Chapter Text
As a child in the alienage, she stayed out late with her cousins, running home with dirt in her hair and pebbles in between her toes only as the sun finally set. She tumbled in through the door, a heap of laughter and late summer freckles, and her mother rolled her eyes and mumbled something about raising a troublemaker, with no disappointment in her voice. Tabris would beam proudly up at her, all skinny legs and rounded cheeks. Together they washed the filth from her hair, combed and plaited it until it lay neatly down her back, and the next day when Tabris came home another mess, her mother was never angry. My troublemaker, she’d say, and reach for the comb. While she tugged out every knot and tangle, she hummed old tavern songs and told her daughter stories of the battles she’d faced and the enemies she had struck down.
Years passed and her mother was gone more and more. Another little errand, she’d say, and pull her blades from their hook on the wall. Tabris would come racing in at just sunset to find her father stirring the stewpot alone. The first few times he offered to braid her hair for her, but he was rough with the comb and his stories were never as good. So Tabris scrubbed the dirt from her own scalp and tugged out every tangle and wove her hair into a loose, messy braid that would always fall apart too soon. In the mornings she’d meet up with her cousins with her hair half-tied, and that was how Shianni and Soris knew to go easy on her, to expect her to be quicker to anger than usual. Days or weeks would pass and her mother would return, and Tabris would arrive in the morning with every hair in place, and she had all new stories for them to play-act in the streets until sunset.
One night, Tabris woke to a frenzied knocking on the door. Her mother told her in a whisper to stay in bed, but Tabris crept quietly after her. Soris was standing on the doorstep, smelling of smoke. Behind him the dark night was lit with flames. He told them his house was on fire, through hiccups and coughs, said the guards had set it. Her mother sent Tabris and her father to help Soris find his family, promising Soris they would be fine, and as they rushed out the door Tabris looked over her shoulder to see her mother pulling her weapons from the rack on the wall.
The house was a mountain of flame; Tabris looked at it from the street and felt the heat on her skin and tried hard to think of something to say. Cyrion bid them wait in the street and went plunging into the inferno while Tabris rubbed Soris’s back and listened to the roar of the flames. Around them, elves darted past in the dark, running toward or away from vengeful guards. An eternity later her father returned, covered in soot and pulling the blackened body of Soris’s brother, and he said something gentle with a hand on Soris’s shoulder. They took him home with them that night, gave Soris the spare bed and wrapped his brother’s tiny body in a blanket to deal with in the morning, and together Tabris and her father stayed awake all night waiting for her mother to come home. She never did.
In the taverns, later, Tabris heard stories of the guards that took down her mother, how many she killed before they bested her. When the elves told stories, they spoke of her like one of the warriors of legend, and when the human guards told the stories, they spoke of her like a demon, ripped from the fade in a blaze of fire as they purged the alienage. Tabris found her mother’s extra daggers in a dusty chest one day, and took to practicing with them in the garden, imagining herself being talked about with fear and reverence in the darkened taverns of Ferelden.
In that manner, she came of age; quieter now than she had been as a child, less her mother’s proud and laughing troublemaker and now the calm and terrifying start of a resistance. Her scrawny limbs turned thinly muscled, and her eyes were always watching over her shoulder. Valendrian and her father arranged a marriage, hoping to quiet the soft hum of rebellion building within her. She was angry with them, so angry. Only when her father looked at her with moist eyes did she remember everything he had lost too, and she closed her eyes and sighed and agreed to do what he asked, knowing he only wanted her to be happy.
Tabris dressed in her finest clothes and pretended to be content. Feeling empty, she stood in front of her family and said the words Valendrian fed her, and then the humans swept in. She looked at the guards with her eyes blazing and thought, how dare you take more from me, and then someone hit her from behind and she fell. She woke later in the damp cellar of the arl’s estate, and Soris arrived and put a cold sword in her hand, and she gathered herself and imagined how her mother must have looked in the bloody streets in a night lit by flames and sparking steel. She struck out again and again against every guard in her path, and she saw all her weaknesses and knew her practices in the garden were not enough. When she killed Vaughan, slowly and calmly, she felt nothing but burning humiliation at every strike his guards had landed against her.
The guards found her hours later, after she’d scrubbed the last of the blood from her skin, and when they called for the killer to step forward she knew she had no choice. She stood tall and said it had been her and only her, avoiding Soris’s eyes entirely out of fear of betraying him. Duncan cut in, offering her a way out, and without thinking she took it. Her father cried at losing her, and she hugged him and kissed his cheek and promised she’d be okay. He patted her hand, sniffing quietly, and told her that he knew. She was her mother’s little troublemaker, he said, and she smiled grimly and left before he could see that she was crying too.