The Assassin

You’re born on the streets of Tarantia. On the docks, actually. Your parents lived there—one a captain of a merchant ship, the other a whore—and they pretended to be happy. And then your mother, the whore, found out she was pregnant, and she didn’t know if it was the captain’s child or not. In her heart she wanted it to be, but she had plied her trade as he was out at sea.

When you’re born, you have golden hair and soft skin and a face that doesn’t look like your “father’s”. It doesn’t take him long to realize that this isn’t his daughter. So he leaves, sets sail, goes to another port to call home and find another girl that he can pretend to be happy with. And your mother takes care of you as best she can, until she loses too much money, angers too many people, and wakes up one day to her throat slashed and her child stolen.

You’re sold to slavers out of Zingara, but you escape before the transaction’s made. You’re five years old, homeless and motherless, and you survive for two days before you steal something. Just a bit of fruit. At first. One meal. Then two. Then three. Then you’re not that hungry, because you’re stealing all the time, and you’re a little kid, so you can hide pretty easily in dark, tiny places that nobody thinks to look.

Before long you’re cutting purses and picking pockets, because a few coins gets you farther than food ever will. Eventually, you get found by a gang of kids, and they beat you up. Steal from you, kick you bloody and broken down to the docks. Kind of like you’re starting over again.

You go to the Temple, and stay there for a while. It becomes your home as you keep stealing. But eventually, you head into the Noble District, looking for fatter purses to cut, and are never heard from again.

That’s because, when you’re there, you cut the first purse you can. And he catches you, just as the purse falls from his belt. He breaks your wrist, your nose, before you can even cry out. And then you fall into darkness, and when you wake up, you’re in the man’s house and he tells you how impressed he is. How surprised that you actually managed to get a knife on him. So impressed that, instead of kill you, he’ll teach you to do better than that.

Then he breaks your other wrist, and tells you that you’ll either learn to mend yourself, and live, or starve to death.

And that was the easy test.

You mend as best you can, and you keep yourself fed, at first by scraping your mouth along bowls, chewing like an animal, and then with weak, feeble hands, drawing it into your teeth.

He teaches you how to fight. He teaches you what happens when you lose a fight, and when you win. He makes you kill a man, a boy, a woman, a girl, a baby. It becomes easier each time, until he brings out the baby and you strike without thinking about it. Cleaving off its tiny head.

Then you throw up. And he breaks your legs.

But you mend. Like before.

He cuts you, with tiny knives and swords. He stabs you. He means to kill you slowly, but you survive, each and every time. He burns you, suffocates you, poisons you, and each time you live.

You hate him. You hate him so much that you want him to die. You want to leave, to run away, but you don’t, not because you’re afraid of what he’ll do to you, but you don’t want him to live.

Slowly, he beings to talk without the show of knives, the display of death. He tells you about the poisons he uses, the knives, the swords and bows he owns. The axes. Each has a story, and he lets you use each one, learning their ways. But you’re small, and weak from his ministrations, so you take the lightest weapons and learn how to kill.

Ten months he tried to kill you. And then ten years he trained you. And he kept trying to kill you in those ten years.

He would poison your food, steal your clothes and throw you out onto the street, spread lies and rumors about you to gangs and they’d try to kill you. Set you up as a prostitute and send men to you. Sell you into slavery.

Each time you’d get away, and return to him, and he’d tell you why he did it.

Expect betrayal.

As much as you hated him, you loved him, too, because he honestly cared for you. But he never touched you except to cause pain, never did anything except to teach.

In the end, it was because he was training you to kill him.

An end to his life, a beginning to yours.

The first time you tried, though, you failed. Miserably. And he broke your jaw, your arms, and laughed at you. Left you in the street to die. But you hadn’t come this far to die. It took months, but finally, you killed him. Watching where he went as he left his home, you made people believe he was plotting against them. Wanting to kill them, steal their businesses, kill their families and sell them off to Necromancers or slavers.

So he died. And his clients fell to you.

And his life became your life.