Fateful Summons ~Nona~

[ashara]

She had been training, practicing making the dagger meet target when it came. The youngest of the Rashad family had rushed up to her, a little taller now than he had been when she had first met him, and stopped her swinging hand midway at the urgency in his voice. “Adela!” He had cried, violently startling amidst the calm and clarity that she usually felt while in the training grounds. Adela, while lacking in general sensibilities, knew a tired, slightly frantic boy when she saw one, and so she sat him down.

 

Neatly tucking the daggers in, she had waited beside him, more than just curious at what had brought him to her. For a moment he simply sat, and Adela knew then, as the impatience inside her bubbled and festered, that she would never have a child. Having children meant being a good mother, and all she wanted to do now was to shake the lad out of his state and ask him his cause of frenzy. And that was hardly matronly, she thought. He did speak though, words mingling with sweat that came coursing down his cheeks and past his lips.

 

A summons! exclaimed the little boy, panting as he explained. Nona had sought him out, telling him to bring her Adela, quickly. He mentioned with a fervent nod her promise for a cookie and some milk, but Adela couldn’t laugh. Without much thought about the feelings of the boy, she demanded brusquely where Nona was and set off without a word of farewell. Nona had never called for her like this, but there was no doubt that it was Nona who had called him. If this was some fool trying to trick her into wasting a day of wholesome training, he or she would pay, dearly. Daggers weren’t always the best option of course. Before she had known weapon, she had known poison. And before that, she had known words. So yes, the person would be sorry. Quickly skimming through the directions the boy had given, Adela began to make her way to Nona.

 

~Adela Llafynne

 

OOC: I don't think we decided details of where, or how the idea where Nona's been caught occurred, so I've been painfully vague, sorry. Hope this works!

[silhouette]

“Blood and Ashes!” Norena Doronas ground out as she threw a poisoned dagger at the wall of her private kitchen. The gall. The bloody, mindless gall that that wretch had shown. She glanced at the dagger, seeing that it stuck to the wall right where she’d imagined his throat. If she could get her hands on him, he would be dead already. Unfortulately, she couldn’t get within a mile radius of him without being spotted. He’d seen her face and he’d spread the words among his men and now she was supposed to do as he wished or else… or else he would take her to the nearest magistrate to have her hanged as a murderer. And the worst part was that he had proof.

 

Of course that was where it had all gone wrong. She had always been so careful, and yet… living at the Rashad ranch had given her a false sense of security. That was always where things went wrong. She had gotten careless, and now that blighted son of a whore had figured out what was up. “Mercenaries.” She ground out, looking as if she smelt a dead rat. “Bloody mercenaries.” The price he had asked for his silence was reasonable. For now. She knew how this worked. First he would ask only the reasonable things, and she would pay them, thinking she got off easily. Then the demands would get harder to fulfil, and harder and harder until finally she ended up not paying, and then he’d betray her.

 

Which was why she had no intention of paying her in the first place. Even as she prepared a little package for a little killer, Adela appeared in the doorway to the hidden basement of their little house. “Ah, there you are.” Nona breathed, looking relieved to see her surrogate daughter. “I need to ask something of you, and I doubt you’ll want to hear it. Still, there is no other way.” She waved over to one of the stools by the workbench. “Please, do sit.”

 

“There was a man in a town not far from here. He was an old man, who shared the same alliances as we did, until he came close to death. Then his mind filled with doubt, and he sought to redeem himself in the eyes of the light by betraying some of his closest allies. One of those was Nathan Rashad.” Nathan, the man who had offered them a home and a safe haven. “Needless to say that when Nathan got word of it, he sent someone to prevent it. That someone was me. I do still believe I was careful enough, but through some bad luck, someone discovered that his death wasn’t as natural as he had been lead to believe.”

 

Her lips pressed together in a hard line. “He contacted me in the village, today. He and his men. Said that he would bring me before a magistrate, unless I pay him money to silence him. This is out of the question. I would have killed him there and then, but he had his men watching me the entire time. He knows what I look like. His men know what I look like. I can’t come close enough to him to kill him.” And that was where they got to the part where Adela would have to prove her worth. “I need you to do it for me.”

 

~Nona Doronas

poison chef.

 

[ashara]

She had coursed her way along well trodden paths, wearing an impassive face that now came much as easily as her habit of pushing her hair away from her face when she was nervous. Directions were hardly needed to head back to the house that she recognised as home now, but the boy’s words would not shy away from her mind, nay, instead his voice would take it as obligation to run through her mind without a single pause, a moment’s pity where she could’ve sought out clarity and sifted through the haystack for the much desired needle. Panic was not something that was going to help her achieve much, but it had clouded her thinking the moment the boy had come panting. And severe dislike for being kept in the dark, or ‘out of the blue’ was not providing much assistance on the matter either. If Nona was truly worried, would she have sent a boy to fetch her? Or was it because she was so anxious that she had picked the most unlikely messenger? It was not the first time that Adela felt like she needed to get away from the Ranch. Her thinking, her beliefs…the pressure made her head hurt. Indeed, she could not say she had seen anything of the world so far except that out of a child’s eyes when she had lived with her parents.

 

It was with such musing that she had headed through the door, to find the cottage seemingly empty. To a stranger things could’ve seemed very much in order, Adela supposed. The vitalising smell of freshly baked goodies, scrumptious delights that had often kept Adela watching her near nonexistent curves was there of course, which for the most part was what the average visitor linked to Nona as is. However, for someone who Nona had filled the gaping hole of ‘mother’, the situation was concerning. Nona was a methodical baker and chef, a woman Adela admired especially because of her ruthless understanding that things could never be left half-done. Taking in the scattered bowls on the left, or perhaps the idle, careless manner in which the wooden spatula had been left used…

 

Brief seconds frozen into past as realization dawned on her, her footsteps were lighter than usual as she made her way to the last level of their cottage. If someone was in there with Nona, to Nona’s discomfort, things could be finished quickly, or things could become very very tricky to deal with. Adela knew that it depended most of all on Nona and it was why she tiptoed down, clinging to the walls as she waited for sound from below to kick in. Upon hearing Nona’s loud curse though, she felt relieved. Alone. Angry. Not bothering to cover her steps any longer, she quickened her pace. “I’m here!” she called out as she stepped into the basement. When Nona turned to face her, Adela knew that there was little to do but nod for the next few minutes, perhaps hours, so she took the offered seat without any dispute. Although a few possibilities had been scratched off the list, there was still too much she didn’t know.

 

It was not unexpected, the way the facts were being uncovered. Nona had gone for several of these jobs before for Nathan and Adela had learnt early on that what she did was as necessary for the comfort and security the two of them had now as her responsibility as the cook of the ranch. However, never before had she seen Nona so restless before, certainly never about something like this. These were the skills that Nona would’ve listed as secret, would it be that there would come a time that such knowledge was forced out of her. And secret or not, these were skills that had never failed her mother, as far as Adela knew. She listened uneasily, thinking rapidly over what help she could give Nona. Perhaps they could enlist the help of another? Adela herself would go and demand Master Rashad’s help. He owed Nona this, whether or not she was under his service. Surely Nathan would not consider accepting the loss of a talented Assassin such as Nona? The thought angered her. Why, she would…

 

“I need you to do it for me.”

 

She looked up, straight into eyes Adela knew had been watching her all through. So this was why, this had been the cause. After so many months of consistent refusal, after Kane Trahil, after meetings and learning under a variety of faces and names…this was the moment that made all other times akin to the dry autumn leaf that got stepped on, making a resounding crunch as it was. “Just tell me where and who he is.”

 

~Adela Llafynne

Little killer

 

OOC: I think I'll do this next bit on my own so there's no need to post! I'll poke you when I write out the actual killing and have Adela report back to Nona. :)