Driven By Instinct

3 - Acquaintance

Against the tall, flickering firelight, Vica's huddled form cast a deceptively long shadow that stretched from her feet all the way back into the grove of trees that surrounded the clearing of the assassin's campsite. The cold was persistent. The lack of an outer cloak to absorb the deep chill of nighttime darkness alone was almost enough to persuade Vica to try to crawl closer to the fire the assassin had made, throwing both her pride and her sense of self-preservation away. But on top of that, her footwear was thin and flimsy, cotton slippers that the farmer's wife had set by the front door for her to wear inside the farmhouse.

Vica cursed the dumb shock that had overcome her earlier, regretting every stumbling mistake that she had made as she was taken away. But every temptation to longingly glance at the fierce campfire was abruptly quashed by the sight of the dark-haired, yellow-eyed man sitting across the way. He stirred the flames with a thick branch occasionally, but for the most part, he seemed content to sit motionless on a fallen log and split his attention between her and the fire.

She felt his eyes on her like hot embers and the keen blade of a dagger; without her magic, the sense of vulnerability and helplessness that settled heavily over her felt solid enough to take physical form. Vica wondered if her captor could sense it as easily as she feared he did.

Vica didn't know how much time had passed since they had left the farmhouse. She didn't even know what time it was when she had awoken to find him hovering over her, so she had no frame of reference to chance a fair guess. But it wasn't daybreak yet, so it couldn't have been more than a few hours at most. Likely less, she thought to herself tightly. Shivering in the cold made the minutes pass slower. It could easily have been only an hour, and the warmth of daybreak could still be hours away. Being taken captive and rendered utterly powerless in a way that she never thought she would experience was markedly unhelpful when it came to tracking time accurately.

The assassin was still watching her, but there was neither hostility nor suspicion in his eyes. But Vica knew that trusting him to be a reasonable or kind man was foolish; one minor misstep and she could be writhing on the ground with a broken arm for her mistake. She had encountered mercenaries before and guessed that an assassin like this could be just as ruthless. He had not killed her yet, which seemed to imply that he was transporting her alive to some destination for the time being, but that didn't mean he had to transport her unharmed.

She wondered if she was simply being kept alive so that he could kill her in the personal presence of whomever had contracted him. It wasn't unheard of. She didn't know who she could have possibly enraged and made an enemy of to provoke such a thing, but then again, it took a certain kind of wretch to hire a cutthroat to end someone's life to begin with. Surely a man who would employ the services of an assassin that would threaten innocents couldn't be reasoned with. She reached again tentatively for her magic in the hopes that something had changed in the last few minutes, but was met only with freshly renewed disappointment and apprehension.

Vica finally yielded when she realized that she could no longer feel her feet. She gave up a short lived attempt to massage the feeling back into her ice-cold toes, and crawled slowly on numb knees closer to the fire. She drew up just short of singing herself on the flames, and in the motion of lifting her chin to better observe the fire and measure the relative safety of sitting so close to it, caught the ever-present gaze of the assassin across the way.

A lazy smile curved the corners of his mouth, and he slowly moved his hands to spread and hold open the edges of his black traveling cloak at her. He c****d his head, punctuating his brazen invitation with his careless posture.

If she didn't have to fear for the integrity of her bones, Vica would have volleyed back some unspoken retort in kind, but she didn't want to chance the risk of provoking the man. He had seemed imperturbable so far, but he was a killer nonetheless. Hiding his sadism and waiting for the slightest excuse to reveal it seemed just the thing that an assassin might excel at. She would be an i***t if she expected to come away from all of this alive, much less unharmed.

Vica broke their brief stare with no overt reaction to what he had done, opting to turn her gaze on the bottom of the crackling fire instead. It was best to be as unresponsive as she could get away with, keeping things calm until she saw the right opportunity to escape. Attracting his attention in any way would only make it harder for her to find that chance, though she had the sickening suspicion that he was already too attentive to her every motion as it was. But she had no choice to be patient, and to wait.

"Sleep," the man said as he closed the edges of his cloak again. Apparently his sense of humor was something else, Vica thought with a grimace, but at least he wasn't one to belabor a bad joke. "You're due in the capital in eight weeks. Fifteen hundred miles. I'm going to push you every day until we get there, so rest while you can. You're going to end up in the same place either way, so I suggest you make it as easy as possible on yourself."

All the way in the capital? Vica contemplated his words, pried them apart in her head. She had never been to the capital, didn't know anyone who lived there. Doubtful that anyone there would hire someone just to pursue a stranger to the outer fringes of the nation. But she supposed it was possible that the assassin's employer was not from the capital at all; maybe he was just going to meet them there for whatever reason. But then why at the capital? It seemed foolish to take a mage to the city where mages reigned supreme for any reason whatsoever.

But then again, this man could somehow disable her magic and render her utterly powerless. Who was to say that he couldn't do the same to an entire city of mages? He had nothing to fear if that was the case. But that still explained nothing - several outrageous and unfounded theories crept around the back of her mind, but the truth was that without more information, she couldn't even begin to chance a guess as to his true motives. In fact, was this assassin even working for someone else to begin with? Perhaps he was moving according to his own mysterious machinations all along.

"If you're hoping that I fall asleep before you, don't waste your time." The man beckoned her over with a crook of his fingers. When she hesitated, his mouth curved into another slow smile like before - but this one inexplicably raised the hairs on the back of Vica's neck. His yellow eyes never wavered from her face, and she noticed not for the first time how intimidatingly tall and solid he appeared even underneath his traveling cloak. "Don't make me come get you." His threat, however gently delivered, promised consequences that Vica was reluctant to explore.

She pressed her lips together in a thin line as she slowly stood up by the fireside. The warmth had already crept halfway through her body, thawing her chilled bones, but as she rounded the flames and neared the assassin, she thought she suddenly felt even colder than before. She stood next to him on his left, looking down into his face - but to her surprise, he then slid down from where he had been sitting atop the fallen log and came to a rest on the grassy floor of the clearing below it. He stretched his legs out in front of himself and a contented sound escaped his throat like a purr, but in the next second he had shifted again so that he could crook the leg closest to Vica and bend it at the knee, propping it up with the foot firmly planted on the grass. He leaned back against the log and glanced up at her, and then patted the ground next to himself. "Get comfortable. Here." With a sweep of his left arm, he held open one edge of his cloak and indicated with a nod that he wanted her to settle in against his side.

"Really?" she couldn't help but ask, a bitterly incredulous barb bristling under her single word. She stared down at him, yet to move.

The man stared back up at her for a fleeting moment before answering. "I thought of tying you up and just letting you sleep by the fire," he said, "but you would still be cold because you're dressed in rags. And then you'd roll into the fire in your sleep, and then my prize pig will end up roasted, just like that. I don't need your cooperation to keep you alive, but I'd rather do this the easy way. You don't have to like me, mage, but I'll make things easy for you if you do the same for me."

Bargaining with an assassin. Laughable. But she felt fear rekindling in the pit of her stomach as she continued to watch him. Something in the smooth timbre of his voice clawed gently at her instincts, told her that it was dangerous to test him no matter how repulsive his brazenness. Here was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted, and as flirtatious and joking as his demeanor seemed, Vica realized that that was just a means to an end. He was not a flighty man, easily taken in by a womanly form. His pretense of lackadaisical ease merely masked his cold efficiency - she remembered still the terror that she had felt when she saw him looming over her in the attic of the farmhouse. She had felt it as surely as she did now, the awareness that this man could break and shatter someone however he wished, whenever he wished. Again the suspicion crossed her mind that though he may have been tasked to keep her alive for something, he may not have been obligated to keep her unharmed. It was likely that he was simply staying his hand because it was convenient this way...so far.

"You'll wake up every time I move," she said smoothly as if genially warning him. But as soon as she gave voice to the words, she realized that that was the true intent behind the man's actions.

He, too, saw it the instant it dawned upon her, and smiled again knowingly. "That's the idea."

And then after a measure of hesitant fumbling, somehow she was under his left arm, which was draped about her shoulders. For all the discomfort of being so close to a man who could undoubtedly snap her neck in fourteen different ways with one hand, Vica couldn't deny the relief brought on by the sensation of foreign body heat seeping into her. She regretted once more that she couldn't bring her own cloak with her - what would she do tomorrow, when they were on the move?

"You don't have a lot of questions for someone who was spirited away."

Vica didn't turn her head to face him, looked at him out of the corner of her eye instead. "I'm shy. Forgive me." He must have been stunned momentarily by her brief impudence, because she could see him turn his head to stare at her with a blank expression on his face. Her pulse raced. She hadn't been rude, just a little sarcastic - surely he wouldn't harm her for that? She suddenly regretted not curbing her tongue. One could never be too nice to a killer, after all. Lesson learned.

His quick exhale of laughter made her start under his arm. "What's your name, mage?" he asked.

In that moment, Vica gave up on attempting to read the man and understand him. She was tired, and now that she was warm, she felt the fatigue crawling over her despite the circumstances. "Vica," she relented with a sigh. It didn't matter anyway. She had gone by various generic titles thus far in her travels, but not out of any true desire to hide her name.

"Vica." The man used his right hand to lightly brush away a firefly that decided to sit on his elevated knee. "Hm. Doesn't sound familiar. I thought for a second that you might be some runaway court magister, unless you're lying. Are you lying?" He looked over at her again.

The corners of Vica's mouth drew back in a wide frown. "Vica's my name," she repeated, suddenly irritated by his dismissive response and the subsequent sinking realization from his words that he, too, had no idea why he had been tasked with capturing her. "I don't mean anything to anyone. I'm still of the mind that you've caught the wrong person." Hope springs eternal, Vica thought privately, but maybe this was still a possibility.

"Sorry, Vica, no chance of that." The man mock-fondly squeezed her with the arm around her shoulder. "There's no one for me but you."

"Does this normally work out for you?"

"Does what?"

"Trying to charm your marks." Vica pinned her  stone-dead gaze on the man's lazy grin. "Don't pretend that's not what you're doing. And don't ask if that means I'm charmed." Somehow, her reminder to herself that she needed to seem affable and cooperative had evaporated into the night.

"No, I was just going to say that I don't typically charm corpses."

And then just like that, Vica stilled again at the sudden reminder that the man wrapped around her was not a good man. Something she had said had brushed his nerve after all, if he felt compelled to remind her of it so abruptly. She sensed him observing her acutely, could almost feel his eyes as they searched for something in her face. She held herself as rigidly as she could under his stare, and then he finally turned his face away, apparently fully satisfied by what he had ended up finding.

"Hey," he added softly. "My name is Constantine."