and if she leads
Pairing: Altaïr & Maria (platonic) Word count: 2028
Discovering he’s kind is the worst mistake of Maria’s life.
Hating them, disdaining them, has been easy especially after Robert’s death. She bore no undue fondness for the man, an ass who paid her no favors and only brought her on because her wages cost less than a man’s, but he had given her opportunity where no one else would. Continuing his grudge was easy tribute.
“Here.”
She looks up, hands already forming fists, to see the Assassin offering out a waterskin.
“You haven’t drunk anything and your face is” — he fans his fingers across his face as if to indicate a flush — “red. You need to drink.”
“I’m fine,” she snaps.
“Drink it,” he insists. “You’ll be ill.”
She takes it from him mostly to get it out of her face and scowls for good measure. Her face feels hot as a fire iron, dry and cracking from the heat in this cargo hold.
“I don’t need you babysitting me,” she snaps in Arabic, “and I speak your tongue better than you speak French.”
He doesn’t protest but only holds his hands up in placation and takes the skin back when she’s done. They sit in silence a long while, only broken by the sway of the ship and the slosh of waves against its sides. The Assassin seems unbothered, his arms resting over his knees and eyes half-lidded as if dozing. She doesn’t share his patience, and watching him only makes irritation crawl up her spine like spiders’ legs.
“What are you running from?” she asks at last.
“I am not running from anything,” he retorts.
Raising an eyebrow, she looks pointedly to the dismal cargo hold. No one chooses to travel in such accommodations unless they’re desperate. The barrels lashed to the floor groan with the swaying of the ship, scraping against each other with tired whines.
“I’m looking for something,” the Assassin finally mutters, grudging.
He doesn’t offer any more or ask what she’s running from, and so the swaying silence settles in again. It isn’t any more welcome the second time around, and Maria tilts her head back against the wall to keep from smacking her forehead into it just to relieve the tedium. She’s never been one for sitting still, for waiting for something rather than reaching out and making it happen herself. Growing up, her mother berated her for her lack of patience and her bullheadedness, as if reprimands could reshape what nature wrought.
“Is is true your leader is a prophet favored by old gods?”
That earns a sound almost like a laugh from the Assassin, a snort that is equal parts amused and tired. Running a hand back over his hair, he drops his white hood to his shoulders and leans his head against the wall in a mirror of her pose.
“I do not feel like a prophet,” he remarks, quiet, “nor favored by any gods.”
With his face out of the shadow of his hood, he looks surprisingly young and his answer stops Maria short. Even with tired shadows under his eyes and the whisper of stubble along his cheeks and jaw, he looks young. Far too young to be the Old Man of the mountain. He cannot be much older than her, if any at all, and the stories of the Assassins’ leader stretch far into antiquity.
“You?” she demands. “But the stories are of an old man, a long white beard — you cannot be the great Mentor of the Assassins.”
His lips twist, displeasure in their curl.
“He was old,” is all he says.
A sneer curls Maria’s lips before she can think better of it. Haste has ever been her saving grace and downfall all tied together.
“So that’s it,” she says. “You killed the old man for glory and ambition, to steal his own seat. How base of you, to turn like animals against your master.”
“There was no glory in it,” he snaps, straightening. “I did not do it for ambition.”
He’s straightened, turned toward her with jaw tight and amber eyes hard. His hands have tensed to fists, and she half expects that wrist-borne dagger to jut forth and cut her throat for the asking. Lifting her chin in challenge, she meets his stormy glare with her own. He looks away first, turning sharply from her and pulling his knees back close to his chest. His shoulders are still tense, hiked up, and he flicks his hood over his head once more with a sharp gesture.
It’s not like she cares what he thinks or what his motivations really are, but Maria can’t swallow down the strange guilt that worms up her chest. His fury seemed genuine, lashing out as if to protect an open wound. She doesn’t care about him, but it still feels wrong to have probed a hurt like that with so little finesse. He’s a far cry from a gentleman, but in all their interactions, he’s seemed an honest man. It seems unfair to have questioned that so rudely.
“Was he your father?” she asks after a moment, trying at a gentler tone.
The Assassin exhales, short, and doesn’t answer immediately. There isn’t any surprise on what she can see of his face, though, only the tight-lipped look of someone unsure of the right answer. That, more than what he says, gives her the answer she sought.
“No.”
Close enough to one, though, if she judges right. That hesitance didn’t come from an easy answer. Lacing her fingers together, she toys with the ring on her middle finger and lets her questions die. It was a gift from Robert, a token from a man she killed for him. It’s morbid, perhaps, but it was the first time he commended her for something other than simply not being in the way.
“Why did you join the Templars?”
The question startles her, pulls her gaze from the past to the Assassin instead. He watches her, patient, the temper gone out of his posture and expression. He doesn’t look any happier, either, just — blank. There’s a coldness to his expression, a mask of impassivity. He can’t have scrubbed the fatigue from his features, but he seems to have found some way to coil it into armor, that earlier vulnerability bound tightly away.
“I was looking for something,” she replies, dry, before sighing and releasing the ring to interlace her fingers. “Back in England, I was expected to be a — a very specific image of a lady. To dress well, to mind my tongue, to bear sons for my husband. I wanted something else.”
“And did you find it here?” he asks.
He sounds genuinely interested, as if he’s truly asking for the answer rather than just to be nosey or needling. Seeking an answer to his own search? she wonders but doesn’t ask aloud.
“Yes,” she answers truthfully, “in a way.”
The life she’s lived here in this desert land has been rough and bloody, rarely honorable and never glorious. Still, it’s given her freedom, raw-fingered and dirty as it is. She thinks back to England, to the girl she was on her wedding day, and knows that that girl would be proud of the bared-teeth grin she sports now instead of a bridal veil.
“And you? I hear the Assassins recruit from cradles,” she says, trying not to make it sound like she’s provoking him. “Or did you join of your own will?”
“There is always choice,” he says, as though it’s an automatic response.
Dropping his head back against the wall, he tilts it to one side as if in thought. He’s quiet a moment, though she’s starting to get used to these pauses. Before now, she would not have called him a thoughtful man, but then, she hardly knows him at all.
“I was born to the Brotherhood and joined when I was of age — some years out of the cradle, at least.” He shoots her a look, half-teasing, before carrying on, “But I have chosen this life.”
If she was looking for any answer in particular, that wasn’t it. She doesn’t know what would be. It seems too mild, too settled an answer for a bloody young leader chasing the unknown as a stowaway. Perhaps she is more romantic than she wants to admit.
“So you believe your Order is right, then?” she asks.
“Yes,” he answers before pausing. “I believe that we carve the path to truth, and that the path is as fallible as the men who make it but the pursuit of freedom, of truth, is worth the errors. Plato himself believed in the pursuit, even within his—”
“What, are you a monk now?” Maria demands
She’s heard strange tales of the Assassins, but never that they would wax poetic about dead men’s beliefs. The stories around them were ever of the mystical and bloody sort, about their ability to vanish from thin air and reappear in places no man could reach. Magicians, she would not be surprised by, but scholars?
Now, the assassin pauses, looking surprised. The bemusement on his face is enough to make her almost laugh, and she stifles the smile that threatens her lips.
“You do not care for philosophy?” he asks, in the same tone as someone shocked that she does not like fish or incense.
“For the thoughts of long-dead men who believed all the answers of the universe were contained in their own minds?” She scoffs. “Show me one who did something with those grand thoughts, made some real change in the world, or better yet, show me a woman, and perhaps I will care for it.”
He stops short, seeming to process her words before relenting with a slight inclination of his head, something like concession in the gesture. Amused, Maria offers out her hand.
“My name’s Maria, by the way,” she says, “Maria Thorpe.”
He cants his head, eyeing her hand as if uncertain of the gesture. Instead of shaking her hand, he clasps her forearm instead, hand firm even if his attitude isn’t.
“Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad,” he replies, releasing the hold.
By now, she’s become used to the descriptiveness of the names here, and her eyebrows rise slightly at his own. How handy of their titles to provide such information, though she does wonder at the thought of an orphan being made a leader of his people.
“I’m sorry about what I said earlier about you,” she says, folding her arms over her knees, “and your French isn’t really that bad.”
“It is fine. Your Arabic is” — he pauses, wiggles his hand as if in ambivalence — “passable.”
Startled, she looks to him sharply and finds a grin pulls up the corner of his lips, curling the pink scar cutting through them. The start of her irritation fades, irrationally won over by something like amusement. She probably deserves it, anyway.
As the ship docks and they separate to steal onto land, she has a feeling a bookmark has been placed in this conversation, that the final chapter is not yet written. Despite her better judgment, she likes the thought.
---
“Aristoclea!” he calls the next time they meet.
She freezes with one hand on the top rung of the ladder and twists around to squint at him. Is he having some sort of attack? Is it a code for a band of assassins to trap or kill her? He’s two arms’ lengths below her, scaling the wall instead of the ladder like some overgrown spider.
“What?” she demands.
“A female philosopher, who did more than sit and talk,” he says, leveling with her. “The teacher of Pythagoras.”
Before she can form a reply, his quick hand has snatched the Piece of Eden from hers, and he hauls himself over the edge of the roof with a single fluid roll. Before he’s fully on the roof, his feet are under him and propelling him forward. She scrambles after him, irritated at being duped, but she can’t fight the smile pulling at her lips. Even without seeing his face, she knows he wears a matching one as they race across the rooftops.
