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“Why,” Hawke says in exasperation, looking at the decidedly empty crates where their cargo most certainly is not, “Why is it that we always end up dealing with weasels? Just once in my life – just once – wouldn’t it be nice if things actually went according to plan?”
“Boring,” is Isabela’s unhelpful observation.
“Boring is an empty hold all the way to Amaranthine,” Hawke responds with a grimace. “Well, at least no one’s trying to kill us yet. That’s something.”
As if to mock her, an unctuous and entirely unpleasant voice comes from the darkness: “Good evening, ladies.”
Isabela tries valiantly to suppress a laugh. “This just isn’t your day, is it, sweet thing?”
“I knew we should have stayed in bed,” Hawke says morosely.
“We could go back there, if you like,” Isabela offers cheerily. “Once we’ve taken care of this idiot.”
“Ahem,” says the aforementioned idiot; he steps out of the cover of shadow, and Hawke is even more certain that this is not her day, because he is obviously a nobleman trying to pass for a thug – she has seen enough such subterfuge to know – and whenever Antivan nobility is involved, things get sticky. “Might I… interrupt?”
“Only if it’s to tell us where you’ve stashed our brandy,” Isabela drawls. “My friend isn’t in a very patient mood tonight.”
The man – young but with thinning hair and a pinched expression, wearing simply made clothing that is just too well-tailored for a genuine street tough – looks taken aback. “Brandy? What in Andraste’s name – ah. Well. There actually isn’t any brandy. My… employer –”
“Skip it,” Hawke suggests. “You should practice next time. Perhaps with a mirror. Though I can’t imagine you’re overly fond of mirrors.” Isabela snickers, which improves her mood, especially considering the sap hasn’t tried to kill them yet. “What is it you actually want?”
“I can see you’re no ordinary smuggler,” the man says, and attempts a smile, which doesn’t really improve his appearance. “I apologize; I had no idea there would be two of you, and your beauty has robbed me of my eloquence.”
“Ugh,” Isabela says pithily. “Please skip that, too.”
“You do not know what you are missing,” he says, with a failed attempt at flair. “But in this case, let me speak of something you will understand. I have… a bit of a difficulty. Resolve it, and I pay you. Say… thirty gold sovereigns?”
Hawke grins. “Now we’re listening.”
***
“It’s a bit odd, isn’t it,” Hawke muses as they stake out the ostentatious manor. “For thirty, he might have gotten a Crow. We can’t match their reputation, even if it is overblown.”
“Mmm,” Isabela says. “Well, I can see two possibilities. One: the Crows turned it down.”
“Comforting,” Hawke mutters.
“Two: it’s a suicide mission.”
“Now that’s just insulting,” Hawke interjects. “How green does he think we are?”
“Well, you do keep a lower profile these days, Serah Champion.”
Hawke grimaces. “Oh, shut up.”
Isabela just laughs. “Oh sweet thing, take it from someone who knows – when you’re on the run from something, it’s generally considered a good thing if you’re not recognized by everyone you meet on the street. I’d say piracy’s turned you into a very successful escapee.”
Because she has a point, Hawke shrugs and admits, “I must confess I don’t regret becoming a pirate. The sex is really good.”
“Well, duh,” says Isabela with a smirk, her hand playing over the small of Hawke’s back. “And pirates get to wear pirate outfits, which are considerably easier to take off than that horribly concealing armor you used to wear in Kirkwall.”
Now it is Hawke’s turn to laugh, and not just because Isabela’s touch tickles, in the most promising sort of way. “Maker, yes. I’m glad you convinced me to sell it. The rum we got with the coin I received for it was much better.”
“That’s me, always thinking practical.”
Isabela is working her way around to her laces, which should be shocking, but a few years into it, it’s practically par for the course. While Hawke isn’t strictly opposed to a tumble in some nobleman’s bushes, considering the situation, she bats her lover’s hand away with another laugh. “Yes, I’m very sure you were thinking about practicality at the time, and I would love to discuss this some more, but —” Hawke points at the exuberantly dressed man walking into the manor with a young woman all but plastered to his side “— I believe that’s our Don Juan entering the stage.”
***
They allow a few minutes to pass before going in after the mark, and when they walk into the gaudily decorated front hall – complete with columns and a fountain in the shape of a frolicking, nude couple of highly unlikely proportions – it becomes obvious something is terribly wrong, because all of the guards are dead on the floor and a maid is slumped against the basin of the fountain with a poison dart in her neck.
“Either this house is haunted, or someone got ahead of us,” Hawke says after a moment, surveying the massacre. “They’ve done a good job. I’m almost impressed.”
“Hmm,” Isabela says, surveying the fountain critically, head cocked to the side as if this will make the sculptor’s ambitious vision more plausible. “Me, too.”
Hawke sighs and says, “Darling, focus. If we can actually complete the job, I’ll buy you one.”
Isabela snorts and turns toward the stairs. “Well, whoever did this, they’re not getting away with our coin now. I have plans for it.”
Hawke sighs again, and silently kisses her plan for new boots good-bye. “Agreed. Let’s find out what's up.”
They sidestep the corpses and go up the steps toward the mark’s sleeping quarters. Hawke places her hand on the doorknob and is about to turn it when a loud groan comes from inside. She looks at Isabela, and the pirate captain raises an amused eyebrow. “Well, well,” she says. “Our Casanova doesn’t waste any time, does he?”
“Time is gold,” Hawke replies, grinning. “And speaking of gold…”
She opens the door.
The mark makes a pitiful sound around the piece of cloth gagging him. His gaze flicks wildly between the three of them. Hawke isn’t sure, but it seems like he spends an inordinate period of time on Isabela’s breasts, which does imply that his taste isn’t all bad.
“I’m not a Crow anymore, as you may recall,” says Zevran, stepping away to give a little bow, “and may I say your beauty grows more stunning by the day? There’s also your new outfit, of course. It is a remarkable improvement on your old one, Serah Hawke.”
“Yes,” Hawke says. “People keep saying that.” Shortly before going for her laces, which, again, she is not opposed to, depending on the circumstances. She spares a moment for regret, because Zevran, as she recalls, is rather skilled with laces, and other things.
“I’m always happy to see you, Zevran,” Isabela says, “but that’s our mark you were about to kill when we came in, not to mention you’ve already slaughtered the majority of his staff.” She gives him a mock pout. “That’s not very nice.”
“Ah, my dear Isabela,” Zevran says with a wry smile. “Why, it seems you and I are destined to encounter each other in the most bizarre of situations. The staff… well, they were an unforeseen bonus. You’ll find, however, that this is my mark here on the bed.”
Hawke takes the scroll Zevran is holding out to them and unfurls it. Then she curses and tosses it to her lover.
“A contract for forty sovereigns?” Isabela exclaims, staring at it in puzzlement. “We were only offered thirty!”
“That extra ten is my compensation for having to suffer my employer’s painful attempts at flirting,” Zevran replies with an expressive wince. “I get the shivers just from thinking about it.”
“Our client lied to us about alcohol,” Isabela grumbles. Zevran makes a sympathetic face. “Then he tried flirting. Also badly, I might add.”
“Poor Isabela,” Zevran says, his voice saccharine. “I would offer to comfort you, but…” He gestures with his dagger towards the mark.
“I am officially impressed,” Hawke announces. “Who is this man, and what has he done to piss two people off so much they’d be willing to pay this kind of money to get rid of him?”
“Ah, well, this is Antiva,” Zevran says fondly. “Perhaps he’s running for government? Or he’s really bad in bed? Or both?”
“I will never in my life comprehend Antiva,” says Hawke.
“Well, they have good liquor,” Isabela says with a shrug; she is clearly still sore about the fictitious brandy.
“And also, they have me,” adds Zevran. “Well, sometimes.”
“Point,” says Hawke. Because in a strange way, they do have a point. “That doesn’t, however, solve our problem.”
“Where is the girl?” asks Isabela suddenly, looking around the room. “We saw a girl come into the mansion with him.”
“Oh, the girl.” Zevran begins to laugh. “Well, you see, she was just about done tying him up when I got tired of waiting inside the closet.”
“However did you manage to get into the closet in the first place, when you were downstairs wreaking havoc on the rest of the inhabitants of the house?” Hawke demands. The two rogues give her identical, pitying looks. She sighs yet again, and shakes her head. “Never mind.”
“As I was saying,” Zevran picks up again, “she left him there and tried to escape through the window. I didn't even have to push her – she slipped and fell all on her own.”
Isabela walks over to the window, looks down, and clucks her tongue in disapproval.
Hawke snorts. “Oh, Antiva,” she chuckles, shaking her head.
“In any case,” Zevran continues, “the girl is, ultimately, inconsequential. As far as I know, no one was willing to pay for her removal. Now this one…” He brings the point of his dagger to the mark’s throat.
“Well, don’t kill him yet,” Isabela says. “There’s still the matter of who gets paid. And before you say ‘I do,’” she cautions, giving Zevran a pointed look, “do try to recall that while I’m quite fond of you, I’m not quite fond enough to let you walk away with my money.”
“Our money,” Hawke interjects.
“Oh, Isabela,” Zevran says with a long-suffering sigh. “I don’t suppose it would do me any good to protest that I was here first?”
Isabela shrugs and tells him, “History is written by the victor, darling.”
Zevran grimances, then says, “Oh, very well; I have been on the business end of your daggers before, and it is not an entirely pleasant place to be. Most of the time, at any rate. There was that one incident, as I recall –”
“Focus,” Hawke says.
Isabela pouts and points out, “That was a good story, you know.”
“Right,” Zevran says, giving Hawke a sideways glance. “Ten sovereigns.”
“Twenty,” Isabela counters. “That’s half, and there’s only one of you, and two of us.”
“Fifteen,” Zevran parries calmly. “That is half of what you would have gotten from your extremely unpleasant patron, with the added bonus of never having to see him again; generous, when you haven’t actually done any of the work.”
Before the two of them can get into a fight – they’re not far from it, in Hawke’s estimation – she interrupts and says, “Deal.” When Isabela glares at her, she points out, “That hunk of marble down there would have sunk us, anyway, and frankly, I’ll gladly sacrifice a few sovereigns if I don’t have to deal with that lying cheapskate.”
Isabela sighs in a long-suffering way, but says, “Oh, I suppose you’re right. For once, your fatalism isn’t unfounded; this day was doomed from the start.” She then turns to Zevran and says, “One condition: you’re buying the drinks once we’re paid.”
Zevran grins winningly and replies, “I’m sure we can work something out; it would be my pleasure.”
“Good,” Hawke says, secretly relieved. “Get it done, and let’s get gone.”
There are about fifteen men waiting for them, blocking the main door. Maybe a few more – Hawke tries to do a headcount for preparedness’ sake, but gives up when the giant statue keeps distracting her. It seems to have become uglier in the two minutes they spent in the mark’s room – though how that is even possible, Hawke has no idea.
“Zevran Arainai,” says the man standing one step closer than the others, presumably the leader. He has dark hair slicked back into a tail and a rather flamboyant moustache that curls up at the corners. He also, unfortunately, looks like trouble; his leather armor is worn in all the right places, and the hilts of his daggers are plain. In Antiva, jeweled hilts mean impostors; plain hilts mean assassins. And only a Crow could sport such a moustache in public and live to tell about it, so it is rather unsurprising when he continues, “My name is Alfonso Fernando de Sancho Tallos. I am here on behalf of the Antivan Crows.”
“Of course you are,” Hawke says, resigning herself to the fact that nothing’s going to go well until she gets out of this house, and maybe not even then. “You didn’t come here to share a cup of tea, I assume.”
The Crow throws her a dismissive glance that turns appreciative when he sees what she looks like and how little she’s wearing. Unlike Zevran’s appraisal earlier, she does not find this one flattering. “I would love to share a cup of tea, and more,” he says, “but first there are other things to take care of – such as that man standing next to you. You must know he’s a dangerous killer and a traitor – you would do well to wash your hands of him now.”
“Seventeen men to deal with me? Surely that is a bit excessive?” says Zevran, who apparently has no problem blocking out the statue long enough to count them. “Don’t get me wrong – I’m flattered.”
“You would be,” Hawke sighs.
“You have defied the Antivan Crows for too long, Arainai,” Long Name says, ignoring her. “You must pay for your crimes.”
“I trust the ladies here will punish me accordingly once we are out of this place,” Zevran says with a rakish wink. Isabela nods, clearly unopposed to the idea. “You will not consider letting me go?” Zevran asks, with little hope apparent in his voice. That he asks at all is not a sign of cowardice but, Hawke thinks, of tedium. She can’t imagine the number of Crows the man must have had to kill by now, and even one’s favorite hobby becomes dull after a time, especially when one is not getting paid. “I have no intention of… coming quietly, as it were,” Zevran continues, his tone apologetic.
Long Name and his cronies draw their weapons in complete unison; let it never be said that the Antivans don’t have a flair for the dramatic. “Too bad for you, my friend.”
Isabela sighs. “You’d think they’d have learned by now,” and throws a knife at Long Name. He keels over, and all hell breaks loose.
“I’m really,” Hawke pants, swinging her sword frantically, “getting tired,” she grunts as she slams the pommel into an assassin’s stomach, moving on before he even has time to keel over, “of killing Crows.”
“Think how I feel!” Zevran complains; she can see him from the corner of her eye, a grin on his face, daggers a blur of motion. “These are the third fools this week!”
“I could use a new set of sheaths,” Isabela shouts from somewhere behind Hawke, by which Hawke can deduce that the unfortunate owner of the sheaths Isabela is coveting is not long for this world.
She’s up to three dead and one whimpering like a baby and clutching his privates; with a jab of her sword, she sends him flying towards the centerpiece of the hideous fountain. There is a loud cracking noise as his head connects with the statue’s protruding phallus; he topples into the gilded basin face-first, and does not rise. Even in the heat of battle, Hawke has to laugh; death by giant marble phallus is likely not particularly common. Outside Antiva, at any rate.
Numbers five and six rush her from both sides. One of them falls before she can get to him, a dagger sticking out of his back. The other is quickly dispatched with her own overhead strike, and then there is sudden and profound quiet, punctuated only by hard breathing.
“Zevran, darling, spending time with you is positively unhealthy,” Isabela grouses after a moment. Hawke turns to see her holding her shoulder, blood seeping between her fingers. “That little bugger was almost fast enough.”
Zevran looks almost contrite, then digs inside his jerkin and tosses her a poultice. “I would apologize, but this…” he spreads his arms in a gesture of feigned innocence. “This is just the cost of doing business in Antiva. You understand.”
Hawke wipes her sword on a dead assassin’s shirtsleeve, then sheaths it and sighs. “I keep wondering if the brandy is really worth it,” she muses. “Do you think your client even intends to pay you at all?”
Now Zevran looks pained as he admits, “I think she would as soon try to stab me as pay me, all things considered. Although her jewelry was not of poor quality, if rather… pretentious. I might recover my fee that way, if she is foolish enough to meet me again.”
“I would like to point out,” Isabela says stepping over two bodies to stand shoulder to shoulder with Hawke, “that Hawke and I actually killed the majority of them. Including… whatever his name was.” To punctuate, she leans over and retrieves her throwing dagger from Long Name’s eye. “And our client was legitimate.” Hawke snorts, and Isabela amends, “Probably legitimate, meaning there is some possibility he will pay us. Also, your little friends castrated my statue.” She pokes at the statue’s marble erection, which Hawke now realizes has cracked from the collision with the man she threw at it. At Isabela’s prompting, it falls off entirely, and if the man facedown in the fountain wasn’t dead before, he unquestionably is now.
“It wouldn’t have fit in the hold,” Hawke says, for the sake of fairness; honestly, she is relieved to have the matter of the fountain decisively resolved. “But the rest of it makes rather a lot of sense.” Neither of them mentions the fact that Zevran would almost certainly have died without them; however brilliant he thinks he is, one on seventeen are not odds any sane person would bet on.
Zevran sighs deeply, his shoulders rising and falling in punctuation. “Ten sovereigns?” he says hopefully.
Isabela looks like she is about to argue, so Hawke quickly says, “Done.”
“Oh, all right,” Isabela says, “but only because you’re so cute when you’re bloody. However,” she adds quickly, shooting Hawke a glare to preclude any further interruption, “you’re still buying the drinks. That part is non-negotiable.”
“About that, my dear Isabela,” Zevran says with a twinkle in his eye, giving a little bow at the two women. “I meant to tell you earlier – I have a little… counter-proposal for you.”
“This had better be good,” Isabela tells him. “These people just tried to kill me and then broke my statue. I’m not in such a good mood.”
“I think you’ll find my idea more than satisfactory,” replies the Antivan with a smile. “Before coming here, I did my usual research about the mark.” He walks through one of the side doors leading away from the front hall and motions for Hawke and Isabela to follow.
“I hope you don’t mean to imply that we didn’t,” Hawke says, feeling a bit put out; not that they had delved much deeper than ascertaining his address and the general layout of his house, but still, they hadn’t gone in entirely unprepared, even if it had turned out so poorly.
“Oh, no, he stalks them for weeks,” Isabela says airily. “He hasn’t anything better to do.”
“And that, ladies, is your good fortune,” Zevran parries, clearly unoffended. “It turns out that, when he wasn’t busy making other people want to kill him, our dearly departed friend upstairs spent a lot of time and effort collecting rare liquors from all over Thedas.”
“You think that collection is somewhere in this mansion,” Hawke guesses. If the collection is even half-decent, selling the alcohol may turn out to be more profitable than performing the actual hit.
Zevran nods. “Indeed, but not just somewhere in this mansion. In fact, it should be,” he rolls up an expensive-looking rug to reveal a small trap door, “right under our feet. Shall we?”
They descend into the wine cellar. Hawke finds a candle by the entrance and lights it with a nearby match. Then she looks around, and decides that as of this moment, all three of them are disgustingly rich. Out of the corner of her eye, she can already see the figures dancing through Isabela’s head.
“See, this is why I like you so much, Zevran,” her lover says, grinning. “You always know how to cheer me up.”
“I live to please,” Zevran replies. “Now, I suggest we make off with the spoils before someone else comes to kill our mark – or me, as the case may very well be.”
They find some old robes in a corner that get turned into impromptu sacks for transporting the alcohol. Even the bottles are fancy, all ripples and colored glass, works of art in their own right; they could probably drink the contents and sell only the containers, and they’d still make a fortune. The profits they could make from this collection will more than make up for the little issue of their payment, which Hawke is pretty sure they’re never going to get.
“I think you’ve earned a ride,” Isabela tells Zevran after she has popped the cork off of a bottle and taken a swig of the contents with relish.
“O-ho?” Zevran replies, clearly intrigued. He gives them a curious look, a bottle in each hand. “I do love it when you speak in innuendo.”
Hawke cracks up as Isabela says, “For once, I wasn’t.”
“Well,” Hawke drawls, thinking back to one particularly memorable afternoon near Sundermount, “that isn’t strictly out of the question, either.”
“All right,” Zevran says, “I’ll play along. A ride where?”
“Anywhere you like,” Isabela says generously. “I think you need some time away from Antiva City, all things considered. A holiday of sorts.” She toasts him with the bottle and drinks deeply. “Nevarra is nice this time of year.”
Zevran laughs heartily, then says, “Then I accept your invitation. Both invitations,” he adds, winking at Hawke.
“Maybe today wasn’t a complete waste after all,” Hawke admits, feeling optimistic for the first time since the infamous empty brandy chest.
“Oh no,” Isabela replies. “It is a positively glorious day. Try this and see.”
She passes the open bottle to Hawke. The wine goes down smooth as silk, and Hawke finds herself smiling back before she hands the bottle off to a very smug Zevran. “Not bad,” she agrees. “On second thought, not bad at all.”