Chapter Text
When point of the knife sinks into Emily Kaldwin's back she cries out as much in surprise as pain. The next second she's drenched with blood that is not her own, running hot down her spine as she pulls away and reaches for the wound, feeling the new slit in her clothes with a strange sense of otherness.
Everything is chaos until she feels Corvo's arms close around her, then with a deafening roar they are on top of a roof.
“Emily,” he pants, hand pressing down over the spreading patch of blood in her coat. His other hand comes to her face, pulling it up to his. “Emily. Look at me.” She winces but meets his eyes, breathing shallow breaths.
“I'm all right,” she pants. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” He sounds scared. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, I’m still here,” she says weakly, reaching for his hand to squeeze. “Just get us away from this place.” After a few minutes of stomach-churning blinking wrapped under his arm, they land at an infirmary and Corvo lets her throw up in a gutter before carrying her through the door.
“Make way for the Empress,” his voice booms across the ward. “She has just survived an assassination attempt.”
Hours pass while Emily Kaldwin’s wound is nursed like a colicky newborn.
She is lucky Corvo was there with piece of steel through the assassin’s throat, or she might have been in more serious trouble. While she’ll have to rest a while to let the wound to heal, the physical damage was only flesh-deep. The emotional damage, not so much.
Corvo has not left her side since, nor slept more than a few hours, and it shows in every tired line of him. She knows it is no small thing for him to take a life, and he's tried so hard to keep his hands clean. Now she’s the reason for the blood and guilt she knows cannot be assuaged, because even that assassin had been someone.
“Go home, father,” she tells him as he drifts off against his own knotted fingers. “Not even you could get to my bedside without being noticed.”
"I doubt that." Corvo stirs and rubs his eyes, mouth turned into an insistent frown that has not budged in long days and longer nights. “How are you feeling?” he asks, and she gives a sigh that stabs at the stitches in her back.
“Itchy,” she remarks, “but you need this bed more than I.”
“I’ve been thinking about what happened,” he says like he's chosen not to hear her. “There was nothing I could have done.”
“You saved my life.”
“It was too close,” he says. “My training has failed you.”
“You haven’t failed me,” she sighs. “It was just a little… stabbing.” Outsider knows he’d been stabbed enough. She once watched him take a dagger to the forearm and finish his drink before pulling it back out.
“Even so,” he presses, “something needs to be done.”
“Yes,” she agrees, “you need to go home and get some sleep.” She sits up in bed, pulling together her bravest face for him.
“You aren't experienced enough in defending skilled assassins,” he diagnoses, like he’s spent long enough around doctors to start thinking he is one.
“Thank you for that observation,” she remarks with politeness that suggests she means the opposite. “I hadn't noticed.”
“You need a new teacher.” He looks up at her with remorse she can’t understand. “A master assassin.”
“What are you talking about?” she despairs. “You’re half-mad, father, please just go somewhere else and rest.” He is stressing her just to look at.
“I have an idea,” he continues with ringing clarity, “but you’re not going to like it.”
She throws a tray of crystal glasses when he tells her what he wants her to do.
“Never!” she spits as he puts up a hand against the assault, the glasses shattering on the floor and summoning a fleet of nervous guards and doctors, all of whom he sees off with a seething glare and few stomps to herd them back out of the door they came through.
“You know this gives me no joy,” he replies evenly, turning back to face her with apology in his eyes, “but it is what needs to be done.”
“No!” She is defiant. “The very man who!” She’s unable to finish.
“I know,” he says, more pained with every moment, “but there will be more assassins. There will always be more assassins.” They had no leads on who was behind this one, but speculation between the political factions and gangs was prolific. “Not even I am enough to stop them all.” She hasn’t seen him smile since the attack, and though he usually wears a frown as his resting face, this is a new level of torment.
“I’ll train harder,” she insists, “something else, anything else.”
“I have thought it over too many times,” he explains in his careful, unbearably serious way. “The choice is yours, but he was the best there's ever been.”
“And he killed my mother!” she bellows.
“Yes,” says Corvo, “and if he cannot kill you, who do you have left to fear?”
Emily swallows bitter spit and forces herself back in the bed. She’d be a liar to say she hasn’t had nightmares where she watches herself from a child’s eyes as she is beaten and impaled on the sword of that terrifying scarred man. What she would do for dreams where she doesn’t die her mother’s death on the cold ground.
“I’ll need to think about it,” she says quietly.
“I understand,” he answers, and perhaps having broken this wretched truth, at last begins to gather his things and pack up the temporary campsite he has assembled at her bedside for the past week. He pauses at the door. “If you need anything-”
“Go to sleep, father,” she nags. “I’ll call for you as soon as I wake up.”
“Very well.” It is obvious how he forces himself to accept this. “Then… goodnight.”
She delivers it like a warning shot into the doorframe. “Goodnight.”
Emily is on her feet long before she is officially cleared to do so by her flapping gaggle of physicians, but when she is at last able to stroll outdoors without setting them a-squawking, she takes a walk in the gardens with her father.
“The cabinet will lose their minds,” she tells him without context.
“They do not need to know,” he replies without needing it. “You will merely be resting on the Southern Isles to recover from your injuries.”
“I’m fine,” she groans. It was one little dagger in the back, which she was more than sick of hearing about.
The kingdom had been in uproar, with fighting in the streets between factions assumed to have some part in the crime; a vigil of well-wishers in the city square that guards had needed to disband after the fourth day of emotional outpouring; artists painting portraits of her sickbed, most of which were exaggerated beyond reason and would end up on the fire if she had any say in the matter.
She concludes, “So, you’re telling me to lie to my advisors?”
“They wouldn’t understand,” he answers openly. “Besides, if you are on a ship quickly enough they will only have me to argue with.” They hated doing that. Not that Corvo didn’t listen, or outright bullied them, but he dissected their intentions so methodically few left without bearing their true motives like a standard in a parade of fools. Many a comment was made in parliament that the Lord Protector would be better named the Lord Impenetrable Fortress.
“Not so fast,” she says, dragging him down to her pace in both reason and walking speed. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“If you are considering the politics, you have accepted it already,” he replies, and she hates that he is probably right.
“He might refuse.”
“He won’t.”
“I might not find him.”
“You will.” He holds out two pieces of paper; a map, and a wax sealed letter, addressed to only one name – Daud.
She leaves on the first ship out of Dunwall after dark.
She tracks him to a village in the Serkonian hills, only to find most people have no idea the man she’s seeking even exists. Rumours send her hiking up hard trails under a baking sun, thankful for the time she had to heal in a secluded cabin on the ship that ferried her here.
She has not seen a building or person in half a day when, over the ridge pointed out at her last calling post, a house of ancient stones rises. She has seen ruins scattered across these lands, but this one has been painstakingly repaired and seems at odds with the rawness of its surroundings. A villa clinging to a hillside half way up a mountain, watching over vineyards and groves of figs and olives.
Arriving sweaty and with her wound itching something terrible, she slings her pack against a wall and starts to round the building in search of something to drink. She hears footsteps behind her – Corvo has told her this means he wants to be heard.
“What are you doing on my land?” The voice is beyond ragged, and she would like to say she remembers it, but he was silent the only time they met.
He delivers this idle threat to her back, while she is still a stranger, but when she turns around to be recognised his composure is blasted like dynamite on a cliff face.
There are many better, wiser things she could say, but what she does is, “Remember me?”
As he stares at her with eyes wide, she realises she doesn’t know what she was expecting; that he should tell her he’s sorry and put a bullet in his temple, or that he should run a blade through her gut instead. Certainly not that he should look like a farmer who has just returned from the fields, with a straw hat hanging off his back and dirt streaked through his silvering hair.
“Of course.” He pauses for a breath she thinks he takes to steady himself. “Get out of here.”
“Corvo sent me.”
“I don’t care,” he growls. “Leave an old man be.” He steps backwards, then tearing his eyes away puts his back to her and walks.
“I need you to teach me,” she says, cold and clear, and he freezes in his clumpy leather sandals.
“What?” He still doesn’t look at her.
“It wasn’t my idea,” she notes, wiping sweat from her forehead and coming it back through her hair. “In fact, would be a great deal easier for me if you refuse.”
“Good,” he rasps, half-turning to catch her eye. “I refuse.”
This entire awful exchange nearly done, she reaches into a jacket that screams ‘foreigner’ in this land and presents a note to him, sealed with the insignia of the Lord Protector, unbroken.
“Corvo said if you refused to give you this,” she recites begrudgingly. “You have to read it before I can go home.” It’d taken her days to find him, on top of the sea voyage to Serkonos, and she is not relishing the arduous trip back – though it beats the alternative. He reaches for the paper but stops short of taking it, like he is afraid to touch her.
She huffs and pushes it into his fingers, which snap shut like a trap. Tearing open the weather-softened wax, he reads the single line of text written inside, his face barely changing, and shoves the note into the pocket of rough-hewn trousers.
“I’ll do it,” he says sourly.
“Good, then I hope to never see you-… what?” She can’t, or won’t, believe her ears.
“I’ll do it,” he repeats. “So you need to learn how to escape the assassin’s blade?”
“Well… yes,” she mutters, and then in a heartbeat he has her back against the wall, wound stabbing at her in protest from one side, and a knife at her throat from the other.
“Then you better start learning,” he growls. “I could have killed you ten different ways since you walked up.” She grabs his wrist and pushes his hand away crossly; he had no killer intent, but it was an obtuse way to make a point.
“We haven’t started yet,” she argues, tilting her chin up at him. She knows how much she resembles her mother, and hopes it makes his blood run cold. Like staring at a ghost.
“Always be on your guard,” he replies without wavering. “That’s your first lesson.”