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Hawke is a good liar, quick on her feet and her tongue quicker still, spinning fanciful tales to redirect and confuse with an ease born in a young heart, a malleable metal for an unseen blade, silver-tipped between her grinning lips.
She doesn’t know what starts it all – hers is not a particularly malicious soul, but there’s dirt beneath her fingernails and leaves in her hair when she first tries her hand at this mischievous art. The sheep have escaped their enclosure, their eager bleats mingling with the birdsong in the hills, and she knows her own inattention to be at fault.
But, “Father, I made sure the gate was shut,” she says, guileless eyes as blue and wide as the Lothering sky, and Malcolm sighs with an old patience but believes her, because his eldest is not the pup with her head in the clouds, dreaming of a warrior’s glory. And so it’s Carver who is sent to bed early, and Marian stifles her guilt with a smile – buries it deep with the ashes in the hearth as her mother sighs her soft lament of where is his head these days?
She gets better at it, too, as one is wont to with things often practised.
Firebirds dance between her palms, lapping at her fingers like laughter, but her youth makes her careless and one leaps too far – catches hold of the haystack behind the barn, and before long the whole farmhouse is ablaze.
“It was like this when I got here,” she says, eyes wide with fright that’s only partly feigned, and no one questions her, only pats her back and thanks the Maker for her quick thinking when she’d rushed to fetch help. She feels her father’s eyes linger with unease, but she can feel his relief, too, that the villagers suspect only a careless farmhand and not Malcolm Hawke’s daughter of apostasy. But from that day her lies don’t fall quite so easily between them, and it becomes a challenge she loves – and one she seeks out, driven by some reckless impulse she can’t explain.
“I was in my room all night,” she says, even as a bruising kiss blossoms a small red rose beneath the neckline of her shirt, and she can feel the hands of the baker’s eldest son on her hips still, his smile beneath her ear and his clever tongue on her pulse. She’s just climbed in the window and ducked under the covers, and there’s breathless laughter in her throat at almost being caught.
But they believe her, or at the very least her mother does, and if her father knows he doesn’t mention it, only tells her to be careful, heart. And Hawke doesn’t know if she’s grateful, or if she’d rather he scold her for her carelessness.
Then her father dies, and there is no one left to tell her lies from her truths, and now Hawke must lie for them all – must hide her sister’s magic as she must her own, and the lying becomes a burden now, and nothing like the youthful venture she’d taken such pride in. And on the heels of her father’s passing the Blight reaches Lothering, and her lies are all she can take with her. Her father’s library sits abandoned in their haste, the tomes too heavy to carry; her mother’s wedding dress that would have been hers or Bethany’s, snug in a box beneath her parent’s marriage bed. None of these things could she take, but her quick tongue she still has, and it’s both a blessing and a curse. Because a silver tongue is of no use against an ogre, and though it gets them across the sea and into the city that had been their mother’s last hope, Hawke cannot help but feel cheated, with her sister’s last breath ringing loud in her ears.
But she doesn’t stop lying, and she shapes her new life from the mould of her old one, wears smiles too bright and too pleasant for neighbours and employers who think her odd indeed. She gets her hands dirty and her robes bloodied, and weaves her stories with an ease that almost puts Varric’s to shame. Aveline only shakes her head (so like her father, Hawke thinks), and doesn’t even buy her half-truths. Merrill buys everything, eyes wide with an unwavering faith Hawke loves and loathes all at once, and Isabela only scoffs and claims with each lie uttered that she can do her one better.
But Fenris – Fenris is hard to lie to, Hawke finds, and his is a brutal sort of honesty that she comes to admire, that she comes to crave, as she craves his hands on her hips and his warm mouth below her ear. Not a baker’s son, and there’s no need to pretend at chastity now, and so Hawke sheds her lies with her clothes until she’s bare before him.
But he leaves her between her still-cooling bedsheets, confused and hurt and with the remnants of kisses along her throat, but there’s no one to hide them from now, except perhaps herself. Because he doesn’t come back, and she feels them on her skin when she moves, when she breathes and laughs and lies, not the roses of her youth but ugly, thorny things.
He’s concerned for her, and she doesn’t know whether to hit him or embrace him, but she does neither.
“I’m alright,” she tells him instead when she catches him looking, lets the corner of her mouth curve just so, and she sees some of his worries clear from his gaze.
“I am – glad,” he says, lies, and Hawke waits until his back is turned before she lets her face fall. She is not alright and he is not glad of it, but she pretends they can fool each other, though they fool no one else. And the years smooth the edges of her lies and his, until she wonders if she might just believe them.
But they say the truth is an inevitable thing, and so “I love you,” she breathes, years later when the city and the sky and the world itself burns around them, and it is honesty as she’s never known it, hot on her tongue as he swallows it whole, and takes everything she offers now that he didn’t before. But truth is a fragile foundation on which to build a life already weighed down with lies, and Hawke knows it, even as she allows herself to imagine her small fancies – a future free of worries, and belly round beneath her palms, warm with something other than her magic. And she thinks, hopes, she might have this; that after everything, she’s due this little victory, surely. That a day will come when she won’t be needed.
Of course, an expert liar, Hawke is her own most gullible fool.
.
It’s too early to call it morning, the day she leaves to help save an ungrateful world from itself and the wrath her mistake brought upon it, and her eyes are heavy with sleep and her own sorrow as she makes her way to the bed, careful not to rouse him.
“I’ll be back soon,” she whispers, and the lie falls a quick kiss against his brow, before she tucks her cloak about her shoulders, and with her many untruths heavy in her pockets, Hawke wonders if this will be her last.