Chapter Text
1.49AM, May 16th, 998AB, outside Katol Keep, Central Katolis
Whatever Callum had imagined elves to be like, Rayla was not it. She was his age for one. Or looked and acted like it anyway. Insanely competent and intimidating, but still. If he was just a kid, as Soren had put it, then so was she.
He’d never seen an elf before, just depictions in books of beautiful monsters, deadly and cruel. While Rayla certainly fulfilled some of those traits, other were doubtful. Cruel? No. Definitely not. Even when she’d chased him, threatened him with those very pointy swords, there had been determination, aggression yes, but no malice or pleasure. Monster? He didn’t think so. Was pretty sure not. But then, he didn’t know much about her.
He watched her surreptitiously, sitting on a rock a few yards away from where him and Ez were huddled up together. Her stance had lost its poise and alertness over the last hour he’d laid awake, and she was half slumped over, picking at a silver ribbon tied around her wrist.
The light of the full moon made her almost glow in the darkness, her white hair shimmering like reflections on a pond, throwing her dark, patterned horns into stark relief against the night sky. Her skin, very pale, almost luminous in the moonlight, had a pinkish, purplish tone to it. Probably it wouldn’t be noticeable to most people, but to Callum, who’d spent his childhood mixing colors it was another thing that marked her as not quite human.
Oddly enough, her presence didn’t frighten him. Disregarding that their mission united them, and she would have no reason to harm him or Ez, he was confident she wouldn’t even if there had been no mission. He’d seen her in action. She was efficient. If she’d truly wanted him dead, he would have been dead. She’d been stalling. He knew what stalling looked like, he was pretty good at it, if he did say so himself. And she’d been very easy to convince, that her mission could be for life and for peace, rather than for death and war.
Still, while he was sure she wouldn’t harm them… that still left a wide variety of other options, like the possibility that she would lead them too far into the wilderness for them to be able to alert others, and then just leave them in a ditch while she took off for Xadia with the egg?
But… she’d faced her leader on the ramparts, telling him and Ez to run. She’d stood between them and the wolves in the dungeon. She’d offered to go with him back into the tower, back into an ongoing fight that included her own people. And that had been genuine, he was sure of that. No one had ever, to his memory, offered to put themselves on the line for him like that before. But she was closed off too. And he really didn’t know her at all, what she’d done in her life.
He realized rather late she was looking back at him.
“Rayla?”
”Yes?”
“You’re an assassin.”
“Yes...?”
“How- er… how many people have you… killed? Sorry, is that rude to ask an assassin? Or an elf? I’ve never really met either before-” He hoped, was pretty sure… the answer was zero, but-
She looked at him seriously. “Let me see, hmmm, carry the two-” She was counting on her four-fingered hands.
He gulped audibly.
“Shhh! I’m doing complicated math here, and at your behest too, least you can do is be quiet.” She rolled her eyes. “Now shush, fractions are hard for me to do in my head.”
“Why would you need to do fractions to add up…?” He wondered.
“Assists. What else could it be?”
He looked up. At her smirking face. And felt rather dumb. “So… the answer is zero, I take it?”
“It’s zero. I’m 15, Callum! Have 15-year-old humans usually racked up a long list of victims?”
“Not usually, no.”
“There you go.” Rayla said matter-of-factly.
“In my defense, I didn’t know if you were really 95 years old, and elves just-”
“Are you 95 years old?” Rayla asked, exasperated.
“Ah no, I’m 14. And 5/6ths, since we seem to be in agreement that fractions count.”
“This was my first mission. And I failed. So yeah. Zero.” Rayla said, rather curtly.
“So the guard that escaped, and told us about your assassin team- squad? What do you call it-?” He asked.
“A murder. Like with crows.”
“Really?”
Rayla let out a snort of laughter. “Oh, this trip might be more fun than I thought!”
“So I was spared your blades, just for you to murder me with words all the way to Xadia?” He exclaimed, a bit frustrated, but smiling slightly, despite himself. The grin on her face was pretty contagious, and he quite desperately needed the levity after the events of the past day.
“Assassins train with many weapons,” Rayla said, in mock self-importance, still grinning. Yeah, even if he was to be the target, he supposed this surprisingly good-natured humor was preferable to the alternative of grumpy, closed-off focus.
“Anyway, what I was getting at. The guard that escaped. That was because of you? You let him go? Like you let me go?” Callum asked.
“How…? How can you be that smart and that gullible at the same time?” Rayla was looking at him in disbelief.
“Thanks?”
“Anyway, I didn’t ‘let you go’,” Rayla protested. “You and Ezran, and the presence of the dragon egg, convinced me that this mission is more important.”
“Okay, if you say so. So that was a yes to my question, you were the one to let him go? So after failing to kill a grown man, an enemy soldier who’d willingly signed up for military service - and don’t tell me it was skill that let you down, I’ve seen you fight and I’ve seen Marcos fight - you totally thought you were gonna murder an innocent 10-year-old? That was really your plan? How can you be that determined and that delusional at the same time?” Was he really just blatantly provoking an armed assassin? Him, step-prince Callum, scared of everything? But he wasn’t scared of her.
She surprisingly didn’t rise to his taunt at all. She’d gone a little pale, and when she spoke it was nothing like the confident tone she’d had so far. “Marcos?”
“Yeah. Nice guy. Friend of a friend. I’m sure he appreciates being alive.”
Rayla looked down, looking a little sick. “I didn’t want to kill anyone. I- I wanted to fix things.”
“You are.” Callum said quickly. He never had been very good at watching people clearly upset. And after all, they were allies, not enemies. “We will.”