Chapter Text
“We saw that big dragon again,” Eyhild announces without preamble, shutting the wardrobe’s false panel behind her with a clang.
Ever since the fight on the borders of the Reach, the sense of something winged under her ribs has kept her moving with restless energy. Evening is coming on after a third full day of travel in the freezing rain, and because she ushered Lydia down the secret stairs ahead of her she can see her friend’s shoulders slumped with weariness. Eyhild knows why the strain of their hurried journey has hardly touched her by comparison. Like the other dragon souls that have flowed flaming into hers, soon it will go quiet—and with it the need to curb a temper not her own. If this is what it means to be Dragonborn, she’s growing used to it.
That thought cheers her, leaving her mood so at odds with her words that at the foot of the stairs Delphine exchanges glances with Lydia: incredulity from the Blades agent turned innkeeper, a long-suffering grin from the housecarl.
“You didn’t confront him, did you?” Delphine says.
“Oh, she did,” says Lydia, still grinning.
“I saw him circling something, and I realized it must be one of the burial mounds. Like at Kynesgrove.”
At the time, Eyhild was thinking only of the damage one more resurrected dragon could do. She’d set off running across the wet fields with no more than an outraged hey! and Lydia’s shout of alarm fading behind her. She falters, realizing how foolhardy she must sound, but Delphine has a simple question. “Where?”
Eyhild goes to the map on the table. “Here, south of Rorikstead.”
“No, my Thane, it was this one,” Lydia corrects her with exaggerated patience, pointing to another of Delphine’s tickmarks.
“Oh. Yes, thank you, Lydia.” Eyhild says meekly. The tickmark is almost a day’s travel farther south than her guess, but mistaken bearings are far from the worst of her ignorance. Her unremarkable Nord looks prevent her from standing out in Skyrim, but her family comes from Bruma on the other side of the Jerall Mountains; she made her first, disastrous border crossing only six months ago. She often thinks she is blundering through a role that everyone else expects her to understand.
Lydia just nods and bumps their shoulders together companionably, the steel pauldron tapping against the moonstone. Eyhild looks up and sees the twinkle of humor in Lydia’s hazel eyes. She smiles back. When they first started traveling together, the title of Dragonborn still new and bewildering on Eyhild’s shoulders, she thought her housecarl despaired of her. Now she knows that Lydia’s irreverence keeps the two women on level enough ground to be friends.
Delphine dips a quill into vermilion ink. She slashes it twice across the mark Lydia showed her, making a cross: one more dragon raised from the dead, and one less to fear.
“So,” she says eventually, “you wanted a closer look?”
“I wanted to stop him,” Eyhild answers, ignoring the sardonic note in Delphine’s voice. “He Shouted me down and flew away. Left the resurrected dragon to Lydia and me.”
“Like at Kynesgrove. I wonder why he didn’t kill you himself, now that he knows what you are…”
“He tried at Helgen,” mutters Eyhild. Her hair drips cold water down the back of the stolen armor, and she realizes she’s reached up absentmindedly to rub the back of her neck. She lets her hand fall.
“He’s a coward,” Lydia realizes aloud.
“I don’t know about that, but at least you made it out alive. The embassy was dangerous enough without you picking fights with dragons,” says Delphine.
Her tone is sharper than before, and Lydia stirs indignantly. Eyhild holds out a hand to stop her, needing no defense; it’s true enough. She remembers the smell of the embassy cellar, of sawdust and elven perfume failing to mask the reek of death. The buoyant feeling of the dragon soul turns sour in her stomach.
“They killed Malborn,” she confesses. “I—I wasn’t fast enough, even with the Voice.”
“Damn,” says Delphine, without blame or even much heat. Eyhild realizes the risk to the hapless bartender must have been part of Delphine’s plan. Her flicker of outrage dies unspoken when she meets the Blades agent’s gaze and sees the look of bleak defeat there.
But Delphine reaches across the table and pats Eyhild’s arm. “I’m sorry. You’ve had a hard few days. Look, your gear’s safe in the chest over there, as promised. You should find some dry clothes.”
With that, she goes back to the inn upstairs. Despite her exhaustion, Lydia reaches the stowed gear first and busies herself looking for Eyhild’s spare clothes as well as her own. Eyhild sighs, drops her swordbelt to the floor, and shucks the stolen cuirass over her head. The burlap sack she carried back from the embassy is damp, but when she unties the opening she finds the three leather-bound notebooks inside dry enough. She wipes her fingers ineffectually on her tunic before she sets them out on the table. Lydia tosses her a bundle of dark blue fabric: her old robes, frayed at the wrists but clean, their familiar enchantment coursing in every thread. She puts them on gratefully.
Delphine returns a few minutes later with towels and mulled mead, both warm from the kitchen. She raises an eyebrow at the change of clothes. “I didn’t know you were a Synod mage.”
“I’m not anymore. Seven years was enough,” Eyhild says, and shakes her head. She trades a mug for a folded slip of vellum, explaining, “The Thalmor know nothing about the dragons.”
Delphine takes it, but frowns at her. “Really? That seems hard to believe.”
She nods toward the note. “They think the Blades know something.”
The vellum makes a crisp sound as Delphine shakes the fold loose, and she snorts bitterly. “Ironic—the old enemies assume that every calamity must be a plot by the other side…”
“They also think they can find a Blade. Do you know someone called Esbern?”
Delphine nearly drops the third cup of mead, slopping it over her fingers. Eyhild steps forward in alarm, but then she sees that Delphine’s face is alight with triumph.
“Esbern? He’s alive?” Her voice climbs the octave; she’s almost laughing. “I thought the Thalmor must have got him years ago. That crazy old man…”
She turns away smiling. Eyhild bends to dry her hair, and her confirming hum is muffled. Delphine goes on as if talking to herself. “Figures the Thalmor would be on his trail, though, if they were trying to figure out what’s going on with the dragons.”
“Because he knows the lore?” says Eyhild, looking at her upside-down.
“None better. He was obsessed with it, really. I guess he wasn't as crazy as we all thought. How did you know?”
“I stole the ambassador’s files. She says he’s an expert. ‘Capture Only’.”
Delphine’s face settles into a grim stillness. She says only, “May I see?”
“On the table. They’re after you too, you know—‘Capture or Kill.’”
“Should I be proud, Dragonborn?” She picks up the first notebook, and Eyhild knows that it is Delphine’s own because she sets it back down after flipping perfunctorily through the pages. As soon as she has a hand free, Eyhild reaches for Esbern’s dossier instead and passes it across.
Lydia has retreated to a corner to change; there’s a moment of quiet as Delphine reads about her fellow fugitive. Eyhild sips her mulled mead, listening to the muffled footsteps and conversation from the taproom upstairs. Sven’s voice rises above the comfortable noise, singing: Down with Ulfric! The killer of kings… Eyhild winces, and taps her fingertips thoughtfully on the cover of the third notebook.
“The ambassador doesn’t keep very thorough notes, does she?” Delphine complains after a few minutes.
“I don’t think she knows much about Esbern. Or you,” Eyhild points out.
“And still less about the Dragonborn, so much the better! But you’d better get to Riften before the embassy can send word. Because, gods help us, the Thalmor are right: Esbern will know how to stop the dragons if anybody does.”
Eyhild asks, “Do you know where to start? The Thalmor haven’t found him…”
“Yet. As far as we know,” Delphine corrects her. She considers. “He’s probably down in the Ratway. It’s where I’d go.”
“Thanks.”
“Whose file is that? It’s thicker than mine or Esbern’s,” Delphine says, noticing the third notebook.
Eyhild holds it out to her. “See for yourself. I think I know what to do—after Riften—but if I’m wrong…”
“Oh?”
“If I’m wrong, saying what I think might mislead you. Please.”
Delphine glances across the room at Lydia, who crosses her arms and gives no sign of her own thoughts. Then she looks at the first page of the dossier.
“Asset?” Delphine practically hisses. Eyhild says nothing. A few minutes later the Blades agent mutters a curse tinged with sympathy, and then she cocks her head in confusion. She flips backward several pages and reads again more carefully. In the long silence, there’s a soft snore from the direction of the gear chest: Lydia has dozed off sitting upright on its lid, her head tilted back against the wall, so worn out that sleep overcame her almost as soon as she was off her feet. Eyhild feels like pacing.
Finally Delphine gives the dossier back to her. “Go to Riften,” she says.
“I’m not leaving your friend to the Thalmor, don’t worry,” Eyhild says with feeling.
“You know what I mean. I said before that they wanted Ulfric’s rebellion to last. I was wrong about Helgen, but only because it’s twenty years too late! You’ve proven the ambassador had nothing to do with the dragons, now don’t try to fight two wars at once.”
Eyhild says ruefully, “She probably knows Lydia and I were part of the attack on Northwatch Keep by now.” Then her head jerks up. “Oh. Oh, Divines.”
“Dammit, you could have told me that before I sent you to the embassy!”
“But this is why the Thalmor wanted Thorald Gray-Mane, don’t you see?” Eyhild cries in dismay. “He knew his family name was more important than anything he’d done. Not a Jarl’s son, but close enough to sow chaos…”
“Slow down. What’s this about?” Delphine looks intrigued.
“You mean… but everyone in Whiterun seems to know, already. The guards have been congratulating me on my choice in enemies,” Eyhild says.
Delphine shrugs. “Maybe there was less to the rumor than you thought. Some of Jarl Balgruuf’s men are shrewd enough to fit the pieces together. You said the Thalmor were after the Gray-Manes?”
So she has to tell the story from the beginning. Delphine listens while Eyhild tells how she stopped to help Fralia Gray-Mane for no more reason than that the Battle-Borns had the old woman outnumbered, and how she learned after she accepted an invitation to dinner that she was really being brought into a deadly secret. She describes the lonely fort on the northern coast, and here Delphine asks her to wait while she spreads maps and fresh parchment across the table. They work together to pin down the approach from the narrow beach to the back gate, the distance across the courtyard to the keep, the layout of the prison below.
“From what I’ve heard, the Thalmor haven’t moved back into the place,” Delphine says. “But if they do, I’ll know what to expect.”
“You’ll stop them?”
“Not if you beat me to it,” Delphine deadpans, but Eyhild doesn’t smile at the compliment.
“They’d left a dead body to rot in its chains, where the prisoners would have to look at it while they…” she begins instead, plaintively.
“Hush. You stopped them.”
“But it was like that again at the embassy.”
“You stopped them, too, didn’t you?”
In the morning Delphine helps Eyhild and Lydia pack their gear while she gives them instructions in no particular order: how to reach Riften unnoticed, how to know whether the Thalmor were tailing them, what to tell Esbern when they found him. They set off feeling almost like children escaping from lessons. The icy rain from the night before has cleared away, and the day breaks warm for Sun’s Dawn with the wind out of Falkreath. Eyhild pushes back her hood to feel the slanting sun on her face.
From somewhere by the riverbank comes the steady sound of someone chopping wood, and the sunlight picks out the golden hair of the man working in the lumberyard. Eyhild is surprised to recognize Ralof the sawyer’s brother, a fire-forged friend. He stops and lifts his hand in greeting when he notices her. She waves back. He seems scarcely less conspicuous in farm clothes than in his Stormcloak blue, and she worries: though the guards here are loyal to Whiterun, unlikely to betray a local man to either side in the war, it does not make him safe. He should be in Windhelm…
“Do you think Delphine is right about that file?” she asks Lydia.
The housecarl only repeats what she said when they first spoke about it, in Dragon Bridge the day after the embassy party, hiding at the inn and reading the spoils of Eyhild’s raid until they dared to cross the river. “He should know the truth.”
Eyhild sighs. “Then we agree. Maybe we should split up.”
“You’ll need me in Riften, Thane,” says Lydia pointedly. “Have you seen the place?”