Corvo's dark clothing, a splotch of color that caught the late afternoon light.
Emily cheered and clapped, and raced to meet them, back through the machine room, the metal floor clanking under her feet.
The sun had wandered a bit once more. The stairwell was dim. The oil lamps on each landing had not yet been lit. From far downstairs came the metallic scrubbing of a brush. Someone was cleaning the kitchen sinks.
She ran down to the first floor. Her shoes pounded against the wooden floor in time with her heartbeat. Darkness congealed in the corners like mold, caught in the cobwebs under the ceiling.
Emily raced down the steps, took them two at a time and almost fell into the tavern.
"Careful!" Cecelia admonished her, on a surprised outrush of breath, when Emily almost barreled into her.
Emily gave her a quick, blurry smile and ducked past. The door opened. And then she stood bathed in the pale winter sunlight, felt its faint warmth on her face, barely taking the edge off the chill but so very welcome nonetheless.
Her ribs loosened. Each step down the stairs had tightened invisible screws there, until she'd felt she might just shatter inward by the time she'd gotten downstairs. Now, she could breathe.
She inhaled a fresh breath of air. It smelled faintly of rot from the river. But this air had not been cooped up inside with the shadows, and with her thoughts of her mother bleeding into it like poison being re-fed.
Ms. Curnow was leaning on the gate to the dock. Her hair looked reddish in the late afternoon sunlight. She had loosened her collar, but other than that had made no concessions to the end of her working day. If Emily's legs were a bit wobbly as she walked over to her tutor, well, Callista did not look her way.
Emily spotted Mr. Joplin in his workshop, bent over a bench but with his head tilted oddly. His glasses reflected the light. He seemed to be pretending to work while staring at Callista.
She knew all about engineers like him. At the Tower, she had heard whisperings of genius and madness and Sokolov. Piero Joplin was not him—at any rate, he was friendlier, and greeted her with a little nod instead of just a frightening stare from his wildly bearded face and then a too-deep bow, like Sokolov had.
"Magnificent, weren't they?" said Callista, when Emily approached her. She spoke with a little laugh just out of reach in her voice. Emily decided it made her sound even nicer, and younger. "I'm only glad they're both on our side."
Emily nodded, but had to stop herself from rolling her eyes. The thought of Corvo being on any other side was just ludicrous.
The wind from the river caught her hair and blew the short tangles across her face. Emily sighed and pushed the strands off her forehead. The ribbon had held it back. But it had also helped Corvo in his fight, and so she would not complain about its loss.
The duelists came down the stairs. They both looked sweaty and rumpled. For a brief moment, Emily had a chilling thought of the wintry cold and whether it might be settling in their chests, and tomorrow they would be coughing and the day after that there might be blood...
The moment passed, nothing but a brief, fast-paced cloud. "Well fought, good sirs!" Emily greeted them, at the same time that Callista enthused, "That was amazing!"
The admiral glanced between them with a wry look. It was perhaps odd that Ms. Curnow was the one who beamed at them, and Emily who stood straight and affected the air of an elegant grown-up lady at court.
"Gotta keep in shape," Havelock said gruffly. He quirked a smile at Callista that looked odd on his weather-beaten face. He did not smile very often. "And Corvo here is a real challenge." To Corvo, he said, "Care for a drink?"
Corvo nodded. He wiped his tangled hair out of his face, in much the same way as Emily had just done. The thought made her smile. He didn't look very tired, despite the rigorous sparring match he'd just been in. His footsteps were easy and measured as always, his sword neatly tucked away.
"That must've come in handy against the pirates," Ms. Curnow said to Havelock.
She fell in step beside him, with a look of shy admiration Emily didn't think she'd ever seen before. She looked a bit like Emily thought she would herself, if she ever saw a real-life whale, or a real pirate like the ones from her stories.
The admiral scoffed. Together, they all walked over to the pub. "It's been a long time since I've been on a ship," he said, after a pause. He did not seem to know what to do with Callista's wide-eyed look.
The long shadow of the house fell across Emily's shoulders. She heard a swish of moving fabric. When she looked up, Corvo was untying her ribbon from his coat. He must've seen her fidget with her hair.
"Oh!" Emily said, dismayed, as Corvo held out the ribbon. "But, no, I gave it to you..."
Mr. Joplin walked past her through the door. His eyes behind his grease-smeared glasses were fixed on Ms. Curnow's back.
Then the door swung half-shut behind him, and Emily was alone with Corvo. Ms. Curnow's voice faded and muffled beyond the wall. They were getting that drink. Wallace was probably rousing from his thoughts, leveling a haughty stare at them, glasses clinking as he set out the whiskey on the bar.
Corvo was still holding the ribbon. Emily swallowed. Her thoughts whirred fast. In the end, she dropped her courtly lady act. She sighed as though it were a great imposition, and said, "Well, alright."
She held her hair up and out of the way. Corvo knelt by her side, his boots crunching on the gravel and frozen grass, to tie the ribbon back into place.
His fingers were big and clumsy, not like the slim, fast hands of her handmaidens. He was too wary of catching strands of her hair in the knot he made. The red headband slipped down her hair. Then he had to tug to get the white ribbon into its usual place just beside her part.
It was quite cold in the shade cast by the house. Emily shivered a little. "Corvo," she whispered.
She spoke very quietly, so none beyond the door would overhear. But Corvo caught her hesitant query. He always did.
He leaned down further to hear her. Emily stared at his knee where he knelt in the dirt, It seemed easier than looking up at his face.
Corvo would not lie to her. She knew that like she knew the sun rose in the east. He would not lie. She could ask, and he would answer.
He would know if the assassins could get them here. If they would one day congeal out of the shadows like they had at the gazebo. And he would tell her if he had ever seen the darkness move in the stairwell, or if it was just her childish imagination, driven into a fright by her ordeal.
She meant to ask. Truly, she did. But somehow, what came out instead was, "Is my mother really dead?"
She looked up, then, to catch his answer. She saw it in the firming of his mouth, the little lines around his eyes, before he nodded.
The furrow of concern on his brow did not go away. He knew that hadn't quite been what she'd meant to say. Sometimes Emily mused that because he did not speak, Corvo had honed his hearing over the years, and could now listen to even the faintest threads of thought.
"It just seems so— unreal," Emily blurted out.
She felt heat rise to her face. It was like another veil had torn, another fog of strange fancies in her head.
What was she doing, intercepting him on his way to a well-earned drink with their loyalists? Oh, she knew Corvo didn't mind. He never had, and he likely never would. Emily could not fathom any circumstances under which he would ever turn her away. But—
She glanced back at the door. Mr. Joplin had only just walked through. What if he had heard her silly question?
"When I was at the Golden Cat," Emily said quickly, "well, I spent so much time there, months really, and it just didn't seem real sometimes, and now I'm here and..."
Corvo studied her. She fought not to squirm under his scrutiny. Then he reached out and very gently pinched the soft, pale skin on her wrist.
Emily snorted. If her laugh sounded more choked than it had any right to, Corvo didn't mention it. "All right," she said. Her voice shook, but only a little. When she breathed, it went in easier, some of the tension melting away. "I'm awake."
Corvo nodded. He rose, and offered her his hand.
His hand, so very familiar to her, from the neatly trimmed nails to the sword calluses in his palm. Maybe she took it too fast to seem entirely casual. But his fingers closed around hers with their usual unhurried familiarity, so perhaps Corvo had not noticed anything.
Together, they walked through the door, into the dusty air of the pub. With Corvo's bulk as a reassuring presence next to her, Emily did not glance into the stairwell.