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"But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves."
-T.H. White, The Once and Future King
There was nothing wrong with bears in principle, of course; she of all people knew that more than anything.
Bears were simple. They had simple wants and needs and simple means to achieve those wants and needs. The methods by which you kept your own wants and needs from intersecting with theirs were actually quite simple as well. Hang your food stores high. Avoid certain paths and fords in early spring. Avoid smelling like a freshly gutted halla in the high noon sun while out hunting. The basics.
This bear was more…. complicated.
Four rows of eyes rose to the apex of its skull, each one blinking in a desultory fashion that suggested the action was merely cosmetic. Its fur bunched oddly in places, suggesting spikes, or perhaps plates of armor, and was the color of lamp blacking if it had somehow been crossed with mother of pearl.
Darkness roiled around its foremost paws and the bear’s shadow stretched out endlessly behind it. Flowers grew there, winking in and out of the dark like tiny stars, but whatever scent they carried with them was drowned out by the wall of musk and fur and magic that stood before her.
Distantly she wondered what exactly she had brought with her that had caused it to take this form exactly, before she reminded herself that sometimes, things were not entirely about her.
Possibly it just liked bears.
Even if its grasp on the technical details of bears was somewhat haphazard, and included a great deal more gold filigree on its claws.
She took a breath. Scents crowded her, assaulted her- fur and flowers and ozone and perfume- but back where she was (really was, legs crossed, hands folded quietly before her, her back straight as a ramrod), she knew that the only smells that mattered were the small, unfussy, indoor smells of beeswax and parchment and the low musty reek of unaired curtains.
It was the curtains that grounded her. It was impossible to be intimidated by eldritch beings from beyond the Veil when in the back of your mind you knew the laundresses needed to scrub the mildew out of the hangings.
She opened her mouth again, more settled this time. But before she could speak-
“Inquisitor,” said the bear, its voice rolling out before it like a velvet carpet. Its breath washed over her; she steeled herself as her thoughts momentarily blanked out at the sensation, which was not so much a smell or a feeling as it was an aura of unmistakable power.
So it was that it took her a moment to register the undercurrent of amusement in the bear’s tone. Amusement that did not dissipate.
“How may I be of service to you?” said the bear, who she was still referring to as a bear in her head, as giving it the satisfaction of thinking of it as a pride demon would only encourage it.
She opened her mouth again, relieved to be answering a direct question, when the bear once again cut her off before she could get to why she had come.
“I have watched you from afar, as have many of my fellows,” said the bear, and ah yes, there was the amusement again, not so much an undercurrent this time as it was a paddle the bear was using to drive his point straight downstream. “We have witnessed your efforts. We have seen your enemy. We know what you would do to face him on the field of battle. What may I do for you.”
It stretched, then. Muscle rolled under spiked and nacreous fur as its eyes shut one by one in pleasure. Its shadow swept forward as neatly as the hem of a chevalier’s cloak, reaching dangerously close to where she sat. More of those selfsame flowers sprouted in its wake, the centers glowing gold and white and familiar, so familiar-
The bear chuckled.
No, strike that. She was charitable enough to keep referring to it as a bear, but not so charitable that she could mislabel a snigger.
The bear’s lips had not lowered at the corners from its earlier laugh. Its teeth were still showing, and as she watched they became more visible still, the skin in its mouth stretching impossibly back until it seemed like its smile ought to take half its head off with it.
It panted- not the bone-deep chuff of a dubious bear, but an all too human expression of ugly anticipation.
She firmed her spine. Somewhere, far away, her hands clasped tighter together and her lungs drew in deep, counting the beats of a rhythm only she could hear.
It waited for her to speak this time, its shadow licking patiently at its flanks.
Her voice cut through the haze of the surrounding space like a window being opened suddenly in a stuffy room.
“Silver, or gut?”
The bear closed its mouth.
She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but it seemed like the shadow flowers even paused their incessant beckoning.
At last, it said, “I do beg your pardon?”
The reverberating, nightmarish quality of its voice from before wasn’t entirely done away with- when it spoke it still sounded like a bucket of smug bees being violently shaken into a river of molasses- but it was less sure of itself, for starters.
She rested a hand on the satchel of materials at her side. It was a representation, of course, the real thing was back with her meditating physical self. Josephine likely would have had words to say if items on loan from the university of Orlais wound up on the other side of the Fade.
Carrying on as if nothing were amiss, she said, “An expedition just reported back from an excavation of a temple of June in the foothills of Montsimmard. They unearthed instruments, some dating back to the founding of Halamshiral, but some very much older.”
“Oh,” said the bear.
She was uncertain if she could see a furrow in its brow or not.
Opening the satchel, she drew forth drawings and diagrams. Thankfully she had studied them enough in the physical world that their Fade constructs were accurate, or at least enough for her purposes. She lay them out on the grass before her one by one, drawing the bear’s attention to one in particular. The bear did not visibly react.
“You see,” she said. “One of the professors theorized that strings from instruments dating approximately just after the fall of Arlathan may have been magical in nature, and thus are impossible for us to recreate with modern tools, but he also found newer strings that seemed to be made of plain, unmagical silver. We found other instruments whose strings had degraded entirely, and therefore may have been made of anything from gut, to some fiber that we have not been made aware of.”
“Well,” said the bear, “I-”
She cut in smoothly. “They also reported that some of the instruments resemble the spiked fiddle my people have found depicted in other ruins, but others had a closer resemblance to the Tevinter lyra, which reportedly used a bow of halla-hair.” She paused “Or human hair. One can never tell how much exaggeration goes along with blood magic.”
It was uncertain whether the bear stayed silent or that she simply continued before giving it a chance to do otherwise. “Gut seems by far the simplest solution,” she said, “but then there remains the question of what kind. Some artifacts seem to suggest that the halla provided the best gut, but to be honest with you,” (The bear blinked again.) “my people may often exaggerate their uses. Varghest was another possibility, were it not for the fact that it seems impossible to cure their intestines in ways that don’t involve melting one’s equipment.”
She finished speaking, and looked at the bear expectantly. Drawings, diagrams, and painstaking research notes lay in a careful semi-circle before her.
The bear was still on its haunches. Its skin had reverted back to its earlier, more bearlike dimensions at the corners of its mouth, and even some of the spikes and suggestions of horns around its ears had settled down somewhat.
After an eternity of stillness, while the long, lonely winds of the Fade moved through them both like the tides of some vast ocean, it reached out its paw.
Holding one of the pages between two gold-filligreed claws with impossible delicacy, the bear squinted at its contents.
Something improbably like a snort suddenly escaped from its lips.
“Reconstructed nonsense,” it said, and the bees were gone from its voice this time.
It used its other set of claws to point- or rather, jab- at the paper. “How many pegs do they think were here? Six? Where would they fit?”
“That’s what I said!” she said. “Then they had to gall to come to me with the theory that the number of strings had to correspond to the numbers of the elven pantheon and honestly-”
“Hold one moment,” said the bear. “My deepest apologies, let me fetch my spectacles.”
With luck, no one would ask about the missing lyrium.
Laeta could meditate to the point of being able to enter the Fade, but frankly, it was an all-day affair that she’d never been able to manage without a drummer to keep the beat, or a relative on hand to smack her briskly in the face if she meditated herself clean out of the ability to breathe. It was easier with lyrium, even if it did stain her teeth a vivid blue and leave her uncomfortably aware of things such as, how many strands of hair she had on her scalp, or how many dust mites landed on her face from one moment to the next.
No one should ask, moreso. She was a mage. Mages used lyrium. Laeta had used lyrium as part and parcel of her being a mage, and therefore there was no mystery to be had. If Josephine, or Creators forbid, Cullen inquired about it, she would merely point out those two salient details and let them draw their own conclusions. Mage, ergo lyrium.
Right.
She made a quiet mental note to fudge some of the inventory numbers the next time she passed by the quartermaster’s billet, and continued on her journey through the halls of Skyhold.
Her experiment had been a success, in any case. She had advanced her own stores of knowledge considerably, and had even tested herself in what she was relieved to have found true.
More or less.
Sandaled feet slapped resolutely at the paving stones, stirring up dust as she walked. Bitterly cold sunlight dappled down through the ruined ceiling, and with it came the voices of the work crews as they swarmed over the roofs and buttresses pulling off the shattered and the rotten edges of her castle and replacing it with the new. She fancied she could feel Skyhold pulling itself together under their attentions, squaring its shoulders and sinking its roots deeper into the mountain as they labored over it in love. She also fancied she could feel each and every one of her skin cells singing a glad little song about how wonderful lyrium was. She then decided to focus on something else.
Somewhere in the west, the Wardens were doing something unspeakably awful and doubtlessly extremely unhygienic, but here, in the spine of the world, the morning was clear and calm and its people likely as safe as they could manage. No armies could round the pass and catch them napping- they would have to navigate the long, treacherous river valley that lead up to the fortress. Minus the sudden appearance of heavy cloud-cover, even a dragon would have a difficult time not giving the defenders forewarning enough to at least move everything flammable indoors.
They had a reprieve, or at least as much of one as they could ever expect. And Laeta had made use of it to the best of her ability.
She stopped by her rooms first, to collect her things and drop off her notes. If she left as quickly as possible and did not spare a glance for the impeccably straight, unslept-in bed linens and carefully laid fire, there was no one to witness it.
Light did not ordinarily reach the base of the tower, and what light there was tended to flicker and cast shadows of things that weren’t, strictly speaking, there. (Veilfire, as an interesting magical tool, was all that you could want and more. Veilfire as an actual light source was in want of a few improvements. Not that it was her place to judge.)
But it was warm, and smelled heavily of books, and paint, and the faraway reek of birds, and it was both safe and familiar. There were cobwebs in the joins and the kitchen girls liked to use one of the stairwells to trade orange slices and gossip. The divan against the wall sagged in the center, and its feet were scuffed from its long journey from some forgotten attic all the way to the base of the tower. (Creators willing, Josephine would not have it summarily replaced with something featuring a great deal more gold leaf and a great deal less comfort).
The world, in all its complexities, was forced to become small and simple and good in this place, with its parchment smells and the occasional pat of raven droppings from overhead. She liked it. She worried, sometimes, about how much she liked it, especially after Haven.
Her mind was wandering again. She shook her hair from her shoulders, and cleaved her tongue hard to the roof of her mouth as if she would press it all the way through.
She had come here with a purpose.
Laeta tucked what she carried with her carefully between her ribs and upper arm, and hooked the longer piece from her belt buckle as she crossed the room to the ladder propped against the scaffolding at the base of the wall. She distrusted the leather ties binding the ancient ladder together more than she distrusted Orlesian politics and the grand clerics combined, and she took no risks in while climbing. Her sandals had been left in her rooms, and the grey weathered wood was smooth beneath the soles of her feet, and warmer than the flagstones had been. The colder air had cracked her skin and toes in the weeks since she had arrived in Skyhold, but she had since become more diligent in caring for them. It felt good to go barefoot once more.
Gone was the armor she’d worn day and night, and often slept in, when they were still quartered at Haven. Gone too was the restrictive shem clothing that she’d muddled her way through the basics of while still wrapped up in her half-hearted attempt to gather intelligence on the Conclave. (Laeta understood that the overall design of the Orlesian brassiere was no doubt comfortable and supportive to many of its enthusiasts, she had never needed anything than a stout band of linen to perform the same service. The less said about her experiment with stays the better.)
These days she wore leathers and soft, draping tunics that covered as much as they needed to, and may or may not have made Josephine choke on her wine the time Laeta arrived at a meeting with Teryn of Highever clad in a tunic that left her bare-armed and bare-shinned and leaving zero doubt as to how far her vallaslin reached past her collarbone.
(Laeta had argued that as long as she was still receiving regular shipments of arms and soldiers from the Cousland estates it shouldn’t matter what she wore, but she had come away with the impression that Lady Josephine “embossed brocade from wrists to ankles” Montilyet had remained unconvinced.)
The ladder creaked and rattled, but didn’t shake apart under her weight. She reached the top, hooked her knee over the lip of the scaffolding, and pulled herself neatly over with her burdens intact.
He was there, of course, as he ought to have been.
She still had the bear in her mind- the bear and all those tiny winking flowers carpeting its endless shadow- and with the Fadelight dancing around them it was as if this corner of the tower was its own little section of the Fade, with everything blurring at the edges and shifting in out of sight. Solas was in the heart of it- blanketless at the top of the scaffold, with nothing covering his head at all, she noticed with a sniff.
Sleep diminished him, she’d found. He was already larger than an elf had any reason to be, but he’d somehow evolved the ability to compact himself quite handily into any available space. His hands fitted beneath his head and his knees tucked together until there was even room enough at the farther end of the scaffolding for Laeta to sit, cross-legged, in the space between his legs and empty air.
Her father had been considered tall, she thought, more of that blue-tinged giddiness still washing through her. Thin as a whip, but tall. But then, he and many others in the Clan had grown up during the rebellion in Ferelden, where the lack of game and the warring humans had driven them all near starvation. Four children out of five had never achieved their full adult height. She tried to picture Solas among her slender people with their diet of simple proteins and greens, and imagined it would be very much like that time Master Dennet stabled his brand new Orlesian warmbloods in the same building as the Frostback hill ponies Scout Harding had brought in for her forces.
She blinked, hard.
Wool-gathering again. In a patently ridiculous fashion.
Besides, she thought, her father would only have to spend five minutes with Solas before hauling out parchment and pen and getting him go over ancient elvhen verb declensions, much less compare shoulder widths.
Far overhead, the raven cages were silent- it was too early for the birds to fully wake yet- and apart from the distant sounds of construction the fortress was blessedly quiet. The bread would already be finished rising and baking in the ovens, she thought, and comforted herself with the fact that she had the rank to simply walk in any time she chose and take what she liked.
Bread, with soft cheese, and Antivan olives later, she thought, a twist of warm pleasure in her chest. But first-
She settled more squarely on the scaffolding, carefully sitting criss-crossed as she unhooked what she had carried with her and balanced the spike at the base on the wooden planks before her.
Solas slept on, somehow, a line pinching hard at the skin between his eyes that smoothed, slowly when she glanced back his way.
She twisted the pegs, tightening a string or two that had been too hastily added, and kept her fingers on them as she raised the bow (rosined halla hair- she might have scoffed outwardly to the bear about her people’s obsession with using every part of the sacred deer, but it was what she had been trained on) and began to tune her instrument.
It did not, on the whole, take Solas very long to wake.
His eyes did not open immediately, nor did he startle. It made her realize that while she had quite often looked over at him during a quiet moment in the field, even when they had stopped for as little as an hour or two to water the horses, she had often seen him sleeping like this, as if he had the ability to drop off wherever he was and simply switch on again as needed. But she had never seemed to catch him at the moment of waking. He just, always was, somehow.
He relaxed, suddenly, that was how she knew.
She wondered where he had been, that made him sleep so tensely.
Also, while what the Rivaini called the kamancheh (and her own people called a much longer name) had a pleasantly desolate voice, the act of tuning it was hardly what one might call soothing. So it was a wonder when Solas awoke in the manner of a cat suddenly finding itself square in a sunbeam on a kitchen floor.
Laeta did not edge away to give him room. She had not touched him, in her efforts to reach this place. If he wanted to touch her, that was his prerogative.
He stretched, brushing her perhaps by accident, but did not press. He shifted carefully, turning from his side to his back and resting his head on his bundled outer robe as he drew his knees up and looked owlishly at her. The fur framed his skull rather in the manner of a dandelion gone to seed. She thought it charming.
“Well,” said Solas, sleep-roughed and low. “Good morning.”
Apprehension broke through for a moment while he looked at her, his hands on his stomach. She shifted her fingering slightly, lost the mark, then paused.
She took a breath. “I,” she said, “have been doing some reading.”
He blinked, his lashes short and dark against his cheek. If he was baffled by her appearance, or disturbed at being awoken, he gave no sign.
He didn’t even have the decency to look mussed from sleep, although she wasn’t quite certain how he would manage to do that exactly.
She twisted her instrument to show him better.
“These strings," she said, "Here," and she gestured with the hand that held the rosined bow. “The upper scales. In Orlais they’re made of silk, but we use gut. Sometimes silver or steel is used as well, but they all produce different sounds, and it’s difficult to say which one is the most accurate.” She gestured slightly with the hand holding the long and lovely neck. “Or rather, accurate for pre-Tevinter elven music. Although frankly I decided not to experiment with inscribing runes on silverite strings, even if Dagna sounded more or less positive it could be done.”
She was speaking too quickly. Slow down, she told herself.
“Ah” said Solas, still apparently nonplussed and supine before her.
“Exactly," she said crisply. "It still left the question of what kind of runes to use, and I didn’t want to suddenly find my hands on fire mid-performance.”
She closed her mouth. Counted a quick, measured one-two-three inside her head. “These strings here,” she said, just as smoothly, “were always rumored to be of different materials, and I ruled out silk as a solution ages ago. So I found, er, someone to ask.”
“I see,” said Solas. His face showed little expression, but some of the sawed edges had sanded themselves away from his voice.
She faltered again. Not fatally, but just enough to be obvious.
It occurred to her to think, for the very first time, that while Solas might enjoy bringing his own studies and discoveries to the forefront of the conversation, that was very different from actually being interested in someone else’s.
She wasn’t exactly sure what she would do if that wasn’t the case.
But then-
That was the lyrium again. It had to be.
Creators willing, she would never touch the stuff again unless worse came to worst. She had seen Dorian after a hit or two- sometimes his pupils grew three times their size in the span of a minute. Afterwards it was as if lyrium bypassed the laws of time and space to allow him to talk even faster.
Laeta had hesitated for far too long. She tapped her fingers on the neck, her lip twisting her teeth, then she proffered it once more for his benefit. “Gut,” she said, indicating the two lower strings. “At the core, and wound with silverite. I had them made when I first made the connection, and when I had my theory confirmed, I-”
“Show me,” he said suddenly, pushing himself up on his elbows. “Please, go on. Play something.”
Her hands faltered once more on the pegs, and she looked at him, her pulse ticking steadily in her throat.
He actually did look someone only recently dragged from sleep; she saw that now.
He still blinked too often, as if he were acclimating to the light, and his voice was still gravelly, but he looked warm and interested in a way that she’d mildly feared he wouldn’t be, at this early in the morning, when abruptly woken up by someone with a thesis that needed proving.
It wasn’t the bear again.
She did not kneel here, and there was no danger. Nothing towered over her, or held its knowledge back with a price. She was not mocked or dismissed, and even with the lyrium dancing in her blood, she did not have to struggle to keep her emotions in check.
But at the same time, it was.
It was what you brought with you, she thought. And she had only brought one thing with her.
Laeta left off speaking at once, giving it up as a poor experiment, and sank her spine into the perfect curve, bringing the bow around in one smooth motion as she shifted her fingers into position on the neck.
She exhaled, once. And began to play.
As soon as she started, she knew that she would need more practice to reach the full range of the wound strings- they were more variable, richer too in a way, but her familiarity and skill would bring the true richness. She also supposed the gauge could be tinkered with- she was used to thinner in her own experience, and had not thought to give the exact measurements to Dagna before commissioning them.
The piece was simple, a variation on a larger hymn to Mythal. Laeta herself had translated the bulk of the sheet music from an expedition to a ruin she had made when she still lived north of the Waking Sea. She was partnerless, but could carry the weight of her piece herself without the accompaniment of the long-necked lute her people used.
The silverite bit into her fingers as she pressed on the strings, a warning and a challenge. It sang back, she realized with a funny little leap of pleasure, that was the difference, and the gut gave it heart and spring and substance. Her people’s music wasn’t all metal and magic, it was meat, warm and alive, and it was the bone inlaid into the dark wood that formed the bowl of her instrument. She didn’t have to be a mage or a Keeper’s second to reach in and make it sing for her- she merely had to seek out that twist of sweetness that lay in the heart between one long pull of the bow and the next. And that, she could do.
The prelude finished, and the song shifted into a higher register, one that used the wound strings less, but still relied on them for the backbone of the hymn
But most importantly, she realized, this wasn’t a gift she was bringing Solas, or a ploy to get his approval. She was promptly surprised and even mildly pleased with herself to find that she did not particularly need his approval.
She wished simply for his company, and she was grateful that he had agreed to give it to her.
Gratitude suited her better, in any case. It always had. Gratitude picked you up again when nothing else would. It relied on the presence of generosity and kindness, and with those two things in hand she had always been able to do what needed doing.
Laeta reached the part she had been most excited to hear the difference in the quality and tone of the sound, and thought back to what the bear had said. He had been very polite after a time, and had even pulled one or two extra arms from the void of his midsection to demonstrate a technique she had seen fragments of in a scroll or two, but never performed.
She heard it at once, when she reached it. Not that she was flawless, far from it, but that there was a difference. There was the potential. She saw what could be, with time and effort, and she could even experiment with it right now, if she wished, if she just went back three measures and-
“Hold on,” she said without thinking, “I could have done- I just needed to flex the-” then she stopped, mid-note, because she had closed her eyes at some point in the song and then she had opened them and was brought to stillness.
Solas had pulled himself up while she played, mirroring her by criss-crossing his legs and leaning forward. He had his chin resting in one hand, his fingers partially covering his mouth as he watched her, and when she met his eyes he reached out and touched her bare foot where it sat closest to him.
She patently refused to read his expression.
Sudden self-consciousness made her sit upright once more, removing the bow from the strings and cradling her instrument protectively.
“Well,” she said.
She looked away.
“You get the idea. I still have to rework some of the music I found, key seems to be one of the most difficult things to translate, but-” She stopped. It wasn’t lyrium hammering in her ears this time, but her own blood rising.
“I know,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “that it doesn’t sound as it should. As you may have heard it. I know it’s more my own creation than anything else, that I can’t make it sound as it was.”
She paused, teetering on the brink like an awkward rider on a horse made primarily of knives and conversational missteps. Oh Creators, she hadn't wanted to drop all of this on him right now, but it was now or never and all she could do was hope for the best.
“But I was always hampered before,” she said, more slowly, more reluctantly than ever and no she definitely wasn't looking at him anymore, “by the idea that there were questions I could ask and those who could answer them, but that I mustn’t dare, for the sake of the Clan. Because there were no others after me. And I could not be spared.”
To her utter horror, her eyes had started watering.
“I could have created something new, and not asked any questions” she said, straightening more and laughing somewhat- brightly false covering-up laughter that did exactly what was asked of it and no more, “or I could have traded so much for it to sound exactly as it should have been.”
And oh, the bear had offered, towards the end. She hadn’t given herself any time to consider it.
“But this is what I wanted,” she said, pressing her fingers to the strings to steady them. “To take what I could of the old, and make it grow again.”
Laeta inhaled. “And I wanted to thank you for helping me.”
She looked up.
Which, on the whole, was a mistake. Creators, she was looking at him again, and this time his expression was impossible to ignore. It was shocking to see it here in the waking world, not muffled by what she could remember of the dream of Haven, and how did she not know she could be this embarrassed?
But she looked at him, even still.
His hand was still on her foot. He slowly squeezed it, something that would ordinarily make her yelp, but she was too frozen for that. She wondered if she ought to warn him, even so.
She’d thought of the dream for a reason. She’d never quite regretted what she’d done, especially since she was fairly certain that her dreaming self wanted what it wanted and couldn’t be blamed for going after it in a dream, for Mythal’s sake. She had regretted how uncomfortable he’d been with it afterwards, and she had let him keep his distance ever since. She also wasn’t sure if she wanted him equating her dreaming self with her waking self anyways, since four nights out of five she had the same dream where she buried Orlesian musicology scholars up to their necks in tidal flats and waited for the waters to rise.
But he looked at her with wonder.
Divorced from wariness, for once. And she thought, deep down, ah well that’s all right then. If I could manage that, at least.
He squeezed tighter for a moment, then released her, letting his hand drop to the scaffolding.
“That was, beautiful,” he said, and no, she couldn’t say she had ever heard his voice sound quite like that before. “I cannot tell you how beautiful that was.”
Ah, she thought again. Well.
Well.
“Yes, of course” she heard herself say, eventually. “I mean, it’s a work in progress, I can show you some of the notation if-”
“Please,” he said, and then he was leaning back, reclining on the scaffolding once more, his long legs stretching out next to hers with no concern for keeping the distance between them carefully and strictly delineated. “Please, play on. Anything you wish.”
Honestly, she had been about the suggest that they find something to eat, as the only thing she had imbibed in the past eight hours had been six ounces of pure grade lyrium, and the walls were beginning to smear rather, but since he had asked-
Laeta allowed herself to beam at him, just the once.
She looked a fright, she knew that.
But she meant it; from the bottom of her heart she meant it.
She had thanked him already, and she didn’t want to continue to pour gratitude at his feet, but neither could she find a way to tell him how much she was grateful for this. For his listening. For the way he was now, stretched before her, and open to her in a way she honestly hadn’t thought he could be.
She would be grateful for this, she thought, for a very long time. Even if nothing came of it but this very moment.
Music rose up the tower after a time, just as the ravens began to rattle themselves awake. The phrasing wasn’t as formal as before, but the playing was looser, more fluid, as she warmed further to the new strings and learned how best to use them. Elsewhere, the morning bread was pulled from the ovens just as the shifts for the wall sentries changed over- soon there would be eggs and potatoes and gallons of sweet tea for the soldiers in the barracks. Doubtless her advisers were already awake, or just beginning to be so- Josephine in her office with her coffee and pastries, Leliana on…. whatever she lived off of, and Cullen with his soldier’s rations in that half-ruined tower he seemed to think was of strategic importance.
It was a good place, this fortress of hers. It was filled with what she had brought with her and more. It would grow, and live, either with or without her, but for now it she was filling it with herself, and her music, and that peculiar sense of ringing clarity in her chest that seemed to always be just barely shy of floating her off with it.
It was good, and it was hers.
Of course, eventually, a voice from farther up the tower roared out-
“Vishante kaffas I fell asleep ten minutes ago WILL YOU KEEP IT DOWN?”