Freeing Lilia

Serenity

Chapter 2: Serenity.

Sage was a man of effortless elegance who had only reached his thirtieth summer this year. He was built tall and lean, with a body moulded for fighting and for loving. His staff was in arm's reach as I ducked into his tent.

In the dim light of the tent, it was hard to tell where he hailed from. His skin reminded me of the topaz stones we had once 'found' in a guarded carriage on the way to the capitol, rich and warm while his eyes were a disconcerting gold-speckled green. High set cheek bones made his face sharp and severe, with a wide mouth that rarely smiled.

With a body and face like that, growing up as an abandoned child was never going to be happy story. He had told me freely about the woman that adopted him. Maybe, he had wanted to gain my trust by disclosing it, or he wanted to show me that there was no shame in sharing the darkness from my past.

His adoptive mother had been like Miss Pretty. He had been too beautiful to be just trained as a thug, so they showed him the ways of the courtesan while also training him ruthlessly as an assassin. He was the child trained to kill.

It made me sick when he told me, and I spent days afterwards thinking about what kind of person would pay for the services of a boy who had no choice in the life he lived. He was too young to have his innocence stripped so ruthlessly like that. They had thought him how to read and to write, how to ride a horse and wield a weapon but for everything that they taught him, the debt he owed to them grew larger.

For retaliating, they punished him. Only – it couldn't be lasting because that would damage the merchandise.

He never told us how he escaped – that memory was locked tight. Afterwards everything led to us. He turned his skill to the criminal trade of robbery and assassination where he was the boss. The Rainier band of thieves and assassins headed by the man everyone knew in the criminal underworld as The Sage, were feared, despised and for some, loved.

Everyone of us had our own stories but we had melded together into a misshapen machine that served our own ruthless purpose.

A half smile formed as he turned towards me. He was dressed impeccably as he always was in a thick woollen tunic of gold and emerald. Rings adorned his long fingers, but he still wore the rough, scuffed boots I had bought for him months ago in a market stall because I thought he would like them.

"Blue," He motioned with an elegant wave of his hand, his gold rings flashing in the candlelight. Grimacing, I sunk into the seat at the centre of his chair. He had a makeshift table – just a broken old thing he managed to haul around with him. Sage always exuded an air of pristine elegance, even sitting in a tent in the countryside with me.

I had earned a name for myself in Anene. Blue had morphed into Bluetail because of the tattoo on my arm but it was nothing compared to Sage's name which was whispered through the criminal underworld with fearful reverence.

Sage sat after I did. His days as a courtesan had never truly left him. He sat with a tilt to his body that to any man or woman would read to be inviting.

I pulled off my gloves as I reached for the candied dates that he always had on his little table. "Sage- I swear whatever my brothers said about my actions today were most likely completely true but I..."

"Blue," He raised a hand, and I fell silent immediately. With pursed lips, I cast a look over the tent. Everything about the camp was situated to protect Sage. My brothers and I kept him at our centre. He was our brain, our bones – he kept us upright and told us what to do. Without him we would be nothing. "Did I not give you a job?"