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Echo had given her life to her people and her Queen, ever since she was a child. The Queen’s most trusted weapons had to be picked young, before they received their first scars, and raised away from the general population. Her childhood - as much as any Azgeda had one - her choices, and even the very skin on her bones, marked with the tattoos of foreigners, had been given to people that wouldn’t even recognize her.
She never regretted it. She was, after all, one of the greatest tools to keeping the glory of Azgeda alive. She would live a half-life, a life alien to those she calls her own, so that they may thrive. Echo was named well, a haunting fraction of the original sound, but integral to the original noise. She accepted her role, and even grew to love it. After all, she had never known anything other than serving her Queen and people.
And then her Queen had died in a loophole, of all things. A cruel exploitation of law and language, and Echo’s work for her had never seen the culmination it should have. She was the blade that had frayed a rope, so that an “accident” may occur, and it had snapped on the wrong person. She wanted vengeance for the woman who had shaped her, but in doing so, Queen Nia had instilled more than an obedience to royalty in her.
Azgeda above all.
So when the opportunity had showed itself for Azgeda to rise triumphant above all other in the Coalition, her Queen’s original goal realized, Echo had seized it with hard words and a sharp blade. She had taken a city in a heartbeat for a dying King and cast aside the shadows that had raised her, stepping into the light, her role as a spy and assassin sacrificed for her people as everything else in her life had been. Her people had remained in control of Polis, her King had woken up, and sometimes he even listened to her.
He wouldn’t, however, listen to her when it came to the grounds of combat. Pride, stupidity, “diplomacy”, whatever one called it, Echo found herself longing to creep through the streets of Polis and take protecting her King into her own hands. But those days were gone for her, too many people knew her, and they would assume her King had ordered her to kill for him, that he may avoid a fight. She couldn’t make him appear weak like that, so Echo sharpened her blades and worked herself into a brief, exhausted slumber the night before her King would die to an inferior warrior.
She was awakened with a blessing. One of her informants - just because she was no longer a spy didn’t mean that espionage was a lost art - gave her the best news she could have expected. The ambassador who was going to kill her King had been found dead in his dinner, no signs of a struggle. Most people were saying his heart stopped, a tragedy, but unavoidable. Echo’s people were singing a slightly different tune, of a cloaked figure stalking through the streets, and of a certain ambassador with a love for wine not requesting a second cup after the figure met with him.
So Echo had dressed herself for court, her leathers and furs unmistakably Azgeda. She would not wear the silks and cottons of the other tribes, would never risk being mistaken again. For the sake of disguising herself, she had given away her identity so many times. In her new role, she would proudly bear any sign of her people that she might.
She had whispered the information to her King, what the people were saying, and what she felt to be true. An assassin had saved him, but not one of his own. Someone with an eye to keeping him on the throne, and someone with enough disregard for his decisions to go against his orders. Echo watched the crowd as Roan had announced the public view, that the ambassador’s heart had stopped.
She cast her gaze over everyone as they bowed their heads and prayed, saw one of the Skaikru follow the traditions of the Kru as if she knew their rituals. The same Skaikru who had brought them the information, who mumbled something quiet to the right hand man of the ambassador who had died. As the woman - Octavia, Echo recalled, with more ties into Trikru than most - left the meeting prematurely, Echo wanted nothing more than to follow her. However, her role kept her posted next to her King, so Echo let her suspicions about Octavia simmer as she turned her attention to politics.
When she was finally dismissed from her duties for the day, Echo knew what she should do. Cast out her net of informants, gather intel on Octavia kom Skaikru, formulate a plan before approaching the potential assassin. She should see if she could use Octavia to her own means, potentially training her as Queen Nia had once trained Echo. The thought of imparting her knowledge, of finding another dedicated to the art as Echo had been, gave Echo such a thrill that she decided to cast out what “should” be done and sought out Octavia’s quarters on her own.
She didn’t knock when she arrived, simply opened the door and stepped purposefully into the room. She didn’t know what she was expecting exactly, perhaps Octavia mending a black cloak or sharpening a blade, but Echo felt a shade of disappointment when she stepped into an entirely empty room. There was hardly anything to distinguish it as inhabited, only a few sets of clothing carefully stacked. No weapons, and no black cloak to tie Octavia to the figure who had stopped the ambassador.
Echo considered leaving and returning to her original plan, but something about the look she had seen on Octavia’s face, about the sharpness in her eyes and the deadly strength in her spine, inspired her to stay. She didn’t want to learn about her from her informants. Echo wanted, for the first time in a long time, to go into a situation blind, as she had done in the first days of her missions. She had only her suspicions, her instincts, and her skill to rely on, and it invigorated Echo as politics never could.
So she sat on the bed of the Skaikru killer and waited, watching the door. For a while, she simply sat as still as only a spy could, and then Echo grew bored. She could have sat still longer, but Polis had spoiled her. Instead of exerting her will over her own body to remain motionless, she pulled one of her own blades, a small concealed weapon she had only used three times, and refined its already hair splitting edge.
Although Echo had been watching the door, she had been listening to the window behind her. If she was correct about Octavia, she had no reason to believe that she wouldn’t scale the outside of the tower from an adjacent room in order to avoid a potential ambush inside her door. The faintest breath of wind sighed through the window as it opened, and Echo smiled to herself. So she was right.
She listened to Octavia creep across the floor towards her, stealthy enough to avoid notice by anyone except, perhaps, another spy. Echo knew the first things she would teach Octavia, the way to shift your weight silently, and to vary the cadence of walking so that if your footsteps were heard, the wouldn’t be recognized as the sound of someone walking. She kept her eyes on her blade and waited until she heard Octavia pause, presumably to draw her own weapon to threaten Echo with, and then she turned the tables.
In the barest of moments, Echo stood and swept Octavia’s right leg from beneath her, assisting her in falling onto the bed. Working with the element of surprise, it took hardly any effort for Echo to pin Octavia’s limbs beneath her, knees on knees and one hand holding her wrists above her head. Just as Octavia began to struggle, far too late to make a difference, Echo held the small blade she’d been sharpening to her throat.
“Shhh,” Echo hushed her, and Octavia stilled at the feel of steel. “Are you ready to listen?”
Echo watched Octavia take three very deliberate breaths and mentally congratulated her. Controlling one’s instincts was hard, and for Octavia it would be harder still, given her upbringing. The Skaikru were weak, and Echo expected nothing less from Octavia. Perhaps she was on slightly better footing from her time as a Second, but she would still need a lot of work to learn skills Echo thought of as second nature.
“What do you want?” Octavia hissed, and Echo smiled down at her. Octavia could have called for guards, or raised her voice, but Echo knew that she was smart enough to know her allies were few in Polis.
“You killed the ambassador,” Echo commented, and for the first time actually noted the black cloak Octavia was wearing. She wondered if Octavia had taken another life tonight and felt a thrill of excitement. She liked this Skaikru, Echo decided.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Octavia raised her chin in defiance, pressing her neck into the blade in the process. A small red line appeared, but she didn’t flinch. Echo really liked her at that.
Echo leaned down closer, moving her mouth next to Octavia’s ear. If Octavia was afraid of Echo, or of the potential death she carried, she was hiding it well.
“Good,” Echo breathed in a whisper, and she pulled back to see Octavia’s brow furrow in confusion. She considered remaining in that position for the entirety of their conversation, quite enjoying the image of Octavia restrained below her, but after a moment, Echo sighed and released her, stepping back and standing in front of her.
Octavia sat up but didn’t stand, and she also didn’t check her neck for blood. No fear of injury or death, that boded well for what Echo had planned. Echo pulled a cloth from one of her many concealed pockets and wiped her blade before returning it to its sheath, and then, on a whim, wiped Octavia’s neck. She didn’t fail to see the almost concealed stutter of breath, and Echo filed that away for later consideration. Perhaps the Skaikru girl had interests that ran in tangent with her own.
“I can help you,” Echo said after straightening her back again. At a lack of reply from Octavia, she continued, “You know what I am.”
“I know what you were.”
The jab stung, and Echo restrained herself from striking Octavia for it. The Skaikru woman was right, Echo wasn’t a shadow anymore. But she could pass along her mantle, and she wouldn’t do that by denying Octavia the freedom to speak her mind to her mentor. Echo’s job had always come with a large range of freedoms.
“Then you know I can help you,” Echo responded, and she watched Octavia weigh the choice. She would have to trust the person who had betrayed her people, would have to set aside personal vendettas in order to pursue the life that called to her. Echo wondered, for a moment, if its hold on her was strong enough that she could make that call.
Octavia looked up at her and in that moment she was more fierce and beautiful than anything Echo had ever known.
“When do we start?”