Chapter Text
Enoch Van Markham arrived in Kirkwall a week after the letter had come to Ansburg through not sleeping enough, eating in the saddle, and changing horses on the post road at every opportunity. It also helped that people who used the Marches’ post road knew to get out of the way when a courier-horse came charging down the middle of the path.
They did it even faster when they saw that it wasn’t a courier-horse, but a mounted Warden. The Marches’ Wardens were not known for being seen outside of Ansburg, and stories of the Fifth Blight were still a fresh memory. A Warden galloping flat-out was a man on a mission of vital importance for all of Thedas.
Thank the Maker that the city guard knew where the Fereldan Wardens were staying, otherwise he would have had to scour the city, and lose precious time.
The elf who answered the door looked surprised to see his armor.
“Warden-Constable Enoch Van Markham of the Free Marches,” he introduced herself when she continued just standing there. “Ansburg received a letter from Warden-Commander Mahariel, and I am here to answer it.”
“I- all right,” she said. “You can come in? I’ll go see if he’s up for visitors.”
That sounded bad. That sounded very bad.
The mansion was clean, but it had a newly-scrubbed look about it. It was underfurnished, but even the addition of more couches or tables or chairs wouldn’t get rid of the obvious signs of wear and neglect. Enoch was struck by the curious feeling of walking into the home of a group of meticulous squatters, determined to offset their utter poverty by upholding it to an acceptable standard.
He’d better not say that out loud. But still, it was strange that they were so obviously making-do rather than staying with any of Kirkwall’s eminent families, or even the city guard. The Warden-Commander was also the arl of what had been the best port city in Ferelden, after all.
Maybe that was it. This was a group of Fereldans led by a Dalish barbarian who’d torched his own best asset. Maybe they liked living like this, Maker only knew. He’d never had any desire to visit Ferelden. Coming to the Free Marches after growing up in the Nevarran nobility had been shock enough. At least the Free Marches were respectable. Ferelden was just a mudhole that subsisted on the delusion that they could fight the Orlesian Empire.
The formal dining room the elf took him to looked like the place where whoever had tried to clean this place had just given up. The table had been done, and the chairs, and the floor between the doors and the table; but rubble and broken furniture had been shoved up against the walls. He was left alone in this room for a good ten minutes, and ended up taking a chair even though the elf hadn’t bothered to offer one to him.
A human woman came to greet him eventually, all smiles and noble bearing and no hint of warrior about her, much less Warden.
“I am Lady Delilah Stockard of Amaranthine,” she told him, when he stood to take her hand and bow over it in the proper courtly fashion. “Our apologies for not being better hosts, but we’ve had an extremely trying week, and I’m afraid the people who would usually greet you took the worst of it.”
This woman kept saying ‘our’, even though she wasn’t a Warden. She’d said she was Lady of Amaranthine- or maybe just a Lady from the Arling of Amaranthine?- and Enoch hadn’t thought that the Grey Wardens of Ferelden had entrenched themselves so effectively.
“Forgive me,” he said, because he was here on Warden business that was only for the ears of Wardens, so he needed something else to talk to Lady Stockard about. “But I must confess myself unfamiliar with the Fereldan peerage system.”
“Few outside of Ferelden are,” Lady Stockard said graciously. “Our Queen sits at the top, naturally, and under her are the two Teyrns- well, one now- and the six Arls. Sworn to the Teyrns and Arls are many of the Banns. Other Banns rule as minor independent lords, sworn directly to the Queen and the Landsmeet. The Lords proper are few, landless, and sworn to Arls or Teyrns, given their titles for their service. Fereldan knights may be sworn to any of the nobility, or simply to their Order.”
Landless nobility. How marvelous. In Enoch’s experience and hear-say, those sorts were conniving, sycophantic bastards, always grasping at the chance to be raised into the true nobility.
“And what service do you provide for your Arl, Lady Stockard?”
She recognized the test in his wording. Her smile went just a little tight on the edges.
“I am to be Seneschal of Amaranthine,” she told him. “I will relieve the duty from my poor brother, who has been acting dually in that role and as Warden-Constable of Ferelden. He and a Senior Warden should be attending to you shortly.”
So she was competent enough at the Game. Not particularly elegant and rather too forthright- Fereldans!- but polite and effective at shutting a conversation down. She’d even naturally worked in the information that she was of roughly the same rank as him, considering only the Warden side of things, without being crass about it. It wasn’t that he’d honestly had any suspicions that the Warden-Commander of Ferelden was keeping her as his mistress; but one just did not meet a fellow member of the nobility and not determine their status relative to yours, on paper and in actuality.
When Lady Stockard’s brother and the Senior Warden arrived, Enoch was sure that they were having a joke at his expense. The taller, blond one couldn’t be older than his mid-twenties and the shorter, darker one was just maybe a couple of years older. Neither of these men were old enough for the positions they supposedly claimed- they were barely old enough to be Warden recruits!
It turned out that the dark one was Lady Stockard’s brother, Warden-Constable Howe; and the blond one was Warden-Captain Alistair of some place called Soldier’s Peak.
Maker and Andraste, what was the world coming to. What were they doing in Ferelden? A Senior Warden who was twenty-five if he was a day!
He was also taken off-balance by the fact that the Constable was ‘Howe’ and not ‘Stockard’. Strange that they wouldn’t share a surname. He’d thought that, since Lady Stockard was going to be Seneschal, the Stockard family was well-regarded. He would have said that her brother had married up and taken his wife’s surname, but Wardens didn’t marry. Maybe it was their mother’s family name, and he was making a point.
“Where’s your Commander?” he asked Constable Howe once his sister had left the room.
“Recovering,” Howe answered shortly. “We had a bad encounter with a Tevinter blood Magister earlier this week. He isn’t better yet.”
That was an honest relief. When that elf had said she’d go see if the Commander was up for visitors, he’d been sure she was helping to cover up an unnatural Calling.
“The good thing is that we figured out what the Taint source here was,” Captain Alistair said, and no, never mind, they’d clearly all been caught in the beginning stages of it. “A local financed a trip to the Deep Roads to look for treasure since the Blight cleaned out many of the tunnels closest to the surface. A member of the expedition brought back some Tainted lyrium without knowing what it was-”
“Excuse me,” Enoch interrupted. “Tainted lyrium?”
“Hey, we were surprised too. We only found a little bit of it thought. The rest of it was sold, and we don’t know to whom or to where.”
“It’s red,” Howe put in, “Simply physical proximity is enough to cause people to begin exhibiting signs of madness. It took nothing more than skin contact to convince one dwarf to abandon his brother in the Deep Roads so he could keep the red lyrium for himself. We found the remaining piece locked in a glass-lined iron box. It appears to work well enough.”
“That’s…” Enoch said. “That’s much better news than I feared.”
“What?” the Captain asked. “Ogres in the streets, ghouls haunting the estates, shrieks in the Chantry?”
“Don’t even joke about that!” he immediately reprimanded the entirely-too-young man. All of Kirkwall darkspawn- Maker. “Can’t you put two thoughts together! Or can’t you imagine the disaster that would be!”
The Captain’s face went stone-hard. It made him look significantly more suited to the title ‘Senior Warden’- not older, but someone who’d had true experience.
“I don’t have to imagine it,” he said, humor vanished. “I’m the other Warden who made it through the Blight. I saw what was left of our brothers and sisters at Ostagar. I’ve spent entirely too long in the Roads. I’ve seen a city overrun by darkspawn. I faced down the Archdemon.”
Enoch wasn’t sure if it was politic to apologize or not.
“In the Vimmark Mountains,” he told them instead. “There’s a tower that rises out of the Roads. It’s at least as magically fortified as Aeonar, and staffed entirely by Wardens. Inside it is imprisoned a talking, thinking darkspawn who claims to be one of the original Magisters who defiled the Golden City. If that’s the truth doesn’t matter much. It can imitate an Archdemon’s song, drawing in more darkspawn and nearby Wardens who aren’t prepared to stand against it. In Ages we have not been able to kill it. Only keep it trapped.”
“There are more talking darkspawn?” Howe asked, and Enoch had not thought that this could be worse. If they hadn’t heard of Vimmark Prison then they definitely hadn’t heard of the other ones which meant they only could have encountered one during the Blight, or in the Roads, roaming around free and causing trouble he didn’t even want to begin to contemplate.
“There are two other Warden prisons, in the Hunterhorn Mountains and the Hundred Pillars. We had thought that they remained unbreached but if we have been so deceived-”
“The Architect never said anything about Magisters,” Howe interrupted him. “And he’s dead, anyway. I helped kill him. He was part of the… ‘Thaw’, is the technical term, for right after a Blight is over? He was making darkspawn like him, capable of thought and speech, by having them drink Warden blood.”
If Enoch thought about that he was going to be sick.
“There was this whole civil war between darkspawn. It was… a strange experience.”
“And you’re certain it’s been taken care of?” Enoch asked.
“It’s been four years, and everything’s been quiet since.”
Maybe, just maybe, they’d gotten out of this one. But Enoch wasn’t sure it was ever a good idea to be optimistic when it came to darkspawn.
“Constable Van Markham?” Captain Alistair asked. “You said this darkspawn could draw in Wardens who were close by? How close by?”
“There’s a good reason why our headquarters is on the other side of the Marches,” Enoch told them. “Kirkwall is- I’m honestly surprised that you found an actual Taint source in the city. We don’t come here. Vimmark Prison is close enough that it always feels a little Tainted here.”
The Captain’s expression did an odd thing- he wasn’t sure if that was anger or just a reaction to a nasty surprise- as Howe muttered something about ‘can’t have been good for Anders’.
After a moment, the Captain slammed his hands down on the table and shouted: “Fuck this!”
“Um,” Enoch said.
The Captain stood, and his chair scraped loudly against the floor.
“Get up, Nathaniel, we’re leaving.”
“Alistair, we can’t just-”
“Maferath’s mercy we can! We don’t deserve this! This city is a Blighted cesspit of blood magic and corruption and we are going home. If we stay here this sodding prison is going to be the next thing to get us, and I’m not going to wait around and hope that it doesn’t happen! I’m not doing that to Theron, or Zevran, or Anders, or any of them; and I’d hope that you wouldn’t want to do this to your sister! I don’t care what ship it is, we’re getting on one out of here tonight! This is the last straw, Howe!”
Senior Wardens did not order their Constables around. Enoch waited for Howe to reprimand him, but either his Captain was just saying what he himself was thinking; or the Blight Warden got a lot of leeway because of his experience. But if that was true, why wasn’t the Captain Constable?
Fereldans were strange.
“Go tell everyone to pack up,” Howe told him after a moment. “I’ll see Constable Van Markham out and find us a ship.”
They hadn’t gotten a courier ship, which was just as well. Nathaniel had said that all the regular couriers between Kirkwall and the Fereldan coast were rather miffed at them for the way they’d kept cancelling their negotiated passages home. Instead they’d gotten berths on a merchant out of Rivain that started from Llomerryn, made a westward circuit around Antiva’s coastal cities, then bounced back and forth across the Waking Sea from Ostwick to Highever to Kirkwall to Jader to Cumberland to Val Chevin and Val Royeaux. She was on her way back to Llomerryn, and had been persuaded to make an extra stop in Amaranthine for a little more coin and his promise of no tariffs or port tax once they got there. No one from Llomerryn would pass up that sort of opportunity, and so the ship’s captain was quite happy to have them along in the empty space some of her sold cargo had once occupied.
Theron left Nathaniel and Delilah to discuss with the first mate the sort of goods on sale in Amaranthine- apparently news of the arling’s new mines hadn’t really left Ferelden, and the first mate thought that he could convince his captain to speculate on some Amaranthine granite and silverite ore. While they secured a little bit of the arling’s financial future, Theron went looking for Zevran.
He was up in the rigging, and Theron stood on the deck looking up at him for quite some time before one of the sailors offered to go get him down.
“Thank you, but only if he wants to.”
He wondered if Zevran was thinking about Isabela. Theron had extended invitations to her, Merrill, and Fenris to come back to Amaranthine with them, but Fenris was the only one who had accepted. Theron hadn’t really been expecting Merrill to come along, since she had Marian, but he still missed her. Zevran was probably feeling the same about his old friend.
Theron wasn’t actually sure why Isabela hadn’t come along. He’d gotten the impression that she’d stayed in Kirkwall too long for her liking, but her business was her business. He’d made sure that she knew that she was welcome to come visit and not pressed for an explanation.
Still, he wished she had come. She clearly made Zevran happy, and- he really needed that right now. Ever since he’d woken up, he’d been distant and pensive, entirely unlike himself. And he wouldn’t talk about it, and wouldn’t say why.
Theron couldn’t get him to smile. He wasn’t sure that Zevran had been sleeping, either, and that made panic flutter in his gut. What if Merrill hadn’t worked it out as well as she thought she had, what if he was still-
The sailor who’d gone up into the rigging reported that Zevran didn’t want to come down. So Theron left, and hoped that he’d come to bed tonight.
They’d docked in Highever for the day when Zevran came to see him. Anders had been wondering if and when he would.
“Do mages dream of demons?” he asked.
“Often enough,” Anders told him. “Not all the time. They usually only target those very strong in magic, or those very weak- naturally, or through exhaustion; and also those in fragile emotional or mental states.”
Zevran’s expression didn’t change, but there was a little flare of hatred in his eyes. Anders remembered the morning he’d come in to breakfast covered in the previous night’s blood, and told himself not to flinch.
“How do you sleep?” Zevran demanded.
They were down in the hold. Anders had been staying out of sight of the crew out of habit. He’d almost broken himself of the low-level anxiety that came from not having somewhere to hide while with the Wardens, but then Caron had come and then he’d been in Kirkwall and Kirkwall was almost nothing but hiding. He knew the crew wasn’t going to hurt him, because he was claimed as a Warden and under the Commander’s protection besides, but he still felt more secure down here. He’d have plenty of time once they got back to Amaranthine to finally shed the anxiety for good.
Anders gestured for him to sit on a crate, and hopped up onto one himself.
“In the Circle, it’s called ‘lucid dreaming’,” he said. “The trick is to always know when you’re dreaming, so you’ll be able to tell if demons are trying to deceive you. It can take a lot of practice. Not everyone can do it. Those who can’t are usually pulled for the Rite of Tranquility rather than allowed to take their Harrowing. Most apostates don’t learn how to do it, and just avoid dreaming at all out of fear. If you train yourself into waking up every hour and half or so, you can avoid dreaming entirely, or only get a little way into one before your body wakes you up out of habit.”
Zevran was clenching his fingers around the edge of the crate he was sitting on. Anders didn’t think that he knew he was doing it.
“Tell me how,” he said. “They keep coming, every night. I can’t sleep any longer. I just- don’t.”
“When you’re awake, get into the habit of asking yourself if you’re awake, and check. The best thing to do is to try to focus on details, read a bit of something if there’s a text around. Then look away and look back. The Fade doesn’t ‘remember’ things like that very well. If it’s changed, or if you can’t make out the details or the words in the first place, or remember them at all, then it’s a dream. When you wake up, keep a record of your dreams. Usually you’ll have the same sorts of oddities in each, and once you know to look for them, it’s a lot easier. And if you wake up from a dream, go back to sleep.”
Oh, he didn’t like that advice. Anders remembered not liking it either, when the Circle taught him how to do this. He wasn’t sure that any mage had ever taken it well.
“It’s important,” Anders told him. “Even if you’re terrified out of your wits, or so angry you want to kill something, or don’t see the point in living like this any longer, go back to sleep. Strong emotions make it easier for you to keep control.”
Zevran didn’t look convinced.
“But the demons feed on those emotions.”
“But they’re yours,” Anders said. “They make you human- well, you know. Demons and spirits only get one. We get all of them, and we get them intensely. The more we feel, the more we can change the Fade, and the more control we have over our souls.”
“Ah,” Zevran said, and that had seemed to help? Good. Anders remembered most apprentices in the Circle having the hardest time with this truth. It had a tendency to seem counterintuitive to people. Well, Zevran was an adult, and could reason through it like children couldn’t. “But if that does not work?”
“Train yourself like the apostates do,” Anders told him, and shrugged. “I can’t help you with that one, sorry, I never learned it. And there’s-”
Did he want to bring this up? He thought about it for a moment as Zevran watched him sharply. Zevran had been a Crow. He had assassin training. He knew how to not poison himself.
“There’s a pill you can make,” Anders said. “Out of snowdrops, or if they’re not in season, daffodils. You pick the leaves and bulbs, crush them up, roll the bits together in a bit of fat, and eat it. Someone told me once that it works best with snowdrops and daffodils, but I haven’t tried it myself. It’s bad for your memory and your heart if you get it wrong, and you shouldn’t take it long-term. But if you get knocked off the asleep-awake-asleep cycle, that can help you make the dreams lucid while you get back into it. I know how to make it if you want some, but I haven’t got any of the ingredients with me right now.”
“Perhaps,” Zevran said, and got off his crate. “I may ask again when we arrive in Amaranthine.”
Fenris had very little to compare this journey to. He could remember the trip by ship to Seheron and back, and knew the look of the island and Minrathaous from the water, but he hadn’t sailed into Kirkwall. He’d come overland, in secret. This was the first time he’d come to a new city openly, without a master.
Amaranthine’s coast from the sea looked much like the descriptions he’d heard of the approach to Kirkwall, though here there were no signs of ancient Magisters bending the earth to their will. The coast was rocky and rose and fell between cliffs, the sea-exposed rock mostly the dirty white-grey of Kirkwall, but here shot through with wide bands and veins of warm brown-yellow-orange-red stone.
“Amaranthine granite,” Kallian said, coming up to lean on the railing beside him. “The arling is named Amaranthine because of the amaranth flowers that grow here. There are a couple of different types- Green Tails, Andraste’s Torch, and Love-Lies-Bleeding are the most common. You can eat the leaves and seeds- Green Tails is the best for that- or plant them for garden decoration or to make dyes. Andraste’s Torch is a dark wine color, and Love-Lies-Bleeding is a sort of pink-purple. Amaranth dye is pink or purple or that deep wine red- Chantry colors. The arling supplied dye to most of Chantries in Thedas under the White Divine, and the nobility as well. Orlais has fields they planted from Amaranthine seed they stole during the Occupation, but the quality isn’t as good because they don’t know how to breed them properly, and the flowers don’t do as well in their sort of soil.”
She smiled a little, with a sideways look at him.
“And they say that Amaranthine dye is better for the Chantry anyway, since Andraste was born here. More holy, and all that.”
Memory stirred- Magisters’ bright robes and dressed, brilliantly-colored imported potpourri in elegant glass jars and tubes in the High Chantry, lip paint in an impossibly deep red.
“Some makes its way to Tevinter as well,” he told her, and saw that she was trying not to smile wide. “You can be proud of that. I won’t hold it against you.”
“I was never really proud of Denerim, or Ferelden much,” Kallian admitted, watching as the cliffs started to fall away again. “So I was surprised when I started to care about Amaranthine. But it’s mine. And I’m part of rebuilding it better- a place for elves to go that isn’t the Dalish, a place where the Wardens rule fairly, a place where most don’t have to worry about money because the dye with the granite and silverite can make us rich, and there’ll always be work on the docks or unskilled hands needed for the little jobs that hold it all together.”
His immediate reaction was to scoff and dismiss it as idealistic nonsense, but he bit it back. This place had an elf as its ruling noble and they’d taken him in without any pressing need to, and then not turned on him when he’d almost cost them everything. He owed them for their kindness, which was why he was on this ship and why he’d refrain from criticizing very harshly.
The coast turned and the cliffs began to rise again. What Fenris thought might have been a rock outcrop slowly resolved itself into high city walls constructed of Amaranthine granite, the ramparts and towers roofed with a mosaic of warm-colored woods.
“The city of Amaranthine,” Kallian told him. “It’s a shame we’re not coming into port later in the day. It’s beautiful at sunset. It looks like it’s made of sky.”
From what he could tell of the seaward approach, the city the arling took its name from had high, strong walls on the three landward sides, and a lower one facing the water and the port. The cliffs dropped at the shore here, a natural scoop out of the landscape that probably made this the best natural port for miles in either direction. The city proper stood at the top back of the scoop, but the land walls extended out around to the cliff edge, ending in tall, sturdy towers- lighthouses.
He’d thought only Tevinter had those.
Behind them, the crew hurried back and forth across the ship. Someone cursed nearby and Fenris glanced back- two sailors were trying to tie a roll of cloth to a third with a length of rope. They succeeded and the sailor flew up the rigging to the flag mast. A banner quartered cream and gold, bearing a sort of deer and a bear again in cream on the opposite quarters, unfurled in the wind shortly after.
A few minutes later, the lighthouses of Amaranthine were flying new banners under the gold sun on wine red of the city- the Wardens’ blue and white in the east, and cream and gold again but with a only brown bear in the west.
“And now they know we’re here,” Kallian said. “There’ll be a crowd at the docks, and the City Council and Captain Alec of the city guard and Mother Eileen from Our Lady Redeemer will be there for the official welcome. If you want to slip off instead, I’ll help. I just have to tell someone.”
Fenris thought about being in the center of attention, and a stranger, a foreign-looking elf in the midst of so much Warden armor, and accepted her offer. She went off to tell one of the Wardens what they were doing, and when they docked, got him away from the crowd with reassuring alacrity.
“Care for a tour?”
She took him all around the city, pointing out such local landmarks as The Crown and Lion, the inn where they’d be staying the night; and the Chantry of Our Lady Redeemer on top of an artificially-heightened jut of land, newly rebuilt in the finest local granite and imported Antivan stained glass for the windows.
He stood at the top of the stairs connecting the lower city to the upper city, staring at the building, struck by how different it looked from the other important Chantries he’d seen. The High Chantry in Minrathous had been made out of one of the temples to an Old God; and the Chantry in Kirkwall, he’d heard, was Tevene materials and techniques trying to imitate the Grand Chantry in Orlais. He knew Our Lady Redeemer was a pilgrimage site, but it seemed rather- unpretentious. It was nice, yes, and obviously meant to be impressive; but it wasn’t overwhelming. Was this a Fereldan thing?
It took until Kallian stopped them at a booth attached to one of the city market shops for Fenris to realize why, as they’d walked through the city, he’d been feeling out of place, yet strangely belonging.
“There are a lot of elves here,” he said to Kallian as the stall owner handed over two green-wrapped edible things in exchange for her handful of coppers. He was human, but hadn’t thought a thing of greeting an elf woman in official armor with a greatsword across her back with an easy ‘Hey, Sergeant!’ and a smile.
“There are,” she agreed, and handed him one of the edible things. “These are our local specialty, amaranth seedcakes- no, you don’t unwrap them, the amaranth leaves are part of it. Helps keep the thing together.”
Fenris took a bite. It was strange tasting toasted greens and crystallized honey in the same mouthful, but it wasn’t bad.
“A lot of people got displaced by the Blight,” Kallian explained as they ate. “And then when Queen Anora gave Amaranthine to the Arl-Commander, a lot of Fereldan elves got excited about the possibilities of an elf who was a hero to the humans and an official part of the nobility, so a bunch of us left our alienages and came to Amaranthine- the arling, not the city. But then there were more darkspawn and Arl-Commander disappeared for a bit and some asshole out of Orlais got sent to replace him. Everyone who’d been displaced or come looking for better got stuck in a tent city outside Vigil’s Keep- that’s the Wardens’ headquarters here- and if there’s one thing us Fereldans hate more than anything else, it’s Orlesians, especially in positions of authority. It was a good bonding experience for us, and that’s why there’s so many elves here, and no alienage.”
Fenris had to remember to swallow.
“No alienage?”
“That’s the best thing about this city,” Kallian said proudly. “The people from the tent city got first pick of the land here once the Arl-Commander came back and the city started rebuilding, and in exchange we helped with the rebuilding. Since everybody was friends, an alienage never came up, and then the city was finished and we'd all just silently agreed to ignore that it didn’t exist. The biggest problem the guard has now is new humans coming to the city who don’t have the same mindset and think that elves should be in alienages. I’ll tell you a dirty little secret- the guard doesn’t usually book people for beating up on those sorts so long as it’s only as bad as the average bar brawl. The guards here are all from the tent city or transferred from the Vigil here because they’d been helping us out, you see.”
She swallowed the last of her seedcake.
“Now, I’m not saying there aren’t elven neighborhoods,” she told him. “Because there are. Some elves want that sort of security. But a good half of this city at least is elven, and plenty of them live mixed right in with the humans. It’s giving the rest of the country a quiet fit, but Captain Garavel says that we’re winning, because elves from the alienages keep paying out to come here, and places like Denerim and Highever and Gwaren are going to be facing a real shortage of cheap labor soon, if they don’t start making things nicer for their elves.”
Kallian looked up.
“Come on. It’ll be dark soon and I want to show you the view from the walls before we go to the Crown and Lion.”
The sun had begun to set by the time they got to the best spot on the battlements, and Fenris had to agree that it made the city of Amaranthine look made of sky.
The afternoon had been taken up by the official welcome home at the docks, an informal presentation of Delilah and her family, and briefings from the City Council and Captain Alec on the state of the city and surrounding area. Things were going well.
By the time that had been over, it had been time for dinner. Now that was over as well and Theron was in his bed for the night, and finally had time to look at the letter Captain Alec had handed him some hours ago. It was sealed with Queen Anora’s signet ring in wax and the official Fereldan royal ribbon, gold-edged cream with running mabari in black.
He cracked the seal.
To His Arlship Theron Mahariel Sabrae of Amaranthine and Commander of the Grey in Ferelden: Greetings.
Where are you, stop running off, you have an arling to take care of. I got a letter from Viscount Dumar about taking back Fereldan refugees, and while I agree it’s a good idea, I did not authorize a diplomatic mission. I forgive you only because the Viscount made it clear in his letter that he’s been wondering if it was politic to ask me about this for some time. Please try to confine yourself to dealing with your own business in the future, unless explicitly asked for assistance, as I am doing right now.
It has been five years since my husband died, and this country is now stable and secure enough under my rule to accept a Prince-Consort. I am soliciting advice from the most trusted of my people on the matter, and expect you in Denerim at court at your earliest availability once you return from Kirkwall. Bring one of your Orlesians, Alistair, and Zevran.
From the hand of Her Royal Highness Queen Anora, Arlessa of Denerim, Teyrna of Gwarin, etc.; by the blessing of Andraste and the conviction of the Landsmeet.
Enclosed behind the terse letter were several additional pieces of paper. There was one for each region of Thedas, labeled at the top and followed by a list of names, occasionally with annotations- with the exception of the papers ‘Tevinter Imperium’ and ‘Rivain’, both of which contained only one other word: ‘heretics’.
Theron was looking at the list title ‘Ferelden’, with its three lonely names and an annotation noting the fact that most of the eligible young noblemen had been killed in the Blight and that the country was facing a dearth of native husbands for its many noble daughters, when Zevran came in.
He put the papers down immediately and waited hopefully, breath short, as Zevran stripped down and slipped into bed with him.
“What have we here?” he asked, fingering the papers.
“Anora is going husband-hunting to secure the succession,” Theron told him, and Zevran pulled out the list for Antiva and skimmed it.
“Hm,” he said, and then took the rest of the papers and tossed them onto the bedside table. He turned the movement into a roll onto Theron, half-supporting his body on his elbows and burying his face into the side of Theron’s neck, inhaling deeply.
Theron reached up to hug him, and Zevran pulled away a little.
“It occurred to me,” he said, and maybe the smile and the promising look were a little forced but he was trying, this was the mostly like himself he’d been in days. “That I have yet to thank you for the absolutely fantastic endorsement of me you gave your clan.”
“You deserved it,” Theron told him, and this time Zevran didn’t move away when he reached for him, instead letting himself be pulled down into a kiss.
“‘Ma’sal’shiral,” Zevran said against his lips, and Theron smiled so wide it hurt, warmth flooding his body.
“‘Ma vhen’an, ‘ma Satheraan.”
When he awoke in the morning, Zevran was gone. So was Anora’s list of potential husbands in Antiva, which had been replaced with a note in his handwriting.
I am returning to Antiva. Do not follow me. Tell Anora that every name on her list is a Crow, or has close ties to them. Foreigners always forget that we are the real power in this country.
And then a bit further down, an afterthought:
I am sorry. Sal’shira nenhnis, vivir feliza, live well- I cannot wish it enough. Thank you for all you have done, but you can do no more.
Theron sat in bed clutching the note for a long time, staring blankly at the opposite wall. Zevran’s clothes and weapons were gone, but he’d left his Warden armor. It was folded and stacked neatly on the desk chair, silverite plate gleaming in the morning sun.