Songs and Memories
Twelfth Day of the Seventh Month 293 AC
It was supposed to be such a straightforward deed, Rhaella thought, even as part of her scoffed at calling buying a dissolute nobleman's debts from a moneylender straightforward. Less bloody than arranging an assassination, certainly. The former temple turned gambler's den was burning with a fierce red flame, exhaling smoke from every window as men threw themselves from the crumbling balcony only to land in broken heaps. Clear enough that it was a raid of some sort from all the thugs waving weapons high. The smell of smoke and charring flesh woke memories she had so long struggled to keep locked away.
A hand touched her shoulder, cold even through the fabric of the plain linen dress she was wearing. "Are you alright?"
"Yes," she answered, the act of speaking puling her from the grasp of dark memory, the reminder that she had responsibilities to see to. "Do you think this could be a coincidence?" she asked Lady Drekelis.
"I don't trust coincidences," the younger woman replied softly. "It's either someone knew we would be moving in to secure more votes in the Guild and decided to help us along in a rather blunt manner, or the gods themselves have seen fit to decree that no queen shall be seen in such a den of vice and wretchedness."
For a moment Rhaella was shocked that her companion could jest when men were dying so dreadfully.
Be fair, the lady told herself. She is no more hardhearted than many lords you knew and ladies more likely than not, but women weren't supposed to show such harsh sentiments.
Odd how I keep finding little nuggets of hypocrisy in my thoughts like worms in an apple, that same storyteller's voice that lived near the heart of her magic whispered.
"Well then, there's no sense lingering here." Though the words were reluctantly spoken, they were true nonetheless. They had been sent here on a task for more important than saving lives from one small fire, particularly as the only way to put an end to it would involve a show of magic, that would ruin days of careful hiding.
Her eyes caught a flash of purple and white in the firelight. With an unconscious skill that had been drilled into her since girlhood the former queen recognized a knight's blazon...
A white bend cotised, on a purple field... House Hasty of the Stormlands. A moment later she recognized the bearer also, though he looked much older than she recalled, old and wary. Ser Bonifer was fighting two thugs, one welding a mace and the other a hammer sharpened to a spike on one end.
Wyla obviously followed her gaze. "Now what's a western knight doing here? Playing sellsword, mayhaps? It would be too much to ask if you know him."
"No... no I do, he was a well-known tourney knight but pious, I can't imagine him..." Her words cut off as the thug with the hammer hooked the shield out of the knight's hand while his fellow raised his mace high.
A poor way for any knight to die...
There was no pause between thought and action as she walked a few steps out of the mouth of the alley and sang three words in a cheerful dissonant melody, the words all but lost in the roar of the flames and the sound of battle... almost. The mace wielder collapsed to his knees gripped by unnatural laughter. A moment later the man's brains were splattered on the cobbles.
I might have killed him myself... Rhaella's stomach roiled.
"You asked about the sort of life you are likely to see around Drowned Town. That's part of it," Wyla said, not unkindly. "Do you want to go or finish playing guardian angel?"
The former queen remembered the smiling knight who had taken her favor all those years ago, who had crowned the girl she had been queen of love and beauty and how much more pleasant those few moments of youthful vanity had been than being queen in truth. Bonifer deserved that much at least no matter how far he may have fallen.
Ser Bonifer walked from that fight with scarce a scratch on him, leaving Rhaella to wonder faintly what he would think had he known who had saved him.
OOC: Some very middle of the road rolls from Myr, so I figured I would take the chance to flesh out Rhaella's character a bit more.
