Ymra, Part 3

(Part 1)

(Part 2)

She entered the small room she called a home by climbing through the window facing the back alley. Before she had come here, she had tied a red strip of cloth to the flagpole on the tower of Whispersong the Knowing, a few neighbourhoods away. This was to signal the status of tonight's mission without ever coming into contact with the next link in the faction chain. The peculiar mode of communication was both for practical reasons and for secrecy and ensuring that no one link knew too much. There were hundreds or thousands of agents working for her faction, and meeting another agent in person was a lot of logistics for such a simple message.

She removed her cloak, which was tan and black. It was designed in a very particular way. The hood was tan, with two streaks of black running down each side from about eye-height, forming a jagged curve and growing in thickness until it met the lower part of the cloak at the shoulders and blended into the blackness of it. It had been made to resemble the eagle that followed her when she worked, the Osprey. She was a Junior Agent, and many mercenaries weren't given a proper Name until they had worked their way into a faction leader's closest circle of agents. Still, whispers and rumours about an "Osprey" had started to surface, and this was, at the moment, her proudest achievement.

Tonight she would have no trouble falling asleep, satisfied with the night's events. The feeling of success was just enough to keep her mind from wandering to unpleasant responsibilities and duties of tomorrow.

---

"No", she said, "I haven't heard anything more from him, I'm sure he'll send a letter soon".

She wasn't sure whether the lie about her brother was a betrayal or a mercy. But she was forced to believe the latter, lest the guilt of it tear her conscience to shreds.

Osprey grimaced slightly and felt pained when her mother winced, her old bones aching as she sat down on the edge of her bed. It was a pain like no other. It wasn't a pain of the flesh, much worse, it was a pain of the soul. Not a pain like disappointment, or sadness, or even despair. It wasn't even like the pain of sorrow and the loss of meaning after a bad breakup – less acute perhaps, but so much more disturbing. She couldn't help remembering when she was a little girl and her mother had been young, and fit, and she could remember thinking so highly of her. Her mother could do magical, wonderful things then, like cooking mouth watering meals, and curing the pain of a freshly bruised arm with a kiss. And as she watched her aging mother settle slowly on her bed she felt that somehow the magic had left her, or that the magic of adulthood was a simple trick that lost its magic once you were shown how it worked. And she felt the pain that children feel seeing their mother or father hurting. Staying there became unbearable, although that broke her heart.

She walked the streets of her neighbourhood, which were still bustling with life and would continue to do so for some time before the dusk fell over them and signalled the end of the day. She felt wholly uncomfortable walking in the street, and this worried her. She would be much happier on the rooftops, springing from house to house, seeing the world from above, free from the maze that the houses forced upon the people on the ground. She worried that the more time she spent up there, at night, running errands of action, the more she would feel uncomfortable in the streets, with the rest of the people. The more she stayed up there, the more she wouldn't belong here, until she was so removed from it that she could never return to the streets, to people, to daylight.

She made her way from the trader's neighbourhoods and into darker and poorer ones. A neighbourhood could be anything from fifteen to a hundred houses in size. They could be neighbourhoods because the same merchant owned all the houses, because a church had taken it upon themselves to care for the faith of people within a given area, because a faction leader had sent an agent to govern over it, or any other reason that made it sort of sensible for a group of residents to band together.

Osprey walked down a street very similar to the ones in her own neighbourhood, except it was dead quiet – without life. There were no traders here, no smithies or bakeries or leatherworkers. There wasn't even a pub or a brothel. She arrived at something that would have been a decent house about two generations ago. Now it was so crooked and misaligned and withered, the wood so rotten and tormented, that it seemed like it would collapse should a drunken fool collide with anything load bearing. Osprey didn't want to go inside, but it wasn't because she was afraid of it collapsing. She gently climbed the outside stairs leading to the second story apartments, and entered.

She found her brother sitting in a fetal position in the corner, his head resting on his knees. In his room was a blanket, a wooden chair with two of its legs missing, and a simple wardrobe with four drawers, all empty. He hadn't noticed her.

"Tristan", she tried, not daring to expect a response.

He moved his head slowly and looked up at her. He didn't smile when he saw her – he frowned sadly and looked at her with pathetic, pleading eyes.

"Have you...", he started, his voice weak and trembling, "... Have you brought me..." He couldn't finish the sentence.

"No", replied Osprey, "I tell you every time, Tristan. I will not bring you your poison."

Tristan looked away, stared at the wall with a look of disappointment and despair. She kneeled down next to him, pausing to assess him for a moment. He was so thin, and filthy. Part of her had immense sympathy for him, her brother, and wanted more than anything to help him. The other part hated him for what he had done to himself, to their mother, to her, and knew that whatever help she could provide he would refuse, unless it was a pouch of faintly pink powder. She sat a basket filled with a sausage, tomatoes, and a loaf of bread down next to him.

"Please, Tristan. Eat it before it rots this time. I beg of you"

Tristan still stared at the wall, motionless. She caught herself being almost impressed he had kept his head up for so long. She got up slowly. Tending to their mother was bad enough, but the state her brother was in was so horrible she had seriously considered never coming back, and she did so again.

On her way back to her own lodgings, she couldn't help thinking about her mother and brother yet again, tiring though it was. Tristan had left home years ago to seek fortune in other parts of Ymra. Their father had already died in a drunken stupor at the pub at that point, and Osprey and her mother had been left to fend for themselves. Tristan sent letters home from various regions of Ymra from time to time, but success eluded him. When he finally came home, he had less than he had left with, apart from a strong addiction to the pink powder sometimes called cherrydust. He wouldn't meet with his mother, and made Osprey promise that she wouldn't tell their mother of the fate that had befallen him. The first few years he maintained presence of mind enough to keep sending letters, telling his mother that he was fine somewhere else. Eventually he became so debilitated by the drugs that the letters stopped.

Every day their mother asked for him, and Osprey always told her that he was probably fine, and that surely there would be another letter soon. And she would have felt even worse about it if it wasn't for the fact that their poor mother had no hope of remembering a conversation from one day to the next, so every time Osprey promised a letter, it would genuinely comfort the old woman.

Osprey walked through the darkening streets and longed to be on the rooftops. She simply could not wait to don her mercenary gear, meet up with her companion animal and young apprentice and see if there were jobs to be done this night. And if there weren't, she would simply enjoy the height, explore, practice new routes. At least she would be removed from the miserable conditions of the ground level.