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Adaar is munching on her third sugar cookie, feet dangling and swinging over the edge of the roof, when Sera asks, “Why d’you take us out so much?”
Sera’s slender legs are propped against the outside wall of her room, back stretched across sun-warmed shingles, hair wildly splayed around her like a misshapen halo. It’s a rare moment of rest before a rough trek to Emprise du Lion, and Adaar hums idly before she takes her next bite. “What, you and Bull and Dorian? If you don’t want to…”
“Not what I said,” Sera grumbles. “I just mean… people—not people people—but people like Lady Poncy Enchanter and Madame Scary Seeker would be better suited, right? Nobby nobles and arse kissing and learning.”
“Sera,” Adaar groans, a tangle of swallowed laughter and incredulity and growing confusion. “You know I don’t think like that.”
“Well, I know,” Sera allows. “But they don’t.”
She snaps a cookie in half and hurls it in the general vicinity of the great hall. Josephine is deep in discussion with a Revered Mother, Vivienne glides down the stairs on a well-dressed Orlesian arm, and Varric’s arms move emphatically as he spins a tale for an enamored crowd of onlookers. Sera’s aiming at none of them, or any one of them, or all of them—and that’s precisely the problem.
“They’re not the Inquisitor,” Adaar says firmly. “I am. And I decide who I need with me.”
Sera glances at her upside-down and cross-eyed, looking so terribly young for a moment that Adaar has a brief, fleeting fantasy of her hands around another time-bending amulet, finding and crushing every bastard who decided to hurt a child. She blinks away the red haze in her periphery and pokes Sera’s side. “That means you. The quickest, craziest, most nimble archer I’ve ever met.”
Sera makes an unintelligible noise, something between a snort and a yelp and a laugh, and jolts away from Adaar’s finger. “Drown me in squishy feelings, huh?”
“Well, since you asked—”
“Inky!”
“—I trust you to have my back in any fight. To remind me of the little things when I lose my way. I see you face every moment with stubborn vivacity and I admire you for it. Sera, you’re one of mine. You know that, right?”
Silence falls for a few moments before Sera turns her head away, hiding a muffled sniff beneath the arm flung over her face. “Do now.”
“Good.” Adaar holds out the half-empty treat bag with a smile. “No one says shit about my family.”
“Yeah, yeah, made your point.” Sera finally sits up, wiping her eyes—but then she freezes in place and peeks through her fingers, eyes and voice alight with excitement. “Wait, did you talk to Bull and Dorian already? You haven’t, have you? Let me tell them! I wanna see the look on Dorian’s face when he realizes you love him.”
Adaar taps her chin thoughtfully. “How about you do a trial run on me first? We can’t kill him before we make him suffer in the cold, after all.”
Sera grins mischievously at her, and claims another cookie.