A/N: In addition to my uniform thanks to my readers, followers, reviewers and the like, I'd like to add a bit of...well, I suppose it's trivia to my commentary/notation. I always intended for Haytham and Ziio to have proclivities for certain senses, if that makes any sense. For example, Haytham is a very auditory, very visual man. He doesn't much care for being touched and is excruciatingly hesitant to touch others as well. I centered much of his subtleties on music and sound, considering quiet brings him tranquility to be alone with his thoughts. He's a perceptive person overall, and sight and sound are much more telling factors about people than, say, touch or taste. As for Ziio, interestingly enough, she's very kinetic. She needs to touch something to know it, and I really wanted to get that across in my writing. My apologies for that digression. Please enjoy, thank you always and immeasurably for the kind words!

Disclaimer: All of the following characters belong to Ubisoft. I neither own, nor claim ownership of anything referenced or utilized in the following.

The placating glow of the inglenook guided my hand across the thin sleeve of parchment sprawled before me, the fracas of the tavern's lobby counterpoised by soothing flames enclosed in brick. I listened unenthusiastically to the languorous refrain of a solitary lute player posted near the door as I scrawled prosaic memories upon an otherwise vacant page. The spontaneous plucks of the bard's fingers against his habituated corded column stifled the drunken cacophony erupting relentlessly about me, erratic and listless. Despite my consciousness of the garrulous and inconstant grandeur of the life music tumbling free of the sour mouths of men and the clangor of mug flats upon the bar, my sentiments were with Ziio.

As I transcribed the frigid and perilous viscera of the frontier, I retreated to the reaches of my psyche that hosted thoughts redolent of her. I nearly felt the nip of a wayward squall as I recalled the way she cradled my face in the bed of her palm, observing me with an intensity and focus rivaling that with which I watched her. My skin had smoldered beneath her fingertips and I was overcome with a voracious anxiety I had only known in her company. Amber and iridescent of the utmost patience, her eyes had pored in a skyward tilt into my own. Although mere days had gone since the last I had been granted her presence, I unearthed the incorrigible longing to immerse myself in the splendor of her contralto and the complexity of her ever distant stare. I tilled my calloused fingertips through my hair, miring the kempt nature of the beleadel cinched at the base of my scalp, and my chest resounded with the guttural trepidation of a groan. It would not be long before I sought her out again.

I attempted to pen an additional line – perhaps about the icy fingers of the breeze at the cusp of a fearsome tree creeping across my bare face or the soporific expanse of greenery that was the timberland, dormant beneath a duvet of frost and bereavement – but retired my quill to the desktop in frustration. Painterly concepts, lucid memories, and the gossamer breath of inspiration toyed with my mind and perished as quickly as they had come. My hand, still coddling the useless plume between my thumb and forefinger, did not move. Where once words had resided, there was the reproachful thought of the young Mohawk woman, gazing at me through a veil of inveterate enigma. I endeavored to attain the wonderment and aggravation I had felt when beside her, but struck my written musings through with an unsightly streak of ink, useless and incapacitated by my own needless frivolity. The words had gone.

"Writing, Master Kenway?" I was usurped from the solemnity of my thoughts by the conversant baritone rising above the pub's wonted ataxia.

I did not acknowledge the elder man immediately. I erected my spine against that of my chair and wrought my shoulder blades circuitously against the mead of muscle lying just beneath the surface, rife with ache and inertia. "Not any longer, it seems."

I winced slightly at the discordant screech of the adjacent chair's legs scraping against the Dragon's filthy floor as my companion made a roost for himself and the cider cupped in his hand. He chortled. "Yer muse escapes you?"

My steely mien dispelled and I regressed into the warmth of Ziio's smile. I crossed my arms and turned toward the hearth, an inadvertent grin scrawled across my lips. "I'd hardly think it so romantic."

"Oh?" my accomplice proffered in jest, his imperious voice faltering with a portentous quake of his chest. "Yer expression would suggest just the opposite. Strange, considerin' I haven't seen a lady in yer enclave as a' late. Then again, I haven't seen much of you in recent days at all."

"Well, I suppose I haven't been in." I diverged my gaze to the ramblings upon the page marring the tabletop and gave a haphazard attempt at appraising the prose that lay. "Yours and Hickey's ceaseless interest in my personal affairs is…"

"A tad meddlesome, you think?" He subsidized with a jaunty snicker.

"Daunting." I rejoined. I would not be so easily entertained.

"I assure ye, sir, my inquiring mind entails only the best of intentions." He'd acquired something of a mawkish weight to his voice, though his throat contracted about a chuckle in good nature. "Cannot rightly say the same of Hickey, I'm afraid."

I addressed the man with my eyes and the fatigued reverberations of my chest were redolent of insouciance, neither condoning nor condemning his fraternization. "You're punctual this evening, Johnson."

"Aye," the man replied with a ponderous swig of his tonic, "Was here this afternoon with Pitcairn, playing a spot of fanarona intending to wait for the meeting, but the man ran off not but a few hours ago. He said something about the post – nothin' of my concern. Wagered a pocketful of sweetmeats and left them there on the table. Exonerated 'em right into my pocket."

"What use have you for confections? Or he, better yet."

The weathered creases hooding his eyes corroded further into his flesh as he bundled his brows and gazed pensively into the frothy golden surface of his drink. The coarse bristles of his facial hair made the bow of his mouth decidedly enigmatic and, though I acknowledged an abrupt change in demeanor, I had little ambition to interpret it. I facilitated my curiosity no further and found my hand hovering precariously about the inert quill upon the tabletop, inoperable.

Johnson sighed haughtily and eventually set his mug upon the table beside my mound of parchment, that same, vaguely piqued expression of apathy carving away at the yet young wrinkles in his skin. "Children, I suppose; it's something we've in common – Pitcairn and I. Regardless, the gesture's overdue, my having only returned from New York at dawn, today."

"Did you? Rather reckless of you to take leave, given the delicacy of our mission."

"We've a few months before our affairs become imperative, the way I see it, and I was summoned to attend to things with the Iroquois. I had words with some councilmen, ensured things were well at the Fort and, admittedly, played a few rounds of stickball. Predominantly business." He reasoned.

"The Iroquois? I thought you were visiting your children." I pinched my brow in suspect, the heinous touch of a frown tugging at my lips.

"I was." He replied measuredly, challenging words yet unspoken with a guarded glower. I understood his implications quite abruptly.

We were swallowed, then, by silence as Johnson baptized his thoughts in drink and the effervescent film of introspection spilling over the lip of his mug. I was grateful for the reprieve, preferring the ambiance of an active conscience to that of ensuing, clamorous reality. I contemplated my scarred and hardened fingertips in brevity and imagined my companion's brood behind a vestige of dispassion. Boys, the lot of them. I could hardly fathom William Johnson and a daughter, not of the same name, but like in lineage. I wondered with a harrowing ache of my chest what circumstances had so mercifully beneficed him so as to permit such a life – seamlessly and simultaneously intercrossed between Order and Iroquois, duty and dalliance. In the stead of the man's anonymous lover, I found the immutable frame of Ziio, standing amidst false children and subjugating false motherhood in a facet of my mind all too tangible. My conscience belonged to her, irrevocably.

I raised my eyes attentively as I caught a slight but sudden movement lurking in my periphery. Johnson has reeled his neck toward the Dragon's entrance, reverberating with the tuneless splendor of inebriation and boyish aggression. Unsurprised, I watched unenthused as Benjamin Church goaded his accomplice, Thomas Hickey, over the sodden threshold and out of winter's debilitating bite.

"Cammon, man, you're making a scene!" Benjamin feigned composure as he gesticulated understatedly with either of his bare, pudgy hands, fingers splayed inelegantly like a string of sausages, ruptured and strewn with the unsightly reminders of struggle.

"Well gimme a damn second!" Thomas bellowed through the aperture, still ajar with the thick maple wood shimmying idly betwixt the wall and the heel of a discarded workman's boot. The man embedded his fingertips into his thigh and with a staunch, rigid jerk of his arms, dislodged himself from the sizeable dune of soiled snow on the roadway and stumbled into the tavern. "So excitable – you're bloody exhausting, Church."

"I'll not shine on yer dallying, men, over here." William conjured the men toward us with an exhaustive ellipse with his subdominant hand. His voice carried along the last of the gaping doorway's frigid regurgitation, uneven and evidently fatigued by an exasperation I shared, and something like sopor.

"Gentlemen," I paid in etiquette and little else as Hickey and Church drew chairs to our table.

"Evenin'," Hickey grumbled with a languorous smile. Church nodded brusquely over his ample shoulder as he wielded his hands before the ingleside.

"Well, you don't lack for tardiness, though it appears ale is in abundance," I remarked, unencumbered by the conscientious rigidity of Church's physique.

"Oi!" Hickey exclaimed in retaliation, lurching clumsily across the tabletop. Johnson retracted his hand, holding nearer his drink. "Pitcairn ain't showed 'is face round here neither! If anything, point the bloody finger at 'im!"

"He'll be here," Johnson stated firmly.

"What's he gotta do that's so important anyhow?" the pugnacious man groused.

"I haven't the slightest," I replied, "but what of you?"

Hickey refuted my expectant glower with an enticing purse of his brow for a few moments, but relinquished eventually with a guttural, thoroughly revolting snivel. "We was up in Charlestown playin' billiards. Church 'as a talent for the fame, turns out, an' I got m'self a clandestine kinda interest in money, as you might'a known."

"Thomas, succumbing to the gambit?" Johnson relayed heartily with a red-faced chuckle.

"Well, we was gonna leave sooner, but when we went to fetch the horses, a game a' cudgeling broke out an' we had to see the turnout."

"In fairness," Church slurred, "I wanted to leave."

"Cudgeling's a boorish sport fought by barbarians and fools, interchangeable, and incited by loosened mouths and indiscriminant barmaids." I digressed and glanced from the party, becoming quickly exhausted by the volatile and stentorian nonsense spewing concurrently from every oblique route about me. I strained to center on the intermittent and concord string flicks of the since displaced musician, if not to ease my mind, then to silence the dissonant tempest brewing in the sour air of the pub's main floor by even a modicum.

I impassively attended to the conversation once more, watching with inevident, cynical amusement as Thomas Hickey garrisoned his argument with a hiccup. "Yeah, but you ain't seen a match 'tween a Scot an' a Cossack before."

I spun my focus briefly to the ceiling with a sniff.

"Cudgeling? Is that what this audience is about?" resounded the thin and aged floorboards amidst labored groans as the remaining fragment of our motley band trudged across the unattended grit and spoil of the Green Dragon's unapologetic bacchanalia.

The man emerged from the restless offing as a sloop through the typhoon torn tide, filthy extremities and faces spilling mightlessly over his shoulders and vanishing lankly back into the sea of bodies and fracas in his wake. He rejoiced softly in the eyes, entrenched by sleeplessness with eaves of wretched antiquity, heavy in step. He bore his own weight like a burden unwieldy, each footfall rippling through him in entirety and edging him forth like the seismic steps of a Trojan horse. He wore evanescence in his slender, wrinkled stare, and a shiftless grunt on his mouth, unassailable and altogether unbecoming. His weathered hand secured the dormant pommel of his sword, suspended at his waist, and would likely have intimidated a man lesser in camaraderie or tact for combat. He nodded to a miserable looking tenant and thusly robbed him of the barren seat before him, sidling between it and our table with a tired expulsion of breath.

"Mr. Pitcairn," I said in a nigh neighborly inflection, though my prim and uniform frown squelched such ambitious delusions. "Hello."

"Yes, yes, hello John, old man!" Hickey shouted muddily from under the overbearing cowl of a dastardly grin. "An' wot 'ave you been up to this evenin'?"

John Pitcairn's lips peeled back into a smile, a great deal of effort written in the dour lines of his face. "Judging by the smell of ya, not nearly as much fun. Salutations, boys. William, Master Kenway."

Hickey relapsed into a bout a modest humor and conceded in favor of our ally's indifference, dispelling his contumely and sealing his mouth. He motioned a barmaid with a nod and impatient circumnavigation of his hand. He twirled his index finger in a roundel about the table and the woman bounded toward the bar with a timid, servile curtsy. I watched him through ambiguous eyes as the man's stare emulated the subtle rock of the waitress's hips, covetous and cold in the same instance. I had no interest in partaking in his tirade of debauchery and imbibition. I interwove my fingers upon the disheveled heap of paper and relieved my lungs of weighty, surplus air, and commanded the attention of my men with little more than the guttural clearance of my throat.

"Now that we're all met, gentlemen, I should like to expatiate upon my reason for calling for such organized assembly." I began, addressing each of my allies with a cursory glimpse, "In lieu of Charles Lee's departure and the generous delay in our league against Edward Braddock, we find ourselves chiefly latent, but free, however, to discuss matters of the Order. As such, I'm obligated to denote that the Assassin presence in the colonies is vast, as we're all aware, but spectacularly obscure. I propose a lobby of diverse and expansive nature, one that will indefinitely sow us to New England soil as propagators of a novel and illustrious empire."

I observed the subtle transmutations of the faces about me – quirks of intrigue, creased brows by illicit confusion, iniquitous simpers of knowledge and allegiance. I did not permit my enthusiasm, my untarnished motivation, to permeate my expression and continued concisely, void of inflection or sentiment. "What I propose, brothers, is the exhibition and usurpation of the Assassin domain. We'll maneuver with the utmost subtlety, as we've the invaluable asset of anonymity here in the colonies and I should rather like to preserve it. Identify members of their ranks and report them to me – if we can't influence their fidelity or otherwise extricate information from them, we dispatch them. The Masters are our ultimate objectives; do away with the mentors, and the lieges unravel."

"You've your contract, men, now I beseech you find me names." I traversed the table once more with a solicitous, idle gaze before pressing my palms against the cluttered surface, smoothing my skin across the rough lumber and corrugated parchment. "May the light of the Father of Understanding guide us."

The men echoed the sempiternal farewell before eventually diverging into unrelated tangents of conversation and strategy alike. Thomas and Benjamin recounted rashly portentous tales from their jaunt in Charlestown, perforated by verbose and unwarranted digressions and vulgar gestures. Our corner of the tavern fluoresced with the vigor of affiliation, the virility of our company, and the ceaseless fecundity of sound – purposeless, frenzied babel. I withered away to the pleasantry of the woodland, utterly silent and elegiac, yet respiring with a precious, unattainable soundless symphony. I wondered when I might be so audacious as to spoil myself with the gratuity of silence's song, of the muted howl of winter's dying breath, of that woman's quietly enduring, loquacious eyes. I longed perpetually for the lamentable cadence of nothing, and again, I found solace only in thoughts of her.

"It's remarkable, what yer doing, Master Kenway," I heard Johnson mutter meritoriously against the gape of his tankard. "With the refugee camp and yer Ziio. Sustaining our alliances is easily as important as this new assignment a' yours. I'd take comfort in knowing you'll continue your work with them whilst we mind the Assassins."

I considered the man with my words alone, fixation narrowed upon the abyss. "She isn't mine, though it was always my intent to keep our ties with the natives close. Such bonds are imperative."

"Of course."

The woman called Catherine sauntered eagerly up to our party, bearing a tray of cider jugs and a delicate vase efflorescing with sprawling yellow leaflets and bulbs. She bowed at the waist and carefully poised her bearings upon the tabletop, taking paramount care in positioning her flowers with the pink pads of her fingers. With her thumb, she dressed the fragile surface of a golden petal and succinctly brought the digit to her cheek, thoughtfully beholding her arrangement through reedy blue eyes. She smiled first at William Johnson, and then to me.

"I've been growing these in the window for months now," she mused warmly, "My mother always said jonquils seem to say 'return my affection'."

"How about 'return my pittance', ya wench!" Hickey dribbled objectionably, shunting his mug across the room with a dramatic bellow. "Fetch me another beer an' try to keep the piss out of it, this time!"

With an odious, unladylike rejoinder, Catherine waded back into the fray, leaving the modest bouquet behind. I had pondered what benefit would be gained from scolding Thomas, but aborted the arbitrary thought nearly as quickly as it was incited. I drove my eyes across the table and witnessed the halcyon, almost whimsical gaze the flowers had earned from John Pitcairn.

"Yer something of a private man, Haytham," Johnson proffered casually, "But I've noticed yer in better spirits, lately. Has that something to do with her, I wonder?"

I smiled, a reserved laugh upon my lips. I addressed the jonquils with reinvigorated stringency as I drew my fingers along the length of the page before me and felt the weight and the warmth of the script against my skin.

"I wonder." I replied.