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The Inquisitor has a particular fascination with little shops, and while traveling will stop the group to explore even the least-promising-looking carts and secondhand stores. Cassandra would call this an abominable waste of time—she has never had much patience for shopping—except that the Inquisitor also has an astonishing talent for finding a rare rune or satchel of some much-needed ingredient in the back of those shops.
(Also, although she is unwilling to admit it, she herself enjoys digging through the inevitable stacks of yellowing secondhand books. There is usually nothing of interest, but sometimes....)
She is carefully checking through a stack of adventure serials, looking for an elusive chapter that she is missing from her collection, when she hears Vivienne say, "Ah, Inquisitor, here is something that may interest you! A historical piece, if you will."
"Hm?" the Inquisitor says, and then, "Oh! Oh my, that is interesting."
Cassandra vaguely wonders what they've found but not enough to leave off her search for "The River Dane Expedition."
"Isn't it? This sort of thing was quite popular, oh, some eighteen to twenty years ago. They were all over—paintings, woodcuts, popular printings, even a few fictionalized retellings with illustrations."
"I suppose I can see why. My goodness. It's not—it can't possibly be accurate, can it?"
"The dragons are, or so I am told. I was of course in the Tower at the time, so I have no firsthand knowledge."
"But surely not the armor...?" the Inquisitor asks, and that is enough to make all the vague clues gathering in the Inquisitor's head come together into a sudden clanging alarm, and she leaves off her search and heads into the back room.
"Well, I am given to understand her fashion sense, such as it is, has changed significantly in the past—" Vivienne says, and then breaks off when Cassandra storms into the room.
And sure enough, what they are discussing is one of the twice- and thrice-damned woodcuts.
The portraits were bad enough, and their knock-offs, but the woodcuts were unabashedly dreadful, and this is a perfect example of why. The dragon is... well, it's a dragon, and the famous great tower behind it is the great tower, but the way they have depicted Cassandra is—
—is—
—ugh.
She realizes she has vocalized that last thought out loud.
The Inquisitor, though, is difficult bordering on impossible to intimidate. "So," she says, "Inquiring minds want to know, Cassandra. Did you defeat a dragon singlehandedly in a very short skirt with your hair flying about?"
"I am going to purchase this," Cassandra says, jerking the woodcut down off the wall.
"But I was going to buy it," the Inquisitor says, all innocence. "I thought it would look remarkable in the Great Hall. The garters are really something."
"I am going to offer the shopkeeper twice the selling price," Cassandra snaps.
Vivienne is also, sadly, difficult to frighten into silence. "There's nothing to be ashamed of, my dear. The look may be slightly gauche, but it is most striking."
Cassandra snorts.
Later that night, around the campfire, Cassandra provides some kindling of great historical interest. The Inquisitor laughs and Vivienne sighs, but Cassandra is satisfied that it was a purchase well-made.
That, however, is only the beginning.
It is not a new problem, of course. Vivienne was not wrong: for a period of some years after Cassandra was first named Right Hand of the Divine, Orlesian society had a brief but intense fascination with her—facilitated, Cassandra had to admit, to some extent by the Chantry. Her own official portrait, while lacking in ridiculously short skirts, had been extremely romanticized, and had featured the head of a dragon in the background and a certain motif of dragonfire around the edges. But it was the popular depictions, in highly improbable armor and even more improbable poses, fighting dragons or standing atop their dead corpses or, in some particularly ridiculous variations, riding them, that flourished in sadly large numbers.
At first, with the brittle above-it-all fury of her younger years, she had done her best to simply ignore it, and in truth the fad passed in time. But the passing of the fad did not remove the objects themselves from circulation. It was disconcerting to enter a tavern on Seeker business and see a picture ostensibly of yourself, legs (and more, in the worst cases) on full display, standing on a dragon.
By the time Cassandra was thirty, she had begun to quietly buy up the paintings and printings when she found them. (The Seekers paid a modest stipend, but Cassandra lived so simply that she had, by then, a considerable savings even so.) Once she collected a sufficient number, she had an extremely satisfying bonfire.
By the time of the Conclave, most of the paintings and printings had disappeared—destroyed by Cassandra, deteriorated (many of the broadsides had been cheap to begin with), or simply lost in attics and basements.
So it is... suspicious... that within a month, Leliana has a new decoration in her loft.
Perhaps the Inquisitor said something about Cassandra's discomfiture, or Vivienne did, although sometimes Cassandra suspected that Leliana didn't need to be told things at all—that the rumor among the rank-and-file that her birds (or even the wind itself) whispered secrets in her ear was true. Then, too, Leliana had known her long enough that her dislike of her so-called fame was in truth no secret to her.
Whatever the reason, though, one day Cassandra mounts the stairs to the rookery to confer and finds herself confronted by a painting of herself.
"Look what I found," Leliana says with barely-contained glee.
It is, at least, one of the better class of paintings, modeled after her official Chantry portrait, and therefore bereft of extremely short skirts, boots clearly designed more for aesthetic appeal than practicality, or (Maker preserve her) exposed cleavage. But it still features her, age twenty and... limber, posed dramatically atop a dragon, wearing a breastplate that has been hammered out in strategic places in a way that no real breastplate ever would be, her sword plunged into its skull (not the way to kill a high dragon; their skull-plates are notoriously thick), her hair flapping around like a banner in the wind (which is pure foolishness—she did have long hair at that age, but she braided it and tucked it inside her armor; long loose hair in combat is a very poor idea indeed).
"Leliana," she says. It is meant to sound like a warning growl. It comes out dismayingly plaintive.
"I think it's quite nice, don't you agree? Good to remember where we came from."
"You are mocking me."
"Me? Never."
"Shall I find pictures of you, at twenty years of age, and post them about the public areas of Skyhold?"
"The only portraits anyone would have made of me at that age would be perhaps... not quite the thing for a religious organization, yes?" Leliana gives her a catlike smile. "But quite decorative. I was, sadly, more decorative than sensible at that age."
Cassandra grunts an acknowledgement of the point. "And I was more angry than sensible. I am still frequently angry, though. I will break in when you are asleep and destroy this, you know."
"You may have heard that I don't sleep."
"You may have convinced the others of that, but I know you better than that."
"I suppose you do." Leliana gives a dramatic sigh. "I will just have to admire it until such time as you remove it, I suppose. I don't know why you object. I think the painter has captured you rather well. Younger you, at least."
"I look as if I intend to either remove every scale from the dragon using only my teeth, or else go have a manicure."
Leliana smiles. "Precisely my point."
The betrayal is not complete, however, until the day she returns to find Josephine sitting on the floor, sorting through pictures.
In fairness, ever since she moved most of her belongings into Josephine's rooms, she has given her the freedom of her possessions—Josephine does not read her journal, of course, or read her correspondence, but Cassandra has always made clear that possessions such as her books, or her scented hand-salve, or those thick woolen socks that Josephine will not buy for herself but loves to wear in private on cold winter days, are hers to use as she likes.
She had forgotten the small collection of pictures she had not had time to burn until she comes into the room to find Josephine with them arrayed around her. Josephine looks up with a mischievous light in her eyes that is both beautiful and extremely dangerous.
"No," she says, before Josephine can say a word.
"I can see why you object to most of them," Josephine says. "They are mostly quite dreadful. Especially the one with you in the... thing. It's not armor, I'm not sure it's even clothing."
(The most lascivious printings, Cassandra had assistance in stamping out—while the Chantry was happy to have its figurehead warrior plastered from sitting room to tavern, the ones in which Cassandra was rather less than clothed did not suit the image they were attempting to maintain. But some persist, as such things always seem to do. In the very worst, Cassandra appears to be riding a dragon wearing a particularly large necklace and a handful of strategically-placed gemstones and some body paint, and nothing else. Her breasts in that one are so improbably buoyant and inhumanly spherical as to be very nearly hypnotic.)
"But," Josephine continues, "some of them are quite nice. I think I had this one, actually." She's holding up one of the more conservative printings, in which Cassandra is fighting the dragon singlehandedly on the ground, which did not in fact ever happen. (But at least she is clothed. Small mercies.) "Word of your exploits traveled to Antiva, of course. I remember my governess telling me all about it."
It is still somewhat disconcerting to realize that, when Cassandra was fighting dragons and saving the Divine, Josephine was eight years old. "I had them in there so that I could burn them," Cassandra says.
"We could keep perhaps one? For sentimental purposes."
"I love you like I love air, Josephine, and I would do almost anything for you. But no."
Josephine sighs, gathering them up again and slipping them back into the chest. Cassandra knows that Josephine does not give up so easily, but for now, that seems to be the end of it.
"And this," the Inquisitor says, as she introduces them to Warden Alistair, "is Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast."
Alistair had taken the introductions to the motley array of the Inquisition inner circle with what Cassandra thought was admirable equanimity—had even greeted Leliana with an affection that coaxed out an unusual reciprocal warmth—so she is taken rather aback when he says, "The Seeker Pentaghast?"
"As far as I am aware, there is only one," Cassandra says, startled, but Alistair has already begun digging in his pack.
"It's usually Cassandra acting the fan," Varric says.
After a moment of rummaging, during which the senior Warden and erstwhile Theirin scion unearths a pair and a half of dirty socks and a bag of what look like dog chews, he finally comes up with—
—sweet Andraste and all her saints.
Alistair is holding out a small statuette of... her. Age twenty. In improbable armor, with her modeled hair stiffly arranged so that it will flap in the breeze forever. Such things were popular for a while some years back, figures of warriors and monsters, heroes and villains, crafted in bulk through some curious dwarven process, but she had somehow been blissfully unaware that she had been the subject of one.
Leliana, the traitor, starts to laugh.
"They didn't make many of the Right Hand of the Divine figure," Alistair says. "It took my wife years to find this one for me. It's even rarer than the Dalish mage statuette."
Leliana sounds like she may never stop laughing. And Varric is grinning like he's going to file this away for future use.
"Which is a shame," Alistair says, apparently oblivious, "because I've wanted it ever since I heard about the Hero of Orlais as a boy. We all wanted to grow up to be dragonslayers after that, you know."
Now even Dorian is giving her an amused look. It is perhaps because of that that Cassandra gives in to momentary impulse and makes a lunge for the figure.
Alistair is quick on his feet, curse him. She makes a second undignified grab for the figure before she admits defeat. (Also, if she doesn't stop now, Leliana may actually injure herself.)
"Oh," Alistair says, after a long puzzled moment during which they stare at each other. He smiles and holds it out. "Would you like to sign it?"
They are at the tavern, some days later, when Varric says, "Do you suppose Alistair would sell me that statuette, if I offered him enough gold?"
"Josephine already tried," Cassandra says. "He said no. Sentimental value."
Varric eyes her. "You seem suddenly very calm about this."
Cassandra sips her wine and doesn't answer for a while. Then, she says, "I paid Dagna a considerable sum of money to make him a Left Hand of the Divine statuette to match."
She thinks she can see genuine pride in Varric's slow smile. "Well played, Seeker," he says. "Well played."