It should have been perfect.
Every day the citizens of Riften greeted Dagnell as their Thane. It still made her jump, sometimes, and look over her shoulder, wondering who they meant; and then she would realize yet again that she was the Thane, and laugh because she was that, of course, but she was also the person running the organization that robbed them blind at every opportunity. She couldn’t help but laugh about it.
Every night she slipped into bed with her husband, a man she found improbably beautiful in body and spirit in spite of all evidence to the contrary. There was no doubt that Brynjolf was a very bad man, in most people’s sense of things, in spite of Roggi’s heartfelt observation that men were neither good nor bad. The higher-minded people of Riften still hated what they imagined him to be as much as ever, knowing only the smallest part of what he really was; and he still used his considerable charm to swindle them at every opportunity. He was devoted to the practice of larceny. He was devious, a con artist of the highest order, and unflappably capable of cold, deadly violence if the situation called for it. But once he gave his trust to someone it was given for good, even if it wasn’t in his best interests, and that was probably his worst fault in Dag’s mind.
Brynjolf wasn’t a traditional, romantic husband, didn’t call her pet names, didn’t profess his love aloud frequently as some husbands did; but everyone knew where his feelings, and his pride, lay. Feeling his solid, warm body next to hers in the bed, or standing next to her in the Cistern while they planned the next heist, gave her a rush of joy, as did hearing the laughter that came from him more and more frequently once he was able to relax and focus on those things he was best at. And he made sure she knew how much he wanted her, every chance he got. Brynjolf made her happier than she could ever have hoped, and she knew she would love him until her last breath.
She would slip into bed with him, and watch him fall asleep. It was so good to see him get real sleep, have a real life, enjoy being alive.
She had more than she could possibly have imagined having, on that day she’d trudged into Riften with a toggled-together bundle of gear looted from dead guards. That seemed like another person’s life now. She had everything she could have imagined.
But after Brynjolf would fall asleep, Dag would lie awake thinking about the boy.
She had met him in Windhelm on her first job after the wedding. He was an orphan, and had escaped from Honorhall Orphanage. He wanted the caretaker, Grelod the Kind, killed and he thought she was from the Dark Brotherhood. For weeks, she had thought about it. She had imagined what it would be like, whether it would feel good the way killing Mercer had. Her other voice had kept reminding her of it whenever it slipped from her consciousness.
She had wanted to kill Grelod. She had gone to take stock of the situation, using the excuse of inquiring into adoption. After all, she was a Thane, she was married, she had a home with an extra room, and somewhat to everyone’s surprise there was still no sign of a future addition to Brynjolf’s household. She was a perfect candidate to adopt one of these poor children. But Grelod forbade adoptions. While there she’d overheard Grelod telling the orphans that they would never be adopted, calling them names, threatening them with no food and extra beatings. Extra beatings.
Grelod had needed to die. She wanted to kill Grelod. Not just that but she had wanted to kill Grelod, in the same way she had wanted to kill Mercer Frey, just for the sport of it.
Dag had taken a great deal of pleasure in making it slow and painful, using a poisoned arrow. And she had used her powers as a Nightingale to watch, unseen, as Grelod died in terror, not understanding why her breath wouldn’t come. The voice in her head had chortled and told her, again, always knew you were a killer.
It hadn’t taken too long after that before the Dark Brotherhood had contacted her. Or, rather, had snatched her in the middle of a night when Brynjolf had been away, and had taken her to a cabin in the marsh south of Solitude, where a woman in that distinctive red and black armor made her choose which of three prisoners to kill. It was their contract, she’d told Dag, and Dag needed to pay them back for it.
She had killed all three of them in a whirlwind of flashing Alik’r scimitars, given to her by the Dragonborn. It had seemed somehow gruesomely fitting to do so, and she had looked around in satisfaction at how much of the cabin’s interior had been touched by her handiwork by the time she was done. Nearly every surface had some blood spattered on it.
The Dark Brotherhood had been pleased.
If she was honest with herself, it – the thing that kept her awake at night after Brynjolf had long since fallen asleep — had actually begun to be a problem before that, from the moment she’d gotten back from the Sepulcher and started doing more jobs to get the Guild going again.
The one in Windhelm, right after she’d married Brynjolf, had been the worst. Torsten Cruel-Sea had made no bones about his motivations, even though he gave as his reason for contacting her rather than the Dark Brotherhood a desire to re-establish business ties with the Guild if it went well. The truth was that he simply wanted revenge. Dag had complied. Eagerly. They were all going to die; and they did so in a campaign of terror that had lasted no more than half an hour. Some had fallen to her arrows – death from nowhere, as she crouched hidden in the trees, death that had the remaining bandits fleeing from an enemy they could neither see nor hear. Some found the sharp edges of her scimitars. And the leader; well, his head had rolled all the way across the room after the scissors cut from behind had relieved him of it. She had laughed and reveled in the color of the enormous pool of blood his passing had left in its wake. And then she’d burned their so-called guild banner while she smiled and smiled.
Delvin had given her a strange look after that job. Torsten Cruel-Sea had been more than pleased. Apparently he’d gone to see her handiwork for himself and had sent a vivid report to Delvin. “Use your skills and not your blade, and you’ll go a long way,” he told her. But her blades were her skills, and the other tricks she had learned from Delvin just reinforced them. She wanted to use them more, not less.
There was something else, too.
On the day before this one, Dag had stopped in Kynesgrove to see Roggi, as she often did. They had shared a meal, had a chat, and had parted with a warm embrace, Roggi not realizing it was finished.
On that terrible day when she had thought she would lose Brynjolf, when they had stood and screamed and cried and finally forgiven each other, Dag had done her best to reassure him that his sarcastic comment about her “friend” was unfounded, not in so many words but by letting him know that she loved him. That much was true.
But as to the rest, Dag had lied.
For reasons she would never fully understand, the two men shared a mutual respect. She would have expected Roggi to hate Brynjolf, and vice versa, but that wasn’t the case at all. Maybe it had been that look that they shared at the wedding that started it; maybe it had been the night Brynjolf had gone to meet Roggi in the first place. Roggi had even visited them several times at Honeyside, and the two of them had seemed to enjoy each other’s company a great deal. She’d returned home a couple of times to find them on the back deck, chatting like old buddies, sometimes giggling like two young boys. It was clear that they considered each other friends. Brynjolf had said as much. It made Dag slightly uneasy, but she was glad that they did.
She had gotten into the habit of stopping in to see Roggi on her way home from a job for Delvin or Vex. It was a good stopping point for most trips, and Brynjolf knew about, and agreed to her visits. Dag and Roggi would share a meal at his home and talk about how their lives were going, and at the end of it they would hug goodbye. There was always an unspoken longing in those hugs. They would look at each other for long moments and then part, reluctantly, before it became anything else.
But then one night it had become more than that, when the meal had included a little too much mead, and a kiss, and then the only thing in the world that had mattered was being able to touch each other again. And afterward they had clung to each other and mourned all the things that might have been but never would be, and that shouldn’t have been but were. It continued to happen on occasion in spite of their promises to each other that it shouldn’t ever happen again. She knew that Roggi hated the situation, and hated himself for continuing to let it happen, because in spite of all his protests to the contrary Roggi was an honorable man who strove to live an honorable life. The problem was that he had always wanted her for himself, he told her; he still did, and he had no control over his emotions regarding her. And Dag – well, Dag hated herself anyway.
Dag had never intended anything of the sort to happen.
She had known, in every fiber of her being, that she wanted to be married to Brynjolf. She had meant every word of her pledge to be his companion, now and forever. She loved him beyond distraction.
But she also loved Roggi.
She had thought that maybe Brynjolf knew, had always known in that way he knew things, but he had never said a word until that awful night when he left the implications about her “friend” hanging in the air like a black cloud. Even after that he never mentioned it again. It was as though he simply accepted whatever had happened, and whatever would happen, without question. Roggi had been right about this as about so many things; being in love was like finding the piece you hadn’t even known was missing. But, as she had realized the day before the wedding, her problem was that there were two pieces that had been missing, and all three of them seemed to understand that. It was a miserable situation, made all the more miserable by the fact that the two men cared about each other, as unlikely a friendship as ever happened.
It was just more proof to her that she didn’t deserve either one of them, that she was in fact a danger to them both. She was the weak one. She was the problem. She had always been the problem, for her entire life.
It was more proof, her voice told her, that there was something desperately wrong with her. It had been simply wrong, from the moment she’d crawled out from her hiding place and seen her mother, her throat slit nearly to the bone, and her father beaten beyond recognition, from the moment she had taken the dead bandit’s scimitars. It was the thing that had killed the Forsworn agent in Markarth and reveled in his blood; the thing that had made sure Mercer could see his own sword ending his life; and the thing that had watched as Grelod had died in terror, trying to draw another breath. She wanted to kill, and take, and somehow have revenge on life for making her live it.
She was simply, utterly, desperately wrong.
In Dag’s quietest moments, when she could be completely honest with herself, she knew there was no separate voice in the back of her mind telling her the things she didn’t want to hear. There never had been. It was just her. She’d just done a fine job of keeping the desperately-wrong part of herself asleep for all those many years, until finding the Thieves Guild had brought it to eager wakefulness.
_________
So, on this day, in Honeyside, Dag did her best to hide that dark thing in her heart as she shared the evening meal with Brynjolf. They talked about the Guild, and the day, and he laughed and called her “lass” in the lovely Falskaar brogue that always turned her head and quickened her pulse, and downed the flagon of mead with the tiny bit of sleeping potion added to it. They went to bed and she loved him as hard and as well as she possibly could, as the potion slowly worked its magic.
When he was asleep, she rose and slipped into the spare room, dressing herself in a set of armor that she had hidden there, leaving her Guildmaster armor carefully laid out on the bed. She crept up the stairs, then placed the Amulet of Articulation and her Bond of Matrimony on the table where he would be sure to find them, along with the key to Honeyside.
She crept back to their bedroom for one last look at him.
“I love you so much, Brynjolf,” she whispered. “Eyes open. Walk with the shadows.”
And then she left their home, fighting hard against the tears that wanted to come. This had to happen, before something else went horribly wrong.
It would happen.
_______________
Had anyone been watching the back side of Riftweald Manor the next morning, they would have seen a stranger, a Redguard woman, emerge from the boarded-up house. Her deep-set eyes were pale, an eerie shade, almost yellow, and topped by slanted eyebrows that seemed permanently set in a frown. She had long black hair not quite contained in a braid; smooth, glistening, unmarred skin; and a slightly disdainful look about her full lips. She was dressed in a half cape and loosely laced ranger armor that revealed more than was proper, and walked as though she dared a soul to utter a single word about it.
The woman walked through the marketplace once, speaking to all the vendors. She was purchasing a few supplies for the road, she told them in a rich, husky voice. They were pleased to make her acquaintance, particularly given the amount of coin she spread amongst them.
She was buying some meat from the Dunmer food vendor when a commotion caused them to pause in their transaction, to watch a trio of figures in black leather striding across the market toward the Temple of Mara. One of them, a large man with red hair, was clearly upset, shouting, and the others were trying and failing to calm him. The two women looked at each other and shrugged.
“Brynjolf,” the Dunmer said. “There’s always something going on with him. I think he is somehow connected to the Thieves Guild.”
The Redguard woman smiled. “Best stay away from him, in that case,” she said. “I’ll make sure to bring those ice wraith teeth back to you as soon as I can.”
“Thank you. I was afraid I was going to run out. What was your name, again?”
“Sayma. Sayma Sendu.”
“I hope to see you again soon, Sayma.”
Dagnell smiled and walked toward the north gate of Riften. It had taken her a great deal of money and persuasion to convince the face-changer to meet her in Riftweald Manor where they wouldn’t be seen, and to ensure her continuing discretion. She sighed, settling her backpack and scimitars into a more comfortable position. She looked back at Riften and swallowed the lump rising in her throat. It hurt, more than anything ever had, but it was time. Sayma had to go, before Dagnell hurt anyone else.
