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one.
Josephine digs in her heels and braces herself for both the walk across Haven’s icy grounds and the conversation she needs to have. In her gown and treaded boots, she feels ridiculous; but better ridiculous than injured, as the Commander droned when he procured these boots for her. She gently shuts the chantry door behind her and shuffles over to the spymistress’s tent.
Leliana is bent over a map, but Josephine can see the moment she senses her presence; with the subtle shift in her eyes and the set of her jaw, the change falls like a soft breeze. She comes up to the woman’s side and lingers for a moment, peeking over her tall shoulder at the markers, letting the sound of her breathing fill the space, before she leans into the woman’s ear.
“Did you really kill that scout?”
“Josephine, you know better than to ask me that here.” Leliana does not even flinch, simply slides one marker down the map. It does not escape her notice that it is an inverse of the plan they’ve made inside the War Room. Leliana’s objections were strong enough at the time.
Josephine tosses her head back toward the chantry doors once, her dignified look a leap of faith, before she sets off without looking back. Leliana will follow her or she won’t, and nothing she can say or do will influence her. She’s barely inside the nave before Leliana passes her, heading directly for a side stairwell that leads to a cellar. She suppresses her smile. It seems she still knows her friend after all.
“All right,” Leliana begins once they’re safely tucked away. “Ask away.”
“Did you kill that scout?”
“You need to be more specific, Josephine. It’s essential to the craft. Vague generalities get people in trouble.” She pushes her hood back from her head and tips her face up to the lantern, letting the light flicker across her features. The unwanted memory comes floating back to Josephine, from years ago in Val Royeaux: the soaring melodies of the Chant ringing through the city as they sat on their apartment roof in the fading light, eating crisp pastries full of light cream that dissolved on the tongue. The chanters and the crowds were like ants down below, perfectly fitting for their rooftop picnic.
Above their heads, they’ve just reached Threnodies, and the mournful notes seem to press in on her as she blinks slowly at Leliana. “You cannot be serious.” Her mouth is still watering from the memory of those pastries, full of tart lemon curd and blackberry jam that made her lips pucker. They sold the berries, too, in bucketfuls, and the two of them could go through one in a quarter of an hour, letting the juice stain their tongues and their hands deep red. “I didn’t come here for you to train me. That part of my life is over.”
Leliana takes a bit of the oil she’s opened and swipes it across her chapped lips. There’s a thin ring of red around her fingernails, rust red, not berry red, and she tries not to let her mind veer down that dark corner.
“Josie,” she says. “We can’t ever leave it behind. It’s part of us. It’s like breathing—we know how to stay alive.”
“I don’t need this to stay alive,” she insists, trying to ignore the curl of discomfort unwinding though her stomach. “I don’t need to kill. I just need you to answer the question, Leliana.”
“I didn’t kill him,” she sighs. “Is that what you want to hear?”
“I want the truth, Leliana. I want the truth.”
“I wanted to. I still want to. But the Herald does not approve, and it’s important to keep her happy.” To keep her happy. All these little things, these word choices, the flat look in her eyes, are beginning to grate on Josephine, beginning to unsettle her. She has to wonder what happened to the woman she used to know—still steadfast, still a little insecure, but not this—not so jarred by the world that she can’t accept it. Her eyes fall on Leliana’s hands again, where she’s worrying away at the nail. She stills under Josephine’s gaze.
“Do you want me to do that for you?” she asks gently. “We used to all the time.”
“It’s fine,” she responds, just as the chanters stop for a break. The silence is overwhelming. She’s never wanted to hear Threnodies so badly.
“Let me do this for you, Leliana.” She comes closer, wondering when she and Leliana changed so much. “It may seem trivial, but—“
“My hands have not been clean for a long while.” But she lets Josephine take her hand, lets her turn it back and forth and work at it with her handkerchief, and doesn’t say a thing, just huddled with her under one of the braziers.
“How much longer can you keep this up, Leliana?” she finally whispers. She’s not expecting an answer. She’s not even sure she wants one.
Leliana knew her before she ever knew herself. She turned to her on that balcony and asked her, Are you sure this is the life you want? In her lilting accent, her eyes wide, it seemed like another teasing joke—the parties, the people, one million exhilarating chances to play pretend. And Josephine, bright-eyed, flushed from the sticky summer heat, answered with a smile.
Who wouldn’t want this?
two.
Flissa brings him a plate of braised rabbit and deer, with a note it was the Herald’s prize. If he closes his eyes, he can taste the faint hint of lightning strike, that sizzling electric nature. Cullen hasn’t been prone to fantasy in a long time, but he has a startlingly clear vision of the chase and the hunt, her wild company tearing through the woods, and of the moment itself, the arcing bolt, maybe the curls of smoke.
“Commander.” His eyes fly open, and Josephine and Leliana are standing there; he tries not to display too much of his shame at being caught off-guard. He’s off-duty, after all. As much as they can be. “I am surprised to see you here,” Leliana continues. Josephine’s eyes slide over to her and her guarded expression before jumping in.
“I am not. We all have to eat, do we not?” She is the diplomat in her spare time as well, he sees. He’s coming to appreciate these peace offerings.
“Would you like to sit?” he says slowly. The sting of their earlier argument has not quite left any of them, but the women accept his invitation and join him at the table, both on the opposite bench in a blunt display of their unstable dynamic. It’s like everyone in Haven is watching them at any given time, which is an intolerable sensation—always worming its way up his spine. Cullen’s no stranger to being stared at, but everything feels like more here. More power, more responsibility, everything matters more. There are so many ways to mess up a fresh start before it even begins.
Feeling the beginnings of his panic spiraling, he chooses to focus on how quickly Leliana can get through a bowl of Fereldan stew. It’s quite impressive, especially when Josephine is poking at hers, her mouth set in a firm line.
“I think you like that stew more than most Fereldans do,” he says bluntly, and she slides her gaze back over to him.
“I was born in Ferelden,” she replies, before abruptly dropping her spoon when she reaches a chunk of meat. She stares at the bowl for a moment before signaling the nearest server, who drifts over.
“What is this?” she asks, her tone deceptively light. The man glances down at her bowl.
“It’s rabbit, ma’am.”
“It’s rabbit,” she repeats, sliding one finger along the edge of her knife. Cullen almost snorts, but he’s held fast at the sight.
“Yes ma’am.”
“There’s no nug meat in here.”
“No ma’am.” With one last lingering glower, she turns her attention back to the bowl.
“I’ll eat it if you don’t want it,” he says, tearing off another chunk of bread.
With the Herald off to Redcliffe, Leliana is smug, Cullen is lost, and Josephine is stretching herself to keep them from snapping each other’s heads off.
“Dip it in the wine,” Josephine says suddenly. He swings his head towards her. “Try it.” She pushes her steel cup towards him, and he swirls another chunk of bread in the liquid until it’s soaked with a deep plum color. He pops it in his mouth, and though the lyrium has dulled his sense of taste, it’s a pleasant one.
“You’re right,” he acknowledges. Josephine smiles.
“If only you said that more often.”
“I’m quite fond of nugs,” Leliana continues. “I never could abide to see them eaten.”
“I bet they can’t, either,” he adds flatly. Leliana nods, and it’s the most genuine thing he’s seen from her. Josephine finishes her pudding with a small smile. He feels a little bit of sadness for them, so far from home and stuck with food that’s completely foreign.
Before he can think too much, he slides his pudding towards them. Thanks to the lyrium, he can’t taste it anyway, not unless they put a metric ton of sugar in it. Both the women look at him with appraising eyes, and he presses his lips into a thin line. “I can be diplomatic, too.”
“To diplomacy, then,” Leliana drawls, tipping her mug in the air, letting it hang until they all raise theirs and bring them together with a solid clink.
three.
In three hours, the Herald will be lying on a cot, and the four of them will be back to bickering—without her, the lynchpin that keeps them in place, they have only their own wills to keep themselves together. Cullen and Cassandra will disappear to find her, and Leliana and Josephine will inventory supplies, and they’ll all leave the chantry mothers to the soothing and the comforting.
But that will be then, and this is now. They sit in pairs at the edge of the camp, sharing two threadbare blankets that they deem expendable and pressing their limbs into each other for warmth. Josephine and Cullen try hard to ignore the stares coming their way; Leliana and Cassandra stare back boldly, long used to being watched. It has been a long time since Leliana was on the road in the company of others like this; while working for Justinia, most of her missions were in cities or involved travel on her own. It might even have been the Blight, the last time she did something like this, back when she was sharing stories with the Warden and her company, all of them fighting each other for a chance to bathe or to go into a city, where there might have even been a promise of a night in a bed.
None of them will be sleeping in a bed any time soon.
“I suppose we should start making a plan,” she begins. Cullen and Cassandra look at each other with a small smile, which makes her feel oddly defensive. “Would you two like to share with us?”
“I believe the situation is… fucked,” Cassandra says. Josephine snorts.
“Couldn’t have put it better.” Cullen jumps in. “This means our plans…“ He shifts on the log with a grimace. “…will probably get fucked as well.”
“So we should not rely too heavily on any one plan. Just move forward and take things as they come.”
After years of knowing Cassandra, Leliana feels like she’s been thrown into an upside-down world, but starting another argument will not do them any favors. “And you agree with this, Josie?”
“I have had a stone in my shoe for the last two hours. My only plan is to remove it.”
“Just take it off, Josephine, no one is going to cut your feet off,” Cullen responds flatly. “Except for the toe goblins of the Frostback Mountains—“
“You’re ridiculous, and this behavior is unacceptable,” she says, sticking her nose up in the air and fighting a smile. “We’ve portioned out rations, we’ve gotten everyone warm, and there is nothing we can do until morning,” she directs to Leliana. “They need to rest. And if we have any chance at finding the Herald—“
“If there were a chance, would we not have found her by now?” Cassandra interrupts tiredly, to which Cullen frowns. It was the first issue to divide them, with Josephine and Cullen still clinging to hope and leaving lit fires behind while the hands of the Divine preached pragmatism. Leliana cannot take another round of this argument.
She throws her gaze up to the sky. “Do you see it up there? Kios? Or the Shadow?”
Cassandra looks up with her, eyes alighting on the constellation. “Searching for omens already, Leliana? Neither of those are particularly good ones.”
A group of mages drifts by, chattering about the Herald under their breath.
“I’m going to search,” Cullen says suddenly, getting to his feet to gather his supplies. Cassandra watches him carefully, her eyes narrowing, before she sighs. “Fine.” She gets up to follow him, and the two of them share another silent exchange before she repeats herself, and they drift off to recruit a party. She gets up to take Cullen’s spot, snatching Josie’s boot off her foot before she can complain.
“Such a tiny stone,” she teases as the offending pebble falls out, the perturbed Antivan tucking her foot under her other thigh.
“And what a mess of trouble,” she replies, staring back into the fire.
four.
This morning, Leliana woke to find Cullen on the lower level of the turret, sprinkling a trail of birdseed on the window. Through bleary eyes, she watched the scene, connecting the dots, but not quickly enough to catch him before he left. There’s a little black bird that’s always been disappearing when Leliana needs her; the one that snuggles up to their hands in search of food and nips playfully at their clothes, a little scrawny and small. A year ago, it would have surprised her to learn that she was Cullen’s favorite. Now, she’s not sure.
The first chance she gets, she marches down to his office—and he’s gone.
“Where is your commander?” The scout jumps as she looks up at Leliana from her seat on the floor, where she is carefully matching one scattered set of papers with another. Her eyes grow even wider at the sight of the bird on her arm and the cage dangling from her other hand. To her, she’s probably escaped from the madhouse.
“He said he was feeling a bit poorly,” she replies slowly, “and he went for a walk to clear his head.”
Leliana does not need the skills she has to fill in the blanks, that Cullen is suffering from his withdrawals again. Her annoyance with him dims a little, until she notices that the files the scout is working with are the ones she sent to him last week and has heard nothing about. The flame flickers back to life.
She sets the cage on the desk and herds the bird into it. “Tell him the bird is his. And that now he has no excuse for responding to my messages late.”
She leaves quickly, but turns back to find his messenger lovingly cooing at the creature. “And make sure he reads the note,” she calls, pointing at the scroll tied to her leg, where her warning lies in slanted handwriting: Have fun. She shits everywhere.
Predictably, she hears nothing about the gift for the rest of the day. That is, until she bumps into Cullen in the kitchen that night, searching for something sweet to curb her craving. He startles when he sees her, and she prides herself on her silent steps.
“Why are you suddenly so shy around me, Cullen?”
“Maker’s breath, you’re like a ghost.”
“I gave you those papers, and I met your scout this morning—you’ve just been avoiding me.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s so genuine it disarms her. She glances up at his face, but he’s staring into the mug. As much fun as it would be to get him to say it again, she’s burning to know more. “It’s different without her here.” Josephine, off in Ferelden keeping two countries from a war started over a fork held in the wrong hand, has long been their balancing force. “And I thought you’d be glad for me to leave you alone.”
“Now why would I want that,” Leliana remarks dryly, sliding onto the stool across from him and grabbing two grapes off the bunch in a practiced motion. His features are sharply drawn in the light of the candle, and he looks more tired, as they all do. Leliana is just not one to show it, but she is now. “Are your headaches getting worse?” she asks gingerly.
“No more than usual.” He pushes his hair back off his forehead and her eyes flicker up to the motion lazily. “I don’t know why it’s so much,” he murmurs, and she feels like she shouldn’t have heard it at all. Before she can say anything, he shakes his head. “Thank you for the bird.”
“I was tired of you trying to steal her. You kept leaving birdseed everywhere.” It was a nightmare to clean up, but it did give the scouts a good laugh. “Have you named her?”
“I was thinking Beatrix, but it’s a bit undignified—she has a habit of relieving herself all over my floor,” he says, but it’s so fond that she in turn has to let a soft smile slip, tucked behind her hand. “You know, you dropped your leaflets the other day. They had the newest fashions from Orlais. I have them on my desk, if you want me to get them.”
“Were you interested?”
“I don’t think I could pull them off.” She smiles and takes a cherry, twirling the stem between her fingers. “They didn’t look bad,” he says slowly.
She lets out a tsk. “It’s long hair that’s the fashion now. I’ve not had long hair in a while.” All she does have is the memory of running through Denerim streets with her braid flying out behind her, and how her mother called her her little comet for her fiery tail.
“Neither have I,” Cullen responds, and she looks up to catch the teasing glint in his eye. “My mother could never get us to sit long enough for a haircut. So she gave up and let us all grow it long, and we all looked like right fools, I’m sure. Her little forest children, she called us.” She smiles at the thought.
“You don’t write to your siblings,” she begins slowly.
The cloudy expression returns to his face. “Yes, because you read all my correspondence.”
“Only what interests me. And you’re not that interesting.”
“My thanks, my lady,” he drawls. “It’s fine. I’m used to it. I just… don’t know what to say. Where to start.”
She thinks of her mother, of Cecilie, of all the servants at the palace, everyone she could never get too close to. She thinks of all the letters Cullen’s sister has sent him.
“I won’t read it,” she acquiesces reluctantly. “Write your sister back.”
With a curious smile, he blows out the candle.
five.
He thinks he could fall asleep here, the world softened by good drink and rich food, Leliana humming as she runs her fingers through Josephine’s hair, Cassandra letting him tap his foot listlessly against hers, just like the nights the three of them shared in that cramped room in the Haven chantry. Hang propriety, hang the tittering of those nobles.
“We should get to bed,” Cassandra voices, but none of them move. Just five more minutes, can’t we slow down for five minutes. It’s a thought he’d never voice rationally, but he’s had enough of being rational this evening.
The Inquisitor was first to leave, her fatigue wiping her out only a few minutes after they all sat down, and he and Josephine took her back to her room, neither of them willing to say a word. The rest of them are too wired to fall asleep and too tired to do anything of use, instead all lounging around the fire and offering up fragments of sentences that trail off into nothing.
“Maker, did you see the Duchess de Suchet? Her hair—“
“Like a possum ate her forehead,” Cassandra finishes bluntly. Josephine chokes on her laughter.
“Your sister is just a delight, Josephine,” Leliana jumps in.
“She is, isn’t she? And she’ll be the death of me.”
“Are you close?” Cassandra asks.
“We all are. Though it’s hard when I’m so far from them.”
“I can only imagine,” she says after a moment. Cullen tips his head towards her, but she’s looking at the fire, her face impassive. Ever so gently, he puts his hand on her knee.
“Do you think we’ll have time for a night out before we go back?”
“For what?” he asks.
“Well, there’s a lovely opera—“
“No.”
“Please, Josephine.”
“A play, then. Or shopping. Just—a day of normalcy. I feel guilty even suggesting it, but—look how nice this is. Sometimes I feel like we’re just working to the bone and there will be nothing of substance left when we’re done. There’s no one left after us.”
They’re silent at that. Like usual, Josephine has pinned them down exactly, leaving them all a little off their guard. Cullen thought he was used to this life, the work, the sacrifice. But the idea of simply slipping away is… unsettling, to say the least. It leaves him adrift.
“All right,” he says first. The others glance at him, skeptical, and he has nothing to say, suddenly feeling boyish.
“Okay,” Leliana agrees, almost always one to grant Josephine something. The three of them cast their gazes to Cassandra, who’s still staring at the fire, her mouth set in a thin line.
“I’ll make it happen,” she grants with a sigh. Josephine lets out a shocked little laugh.
His head doesn’t hurt as much, he realizes.
six.
She hears them before she sees them, their muffled voices carrying through the door.
“I’ll take the nobles if you want the varghests,” Leliana remarks slyly.
“They seem the same to me,” Cullen grumbles as he flips through his file. “Frightening, ill-tempered… prone to biting.”
“Then you bite them right back, Commander.” Josephine lets out a nervous laugh and takes a deep breath to steel her nerves. With one hand on the doorknob, she cracks it open and pushes her face through the gap.
“I didn’t bring you two here to talk about work,” she interrupts. The two of them pause and swing to face her. She blinks. “This is a surprise,” she intones, trying to get her point across, do not freak out, do not give anything away. “So just stay calm.”
Cullen puts his hand on the door, a little above her head, pushing it open just enough for the two of them to slip past her and for Josephine to firmly shut the door behind them. It’s just in time, because they both stiffen at the sight of the dead messenger on her floor.
“Dear Maker,” Cullen whispers. The only sound is their breathing—she put the fire out in her shock, dimming everything. The two of them turn to her, and she can’t meet their eyes as they gingerly ask her their questions. How long ago? Leliana drapes her shawl around her shoulders. Was there any warning? Cullen tugs her elbow and sits her on the couch between them. She answers in a careful, guarded tone, feeling unmoored from herself. She’s drifting away, and below on the sofa, the three of them exchange theories in hushed tones.
“Does the Inquisitor know about this?” Cullen finally asks. Josephine feels the unease in her stomach.
“The Inquisitor needs to concentrate, and should not be bothered with trivial things—“
“This is not trivial!” Cullen exclaims. He rests his broad hands on her shoulders, leaning down to meet her eyes. “Josephine, you can’t live like this. They were—what, ten minutes away from finding you here? When are you not in your office?"
And she thought she understood, but for a moment, she well and truly gets it, why soldiers follow Cullen into bogs swollen with the undead, through winding mountain paths strewn with demonic remains, when his soft eyes are alight with passion and imploring her to let them help. For a moment, she almost gives in.
“I will not stoop to their level,” she replies, raising her chin against him. Something flickers in his eyes, and she turns away, stepping neatly towards the messenger to drape her shawl over the boy. Cullen and Leliana stare at her, their eyes burning into her back.
Because Leliana and Cassandra live and sleep a breath away from the waking world, but Cullen has a drafty tower to himself, they all trickle into his loft as the day wraps up under the pretense of a late-night session of work. The others relented to her arguments to keep matters secret, because things are tense enough at Skyhold without (admittedly well-founded) rumors of assassins in the shadows.
They’ve dragged a pile of pillows and quilts to the middle of his floor, stripped the bed bare and tacked up a tarp over the hole in his roof to protect against the draft.
The other two have drifted off, but Josephine knows Cullen has just as much trouble sleeping as her, if for different reasons. She’s not sure what visions come to him when he closes his eyes, but they’re not nearly as pleasant as the restless anxiety she faces, the wide-open drama of a life beyond this, the possibilities that lie beyond the edges of the map.
“Josephine, do you still believe we can solve this peacefully? They’ve come into your home—“
“Leave it, Cullen. There is nothing we can do tonight.” Her voice brokers no room for argument. Cullen looks away, his jaw set, but she’s not that angry. If anything, his use of the word “we” has only bolstered her spirits.
“What do you think you’ll do, after this is all over?” She turns back to look at him, surprised. He’s spent half his life for the Chantry, the Inquisitor has spent all of hers in the Circle. It’s always seemed terribly lonely to Josephine, who’s only now knowing a life without her family. All her duty has been to her family. Until now.
“I’ll go back to Antiva and try to resolve our finances.”
“No adventuring for you?” he continues softly. “Josephine, the pirate queen. My sister would read one hundred stories about you.”
“I would not be a pirate,” she teases. “I would be an admiral. Why settle for one ship when you can have a whole fleet?”
“Shame. Pirates have all the fun.” He rolls to the side with a pop of his bones.
“And how would you know? Ferelden has no navy. You’ve never met an admiral, they could be great fun.”
“Not after the war. We did once.”
“Shame,” she parrots. “You could have joined that instead and saved yourself a lot of trouble.”
She’s a bit worried she’s gone too far, but when she spies a look at his face, she knows they’re both thinking of the Inquisitor again.
“I get seasick," he says finally, and the both of them dissolve into quiet laughter, holding their breath when Leliana stirs and rolls over.
“Well, you must get over it, then, and come visit me in Antiva. We can sail all the way to the edges of the map,” and she places both hands on his arm to rock him, “the boat slowly rolling with the waves, back and forth, back and forth—“
“Maker, save me,” he huffs, his face going pale as he shoves her off. She laughs, and for a moment, the assassins are completely forgotten.
seven.
The sky is collapsing outside, and they’re having a tea party.
After armoring the Inquisitor and sending her off to the mountains with her companions, they began the tricky business of waiting. It is amazing how impatient war has made them. But they have the duty to project confidence, to keep everyone still at Skyhold secure—and unfortunately, it means they have to stay visible and stay calm. In the cold mountain air, they’re all clutching mugs of tea to keep their hands from shaking.
Through a silent accord, there are things they do not talk about: the lock of hair under Cullen’s pillow, the perfume Josephine has sprayed at her wrists, the ribbons with which Leliana has laced her boots. Instead, they hold court in the main hall and try to speak of the lightest things: of family far from the Inquisition, of the taste of childhood pastries, like biting into a cloud, and they veer sharply back to these when a thought surfaces of a traveling companion, or worse, of the Inquisitor.
“Have you written your sister back?” Leliana asks Cullen. And what does she think of your sweetheart—
He deflects to Josephine. “Is your brother still asking for a horse?” Ever since he heard of her silken mare—
“I think we should take a holiday,” Leliana says finally. A few feet away, a group of noblewomen glance at her skeptically.
“Where couldn’t we go?” Josephine laughs. “With a keep in every barren desert and frozen wasteland in Thedas.”
They do not talk about how much time has passed, how the sky has darkened to a misty blue and the moons have begun to float into sight. The children are drifting off to sleep, hosts of families tucked together in corners of the hall.
From outside comes a cry, piercing through the night air. With a cursory glance at each other, they rise and rush out the doors, the crowd parting for them at the sight of Leliana’s steely gaze. Cullen and Josephine wear their stricken expressions like a set of matching dolls. The cry sounds again, warbling through the night.
“That’s…” Josephine tips her head.
“Sera,” Cullen breathes.
Slowly, the party comes into view—Sera on Bull’s shoulders, Cassandra and Dorian dragging each other forward, Varric’s stout form weaving through them all. They can almost miss Solas’s absence because last comes their Inquisitor, her hand piercing through the muddy darkness. She’s casting her eyes back and forth, searching for something, until finally, she sees them, and she stills.
The three of them stand tall on the ramparts, silhouetted by the lamplight.