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Skyhold was a mountain fortress jutting defiantly from snow-covered cliffs, commanding and imposing. It was large enough to house an army. But not, as it happened, three of them.
Three armies, thought the elf slipping through the crowds, countless courtiers, lords, teyrns and nobility of every stripe. And their retinues. How are they feeding them all? The most powerful magic here must be how they're managing the sewage.
The thought brought a smile to her eyes, and she kept them carefully downcast. She had seen Redcliffe's banner among the throng, and she wasn't ready to be recognized.
Ego, she chided herself. What was it you told Zevran? It's nice to be irrelevant. But there was a chance, though a slim one, that someone would recognize her and she was here to ask questions, not answer them.
She was dressed as simply as any servant rushing around. Most of them were elves as well, of course. That much hadn't changed, might never change. Still, she wore her hair to cover the tips of her ears, the dark mass braided and twisted around her head.
The party was in full swing, as it had been for days now. Ever since the Inquisition had finally slain Corypheus, closing yet another massive breach in the sky, people couldn't seem to celebrate enough. Finding one lone dwarf in the crowd was proving to be difficult.
Especially if one did not wish to attract the notice of the Inquisition's spymaster. Her lips thinned in annoyance. How had Leliana become what it seemed she had? Bard, yes. Even devoted sister of the Chantry. But the whispers and rumors of the Nightingale made her out to be a knife in the shadows, grim and remorseless, silent death that came and went and left the world cold behind her.
She shook her head. Pointless. What Leliana had made of herself was Leliana's business. But it seemed there was no choice. She was going to have to go into the hold itself and risk being seen.
The main hall. It was the only place she hadn't looked, hadn't ever gone. The bulk of the nobility would be there. Anora might even be there, and she didn't dare face the Queen of Ferelden or she might finally lose control of her temper and squish the woman into a pasty blonde smear on the nice marble floors. And if Anora had not come then she would have sent Eamon, and Eamon would have known her. Teagan was here, representing Redcliffe, and if anything was more likely to remember her than Eamon. Orzammar had sent a delegation; there was risk there aplenty. There were those among the Circle – former Circle – mages who would know her instantly.
So she kept her head down. That didn't hinder her search. She was, after all, looking for a dwarf. If the descriptions were accurate, he'd be instantly recognizable, if not from the enormous crossbow he carried then from the thatch of red chest hair that was evidently his pride and joy.
Finally, she found him. Two days of searching, and he'd been in the keep all along. He sat with his booted feet up on a table. Though he was surrounded by people, he gave the impression of being completely alone.
She stepped toward him, positioning herself at an angle to the tilt of his head, and waited.
It was the staring, she knew. Oh, he was probably used to being stared at. He was arguably even more famous than she was – Ego, ego – but still she stared. He was fresh from a battlefield. She knew firsthand how fine his instincts would be. Whether he meant to or not, he would be watching for the unusual, the moment that didn't fit the pattern. And he would know he was being watched.
So she stood, a slender bit of stillness in the swirling throng. She did not move. She did not chat or laugh. She did not gesture or stare around in wonder.
It was a gamble, she knew. She was making herself visible to more than just the dwarf. But he was closest. She had to hope he would see her first.
His expression flickered from one of bland amusement to vague concern. Finally, he turned from the story he was listening to and scanned the crowd. Their eyes met.
His gaze moved on, then came back to her.
She waited, silent, watching him.
After a moment, puzzled, he inclined his head in greeting.
Still she waited.
His frown deepened, and the moment before he could turn away from her, she nodded her head toward an alcove, a questioning arch to her brow. Then she turned and slid through the crowd.
"All right," he said a moment later, catching up to her. "Let's say you've got my attention. What did you plan to do with it?"
"Varric Tethras," she said.
"At your service. For another few minutes, anyway."
Her lips lifted, a small smile. "I have a bargain for you."
"Always was a sucker for a beautiful woman with a bargain."
"You will tell me a story, one of my choosing. And in return, I'll tell you one of yours."
"Well, that's quite an offer. Except since I don't have the slightest idea who you are, how would I know what story to ask for?"
"You'll know," she said softly.
"Elves. Always with the mysterious crap."
She waited with that same faint smile.
"All right, Kitten, why not? I'm getting kind of bored listening to the third son of Teyrn Shitheels try and impress me with tales of the fifth battle of the chicken coops in Ass-End Village. Might as well hear a story from you, instead."
He waved her off as she started to speak. "Not here, though. If this story is going to be any good, let's talk someplace quieter."
"All right," she agreed. It suited her better anyway.
"C'mon. There's a balcony with a great view and quick access to the wine cellar."
He started to lead her away, but she stopped him. "I'll meet you there," she said.
He hesitated. "You sure? This is an awfully big castle, Kitten. Hate for you to get lost. Someone might step on your tail."
Her expression lightened further. "You get to the balcony," she said, "and I'll find you."
"You plan to turn into a bird and fly up there?"
"Something like that," she agreed. Her grin flashed momentarily impish, and she slipped away.
"Well… shit," she heard behind her.
Varric watched the sky. Sure, maybe the elf had been kidding about the bird thing, but he'd seen enough not to discount it entirely. He wanted to be ready for her. Just in case it was misdirection on her part, he leaned down to see if she was climbing up the wall.
Light flared, a pulse of soft green-white. He sighed and looked over his shoulder in time to see the elf reform out of the glare of magic.
"I didn't think you'd actually come alone," she said.
"I didn't think you'd actually fly up here," he replied, " so here we both are, feeling foolish."
She curled her legs under her and sat, rounded onto herself in the corner of the balcony. "And chilly," she said. "I've never known a cold dwarf. Why is that, do you suppose?"
"Beats me," he said, leaning against the balustrade. "I'm freezing."
"Probably the open shirt."
"Are you kidding? All this chest hair is what keeps me warm."
She chuckled, soft and silent, just puffs of air.
"Listen, I'm perfectly willing to stand out on a freezing cold balcony and trade witty remarks all night, but shouldn't I at least know your name?"
She shook her head. "Not yet. First you have to tell me the story."
"All right. But if it's the next volume of Swords and Shields, it's still with the editors."
She shifted, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. "No," she said softly. After a moment of silence, she took a breath, held it, then exhaled slowly. "I want you to tell me about Anders."
He blinked and straightened. "Anders? Blondie? Why in Andraste's ass would you want to hear about him?"
"Your story first," she reminded him, "then mine."
"He was crazy, he killed a bunch of people, and then he died. The end. Now if that's everything…"
Her flinch was visible, even in the dark. "He died? Rumors didn't agree on what had happened."
Varric watched as she closed her eyes. When she looked at him again, he saw a cold barely less frigid than the mountains around them.
"The story," she said, lifting her head. "He wasn't always crazy."
"So you knew him."
She watched him over her knees, long-lidded eyes unblinking.
Varric sighed. "Look, it's really not a good story. It's all betrayal and things going boom. There's not even a love interest in it."
"Nonetheless."
"Fine," he said after a minute. "But this better be one hell of a story you've got for me, Kitten."
She relaxed a little, no longer clenching herself so tight. "Tell me about … about when you met him."
So he did. He was Varric Tethras, storyteller, and he told the story. It didn't need much embellishment, but he did resist a natural urge to tell it from a better perspective. Anders still creeped him out, frankly. Knowing that the mage had been that crazy, had lived and fought side by side with him, all while plotting the greatest single act of destruction wrought by man? It made his skin crawl.
Some of that was bound to seep into his tale. Choices of words, phrases, pacing, all conveyed a deep hatred for that crazy blond son of a bitch who touched off the powder keg that wrecked his home and started a war.
But she didn't interrupt. She let him finish.
"He didn't try to run," Varric said, winding his tale down, looking out at the mountains. "He didn't argue. He didn't even really try to justify himself with a melodramatic speech. It was as if in destroying the chantry, well, he destroyed some part of himself, too. In the end, once it was done, he was as empty and broken as the buildings that still burned behind him."
The wind whined through the battlements. Below, the party was still going on. Out in the campgrounds, the fires of the gathered armies of the Inquisition sparkled against the snow.
He turned back to her. "Well, Kitten? Was it everything you had hoped it'd be?"
"Mistakes," she whispered. "I thought I was helping him. I wanted to give him what I had been given." She shook her head. "Nothing qualified me to decide. I just didn't know how to judge. Not until Nathaniel. With Nathaniel, I knew. I've not been mistaken since. I was mistaken in Anders."
Varric nodded a little, hoarding the tiny clues she dropped. "What was he like when you knew him?"
"Silly," she said promptly. "He was like a little boy, full of delight and wonder and mischief. He had a darker side, of course. His experience in the circle was not… Not as quiet as mine had been. They did not reward his humor or his curiosity. That was why he fled."
"So he wasn't always carrying around a demon inside of him."
She frowned at him, sharp and angry. "Justice was no demon." Then it melted away. "At least, not when I knew him. He was thoughtful and deliberate. He cared. About everything. He felt it all so very much, and only wanted to make things right. He fought for it, with word and deed and blade."
"Hard to imagine him like that. Them. Whatever pronoun you use for a possessed mage."
"When I first knew them, they were not… Justice was not bound to Anders."
He nodded again, suspicions all but confirmed.
"But go on," she prompted him. "That is not the end of the tale."
He hesitated. It wasn't, quite, she was right about that. He just wasn't sure he wanted to tell her the rest. What if he told her the truth, that Hawke had executed Anders with a knife to the back of his neck, and she decided to go after Hawke? He tried to imagine that fight and failed, temporized and shrugged.
"He died, like I said before. Half the city wanted him dead, even the mages he had supposedly freed. He just sat there and said he wouldn't fight."
"And they killed him."
He nodded.
Grief spilled out of her. "Oh Anders," she whispered, head ducked low. "I'm so sorry. I should have followed you. Poor, tormented child."
He may have hated Anders, but not even Corypheus could have left her there in that much pain. "It was quick," he offered. "I don't even think he knew it when he died."
After a struggle, she mastered her emotions. Then she stood, just as if she hadn't been curled in a tiny elven ball on a frozen balcony for the better part of an hour. "That's something, at least." She turned to go inside.
His hand wrapped around her slender wrist. "Not so fast, Warden," he said. "You still owe me my story."
She looked down at him. "Warden," she said.
"Look, I’m a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. The number of people who would have known Anders before Kirkwall is slim. And of those, the only ones who made any decisions for him, decisions they'd regret, are even fewer. To make those regrets bad enough to track me down just to get her heart broken? Only one. You're her. You brought Anders into the Wardens. You're the Hero of Ferelden."
Her anger encompassed her fisted hands in blue-white light. "Never call me that," she snarled.
"Fine," he said, holding up both hands, letting her go to do so. "What would you prefer? Commander of the Grey? Arlessa of Amaranthine? Or should I pretend we're friends and call you Neria?"
It all made her uncomfortable and her anger trickled away. She shifted on her feet. "I was never the arlessa," she said. "The arling was deeded to the Wardens, not to me."
"Fine. I'll stick with Kitten, then. And you owe me my story."
"So I do," she agreed, wrapped again in the quiet poise that had attracted his attention in the noisy hall in the first place. She walked inside the small storage room, a separation, he noted, as much distance as she could get between his story of Anders and whatever story he would ask of her.
And she knew, or thought she did, what story he would want.
He followed her inside and shut the doors, playing into the drama by using a touch more force than was necessary, letting the firm clank of metal against casement serve as final punctuation to his story before she began hers.
He leaned against them a moment, then turned. "Fine. Then here's the story I want. Where the hell have you been, O Hero?" His jaw tight with his own anger, he stalked toward her. "People have been dying here, facing an archdemon, a godling, magic that literally could tear the world apart. They looked for you, they needed you. What the fuck were you doing while all these people suffered?"
She blinked rapidly. Part of him wondered how long it had been since anyone had yelled at her. Well, she had better get used to it tonight.
"People wanted me," she corrected him. "They did not need me. I possess no ability to seal the rifts, that was all on your Inquisitor."
"Fine," he said, brushing that aside, "you couldn't seal the rifts. But so what, Warden? There are whole armies of people out there who couldn't close the rifts, but they came. Hell, I can barely close the damned doors in this place, but here I am. Where were you?"
"Such a narrow world you live in," she snapped. "Just because I have not been here, you assume I've not been helping anyone. Mark me well, storyteller: the Inquisition is not the entire tale, and its story is not the only one moving in the world. Mind that you do not begin to believe your own propaganda. There are other ways to help people than planning the fate of the world from Skyhold's halls."
"I've seen enough combat to know you concentrate your strength if you want to be effective, and so have you. Skyhold, the Inquisition, they're the dominant force in this war whether you like it or not," he shot back. "How do you know where your talents were needed most? How do you know what lives you could have saved, what people you damned, because you were not here?"
"That," she said. "That is the problem with this Inquisition. It has already begun to believe itself to be the only right way. Help the Inquisition, or you are hindering it. Such a tiny step from there to 'obey us or be a traitor'. That is where this will lead, Master Dwarf. Listen to me, heed me, even if you hate me. They have wielded a sword sharper than any the world has seen since the time of Andraste herself, and they will not put it down. Not while they can justify it to themselves.
"Next will come the uprisings against the Inquisition's methods. Your vaunted leaders will respond with dismay and disbelief. How can anyone not see that they mean only good? The uprisings must, of course, be quelled. They will create martyrs of dissenters, and soon they will become tyrants."
"Bullshit," he said. "You don't know that. You don't even know the people here. You don't know Evelyn, you don't—" He stopped.
She arched an eyebrow, the nodded. "You see? I do know. I know Leliana. I know Cullen. Gods help us all, I even know Morrigan. I know good hearts that become warped. They will do what they believe is good for the world, whether the world agrees or not."
He felt unease twist through his heart. "Your fellow Grey Wardens seem to disagree with you."
"And they are wrong," she said simply. Then she shook her head and sighed, sitting on a dusty crate. "They will not learn," she said. "We keep making the same mistake, over and over. Sophia Dryden made it. Clarel made it. We overreach. We try to be more than we are." She offered him a small, sad smile. "We believe our own stories. And then the world suffers.
"I was not here, Varric Tethras, because I am a Grey Warden. I am not a hero. I am not a leader. I watch for the Blight. I kill darkspawn. I do these things because no one else can. I do them to be ready for when an archdemon rises, so that there will be someone around to slay it."
"Corypheus's dragon…"
"Was not a true archdemon," she said. He decided that if he ever told the story, he would describe her as wistful. For whatever reason, the thought of an archdemon made her wistful. "None of us could be sure at first. Some of the signs were there. But it was not."
"So you weren't here because eventually some crazy darkspawn is going to corrupt a dragon? In a few hundred years, give or take? Because, gee, we sure wouldn't want the world going to hell or anything." He gestured behind him, encouraging her to look beyond the mountains at the mess the world had become.
She shook her head a little. "Stop believing in the legends," she said. "You have to."
"I'm a storyteller, Warden. Believing in legends is kind of my stock in trade."
She studied him. "True," she said. "And maybe if I can make you see, you can make them understand."
He spread his hands. "I'm all ears."
She took a breath. "I was not here because the rifts did not matter," she said finally.
"Excuse me?"
"The rifts did not matter. Wars will come, and they will be fought because people will believe if they do not, the world will end. But wars do not matter. Tyrants will rise and cut a bloody swath through nations, leaving hundreds of thousands dead, and they do not matter. Monsters will crawl from the caverns of eternity, bringing horror to the world, and they do not matter. Even when I am proved correct about the path your Inquisition is on and they become the darkest master the world has known, they will not matter. Not to me.
"Grey Wardens are a weapon conceived and birthed for one purpose, and one purpose alone: to kill an archdemon. To do so, we sometimes have to carve our way through hordes of darkspawn. We will overthrow kings, destroy cultures, smash mountains into rubble and dust. We have the right of conscription because during a Blight, that is recognized. We must be able to do what we must do, and to do it, we can answer to no hand.
"We are a weapon, Master Storyteller. And when that weapon is used for any other purpose, it is deadly to all things. Even to itself."
"So you think the Wardens were wrong to ally with the Inquisition?"
"They were wrong to turn aside from their duty," she said, nodding her agreement. "In days to come, when the Inquisition is cursed from every corner of Thedas, the Wardens will bear the curse with them. They will be driven to near extinction, holed up in Weisshaupt, perhaps. A last bastion. Then the Blight will come again. The world will not believe they need the Wardens and will fight. Fight, fail, fall. Only when the world is on the brink of being consumed utterly will they call for us, beg us, rage at us for not saving them sooner."
His imagination was all too up to the task of seeing the world she painted. For a moment, just a moment, he believed her utterly.
Then he shook his head, a rapid motion. "Kitten, you have one morbid brain between those pointed ears of yours. If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that there's always hope for a better world."
She sighed. "I pray you are right. But fear you are not." She stood then, dusting herself off. "Well. We have traded stories. Do you count our bargain fulfilled?"
"What story?" he asked. "You told me about a future that may or may not exist. I gave you truth, you gave me fiction."
Her head tilted and she studied him. Her eyes, he decided. It was her eyes that marked her as something other than the elf servant she was dressed as. They were blue and green, not turquoise or teal. He searched for a better way to describe them, but everything seemed trite. Haunted leaf and tortured sea. Empty emeralds and bitter sapphires.
The green of the breach against the blue of the sky.
"I suppose you're right," she said. "Ask, then."
There were so many things he wanted to ask. A million tales had spread through Ferelden about the Hero, about the Blight. About Loghain's betrayal. Orzammar and the rise of King Behlen. The Anvil, a legend among even the surface dwarves. Even about the ashes of Andraste and the Temple as it had been before Corypheus. King Cailan and King Alistair, two rulers lost to the same archdemon.
Alistair. Alistair and the Hero of Ferelden had been lovers. Some of the more romantic, if less credible in his opinion, even said he had sacrificed himself to save her. That she had left her homeland to get away from the memory of his death.
And suddenly, he couldn't bear to ask her for any of those tales.
She was motionless, quiet, watching him. She expected him to ask. She was, he realized, bracing herself against the pain of being asked. Of telling a story that would make her cut her heart out and show it to him. That, at least, was a pain he understood.
"Is it true," he asked finally, "that you taught the Qunari to dance?"
She blinked slowly. The pain slid away, replaced by gratitude and a fine sheen of unshed tears. "To be fair," she said, "it was only one Qunari."
"Have a seat, Kitten," he said, gesturing with a half-bow to the crate, "and tell me all about it."