———————————————
SPOILER INFO
This fanfic novel is largely based on the events that occurred in an actual game of Skyrim I played. Therefore, it's inevitably a spoiler.
———————————————
previous day
4-202-02-17 11:32
Black-Briar Manor, Bitchen, The Rift, Skyrim
It's a wonderful day with the sun shining – which, of course, is not unusual when you wake up several hours after sunrise.
We hurry to Elgrim's shop. Ingun Black-Briar is not there and they have no idea where she could be.
Now we walk to our house. I'm gracious enough to knock on the door and give Maul and Lydia time to get some clothes on. I explain to Maul what we have done and that I would appreciate his help in keeping the underworld in line. Maul assures me his complete support and even volunteers to help us get rid of the Thieves' Guild for good. Clearly he can see which way the wind is blowing and wants to be on the winners' side – as well as Lydia's.
I walk Maul to the door and tell him that, as he undoubtedly understood, Lydia lured him out of the palace so he wouldn't get in the way while we were dealing with Maven. I ask him not to punish Lydia for deceiving him (as would by custom be his right) because she had no choice, she had to obey my order.
Maul assures me he loves Lydia and would never hurt her.
I advise him not to lay it on too thick. Having your almighty boss smashed like an insect is no reason to cease being a man. It's not attractive.
Maul leaves. I return to the kitchen and cut the girls' excited chatter short. We have a lot of work to do, so we head for the inn to have a bath.
Our first visit after that is to the palace where we find Maul standing on his post in front of the empty throne. I inform him that I'll send the other members of the provisional city council to the palace soon. I instruct the guards to pass the word that Ingun is to be arrested and temporarily kept in the prison until I return, which should be in a week at the latest. Then I suddenly realize I'd forgotten all about Sibbi Black-Briar. He must be still in the jail!
We find him most amicable.
He's sincerely happy seeing four pretty women and invites us to visit his cell together or one by one just as we please. I feel almost sorry putting him to death.
Then I round up Madesi, Brand-Shei, Mjoll and Bolli. I have decided against inviting Haelga instead of Brand-Shei. He is nice and feels deep gratitude for my help, whereas Haelga has never shown any liking in me. Apart from which, Sibbi was big love of Haelga's close relative Svana, and there is no way of knowing how far that might influence Haelga attitude towards me.
I tell the new citizen council that I know this is an unusual situation, but we'll have to make the best of it. The Imperial soldiers will remain for the time being, but the responsibility for keeping the life in The Rift as normal and nonviolent as possible will ultimately rest upon the five of them, so I'm begging them to tolerate each other and work together and refrain from any drastic undertakings. That goes especially for Mjoll and Maul.
As we leave the palace, I finally get a chance to ask Lydia how it was last night. She says Maul wasn't offended at all. He actually appreciated Lydia's going out of her way to be together with him in spite of her embarrassing state. That was before he learned from me that we actually needed to keep him away from the palace. But Lydia tells me she had a chance to talk to Maul after that and apologize to him and he really wasn't angry. She tells us it was actually an exciting experience to suck a man off while having her period, even though she hopes she won't have to do it again – except perhaps with her future husband.
I spend the rest of the afternoon walking around and talking to various people and making sure they understand things are under control and there shall be no new war and they are to go on with their usual work. When I see shops closing, I realize it's past 6 in the evening already!! Planning this whole endeavor, I was unsure how I would kill time today (because Ulfric obviously needs to be assassinated while he's sleeping), but now I have to worry about making it to Windhelm on time. After all, we still need to find Maven's country house and kill her remaining henchmen.
Dusk is falling as we explore the hilly, partially mountainous region east and northeast of Bitchen.
We find a Lost Prospect Mine and two or three groups of bandits, but not Maven's country mansion. It's almost dark when I'm beginning to get desperate. I'd feel very bad if I had to leave a strong group of Maven's cutthroats alive in the Bitchen area, but the darker it'll get, the harder it'll be to search for anything around here as well as to find one's way around the mountain ranges. And we'll have to reach Windhelm no later than 4 in the morning.
The girls suggest we should look further south – which means east-southeast of the city. Indeed, we now find a large mansion between mountains from which a path goes south to the main road. We are approaching from the west.
Descending the rocky mountain, I mentally urge myself not to do anything foolish, but it's hopeless – I can't muster any patience to think about tactics. I just keep rushing forward and attacking everyone hostile-looking. We kill a couple of guards outside the side door, then enter and go from room to room.
I'm not sure we've got all of them, yet I find my legs carrying me out the main door. There doesn't seem to be anyone. A little ahead is a wooden watchtower. As I run towards it, my followers on my heels, we are attacked from behind and in fact Jenassa gets hit rather badly. The bottom line is: I was inadmissibly lax on this mission. I guess I'm unable to think clearly right now because I'm terrified about having to kill Ulfric – and face Yrsarald after that.
We must waste no more time here. Admittedly, we may have missed a thug or two around here, but they will surely scatter to all winds instead of going to Bitchen to fight against the new government. So we can now head for the Bitchen–Windhelm highway.
We travel north towards Windhelm without stopping anywhere.
As we approach Windhelm, I instruct the girls to hide west of the bidge and keep out of sight. Me, I swim to the western harbor and sneak up to the western gate. There's a guard outside the gate, but I wait for the moment when he is looking the other way and succeed in sneaking past behind his back and in through the gate. He will surely have heard me open and close it, but I hope he didn't see who I was. I dash around the nearest corner and hide in a doorway. The street between here and the marketplace is completely empty.
I can hear the gate open and then close again. Faint footsteps get closer, then stop, then go away again, and then the gate opens and closes. Evidently the guard gave up trying to catch up with the mysterious intruder, so I can now stop to think how to proceed. It's only half past 1, so there's no hurry. I'm not sure Ulfric is even sleeping yet. Therefore, I take my time, a lot of time, sneaking past the sleepy guard who is watching the marketplace. I'm extremely happy the ever-present and all-seeing old beggar Silda is at none of her usual spots. Hopefully she has found herself a sleeping place indoors.
It's an hour later that I reach the palace. On the palace square, I meet a guard who has evidently just come out and is going to make his usual round around the town. He is obviously seeing me, and so is the guard standing outside the entrance, and so will the two who, as I presume, will be inside, but it can't be helped.
I walk up to the soldier who is guarding the entrance and tell him I have an urgent message to Yrsarald and he'd better be especially alert and arrest anyone whom he doesn't know who tries to enter the palace. It's just a smokescreen – I plan on making it look like afterwards as if I had been expecting an assassin to try and infiltrate the palace.
I also inform him I'll take full responsibility for waking Yrsarald up. He smiles and says I can rest assured he won't mind. I can't help smiling in turn, and then I enter the palace.
The throne room is empty, apart from the two guards to whom I have to explain myself too. I tell them I come from Bitchen with vitally important news I'll have to give Yrsarald immediately. They let me proceed.
At 3:14, I reach Ulfric's bedroom. At 3:17, Ulfric Stormcloak is dead.
I go and wake up Yrsarald and beg him not to make any noise. I show him the documents I stole from the Thalmor Embassy almost three months ago that reveal in detail what Ulfric told the thalmors while being their captive (and undoubtedly tortured), and how after his release they blackmailed him to continue giving them information about the Stormcloak operations, and how he even occasionally received assistance from the thalmors who were keen to keep the Skyrim civil war going for as long as possible.
Yrsarald is shocked and begins to think out loud (well, in murmur, actually) what to do about Ulfric. I cut him short and tell him Ulfric is dead, and I'm really very terribly sorry I killed the two guards patrolling the sleeping quarters, but I had to, because they might have raised alarm or even prevented me from going into Ulfric's bedroom.
I'll spare you all the confusing details, but the essence of our following conversation is this: I tell Yrsarald that he has every right to punish me for not telling him about this beforehand; however, right now we have to prevent an outburst of unimaginable outrage among the Stormcloak supporters. We'll have to tell the people that while I was in imp-controlled Bitchen and killed the anti-Stormcloak Black-Briars, I learned that the thalmors had sent an assassin to kill Ulfric. I rushed to Windhelm to warn him. Unfortunately, I came too late and Ulfric had already been killed. We must open a window through which the assassin ostensibly escaped. At the same time, we will announce that the Aldmeri Dominion has attacked Hammerfell, which is the first stage in their new war against the Empire, and that they have a secret stronghold in western Skyrim, and they have also sent assassins to murder Jarl Elisif and General Tullius, and I am hurrying to the west to find out about the situation in Solitud, and in case of any trouble there, convince the Imperials that it's not a Stormcloaks' provocation but a hostile move by the Aldmeri Dominion.
I inform Yrsarald that I have made a deal with General Tullius, and that I destroyed Maven Black-Briar's criminal organization in Bitchen and we shall restore the Stormcloak ally Laila to power, watched over by the citizens' council appointed by me. I also inform him that Laila's steward Anuriel is Maven's spy who might well be involved in skooma trade. She has to be painfully interrogated and then executed. And I'm going to exterminate the Silver-Blood mafia in Morpork because, firstly, that's a part of the deal with Tullius, and secondly they are a most despicable bunch of traitors and racketeers.
When Yrsarald doesn't say anything for several seconds, I add timidly that I'll go with Tullius's soldiers and destroy the thalmor stronghold at Fort Masser. Having said that, I cast my eyes down (we're sitting on his bed facing each other) and wait.
I flinch when Yrsarald's fingers lift my chin up. I look deep into his dark blue eyes in hopeless pursuit of figuring out what he is thinking.
"Laura."
"Yes." I look down again.
"One of these days, we'll need to sit down and talk."
I make bold to look up once more. "About what?"
"About us. About our future."
I almost fall onto the floor with surprise, which is a really hard thing to do when you're sitting cross-legged in a perfectly stable position. I'm perplexed. I mean, perplexed is not the word. I had played through a great number of possible scenarios time and again, but I never expected this.
I had imagined getting Yrsarald to talk "about us" would require immense effort. I had my speech rehearsed a million times in my head about how I have always given him everything he wanted and I think it's about time he give me what I want, and if our relationship is to last, we need to share more than our bodies. I need to know what makes him happy and what makes him sad, and what plans he has for our future, and I need to be able to tell him what I think and feel and desire. And now he's basically taken it out of my hands by bringing up the topic of sharing before I had made so bold.
Yrsarald's hand pushes my shoulder motioning me to stand up as he rises up too. I can't help relishing the sight of his manhood, impressive even when far from its full size. "We must waste no time," says Yrsarald while getting dressed in a fast soldierlike manner. We hurry to Ulfric's bedroom where he verifies Ulfric's heart in indeed not beating. (I hadn't thought of that.) Together we carry the two dead guards from the corridor into two empty guest bedrooms. Then Yrsarald orders me to run and bring here the court wizard Wuunferth, as well as the two guards in the throne room. The guards are to remain standing in the corridor well away from Ulfric's door and wait, Wuunferth is to enter Ulfric's bedroom where Yrsarald will talk to him. I am to stay with the guards and make sure they won't approach the door to eavesdrop, nor venture into any of the other rooms.
I do so, and obviously I'm not hearing what Yrsarald tells Wuunferth. As I'm to learn much later, Yrsarald's plan is to ask Wuunferth to pretend to examine the two guards from downstairs and announce that they had a spell cast on them which made them forget how the assassin entered the palace an hour or two ago. While I'm downstairs summoning them, Yrsarald very cautiously breaks one of the windows (they can't be opened) as if Ulfric's murderer had climbed out of it.
Yrsarald has calculated correctly that Wuunferth is smart enough to know what's good for him. After he and Yrsarald have come out of Ulfric's bedroom, the wizard takes the two guards into an empty room while Yrsarald takes me aside and tells me to quickly leave the city by the main gate seen by as few people as possible, and tell every guard whom I meet that Yrsarald has ordered them to detain all strangers. (That's for the show, of course. Should the guards actually bring any suspicious people to him, Yrsarald intends to ask them a few simple questions and then let them go.)
Yrsarald asks me where my followers are. When I say I left them outside the city, he praises my foresight. I feel extreme happiness, as well as profound admiration for my sweetheart's ability to figure out what to do so quickly. They say quick decision-making is the most important characteristic of a military leader (coincidentally one I'm utterly lacking), and tonight I've had a rare chance of seeing it in action, as it were, from a front-row seat. Anyway, I'm not even allowed to spend the night in Windhelm, let alone jump up, put my legs around Yrsarald's hips and kiss him passionately. Having received my orders, I nod and hurry away down the corridor while Wuunferth is still busy with the two soldiers telling them what I have no clue of at this moment. I hope Yrsarald will be able to break the news to the population so as to... wait, I need a letter from him to show Tullius!!!
I run back to the other end of the corridor. I find Yrsarald in the room opposite his own, explaining something to the two guards. He comes out with me and I tell him that I need a letter written in his hand and stamped with Ulfric's personal seal (which is here – I take it out of my pocket) to the effect that the Stormcloaks will refrain from hostilities as long as the Imperial Army will, and that he is prepared to work together with Tullius in thwarting the thalmor aggression against Hammerfell and, should it come to be, against Skyrim.
We hurry downstairs into his office. Yrsarald musters all his calmness in order to write the letter with a more or less steady hand (I can see he's no scholar). I help him over the difficult formulations and then he signs and seals the letter and puts Ulfric's seal into his own pocket. We hug and I'm about to leave, but I remember one thing at the last moment. Would he give me a written order to eliminate the Silver-Blood mafia, similar to the one I got from Tullius for destroying the Black-Briars in Bitchen?
Yrsarald says: no, he can't do anything of the kind before he's had an independent confirmation that the Black-Briars have indeed been eliminated.
"Don't you believe me?" I ask, offended.
"Don't start, Laura," he replies, looking at me sternly. "I, citizen Yrsarald Ragnarsson, believe you all right, but I, the acting supreme commander of the Stormcloak Army, have no right to undertake something so weighty upon the word of one adventurer, no matter how gorgeous-looking and personally close to me."
However, after a moment of reflection, he does write me a document to be shown to any jarls or officers or such whenever necessary (but not to the general public, of course). It says that Jarl Ulfric has been murdered by a thalmor assassin and the Aldmeri Dominion has started a new war; therefore the Stormcloak and Imperial leaders are working on a proper peace treaty to be concluded forthwith; all the thalmors are going to be banned from Skyrim; the Stormcloak military is to refrain from any hostilities against the Imperial forces unless in necessary self-defense; and all civil and military authorities are ordered to give the Breton woman Laura known as the Dragonborn all possible assistance.
He hands me the signed and sealed document, and tells me to get the fuck out of here. I say "Yes, Mylord", chance a cautious smile and hurry away.
Fortunately, the streets are still empty. I exit, as ordered, through the main gate, pass Yrsarald's order concerning the detention of anyone unknown on to the guards, and start running westwards along the main road at usual traveling speed as if everything was normal.
I meet up with my followers, as agreed, on the bushes just off the road at the crossing west of the bridge. We're going to need a place to sleep. We think briefly of going to Kynesgrove, approaching it from the south, to establish witnesses who saw us coming from the direction opposite to Windhelm in the early morning after the night when Ulfric was murdered. Then, however, we decide it'll be better if the people of Kynesgrove won't have even an idea that we were anywhere in the region this night. We'll take the Hviterun highway and see if we'll be allowed to sleep in the workers' dormitory at Mixwater Mill. It should be empty or almost empty.
Indeed, we find the shack door unlocked and not a soul inside. As there would hardly be any point in disturbing the proprietress Gilfre so early in the morning, we just close the door behind us and go to sleep.
next awakening
return to the table of contents
