Assassin's Creed: Unity

D
ARK
C
ORNERS

He had a thin face framed by a spill of almost pure white hair, looking like a dandyish but down-at-the-heel doctor in his long black cape and tall shabby hat, the ruff of a shirt spilling over his collar.

He carried a doctor’s bag that he placed to the ground and opened with one hand, all without taking his eyes off us as he took something from it, something long and curved.

Then he smiled and drew the dagger from its sheath, and it gleamed wickedly in the dark.

“Stay close, Élise,” whispered Mother. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

I believed her because I was an eight-year-old girl and of course I believed my mother. But also because having seen her with the wolf, I had good reason to believe her.

Even so, fear nibbled at my insides.

“What is your business, monsieur?” she called levelly.

He made no answer.

“Very well. Then we shall return to where we came from,” said Mother loudly, taking my hand and about to depart.

At the alley entrance a shadow flickered and a second figure appeared in the orange glow of the lantern. It was a lamplighter; we could tell by the pole he carried. Even so, Mother stopped.

“Monsieur,” she called to the lamplighter cautiously, “I wonder if I might ask you to call off this gentleman bothering us?”

The lamplighter said nothing, going instead to where the lamp burned and raising his pole. Mama started, “Monsieur . . .” and I wondered why the man would be trying to light a lamp that was already lit and realized too late that the pole had a hook on the end—the hook that they used for dousing the flame of the candle inside.

“Monsieur . . .”

The entrance was plunged into darkness.

Ace titles by Oliver Bowden

ASSASSIN’S CREED: RENAISSAN
CE

ASSASSIN’S CREED:
BROTHERHOOD

ASSASSIN
’S CREED: THE SECRET
CRUSADE

ASSASSIN’S CREED: REV
ELATIONS

ASSASSIN’S
CREED: FORSAKEN

ASSASSIN’S CR
EED: BLACK FLAG

ASSAS
SIN’S CREED: UNITY

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ASSASSIN’S CREED® UNITY

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with Penguin Books, Ltd.

Copyright © Ubisoft Entertainment 2014. All rights reserved. Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft, and the Ubisoft logo are trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18924-9

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Ace premium edition / December 2014

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

12 S
EPTEMBER
1794

On my desk lies her journal, open to the first page. It was all I could read before a flood tide of emotion took my breath away and the text before me was splintered by the diamonds in my eyes. Tears had coursed down my cheeks as thoughts of her returned to me: the impish child, racing through the hallways of the great Palace of Versailles; the firebrand I came to know and love in adulthood, tresses of red hair across her shoulders, eyes intense beneath dark and lustrous lashes. She had the balance of the expert dancer and the master swordsman. She was as comfortable gliding across the floor of the palace beneath the desirous eye of every man in the room as she was in combat.

But behind those eyes lay secrets. Secrets I was about to discover. I pick up her journal once again, wanting to place my palm and fingertips to the page, caress the words, feeling that on this page lies part of her very soul.

I begin to read.

9 A
PRIL
1778

i

My name is Élise de la Serre. My father is François, my mother Julie, and we live in Versailles: glittering, beautiful Versailles, where neat buildings and grand châteaus reside in the shadow of the great palace, with its lime-tree avenues, its shimmering lakes and fountains, its exquisitely tended topiary.

We are nobles. The lucky ones. The privileged. For proof we need only take the fifteen-mile road into Paris. It is a road lit by overhanging oil lamps, because in Versailles we use oil lamps, but in Paris the poor use tallow candles, and the smoke from the tallow factories hangs over the city like a death shroud, dirtying the skin and choking the lungs. Dressed in rags, their backs hunched either with the weight of their physical burden or of mental sorrow, the poor people of Paris creep through streets that never seem to get light. The streets stream with open sewers, where mud and human effluent flow freely, coating the legs of those who carry our sedan chairs as we pass through, staring wide-eyed out the windows.

Later we take gilded carriages back to Versailles and pass figures in the fields, shrouded in mist like ghosts. These barefooted peasants tend noble land and starve if the crop is bad, virtual slaves of the landowners. At home I listen to my parents’ tales of how they must stay awake to swish sticks at frogs whose croaking keeps landowners awake; how they must eat grass to stay alive; how the nobles are exempt from paying taxes, excused from military service and spared the indignity of the
corvée
, a day’s unpaid labor working on the roads.

My parents say Queen Marie Antoinette roams the hallways, ballrooms and vestibules of the palace dreaming up new ways to spend her dress allowance while her husband King Louis XVI lounges on his
lit de justice
, passing laws that enrich the lives of nobles at the expense of the poor and starving. They talk darkly of how these actions might foment revolution.

My father had certain “associates.” His advisers, Messieurs Chretien Lafrenière, Charles Gabriel Sivert, and Madame Levesque. “The Crows,” I called them, with their long black coats, dark felt hats and eyes that never smiled.

“Have we not learned the lessons of the Croquants?” says my mother.

Mother had told me about the Croquants, of course. Those peasant revolutionaries of two centuries ago.

“It would appear not, Julie,” Father replies.

There is an expression to describe the moment you suddenly understand something that had previously been a mystery to you. It is the moment when “the penny drops.”

As a small child, it never occurred to me to wonder why I learned history, not etiquette, manners and poise; I didn’t question why Mother joined Father and the Crows after dinner, her voice raised in disagreement to debate with as much force as they ever did; I never wondered why she didn’t ride sidesaddle, nor why she never needed a groom to steady her mount, and I never wondered why she had so little time for fashion or court gossip. Not once did I think to ask why my mother was not like other mothers.

Not until the penny dropped.

ii

She was beautiful, of course, and always well dressed though she had no time for the manner of finery worn by the women at court, of whom she would purse her lips and talk disapprovingly. According to her they were obsessed with looks, status, with
things
.

“They wouldn’t know an idea if it hit them between the eyes, Élise. Promise me you’ll never end up like them.”

Intrigued and wanting to know more about how I should never end up, I used my vantage point at the hem of Mother’s skirt to spy on these hated women. What I saw were overpowdered gossips who pretended they were devoted to their husbands even as their eyes roamed the room over the rims of their fans, looking for unsuspecting lovers to snare. Unseen, I would glimpse behind the powdered mask, when the scornful laughter dried on their lips and the mocking look died in their eyes. I’d see them for what they really were, which was frightened. Frightened of falling out of favor. Of slipping down the society ladder.

Mother was not like that. For one thing she couldn’t have cared less about gossip. And I never saw her with a fan, and she hated powder, and she had no time whatsoever for charcoal beauty spots and alabaster skin, her sole concession to fashion being shoes. Otherwise, what attention she gave her comportment was for one reason and one reason only: to maintain decorum.

And she was absolutely devoted to my father. She stood by him—at his side, though, never behind him—she supported him, was unswervingly loyal to him, backing him in public even though behind closed doors they would debate and I would hear her cooling his temper.

It’s been a long time, though, since I last heard her debating with Father.

They say she may die tonight.