Chapter 6

Taelandra looked into the faces of the men before her and frowned, her thin lips pressed together tightly and her small eyes fierce. "Never," she told them firmly, smoothing her robe over her legs.

Their leader, a brutish man even for a mercenary, took on an entirely new threatening appearance as his jaw set. "Our Commander is not without mercy. Leave this place before midday and you may be spared your lives. Fail to do so and you will die."

"I'm afraid it is you who will be dying," Taelandra chuckled, standing from her heavy oak chair. She towered above almost all of the men at her full height. "You would do well not to underestimate us. See that you tell your Commander that."

A man with a black pit where his left eye ought to have been and who was missing most of an ear sneered. "A group of old folk against a whole army and you expect to win?"

"As I said, you would do well not to underestimate us." She allowed her comment to sink in a little before saying, "You can show yourselves out, gentlemen," and breezing past them, down the wooden stairs and out into the daylight.

The morning was crisp and fresh, with a thin film of dew clinging to the leaves of all the plants and the birds overhead chirping. What blighted the picture were the tents lined up in their hundreds just beyond the boundaries of her home, filthy and ragged, and the men who dwelt there had made it their business to befoul the area as much as possible, filling the once clean air with the stench of burning meat and excrement. Taelandra wrinkled her nose and fought with the overwhelming urge to vomit, quickly crossing the courtyard and entering the small chapel before she was noticed and had a torrent of abuse hurled at her.

Within, the two dozen men were hardly what she was used to working with. These were men past their primes, who complained about their joints and were losing their eyesight, but at least she could argue for their experience. She was older than every one of them and still barely more than middle-aged, but she had come to accept long ago that men lived lives on this plane for little more than a fraction of a heartbeat while the mer endured for ages.

"They attack at midday," she announced, positioning herself at the lectern. "Now, this is not the most defensible of positions, but it must not fall, for if it does then we place the entire county in jeopardy, and subsequently the entire province of Cyrodiil. Brothers, can I count on you to aid me?"

The response what not what Taelandra had been hoping for. A few moments of silence followed her speech as the men looked between each other hopefully, wishing that somebody would speak up, as though they had been planning this for some time. The woman's stomach twisted into a knot when she realised that it seemed as though she would be fighting alone to save this poor old building from being overrun by the scum outside in their squalid campsite.

"Brothers, I cannot protect this place alone. Without your help it shall fall into the hands of those horrid mercenaries and our order shall fall once more. Tell me that your years here have not turned you soft and that you still believe Cyrodiil is a cause worth fighting for! One day soon a new Emperor will be installed and we Blades shall have work to do as we did so very long ago. Tell me you can still remember the days under Uriel Septim? You are old men, but you are not so old that you cannot recall that time!"

"Hush, Sister," whispered a man who compared to the others was positively ancient. The lines on his face were deep and pronounced, and his entire visage was wind-burnt as though he had spent many a year at sea. "We are old men. It has been a decade since some of us last took up a sword, as long as there has been no Emperor upon the throne. We would hinder you far more than we could ever help you. We are soldiers no longer."

"You expect me to fight alone?"

"No, Sister," the man said calmly, the inflection in his voice utterly minimal. "Give up and return to Cloud Ruler Temple."

"I will not let Weynon Priory fall. If you will not help then I shall defend it alone." Taelandra stepped down from the lectern and scanned the group before her with pale green eyes. "You have until midday to flee, and there are horses in the stable, unless those ruffians decided they fancied a late night snack of charred horse meat. Should any of you actually hold any value to our order, I shall be at my desk." She left abruptly.

In all honesty the woman was as scared as the rest of them. At this moment in time it looked as though she would be facing around one hundred men paid for their loyalty single-handedly. Mercenaries wouldn't be too difficult to discourage from fighting if they believe she actually had a decently sized force of her own, or even a force at all, but at present she was backed by a group of terrified old men who had been warriors in a past life they all seemed to have shunned from their memories and would abandon her in order to save their skins. Now the mercenaries would be killing her and any men who stayed for blood sport, and any one she killed would be replaced by ten more until Weynon Priory fell.

The prospects looked hopeless.

Taelandra rubbed her temples in an attempt to dispel the headache that was building there, sending a stab of pain through her brain with every beat of her heart. She glared over at the tents of her enemies and envisaged setting the entire camp on fire with a spell she had learnt before she even reached adolescence, but she forced the image from her mind as quickly as it formed. Such things would solve nothing.

She had never been a part of a fight with more than three opponents before. While she had been a member of the Blades during the Oblivion Crisis, she had been on an important mission to the Summerset Isles that had prevented her return. In many ways that was probably her biggest regret, but she could reconcile herself to the fact that at least she had returned and offered her sword to Grandmaster Steffan at the first opportunity. The new Grandmaster had an entirely different leadership style to Jauffre before him, but Taelandra could not think of a single person among the order who was fit to take his place, even though age was beginning to wear on him.

Pacing about in the courtyard getting her nowhere, she slipped into the priory building and shut the door behind her, considering leaving it bolted for a second before deciding against it. As she had suspected, the lowlife band from earlier had seen fit to relieve the building of a few paltry items of silverware that she was beyond caring about; they could be replaced, unlike this order if Weynon Priory were to fall into the hands of their greedy general, a man styling himself as the next Emperor. He was a Colovian warlord that seemed to think he needed a county from which to front his operations… Apparently Chorrol had been just the city he was looking for, with its aging and sickly Countess, tall and defensible walls and nearly central proximity. Taelandra wished she could do more to help the city's defence, but they had holed themselves up inside their walls and refused to open them even for supplies. Apparently the mages were doing their best to replenish food stocks.

It was said that as soon as Countess Valga was at death's door with some illness that no healer could cure, and since she was only countess in the wake of her husband's death and her daughter was married to the Count of Leyawiin there was nobody to take over from her. As soon as she died, Taelandra imagined her people would lose heart and open their gates. She was loved by her people, and had been an excellent leader in her prime. Time, however, had swiftly turned against her.

Chorrol was a pleasant city. It was a shame to see it so close to falling.

Taelandra scaled the stairs two at a time – her long legs made it possible for her to do so without any kind of effort on her part – and walked into her 'office'. It wasn't much of an office, truth to be told, but it was the closest she could get to an office; it had a bedroom adjoined to it in which she slept that had once been behind a hidden wall that had since been ripped out, leaving an ugly scar in the plaster and a gaping hole in its wake. The men slept on the opposite landing on makeshift bedrolls that made them complain about their aching joints whenever they lay down to rest. Any actual beds had been burnt during a particularly harsh winter that had claimed six brothers even with the additional warmth.

She marched to her desk and lowered herself once more into the high backed chair that was there. These were not the same items of furniture that had been here when Grandmaster Jauffre had lived within these walls, she knew – those had gone one winter as well – but she still felt closer to the man than ever when she sat in this place. Taelandra sighed, tracing a finger over the markings in the wood, praying for answers, for strength, for a miracle.

Retrieving her katana from her bedroom, she returned to her desk and began to hone it with a whetstone slowly. She had done the same thing many times over the years, and the repetitive action at least made a start towards calming her frayed nerves and the knot in her stomach. For a moment she thought about sending a bird out for help, but she knew it would be pointless and more than likely the mercenaries would make sport of shooting the poor creature down before it got her message out.

The nickering of horses outside alerted her to the fact that the old men were running. She hoped that the warlord's men would keep their word and let them escape, because for them to die while running away would be the ultimate disgrace upon their memories. Taelandra had always known that relying on them would be a long shot, but she had hoped that maybe at least one of them would have enough of a shred of honour or duty or justice left to aid her at this perilous time. She wished that the door would open and one man would walk through it, the answer to her problems and her saviour.

She laid her whetstone upon her desk and stood, carrying the sharpened blade with her. It had been years since she had last seen combat and months since she had had a worthy partner to spar with and she suspected her skills had grown rusty. Another factor contributing to her impending death.

Even after all this time, her sword still felt like an extension of her arm. It had been made for her more years ago than she cared to remember, with a long, narrow blade and hand-and-a-half hilt; at first glance it appeared just like any other Akaviri katana, but this one she had enchanted herself with a deadly spell that sucked on the life of whomever it cut. A small nick would leave the victim severely weakened, and anything more serious would be fatal. For that reason, she only used it in real combat, sparring instead with its mundane twin or a dull iron longsword.

Exhaling, she took up a stance with her sword before moving slowly into the next position and then the next and the next, faster and faster until her movements became a blur. It was all pointless though; having an enemy against her would make more difference than she cared to think about. Enemies were unpredictable, unskilled, without mercy, unsporting, and above all afraid to die. And an enemy that was afraid of death was twice as formidable as any other.

She didn't stop until she was panting and covered in a thin film of sweat. She slipped her katana back into its scabbard and walked to the large window, looking at the sun carefully. There was maybe an hour left, and almost every single horse was gone from the stable save for the dappled paint mare that belonged to Taelandra herself.

"Did they leave her so that I could run?" the woman mused aloud, her fingers opening and closing on the hilt of her sword. "I shall not run." She returned to her room and opened the chest that contained her old armour, contemplating. She slipped on a light chainmail hauberk over a soft leather shirt, but she didn't dare with anything heavier in case it disrupted her ability to move; she would need to be faster than every one of her attackers if she wanted to make it out alive, as unlikely as that was. The only other protection she chose was a pair of worn leather bracers that she slipped over her wrists lovingly like old friends.

An hour… She sat at her desk and retrieved her quill and a roll of parchment. Dipping the feather into her inkwell, she wrote a message to whoever may find it in future, about this place Weynon Priory and her predicament and her imminent death at the hands of a Colovian warlord for refusing to give up this place. She wrote of the Blades and their mission, and of what she had been doing in the decade since Martin Septim died. When it was done, she dripped plain white wax onto it and let it dry without pressing any kind of seal into it before imbuing the parchment with a spell to protect it should this building be demolished beneath it. Then she hid it.

Outside a drum began to beat rhythmically, calling the mercenaries to take up their arms in readiness for the excessively one-sided battle. Taelandra hoped that the odds would make them cocky and therefore sloppy, but sellswords were notoriously careful with their own lives. She descended the stairs quickly, katana on her hip and threw open the door before slamming it shut behind her, sealing it with a spell so that they could not simply distract her and take the place.

The brutish thug from earlier was there with the man who had no left eye who hung back a little. "We gave you until midday," the first one said.

"And the elderly priests have fled," Taelandra replied coldly, sizing the pair up while horribly aware of the mass behind them. She pursed her lips as she looked at them, scowling. "Before you stands the last defender of Weynon Priory. I warn you; I will not go down easily."

The one eyed man laughed. "One old woman? There are hundreds of us."

"As stated, I am the last defender. I may be of greater age than people such as yourselves could even dream of accomplishing, but I am far from old. You forget that mer such as myself age differently to you weak and pathetic humans," she sneered, drawing her katana from its scabbard. "Do you believe it is fair for hundreds of men to attack one 'old' woman? Surely we should make this a bit fairer and a bit more… entertaining." She was bluffing, trying to buy herself time. If she died, her spell on the Priory doors would die with her and they would be free to ransack the building. To look at them, none of them seemed like the type who would be studied in the art of magic, and this was something she intended to use to her advantage. "I put a challenge to any man who believes they have the skills to defeat me."

There was a pause before a Redguard stepped forward, hefting an axe. He was tall and muscular, and his bare chest was covered in small, deep scars as though he had been punched through by a thousand arrows. Taelandra had known a man like him, once, but he had died long ago; the sort of man you had to defeat using brains rather than brawn. His weapon had a huge blade but it seemed mundane so she didn't need to worry about potential enchantments making her life more difficult. If anything, he was probably an old Arena fighter, by the look of him, who had defected after the Oblivion Crisis was over. While the Arena fighters had saved their district from the daedra during the Battle for the Imperial City, very few of them had remained combatants afterwards.

For his size, he was quicker than she had expected him to be when he charged at her, and the power behind that axe would have split her in two if she had not stepped to one side and allowed him to barrel past her. While he was fast, she was faster, and she danced in as she turned, slashing his upper arm with precision. Her enchanted blade did the rest, sucking from his life force hungrily until he dropped his weapon and fell to his knees. Taelandra decapitated him in a smooth swing of her sword.

"The bitch's sword is enchanted!" one of the mercenaries shouted, voicing the thoughts of every man there. Clearly none of them had paid enough attention to see the slight shimmer in the blade when she drew it, or feel the rippling power from it when it swung.

Now they were worried.

"I shall make this fair to you," she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. "Your two best men against me. When one man falls you may send another, and so it goes on. I shall tire after a while and then I shall make mistakes, so you have no reason to fear."

The brutish thug turned to his one-eyed companion, and she heard one of them growl: "But the bitch's sword is enchanted. We'd lose so many men!", to which the other replied: "Stop being such a pussy. She's an old woman. If people can't take her down then they don't deserve to live."

"Take her yourself then," the man with one eye grumbled. "Any more of you stupid tossers got a death wish?" he yelled into the crowd. Nobody stepped forward.

Taelandra spoke up: "Well, in that case it seems as though you shall have to accept defeat and leave this place." It was dangerous to mock them, she knew, but she could tell that they would not leave until she demoralised them enough that they fled for their lives. "May you forever live with the shame that you were beaten by an old woman with a magic sword."

An arrow whizzed past her face, tearing her cheek open as it sped into the wall of the building behind her. Archers; why had she not thought of that? The bowman stepped out of the crowd, another arrow nocked on his string as her fingers found the sticky trail of blood spilling from the cut. Don't heal it. Not yet.

"Next time I won't miss," he promised, grinding his teeth together.

"I would not be so sure," the woman replied. She had met several overconfident archers in her time. The type of people who believed that they could easily distance themselves from the fight and were therefore invulnerable to harm. She had watched more than a few die in close combat they were utterly unprepared for. Her cheek dripped blood onto her shoulder and down the front of her armour, one slow drop at a time; she knew she could heal it in a heartbeat, but her strategy lay in the fact that they did not believe she could perform magic. A mercenary was a whole different kettle of slaughterfish to a spellsword; one she knew she could deal with.

The archer grinned, a terrifying mash of rotting teeth lining his gums. He drew his bow with deliberate slowness, taking careful aim at the centre of Taelandra's chest. The woman exhaled but was still; let them believe that they have won. In the crowd, other men leered crude offers at her that she blocked out, her eyes locked on the tip of the projectile.

Three… Two… The twang of a bowstring filled her ears as she counted slowly through her mind. He was too close for her to have long to react, and so she said the words quickly, the ones she had been practicing for years and years. The arrow turned to ash before it hit her, spraying her with fine black powder but doing no damage.

"Fuck!" swore the man with one eye as though it had never crossed his mind that an old woman could do magic. "Kill the bitch!" he yelled at his cohorts, though they all looked a lot less assured of their victory than they had a moment ago. "I don't care how you do it, just fucking kill her!"

The more confident mercenaries swooped in like vultures, so many of them that Taelandra knew she was going to have a terrible fight. But the fact of the matter was that now they were scared of her. She knew she could take them on if they were scared of her; they wouldn't go near her blade and they would likely hang back a little to avoid being vaporised. Shooting a wave of healing magic up to her cheek, she felt the skin knit itself back together, stinging a little in the process. Restoration had never been her strong point.

Taelandra faced the first man, a thickset Imperial whose arms were almost as wide as her head and who towered above the rest by almost a foot. He was ugly with a square face, a broken nose and an offset jaw as though it had been broken and not healed, and the sword he carried was almost as tall as the woman he intended to kill with it. Fear spiked in the back of her mind as he lumbered towards her and she dodged his overhead cleave, spinning away to find herself face to face with two of the smaller brutes, one of which had lost his right arm below the elbow. She needed to funnel them into a position in which she would only have to deal with one at a time, she knew, but she didn't have the time to think or even the resources to create such a situation.

Her blade flicked up and was met by that of the one-armed man as the second swung a hammer at her skull, aiming to shatter it. She twitched as her muscles tensed and disentangled her sword from the other, whipping it into the stomach of the second man – who tried to block it with her arm to no avail – and slashing him, turning and sticking the one-armed man between two ribs. Both men fell with a thud.

The woman rotated on the spot as she yanked her katana from the body, blood glistening along its length. She leapt to one side of a thrust towards her midriff, gashing the wielder of the blade and allowing the enchantment on her own to do its work, the world around her becoming a blur as they closed in from all sides now.

She heard a curse as they tried to break down the priory door but were thwarted by her spell. Luckily she had dealt with enough of their kind before that she could predict how they would act, and the thought made her lips twitch upwards into a half-smile as she gouged a line into the small of another man's back.

They were on her so tightly that with a well placed slash she could kill two of them, and they trampled over the dead and dying as though they didn't care for their fallen comrades. The biggest man was hanging back, probably waiting for an opportunity to take her alone, and she heard the overconfident archer shouting obscenities at his colleagues because he could not get a clear shot.

Their armour was practically made of paper against the sharpness of her blade, and she sliced through it like butter, piercing one man through the groin as she stabbed downwards through his shield and turned another man to dust. She did not like having to disintegrate people, and the use of magicka she had not tapped into for some time was beginning to take its toll, weakening her. Screams of pain rose into the sky as she fought her growing fatigue, until finally one of the men grabbed her from behind, holding her still even though she struggled and flicking her blade from her grasp.

This is it then. She slammed her foot into his armoured boot, but it did not lessen his grip. "Gut the bitch," he growled. On the floor she could see almost two dozen corpses and she knew that she had caused carnage among them, a saving grace to the end she was going to have.

"Don't be stupid." The one-eyed man appeared to have made himself their leader now, though Taelandra could not remember killing the brute who had commanded them before; that said, she could not remember killing most of the men who lay dead and dying. "We've caught her now." His grin was the most terrifying thing she had ever witnessed. "I say we have some fun with her."

Fun. She knew what he meant the instant he started speaking and the thought made her stomach roil in disgust. If only she had not used so much magicka she might have had a chance of escaping, but it was not to be, and the man holding her was too strong, though she struggled against his grip with renewed vigour. "I wouldn't give you the satisfaction," she growled, slamming her elbow into the ribcage of the man holding her. He winced with pain but only grabbed her harder and jerked her body around until she felt nauseous.

"Hold still and it will hurt less," he snarled in her ear. His breath smelt putrid, like rotting meat, and his beard scratched her face.

Taelandra closed her eyes and concentrated on amassing some small semblance of magicka with which to smite the man who held her. She knew she could burn him or freeze him in order to force him to let go, but if she did that then there was a chance it would injure her as well and even then the other men around them would make short work of her. One of the thugs picked up her blade and began looking it up and down; it was stained with crimson now and she hoped he would make the mistake of running a thumb along it to checks its edge. He never did.

Of course, there was always the option of using the pathetic amount of magicka she had left in order to end her own life. Not so much death before capture as death before brutal torture and, she predicted, rape. Though the biggest flaw she could see in that plan was that upon her death the spell holding the doors of Weynon Priory closed would be broken and they would have free access, making her apparent suicide being for no particular reason other than that she could not take a bit of pain. Was not giving one's life for one's cause more honourable than allowing oneself to endure inhuman torture in it's defence? No. Taelandra supposed that she was wrong on that count.

Talos give me the strength to stand firm in the face of peril. Julianos grant me the wisdom to escape from the bonds of my captors. Stendarr project thy mercy upon these men so that they might allow me to survive. Arkay help me to evade death. Akatosh allow my years to be long and plentiful. Mother Mara grant these men compassion and understanding. Kynareth cast down thy sky spirits to smite them where they stand…

Her prayer would have continued, but she felt a whoosh beside her and heard a gurgling as the man holding her let go to claw at his throat. When the Blade opened her eyes, she saw an arrow in his neck almost to the fletching, blood trickling from the wound and rising into his mouth, making him choke.

The men around her paused in shock at what had happened, confused as to who had fired the arrow. One of their own? An outsider? They didn't know, or they couldn't tell.

Taelandra blasted the man holding her sword with magicka and bits of his flesh flew in all directions as though they had been mashed into a pulp, splattering everybody with blood and gore. She seized the slimy weapon and slit the throat of the one-eyed man amid the bewilderment before whipping her blade around to face any men who decided to take her on. She should have run. By the Nine, she knew that she should have run, but she was perplexed as well as to who had saved her and her curiosity gave her pause, long enough for the one-eyed man to rasp at his followers before he died and attract their attention back to her.

Inwardly, the woman swore a string of curse words that she had never considered saying before as they turned, blood in their eyes as they saw their fallen leader draw his final breath at their feet, red oozing from the wound to his neck. She would never outrun these men on foot, and she knew that they would kill her before she reached the horse that her comrades had so kindly left for her to flee upon.

That was what she should have done. Cast the locking spell upon the door and fled, so that it would only be dissolved if they hunted her down to kill her, and by then she would be long gone to wherever she felt like being. With a large enough head-start, she would have found it fairly simple to evade them until they stopped looking or until she succumbed to old age; whichever came first.

With her magic drained, she wouldn't last against more than two of them at a time, and now three dozen were advancing on her with murder written on their faces. An almost inaudible twang reached her ears and a man stumbled as an arrow erupted from his chest, the grey feathers of its fletching all that were visible as it punched a perfect hole through his leather vest. The men around him roared in anger, and Taelandra herself wondered who was helping her, and whether or not they could take out all the men before they reached her. She doubted it, since they were moving quicker now and the gap was narrowing, even though she paced backwards through the arch beneath the priory in the direction of the stables.

One was taken in the back of the neck and fell face forward into the mud, already dead. Apparently it had severed his brain stem.

Stay calm, Taelandra told herself. You have allies now. But apparently her allies were on the other side of the priory, hidden in the trees, and she was leading the barbaric pack away from them. Also she had no idea what lay behind her, so any number of the thugs could be waiting. Why didn't they run at her? And why didn't their archer just take her down? She had no idea. Maybe they were afraid of her…

Two more men died in quick succession, one man from a shot to the temple and the other with an arrow in his back. It was clearly a combination of an expert marksman and a powerful bow in order for the projectiles to sink so deep. She didn't know anybody who fletched their arrows grey; over the years she had met people with green or blue or white or black, but never grey, not once. The grey arrows perplexed her greatly, because it seemed as though she did not know her saviour, which led her to wonder why anybody would bother saving her at all.

Taelandra continued walking backwards down the path, paranoia spiking in the back of her mind as she passed the stables and the cottage that had ten years ago belonged to a shepherd and now belonged to nobody. Anybody could flank her and kill her and then the Priory would fall and she would have failed. In the corner of her eye she saw a figure slip underneath the archway quickly, clearly unseen by the people who had remained in the camp belonging to the various ruffians who had deemed to chase her. Three more men were felled by arrows flying from the figure's new location.

One person? Interesting. Asides the moment she had spied their shape moving through the arch, she had not seen them at all, so they were clearly as adept at stealth as they were at marksmanship. Not magic though; if it were magic, all of the enemy would be dead or they wouldn't have been seen in the first place. She wondered who they were and why they were killing the rogues bent upon murdering her just to take over the place she had come to think of as her home.

The woman searched within herself once more. She had a little magicka that had returned, but not enough for a spell of disintegration. Slowly she nodded to herself; she knew which spell to cast. Taelandra inhaled once and then held her breath in anticipation, waiting for the moment at which to cast her enchantment; it was not one of her strongest magic areas and she knew that she could not hold the illusion for very long after she cast it, but it would be long enough for her to escape.

As if on cue, the mystery archer fired and a man went down. Quickly the woman muttered her Ayleid words and felt herself fade from existence, a telltale sign that her Chameleon spell was, at the very least, functioning. The men swore vehemently at her disappearance and ran to the spot where she had last been while she backtracked down the path back to where she had come from, skirting around the outside of the stables and slipping into the trees behind.

The bowman – or, apparently, bow-woman – was crouched behind a rock, an arrow nocked. Her line of sight was through the stables towards the gaggle of confused men, where she continued to pick them off expertly, one at a time. She was a scrawny thing, a Redguard who did not share her race's characteristic tall height; she looked young but the way she wielded her bow spoke of years of experience, and the weapon itself looked like it was of daedric origin, which explained why it was penetrating the armour of the men so easily. The girl herself was dressed in a moss green tunic belted at the waist over leather trousers; her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow and she had strips of black cloth wrapped around her wrists, presumably to stop them from being injured by her bowstring as it snapped taut each time she fired.

"My name is Daaniel," she whispered between shots. "But most people call me Eagle."

Taelandra was surprised. "You can see me?"

The Redguard did not look up, but instead fired another arrow and gained another kill. "I make it my business to see things that others cannot," she replied. Remaining in her slight crouch, she gestured for the Blade to move closer. "We must leave this position. They have realised where my arrows are flying from. Go through the forest in that direction until you reach the path near the Odiil farm; Rallus will be there waiting and you must tell him that Eagle sent you."

"What of you?"

She shook her head. "I can shoot a man dead at five hundred yards. They will not get near me."

"Thank you for saving me," Taelandra offered, though Daaniel did not appear to want to talk.

For a moment, the Redguard woman turned back and met her gaze with burning green eyes. "Thank you for being the only Blade willing to defend your order anymore."

"How do you know about the-"

"Leave. Now." Eagle turned and fired another two shots before sprinting into the forest in the opposite direction to that in which she had pointed the older woman. The men saw her as she ran, but she was lithe as a cat and seemed to float with every stride that propelled her forwards at a pace that would have made Taelandra jealous when she was at the peak of her fitness.

The Blade ducked behind the rock and waited for the men to pass before following the woman's instructions through the forest until she met the road. An Imperial man was waiting for her, his head almost bald and portraying a large, relatively fresh scar from just below his right eye down to his right shoulder. He was wrapped in a travelling cloak, but a greatsword hung from his back, tarnished and well-used.

"Eagle sent me," the Blade said as loudly as she dared. The man reacted instantly, snapping his attention onto her.

"You are the woman who was holding off the ruffians from Weynon Priory then?" he asked, his hand shifting his cloak slightly to reveal another sword strapped to his hip. "I commend you. Times are hard with the warlord attempting to take over the county and few people are left who are willing to fight. Eagle went north, I presume?" Taelandra nodded. "Good girl. She will lead them to our resistance. We are small, but we will not allow this Colovian warlord to sack our city."

"Your resistance?"

"People call us the Bloody Oaks, though the name is inappropriate for we would never sully the great tree with crimson. We fight for the freedom of those in County Chorrol. You are a Blade; it is your business to know these things."

Indeed it was. The Blades had always been the eyes and ears of the Empire, but since there had been no Emperor for a decade… "I had heard the name," Taelandra claimed, based on a half-formed memory of a conversation she had once had with an ancient brother at the Priory. "You are Rallus Odiil?"

"I was," he said simply. "My father and brother were murdered by the warlord's men because they would not cede our farm to his power." He touched the wound to his cheek. "I got this trying to avenge their deaths and then they left me for dead. Follow me." He followed the road eastwards until he came to what looked like the shell of a once prosperous farm. "My home," he mumbled. There were two mounds of freshly dug earth outside the house.

The sound of hooves from further along the road made the woman bristle with fear while Rallus only loosened the hidden sword in its sheath and gestured for her to step back against the house. Four horses came into view, white by the look of them. The riders did not appear to be any threat, but the Imperial man did not let his guard down.

"Excuse me," asked one of the riders, still on horseback as they reined in next to Taelandra and Rallus. She – the Blade assumed she was a woman - wore a green hooded robe that covered her entire body save her hands, which were deathly pale. "We were wondering if this was the road to Weynon Priory."

The jaw of the hardened Imperial set. "What business do you have there?" His hand slipped underneath his cloak subtly, barely making the fabric move.

"We wish to make contact with the Blades. We were sent there from the Imperial City by one of the guards." The speaker this time was a Redguard boy with braided hair and a sword on his hip that had never seen battle, judging by the fact that it was not even dented. "We are survivors from Kvatch."

Rallus allowed his expression to soften, but did not lower his guard. "I'm afraid that Weynon Priory has fallen under the control of a Colovian warlord named Titus Mede," he told them.

A Breton girl with fiery hair growled at her companions. "I told you this was a damn waste of time," she snapped. She looked uncomfortable sitting upon the horse and clung to the saddle until her knuckles turned white. "We should have gone to bloody Cloud Ruler Temple like I told you after we left that stupid guard behind!"

"What business do you have with the Blades?" Taelandra asked, her curiosity spiking.

"We wish to know what happened to the Hero of our town," the green-robed woman explained without a pause. "The Blades of old were eyes and ears for the Emperor. We figured that if they were still formed then we would be able to ask them where her companion had fled to."

The Blade remembered the companion of the Hero of Kvatch, though she had never met the man. An Argonian and a sharpshooter with a bow and arrows fletched green who had escaped hanging in the Imperial City for the murder of High Chancellor Ocato due to having friends in the right places. Even the Blades had not been able to figure out who had freed him, though they had clearly been skilled and had access to elite resources.

"Grandmaster Steffan was the person we were told to ask for," interjected a Bosmer who looked as though he had caught some disease that turned his skin grey and who avoided meeting the gaze of anyone around him.

"Steffan is in Cloud Ruler, yes, but the Blades will not give away sensitive information to just anybody who knocks upon their gates asking for it. The man you seek was pivotal to the ending of the Oblivion Crisis and as such a great asset to the Empire should war strike again." She did not mention that he had been notoriously clumsy and had, at one stage, reportedly killed an ancient lich by accident. However his skills at evading death and his prestige with words would prove beyond useful should they ever have need of him.

The fiery-haired Breton girl spoke again: "My aunt was Sacha Renault."

Taelandra frowned. Captain Renault had been a great leader who had died defending the Emperor on the day he died; she did not realise that the woman had had any family. "I do not wish to promise you that Grandmaster Steffan will speak with you, however if you attempt to go armed with that piece of information there is a small chance you may at least be granted admission to the Temple."

"Thank you!" said the green-robed girl enthusiastically, nudging her horse in the ribs so that it would walk on.

"I would not go that way, if I were you," Rallus told her calmly. "Unless you wish to be captured, beaten and raped until they decide you are no longer worth the sport they gain from you and thus kill you. I would suggest the Silver Road over the Orange Road. You are less likely to die by that path, though you must still be wary. County Chorrol is no place for adventurers such as yourselves who have not yet been bloodied and are clearly ill-armed. This place is like a parasite upon the skin of Cyrodiil and I would strongly advise you to never set foot in this area again if you value your skin." Taelandra was astounded that he could talk of such brutality in such a calm manner in the presence of people barely older than children. "You have not chosen a good time to be searching for truth, kids," the Imperial sneered. "At this rate the only truth you're gonna find is gonna be six feet under."

Author Note: So, I can only apologise that this chapter took something close to three months to write. There have been a combination of factors to my slowness, everything from extreme and total writing block to the fact that I have in the past month sat nine major A-level exams and still have two more to complete before I am free.

This chapter is, I suppose, darker than its predecessors. DualKatanas said the story was boring him, so I decided to burn County Chorrol. Why? Because Chorrol is the one city I never went into the details of during Brothers in Arms.

But, rest assured that I am alive and shall try my best not to leave you waiting for three months for another update, seeing as my exams finish on Friday. On a plus note, I turned eighteen during the past three months. Wow. I'm an adult now. Scary thought :P