Work Text:
It takes him a month and two days to find her.
The moment he learns she has been taken, chained and branded, packaged and sold to the highest bidder, he sets his people upon the task of locating her. It is his fault. She came to Tevinter to find hope and instead found her worst fear. Despite everything, because of everything, he will not leave her to this fate, not when she has fought so hard to free him in return.
When he walks into the villa he does so slowly, calmly, but as the first guard moves to confront him a flare of rage takes hold. Has this man whipped her, marked her, forced her into shackles and rags? Has he touched her against her will? Forced her upon her knees and broken what was never meant to bend?
He does not turn these monsters to stone. He turns them to ash.
His fury grows with every step he takes up to the highest tower but so does his trepidation. He only knows that she lives or else nothing would be left standing in this wretched city. Will he find her mutilated beyond what his sins have already made of her? Will he find that burning fire in her eyes grown cold?
Nothing prepares him for what he finds beyond the last door of the last room.
Blood spills across marbled floors and he follows the maze it makes in the grouting to find her. She is not bowed, cowed, huddled in a corner. She stands above the corpse of her master, red dripping from the dagger still held in her grasp. And for all the fire he has used to cleanse this unholy place, it is nothing compared to the smoldering ruin held within her eyes.
A moment passes between them where he is unsure if she will strike out at him next before she lets out an exhale and drops the dagger to the floor. “Took you long enough.”
Another moment passes before he realizes that this is no rescue. It is a trap. For all the tales of his treachery and deceit, what is to be said of the one who bests the trickster? “You allowed them to take you. You planned this.” He should be angry, shocked, betrayed, but what he feels is relief threaded through with loving pride. “What if I had not come?”
“Then it wouldn’t have really mattered in the end, would it?”
He cannot move as she steps over the body and approaches. She wears a filthy shift and several cuts and burns, hair matted and chopped at different lengths, a band of iron around her neck, and she bears it all with the same unconquerable grace that had him once thrusting away all his plans but for the ones in his heart. And he knows, here among his failings and her victories, in blood and fire and the captivity of her determined spirit, that there will be no greater mistake made than to walk away this time.
She reaches for the collar around her neck and burns the latch to dust with a quick burst of magic. She gives him a smile and holds the smoking remains out in offering. “You have saved me, Dread Wolf. What will you do now?”