Assassin's Creed: Forsaken

by Oliver Bowden

  Perhaps it had turned out that the source of her strength was him. Perhaps the carnage of that terrible evening had simply been too much for her to take. They say it happens to soldiers. They get “soldier’s heart” and become shadows of their former selves. The bloodshed changes them somehow. Was that the case with Mother? I wondered.

  “I’m sorry, Haytham,” she added.

  “It’s all right, Mother.”

  “No—I mean, you are to go to Europe with Mr. Birch.”

  “But I’m needed here, with you. To look after you.”

  She gave an airy laugh: “Mama’s little soldier, uh?” and fixed me with a strange, searching look. I knew exactly where her mind was going. Back to what had happened on the stairs. She was seeing me thrust a blade into the eye socket of the masked attacker.

  And then she tore her eyes away, leaving me feeling almost breathless with the raw emotion of her gaze.

  “I have Miss Davy and Emily to look after me, Haytham. When the repairs are made to Queen Anne’s Square we’ll be able to move back and I can employ more staff. No, it is me who should be looking after you, and I have appointed Mr. Birch the family comptroller and your guardian, so that you can be looked after properly. It’s what your father would have wanted.”

  She looked at the curtain quizzically, as if she was trying to recall why it was drawn. “I understand that Mr. Birch was going to speak to you about leaving for Europe straight away.”

  “He did, yes, but—”

  “Good.” She regarded me. Again, there was something discomfiting about the look; she was no longer the mother I knew, I realized. Or was I no longer the son she knew?

  “It’s for the best, Haytham.”

  “But, Mother . . .”

  She looked at me, then away again quickly.

  “You’re going, and that’s the end of it,” she said firmly, her stare returning to the curtains. My eyes went to Miss Davy as though looking for assistance, but I found none; in return she gave me a sympathetic smile, a raise of the eyebrows, an expression that said, “I’m sorry, Haytham, there’s nothing I can do, her mind is made up.” There was silence in the room, no sound apart from the clip-clopping of hooves from outside, from a world that carried on oblivious to the fact that mine was being taken apart.

  “You are dismissed, Haytham,” Mother said, with a wave of her hand.

  Before—before the attack, I mean—she had never used to “summon” me. Or “dismiss” me. Before, she had never let me leave her side without at least a kiss on the cheek, and she’d told me she loved me, at least once a day.

  As I stood, it occurred to me that she hadn’t said anything about what had happened on the stairs that night. She had never thanked me for saving her life. At the door I paused and turned to look at her, and wondered whether she wished the outcome had been different.

  iv

  Mr. Birch accompanied me to the funeral, a small, informal service at the same chapel we had used for Edith, with almost the same number in attendance: the household, Old Mr. Fayling, and a few members of staff from Father’s work, whom Mr. Birch spoke to afterwards. He introduced me to one of them, Mr. Simpkin, a man I judged to be in his mid-thirties, who I was told would be handling the family’s affairs. He bowed a little and gave me a look I’m coming to recognize as a mix of awkwardness and sympathy, each struggling to find adequate expression.

  “I will be dealing with your mother while you are in Europe, Master Haytham,” he assured me.

  It hit me that I really was going; that I had no choice, no say whatsoever in the matter. Well, I do have a choice, I suppose—I could run away. Not that running away seems like any kind of choice.

  We took carriages home. Trooping into the house, I caught sight of Betty, who looked at me and gave me a weak smile. The news about me was spreading, so it seemed. When I asked her what she planned to do, she told me that Mr. Digweed had found her alternative employment. When she looked at me her eyes shone with tears, and when she left the room I sat at my desk to write my journal with a heavy heart.

  11 DECEMBER 1735

  i

  We depart for Europe tomorrow morning. It strikes me how few preparations are needed. It is as though the fire had already severed all my ties with my old life. What few things I had left were only enough to fill two trunks, which were taken away this morning. Today I am to write letters, and also to see Mr. Birch in order to tell him about something that occurred last night, after I’d gone to bed.

  I was almost asleep when I heard a soft knocking at the door, sat up and said, “Come in,” fully expecting it to be Betty.

  It wasn’t. I saw the figure of a girl, who stepped quickly into the room and shut the door behind her. She raised a candle so I could see her face and the finger she held to her lips. It was Emily, blond-haired Emily, the chambermaid.

  “Master Haytham,” she said, “I have something I need to tell you, which has been preying on my mind, sir.”

  “Of course,” I said, hoping my voice wouldn’t betray the fact that I felt suddenly very young and vulnerable.

  “I know the maid of the Barretts,” she said quickly. “Violet, who was one of those who came out of their houses that night. She was close to the carriage they put your sister in, sir. As they bundled Miss Jenny past her and the carriage, Miss Jenny caught Violet’s eye and told her something quickly, which Violet has told me.”

  “What was it?” I said.

  “It was very quick, sir, and there was plenty of noise, and before she could say any more they bundled her into the carriage, but what Violet thinks she heard was ‘Traitor.’ Next day, a man paid Violet a visit, a man with a West Country accent, or so she said, who wanted to know what she’d heard, but Violet said she’d heard nothing, even when the gentleman threatened her. He showed her an evil-looking knife, sir, out of his belt, but even then she said nothing.”

  “But she told you?”

  “Violet’s my sister, sir. She worries for me.”

  “Have you told anyone else?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I shall tell Mr. Birch in the morning,” I said.

  “But, sir . . .”

  “What?”

  “What if the traitor is Mr. Birch?”

  I gave a short laugh and shook my head. “It isn’t possible. He saved my life. He was there fighting the . . .” Something struck me. “There is someone who wasn’t there, though.”

  ii

  Of course I sent word to Mr. Birch at the first opportunity this morning, and he reached the same conclusion I had.

  An hour later another man arrived, who was shown into the study. He was about the same age my father had been and had a craggy face, scars and the cold, staring eyes of some species of sea life. He was taller than Mr. Birch, and broader, and seemed to fill the room with his presence. A dark presence. And he looked at me. Down his nose at me. Down his wrinkled-with-disdain nose at me.

  “This is Mr. Braddock,” said Mr. Birch, as I stood fixed into place by the newcomer’s glare. “He is also a Templar. He has my total and utmost trust, Haytham.” He cleared his throat, and said loudly, “And a manner sometimes at odds with what I know to be in his heart.”

  Mr. Braddock snorted, and shot him a withering look.

  “Now, Edward,” chided Birch. “Haytham, Mr. Braddock will be in charge of finding the traitor.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  Mr. Braddock looked me over then spoke to Mr. Birch. “This Digweed,” he said, “perhaps you can show me his quarters.”

  When I moved to follow them, Mr. Braddock glared at Mr. Birch, who nodded almost imperceptibly then turned to me, smiling, with a look in his eyes that begged my forbearance.

  “Haytham,” he said, “perhaps you should attend to other matters. Your preparations for leaving, perhaps,” and I was compelled to return to my room, where I surveyed my already packed cases then retrieved my journal, in which to write the events of the day. Moments ago, Mr. Birch came to me with th
e news: Digweed has escaped, he told me, his face grave. However, they will find him, he assured me. The Templars always catch their man and, in the meantime, nothing changes. We still depart for Europe.

  It strikes me this will be my last entry at home here in London. These are the last words of my old life, before my new one begins.

  PART II

  1747, TWELVE YEARS LATER

  10 JUNE 1747

  i

  I watched the traitor today as he moved around the bazaar. Wearing a plumed hat, colourful buckles and garters, he strutted from stall to stall and twinkled in the bright, white Spanish sun. With some of the stallholders he joked and laughed; with others he exchanged cross words. He was neither friend nor despot, it seemed, and indeed, the impression I formed of him, albeit one I formed at a distance, was of a fair man, benevolent even. But then again it’s not those people he was betraying. It is his Order. It is us.

  His guards stayed with him during his rounds, and they were diligent men, I could tell. Their eyes never stopped moving around the market, and when one of the stallholders gave him a hearty clap on the back and pressed on him a gift of bread from his stall, he waved to the taller of the two guards, who took it with his left hand, keeping his sword hand free. Good. Good man. Templar-trained.

  Moments later a small boy darted out from the crowds, and straight away my eyes went to the guards, saw them tense, assess the danger and then . . .

  Relax?

  Laugh at themselves for being jumpy?

  No. They stayed tense. Stayed watchful, because they’re not fools and they knew the boy might have been a decoy.

  They were good men. I wondered if they had been corrupted by the teachings of their employer, a man who pledged allegiance to one cause while promoting the ideals of another. I hoped not, because I’d already decided to let them live. And if it appears to be somewhat convenient that I’ve decided to let them live, and that maybe the truth has more to do with my apprehension of going into combat with two such competent men, then that appearance is false. They may be vigilant; undoubtedly they would be expert swordsmen; they would be skilled in the business of death.

  But then, I am vigilant. I am an expert swordsman. And I am skilled in the business of death. I have a natural aptitude for it. Although, unlike theology, philosophy, classics and my languages, particularly Spanish, which is so good that I’m able to pass as a Spaniard here in Altea, albeit a somewhat reticent one, I take no pleasure in my skill at death. Simply, I am good at it.

  Perhaps if my target were Digweed—perhaps then I might take some small measure of gratification from his death at my hands. But it is not.

  ii

  For the five years after we left London, Reginald and I scoured Europe, moving from country to country in a travelling caravan of staff and fellow Knights who shifted around us, drifting in and out of our lives, we two the only constants as we moved from one country to the next, sometimes picking up the trail of a group of Turkish slavers who were believed to be holding Jenny, and occasionally acting on information concerning Digweed, which Braddock would attend to, riding off for months on end but always returning empty-handed.

  Reginald was my tutor, and in that respect he had similarities to Father; first in that he tended to sneer at almost anything from books, constantly asserting that there existed a higher, more advanced learning than could be found in dusty old schoolbooks, which I later came to know as Templar learning; and second, in that he insisted I think for myself.

  Where they differed was that my father would ask me to make up my own mind. Reginald, I came to learn, viewed the world in more absolute terms. With Father I sometimes felt as if the thinking was enough—that the thinking was a means unto itself and the conclusion I reached somehow less important than the journey. With Father, facts, and, looking back over past journals I realize even the entire concept of truth, could feel like shifting, mutable properties.

  There was no such ambiguity with Reginald, though, and in the early years when I might say otherwise, he’d smile at me and tell me he could hear my father in me. He’d tell me how my father had been a great man and wise in many ways, and quite the best swordsman he had ever known, but his attitude to learning was not as scholarly as it might have been.

  Does it shame me to admit that over time I came to prefer Reginald’s way, the stricter Templar way? Though he was always good-tempered, quick with a joke and smile, he lacked the natural joy, even mischief, of Father. He was always buttoned and neat, for one thing, and he was fanatical about punctuality; he insisted that things be orderly at all times. And yet, almost despite myself there was something fixed about Reginald, some certainty, both inner and outer, that came to appeal to me more and more as the years passed.

  One day I realized why. It was the absence of doubt—and with it confusion, indecision, uncertainty. This feeling—this feeling of “knowing” that Reginald imbued in me—was my guide from boyhood to adulthood. I never forgot my father’s teachings; on the contrary, he would have been proud of me because I questioned his ideals. In doing so I adopted new ones.

  We never found Jenny. Over the years, I’d mellowed towards her memory. Reading back over my journals, the young me could not have cared less about her, something I’m somewhat ashamed of, because I’m a grown man now, and I see things in different terms. Not that my youthful antipathy towards her did anything to hinder the hunt for her, of course. In that mission, Mr. Birch had more than enough zeal for the two of us. But it wasn’t enough. The funds we received from Mr. Simpkin in London were handsome, but they weren’t without end. We found a chateau in France, hidden near Troyes in Champagne, in which to make our base, where Mr. Birch continued my apprenticeship, sponsoring my admittance as an Adept and then, three years ago, as a fully fledged member of the Order.

  Weeks would go by with no mention of either Jenny or Digweed; then months. We were involved in other Templar activities. The War of the Austrian Succession had seemed to gobble the whole of Europe into its greedy maw, and we were needed to help protect Templar interests. My “aptitude,” my skill at death, became apparent, and Reginald was quick to see its benefits. The first to die—not my first “kill,” of course; my first assassination, I should say—was a greedy merchant in Liverpool. My second was an Austrian prince.

  After the killing of the merchant, two years ago, I returned to London, only to find that building work was continuing at Queen Anne’s Square, and Mother . . . Mother was too tired to see me that day, and would be the following day as well. “Is she too tired to answer my letters, too?” I asked Mrs. Davy, who apologized and averted her gaze. Afterwards I rode to Herefordshire, hoping to locate Digweed’s family, to no avail. The traitor in our household was never to be found, it seemed—or is never to be found, I should say.

  But then, the fire of vengeance in my gut burns less fiercely these days, perhaps simply because I’ve grown; perhaps because of what Reginald has taught me about control of oneself, mastery of one’s own emotions.

  Even so, dim it may be, but it continues to burn within me.

  iii

  The hostale owner’s wife has just been to visit, throwing a quick look down the steps before she closed the door behind her. A messenger arrived while I was out, she said, and handed his missive to me with a lascivious look that I might have been tempted to act upon if I hadn’t had other things on my mind. The events of last night, for example.

  So instead I ushered her out of my room and sat down to decypher the message. It told me that as soon as I was finished in Altea, I was to travel not home, to France, but to Prague, where I would meet Reginald in the cellar rooms of the house in Celetna Lane, the Templar headquarters. He has an urgent matter to discuss with me.

  In the meantime, I have my cheese. Tonight, the traitor meets his end.

  11 JUNE 1747

  It is done. The kill, I mean. And though it was not without its complications, the execution was clean insofar as he is dead and I remain undetected, and for that
I can allow myself to take a measure of satisfaction in having completed my task.

  His name was Juan Vedomir, and supposedly his job was to protect our interests in Altea. That he had used the opportunity to build an empire of his own was tolerated; the information we had was that he controlled the port and market with a benign hand, and certainly on the evidence of earlier that day he seemed to enjoy some support, even if the constant presence of his guards proved that wasn’t always the case.

  Was he too benign, though? Reginald thought so, had investigated, and eventually found that Vedomir’s abandonment of Templar ideologies was so complete as to amount to treachery. We are intolerant of traitors in the Order. I was despatched to Altea. I watched him. And, last night, I took my cheese and left my hostale for the last time, making my way along cobbled streets to his villa.

  “Yes?” said the guard who opened his door.

  “I have cheese,” I said.

  “I can smell it from here,” he replied.

  “I hope to convince Señor Vedomir to allow me to trade at the bazaar.”

  His nose wrinkled some more. “Señor Vedomir is in the business of attracting patrons to the market, not driving them away.”

  “Perhaps those with a more refined palate might disagree, señor?”

  The guard squinted. “Your accent. Where are you from?”

  He was the first to question my Spanish citizenship. “Originally from the Republic of Genoa,” I said, smiling, “where cheese is one of our finest exports.”

  “Your cheese will have to go a long way to beat Varela’s cheese.”