Epilogue

So then it's done. The last few words written on a piece of parchment. The ink blots, leaving an ugly puddle smeared across the parchment. Enough ink to drown in. The tips of my fingers and the blade of my writing hand are stained with it. In the dying light, a man might mistake it for blood.

I place my hand atop the manuscript and think of burning it. Of taking the whole lot and throwing it straight into the fire. It might be better that way.

The candle gutters. Darkness swarms across my vision like a flock of ravens. I close my tired eyes, rub at them in the hope my vision clears. Usually this works, but less and less quickly these days.

My own fault.

I work too late into the night, snatching what sleep I can. There are nights when I don't go to bed at all, because the journey from my private chambers to Millona's seems insurmountable and I cannot bear my only alternative: returning to an empty bed. I'd rather not sleep at all.

I knew the price I'd pay, the price the Elder Scroll would almost certainly exact. Moth Priests study for decades to learn the art of reading the Scrolls, and still blindness is inevitable.

I paid that price, and willingly. I would have paid it a thousandfold for my freedom and to have my family back.

I drop my hands and I'm still blind, my world one of pitch darkness. I rub at my eyes again, then turned my head towards the candle. There I see the faintest glint of light through the shadows.

Not blind. Not yet, thank the gods. I'm not ready. I haven't spent nearly enough time committing every detail of Millona's face and body to memory.

"Corvus?"

Millona's soft voice makes me start. My hand knocks against the glass of water and upsets it. I curse and make a grab for it, fumble across the table, trying to make it look like I'm only clumsy from lack of sleep, and not like a man who's going blind. Still, even after everything, my first instinct is to lie.

"You startled me."

"Sorry."

"How long were you there?" I asked, smiling. My voice is as casual as I can make it.

She doesn't answer, and in her silence lies her reply: long enough. She approaches and rights the glass. My vision is clearing already. I can see her now, and my relief intensifies with every sharpening detail. Her face, although blurred, is still lovely, and, in supplication, I turn my face towards her, like a plant following the sun. She slides between my legs, and kisses my forehead. "How bad is it?"

I sighed. Useless to think I could ever deceive her for long. "It comes and goes. Usually it's not too bad..."

"Is it getting worse?"

I was about to lie. I held it ready on the tip of my tongue, the lie that wasn't exactly a lie, just the truth reframed. But she'd been watching me. "Yes."

She nodded slowly and caught hold of my hand. "Come to bed. It's late."

"I didn't want to wake you."

"These days what wakes me is an empty bed."

She says it lightly, but there's a audible depth of pain in her voice. I let her take my hand and pull me up, and then it's easy to slip my arm around her waist, sliding my hand over the silk of her robe. Her hair is loosely plaited for bed, and I think, as I let her lead me to her chamber, that I'll soon have that unbound and kiss away the pain as best I can.

"It's finished," I say. "My tale."

Which isn't exactly true.

I am starting to realise that it will never be finished. I'd touched on her story – the Fox who preceded me – but the truth was I'd barely scratched the surface, and before her there were many others, all with their own stories to tell. I could write non-stop for ten years and never tell them all.

Her name was Julia Juranius. She was Imperial, a Heartlander, born in Weye to a wealthy family. Her father's father had indeed made their fortunes in the wine trade, but her father was a profligate wastrel and he wasted much of his inheritance on gambling and bad investments. Still, she grew up wealthy. I'd been right about that.

I'll never know the truth of how she came to join the Dark Brotherhood – the why's and the hows. I could keep looking, but I'm wary of prodding too hard into that nest of vipers, and the truth is it doesn't matter. What matters is why she left, and why she spent the rest of her life hiding from them. It's in their tenets: their hollow god-thing doesn't look too kindly on those who, rather than killing their contracts, fall in love with them instead. And this contract was a powerful man, who'd already made up his mind to destroy the Dark Brotherhood and wipe it from the face of Cyrodiil. He paid the price for that.

He was a good man. Lex talks about him sometimes, after I've managed to get an ale or two down his neck and he's loosened up as much as a man like Lex can ever loosen up. Lex will always be a serious sort, and he still feels awkward around me, even if his lingering feelings for Millona have ebbed. There's a warrior in the Fighters Guild he's got his eye on, and she cannot be entirely oblivious to his feelings since he blushes and stammers every time he sees her. I'll work on that as I work on him. In the absence of Armande and Min and with Brey back in the Imperial City mopping up the mess in the Mages' Guild, Lex is the closest thing I have to a friend in Anvil. I drink my spiced milk and try not to think about how much I want a bottle of ale instead.

They never quite saw eye to eye when Lex was in the Imperial City, but Adamus Phillida had his own reasons for wanting to protect the Thieves' Guild. Some lingering memory of his mistress, or Nocturnal's influence? Something else I'll never know. Lex respected him though, and mourns him deeply.

This is Julia's story as much as it is my own. It shames me how I've written about her, but as much as I have wanted to gloss over the details and conceal whatever it was between us – messy and passionate and ugly and loveless – lying about it feels wrong. And so I have set it down as best as I can remember, and I beg your forgiveness for that, my love.

This is for you, Millona. This whole blasted tale has been for you.

I promised you once I'd tell you the truth, and this is as close as I think I can get, even if throughout I have had to pretend I am writing for a stranger. Even if I am terrified of how you will react when you read it. Even though I fear it will destroy our shaky reconciliation beyond repair.

In bed you shift against me, murmur in protest as my hand slides over your tender breasts. I murmur an apology into the curve of your shoulder, into skin which tastes of sweat and the salt-brine tang of the sea air. And down my hand slides to the swell of your belly, and a gnawing fear grows in my heart.

I never told you this but when my champion first brought me the Elder Scroll, I didn't come straight to Anvil. Instead I rode as fast as I could to Nocturnal's shrine near Leyawiin, changing horses at every Waystation and avoiding Oblivion gates along the way.

(I was lucky. The only incident was an encounter with a bandit inexplicably dressed in glass armour and wielding a daedric battleaxe too heavy for him to use.)

Already then the situation was ugly, with public tolerance for daedra worshipping heretics as threadbare as a corpse-shroud. The worshippers were suspicious of strangers, but I was a shadow and they let me try to commune with her. She didn't speak to me, but I think she watched me, and the weight of the Elder Scroll on my back grew heavier with every passing moment. Behind me, ravens and crows and rooks crowded the branches of a tree, and their cawing sounded like laughter.

She let me go.

I wasn't sure then, but I am certain now. She let me leave. But more than that: I cannot shake the lingering suspicion that this is what she'd planned for me all alone. Perhaps it goes back even further than that, to Emer Dareloth himself. The first Gray Fox, the one whose shadows we have all been, and a master thief in the truest sense of the world. It's arguable which is the greatest feat, to steal an Elder Scroll from the White-Gold Tower or to steal from a Daedric Lord, but while I stole only to save myself, he did it for the sheer joy of it. He stole for no other reason than because he could.

If he was to appear now in front of me I'm not sure if I'd buy him a drink or punch him in the face.

The trick to manipulating a man is to offer him what he wants most in his heart. To be a master thief and pull off the greatest heist in history. To be loved, to have a wife, a family. To cradle your child in your arms.

Eight months along, and the world has changed. The changes are staggering, almost beyond belief. The end of the Septim bloodline. The implosion of the Mages' Guild. The mess in Morrowind after the recall of the Legions. It's revealed an ugly face of the Empire, showing that our protection is only extended until the Heartland is at risk, and then we find out what really matters. I've barely noticed, and I know I should have. I have been lost in this story, as I was once lost in shadows.

I wasn't expecting the people of Anvil to be so ready to forgive me. Plenty of vile lies have been spoken about me, and much that wasn't lies at all, but never from the people of Anvil. It's almost as if they know the truth of it. Perhaps it's because they love you so dearly and cannot fathom that anyone could feel differently. Regardless, I'm grateful to them for accepting me back. It wouldn't matter if they hadn't, but I know how much harder it would have made things for you if they took against me.

This is all I ever wanted, Millona, to be at your side. To be as good a husband as I can ever be, given the circumstances. To lie behind you, with my hand on your belly, feeling our child kick so fiercely your entire belly lists to one side like a ship beached on hidden shoals.

If you decide, after reading this history, that you would prefer to cast me off, at least I'll have given you a child. I know it's not nearly enough to make up for everything I've done, but it's something at least. I think of all the children we have lost, the ones who never had a chance, and I'll never know if that was simply chance or the sign that I was being manipulated even back then. I was afraid at first, in case this one would go the way of all the others, but you never were.

And here's the truth of it: I too believe this child will be brought to term. Martin if it's a boy, of course – there will be a plague of Martins on this province over the coming years – and, if it's a girl, after my thief who delivered me from my curse.

But there are the other times, when I place my hand on your belly and can't breathe for the rising mass of fear billowing up inside me. When the pulsing of my blood in my ears sounds like the beating of wings. When all I can see are shadows and the shrine of Nocturnal, that bitch who's twisted and manipulated my life as far back as I can remember.

And I think that maybe this was what she wanted all along. Not me. Not the arrogant selfish thieving little shit who always assumed the world revolved around him, but the child growing in your belly.

I see many things a great deal clearly now. Ironic really, given that I'm going blind.

I may be wrong. I pray to all the gods I am.

But this I swear: I will do my damndest to protect you. You and our child and any children that follow. I love you, Millona, more than the world. You are my heart and my lodestar.

When I was lost, it was you who guided me home.