Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Bit of early post for you,” Cullen says, his words punctuated by a yawn. He cards through a small bundle of envelopes as he takes the final two steps into the bedroom. It’s become his habit to rise and make his way down the stairs, through the inner door, and across the walkway to fetch the neat pile of mail – the cargo of ravens that arrived at Skyhold during the night – left on the floor each morning by Leliana’s aide. He does this, he says, to give the Inquisitor a few extra minutes in bed. Because he rarely falls into a deep sleep after waking, in the early morning hours, from the nightmares that plague him, he has little trouble rising when light begins to peek through the balcony doors. Still, the Inquisitor gets the impression that there is more to his mail-fetching than that. It also allows him to begin to shake off the pain in his knees and ankles that is always present when he wakes, she thinks. He almost never speaks of it (“What use is complaining?”), but she often sees him wince as he takes those first steps.

From the washbasin, where she stands soaping her face across the room, Cordelia Trevelyan asks, “Anything from–”

“Yes, actually,” he replies with genuine surprise. “At least, I presume so. Sunburst seal. And – Maker’s breath, is this vellum?” She turns to see him testing the weight of a single letter in one palm. She quickly wipes the suds from her face and walks toward him, her damp washcloth abandoned at the side of the basin. He holds the letter out as she approaches, and, in a ray of morning sunlight flooding through the balcony door, she glimpses that same source of light and life set in scarlet wax against the paper. Or rather, vellum – as she takes it in hand, she sees that Cullen’s assessment was correct.

“A medium that properly reflects the gravity of the office, I suppose,” she says. Her words have a sardonic bite to them that she did not intend, but a glance at Cullen tells her that he doesn’t seem surprised by it. And why should he, she thinks, when they’ve talked of it so much?

If Cassandra’s election to the office of Divine was a surprise to the Seeker herself, it was an absolute shock to the rest of the Inquisition’s leaders. Rumor had favored Leliana’s ascension for months, and the whisperings had been substantiated when her name was put forward in the Grand Consensus held in Val Royeaux. Election of the Divine, however, requires a unanimous vote, and the grand clerics were unable to reach anything like unanimity about the Inquisition’s spymaster. No one – including Cassandra herself – had known the Seeker’s name was even formally put forward until her fate was already decided.

In truth, Cora had been relieved to hear of Leliana’s failure to accrue the requisite votes. She appreciates her spymaster, enjoys her company, even trusts her in many regards (a choice that Leliana herself has, only partly in jest, called unwise); but there is a ruthlessness to her that the Inquisitor finds frightening. The two women tend to agree on much concerning the future of the Chantry, yes, but Cora would nonetheless prefer that they continue fighting the same battle from the same place, so to speak.

Cassandra has been warming the Sunburst Throne now for six months, and Cora still isn’t certain how she feels about it. She grew to love the Seeker dearly in their time together, both because she appreciated her counsel and friendship and because Cassandra had been instrumental in Cullen’s recovery from lyrium addiction. Because of this, her election to Divine was a massive loss to the Inquisition. Yes, having a steadfast ally at the head of the Chantry is no small victory, but that’s just it: Cora has been unsure just how steadfast Divine Victoria will be as the aims of the Chantry and Inquisition diverge. The Seeker is the most determined person Cora has ever met. When she sets her mind to something, she pursues it relentlessly, almost single-mindedly, and Cora does not yet know to what end her friend has set her mind regarding the Chantry.

They spoke briefly last year about Cassandra’s vision for the future. Cora had tried to approach the conversation with an open mind, to set aside her own reservations about the Chantry continuing to exist at all. She knows that her desire to see the Circles remain empty forever is not particularly popular even amongst other mages. Many would see them re-formed but overseen only by the College of Enchanters, with neither Chantry nor templar involvement. Still others believe the Order, reformed and stripped of some of its power, has a place in the Circles. Cassandra, the Inquisitor had learned, is of this latter group.

“Let the mages govern themselves,” Cassandra had said. Cora’s breath had caught in her chest, but the sliver of hope was fleeting. After the smallest of pauses, the Seeker had added: “With our help.” Of course, Cora had thought, fighting to keep a neutral expression on her face. Always with someone else’s help. Perish the thought of trusting reasonable, sound-minded, adults with their own lives. Cassandra had gone on to advocate for the presence of templars in re-formed circles. Not as jailers, she had said, but as protectors of the innocent.

A pretty idea, Cora thinks, if it were possible. In what world, though, would Chantry-sanctioned soldiers who have spent centuries as glorified slave masters allow themselves to be stripped of power? And that’s to say nothing of the dangers of their lyrium madness.

Cora had tried to wait longer before writing to Cassandra to find out just how committed the new Divine would be to the ideas she’d shared all those months ago. As it happened, though, the unrelenting sense of dread in the Inquisitor’s mind had won out. She had penned a letter congratulating her friend and expressing (truthfully) how terribly she was missed. Then, she had laid her Angel of Death on the table, to borrow an expression from Varric.

“Perhaps you ought to start smaller,” Cullen had suggested after reading Cora’s letter, a hint of unease wrinkling his brow. “Something she can easily grant, something that will not be a fight for her to accomplish if she wishes.”

Cora had not listened to this advice. She had to know precisely what she was dealing with. Cullen had meant well, of course; she had even acknowledged that he was probably right. But she has never operated that way. When a fresh templar recruit arrived at the Ostwick Circle, or a veteran was transferred there, she had immediately looked for ways to test them. As a child, this had been as simple as asking a question and gauging their tone, expression, and words when they replied (if they replied). When she became a full Enchanter, she had pushed harder – wandering about after curfew, say, or using magic to light a taper beside them without warning. Her captors were less frightening when she understood their tendencies. Cassandra’s new power would feel less daunting, Cora had reasoned, when she had a better sense of what she planned to do with it.

Thus, Cora had sent her letter, that first and only draft, to the Divine. She had not asked after the future of the Chantry, or the Templar Order, or the Seekers, or the Inquisition, or even, technically, the Circles. Her request had been simple: that the Divine use the many resources at her disposal to track down the vault keys carried by every Circle’s former Knight-Commander and First Enchanter (a simpler task than it sounded, she had reckoned, because she had a feeling that there were duplicates in Val Royeaux, though she did not know for certain), and destroy the phylacteries.

It had seemed – still seems – such a small thing to Cora. The individual Circles’ vaults contain only the phylacteries of their respective apprentices. After a mage’s Harrowing, their phylactery was housed elsewhere. These, too, are likely in the bowels of the Chantry headquarters in Val Royeaux, and they, too, ought to be destroyed, but Cora had thought it wiser to focus on the apprentices’ phylacteries for now. If the Chantry eventually decides to re-form the Circles, rounding up southern Thedas’ apostate children will be significantly more difficult without phylacteries.

The Inquisitor, of course, had left this last part out of her letter. She had instead framed it solely as a request for the apprentices’ more immediate safety. The Circle Towers, as far as Cora knows, are still uninhabited and almost certainly undefended. If a particularly intrepid errant templar, or even a Loyalist mage, wished it, they could do the work of tracking down vault keys and use the phylacteries within to hunt apostate children. It is unlikely, of course, but nonetheless possible. Enough to sometimes keep her awake into the wee hours of the morning.

She slides a finger beneath the wax seal, but it does not come cleanly off the vellum. The rising sun splits in two, and the Inquisitor is momentarily filled with a sense of foreboding. She begins to truly fear, for the first time since she sent the letter, that Cassandra will not have thought the request as simple as Cora did. After taking a deep breath, she opens the letter, glances up at Cullen, and begins to read aloud.

“Inquisitor,

I hope this letter finds you well and, with any luck, in the midst of an early thaw. I miss many things about Skyhold, but the winters are not among them.

Perhaps it would be more polite if I continued with pleasantries, but I would like to think I know you well enough to be certain that you would appreciate my being direct. And so I shall be.

First, know that I do not send this response lightly. I have turned your request over in my head for weeks, and even now, I cannot say whether I am in the right. Still, part of this role is almost never deferring judgment on questions of great magnitude.

I understand the reasons for your request; the history of the Chantry and your own experience attest to the legitimacy of your concerns. Phylacteries have been used to do great harm since the Inquisition of Old. Never again can access to phylactery vaults – particularly those containing the blood of children – be so unfettered as it was before this war began.

Nonetheless, I cannot, in good conscience, grant your request. There may be a time when the Chantry orders the destruction of some, or even all, remaining phylacteries; that time is not now. The future of the Circles is yet too uncertain to make such grave decisions.

I would be happy to speak with you further on the matter, should you find yourself in Val Royeaux in the coming months.

You are, as ever, in my prayers.

Yours,

Divine Victoria.”

Cora gazes, dumbfounded, at the parchment in her hands. After a moment, she blinks her eyes rapidly several times as though this might somehow transform the words on the page. Her mouth, she realizes, is hanging open.

“Disappointing, to be sure,” Cullen says from across the room, where he is rifling through a drawer at the base of the wardrobe, “but it would be worth it to speak with her in person. I am sure she has her reasons.”

“Has her…?” The Inquisitor turns her gaze to him. She briefly wonders whether she’s going mad, or perhaps the commander and his friend have conspired to play a trick on her. “Her reasons, Cullen? What might those be? And why could she not do me the courtesy of explaining them?” She can feel the pitch of her voice growing higher, can hear her volume increasing, but she is too agitated to care just now.

The commander stands, clean tunic in hand, and turns toward her. “I don’t know her mind, my love. But I cannot recall Cassandra ever having made a decision without cause.”

“But she isn’t Cassandra anymore, is she?” Cora snaps. “She’s Divine-bloody-Victoria, which apparently means that she no longer has to explain herself.”

“It could be that she prefers to speak about it rather than write. And yours was likely one of a hundred letters asking for a personal favor–”

“It isn’t a personal favor! A personal favor would be – I don’t know – ‘Please, Your Worship, my daughter joined the clergy and would really prefer to serve the Maker in Orlais rather than some Rivaini backwater, can you put it in a good word, I hope to make a sizable donation toward rebuilding the White Spire.’”

“That isn’t what I–” Cullen presses his lips together, pulls the shirt over his head, and tries again. “I did not mean that your letter was a…a selfish one; only that she is probably drowning in parchment.” He walks to the washstand and picks up its porcelain ewer of water.

“How can you be so…so flippant about this?” she asks with utter incredulity. Her cheeks have begun to grow hot, and she can feel a pressure behind her eyes. In the mirror, Cullen meets her gaze again as he washes his face. Pray, don’t let me interrupt your morning routine, ser, she thinks.

“I’m not being flippant, I just…I think her tone was rather, well, open. And…amicable, even.” He splashes water onto his face, rinsing the last of the suds away, and reaches for a towel. “Much more so than I might have expected.”

“More so than…” For the third time in as many minutes, she finds herself at a loss for words and instead simply stares, blinking, at his reflection. After several moments of silence, she manages, voice lower, “Unbelievable.”

“What?” Cullen, apparently having noticed her expression in the mirror, turns and faces her. If this were any other morning, she would smile at the sight of him: curls yet untamed, brow creased in a combination of concern for her and distaste for the chalky substance in his mouth, brushing his teeth with a fervency bordering on violence. He abhors the cleaning powder, occasionally shivering involuntarily at the sensation of the gritty stuff scraping against his teeth, and always tries to finish the task as quickly as possible. Today, however, her usual fondness is gone entirely; there is only a frustration that is rapidly twisting into anger.

“I didn’t realize you had become a Chantry apologist now that Cassandra was at the helm,” she says simply.

Cullen huffs around the boar bristle brush in his mouth, then turns back to the wash basin and spits. After wiping the remaining flecks of powder from his lips, he picks up the jar of pomade he keeps stowed behind the bowl that holds his shaving supplies. “That’s not fair, Cora, and you know it.” She feels a twinge of guilt both because she knows that he’s right and because he is now attempting to subjugate his hair while only half-facing the mirror as he tries not to turn his back on her again. The guilt vanishes almost immediately, however, when he continues, “I just…I understand why she might feel some…trepidation about destroying the apprentices’ phylacteries.”

“Of course she feels trepidation about it! She’s of a mind to bring back the Circles! So you can excuse my not feeling particularly empathetic.”

“I meant apart from that. She does not need phylacteries to revive the Circles. Hundreds of untrained, magic-wielding children will not go undetected for long, especially if there’s some semblance of peace on the continent. I hardly think that…” – he struggles to choose his next words – “...gathering them up, were she to choose to do so, would be a great burden.” He prods an errant curl at his forehead into submission before wiping the excess beeswax and eucalyptus oil concoction from his fingers. As he turns and walks toward his armor stand on the opposite side of the room, he looks at the Inquisitor again. “I believe her motives are purer than that.”

She folds her arms as he strides past her. “Oh?” she asks, the tiny word somehow able to contain a surprising amount of skepticism and anger.

“Cassandra is not going to easily give up such a means of protecting folk,” Cullen explains. He removes his breastplate from the stand and begins wrestling with the straps. Cora could help – and usually does, unless she has to leave before him in the morning – but she does not move.

“Protecting folk from – what was it you said? – ‘untrained children?’”

“From abominations,” he replies, a slight edge to his voice because he knows that she is being purposefully obtuse. He gives an exasperated sigh. “How many of the apprentices in Ostwick were eventually housed with people who knew the first thing about magic, let alone about teaching its proper use, or how to subdue a magic-wielder?”

She says nothing; she does not need to. The question is rhetorical. She has divulged every detail surrounding the fall of the Ostwick Circle.

“Even if Ostwick were an outlier,” he says, his tone softer, “one can assume that at least – at least – a dozen apprentices from every Circle in southern Thedas have spent the past three years or more without any kind of guidance or instruction.” He fastens the final buckle of his plate before bending to pick up a vambrace. As he begins to strap it around one arm, he takes a few slow, conciliatory steps toward her. His characteristic gentle and calm demeanor has returned. She simultaneously hates and loves how kindly he is treating her, even in the midst of an argument. An argument, she knows, that did not need to happen at all. “You know that it would take only one of them a handful of missteps – even unintentional, likely unintentional – to become an instrument of massive destruction. And if that were to happen, Maker forbid, access to the phylactery could mean saving many, many lives.”

She shakes her head and looks away from him. All of this is so grave, and so vast, and the considerable power of the Inquisition is a paper tiger in the face of it. Her chest aches. Pretending she has something in her eye, she swipes away the tears that are escaping in spite of her best efforts to restrain them. “Even with the Order in shambles, the Divine has forces at her disposal that would delight in doing that kind of killing – and that’s assuming that some lyrium-mad vigilante templar doesn’t finish the task first. Phylacteries are superfluous.”

“I have to leave for report,” Cullen says after several seconds of silence, and she can tell by the almost imperceptible tremor at the start of the sentence that he is fighting to keep his tone even rather than to plead with her. “I…hope your day is a pleasant one.”

Even as her eyes widen and lips purse, even as she wants to rail at him, to ask with utter incredulity how he can simply walk away from this disagreement, she knows that he is making the right choice. She knows, in her logical mind, that he is striding toward the stairs when he would rather stay. That he is going to spend the entire walk to his office reassuring himself that no, Cora won’t be angry at him when he sees her again, that she isn’t even properly angry at him right now, that she will not decide that this is the last straw, the breaking point, the final, intolerable difference between them that she cannot abide.

Before his head disappears behind the stone balustrade, he pauses and looks back at her. She sees him take a deep, steadying breath, and then the scar at his lip twitches with what is almost a smile. It is neither mockery nor joy – the way he rapidly flexes and relaxes his hands tells her that he is indeed seized with worry over their dispute – but a reflexive reaction to meeting her gaze. That the mere sight of her can still inspire such simple pleasure in him, even after all these months, even in the middle of a row, squeezes at her heart. How absurd, she thinks, that she can feel desperate love for someone while also wanting to throw the nearest blunt object at him.

“I love you, Cora,” he says, and it is so earnest that she feels inspired once again to violence. She throws her head back, rolls her eyes, and manages only an, “Ugh!” in response; but he has already disappeared down the stairs.

“‘I understand Cassandra’s concern?’ Andraste’s pristine arsehole, spare me,” the Inquisitor fumes to herself as she tosses the letter to her desk in a fury. The effect of this is less dramatic than she would like. The paper catches a draft from the glass doors and, first blowing a few feet to the right, eventually floats slowly down to the floor.

She realizes, growling and picking the letter back up, that she is acting absurdly. She’s known it since she felt the rage begin to claw its way out as she first read Cassandra’s response. Still, she cannot tamp down her fury. It is as though the part of her mind that knows how to reason, assess, and speak rationally has simply disappeared. Even as she stomps about her chambers, pulling off her nightshirt, dressing, washing, and getting ready for the day, she knows – albeit subconsciously – that Cullen’s leaving was a good thing. A kindness. An act of love.

It is this push and pull, Cora knows, that has made it possible for them to create something together in spite of having neither the knowledge nor experience for it. When she is overcome with righteous fury over the rights and future of mages – and it is this, exclusively, that stokes the kind of anger that drives her reasonable self into hiding – she wants only to fight. She would like nothing more than to goad Cullen into an argument, to needle him until he agrees with her in every way. Until she has gotten some kind of assurance that he is indeed the man she believes him to be and not a bitter ex-templar who harbors grudges against her and her kind.

Such arguments, of course, lead only to tears and regret; hence his intentional departure this morning.

The scales will tip the other way when Cullen wakes from an especially horrific nightmare, or goes through an episode of lyrium withdrawal. He will want nothing more than to fold in on himself. He will try to play the stoic, will try to hide the physical pain coursing through his body and debilitating anxiety wracking his mind. And because he is the worst actor she has ever met, Cora will see it. She will push, gently but firmly, against his reflexive attempts to pull away from her. She will reach a hand into the dark place where he retreats, and her presence will be proof that he is neither broken nor inadequate in her eyes.

It might mean leaving an elfroot draught on his armor stand even after he reassures her (while trying not to wince) that the pain really isn’t so terrible. Or, as happened two nights ago, curling her body around his trembling frame and casting soft pulses of calm against his glistening skin. She might wonder, for a moment, whether she is a nuisance; he managed for years without her, after all.

But then, she thinks as she pulls her trousers on, that is the difference. They both managed, both survived for years prior to the Inquisition bringing them together. Now that she has tasted something sweeter, she never wants her life to be about simply surviving again.

By the time she is striding across the yard of the keep, both her body and mind have cooled. Her cheeks are rosy from the early spring chill, and Cassandra’s letter has been shuffled down her mental list of priorities. It is, after all, outside the realm of her control, and there are plenty of more immediate demands on her attention within it.

She stops to chat for a moment with one of Leliana’s aides, Kost, a young Rivaini from Kont-aar. The girl had been terribly conspicuous upon her arrival at Skyhold several months prior, both because she had been (and remains) only the second Qunari member of the Inquisition and because her speech and mannerisms had been so atypical for her people. She is, in the illuminating words of The Iron Bull, a “fucking nerd” (said to Cora with the begrudging but unmistakable fondness of an older sibling for a younger). She is also, in the words of the Spymaster under whose wing she now resides, “a natural.” Cora is unsure precisely what this means, but she is nevertheless thankful that Kost’s talents are in the Inquisition’s service rather than that of the Ben-Hassrath.

By the time she is climbing the stone steps leading up to the outer wall of the keep, the Inquisitor’s ire over Cassandra’s letter has all but disappeared. Her thoughts are bent upon the tower ahead that was, until the worst of the winter began to abate last month, a half-collapsed ruin that had served as a makeshift storage facility for construction materials. Barely a week after the Inquisition’s arrival in Skyhold – a lifetime ago, it now seems – she had attempted to take refuge behind the warped wooden door. She had been overwhelmed by her own incompetence as the newly-appointed Inquisitor, and she had been desperate for somewhere to have a good, long cry.

Still trying to get her bearings in the fortress, she had chosen the wrong tower. She hadn’t realized she had shut herself, tears already rapidly leaking from her puffy red eyes, in Commander Cullen’s office until she was standing just meters away from him. Hand resting on the handle of the ruined tower’s door, she glances over her shoulder to its neighbor, behind which that same man is listening to his lieutenants’ morning reports. Her lips tilt upward as she pushes the door open. Even now, when she can still feel her frustration with him needling under her skin, she cannot suppress a smile. Sweet Maker, she’s grown soft.

“Good morning, Inquisitor!” intones a cheery baritone from somewhere above her. She looks up to see a flurry of dark violet robes descending a ladder from the floor above. In a few short seconds, two boots thud against the floor, and the fabric has coalesced into Ersk. Remarkably tall even for an elf, he would cut a frightening figure if he were not so agreeable.

“Good morning, Ersk. Are you already at work?”

“Hardly,” he replies. “I was merely taking in the morning from the roof.” He waits a beat, then continues, “I found the sky…terribly uncomfortable when I arrived. I thought it almost…almost garish in its grandeur.”

Cora nods. While she had immediately loved the vastness of the view from Skyhold, she had nonetheless found herself slightly nauseated when gazing across the clouds in those first few weeks. She had spent nearly all of her life indoors until she fled Ostwick. The same is true of Ersk, once an enchanter of the Tantervale Circle. Templar control of the mages there had been more absolute even than in Kirkwall. By the time his Circle fell, he had been in a dungeon prison cell for over a year.

“And yet now you find yourself drawn to it?” she guesses.

“Indeed I do,” he agrees. “It makes me wonder whether my Dalish kin are perhaps not as mad as I’d once thought, sleeping in the mud for the chance to gaze up at the stars.” Then he adds, drily, “If one enjoys shoveling halla dung all day, anyway.”

Cora covers her mouth to suppress a laugh. She knows that his words, however biting, are spoken in jest; Ersk spent his early years in an alienage, its sewage-filled streets far fouler than even the meanest Dalish camp could be.

The pair make their way toward a wooden table where a large parchment scroll has been rolled out, bits of broken masonry weighing down the corners. On it is sketched a cross-section of the tower in which they stand, though one might not initially recognize it as such. The half-collapsed floor above them is pristine. The roof above that, in reality a precarious place to stand because of its rotting planks, is not only in perfect condition but is enclosed. The drawing proposes a wooden structure at the top to give the tower an additional storey.

“You said you were pleased with Onnee’s changes to the classroom?” she asks, bending over the building plan and inspecting the sketch of this topmost level.

“I am. I can understand her trepidation about widening the windows, but I think the benefits outweigh the potential risks.”

“I quite agree.” Cora nods. In her first draft of the plan, the Inquisition’s head builder had allotted mere slits in the walls. She had spent the bulk of her career rebuilding fortresses all over Ferelden after the Blight, so her focus tends toward the martial. Though the (still very practical, highly defensible) top floor of the tower is part of Skyhold’s outer wall, its purpose will be quite different from that of its brethren. The Inquisitor traces a finger around the fresh charcoal lines and smiles to herself. “Our – well, your – apprentices deserve to see the sun.”

She feels a jolt of excitement deep in her belly at these words. It had been no small task, convincing the Inquisition’s allies in the Chantry, a handful of key benefactors, the Fereldan and Orlesian crowns – even her own counselors, at first – that her plan was sane and safe, let alone beneficial. She knows that, were an open war between mages and templars not raging across southern Thedas, no one would have entertained her idea. If they knew of it, half of the clergy would propose she be administered the Rite even now for suggesting such a thing.

By the end of the summer, the tower laid out on the parchment before her will be a reality. It will house a classroom, quarters for two Inquisition Enchanters, and – she bites her bottom lip with anticipation – as many as ten apprentice mages.

Skyhold’s inhabitants have already begun referring to it as ‘the Circle’ (some with curiosity, some with apprehension, some with both), but Cora does not think of it as such. By her reckoning, the Circles were not just – not even primarily – places of learning. They were prisons. The Chantry and its Templar Order dictated every aspect of Circle life, from what could be taught (almost nothing) to when one must rise in the morning (early enough for compulsory prayer) to whom a person could love (no one, without great suffering). The Inquisitor seeks, quite simply, to build a school. With the right people at its helm, and hard work, and a bit of luck, perhaps it can be a home, too, in a way that the Circles never were.

For all her irritation with him this morning, Cullen had been undeniably correct about one thing: there is danger in having hundreds of magic-wielding children living uneducated and unsupervised across southern Thedas. Which parties are the greatest threat and to whom is a matter of debate, she thinks wryly, but none would argue that the current situation is sustainable.

With Corypheus gone, the Inquisition has begun to turn toward its original purpose: establishing and maintaining some modicum of order in the face of an extranational war. That will be its primary means of protecting (and yes, sometimes, pacifying) mages. But Cora believes that her duty goes beyond that; the mere survival of the mages cannot be the ultimate goal. She wants to begin building for her kin what she herself now has: a life worth living.

A beautiful dream, of course. In reality, even with the vast resources at her disposal, her influence is limited. Limited, and finite. There will come a day, whether in one year or ten, when the balance of power on the continent will equalize. The Chantry will regain its foothold or collapse altogether, and the Order along with it. Orlais will return to inciting petty skirmishes on its eastern border, and Ferelden will choose either to defend its territory or fall back yet again. Noble houses of the Free Marches will rise and fall and squabble amongst themselves, one eye ever turned toward the sea. And all of them, every nation, every organization, will tire of sharing power with the Inquisition.

So she will do what she can, however inconsequential in the scheme of things, with the time given to her. She will build a school. She will help give a small handful of children – including the one closest to her heart, her Palum – the knowledge and power to determine the courses of their lives. With any luck, she might even change a few minds along the way, might show what is possible when mages are allowed to flourish.

But then, she is of minimal importance in this endeavor. Last year, she had confided to Dorian that, when Corypheus was gone (“and I along with him” had been implicitly understood), she hoped that Skyhold might become a place of safety, even growth, for some of the former apprentices set adrift when the Circles fell. A handful of Enchanters had been with the Inquisition since the beginning – some had joined even before the Conclave – and Cora had grown to trust and deeply respect them. Surely, she had told her Tevinter friend, such a group might be given the leeway to pursue the project.

Though she now (surprisingly, still, even many months later) finds herself very much alive, the demands on her time are too great for involvement in the day-to-day administration or instruction. Oversight of the apprentices will fall to Ersk.

“Oh, I think ‘our’ is more than appropriate, Inquisitor,” Ersk says with a laugh. “None of this would be happening if not for you.”

“It’s been a joint effort, Ersk. And we’ve a great deal of work still ahead.”

Unlike the Enchanters alongside whom she has worked for nearly two years, Ersk is a relatively recent addition. A fellow teacher from Tantervale had tried to recruit him shortly after Fiona had agreed to join the Inquisition, but Ersk had resisted. He had been skeptical of the organization, what with its Chantry-affiliated leadership and the former Knight-Commander of Kirkwall at the head of its army. It had amused Cora to no end when she learned that Ersk had only begun to reconsider upon hearing a rumor that the Inquisitor had taken Cullen as her lover. If the commander had earned the affection of an apostate, the elf had reasoned, then perhaps he really was a changed man.

When she had recounted this to Cullen one morning some months prior, his cheeks had immediately turned an astonishing shade of red. “That…that is…how absurd…” He had been fastening his scabbard belt around his waist, and one end had slipped from his grasp and clattered to the ground. “Maker’s breath,” he had muttered.

“Only a truly reformed man could have such impeccable taste,” she had teased, bending down to pick up the fallen equipment and handing it back to him with an impish grin on her face.

He had shaken his head and quickly belted the scabbard in place. “You are a menace,” he had said as he bent down to kiss her.

“As much as there is yet to do, I cannot help but feel triumphant. I admit that I was terribly skeptical,” Ersk now says to her, “that you would be permitted to embark on this project at all, even in your own fortress.”

As was I, she does not say. She can recall with perfect clarity the night she first divulged her plan to Cullen. They had been lying in bed, limbs intertwined, bedside candles extinguished. She had spent days working up the courage to ask his opinion on the matter. What would she do, she had fretted, if he thought the idea foolish, or dangerous? If he argued for the comfort of his many former-templar soldiers? Of himself? The school, she had convinced herself, would be the thing that finally fractured them.

And then, lying there with his head tucked into her neck, inhaling the warm scent of his freshly-washed hair, she realized that she had to tell him. They had been fiercely, uncomfortably honest with one another since they had chosen each other; for two people with their respective pasts, nothing else would suffice. Though that honesty was sometimes more difficult now, as both her love for him and fear of losing him had deepened, there was no other path forward.

So she had told him, right then, that she wanted to build a school. She had once asked him to bring Palum to Skyhold should she die fighting Corypheus, and now that she was still breathing, she would do it herself. She had been able to hear herself grow more confident with every word. She would bring Palum here, and others with him. She was going to build a future for at least a few mages no matter what the future held for magic-wielding folk writ large.

Cullen had been silent for several painfully long seconds. When he spoke again, he had calmly, neutrally laid out his doubts and fears. They had discussed each one, Cora conceding some points and holding firm on others. Then, after perhaps an hour of this, moonlight illuminating slivers of one another’s faces, he had regarded her with a combination of fondness and pride. “If anyone can accomplish such a thing, you can,” he had said. And then, as they had begun to drift off to sleep, he had murmured against her ear, “I am with you, my love.”

The Inquisitor smiles now at the memory. “Well,” she says, turning to Ersk, “wonders never cease, I suppose.”

Chapter Text

It isn’t Alistair’s and Anora’s pushing yet again to meet with her that Cora finds irritating – she and her counselors had been expecting as much since the thaw began – but the tone of the letter. We shall be summering with our uncle in Redcliffe and look forward to speaking with you there once the weather has warmed. She lets out a huff for maybe the tenth time since first reading the words an hour ago.

“We must, of course, take seriously such a diplomatic request,” Josephine says from across the War Table, her quill poised to take notes on the council’s discussion of the missive. “We cannot sidestep it in the way we did last year. Corypheus is no longer an excuse.”

Diplomatic request, the Inquisitor thinks, is a charitable description. The Fereldan monarchs’ letter is nothing short of a summons. Perhaps the king and queen have forgotten that Cora is not one of their subjects; indeed, the only person in this room who could conceivably be called such is Cullen, a man who has not really lived in Ferelden for over a decade.

“I’m sure the king and queen consider Skyhold to fall within their borders,” the commander had reasoned as he and Cora had discussed the letter on the way to the meeting. “And arguing the point would get us nowhere. We ought to leave that to Gaspard and Celene.” Indeed, political ownership of the Frostbacks has been in contention for centuries, but the disagreement has largely been confined to occasional barbs leveled at the negotiating table. The mountains are too treacherous and sparsely-populated to be of any real value, and neither side has been keen to wrest control of the sole important landmark – the Temple of Sacred Ashes – from the Chantry.

Skyhold’s position along the disputed border is hardly relevant, of course, because Josephine is right. Nonetheless, allowing herself a bit of righteous anger over the monarchs’ presumptuousness has been a balm to Cora this morning. The reality is that she understands their unease. Of course the sovereigns dislike having several hundred soldiers – some of them mages – from an extranational army stationed across their kingdom. While the Inquisition’s aims had, when Corypheus was wreaking havoc across the continent, been in line with Ferelden’s, the loss of a common enemy has brought significant uncertainty into their relationship.

Cora is no diplomat, not really. Treating with a party whose cause is nearly identical to your own – however challenging it might feel, she thinks, Halamshiral coming to her mind – is not true diplomacy. Working with or even distantly alongside those with whom you fundamentally disagree? That is something altogether different and entirely outside the Inquisitor’s comfort or understanding. Unfortunately, that is also the Inquisition’s new reality.

And while she can sympathize with Alistair and Anora (and would likely do the same in their position), she is nonetheless prepared to fight them on the subject of the Inquisition’s forces in Ferelden. The pair has historically been a great deal more tolerant of mages than most – the Kinloch of their reign was very different than it had been during Cullen’s time there – but she has no reason to believe that they will not support to re-forming of the Circles, including granting amnesty to vigilante templars, if the winds of southern Thedas blow thus. Especially considering how things ended the last time they had been soft with the mages.

As she thinks on this hypothetical future, she finds any sympathy she had for the Fereldan Crown’s position fading. “But is it wise to bend to Alistair’s will like this? To set the precedent of simply appearing where and when he dictates?” Cora asks, trying not to sound as irritated as she again feels as she recalls the letter. Really, the audacity of Thedas’ monarchs, whether Orlesian or Fereldan, to make demands on the Inquisition, an organization that was formed solely because political rulers had spent centuries scraping and bowing before the Chantry and the Templar Order, when–

“King Alistair,” Josephine corrects her gently. “And while I understand your concern, I do not believe he and the queen will view your coming to Redcliffe in that way. This is, after all, their third letter requesting an audience.”

“Yes, well, they chose to send the first two while we were in the midst of saving the world from an ancient evil, so I’m not particularly inclined to pity them,” the Inquisitor says. Then, after a deep sigh: “But you’re right, Josie. We can’t avoid them forever.”

“Perhaps you ought not think of it as an imposition on your time. You can just stop in Redcliffe on your return journey from South Reach,” Leliana adds, “unless your plans have changed.” She glances at Cullen, and Cora follows her gaze.

The remainder of the Inquisitor’s irritation dissipates in barely a moment. The commander, eyes bright, is regarding her from across the War Table, a soft, almost apprehensive smile on his face. After the harsh winter largely confined them to Skyhold, the spring thaw had finally begun in earnest a fortnight past. Vast quantities of snow and ice no longer rendering the passes surrounding the keep impassable, Cullen had written to his older sister to arrange a time to visit South Reach. Her reply had been swift and bursting with enthusiasm.

It’s been years since he last saw his siblings, and he was decidedly unwell on that occasion. With the mental effects of lyrium withdrawal no longer troubling him, the physical effects usually manageable, the world-ending threat vanished, and – to his obvious delight – a traveling companion, the timing seems ideal. She feels the corners of her mouth tilt upward of their own accord. It’s infuriating to be so smitten that she finds herself unable to stay properly angry with bothersome monarchs.

“They have not,” she says, giving Leliana her attention once again. “So, then, how shall I approach the meeting?”

“Well,” Josephine says brightly as, with barely-restrained enthusiasm, she pulls a sheaf of papers from her writing surface and begins doling them out to her colleagues. “I have a few possible options – very rough drafts, mind you…” And with that, she is off, explaining several potential strategies for the meeting. In typical Josephine fashion, the “very rough drafts” are substantial but concise plans over which she has clearly been laboring for months. Cora chuckles inwardly at her ambassador’s passion for this work before finding herself suddenly seized with an intense affection for her counselors that nearly knocks the wind out of her. The four of them have spent hundreds of hours shut away in this room, their debates sometimes measured and sometimes fierce. They have snipped, and huffed, and pleaded, and rolled their eyes, and raised their voices – and then apologized and been immediately forgiven, for they all understand the gravity of the decisions made at this table and the pain of being forced to put the cause first.

How fortunate I am, she thinks for the thousandth time over the past two years, and it is all the sweeter for rarely having thought as much in the first three decades of her life. She blinks, takes a breath, and turns her full attention to Josephine.

---

“What brought this on so suddenly, do you think?” Cora asks that evening as she rifles through her new apothecary cabinet – the handiwork of the keep’s carpenter, designed and commissioned by Cullen as a gift – for a flask of oil.

“I suppose I’ve been feeling…well…apprehensive, for lack of a better word. Uneasy.” Cullen sits heavily on the divan, sighing in relief as the weight comes off his lower joints. “And I…it is possible that I overexerted myself in the training yard yesterday,” he adds, a bit sheepish.

“That anxious to show the young folk that you can keep up with them?” she teases.

“Of course not,” he scoffs. He then pauses, rubs the back of his neck, and says, “Well…perhaps a bit.” Cora sits on the other end of the divan and pulls his legs into her lap. “I do not want them to think me some…some bureaucrat, sitting behind his desk and doling out orders but unwilling to…well, to step into the trenches, as it were. To fight alongside them.”

She tips the flask over her fingers, and, as she rubs her hands together to warm the oil, the scents of verveine and crystal grace fill the air. She allows their conversation to lapse into a comfortable silence. Cullen can ruminate on his worries for hours without ever properly naming or understanding them. She has learned that allowing him the time and space to speak them aloud seems to give him a sense of clarity. And so she waits, lifting his swollen ankle and beginning to gingerly rub her hands over the angry red skin. He sighs, letting his head fall back and his eyes close. His shoulders, too, speak his relief as they start to ease down from where they had been scrunched up around his ears.

She is not surprised when, just a minute later, he speaks again. “The…letter from Mia yesterday morning?” He phrases it as a question, as though Cora might have forgotten the thing to which he is referring.

Mia’s reply to his inquiry about a potential visit to South Reach had arrived the previous morning, and Cullen had given the Inquisitor a summary: she was ridiculously excited to see her brother again after many years apart, and of course Cora must come with him, and their own home was quite tiny but there would certainly be a fine, spacious room at the inn, which was run by Branson’s brother- and sister-in-law, and it would be splendid if Cullen’s visit coincided with Wintersend because the festival was always such great fun.

“What about it?” Cora asks, moving from the ankle joint to knead along his calf muscle.

“There was something she said about Bran that I have found myself…mulling over.”

She glances up at his face to find his brow furrowed, eyes open once again, and his lips turned down in a pensive half-frown. “The bit about his…what was it? His wife’s sibling? Owning the inn?” she asks, unsure what significance such a thing could have.

“No,” he replies and shakes his head. “No, it was something else. She mentioned, in a rather off-hand sort of way, that Bran would be overseeing the seed tithe.”

Cora pauses and regards him with curiosity. Wintersend traditions differ everywhere, of course, and perhaps Fereldans make it into a more religious holiday. She’s never heard of a secular tithe, anyway. Or maybe her never having heard of this particular tradition is a consequence of never having celebrated the holiday outside of a Circle Tower. It still seems that every day she learns something novel about the world that is merely a matter of course to most people. “The…seed tithe?”

Cullen, bless him, has never made her feel self-conscious about this, has never replied with an, “Oh, did you not know?”

“Folk bring a portion of their seed from last year’s harvest – farm or garden – to the Chantry on Wintersend. All of it is heaped into a great pile, and then that night, one of the clergy blesses it and burns it,” he explains.

“That seems a bit…wasteful. I mean, it isn’t as though most people have a great deal to spare, coin or otherwise.”

Cullen nods. “That is the point, in a way. By giving up a part of their potential livelihood for the coming year, folk are putting their faith in Andraste blessing their harvests rather than relying solely on their own capabilities, or on what they can see with their eyes. Although,” he says with a hint of a smirk, “it is more of a superstition than a rite, for most.”

“You say that as though there’s a real difference between those two things,” she replies, grinning. She lays his foot down on her lap once again and takes up the other.

“Spoken like a true heretic,” he teases, gazing fondly at her.

“Are you not proud your little brother is an upstanding, Maker-worshiping member of the community, then?”

His smile fades and his brow furrows. “No, it isn’t that. Or…not that exactly.” He pauses, gathering his thoughts, before continuing. “Mia is not particularly devout – I’ve told you that – nor is Rosalie, from what I gather. It strikes me now that my sister’s never mentioned Branson’s beliefs one way or the other. And…well…I am a bit ashamed to admit it, but I’m realizing that, in a year’s worth of letters, she’s said precious little about him at all. How his children get on, or his harvest – that sort of thing, yes – but nothing that I can recall about the man himself.”

“Until now,” she says as she circles her thumb around a knot of inflammation at the top of his ankle joint. This draws a wince from him, which causes her to pause for a moment.

“It’s alright,” he says, taking a deep breath and nodding to her to continue. She does, albeit with slightly less pressure, and he exhales before returning to the matter at hand. “That she thought to mention it at all, that detail about the seed tithe, in a letter that was otherwise practicalities and plans for our visit…it’s been gnawing at the back of my mind since I first read it. I cannot help but wonder whether she was trying to tell me something without, you know, saying it outright.”

“It doesn’t seem particularly out of place to me, not when she had already mentioned the festival. Perhaps,” Cora offers gently, “you’re overthinking it?”

He nods and gives her a strained smile. “It certainly would not be the first time.” Then, looking somewhat sheepish and placing a hand atop hers at his ankle, “You…needn’t keep at it, love. Your day was no less strenuous than mine.”

“I’m hardly exerting myself,” she says.

His tongue darts out across his lower lip, and his eyes flicker away from her. “I only…you’ve no obligation to–”

“Yes, that’s rather the point of being in a relationship: caring for another person in spite of being under no obligation.” She smirks at him when he meets her gaze again. “Now, would you like a draught to ease the pain so you’re able to sleep?”

“Oh,” he says as he rubs at the back of his neck, “it isn’t so severe now as it was, thanks to you.”

“That isn’t what I asked.” She leans across the length of his legs, craning her neck until she can just barely press her lips to his.

Cullen sighs in the way of one who has tried to hide from his beloved and been found out nonetheless, and he regards her with both the abashedness and affection that come from being fully known. “Yes,” he answers, “yes, please.” He kisses her again, leaning toward her so she isn’t straining herself. Perhaps it is the sweetness of the kiss itself, or perhaps it is his pain having lessened for the first time all day, but he quickly laces a hand around the back of her neck and pulls her in closer. The fervency of it sends a jolt of arousal through her lower belly.

After a while, he parts from her just enough to speak. “If I were feeling better…” he says with no small amount of frustration. His breath is heavy, and she can see him mentally weighing the physical consequences of pulling her onto his lap. As much as she wants that – and, oh, her body is all but aching for it now – she knows that he will regret it tonight when even an elfroot draught will not dull the pain enough for him to sleep.

“Are you dining with your officers tomorrow?” Cora asks.

“I had not planned to,” he replies. “But–”

“Well then,” she says with a mischievous smile, “perhaps we could duck downstairs for an early dinner, and then–”

“Yes, please.” He gives her a smirk and kisses her once more.

---

“You really can’t wait until I’ve returned?” the Inquisitor asks as she reaches for another book.

“I understand that it might be confusing for you, what with my dewy skin and coquettish temper, but I’m afraid that I am not a damsel keen on whiling away the hours in my mountain castle as I await my beloved’s triumphant return.” Dorian picks up a tome from the stack beside the armchair in what has become, over the course of nearly two years, his alcove. He squints at the faded lettering on the cover before opening and leafing through the pages.

“Dorian,” Cora says, tone and expression suddenly aghast – and, inwardly, terribly pleased that he momentarily believes her to be upset – “have you been…have you been leading me on?” The concern disappears from his visage, and he rolls his eyes.

“I’m insulted.” He places the tome into a wooden crate sitting on the floor between them. “If I were feigning romantic affection, you wouldn’t realize it until l was a hundred leagues away with your most valuable possessions and handsomest serving man on the back of my mount.”

She chuckles and shakes her head before turning to the book in her hands. “A Treatise on the Potential Magical Sensitivities of the Common Nug,” she reads. “I don’t suppose you’ll be wanting to cross-reference this one with anything in the Magisterium stacks?”

“Incredible, the things that pass for scholarship in this part of the world. Why didn’t we throw that one out ages ago?”

“Perhaps there will be a nug enthusiast who takes refuge in Skyhold hundreds of years hence,” she says, sliding the book onto a shelf. “It would be rather unkind of us to leave them without reading material.”

Dorian inspects another volume from his pile before quickly moving to place it in the crate. Before he can do so, however, the Inquisitor grabs hold of it. “Oh, no you don’t! I found this one, if you recall. Surely you can dip into your mountain of Tevinter gold and buy your own from a dealer in the Imperium if you absolutely must.”

“And what makes you think that a textbook on the revivification of corpses in a state of advanced decay would be so easy to come by in my homeland, hm?”

“Because it’s horrifying, which I’ve gathered is also the adjective that best describes Minrathous,” she quips, then shelves it. Voice low, she continues, “And you’ll be in enough danger without attempting to raise an army of the undead.”

“Tevinter is hardly more dangerous now than it was when I left.” He folds his arms and, leaning against the chair, regards her with mild amusement.

“Yes, well, you’ve not yet returned from a sojourn amongst the barbaric southerners and begun disputing centuries of received history with the Magisterium, have you?” Cora snaps. She means for it to come out merely as a jest, a riposte in their duel, but there is something else there. She can hear the anxiety masquerading as frustration even as it rolls from her tongue, but she is unable to stop it.

He tilts his head slightly as though trying to discern something in her manner. The barest hint of a smile peeks from beneath his perfectly-sculpted mustache. After several long seconds of studying her in silence, he asks, “Cordelia, are you really going to miss me so terribly?”

The Inquisitor places her hands on her hips and, summoning a confidence that she does not feel, returns his gaze. Their standoff lasts for only a few moments before she throws her hands up in surrender. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dorian! Of course I am! And not only that, but I’m going to be sick with worry the entire time you’re away – during which I’ll know nothing of your whereabouts, mind–”

“It isn’t as though you would be able to come riding valiantly to my aid even if you did,” he interrupts, tone drier than a varghest skeleton.

Her eyes widen and she gestures toward him. “–and whenever I attempt to speak to you on the subject, at best, you turn it into a farce; at worst, you ignore me and change the subject entirely.”

“Come, come,” he says with a dismissive wave of his hand, “we’ve still three stacks to sort through.” He reaches down toward the pile of books but stops short at the realization that he’s proven her point almost instantaneously. She has rarely seen Dorian speechless – never, if one doesn’t count the silence that had settled between them after the confrontation with his father in Redcliffe so long ago. The recollection, though, is apt; now, as then, a combination of melancholy and uncertainty flits across his face. With a sigh, he asks, clearly exasperated, “Well, what is it that you want me to say, exactly? That I swear to be a very good boy and not get myself assassinated?”

“You could start with promising me that you’ll take more care than you used to, however comfortable you might feel because you’re back home.”

“When have I led you to believe that I ever felt comfortable in Tevinter?” he snarks. Cora tilts her chin down and regards him gravely, lips pursed, and he gives a put-upon sigh. “Alright, yes, fine, I will be careful. But I fail to understand why you feel such anxiety about my little sojourn. I managed to survive Minrathous without incident – well, mostly, anyway – for thirty years. I’m frankly offended that you think me incapable of doing so now.”

“Come off it, Dorian. You know very well that I think no such thing. And, of course, you know your home better than I do. I just…” She bites at her bottom lip for a moment, searching for the words that will make him hear her. “Things have changed.” And you have changed, she does not have to add. The understanding is there, silent but heavy, as they look at one another.

Cora knows that she cannot talk with him about this in any greater detail, cannot even properly name it aloud. He would shut himself off from her if she tried; the weight of it is too great, its consequences on her friend’s relationship to his troubled fatherland too daunting. Her own existential crisis borne of loving a former templar was – sometimes still is – harrowing, and that’s with a significantly more refined ability to contend with emotional upheaval than Dorian has. She has no doubt that his method of coping with a shifting worldview and altered values involves little more than wine and willful ignorance.

In his rare moments of vulnerability, the Inquisitor has seen glimpses of these changes. Some, he has admitted to her outright. Prior to fighting alongside her, for instance, he had assumed all mages outside the Imperium to be a lost cause. The Orlesian Chantry’s barbarism surely meant that the strongest among them had been culled over centuries through the Rite of Harrowing. Their bloodlines thus diluted, they could never be truly adept in the magical arts even if they were afforded a legitimate arcane education – which the Chantry, with its Circles, made a moot point.

“I thought I had shed the Magisterium’s archaic notions about breeding,” he had said to her during one of their early attempts to organize the moldering library in Skyhold’s basement. “So much for believing myself more enlightened than Alexius, I suppose.” It had taken less than a week of tramping through the Fallow Mire with Cora to realize that his initial beliefs about her – and all southern mages’ – capabilities were founded not on reason or experience but on prejudice.

This shift in his thinking, though, had little effect on his conception of the Imperium. He had always known his homeland to be xenophobic, so finding out that popular Tevinter beliefs about outside mages amounted to so much hearsay was hardly revelatory. His other changing opinions have been rather more troublesome.

Indeed, Cora thinks, were it not for the welfare of the Imperium’s lowest classes – or class, really, since slave and elf are almost entirely synonymous there – she might not be losing him at all. For all Dorian’s insistence that he’s a narcissistic misanthrope, the Inquisitor knows that her friend has come to care about the fates of the Tevinter enslaved.

“It’s all your fault, you know,” he had snapped at her during a drunken tirade over the winter. “I could have been perfectly happy in my ignorance, could have gone on insisting that, at the very least, the enslaved aren’t starving like the destitute here – which is still true, by the by, so don’t think I’m conceding that point – but then you had to go on about my hypocrisy, with your whole” – here, he had put on a terrible approximation of a Marcher accent that was only made worse by the occasional slurring of words – “How can you be so very opposed to the southern Circles and still defend enslavement in Tevinter thing. And so now, instead of falling peacefully to sleep, I have to lie awake and think about my responsibility to the greater good like some idealistic fucking dolt.”

Now, the afternoon light illuminating both the pair of mages and the storm of ancient dust motes they’ve set to dancing from leafing through dozens of tomes, they regard one another. The Inquisitor’s words, said and unsaid, join the waltz of tiny specks between them. “Do you think,” Cora ventures after many long moments of silence, “that you’ll come back?” There is a tremble in her voice as she speaks these last few words, and she presses her lips together. She realizes for the first time that, while she is of course worried for Dorian’s safety, she is not so afraid for him as she’d thought. No: the fear, the real fear, the thing that’s setting her words aquiver, is what she has just asked him.

“I’ve decided to stay with the Inquisition,” he had said at the party after Corypheus was defeated. “For now.” She had been too pleased to hear this – and half-gone on cider and mead – that she had not asked what precisely he’d meant. For the winter, maybe? Or perhaps until he felt the pull of Tevinter, a kind of homesickness? With such uncertainty, she had naturally felt something akin to dread when her friend had told her that he was planning a brief trip once the mountain passes were clear.

“What in the–” Dorian looks at her with genuine surprise. “Will I–? Kaffas, of course I’ll come back, you idiot,” he says incredulously.

“Well you’ve not exactly been forthcoming with your plans thus far!” she replies, the volume and pitch of her voice creeping upward. She can feel the prick of tears behind her eyes, and she wills them away in a panic.

“Silly me – I didn’t realize I was required to keep the Inquisitor thus informed!”

She hears a door close somewhere nearby and remembers that, however empty it might look from this vantage point, there are a number of other people scattered throughout the tower’s various levels. As the bottom of her field of vision begins to blur, she whispers, “It never occurred to you that I might be just a bit distressed to know that my closest friend might, at any moment, decide to fuck off back to Tevinter forever?”

“It never occurred to you that even a scoundrel such as I would not abandon you to sort out your incompetent Chantry’s mage war by yourself?” He would have her believe that he is merely feigning offense and teasing her as a sibling might do. There is something in his eyes, though, and the turn of his lip, that betrays him. He is, she sees, disappointed in her. Or – no, not disappointed – she’s hurt him.

“I’m sorry, Dorian,” she says after a moment, feeling rather small. It is shamefully easy for her to forget that his skin, while thick as a Skyhold kitchen pudding, is not impenetrable. After a beat, she swipes at her eyes and adds, “It’s just…I’m frightened of losing you. You are…you’re so very dear to me.”

His expression softens such that she wonders if he might actually reply with equal tenderness. A second later, however, he blinks and inhales. “Come now, none of that. We’ve dozens of volumes to sort through yet.”

Cora nods, and they both turn once again to the stacks of books littering the floor. Some time later, when they are fully immersed in their task once again, Dorian speaks. His voice is low and soft, and it carries a grave undercurrent that she has rarely heard from him. “It isn’t as though I want to go to Tevinter. Not now, at any rate, with this Venatori business hardly behind us.”

The Inquisitor gives him a quizzical look. She had assumed that homesickness was the primary reason for his journey. She knows that he has no desire to see his father again for a very long while, if at all, and he has been quite open about having few associates and no real companions in the Imperium. My best and only friend, he had called her when he was several goblets of wine deep at the banquet celebrating Corypheus’ defeat.

“Then…why are you doing it?”

He regards her for a moment as though weighing how to respond, apparently forgetting the massive codex in his hands. Craning his neck to the right and left, he glances out at the landing outside his alcove, then looks at Cora again. Just as he leans toward her and opens his mouth, one of Leliana’s aides passes by them. The mage presses his lips together again and sighs. Then, after a beat, he whispers, “Can you trust that I have your best interests at heart?”

She searches his face, somewhat alarmed at the gravity in his demeanor and tone. She nods slowly. She believes him, of course; but the anxious dread that has been her lifelong companion has begun to creep into her mind once again. How ironic, she thinks, that the thing she was feigning concern about not ten minutes ago has now become the thing gnawing at the pit of her stomach.

“Alright, then,” he says, his voice returning to its normal register and tone. He opens the book in his hands. “Ah, this is the one on creation magic by Henrik Ingridsson. Any references in here you’d like cross-referenced while I’m in Minrathous?”

Chapter Text

Before

At the sudden clang-thud of a copper pot falling from its hook and into an outstretched arm, Cora whips her head around so quickly that she’ll later realize she pulled a muscle in her neck.

“Fuck!” a voice, presumably belonging to the person harassing the cookware, hisses from the other side of the basement kitchen.

Cora presses her lips together and sucks them inward until it feels as though her teeth will slice right through them. In the several seconds that follow the crash, the silence is nearly as thick as the darkness. As it should be. They can afford neither the brightness of tapers nor the easily-detectable magic of spellwork. Nor can they afford any sound louder than the softest whisper, she plans to point out as soon Kael – for it is certainly Kael, by far the clumsiest among them – draws closer.

She hears the faint scrape of metal against weathered wood as he sets the pot down on the large butcher block in the center of the room. A few more slow, measured steps, and his hand is reaching out, fingers tentatively catching on the cotton of her dressing gown.

“Luce?” he whispers, and the woman standing beside Cora, their arms linked together, replies, “Right here.”

Cora feels Luciana shift to hold out a hand to her lover, and within a few seconds, all three mages are standing in a tight circle and facing one another. A sliver of light from the high basement window paints a faint stripe across them. The window is too narrow and too far above Cora’s head for her to see the moon itself, but she feels comfort in the timeliness of its reappearance from behind the clouds nonetheless. She no longer believes that the Maker cares for His children at all, cursed or otherwise, but there is some part of her that wants to believe that even the smallest boon is a gift. From whom, or what, she does not know. She tries not to think on it too deeply.

Divine aid or coincidence, the meager light is auspicious. Luci brought a small taper, but any unnatural glow is, like the clanging of copper, best avoided.

“If anyone gets suspicious,” Cora whispers testily at Kael, “we die tonight.” It is no exaggeration, as all of them are well aware. Three mages slitting their palms – and under cover of night, no less – would be cut down in the blink of an eye.

“At least it would be quick,” he retorts. “Osfrith might be as mad as a deepstalker in daylight, but he doesn’t seem the type for torture.” Unlike the errant templars who, having abandoned their Circles or been driven out in uprisings, now stalk the Free Marches

“And after our quick executions, that same madman would be the only thing protecting the children from his more capable colleagues,” she snaps. A better friend, she thinks, would not be so hard on him. A better friend would allow some levity. Any one of them could have had the same mishap, after all. But Cora is too nervous for joking just now.

She pulls a small, oblong bundle from her pocket and unfurls the cotton rag wrapped around it to reveal a paring knife, worn but still sharp. For at least the tenth time since she crept from her quarters a half-hour ago, she feels an angry shame burn her cheeks at the foolishness of it all. Here they are, grown adults – full Enchanters – slinking about the tower just as they did when they were adolescents out for a midnight tryst. That, at least, made some kind of sense; any young people might do the same, magical or not. But she and her friends are reduced to it still, and – unless they are able first to flee the Ostwick Circle and then to maintain their freedom – they always will be. Kael’s sarcasm was threaded with a simple truth: a swift death would indeed be a mercy.

But there is Palum to think about, and the handful of other children still remaining; any secret hope Cora might foster for an end is immediately put aside when she recalls this. If she is condemned to live, then she will fight to do so for as long as possible.

“Alright, one of you, give me your hands,” she says. Kael takes his hand from Luciana’s and places his palms in the center of their little circle. He does not flinch as Cora takes the knife to him, rending his skin just enough to get the blood properly flowing. He would normally make some quip to lighten the mood, or at least give a playful wince. That he does neither feels like an apology for his earlier clumsiness, and Cora appreciates this. He drives her mad half the time in the endearing way of a sibling – though this comparison is presumptive, she knows, having few memories of her own. She had been four or five when her mother had discovered her abilities and then demanded she be isolated from the other children, and she was sent to the Circle just a couple years thereafter.

She begins to wipe the blade on its cotton wrapping, but Luci smiles and whispers, “Kind of you, but this exercise rather defeats the purpose.” Cora returns her smile and takes her friend’s now-proffered palms. A nick in each, and then she turns the knife to her own skin. She glances reflexively toward the entrance to the kitchen before quickly opening a wound in her left hand, then her right. She gives the blade a quick wipe using only the tips of her fingers, then rolls it back into its wrapping and deposits it into her pocket. It’s possible, she realizes, that she’s managed to smear blood onto her dressing gown, but she cannot see it. She’ll need to think of an excuse in case she meets one of the remaining templars on the way back to her quarters.

“Palms up,” Luci says, raising a hand to face each of her comrades. Cora and Kael do the same, and they each press their open palms against the others. They interlace their fingers and squeeze.

“How long should we wait?” Kael whispers.

“I don’t know,” Cora admits. “I don’t know if this will work at all, let alone what the preferred technique is.” She hates it, the guessing inherent in this exercise. She is a precise person, a careful mage, a devoted student of the arcane; attempting to prepare for a spell that is, at least for the three of them, purely theoretical, makes her equal parts anxious and angry. Anxious because they will be in dire straits indeed should they need to make use of the spell, and angry because the magic is quite simple and should therefore be available for study. What must it be like, she wonders, to simply walk into a library and have the full knowledge of the magical world at one’s fingertips as the Tevinter do?

“I’m sure it will work. Or that, you know, it would work, if we needed to use it,” Luci says encouragingly. Andraste willing, they will not. All will go according to plan: flee the tower, get the resources they’ve been caching around Ostwick for the past several months, make for the mountains, and stay together. If they can manage this last hurdle, none of them will need to stumble through the creation of invisible ink based solely on their scant knowledge of phylactery magic.

But the Maker rarely rewards the careful laying of plans with success, at least where His cursed children are concerned. They must anticipate failure and create failsafes, however absurd, like mixing their blood so they will later be able to craft a hypothetical ink that the three of them, and no others, can read. Never mind that they don’t know the exact mechanics of doing so or that, if such a spell operates like phylactery magic, the mana required might exceed any of their individual reserves.

Desperate times, Cora thinks before giving her friends’ hands a final squeeze and releasing them.

---

Dearest Luci,

We were awoken this morning – long before the sun had even considered making its way over the horizon, mind you – by a very enthusiastic, very loud songbird on the balcony. I can hardly be cross about it, though; every sign of spring is a salve. Even the ones that interrupt my (already limited) sleep. If the snow is finally melting here, then I’m sure the Dales are already

Cora stops, the nib of her quill slowly seeping an ink blot onto the tail of her ‘y’, and looks toward the staircase. She thought she heard the creak of a hinge, but perhaps – ah, there it is. The sound of the door shutting, followed by familiar boots on the stone.

“Back in the middle of the day?” she calls out, voice loud enough to carry down the stairwell.

A few seconds later, the top of the commander’s head appears between the balusters. He smiles at her in greeting, and then, bending to unbuckle his greaves, replies, “Would it be terribly precious of me to say that I simply missed you?”

She can feel her cheeks flush with pleasure. “Yes,” she says, “but I would adore you for it.”

“In that case, ‘I missed you,’” Cullen says. While he finishes divesting himself of greaves and boots, she returns to the letter before her. Her eyes widen as she notices the circle of black now covering her last written word. She stabs the quill into a grizzled chunk of cork and begins rifling around on her desk for a scrap of parchment. Letters, envelopes, reports, and – So that’s where that went! – an ancient atlas lying open beneath the lot, but nary a bit of detritus with which she might mop up the excess ink. With a sigh, she realizes that her composition isn’t salvageable – likely never was, considering the size of the stain – and gives up. She balls up the ruined parchment and tosses it into the old crate that serves as her wastebin.

Only a few sentences; hardly a terrible loss, she reasons. Still, she would rather not waste even a drop of the precious ink. Opening her veins is no bother – she’s far from squeamish – but the spell itself, performed far from Cullen’s eyes though it is, still somehow feels like a transgression.

Back in the Circle, when she and her friends had taken the first step, the spell had still been theoretical. Kael had overheard an Aequitarian describing it to a companion at the White Spire, but there had, of course, been no texts on such a thing at Ostwick. Any books referencing blood outside of a medical context had been accessible only to the First Enchanter – and had disappeared from the Circle when she did. Once the three friends followed suit, they had not, blessedly, gotten separated and therefore hadn’t needed to use that particular brand of arcanum.

Cora had forgotten about the plan entirely until, while gathering spindleweed from a rocky beach on the northern coast of Ferelden last year, it had suddenly popped back into her mind. Out of curiosity, she had asked Dorian if he knew of a way to enchant ink to be legible only by one whose blood was contained therein. He had huffed and told her to simply get to the punchline because, kaffas, wasn’t a fortnight of listening to Varric and the Iron Bull trade terrible jokes enough of a punishment? Only after a short clarification that she was being serious did the Inquisitor come to understand that not only was the spell real, but it was both simple and, in the North, ubiquitous.

Still, when she had first considered attempting the actual casting necessary for it, she had felt uneasy. With no ancient evil to defeat and the mountain passes choked with snow, the Inquisitor had thus devoted the better part of a week that winter in Skyhold’s musty basement library to understanding the precise mechanics of the spell. At first, Dorian had found her need to comprehend such minute, theoretical details amusing; then, after several days, he had called her excessive caution ridiculous. “It’s much less exciting than you seem to think, Cordelia. The blood is a component, not a catalyst.”

“Is something the matter?” Cullen now asks as he frees his foot from a boot and walks toward her.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Cora replies. She waves her hand as though to brush away the concern and works her lips into a smile.

“I know that I’m supposed to be the terrible liar between the two of us, but either your skills are deteriorating, or I’ve become more adept at reading you,” he says knowingly, his own gentle smile as sincere as hers is false.

“The latter, I think,” she says with a sigh, “and I do not try quite as hard as I used to. Not with you.” The evidence of this is the crumpled parchment in the crate at her feet. She is ashamed to admit that, on the evening some months ago when he had first asked about the letter she was then writing, her first instinct had been to lie. It feels silly, when she thinks on it, considering how effortlessly open she is with him in nearly every regard. When it comes to certain arcane matters, though, something happens on a visceral level that drives her to favor dishonesty. To hide.

“You’ve been at that parchment for over an hour now,” he had remarked, yawning and placing his nighttime reading material – a stack of training reports – on the bedside table.

“I didn’t realize that I was being timed,” she had said with a teasing lilt.

“Perhaps I’m feeling rather impatient for you to come to bed.” He had been grinning when she looked up from her desk. Then, with mock disappointment, he had added: “Although I understand if you would rather spend your evening arguing a fair price for a hundred bolts of cloth with some merchant or other from Highever.”

“I’ll have you know that I’m writing to Luci,” she had laughed.

“Since when are those notes more than a handful of sentences?” He had stretched an arm across the duvet on her side of the bed and slowly pulled the cover back, the motion and his gaze infuriatingly enticing.

“Since Leliana and I decided that there’s no longer any real danger in ravens going between Skyhold and the mage settlement in the Dales.” Five days of intermittent debates and individual reflection had led Cora and her Spymaster to this conclusion. They had turned the matter over and over, had looked at it from every angle; in the end, they had discerned no appreciable risk. With Corypheus gone, there was no longer a superhuman enemy that could decipher the origin and destination of a raven imbued, as the Inquisition’s were, with magical wards. The apostate village’s enchantments were such that it would be incredibly difficult to find for anyone who didn’t know an exact location; and for Skyhold, such a feat would be nigh impossible even with map coordinates.

Cora had looked down at the letter. Nearly done. She could dash off the last few sentences in the morning and still make the post. Thus had she popped the stopper into her inkwell and risen from her seat.

“But…” Cullen’s sultry gaze had taken on an air of confusion. “Are you not concerned about someone intercepting your correspondence?” Someone, of course, being apostate hunters who might discern the location of the hidden village where Cora’s friends and dozens of other mages had been residing for over a year.

“Not particularly,” she had said. She had unfastened the belt of her dressing gown and shrugged it off so that it puddled on the floor. “Such an interloper would learn very little from a blank page, I should think.” Just as she was stepping toward the bed, it occurred to her that she ought to pick up her discarded clothing and hang it up, or at least fold it over a chair. The Inquisitor had gotten better about reigning in her mess in the few months she and Cullen had been sharing a bedroom. She would never be one to make the bed each morning, but their quarters were neat enough that Cullen didn’t feel the compulsion to pick up after her any longer (that first week had been maddening for them both).

When she had risen from bending to retrieve the dressing gown, Cullen had looked no less puzzled than seconds before. That was the moment she had realized that all discussions about her personal correspondence had been with the Spymaster alone rather than with the entire War Council. She could have sworn she’d spoken with Cullen about it afterward – she’d been so excited, after all – but his expression indicated otherwise.

“Did I not tell you that Leliana thinks it safe to send ravens to them now?” she had asked, stepping toward the wardrobe and hanging the garment on a hook within.

“That makes sense, with Corypheus gone,” he had replied, his brows drawing together in concern, “but surely you cannot be so open with your words that you fill three pages?”

“Of course we can,” she had said as if this were obvious. “The magic might be exhausting, but it’s not especially difficult.”

“The…magic?” The creases in his forehead had deepened; the playful, seductive man of a few minutes before was gone.

Cora had climbed up onto the bed and sat beside him, mirroring his pose by propping her pillow against the headboard and leaning back into it. The couple had come to similar stalemates of comprehension before; indeed, their early interactions had seemed to be almost exclusively misunderstandings. These have grown fewer over time, the Inquisitor muses now as she recollects the scene, but they likely won’t ever disappear entirely. Her and Cullen’s paths in life have been too different for it to be otherwise.

Still, they each find themselves surprised by the other’s knowledge – or, more often, lack thereof – when such occasions arise. It is disorienting, being able to predict Cullen’s next sentence down to the tone of voice and then, half a second later, remembering that they walked in separate worlds for the first three decades of their lives. It provokes less anxiety for her these days than it did early in their relationship. Most of the time, anyway.

It had come to seem like such a small, harmless thing to her, the spellwork. Not in terms of effort and care, of course, but in principle. “Even a few awkward adolescents with a fair grasp of the arcane arts know how to manage blood ink,” Dorian had said, referring to the spell’s ubiquity in his homeland. Its widespread use in Tevinter – and the consequent ability of most adult mages to break the enchantment – is, incidentally, one of the reasons that similar letters to Dorian during his journey are not an option. “They might make themselves ill with the mana needed, but the mechanics are quite simple. Even lighting a candle is more difficult. And,” her friend had added in an effort to assuage her final reservations, “more dangerous.”

Cullen, when she had sat beside him and explained it on that night several weeks prior, had disagreed.

“But that…Cora, that’s…blood magic,” he had said with rapidly-mounting panic.

“By its literal definition, I suppose,” she had conceded, beginning to realize that her lover’s understanding of the matter was far, far different from her own. “But the blood isn’t the power source for the spell, just a component of it. There’s nothing…nothing malicious in it, or dangerous. It isn’t as though demons were being summoned or spirits were being bound. That takes a great deal more time, and effort, and…well…blood.”

This had been the wrong thing to say. For her, it had been a mere point of fact, and – having formerly been scholar and teacher by trade – she had stated it as such. For Cullen, it had been a flippant description of his greatest fear.

“H-how…what…” He was blinking rapidly, looking down at where fistfuls of duvet fabric were clenched in his hands. She could almost hear the battle raging in his head as rational explanations beat back visions of waking up next to an abomination.

“Cullen,” she had said, reaching out a hand to his cheek. He had flinched at her touch, and she had felt an almost physical ache in her chest at this.

“I–”

“Cullen!” she had said, more urgently this time. He had met her gaze again. Having succeeded in her purpose, she had softened her voice. “Cullen. Love. You used phylacteries, yes? In the Circle?”

“I…yes.” He had sounded short of breath.

“It’s a variation on the same spell. It might be magic that…that requires a drop or two of…blood, yes. But would the Chantry… would the Order make use of such magic were it dangerous?”

As he had regarded her, searching her eyes for reassurance, she had felt as though she were falling from a great height. The hesitation, the fear, the indecisiveness – this was an expression she had seen only when she had woken him from particularly grueling night terrors. When he had been only half-conscious. When he had not been fully himself. Now, however, he was, and still he could not decide whether to trust her.

“I…do not know,” he had finally answered, and, for the hundredth time, she had silently cursed the Chantry’s duplicitousness not for what it had wrought on her, but for how it had shaken him.

“First Enchanters created phylacteries all the time, love. When a child was brought to the Circle, or an apostate – you know this. You’ve even seen it done, I’ll wager.” She had raised an inquiring brow to him, and he had nodded, albeit reluctantly. “And yet I’ve never heard of one turning abomination in the process.”

“But there were templars present, if such a thing had occurred,” the commander had said. His breath had grown steadier and his fidgeting less intense, but his gaze had hardened. “There were…protections. And the risk was taken only because phylacteries were a necessity.”

“I…don’t know that I would go quite that far,” she had said. Her tone, in retrospect, had been more defensive than needed, but so had his. And to call the favorite tool of apostate-hunters a necessity?

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Cullen had replied. The edge in his voice, the set of his jaw; he had become properly angry. “You haven’t watched a demon-bound apostate slaughter a hundred people.”

“Oh?” she had said, narrowing her eyes and turning herself to face him. “Do the Venatori not count, then?”

“That’s entirely different!”

The first proper fight of their relationship had ensued. Neither of them resorted to shouting, of course, or wild accusations – their mutual disdain for such tactics is one of the few areas of common ground in their disagreements – but nor was either of them particularly charitable. Cora had known from the start that his anger was rooted in memories of Kinloch, and that he, like most of southern Thedas, regarded blood magic as inextricably linked to malicious incursions from the Fade.

Now, as she draws herself away from the memory of that tumultuous, argument-filled night several weeks ago, she finds her heart beating more quickly. “Is there anything I can do?” Cullen asks in reference to her obvious fib about nothing being the matter.

“Really, it’s nothing of import,” she replies. He brings his hands to rest at her hips, and the contact – albeit through several layers of fabric – steadies her somewhat. He loves me. He trusts me. He trekked across the keep in the middle of the day just to see me. “Just…frustrated by my own clumsiness. I…my…” Maker’s balls, why can’t she simply say it? It isn’t as though he doesn’t know. The inkwell has been on her desk for months! They had an hour-long row – the precursor to which she was just recalling – over the bloody thing! And something like three hours of phenomenal, sweaty, surprisingly energetic makeup sex the following night! She takes a breath and finishes, “I ruined an attempt at a letter to Luci and wasted far too much ink in so doing.”

A flicker of unease darts across Cullen’s face. Were she not a devoted student of that face, she might not even notice. But she is, and she does, and she is seized again with fear. The creases in his brow, though, disappear almost immediately.

“Well…” he says, trying to sound both sympathetic and nonchalant. The effort is utterly endearing. “You’ve only exchanged a few letters thus far. Surely you aren’t running low yet?”

“No, but I…well,” she sighs, “I meant to ask Dorian whether we might make another batch before he left, and then I forgot.”

“Could you not, er, do it yourself?” he asks. “I mean, I know it’s…it takes…quite a lot of…of mana, but there is always lyrium.”

She smiles sadly at him and brings a hand to his cheek. The love she feels for him, this man who not two years ago would have refused even to speak about a mage opening her palm, is overwhelming. “We don’t have to talk about this, love, as much as I appreciate your effort.”

“I am sorry,” he sighs, looking disappointed in himself. “I know that it isn’t…that you aren’t…Maker, but merely having a discussion about…it shouldn’t be so…so nerve-wracking.”

“We’ve already come quite a long way,” Cora says. This draws a slow smile from him. He studies her for a moment before ducking his head down to kiss her.

When they break apart again, Cullen says gently, “You should never have to fear sharing some part of yourself with me. I am…I am so–”

“We’ve already made our apologies, Cullen,” she replies. “And it will get easier, I think. To talk about…things like this. It already has.”

“It has,” he agrees, closing his eyes and dropping his forehead to rest against hers.

She smiles, the comfort of feeling his skin against hers drawing her into a place of safety. At some point, his touch came to signal a kind of assurance. She isn’t sure when it started. Even before he lost his templar abilities, back when he was still theoretically capable of purging the ambient mana from every inch of her body, she had begun to feel calm wash over her at his hands in her own, his fingers against her jaw, his lips on her neck. “You’re a regular apostate sympathizer now,” she says, shaking her head slowly while keeping their brows pressed together. “Asking to be smuggled illicit texts from Tevinter, taking your mage lover to meet your family…” She tsks, trying and failing to suppress a wicked grin.

“I would hardly call it smuggling,” he says with just enough genuine defensiveness that her smile widens. “Just a bit of…circumventing of the Chantry’s more…intellectually incurious eras.”

Though Cullen has never been a great defender of the Orlesian Chantry as an organization in the time she’s known him, she had still been surprised to learn of the favor he’d asked of Dorian. Orlais – and Ferelden, to a lesser extent – once had a tradition of philosophical and theological scholarship. After the Fourth Blight, in an attempt to regain control of the chaos in southern Thedas, the Divine had embarked on a censorship campaign. Many works were branded heretical and purged from all but private collections. Naturally, the Orlesian Chantry banning a text made it immediately popular in Tevinter, so Dorian promised to bring back enough reading material for the commander to “have a crisis of faith befitting a former templar.”

“Anyway, I need to read something to counteract the brain rot I’ve suffered from Varric’s books,” he says with a smirk. He kisses her again. When he pulls away, his expression is gentle. “And as for meeting my siblings, well…they’re going to adore you, Cora.”

She returns his smile, hoping that the twinge of uncertainty she’s begun to harbor doesn’t show. That would be a first, she thinks. Not since she came into her magic has she met a person who, knowing what she is, has taken to her in the way Cullen describes. Not without taking considerable time to get to know her, and that only after deciding that she was not an imminent threat. If even other mages have at first approached her only with their proverbial hackles raised, she cannot imagine a family of Fereldan farmers treating her without suspicion.

Cullen’s reassurances, she thinks, are as hollow as they are sweet. Perhaps he can predict how Mia will feel, but the others are closer to strangers than siblings. His own disquiet over his sister’s letter is testament to that.

But this is not about her. It is about Cullen, and his own barely-suppressed nervousness is enough for them both. She will be steadfast for him, whatever her reservations. Besides, she has stood against a would-be god and prevailed. A week in eastern Ferelden is nothing at all.

Chapter Text

Before

Cullen has felt this close to death only one other time in his life, and it was a mere three months ago. Not a particularly inspiring run recently, but then he could say the same thing about the past ten years overall. He summons every ounce of willpower to take another step. And then again. And again. What are the odds, he wonders, that the elven apostate actually knows what he’s talking about? Thedas is home to many fortresses in desolate places – Weisshaupt, Soldier’s Peak, Sahrnia – but the commander has at least heard of those. If there were anything like that still standing in the Frostbacks, Orlais and Ferelden surely would have been at each other’s throats for it.

Right foot forward. If the snow before him hadn’t been trampled down by the great strides of The Iron Bull, he thinks, he would not be able to move. Left foot. He had not known it was possible to feel pain like this and still be upright. The week after he had first reduced his lyrium dose, he had left his bed only to shuffle to the chamber pot a few yards away. Half the time, his legs had collapsed out from under him when he tried to stand. Right foot. That they are not doing so now is a miracle, he thinks. One of a thousand in recent days.

“Are…you alright, Commander?”

The Herald’s voice comes to him as though from a great distance, so he is surprised to look up and find her beside him. She is pale, the only color in her skin coming from her wind-chapped cheeks, and there are three fresh cuts on her face alone. An odd thing to see on a healer, but her body’s energy has likely been bent toward staying alive.

After the escape from Haven, Fiona had ordered her mages to use their mana on grave wounds only and to forgo lyrium unless necessary to save a life. The Herald has not exempted herself from this, as both the strength and supplies of the Inquisition have been dwindling quickly over the past few days. Cullen, though already in considerable pain after the evacuation effort, had decided to taper his lyrium further to aid in conservation efforts.

“I am. At least insofar as any of us are,” he says. He almost winces at the way the hoarseness in his voice betrays his lie.

She regards him with skepticism but, blessedly, offers no challenge. As prickly, even argumentative, as Trevelyan can be, he is still unsurprised. Perhaps she is simply unwilling to pick a fight given the circumstances, but he suspects it is more out of camaraderie than tact.

Several seconds pass in silence apart from the muffled crunching of snow under a hundred boots. “I…” She coughs, and then again, eventually pounding a closed fist against her chest in a losing battle against the phlegm accruing there. She was bound to fall ill, of course. She spent almost twenty-four hours stumbling through mountain snow drifts while wearing soaked clothing and bleeding from a dozen different places. Cullen feels the urge to offer her…something. An arm to lean on, or the mantle from his armor, or a healing draught. He knows she would accept none of these things and has in fact already turned down Mother Giselle’s offer of the latter for the same reason he himself is taking dangerously little lyrium. “Sorry,” she croaks after the coughing fit has passed. She clears her throat. “I just…wanted to thank you.”

It occurs to Cullen that perhaps he died at Haven. Perhaps he is in the Fade, and everything around him is some demon’s elaborate creation, and the Maker is punishing him for breaking his vow to serve the Chantry for the rest of his life. The alternative is that Cordelia Trevelyan, the apostate mage who can hardly bear to look at him, is going out of her way to show him kindness.

“You…what?” he manages. He reckons that this could also be a fever dream brought on by withdrawal. He puts a hand to his forehead. He’s burning up in spite of the cold. Still, he hasn’t had any hallucinations since the first taper, and the Herald seems perfectly real. Not blurry at the edges in the manner of delusional apparitions; just surrounded by the normal sort of softness he’s come to associate with her. Maker’s breath, Rutherford. Pull yourself together.

“I wanted to thank you,” she says again. Yes, he decides, she must be real. The look of intense discomfort mixed with genuine gratitude on her face is too complex for a hallucination. “Mother Giselle said…she told me that you were the one who…found me. After Haven.”

“Oh,” he says. He attempts to wet his lips but finds that his tongue is dry. “I…it was a joint effort.”

Trevelyan bites at the inside of her cheek and looks off into the distance. After a beat, she says, “But…you led it. She said you directed the search parties. That you would not sleep. Or even rest.”

His stomach gives a lurch, which he attributes to hunger. His quickening heartbeat is not so easy to explain away. They trudge on in silence for several excruciating seconds as he wracks his muddled brain for a reply. “You…well, the…thing in your hand…seems to be our only hope for…for getting to the bottom of all this…” He gestures vaguely around. “This madness.”

“Ah,” she says, nodding her understanding. After a beat, she adds, “Well…thank you nonetheless. I…hope that I can continue being useful to the Inquisition.” Her ragged voice drops, and a note of bitterness wends through her final words. “A useful mage is a living mage, after all.” She quickens her pace to speed ahead of him, which is no small feat between the snow and her rattling breath.

When he realizes what’s just happened, the commander’s face feels like it’s on fire with shame. He reflexively opens his mouth to call out to the Herald. No, he wants to say. Please. I did not mean it in that way. But that would not be entirely true. Of course he hadn’t meant that the mark is more valuable than her life – a monstrous thought – but neither had he wanted her to believe he had worked so desperately to find her because…well… He squeezes his eyes shut. He will not follow that line of thinking. He is sure that it can lead nowhere good, especially for someone whose reasoning abilities are as poor as his own have become these past months.

It hardly matters, anyway. Trevelyan, a woman who has barely concealed her disdain for him since they met, offered him open, unqualified gratitude, and he responded with cruelty. Perhaps, he thinks, he is exactly who she believes him to be.

When Cullen lifts his head again, he notices a dark shape in his periphery. He turns to see Cassandra, trudging along to his right. She is looking at him with an expression he cannot name. There might be some concern there, or pity, and perhaps a touch of amusement.

“What?” he says. It comes out sounding much more confrontational than he intended, which frustrates him even more.

“You should apologize,” the Seeker says. There is no judgment in her voice; rather, it is infuriatingly calm.

“I will,” he replies. “Though I imagine forcing my presence upon her, even for an apology, would not be particularly welcome.”

“And yet she approached you unprompted.”

“Yes, well…” The truth is that speaking to the Herald about anything other than troop movements or scouting strategy makes him inexplicably nervous, a fact that is both embarrassing and stupid. He can’t even chalk it up to her being an apostate; he’s known of her magic since the Conclave, but his apprehension has only increased over time.

His thoughts miles away, he brings his foot down on a rock that the Iron Bull didn’t quite manage to stomp into the snowpack. His ankle turns abruptly, and an excruciating pain shoots through his leg. He gasps. At the second he realizes that he is going to collapse, Cassandra’s hands are clamped onto his right arm. She hauls him to his feet, then pauses for several long moments as he steadies himself. Once he is standing on his own again, she says, voice low and dripping with sarcasm, “I suppose it would be useless of me to ask whether this is the best time for such an extreme reduction in your lyrium dose.”

“Yes,” the commander says hoarsely. The pain is still so intense that the edges of his vision have begun to darken. “It would.”

“Ugh,” the Seeker grunts. She shakes her head. “Ridiculous.” They continue on for several minutes. Though they are part of a column of dozens, the world is strangely quiet. The whistling of the wind and crunching of beneath boots hardly register as noise after the past few days, and there doesn’t seem to be a member of the Inquisition with the strength or will to carry on a conversation. The only sounds punctuating their solemn march are the auditory detritus of exertion: coughs, wheezes, grunts.

“She will say no,” Cassandra eventually says as though this is simply the next logical statement in a discussion they’ve been having all the while. “Even if she knows that we all think her the best choice.”

“I know,” Cullen replies. Strange, he thinks, that he does not have to ask the Seeker what she’s talking about. None of them have spoken it aloud, at least that he’s heard, but there had been a moment at which Josephine, Leliana, Cassandra, and himself had come to a silent understanding that Cora Trevelyan would be their Inquisitor. It was after the hymn, when she had taken it upon herself to gather the camp and explain Solas’ conjecture about the mountain fortress. She had hardly been able to speak, between the illness that was settling into her chest and the damage from smoke and exposure in her throat. Still, every soul among them had stood in rapt silence as she croaked out an acknowledgment of their grief and, crucially, a call to action.

The commander had felt a sort of swelling in his chest as he listened to her, and he had known. He had known that it had to be her. When he had glanced at the other council members, at Cassandra, even at Mother Giselle, he found that they were already looking at one another and at him. Yes, their eyes had said. Yes.

Thus, though they have not discussed it at all, he understands the Seeker perfectly.

“Which is why the first step will be making her understand that she does have our confidence,” she says. “All of us.”

It takes several seconds for Cullen’s mind, dulled by equal measures of pain and exhaustion, to work out what Cassandra means. “I believe in her ability to lead this movement just as much as you do,” he says with some defensiveness.

“I know that you do,” replies Cassandra. “But she does not, and many of the Inquisition’s former templars will not. So when you make your apology, find a way to show that you have faith in her. That they will have faith in her. That she is not just an apostate with a magic hole in her hand.”

Cullen sets his jaw. He would like to snip at the Seeker, to tell her that Trevelyan would meet any such sentiment with skepticism, even derision, simply because it would be coming from him. He would like to remind Cassandra that he’s been perfectly amicable thus far, and it’s gotten him only thinly-veiled scorn. But then, he thinks, that is not entirely true. His exchange with the Herald not fifteen minutes ago proves as much.

So he concedes, somewhat grudgingly, that Cassandra is right. He will apologize, and he will try to make Trevelyan understand that he is no less confident in her than Leliana, or Josephine, or the dozens of souls struggling through the snow even after nearly perishing at the hands of what looked very much like an Archdemon. And she will not believe him, of course, because he is – was – Knight-Commander Cullen Rutherford.

“There!” Scout Harding’s voice, though hundreds of feet ahead of him, seems to rattle his very bones. Her words are shot through with something he has not heard in days. “Across that valley! A spire! There it is! There it IS!”

Relief washes over the commander with the force of an ocean wave, and a lump rises in his throat. Thank the Maker.

---

“There – look – is that a crossroads ahead? Surely there will be a sign up there,” Cullen says, grunting as he swats a mosquito away from his face. “Sweet Andraste, is it not too early for these horrid things to be out in such numbers?”

“I imagine they’ve taken advantage of all the rain,” Cora replies. She flicks another bloodsucker off Moira’s nose and gives the horse’s snout a gentle scratch. The poor girl’s hooves are caked in mud from the day’s journey. Nothing a patient stablehand can’t remedy, Cora thinks. Unlike my boots. She looks down and grimaces. Her feet look and feel as though they’ve doubled in size with the sopping soil and gravel they’ve acquired on the road. Her calves have begun to ache from the squelching, sucking resistance of each stride. Perhaps lounging around Skyhold all winter really did make me soft.

“At least something is benefiting from the weather,” the commander replies with a sigh. They had dismounted and begun walking, reins in hand, an hour or so prior. Loath as he sometimes is to admit it, he knows better than to ride for more than a couple hours at a time. The last time he pushed himself, he had hardly been able to walk when he reached his destination.

Still, Cora perceives a slight hitch in his step as he struggles against the weight of his own muddy boots. “Shall we ride again?” she asks as they approach the crossroads.

“Once we know we’re going the right way,” he says. There is a tension in his voice, something buried that has been slowly pushing its way to the surface since they broke camp this morning. Something deeper than the mud, or the insects, or the pain inevitably coursing through his knees and ankles, or possibly being lost. She cannot name it, not yet, but she can feel it like a third, ghostly traveling companion marching alongside them.

When they reach the crossroads, a simple meeting of four paths, Cullen looks around with growing indignation. “Where’s the bloody signpost?” His horse gives a sympathetic, equally-affronted neigh.

“Another victim of the rains,” Cora answers, pointing to a ditch several meters away. Like much of the Fereldan countryside they’ve seen over the past three days, it is flooded with stagnant water, a dingy brown from the sediment washed off the road. A long, thin wooden beam, caked in soil clods at one end and adorned with arrow-shaped markers on the other, floats on the surface.

“Of course,” he mutters. He gives a huff of frustration as he regards the useless post.

“Hand me the map,” she says with more confidence than she feels. Wayfinding is hardly her area of expertise, even after plodding across the breadth of the continent. Directions were always left to scouts, if they were around, or Solas, if they were not. Her stomach twists into a knot at the thought of him. Even after months of turning that last day over in her mind, she does not understand. If he had been angry over the destruction of that stupid orb, if he had raged at her, she might have returned it in kind. But he hadn’t. He had instead been quietly, desperately sad, as though they had not just destroyed a great evil and preserved reality as they knew it. Between his bizarre reaction and her own disorientation at still existing, she had not known what to say. And then he had disappeared, and she had been left wondering whether her memory of their last interaction was a fiction born of shock.

Cora blinks away these thoughts, looks over at Cullen, and holds her free hand out expectantly. The crease between his eyebrows deepens, and he turns back toward the road directly ahead of them. “We don’t need it,” he insists.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re going to get ourselves properly lost if we just choose a path at random,” she says incredulously. “And I should know. I’ve been properly lost in every corner of southern Thedas. I’m an expert.”

“Every corner?” he asks, the frustration leaving his voice. She can even see the barest hint of a smile playing about his lips. “And when, pray tell, did Inquisition business take you this far east?”

“I never said it was strictly Inquisition business. Did you not know that I’ve taken a Fereldan lover?” she asks with a teasing lilt. With as glum as the commander has looked today, she intends to capitalize on this moment. She unfastens her waterskin from where it is hooked onto one of Moira’s saddlebags.

“The scandal!” Cullen exclaims. Though his effort is laudable, his false shock is so poorly acted that Cora bursts into laughter. She allows her chuckling to subside before bringing the skin to her lips and drinking. When she has finished, Cullen holds out a hand and continues: “And what sort of man has the Lady Cordelia Trevelyan taken into her bed? Some minor thane? Son of an arl?”

She hands him the waterskin. “Oh, Maker, no. Far better than that. Son of a farmer,” she says as though such a man would be the greatest of prizes. And he is, she thinks as she fondly watches him tip back the skin and drink deeply. The curl at the center of his forehead has escaped its pomade prison, as it is wont to do, and trembles slightly in the spring breeze. His cheeks have a healthy flush that, apart from moments of abashedness, Cora did not see for the entire first year of their acquaintance. They have filled out, too, in the way that the rest of him has since he began to eat properly. At moments like this, she is still surprised by how deeply she loves him – not because adoring such a one is difficult, but because she spent most of her adult life avoiding romantic attachment as a rule. That had been the right choice – she does not regret it, not for a moment – but she has come to realize that, however, unconsciously, she had not believed herself capable of such depth of feeling.

He lowers his chin and opens his eyes again, pulling the waterskin away from his lips and replacing its stopper. As he hands it back to Cora, she sees that his features have softened. With a sigh, he says, “I am sorry, love. For being such a…a grump this morning.”

“Thank you, but the mosquitoes have borne the brunt of it.”

“Well they certainly aren’t getting an apology,” he says before screwing up his face and, as if on cue, slapping the side of his neck and further reducing the pests’ ranks. Then, turning his attention to her again, he continues, “I just…I feel like I ought to be able to recall a…a landmark, maybe…or…or at the very least, orient us properly.”

“‘At the very least?’ That’s hardly a simple task in the middle of a wood at high noon,” Cora replies, glancing back at the leagues-long thicket of trees from which they just emerged. Nor was it his fault that the saddlebag containing their sole compass (and a considerable amount of biscuits and cheese) had apparently ripped open at some point that morning after likely being gnawed on by some nocturnal creature while they camped. “And how long ago was Mia’s wedding? Seven years? Eight?”

“But to remember nothing? The only time I left Kirkwall, in all my years there, and I haven’t a single recollection of the journey to South Reach?” Cullen shakes his head and drops his gaze.

“You were hardly feeling your best,” she says softly, placing a hand on his arm.

“I…” His tongue darts out of his mouth to wet his bottom lip, and she sees that he has begun to tap the tips of his fingers against his thumb, back and forth, as he often does when he cannot quiet his mind. He makes brief eye contact with her again before looking elsewhere. “I recall so little of that time. The wedding, the weeks before. What if…what if I made a fool of myself when I last saw them? Said something, or, or did something, or…Maker’s breath, Cora, was I some dead-eyed ghost of a person? Or a quick-tempered prick? The half-mad embarrassment of a brother who she’s always regretted having stand beside her in the Chantry that day? I–”

“Cullen,” she says, voice kind but firm. She reaches out and laces her fingers through his, interrupting his fidgeting and drawing his gaze back to her. “I seriously doubt that your sister, however patient and forgiving she may be, would have kept writing to you – and with barely a reply for years – had that been the case.”

He searches her face as though he does not quite believe her in spite of desperately wanting to. She smiles softly back and gives his hand a squeeze. The commander’s lips are just beginning to turn up at the corners when his eyes alight on something in the distance behind her. As she turns to follow his gaze, he says, “Perhaps fortune hasn’t entirely abandoned us today.”

About ten meters away, where one of the roads disappears around a hillock, an old man is leading a dusty grey mule. “Shall we ask for directions?” Cora asks.

Cullen nods. “Maker, yes,” he says with such patent relief that the Inquisitor chuckles.

“Good morning!” the stranger calls out as he draws closer to them. Cora is impressed with his speed; neither his age nor the mud seems to have slowed him much. “Or afternoon, maybe? Hard to say.” He waves a knotted finger toward the sun directly overhead.

“And the same to you, ser,” the commander replies with a nod.

“Oho,” the man chuckles, and turning to look at his beast, says, “ser, he says! And myself in naught but old traveling clothes!”

Cullen’s cheeks turn a bright, rosy hue, and he opens his mouth but cannot seem to land on the proper words.

“Not from these parts, are ye? Or a military man, perhaps?”

“I…well, I…er…both,” Cullen says. He would not, she knows, consider himself one of the latter, but he does understand the classic military concept of picking one’s battles. “We are traveling to visit family, se-...I mean, …” In her periphery, she sees him nervously begin to wind his horse’s reins around his finger. He clears his throat, blinks, and tries again with more confidence: “I wonder if you might help us, friend.”

“Of course!” the man exclaims, coming to a stop a meter away from them. “What can I do for ye?”

“We seem to have gotten a bit…lost,” Cora says, trying to give Cullen a moment to gather himself. It isn’t like him to get flustered from speaking casually to someone – not unless he’s secretly nursing a growing affection for them but trying to remain professional, anyway. He must be even more anxious than she’d thought.

The man looks confused for a moment as he turns and begins to motion to his right, but his expression quickly becomes one of understanding mixed with surprise. “Och, but of course ye are with the signpost bobbing about like a barrel on a pond. Where’re ye headed, then?”

“South Reach,” she says.

“Sure, I’m bound for there as well,” he says. He gestures to the path directly in front of him. “Not quite a league to the north, though myself and Tris wouldn’t say no to company if yer not in a great hurry.”

They aren’t, but she looks to Cullen to decide. He nods, appearing more at ease after having a few moments to catch his breath. “The mud hasn’t permitted us much speed anyway. Lead on,” he says.

The party falls into step together, with Cullen in the center of the road and Cora and the old man on either side of him. Their mounts, reins slackened, follow behind. “You’ll pardon my manners,” the old man says, “not even making a proper introduction. Name’s Mac Cennéide, but then so’s half of the folk in Badanloch. Asgall Mac Cennéide, more precise.”

Cora and Cullen glance surreptitiously at one another, hesitating to reply for the briefest moment. The last time they journeyed out on their own, it had been with utmost secrecy. They’d used false names, and few had known their true identities. Much has changed since then, though, and this sojourn is far less dangerous both for the travelers themselves and for their hosts. In spite of the Inquisitor’s renown elsewhere in Thedas, Mia had said in her last letter to Cullen that almost no one in South Reach would recognize her name. As unlikely as this seems, Cora hopes that it is true. She would so enjoy not being the Inquisitor for a while.

“Rutherford,” Cullen says. “Cullen.” The commander, too, must feel some measure of ease knowing that his own name is unremarkable this far east – at least outside of certain circles. Certain ‘circles’. Cora has to press her lips together to keep from laughing at her own pun. She gets control of herself after a beat and says, “Cora Trevelyan. Pleased to meet you.”

“Your speech sounds westernish, Master Rutherford.” Asgall scratches his bewhiskered chin and regards Cullen.

“Yes, I grew up in Honnleath,” he replies. “In the Arling of Redcliffe.”

“But Trevelyan…” Asgall puzzles over this for a moment. “That I cannot place.”

“Most can’t,” Cora says with a smile. “I come from Ostwick, in the Free Marches.”

“The Free Marches!” he exclaims. “Quite a journey you’ve had, then!”

You’ve got no idea, ser. “Indeed. But I’ve – well, we – have settled near the Frostbacks in recent years.” It seems odd to call the life she’s built at Skyhold settling, really, when so many of the fortress’ residents spend half their time elsewhere, but the description is accurate. Skyhold feels like her home in a way that no place but the Ostwick Circle has, and it feels safe in a way no place ever has.

“I’ve not seen the great mountains myself,” Asgall says in a way that suggests he prefers it that way. “Ye’ve been traveling for some days, then, I take it?” They both nod, and the old man goes on: “And what takes you to South Reach?” Cora smiles to herself at their companion’s candid, easy curiosity. Leliana’s information on the arling must have been quite accurate; such openness with strangers suggests little in the way of Red Templars, Fade Rifts, or even mage-templar skirmishes anywhere nearby.

“Visiting family,” Cullen says.

“They must be Blightfolk then, are they?” their companion asks. Then, in response to puzzled looks from both of them, he continues, “Och, my apologies. Word’s got a crude sound to it, I admit, but nothing untoward’s meant by it. ‘S what we’ve taken to calling folk what settled round these parts after the Blight.”

“I see – then yes, they are,” says the commander. “Are there many such folk in the smaller villages nearby? In – forgive me, where was it you said…?”

“Badanloch, Master Rutherford. Aye, we’ve a few families. Land just west of my own is farmed by a fella and his wife from near Lothering. But most made their way to South Reach Village, like yer kin. Can ye believe the place has twice as many souls as it did in King Maric’s time?”

“Twice as many? I’d no idea so many refugees had settled here rather than returning home after the Blight.” Cullen asks. In spite of the subject matter, Cora smiles to herself. The commander’s expression, tone, and manner have eased into something more normal. The wonders of not being left to run in the circles of one’s own mind.

“Some returned, sure. Them from Redcliffe, or Denerim, or other places with the will to rebuild. Places that could be salvaged. Places where the darkspawn blood didn’t destroy the land.” Asgall sighs. “I take it your own Honnleath weren’t so blessed?”

“No. No, it wasn’t.” Disquiet again flickers across his face before he blinks it away. “But my sister tells me that people in these parts were tolerant of them, even welcoming. A far cry from the experience of many refugees in Ferelden, I’m told.”

“Aye, so ‘twas. I’d like to say ‘twere out of the good of men’s hearts alone, but – though the Maker knows I love ‘em dearly – my folk aren’t any kinder than them elsewhere. No, Arl Bryland is to thank for it, I think.”

“Oh? How so?” Cora asks. She is immediately skeptical; the ruling nobility rarely use their influence or wealth to aid the people who live under their so-called protection. It is the one matter on which she and Josephine have consistently disagreed. She recalls an occasion early on when some lord or other in Orlais begged the Inquisition’s help in expelling squatters – refugees from Gaspard and Celene’s civil war – from his land. At that time, they had had few allies among the Orlesian aristocracy, and Josephine had been ready to come out of her boots with excitement at the prospect of the influence this lord might wield in winning his peers to their cause. Cullen, looking across the Haven War Table at the ambassador with bafflement, had done something exceptionally out of character: he had interrupted her. “I will not have Inquisition troops removing desperate folk from this man’s land – his unused land, might I add – as though dealing with an infestation of nugs.”

Josephine had blinked in surprise at the commander’s interjection. He had not spoken cruelly, hadn’t even been visibly angry; but his tone had made it clear that he would not be debating this particular matter. Cora had, after an awkward beat, added, “I…I quite agree. With the commander, I mean.”

Recalling the interaction now, she feels the mild embarrassment of one remembering a version of themselves for which they have little fondness. She had been so naive, so…so timid back then. True, she had not yet been named Inquisitor and therefore had no more say than the group that would become her advisors. Still, she wonders if more confidence in those early days might have made a difference. Could more lives have been saved, she sometimes wonders, had she been more forceful, more sure of herself, braver? If she had not been so convinced of her own ignorance, and so consumed in her hatred for the templars among them that she rarely deigned to support Cullen even in the moments when he was, unquestionably, advocating for the right course?

The voice of the man himself pulls her back to the present. “I recall hearing a rumor in Ki-...at that time, that the arl had made some kind of deal with…what was it? A merchant prince in Antiva? Having to do with grain? I didn’t put any stock into it – there were a million rumors swirling round back then – but…?”

“Aye! Aye, ‘tis true, fantastic as it might seem now,’” Asgall laughs grandly, opening his mouth to show a fair number of missing teeth. It takes several moments for his chuckles to die down, then he grows more serious. “After the Hero of Ferelden bested the archdemon and the hordes began falling back, we’d hundreds of destitute folk strewn about the arling, and hundreds of our own men and women dead from the darkspawn. That first winter, a great many folk nearly starved. So Arl Bryland made a decree. Plant grain, he said, as much as you can, on your own land and any fallow commons or arling land as well. Hire the refugees to work it in exchange for shelter and food. There would be no taxes that year, and none the next for anyone who employed at least five of the Blightfolk. Instead, the grain generally paid in tax to the arl would be bought by the arl, as would any surplus that folk were willing to part with.”

“But how could the arling afford it?” Cora asks, astounded.

“That’s where the deal with them Antivans comes in. Himself borrowed a massive sum from abroad to pay for the grain that autumn, and pay he did. I’ve never seen anything like the harvest that year. Enough for folk to fill their own stores, and the arling to fill its stores as insurance against a poor crop the next year, and the rest sold to Amaranthine and Denerim to pay back the Antivans. It took some five or six more years to pay ‘em in full, ‘course, but even the leaner seasons turned out more grain than we’d had in my lifetime, with the Blightfolk working our farms and eventually buying their own.”

“Nothing like prosperity to ensure everyone gets along,” Cullen says.

“Aye, so,” agrees the old man with a nod. “I gather you’ve been away from Ferelden for a time, then, Master Rutherford? With the Blight over these ten years now?” And your clearly having gotten lost trying to find your way to South Reach? the old man, with his impeccable manners, does not say.

“I have, yes. My…duties took me abroad for a long while, but I returned several years ago to join the Inquisition.”

With Asgall’s head turned toward Cullen, Cora shoots her partner a surprised, almost playful look. How, she wonders, does he plan to play this?

“Inquisition!” the old man exclaims. “The people what helped the Chantry close the great hole in the sky?” Cullen blinks at this, dumbfounded, but their companion saves him from having to stumble through a series of confused questions. “Could barely see the thing from here, ye know – looked like a nasty storm cloud on the horizon – but our Sister Fionnuala told the tale. The same dark magic magic that killed the Divine, Maker light her way, tore open the sky itself. But sure, ye’d know that better than I. Did ye see it yerselves, up close?” He looks between the two of them with a mixture of excitement and dread at the prospect.

“We…did, yes,” Cora says, fighting to keep her expression neutral while processing all she’s just learned. “It was…it was terrifying.”

“By the Maker, I can’t fathom such a thing,” Asgall replies. “But sure we live in extravagant times.” Blessedly, he goes on at length about his brother who lives nearer to the Ferelden Hinterlands and who, on his last visit, regaled Asgall and his wife Imogen with rumors of what was clearly a Fade Rift on a neighbor’s farm, as well as an account of a cousin’s sister’s friend’s mother finding the charred body of a templar hanging from a tree. It becomes clear early on that none of the phenomena Asgall describes are things that he himself or even his direct contacts have seen; it is third-, fourth-, or fifth-hand information, hearsay, and Cora is certain that at least half of it is untrue. The other half is at least probable. None of it, however, is quite accurate. 'The people what helped the Chantry close the great hole in the sky.' Andraste’s silky fucking drawers.

As the old man talks, Cora and Cullen have a silent conversation consisting only of covert glances at one another. How much, she wonders, can one extrapolate an entire region’s knowledge of the past two years’ events based on one man’s retelling? Mia had assured her brother that few would recognize the name Cordelia Trevelyan, but Cora realizes now that she had assumed that the people of South Reach would at least know, on a very basic level, what the Inquisition is and what it has done. Many dozens of her people died in the felling of Corypheus; hundreds more continue to risk their lives in peacekeeping efforts across Orlais and Ferelden. Does half of Thedas truly believe them to be mere…mere Chantry pawns?

When Cora’s attention returns to the conversation, she finds that Cullen has gotten Asgall talking about what sort of game is most plentiful in the arling. As their companion begins recounting how he felled a particularly massive stag some years prior, Cullen looks at Cora. She can read the question there, in the line between his eyebrows and the tilt of his chin. Are you alright? his expression asks. Though she gives him a reassuring smile, she does not try to hide the anger coursing through her veins. She knows that he feels it, too, from the way he had set his jaw during Asgall’s talk of the Breach.

No one will thank you, either, Dorian had said to her in a conversation that feels like another lifetime. She didn’t need their thanks, she had replied, and that was true in a literal sense. It still is. She, Cora, finds hearing praise to be awkward at best, discomfiting at worst. It hardly seems appropriate for Madame de Blah-Blah of Some August Orlesian Estate to laud her when she is alive and well. Hundreds of others – Inquisition members and otherwise – died at the hands of Corypheus and his allies, to say nothing of the casualties of the mage-templar conflict.

But that is exactly the point. She does not want thanks, but her people? They deserve every bit of it. The general public does not need to know just how close the world came to oblivion, but they should be made to understand that they owe the Inquisition’s people a great deal. Simple ignorance is one thing, of course; news travels slowly to the far reaches of the continent even in times of peace. Intentional obfuscation of the truth, though? And by the clergy?

Cora forces herself to take a very deep, very long breath. She can be angry later. She mentally tucks the problem away into a chest. Said chest grows larger each time she opens it, it seems, but that’s the benefit of it not actually existing.

This week is for Cullen. This week, she is a normal person. This week, the chest is locked.

Chapter Text

“The buildings across from the old windmill, she said,” Cullen says, looking from the landmark in question to a small but sturdy stone and wood home. It is one of a clutch of structures that, though unconnected, are grouped together more closely than the others they’ve passed as they’ve gotten nearer to town. They had bid farewell to Asgall some thirty minutes prior when he’d opted to take a detour to stop by the home of an old friend.

A few hundred meters down the road in front of them is a tall timber gate, propped open by large wooden spikes driven into the soil, to the village proper. They do not close the gates at night, then, Cora reckons: another sign of the relative peace here of the past few years, at least compared to elsewhere in southern Thedas. Corypheus had not been able to push this far into Ferelden, and the distance from Kinloch means that mage-templar skirmishes have likely been few.

They pause there, right in the middle of the road, and Cullen looks at her with nervous excitement. He reaches a hand toward her, and she takes it, giving him a reassuring smile. A moment later, just as they veer toward the house, a massive Mabari hound, tongue wagging, races out from behind it. Two children are in swift pursuit until the dog stops suddenly, sits to work at an itch behind its ear, and then flops onto its back in the grass. “No, Daisy!” shouts one of the children in frustration. She has a wicker shield strapped to one arm and a wooden sword in her hand. “Dragons don’t roll over!”

The other child, nearly identical in both equipment and appearance, groans mightily and stabs her sword into the ground. She plops down beside the dog, and her weapon follows suit, its tip now caked in mud. “This isn’t working,” she huffs. Clearly, it is not the first time their dragon has been uncooperative today.

The girl that’s still standing suddenly notices the strangers several yards away and, lowering both sword and shield, surveys them with cautious interest. When she notices her sister’s newfound focus, the other girl sits upright and does the same. Cora gives them a warm smile before looking at Cullen, who seems frozen in place.

“Girls!” The door to the house swings open, and the top half of a woman appears from behind it. “Come get something to eat – it’ll be a while yet before supper.” The woman is only half paying attention to the children in the yard, as she is set on untangling what looks like a mass of knotted yarn. The girls, however, don’t respond. They are still sizing up their visitors. After a beat, the woman in the doorway looks up to find the cause of the silence. When her eyes land on Cullen, they grow impossibly wide, and she gasps.

“Maker’s breath,” she barely says, breathless as she is. In one swift movement, she tosses the skein somewhere behind her and launches herself from the doorway. She closes the distance to Cullen in an instant, flies into his arms, and is lifted off the ground in a massive hug. The woman is both laughing and crying, as is Cullen, and their joy and relief are so palpable that Cora, reaching up to swipe a tear from her eye, realizes she is doing the same.

It surprises her, this strength of feeling. She cannot say whether her emotions are more from pleasure at her lover’s happiness or from recalling the moment, not quite a year past, when she too had a homecoming of sorts. She suddenly misses Luci, Kael, and the children so intensely that it nearly knocks the wind out of her. This isn’t about you, Cordelia, she reminds herself. It’s about him.

And yet, the Inquisitor sees, both can be true. For the thousand differences between Cullen and herself, they are remarkably similar in this. The homes in which they grew up are no longer there, at least not in any real sense, and their respective families (for that is how Cora has always thought of Luci and Kael) have fled elsewhere. Neither of them can “go home,” not truly, and for all the affection their siblings and friends might lavish upon them, however sincere their welcomes, they can only ever be strangers to the places where their loved ones belong. And while this understanding is melancholy in its way, it does not cause Cora grief. Her home – their home – is not theirs, really, and yet it is; Skyhold is more than just a refuge, or a base of operations. It is where they found each other, where they continue to find each other.

“You really came!” Mia says from where her head is squeezed onto her brother’s shoulder. “You really came.” Hearing the near-wonder in Mia’s voice, Cora begins to understand Cullen’s trepidation about this visit in a way she hadn’t before. Of course he would be nervous, she thinks, and not just because of all that he has done, noble and otherwise, since he last saw his siblings. Mia has spent years fearing that she would never see her brother again, perhaps that he might eventually disappear altogether. As much as Cullen was ashamed of being such a disappointment to her in this regard, he grew used to it. Disappointing a person with one’s absence is much more palatable than disappointing a person with one’s presence.

If anything could assuage his fears, however, it is the warmth of this welcome. Mia holds onto her little brother for an age. She comes back to herself only when one of the girls begins to tug at her skirt. “Muuuum,” the little one pleads, eyes bright with the excitement of the moment. Mia takes a handkerchief from her pocket and wipes at her eyes and nose with one hand while the other comes to rest on the girl’s head. As she puts the handkerchief away, her eyes alight upon Cora. She gasps again, this time with playful horror, and immediately steps toward the Inquisitor. “Maker, you must think me an awful host!” Mia exclaims as she pulls Cora into a hug nearly as enthusiastic as the one she gave her brother. Cora’s surprise is such that it takes her a moment to return the embrace; as she brings her arms up, she sees Cullen snickering at, presumably, the look of shock on her face.

After a moment, Mia pulls back, places her hands on Cora’s shoulders, and beams at her guest. “You crossed half the continent to get here just to be ignored while I bawl over my wayward brother. For shame.” Cora laughs to keep from fixating on Mia’s face. Her hair, a mass of chestnut curls piled atop her head and tied with a scarf, is far darker than Cullen’s, and there’s only a slight resemblance in most of their features. Her eyes, though, are uncanny. Cora has spent hours staring into those same hazel eyes over the past two years. “This sounds ridiculous, but I feel like I already know you,” Mia says with a laugh. “Not that he tells me nearly enough in his letters, but nonetheless! Oh, it is wonderful to have you here.”

“Muuuuuuum,” comes a voice, louder and more impatient this time, from behind Mia. The girl pops her head around her mother’s skirt and surveys Cora, then Cullen. The Inquisitor knows that tone, that look: a child aching to be included in whatever has the adults acting so strangely. The girl’s twin has opted to hang back, one arm slung over the now-standing Mabari, and observe the scene with curious caution.

“Yes, yes, Alice, I hear you,” Mia says, weaving a hand around the child’s shoulders and pulling her forward to face Cullen. “This is your–”

“Uncle Cullen!” Alice finishes triumphantly. She looks up at the no-longer-strange-man and asks, “Did you get our pictures? That we drew for you?”

“All business, this one,” says Mia with an amused shake of her head. Then, to Alice: “Introduce yourself properly.”

“MynameisAlicepleasedtomeetyou,” the girl says. The words run together in the way of a ritual that has been rehearsed but carries little meaning to the speaker. Cora has to suppress a smile. “Did you get our pictures?”

“And you as well,” Cullen replies, smiling broadly down at his niece. “I certainly did get your pictures. They were beautiful.” As he says this, he looks over at the other little girl as well so as not to exclude her from the compliment.

Mia turns and follows his gaze. “Obri?”

The girl, with a shy smile and a flush of the cheeks, says, “‘m Obrianna. Pleased to meet you.”

“The pleasure is mine,” her uncle replies. He leans forward in a slight bow. This play at formality has its intended effect: the girls both begin giggling.

“And this…” Mia says, raising her eyebrows at Cora in an invitation.

“Cora,” she says. Just Cora. It occurs to her that she’s never introduced herself to a child outside of the confines of a Circle tower. There had been no introductions with Maren; the toddler had been thrust upon them, half-asleep, before a ten-mile trek through the countryside under cover of night. All of the other children in her life have known her either as Miss Cora or Enchanter Cora.

“Miss Cora,” Mia explains to the girls as though she’s read the Inquisitor's mind, “is your uncle’s special friend.”

“Like Miss Orla and Aunt Rosie?” asks Alice. She has been looking at Cora as though assessing her for some specific quality.

“Exactly,” Mia says, absentmindedly brushing out a tangle in her daughter’s hair. She takes a deep breath and then exhales mightily, still grinning at her guests. “Now then, I’m sure you’re both proper exhausted from the road. Shall we pop inside for tea?” The question, Cora realizes, is rhetorical, for Mia looks around at the scene and continues, “You can hitch the horses to the fence here for the moment, and Jor will settle them in the barn when he comes in for a rest. Your poor boots can stay outside as well – I’ll see to those later on – no, no, it’s not a bit of trouble – girls, yours as well, I’ll not have a speck of dirt on that floor, not after scrubbing up yesterday’s mess. And Daisy’s right filthy–”

“No he isn’t!” says Obrianna, offended on the dog’s behalf. “The ground here isn’t even muddy!”

“Do you think I can’t tell there’s dirt up to his haunches just because his coat’s the same color?” Mia asks. “He’s not to come in the house until you’ve given him a wash.”

“The, er...the war hound. His name is…Daisy?” Cullen asks, the scar at his lip quirking upward as he smirks. The girls have run toward the front door of the house, the excitement of having visitors temporarily forgotten with the promise of food. Each using either side of the door jamb for support, they begin to take off their boots at the threshold.

“They chose the name before their father had a chance to break the news that it was a boy, and then they were worried that it would be confused if they called it something else,” Mia explains with dry amusement. “They had only been calling him ‘Daisy’ for two minutes, mind you.” When they reach the doorway, she stops to help Alice with a buckle. Then, the girl is off again, darting inside after her twin.

As Cora and Cullen stop to remove their own boots – which they have no intention of letting their host “see to later on,” of course – they exchange covert smiles. Cullen’s brow is unfurrowed now, and his lips look less drawn. It makes Cora’s heart sing to see him like this, relieved of his worry after a simple, genuine welcome.

Shoes abandoned, they step across the threshold and into the main living space of Mia’s small but cozy home. The house is what Cora would call ordered chaos, which hews so closely to her own preferences that she feels immediately at ease. An armchair holds a towering pile of clothes, but they are neatly folded. High shelves lining one wall of the kitchen are overstuffed with all manner of copper, tin, and porcelain, but the vessels are stacked methodically.

Cora grins as she watches Cullen duck to avoid the bunches of drying plants hanging from a ceiling crossbeam. Her poor, tidy, meticulous beloved, apparently doomed to be surrounded by women who find comfort in clutter.

Mia gestures toward a dark wood table. Like most of the room’s furnishings, it has the appearance of having passed through the hands of half a dozen other families before it arrived here. The twins are eyeing a plate of scones laid on it while grudgingly marching toward the washbasin to scrub their hands. Their mother, who is filling a kettle at the water pump over the basin, casts a glance at the girls to ensure satisfactory washing before turning to look at her guests. She implores them to sit down, laughing as she brushes off their offers to help.

“Maker, no, no, just sit and rest a while, won’t you?” They do, letting the minor chaos of teatime unfold around them. Obrianna, hands still dripping with water, runs back into a short hallway with the proclamation that she wants to show Uncle Cullen her magic rock, and Alice, in lieu of sitting, is hanging off the back of the chair next to her uncle and peppering him with questions. Mia is bustling about for cups and saucers and sugar, and Daisy is barking at a rabbit just outside the door. While Cullen’s nieces have him occupied (“See how there’s a hole right in the middle of the rock? If you look through it you can see fairies, except I haven’t seen any yet, but my da says it’s too early in the year for fairies–”) and Mia has her hands full of dinnerware, the kettle begins to whistle. Cora jumps up and takes it from the fire. When she turns back around, Mia is looking at her with a smile that contains both thanks and, Cora thinks, the satisfaction of having made a decision about something.

“You’re a dear,” Mia says as she walks to the table. Cullen, still managing to keep half his attention on the twins’ story about how their neighbor says he saw a whole family of fairies by the pond, begins taking the cups and saucers from his sister’s arms and setting them out.

Just as Mia has coaxed the girls into chairs, the hound’s barking is punctuated by another sound. “Leave it, Daisy!” a voice calls from somewhere outside. When Cora hears it again, several seconds later, the voice is just outside the door. “There’s a good boy.”

“Da!” Alice exclaims, momentarily torn between running toward the door and remaining next to Cullen, her new favorite person. She compromises by calling out, “Da, they’re here!” from the table.

“Alice, Maker’s breath, where are your manners? Shouting in your uncle’s ear not five minutes after he’s walked into the house,” Mia says, shaking her head.

“Sorry,” Alice says to Cullen. Her cheeks redden for a moment before the excitement of everything consumes her once again. The door swings open, and an olive-skinned man in a rough plaidweave shirt and hide trousers begins to step over the threshold.

“BOOTS!” Alice pipes up again, and the man stops mid-stride. The girl looks from her father’s muddy shoes over to her mother with a triumphant grin.

“Well done, you,” Mia says, smiling at her girl, as her husband reaches down to shed his footwear.

“Well done, indeed, love,” the man laughs. As he stands outside the door and pulls off his boots, his gaze alights on the strangers sitting on his table. “And welcome to you! Just a moment here and I’ll say a proper hello.” He speaks with a slight brogue, in the way of Asgall and other eastern Fereldans, but it is less pronounced. As many folk as Cora’s heard speak from this country over the past three years, she’s still not terribly adept at identifying their accents.

Cullen, looking a bit unsure what to do, stands and holds out his hand to this new arrival. “Cullen!” the man exclaims and, either not noticing the proffered hand or not caring, throws his arms around the commander. Cullen, though clearly bewildered by this, looks nonetheless moved. “Wonderful to see you, mate.”

“Y…yes,” Cullen replies. “You as well, Jor.”

“That’s our da,” Obrianna, who is sitting beside Cora and munching contentedly at her scone, explains with no small measure of pride.

“Da, this is Miss Cora,” Alice says as she pulls at a handkerchief tucked into her father’s pocket.

“She’s Uncle Cullen’s special friend,” says Obrianna.

“Like Miss Orla–”

“–and Aunt Rosie!”

Jor chuckles as he turns to the now-standing Cora. “Jorrick Devaney,” he says, greeting her as he did with Cullen. Cora adds hugs from two people I’ve just met to the mental list of new experiences she’s had today. “But just ‘Jor,’ really. We’re so pleased you’re here.”

“That we are,” Mia agrees. She has begun to pour tea for everyone, but her husband deftly extricates the kettle from her hands as he leans down for a kiss. A full conversation seems to pass between their gazes in the span of a second. At the end of it, Mia sits down heavily into her own chair, gives a contented sigh, and takes up a scone. “How was your journey, then?” she asks her guests. “Apart from being very wet, I expect.”

“Apart from being very wet, it was fine,” Cullen replies with a grin. “We met an old fellow this morning from – ah, what was it? – Badanloch, I think. Coming in for the market tomorrow.”

“Good country out that way,” Jor says as he leans over Obrianna to fill her cup. “Muddier ‘an a hog sty now, though, I reckon.”

“We’ll not get the fields planted for weeks if it keeps up like it has,” Mia says with a shake of her head.

“Aye, but at least the winter wheat weren’t washed out.”

“I didn’t realize the winters this far south were mild enough for that,” Cullen asks.

Perhaps it is the tea or the butter-lathered currant scone melting on her tongue, but as she sits and takes in the conversation, Cora feels a deep, comforting warmth spread throughout her entire body. Cullen looks entirely at ease for the first time since they broke camp this morning. He is chatting with his sister and brother-in-law as though they’re simply picking up a conversation from a month ago. He talks of farming with the familiarity of a person who’s spent his entire life, not just the beginning of it, on rural Fereldan soil.

And he is not alone in having his nerves put to rest. Cora had not realized, until this moment, just how uneasy she had felt about going to South Reach. Her fears seem absurd now, as she considers how she and Cullen effortlessly became part of the wild rhythm of the house within moments of entering it. It’s an odd feeling for one used to first convincing her acquaintances that she is not a threat. She cannot recall ever having been immediately folded into a place in this way.

When Cullen glances at Cora and gives her a small, easy smile, she realizes that he is mirroring the expression on her own face. She pops another piece of scone into her mouth (Andraste’s fucking tits, this is delicious) and allows herself to relish the goodness of the moment.

The peace is short-lived. Once the twins have finished their scones, they resume their questions, commentary, and story-telling with a renewed fervor.

Mia looks at Cora and gives her a covert roll of the eyes. So much for civil conversation, her look says. The Inquisitor tries not to chuckle; Obrianna has started in on the grave and harrowing tale of how she skinned her knee last week, and laughter would be terribly inappropriate.

Things go on like this until a Chantry bell tolls somewhere in the distance, at which point Jor takes a deep breath and stands. “That’s me off to meet Diarmaid about the colt, then,” he says. To his wife, he adds, “Shall I get anything for supper while I’m down that way?”

Mia, draining the last of her tea, considers this for a moment before pronouncing, “No, we’re grand for this evening. But you might go round to Angus’ and tell Rosie our guests are here.”

“Done.” He waves a hand apologetically at those guests and says, “Sorry to be out so quick, but the work never stops, don’t you know!”

“Speaking of supper,” Mia says as her husband is shutting the front door behind himself, “I hope you’ll not feel slighted if we keep things simple tonight. The whole lot’ll be over to see you tomorrow evening, and Jor and I aren’t the only ones who’ve multiplied since your last visit. I don’t think I’ve two grand dinners’ worth of cooking in me.”

“Maker’s breath, Mia, of course not,” Cullen replies. “We’re used to making do with bread and cheese.”

“Uncle Cullen, come play the dragon game with us!” Alice entreats, practically vibrating with excitement at the prospect.

“Mum says you're a proper knight!” Obrianna nearly jumps out of her seat as she says this.

“Your uncle and Miss Cora are probably ground to bits from their journey, girls, so there’ll be none of that today,” Mia says in a tone that manages to sound fair while also leaving no room whatsoever for argument. Cora, who never quite mastered that balance with her pupils, is impressed. “Now, you’ve two choices: stay in and be put to work with shelling beans for supper tomorrow, or go outdoors and run about for a while.”

Alice and Obrianna consider this for a moment, then look at one another to ensure they’re in agreement. Thinking over the choice put before them seems to have made them forget entirely that they wanted to play with their uncle. Cora turns her head away to hide a smile; this is a tactic in which she has considerable expertise. “Out,” the twins say in near-unison, and then they are shooting off toward the front door.

Once they’ve closed it behind them, Mia looks at her guests. “They hate doing the shelling,” she says with a smirk that looks exactly like Cullen’s but for the absence of a scar. “And maybe they’ll be less likely to row with us about going to bed at a reasonable hour if they’ve burned off a bit of energy.”

Mia tops off her guests’ cups of tea and places another scone onto each of their plates. She then takes one for herself, dunks the corner into her own steaming mug, and regards Cullen and Cora. “So, then,” she says, eyes bright with anticipation. “Tell me everything.”

And they do – or as near to it as they can, anyway. They need not exercise the same caution as when they visited Luciana and Kael, what with Corypheus gone and his few remaining people scattered, but the Inquisitor and her council are still the keepers of a great many powerful secrets. Much of the information they have come to take for granted would be dangerous outside Skyhold’s walls, as Leliana has often reminded them.

“Andraste’s burning pyre.” Nearly an hour later, Mia lets out a great breath, blinking and shaking her head. “I’m not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t a...a thousand-year-old Tevinter magister looking to set himself up as a god.” The three sit in silence for some moments as she processes everything she’s just heard. Eventually, she gives a dry laugh. “It seems so strange, that life in these parts has been, well…normal, more or less. Apart from folk being unsettled about the Circles, I mean, but…you could hardly see it, you know? The…the hole in the sky. Could’ve been a distant storm, apart from how it stayed put. Of course I knew you were in danger–” she looks at her brother, and Cora can see her gulp down a lump in her throat – “but...Cull, I…I’d no idea.” She reaches a hand across the table and puts it on Cullen’s.

“Thank the Maker,” he says as he turns his palm to hers and gives it a squeeze. After a beat, a smirk begins to creep onto his face. “You already spent more than enough ink demanding that I stay safe.”

Mia yanks her hand back and folds her arms as though affronted, but her expression betrays her. “What did you expect? It was months before I knew you already had someone to worry over you!” Cullen’s cheeks redden at this, which sets his sister to laughing. “I love that you never grew out of that. Still blushing like a boy.” They go on trading friendly jabs until Cora, casting a glance out the window and seeing the toy swords and shields abandoned earlier, considers that she hasn’t seen or heard the girls in the hour or so since they left.

“Is there…someone watching your girls?” she asks, unable to keep the concern from her voice.

“Daisy,” Mia says with complete confidence. “And most folk are out in the fields, what with the rain having let up. But if they should wander farther than they ought, a Mabari is more than enough deterrent for any brigand or wolf.”

“But–” Cora begins, then stops short. TemplarsWhat the children are. Or aren’t, more aptly. It surprises her, considering how much has happened since, how heavily her time in hiding after Ostwick still hangs on her. Palum left the mages’ sight only to use the privy.

“You know,” Mia says pensively, “when they first learned to walk, I was a proper mess. I’d not let them out of arm’s reach, and I’d snap at Jor if he looked away for half a second when he was minding them. He finally sat me down and said that we couldn’t raise them with the Blight in our minds. That they were fortunate enough to come into the world after it ended, and we couldn’t teach them – consciously or no – to fear darkspawn around every corner. I was fucking livid with him at first, but of course he was right. I have to remind myself of that every day.” She inhales deeply and, before either of her guests can reply, breathes out and drains the rest of her mug. When she sets it down again, she says, “Shall I start rustling up a wee dinner, then?”

---

After a brief argument (“Oh, yes, ‘welcome to our home, now here’s a basket of potatoes that need peeling.’ No, absolutely not, you must be mad.”), Mia relents to Cora’s and Cullen’s insistence that they be put to work on the stew she has planned for that night.

“For dinner tomorrow, you, er, you’re expecting a crowd?” Cullen asks as he rolls up the sleeves of his green cotton shirt. The Inquisitor can hear the barest hint of worry in his voice.

“The whole lot, of course – they’re all terribly excited to see you, Cull. Rose and her…well…I want to say ‘her intended’, but she’s not gotten up the courage to propose yet and says she wants to finish her apprenticeship first besides.” Mia shakes her head as she heaves a massive copper pot down from the shelf. “But they’re mad about each other, have been for years, so it’s just a matter of time. Still, she’s like to kill me if I ask about a wedding one more time, so I’ll just say ‘her sweetheart’, Orla. And then Bran and his wife and children.”

There’s a beat of silence as Cullen and Cora wait for Mia to say more, but she doesn’t. Perhaps, Cora thinks, there’s nothing more to be said. Mia might have given their names to her brother in her final letter, and Cullen simply forgot to relay that information to Cora. He had been wrapped up in worry over the way his older sister had mentioned Bran’s role in the upcoming festival, after all.

“And…” Cullen says when it becomes clear that Mia doesn’t intend to go on. Having washed and dried their hands, he and Cora start in on the basket of potatoes with their paring knives. His cheeks look like they’ve been chapped by a winter gale. “...I…I realize that I should know, of course, and you…you certainly mentioned it in a letter at some point, I’m sure, but I…cannot recall the, er…the names. Of Branson’s family.”

“Oh, of course – sorry, Cee – I…I might never have told you,” Mia says as she dices leeks. Having just met the woman, Cora cannot say for certain that Mia sounds slightly uncomfortable, but it seems that way. When she speaks again, the undercurrent has disappeared, and her tone is brighter. “So there’s Sophie, that’s Bran’s wife. She’s the only one of us originally from South Reach – apart from all the children, of course. And they’ve got two of those: Eimear, his daughter, is just over a year younger than my girls, and his boy, Tadhg, is…let’s see…Maker’s breath, he’d be two and a half already. Sophie’s brother and his wife run the inn across the yard there, but she and Bran live near the north gate into the city. Wee trek this time of year, with folk coming in from all ‘round to get what’s needful for planting and that.”

The three settle into their tasks. By the time the guests have finished peeling and dicing the potatoes, the familiarity among them has broken Mia of the compulsion to argue against their help. They talk about all manner of things: the character of South Reach as a place, the family’s farmland and livestock, how Rosalie came to decide she wanted to be a smith, rumors of the fighting between mages and templars (few in these parts), whisperings about the Inquisition’s army (none in these parts, as yet), and the occasional band of darkspawn from the south (more than one would like, but fewer each year).

Apart from the occasional vague mention of the time prior to the family’s arrival in South Reach and the earlier anecdote about watching her children, Mia does not speak of the Blight. Cora, who has suffered more than her share of uncomfortable questions about things she would rather forget, knows better than to ask. Likewise, there are times when it would be natural for Mia to bring up her brother’s and Cora’s experiences in their respective Circles, but she skirts around it.

When Jor returns, it is with a plump, squawking chicken dangling from each hand and reassurances for his wife that, with winter well and truly over, they can spare them for dinner tomorrow. Cora’s cheeks grow warm, and she casts a surreptitious glance at Cullen. They’ve brought gifts, but nothing practical. It hardly feels right to give this family two more mouths to feed for a week. How had she not thought of the burden of their visit beforehand? How had Cullen not thought of it? He gives her a look of reassurance, and she sighs and decides to trust him. Mostly. Perhaps she’ll eat a bit less than normal, or–

“CULLEN!” a voice shrieks, its owner throwing open the front door of the cottage. The new arrival flies across the small room with such speed that Cora does not get a good look at her until she has thrown herself nearly on top of Cullen. Mia in miniature, she thinks when the woman is still enough for her to see.

“Rosie,” Cullen manages in spite of his laughter and the skinny arms squeezing his neck. He returns the embrace, which keeps her suspended at least a foot off the ground. Once she lets go and drops to the floor again, she wheels round to face Cora. Beaming, the woman tosses her arms around the Inquisitor with hardly a moment’s breath.

“And Cora!” Rosalie pronounces as she pulls away from the hug. “Do you prefer ‘Cora'? Mia made it sound like you did. I’m Rose, or Rosie, or Rosalie if we’re standing on ceremony, but, oh! I can’t believe you’re both here!” She clasps her hands together. Cora wonders if she’s ever seen so much energy bundled into such a diminutive frame. Sera can get awfully excited in a fight, but she still doesn’t match Rosalie for sheer animation.

“Angus let you off early, then?” Mia asks her little sister.

“It’s not as though I would’ve gotten a thing done for the rest of the afternoon once Jor popped in and told me Cullen was here,” Rosie says. “The girls are up to their knees in the pond trying to catch tadpoles, by the way.”

“Maker’s breath,” Mia sighs. “Did you not tell them to get out?”

“Couldn’t stop to chide, had very important business to attend to,” Rosie replies, lacing her arm through Cullen’s and grinning up at him.

Jor is already moving toward the door. “I’ll get them,” he says.

“ROSALIE!” Mia suddenly exclaims, her eyes wide and ratcheted onto the floor. Two muddy footprints (she really did fly across the room, Cora thinks) decorate the stone between the door and where the younger woman is standing.

“Oh,” Rosie says. Her smile lapses for only a moment before she bends down to take off the offending footwear. “It’s fine, Em. I’ll clean it! Calm down.” She is as good as her word, gathering a rag from one of the cupboards with the ease of a person in her own home. And it was hers, Cullen had explained many months ago, until she’d begun her apprenticeship and moved into the flat above the smithy. All of the Rutherford siblings in South Reach had lived here at one point, with Mia at the head, after they’d settled in the area.

“I’m going to kill someone by the end of the night,” Mia says drily. “I just know it. And the Guard won’t blink an eye. ‘Her family were mad,’ they’ll say. ‘The whole lot of them, just muddy boots and shouting indoors and terrorizing the guests. Remarkable she only murdered the one.’” She pops a slice of dried pear into her mouth and shakes her head.

“He’s not a guest, he’s your brother,” Rosie retorts from the floor.

“And I hope he properly warned you about what you were walking into,” Mia says to Cora with that wicked Rutherford smirk.

---

The late afternoon and evening pass in the same wild manner, especially once Jor has fished the twins from their tadpole-catching and given them a good scrubbing (at the outdoor pump, Mia had entreated). Once they realize that Rosalie is there, they begin demanding that she toss them into the air. Cora watches this with skepticism – the top of Rosalie’s head barely reaches Cora’s nose, and no one has ever called the Inquisitor a tall woman – and then amazement as the girls fly to a surprising height. Working a forge all day, it seems, more than makes up for Rosie’s small frame.

After the evening meal, the adults remain at the table, sipping green tea and talking. Dinner had been a not-unpleasant cacophony of conversation dominated by Alice and Obrianna recounting their earlier adventures at the pond, which included a long description of a possible fairy sighting (“I never knew fairies bore such a resemblance to dragonflies,” Rosie had snickered under her breath.). With the girls now elsewhere, engrossed in weaving matching fen-flower crowns for themselves and Daisy, talk has drifted toward the story of the Rutherford siblings settling in South Reach. Mia is the primary historian, but Rosalie and Jor occasionally interject their own memories or voice disagreement with some part of the account. How lovely, Cora thinks, to have one’s family know the important details of one’s life. To not be burdened with remembering every part of your story, because your sister, or brother, or spouse, or parent can fill in the gaps. She finds herself unexpectedly moved by the communal weaving of the tale, the finishing of one another’s sentences, the collective bearing of hardship, loss, and joy.

Mia, Branson, and Rosalie met Jor and his older brother, who had fled a small village near Ostagar, on the road. Hearing rumors that there was work for refugees in South Reach and having no better options, they had come to the village. Those rumors, for the first time since the Blight had begun, had proven true. The lot of them had been hired on at a farm just south of where they are now – Mia, Jor, and Bran in the fields, and Rosalie to look after the farmer’s children so he and his wife would be free to work the land – and had stayed until darkspawn incursions on the village outskirts had ceased. Jor had saved pay from doing odd jobs and bought part of the farm from his former employers who, with some refugees beginning to return to their homes elsewhere in Ferelden, no longer had enough hands to plant the land. Mia had finally agreed to marry him after a year of his asking (“As if I was going to be a newlywed still sleeping in a shared hayloft,” she says), and they’d built the house. Bran, meanwhile, had fallen in love with a girl he’d met at the market one day and had eventually managed to get hired on at her father’s farm. They married not quite a year after Mia and Jor, and they jointly worked the land with Sophie’s family on the other side of the village.

“You…said you came to South Reach with your brother?” Cora asks, looking at Jor. His jovial expression falters somewhat.

“Yes, he…well, we’d been set upon by darkspawn just after we left home. Ben weren't half bad with a sword, so he decided we’d make a stand. Managed to kill two of the bastards between us, but Ben’d taken a blow to the arm, and the blood got into his wound, so…” Jor sighs. “The Chantry sisters cared for him for those last months.”

“I’m so sorry,” Cora says. Part of her wishes that she had not asked. Another part – the little girl whose own father had succumbed to an old Blight wound – recognizes in Jor’s expression the familiar combination of grief and a kind of melancholic happiness at the opportunity to remember and speak of his brother.

“I thank you,” Jor replies. “Sure, we’ve all suffered loss. We’ve come out on the other side, though, and we’ve much to be grateful for.”

“Not sure how you got stuck with this one, Jor,” Rosalie says, nodding across the table to her older sister and grinning. “Optimist that you are.”

“I’ll have you know that I can be highly optimistic when I set my mind to it,” Mia retorts.

“What’s that, once a year or so?” Rosie cackles.

“She keeps me grounded,” Jor replies. Though he’s speaking to Rosie, he’s looking fondly at his wife.

Mia, cheeks pink, rolls her eyes before turning to Cora and Cullen. “Well, we’ve not given you a moment to breathe since you’ve arrived, and that’s after a week of travelling. I’m sure you’re knackered.”

Laughter at Rosie’s teasing still dancing on his lips, Cullen looks at Cora and then back at his elder sister and says, “We would not turn down a night’s rest, no.”

Mia momentarily presses her lips together and her brow furrows slightly. “If we’d the space, you know, we would have you stay here in an instant, would put you up in the girls’ room and–” She casts a worried glance around the cramped main room of her home.

“Em,” her brother says, “please don’t fret. We’ll be perfectly happy at the inn.”

She sighs. “I know you will – Gilno and Martie do a lovely job – but I–”

“I’ll show you there on my way home, shall I?” Rosie interrupts her sister’s worrying and beams at the guests.

Ten minutes later, Rosalie has led them a mere fifty yards up the road to a two-storey stone-and-timber structure. They all enter to find a small, homey tavern with a handful of patrons chatting with one another over frothing mugs. “Hullo, Gil!” Rosie calls to the man sweeping crumbs from beneath a table across the room. He stops, nods at Rosie, and looks at the guests.

“You must be the brother, then?” he says, holding out a hand to Cullen. Introductions are made, and Rosie gives both her brother and Cora a quick hug before bidding them goodnight and leaving.

“We’ll be full up in a few more days with folk coming to town for the festival, but you’re not like to hear a peep tonight,” Gilno explains as he leads the couple upstairs and to the end of a short hallway.

It is a cramped but cozy room with a washstand, a wooden tub that can accommodate a fully-grown person only if they stand, and a bed that looks to be about half as big as their own at Skyhold. It also has four walls and a locking door, so Cora thinks it’s perfect.

She had not realized until the journey to South Reach how used she had grown to having a space belonging only to herself and Cullen. The couple had traveled most of the way with Varric, who is meeting an old friend in Highever next week, as well as Cole and Sera, who are accompanying him (the former having been invited; the latter having invited herself). Cora and Cullen split off from the rest only this morning. While the Inquisitor quite enjoyed falling asleep to the many sounds of her large group of companions and the soldiers, mages, aides, and mounts that generally accompanied them on cross-continental jaunts, the smaller traveling party of the past week had been almost eerily quiet once they had all retired to their tents. The oilcloth had felt much thinner, every noise seeming somehow to echo. She had attempted to reach a hand into Cullen’s breeches two nights ago – an overture that he only ever welcomed until that point – but he had grabbed her wrist and looked at her like she had gone mad. She could hardly blame him, vocal as he tends to be in bed, although he had told her it was less about the sound than about the nature of one of their companions (“Just because he’s gotten better about not saying what everyone is thinking doesn’t mean that he can’t still hear what’s happening in our heads! I prefer to keep my filthier thoughts to myself, thank you.”).

Not that she intends to shove Cullen down onto the bed as soon as they’re alone. As fraught with emotion as this visit is for him, she has promised herself to follow his lead completely while they are in South Reach. Still, she feels relieved knowing that there is a space from which they can shoo away the world for a time and simply be.

Cora deposits her rucksacks in the only empty corner and turns back, smiling, to Gilno and Cullen. The commander is trying to suppress a look of concern as he steals a prolonged glance at the bed. “It’s lovely,” she says to Gilno earnestly. “Thank you.”

“Sure, but you’re welcome. I’ll leave you to settle, then. Fresh water in the ewer, fit for drinking as well, but give us a holler if you’d favor a bath, and we’ll fill the tub. We’ve extra linens and such, ‘course; you’ll just say the word, aye?”

She thanks him again, as does Cullen – she can hear the anxious undertone in his voice once more – and the innkeep departs, shutting the door behind himself.

“The bed is fine, Cullen,” she says, voice low until their host has had ample time to walk away from the door.

“But it’s so small,” he replies with exasperation, tapping his thumb rapidly against his forefinger. The deeper into Ferelden they have traveled, the worse his nightmares have been. He had even kicked one of the tent poles hard enough to crack it last night. Cole, looking utterly distraught, had struggled mightily not to stare at Cullen for the entire duration of breakfast. (“I could hear their voices, too,” the young man had confided in Cora as they’d loaded the horses. “I could hear them screaming. Like in the White Spire, only…templars instead.”) “I’m going to wake you every night. You’ll not get any decent sleep. Perhaps Mia and Jor have a…a place in the hayloft where I could pitch a bedroll–”

“Oh, none of that,” Cora interrupts, taking the bag hanging limply from his hand and tossing it into the pile with the others. “I’ll be grand. And you’re not to worry about me, remember?” She cups her hands around his face and smiles.

“You say that as though it’s possible,” he replies, smiling sadly at her. He covers one of her hands with his own and, after searching her face for several moments, bends down to kiss her. It is tired, and soft, and so achingly tender that she feels a squeeze at her heart.

“I am…I’m so pleased you’re here with me,” he says when he pulls away.

“And I’m pleased to be here,” she replies. “I adore your family already.”

“Not as much as they clearly adore you,” he says with a smile, “though that isn’t surprising. I’m not sure how anyone could manage not to.”

“I’m sure at least half of the people in Thedas could tell you,” she laughs. Her mouth quickly opens wider into a yawn, though, and a bone-deep weariness settles over her like a mantle.

Cullen lets out a yawn of his own. “To bed?” he asks, kissing her forehead.

She nods. “To bed.”

Chapter Text

To Branson’s credit, Cora will think later when musing on the events of the following evening, he manages to suppress his bitterness long enough for everyone to get down most of the meal. Indeed, she will be hard pressed to recall any evidence that things would eventually devolve as they did. Bran’s greeting Cullen by way of a handshake rather than an embrace might be an omen, but then Cora herself is not naturally inclined to hugs, either. He and his wife, Sophie, are certainly less talkative than the rest of the Rutherford clan, but, again, so are Cora and Orla, Rosalie’s sweetheart. She will wonder, as she pretends to be asleep several hours hence, whether Cullen’s brother had always intended to air his grievances over dinner, or if he had meant to be on his best behavior and had simply failed.

Like the previous afternoon, Cora and Cullen had needed to coax Mia into accepting their help to prepare the evening meal, and, like before, they had succeeded by simply rolling up their sleeves and taking up a (much larger, this time) bucket of potatoes in spite of their host’s protestations. When their forces had doubled with Rosie’s arrival from the smithy and Jor’s from the fields, Mia had realized how vastly outnumbered she was and relented entirely. The sun sinking toward the horizon, she had commanded her volunteer kitchen army as expertly as her brother commands his soldiers.

“I…think perhaps Jor and I ought to do that,” Mia had said at one point. The older woman had poked her head between Cora and Cullen and was surveying with poorly-concealed amusement the dough that they were meant to be kneading. Cora had looked at her partner, whose homespun shirt was caked in flower, then down at her own tunic, which was even messier. She’d regarded the lumpy hunks of dough before each of them. Neither looked remotely like something that could become a loaf of bread.

“It…it never looked particularly difficult – the…the kneading, I mean” Cullen had said. His cheeks had begun to grow red, and Cora noticed that one had a stripe of flour across it. She had let out a cackle.

“I think we’re being demoted, love.”

“Well, it isn’t as though I’ve had much occasion to bake over the years,” he had replied abashedly.

“Oh, it’s fine, Cee. I’ll wager neither of you has,” Mia had said, laughing freely now. She’d nodded toward several bundles of herbs laying on the dining table. “The two of you can chop those up, yes?”

For the next two hours, the group had diced, chopped, stewed, braised, baked, washed, and tidied, shoulder to shoulder, with the girls and Daisy weaving around their legs. The siblings had reminisced and teased one another while Cora and Jor carried on side conversations or simply listened contentedly to their partners’ laughter. It had all been so bucolic, so normal, that it had felt surreal. Cora couldn’t help but wonder if people truly live like this, in between the hardships of life. Was it possible to be this happy, this unafraid, without the walls and wards of a fortress around a person? And if it were, could it be possible for a mage? For her?

She had been shaken from her musings by the arrival of the rest of the Rutherfords. There had been introductions, and more children running about, and then sitting down to eat the meal itself. The first part of the night’s conversation had been much like the talk when she and Cullen had first arrived the day before. Cullen had asked Bran and Sophie about their farm – the land and the weather, Cora was coming to understand, being the introductory topics of conversation in rural Ferelden – and their family. This had evolved into chatter about the children generally and their education, about the arl’s recent push for the building of a school and the unfortunate fact that few of the laboring class could spare their children except in the dead of winter.

When she turns the night’s talk over in her mind later, Cora will try to see through the eyes of that earlier, less rattled self. She will try to find a moment when she might have redirected the conversation, a moment when she could have kept the tone of their visit from shifting so dramatically. After two hours of ruminating, sleepless in bed beside a lover who she knows is also awake and also acting otherwise, she will settle on the end of the meal as a turning point. She will reform the image of them all sitting around the table, bellies full, and sipping mulled wine and tea.

---

“So, Cull, you joined the Inquisition before Cora did, right?” Rosie asks as she stirs a scant spoonful of sugar into her tea. Cora is reminded once again that Cullen’s siblings, like most Thedosians fortunate enough to live far from the Frostbacks and major cities, know almost nothing of their lives these past two years. Mia had warned them in a letter – and the conversation with Asgall yesterday morning had proven – that most western Fereldans’ knowledge of the Inquisition was limited to hearsay and the propaganda spoken in the local Chantry.

“Er, yes,” he answers after taking a beat to swallow a mouthful of spiced red. “That’s right. I joined in Kirkwall. When I left the Order.” His words are slightly stilted, his tone uncertain. Though Cora may know nearly every detail from that time in his life – from most times, really, considering how candid their pasts have forced them to be in this relationship – few others know much at all. She is not sure what he has shared with Mia in his correspondence, or what Mia might have passed on to the others at the table. He, too, seems doubtful on this latter point.

A single, barely-audible scoff comes from somewhere to Cora’s left. At first, she wonders whether she’s hearing things, or perhaps it was just another sound carrying from the bedroom where the twins and their cousins have retreated to play. She notices, though, that Mia’s expression grows slightly strained, and she is glancing toward her youngest brother.

Rosalie, who is perched on a stool pulled up to the opposite end of the table, does not seem to have heard. “Ohhhh,” she says as though the pins are sliding home in the lock tumbler of her mind. “I thought you’d joined after the Conclave, that that’s why you’d left Kirkwall in the first place. But then I’d wondered how you hadn’t…well. Died.”

“Yes, he’s managed to skirt the worst of everything in Ferelden.” Though Bran’s voice is still quiet, it is now unmistakably his.

“He…what?” Rosie asks, blinking at the younger Rutherford brother. Cora glances from Rosie, to Mia, to Cullen. The subject of the comment looks just as confused as Rosalie. Mia’s expression, however, is more grave.

“Safe in the Circle during the Blight, tucked away in that village when the Divine and his fellow templars were slaughtered. A lucky man, our brother,” Bran says. The Inquisitor cannot see his face clearly, being seated on the same side of the table and with two others in between them. His tone is light, almost jovial. Its stark contrast with his actual words is jarring.

“They weren’t ‘his fellow templars’ anymore,” Rosalie says, her expression now hardening as Mia’s had.

“No?” Bran asks. “And here I thought that vows made to the Maker ceased only in death. Am I wrong, brother?” Cora can tell, by Cullen’s fixed gaze, that Bran has finally made eye contact. Cullen’s ears are flushed red, and the color is moving into his cheeks. She can see panic rising in him: the set of his jaw, the way he is feverishly tapping the pad of his thumb against his mug. Whatever he had feared about the reunion, it was not this.

“Branson,” Mia says. It is a warning.

“You’re all acting like he’s some…some hero returning triumphantly home!” Branson shoots back at her. “At best, I’d hoped he would be out of his mind, like the last time. But he seems sane enough, which means turning his back on the Chantry to take up with a heretical hedge witch was a conscious choice.”

“Bran!” Several people – Jor, Rosalie, and even Branson’s own wife, it sounds like – exclaim in near-unison.

The anxiety is gone from Cullen’s face in an instant; in its place is the well-controlled rage of the Commander of Inquisition Forces. Without hesitation, he intones, “You forget yourself, Branson. You owe the Inquisitor your life; you should be begging her forgiveness for speaking so ignorantly.”

“I think one of us worshiping the apostate is enough, Cullen.”

“Enough!” Mia snaps, her volume just shy of a shout. She glances toward the hall; the children’s voices have silenced with everyone else’s. Then, staring daggers at her youngest brother, she fumes, “Outside. Now. Until you’ve remembered how to behave yourself.”

“Why are you talking to me like that?” Bran snaps, incredulous. “Do I look like I’m still a child?”

“You look like a guest in my home,” Mia replies in the slow, careful cadence of a person trying to keep her composure.

“Are all of you mad?” her little brother asks, a hint of pleading in his tone as he looks from Mia to Rosalie and back again. “Have you forgotten that he left us – left you, Em – to the darkspawn? And Loghain’s war, and the mages, and–”

“What are you on about?” Rosie cuts in. “Cullen left home years before the Blight.”

“And how many templars did we meet who’d come back and served in the Chantries? So they could defend their homes? And–and their families?”

“None of those templars had been assigned to serve in Circles, Bran. It’s hardly–”

“How many times were we nearly killed?” Bran’s voice has begun to tremble slightly. “We near to starved, and not a word from him, and the two of you are–”

“'Not a word'?” It’s now Mia’s turn to interrupt, her eyes blazing. “Whose coin do you think built this house, Branson?”

“Mia,” Cullen sighs, reaching up to rub his temples in frustration and exhaustion. “Don’t–”

“All our wages when we first arrived were paid in food and clothes. You’re a smart man, so tell me how you figure Jor and I put back enough coin for the wood and stone to construct an entire home, Bran.”

Silence falls across the table. Even the gaggle of children, half-hidden behind the wall of the adjoining hallway, manage not to make a sound.

After several of the longest seconds Cora has ever experienced, the screech of wooden bench legs on stone rings out. Bran stands, looks at his wife, and says, “The children should already be abed. Let’s go.”

And go they do, so swiftly that their youngest begins howling at the abruptness of it. The thud of the front door closing (with more force than is strictly necessary, Cora thinks) echoes around the small room. That, coupled with the soft patter of Alice and Obrianna leaving the hallway and seeking the refuge of their parents’ laps, is the only sound for a long while.

For the first time in ages, Cora wants nothing more than for a Fade rift to open directly over her head. Being pulled back into that hellscape seems, at this moment, a better alternative than contending with the deep shame that’s consuming her. She must have temporarily lost her mind, thinking that their warm welcome would continue. Has she grown so soft that the hospitality of a small handful of people can destroy her guard? Did she honestly believe that Cullen bringing an apostate to meet his family would somehow go well for him? Maker’s fucking breath, Cordelia. You’re supposed to be smarter than this.

Eventually, Mia speaks. Her voice sounds so small and distant that Cora would think it belonged to someone else but for Mia’s moving lips. “I…I am so, so sor–”

“It’s fi–”

“Don’t apo–”

Cora and Cullen stop short, realizing that they’ve begun to speak at the same time, and look at one another. The commander’s eyes have the red shine of one who is fighting back tears; his flaring nostrils tell her that they are the angry sort. She wishes more than anything that they were alone, that they could sift through this mess together without having to consider the feelings of anyone else.

Rosalie, in an uncharacteristically small, tentative voice, cuts through the leaden silence. “Cullen…is it true, what Mia said about the house?”

It takes Cora a moment to understand what Rosie is talking about. She had been so focused on the effect Branson’s words were having on his older brother that she didn’t fully, she now realizes, comprehend all that had been said. She wills herself back fifteen minutes (Has so little time really elapsed?), trying to recall that part of the exchange.

“Put it out of your mind, Rosie,” Cullen says. “It was ages ago.”

Looking at her younger sister with no small measure of embarrassment, Mia adds, “I promised I’d not tell you.” Then, to Cullen, “I’m sorry, Cee.”

The commander waves his hand as though gently dismissing her apology.

“But,” Rosie says, blinking in confusion, “why would you keep that a secret? Cullen, we thought you’d disappeared entirely! But you were sending Mia coin all along?”

He winces, cheeks reddening. He wants desperately, Cora can see, for the matter to be forgotten. “Not…all along. Just…”

“Yes, all along,” Mia counters. There is an air of defiance in her expression and tone, as well as obvious pride in her brother. “From the month you were promoted in Kirkwall until…well.” Until you were promoted in Kirkwall once more, against your will.

“I don’t understand why you…why didn’t you want us to know?” Rosie asks.

The Inquisitor knows the answer even before it comes (slowly, unwillingly, quietly) out of Cullen’s mouth. “I did not want you to excuse my absence in your lives on account of a few coppers.” In other words, for precisely that reason Mia told Branson tonight.

The house around them may be small, but it is well-built and warm, with a stonework foundation and timber-shingled roof. Hardly the reed-and-twig shack that “a few coppers” would buy. Still, it is clear to all of them that the matter is closed for the time being.

All is silent once more until Mia speaks again.

“Branson is…an angry man,” she says, voice still low and brittle. There is quiet fury in her words. “Not outwardly. Or…not until tonight, anyway. But underneath, he is. He’s terrified, and that makes him angry.”

Rosalie snorts. “As though he’s got anything to be frightened of, big man with his big farm and his big father-in-law collecting half the Lisher bridge levy.”

“Coin and land can’t guard against everything,” says Jor. He looks ready to add to this, but Mia cuts in.

“But that’s hardly a discussion for tonight.”

Cora agrees. Her embarrassment has begun to abate, and she feels in its place a sort of numbness, the vague sense that she is not really here but is instead walking through someone’s memory. It is in this state that, she assumes – for she later has no recollection of it – she and Cullen make their way back to the inn, up its groaning stairs, and to their room. She is only drawn back into herself by the warm, sure weight of Cullen’s hands on her shoulders.

“Cora…” he says, his brow shot through with canyons of concern. Of grief, even. This thought fully recalls her to the present moment, and she realizes with growing horror that she has not checked in with Cullen, has hardly looked at him, and after his brother had said such things–

“Cora, I…Maker, I’m so very sorry,” he says. His voice is ragged, and she sees his Adam’s apple move as he gulps.

“What in the world for, love?” she asks, taking his head between her hands. It makes no sense, she thinks. He’s the one who’s owed an apology, not the other way round.

“For bringing you here, for…for putting you in such a situation,” he says. Cora blinks, and it takes her a moment to understand what he means. Branson, she recalls now, had spoken ill of her, too, hadn’t he? What had he called her? A 'heretical hedge witch'? Such stuff, she thinks, looking back on it now. An idle insult, compared to what he had heaped upon Cullen. As the commander continues, however, it becomes clear that he sees it rather differently.

“I will not let you be subjected to…to…” Disgust twists his features for a moment before turning again into grief. “I will make this right.” The expression that now comes over his face is one she’s seen a thousand times now. Between that and his clear, decided tone of voice, they might as well be leaning over the map in the War Room and planning how to rout a Venatori stronghold. As he usually does when running through a mental checklist or making calculations, he gazes off into the middle distance. “We ought not be on the road at night, and the horses need rest, but–”

“–Cullen–”

“We…we will leave in the morning. We can breakfast here at the inn, or we can go straight away, whichever you wish.” Here, he looks at her once more, and his eyes soften.

“Cullen,” she says calmly, then takes a beat as she considers her words. She brings her hands to the sides of his arms and gives them an affectionate squeeze. “You…you love me so well, and I adore you for it. I do. But I’m going to explain something, and I need you to hear me.”

The mask of the Commander of Inquisition Forces falls away entirely as he regards her; only tender sadness is there now. “I…alright,” he says in almost a whisper.

“What happened tonight at supper was…as far as it concerned me, anyway, it was nothing at all. The Inquisition has been a cloak for me these past two years, but the twenty-odd before that?” She gives a single hollow chuckle. “I’ve had magic for…well, for as long as I can remember. I know how most people think of mages, of…of me. Or how they would think of me, if I weren’t the Inquisitor. How they will think of me, when the day eventually comes that I’m not any longer. I’ve no reason to be afraid of singular, ignorant Chantry loyalists – not now, anyway; not yet – and that’s all that your brother is.”

He searches her face for even the barest hint that she is hiding her true feelings on the matter and, after several beats, finds none. Because, she knows, there is nothing to find. She does not care what Branson Rutherford believes about her, not really. He is a small, angry man, someone deeply wounded by his experience of the Blight in ways that she cannot fully understand, and frightened by the unknown because of it.

And besides, whispers a voice in the back of her mind, all of this might have been prevented if she had not let the kindness of the other Rutherfords peel away her vigilance. She ought to have sensed something was amiss, to have done…well, she doesn't know what, precisely, but surely there was something she might’ve done to protect them, to…to shield the man she loves…

She takes a breath, willing herself to remain calm as she continues. “But the way he spoke to you, Cullen–”

Cullen shakes his head as though his brother’s words are no more than a gnat buzzing around his ears. “I expected…well, I am not sure exactly, but…it would have been foolish to believe I could walk into my siblings’ lives again without needing to…to make some kind of restitution.” He sighs. “He has every right to be angry with me, Cora.” Then, his expression hardening: “I would have no quarrel with him if he had kept you out of it. And chosen a better time. That was not fair to Mia, or Jor, or anyone else.”

“Every right to…?” The Inquisitor’s hands return to the sides of his face. “Nothing he said to you was just. You might feel some guilt about not having written to Mia, not having checked in with everyone, yes, fine – and you’ve sought to make amends for that – but blaming you for the consequences of the fucking Blight? Maker’s breath, Cullen!”

He drops his eyes, and his tongue darts out to wet his lower lip. She can feel the slight tug of his thumb and forefinger worrying at the hem of her shirt for want of a sword pommel to tap. Quietly, he says, “I have wondered if…that is to say…Branson levelled no accusations at me that I…that I have not levelled at myself, over the years. It’s entirely possible that I could have…if I had asked, I mean…I could have been reassigned to the Chantry here. Instead remaining at Kinloch. Instead of being sent to Kirkwall.”

“And you truly think that your Knight-Commander would have permitted it, given your state of mind? Given all that had happened to you?” Cora asks gently.

He winces. “If I had been stronger, though. If I had not let myself be so easily destroyed…had gotten the better of it, and recovered properly–”

“Cullen.” His name is both tender and firm on her lips. It draws his eyes back to hers, just as she intended. “You know – I know you do – that what happened to you was not your fault. It’s a miracle you survived at all. Most didn’t.” He winces again at this. “Your brother has no idea what you were made to endure in Kinloch. If he had, after what he said tonight, he would never have the courage to look you in the eye again.”

The commander tilts his forehead down until it is touching hers. They stand there silently, eyes closed, for a long while. Eventually, Cullen whispers, “I love you, Cora. If you feel even a…a modicum, a hint of unease or…or discomfort about remaining here through Wintersend, we will be gone before sunrise.”

She smiles and pulls her forehead away so that she can press her lips to his. “I’m fine, Cullen. I’ll be fine.”

“And you will tell me if that changes?”

“I will.”

“Alright,” he says, punctuating the word with a kiss.

“Now then,” Cora says, nodding to her left and rolling up her sleeves. Each of her palms begins to glow, one a faint slate blue and the other a deep amber. “I don’t think that tub is large enough for a proper bath, but I’m certainly going to try.”

---

Before

Cora had forgotten just how oppressively hot it can get in here. Head still bowed like the other penitents scattered throughout the pews, she wipes her brow with the sleeve of her robe. The motion brings the fabric across her entire face such that it might look, to the templars standing in the back of the room, like she is wiping away tears instead of sweat. Perhaps that will buy her an extra five or ten minutes.

For all their hallowed training, the knights don’t seem to get a modicum of instruction in dealing with mages exhibiting any emotion other than violent rage or holy self-hatred. She and Luciana sometimes used this to their advantage when they were children. Start crying, they learned early on, and most of the templars would leave to go find an Enchanter who could deal with the problem. Cora hasn’t been able to shed a tear, genuine or otherwise, since Erli’s Harrowing, but the coterie of guards thirty yards behind her doesn’t know that. For good measure, she moves her shoulders up and down in some approximation of the shudder of wracking sobs.

Perhaps, were there not an astounding four templars waiting for her in the rear of the Chantry nave, she would be able to focus her thoughts on her reason for requesting this visit in the first place. She runs her thumb over the silver bracelet on her opposite wrist. It is a simple piece of jewelry, and the only one she has ever worn: a chain connected at either end to an oblong pendant bearing the Bride of the Maker in relief. It is a wonder, she thinks, that she hasn’t worried the image down to nothing in the decade since her father sent it to her. She takes a deep breath, and this time, the shudder of her exhale is real. Her dull anger at the spectacle made from such a large escort, her irritation at the way the Revered Mother had pursed her lips upon watching a mage sit amongst the faithful, her shame as the gazes of those faithful had come to rest on her before returning to their prayers; all of it begins to ebb away.

Cora summons a memory. She has returned to it hundreds of times over the years, like a favorite quilt always pulled first from a chest on cold nights. And like a quilt, she thinks, she has frayed the edges of the thing, caused its fibers to unravel, left the warp and weft of its fabric slack and stretched. She has lived in the Circle for nearly fifteen years now. How much of her recollection, then, is real? How much has she misremembered, omitted, even invented out of whole cloth? The last time she saw her father, she was a small child. Even if her memory of his face, voice, actions is exactly accurate, is it not skewed by the eyes and mind of the six-year-old girl she was?

She presses her thumb against the sharp edge of the bracelet pendant as hard as she can until the pain recalls her to the present. The memory. Her father. Her purpose in coming here.

She squeezes her eyes shut. In her mind’s eye, she is kneeling beside a bed. The rug beneath her feels soft as a cloud. Perhaps the carpet pile is luxuriously thick, or perhaps she is simply so small that the weight pressing her knees down is negligible. How strange, she thinks now, that she should recall such a thing so clearly when the rest of the memory has the fuzzy, undefined quality of a dream.

“Do you remember how it starts, Delia?” Her father’s voice draws her gaze up and to her left, where he is kneeling beside her. She sees his folded hands and does the same, her palms and fingers coming together with a soft clap. Delia. No one else had called her that. Even her father added the ‘Cor’ when in his wife’s presence. A name was a name, Cora’s mother had harped. No more changeable than one’s very skin.

“Oh Maker!” replies a voice that is high, and clear, and foreign, and yet also her own.

Her father smiles. She is sure of this even though, when she tries to reconstruct his face in her mind, it looks like a figure out of a watercolor painting. “That’s right. And then?”

A small, vaguely human-shaped splotch on the other side of her father, at the very edge of the memory, pipes up before she can. “Hear my cry!” A twinge of jealous frustration passes through her. Papa was asking me, Lisbet, she longs to say.

“Very good. And next?” he asks. Each time he speaks, his voice is different. Lower, higher, louder, softer, hanging on consonants, stressing vowels. She has nearly forgotten the true shape of it, and, were she able to cry anymore, this realization would pull tears from her eyes like the roots of a plant sucking water from soil.

Neither child responds, and he gives a chuckle. “You know, even adults sometimes forget – and that is quite alright. Because the part you remembered is the most important.”

The other voice, the one belonging to her sister Elisabeta, whose features are even more nebulous than her father’s, speaks again. “What?” it asks, drawing out the word in a demonstration of skepticism parading as misunderstanding.

“Many people like to recite the Chant when they pray–”

“Like you,” interjects tiny, innocent, unremarkable, as-yet-not-magical Cora.

“Like me, yes,” he says. “But sometimes, I use my own words as well. It’s the beginning – calling out to the Maker – that stays the same. When we do that, Andraste hears our pleas. She takes our prayers to the Maker, and asks that He not turn away from them.”

The Maker, young Cora thinks, must be quite like her mother. Nezetta Trevelyan only seems to acknowledge her children’s requests when communicated through another grown-up, like the governess or Cora’s father. This thought makes her sad for reasons she does not understand yet.

“I like it better when it’s the Chant,” tiny Cora says. This is not exactly true, at least when she is the one praying. It’s too hard to remember even the handful of words her father has taught her, and her sister snickers at her when she pauses too long, and sometimes even calls her stupid once they’re alone in bed. It’s because of how impossible all that memorization seems that, when Papa is the one doing the praying, she prefers to hear him recite the Chant. It is a kind of magic, the way he can keep so many words inside his head.

“Alright, then. Repeat after me, girls. ‘Guide me through the blackest nights.’”

“Guide me through the blackest nights,” the adult Cora now whispers into her clasped hands. For a building made of stone, she marvels at how the Chantry seems to swallow sound. Perhaps the tapestries and banners along the walls are enchanted to absorb it. She wouldn’t put it past the Revered Mother to conscript the Circle’s mages into bewitching the ambience of the very place where she teaches folk to fear them. “Steel my heart against the temptations of the wicked. Make me to rest in the warmest places.” She takes a breath, though the air is so thick with incense and heat that it feels futile. “O Creator, see me kneel: for I walk only where You would bid me, stand only in places You have blessed, sing only the words You place in my throat.”

Several minutes later, when she has finished the rest of the canticle segment, she realizes she recited the words with no thought to them at all. Her mind had instead wandered again to the shapeless, changeable form and voice of her father. You will never see him again, she reminds herself. He is gone forever. You are alone. Are you not devastated, Cordelia? Won’t you cry for him? For yourself? Even a single tear? Are you too inhuman even for that?

And the answer, it seems, is yes. Nothing had changed in her when the First Enchanter had (gently) relayed the news of her father’s death, nor when she had asked how he could be sure and he had tried to steer the conversation elsewhere, nor when he had eventually relented and told how a legal representative of the estate had written to the Circle. She had felt nothing when she had further gleaned from her elderly mentor that the letter’s purpose had not been to inform Cora of her loss but had instead been a formal notification of funds being transferred to the Circle. She had been entirely unmoved to learn that her father’s final gift to her – her inheritance – had been given instead to her jailors. She had not even flinched to see herself referred to in a formal legal document as “Cordelia of the Ostwick Circle of Magi” rather than as Cordelia Trevelyan, had not felt surprise when she realized that her mother had taken even her name.

Alone in her room that night, she had sat in the windowsill and, thumb running along her bracelet, had tried every tactic she knew to make herself feel something. Anything at all. To free herself, even for a moment, from the despair in which she has lived for the last two years. What a relief it would be, she had thought, to be overwhelmed by grief, or rage, or bitterness.

She had failed, of course, just as she is failing now. She had begged permission to visit the Chantry to light a candle and pray for her father’s soul. No place was designed to evoke emotion like a Chantry, she had reasoned; even if she was not brought to tears by the Holy Presence, the headiness of memory would do it. The strict, young Knight-Commander had needed convincing – Would such an impromptu excursion be wise, considering how Cora reacted to the last death of a loved one? – but had eventually agreed with the caveat that more templars accompany her.

And for what? she now wonders as she rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms. The incense is beginning to get to her, but her eyes remain dry even with the added irritant. She feels the same way she did when she entered this furnace a half hour ago. She has lit her candle, combed her memory, recited the Chant, berated herself, acted at weeping to buy more time – and nothing has changed.

She is jealous, at moments like these, of the Tranquil. They understand that they are empty, but they do not feel it. The absence is not perceived as a lack. Cora, though, can feel the hollowness within her, can feel the despair as acutely as if it were a heavy stone laid upon her chest.

“You…do not speak to it, though? Right?” Luciana had asked, lips trembling in fear, when Cora had recently confided that she has had the same dream each one of the some seven hundred nights since Erli’s death. The despair demon that visits her when she sleeps takes different forms – the First Enchanter, her father, her friends, even Erlicar himself – but its manner of speech does not change. Would it not be beautiful, the spirit asks, to be free? Imagine the relief of it! The relief of allowing the hollowness within her to be filled, of truly feeling the rage and grief that have eluded her these past years, and then – crucially – of never feeling anything again. The spirit can give her this, it promises, and more. She could take every templar in the Circle with her into oblivion. She could set her students and friends free on this side of the Veil, then set herself free on the other.

Of course she does not speak to it, she had assured Luci. And it’s the truth. She is not stupid. An abomination would kill indiscriminately. As sweet as the spirit’s promises sound, Cora knows that the templars would not be the only casualties were she to believe in them.

And besides, she has committed herself to the safekeeping of her young apprentices. However much she sometimes longs for an end, she will not abandon them to the same uncaring upbringing of her own youth.

The muffled clang of steel on stone nearby, followed by an audible huff, breaks her stream of thought. She opens her eyes and looks up to see, half tucked into an alcove a scant few meters away, a sour-faced congregant conferring with the Revered Mother. One of the templars, presumably summoned by a wave of the clergywoman’s hand, joins them. Cora can hear nothing but murmuring for a few moments. Then, in the agitated way of a person not getting what they believe they are due, the congregant – a man of perhaps forty wearing the unfussy but well-cared-for garb of a merchant or tailor – foregoes whispering.

“This is absurd!” the man pronounces, his voice low but nonetheless audible to those nearby. “They can pray just as well in the Circle, can’t they? They’ve even got their own dedicated sisters in there!”

The templar – Ser Graffin, one of the younger members of the Order – casts at glance at the kneeling faithful before replying in a hushed tone. Cora cannot make out his words, but she can see the deepening frowns of both the congregant and the Revered Mother. The latter speaks next, and Cora catches only a handful of the terse rejoinder

“…reasonable…and…of…distracting…please–”

The man has gotten himself worked up into such a froth that he barely waits for the Revered Mother to finish before he starts up at Graffin again. “This is a holy place, ser! I am frankly appalled that you would force the Maker’s children to cower in fear whilst they speak to His Bride!”

Cora squeezes her eyes shut and bows her head once more. It is a childish thing, she knows, a tactic of the little girl from her memory. Close your eyes, and the monsters won’t see you. Pull the covers over your head, and you will be safe. Ridiculous, but here she is, trying to convince herself for just a moment that every gaze in the Chantry is not focused on her now.

What a stupid idea this was. She feels no differently than she did when she walked through the doors. The red candle she lit at the feet of Andraste will have burned down to nothing by the morning. The words of the Chant passed by her lips with as much meaning as a sigh. A dozen worshippers are staring at her with distrust at best, revulsion at worst. They took her father from her, and then her freedom, her future, her dearest friend. And now her father, again and forever.

And her name.

It is no wonder her prayers rang hollow, she thinks. Even the Maker cannot hear the cry of a person who does not exist.

Chapter Text

It takes nearly the entire length of breakfast the next morning for some sense of normalcy to return to their visit. The twins eat their porridge in uncharacteristic silence as their parents, Cora, and Cullen try and fail to make conversation. It is Alice who eventually shakes them all out of their unease by unwittingly forcing the issue.

“Are you really a witch?” she asks suddenly, letting her pewter spoon clink against the inside of her empty bowl. She regards Cora with the kind of open curiosity found only in young children and embodied spirits from the Fade who’ve been recently bound to the mortal plane.

“Alice Justine Devaney, I swear by Andraste’s holy knickers–” Mia snaps, eyes wide and face the color of the cream set out on the table before them.

Cora’s first instinct had been to simply answer the girl’s question. She’s spent half her life sating the curiosity of children not much older than Alice, after all; it’s one of the few things she misses about the Circle. But she would never contradict a parent, and, it occurs to her now, honesty on this particular topic might be unwise. She hasn’t a clue what the twins – or any children their age without mages in their family – do or don’t know about magic, and the very young are hardly reliable secret-keepers. As far as she is aware, only Cullen’s immediate family knows what she is. She would prefer to keep it that way.

“You oughtn’t just ask people questions like that, Alice,” Jor cuts in. “Might be they don’t want to speak about it, or that it ain’t for a wee’un to know.”

Alice slumps into her chair looking unsatisfied, but she does not argue. She seems entirely unaware that her question changes something in the air. Embarrassed as Mia and Jor had momentarily been, Alice had nonetheless lanced a boil by being the first to speak, even obliquely, of the night before. Now, conversation flowing more normally, the party begins to chatter about the festival several days hence.

“There’s lots of dancing, and a big fire, and we get to stay up so late!” Obrianna, who is vibrating with excitement, explains to the guests.

“And there’s a contest with bows and arrows,” adds Alice, “and one with swords, only made of wood, because you’re not supposed to kill anyone–”

“And all the grown-ups give you sweets, and mum makes corsberry pie, and there’s about a million people at the market!”

“She might be exaggerating just a mite,” Jor says with a laugh. “And anyway, I can’t imagine we’ll see anything like the usual number of folk. Not with this fair weather after all them weeks of rain we had.” He looks out the window and takes a sip of tea.

“Sure, plenty of people will stay home to try to catch up on their planting,” Mia agrees, “but I’ll wager there’s still a fair crowd – especially folk selling what they’ve worked at over the winter. Which reminds me–” she gestures to her husband “–we ought to get a full bolt of that sturdy Chasind wool this year. Ten patches on a pair of trousers is a bit much, Jor.”

“They’re good trousers!” he replies.

“They’ve got so many patches that they’re not even the same pants!” she says, laughing and shaking her head.

“Muuuum,” Obrianna says after draining the rest of her teacup, “when are we going to get corsberries for the pie?”

“Oh, lovey, I think we’ll just have to buy one this year. I’ve got to get the garden planted,” Mia says, running her fingers through the girl’s curls.

“But you always–”

“Firstly, ‘always’ is quite the word from someone who’s only been here seven years and probably remembers two of those, at most–”

“We remember lots!” says Alice, indignant.

“–and second, we’ve not had so much early spring rain before. Not as long as your father and I have been here, anyway. Needs must, my love.”

“We know what they look like!” says Obrianna. “We can pick them!”

“We’ll not have you in the forest alone. You know that rule,” Jor says with a shake of the head. He’s risen from the table and, after toting two handfuls of dishes to the washbasin, is putting on his overcoat. The fields – half of which still need tilling – are calling.

“Daisy can protect us!” Obrianna counters.

“Daisy’s no match for a pack of winter-hungry wolves,” replies Jor.

“We’ll stay at the very edge!” Alice pleads.

“Don’t argue with your father,” Mia says firmly.

“I could take them,” Cora says. Then, recalling that one of the girls just asked whether she was a witch, adds, “If that would be alright, I mean.” Cullen is looking at her, a question in the curve of his brow. Shall I come as well? she hears him ask in her mind. Are you sure? Are you alright? She gives him a small, reassuring smile. In truth, she’s been hoping since before they arrived in South Reach that she would be able to engineer some time alone for the eldest Rutherford siblings to properly catch up with one another.

“And you and I can see to the garden,” Cullen says, turning to his sister.

“I’ll not keep putting my guests to work!” Mia exclaims.

Cullen stands, pushes in his chair, and smirks. “You’ll recall that I spend far too much time sat inside at a desk, Em. I mean it when I say that I don’t mind getting my hands dirty with something other than ink.”

“Besides,” Cora adds, “we’ve been shut up on a mountain for near to six months.”

Mia studies them both for a long moment. She is not, the Inquisitor has learned over the last two days, prone to displays of great emotion. There is a steeliness in her that Cora reckons is either a consequence of living through the Blight or some inborn trait that helped her to do so with her sanity intact. Still, Cora can tell from the look on Mia’s face that she is genuinely moved. “Oh, have it your way,” she says, throwing up her hands. And though she is shaking her head as though her guests are incorrigible children, she is smiling.

As soon as they set out for the forest’s edge, Daisy galloping back and forth across the field in front of them, the twins grow uncharacteristically quiet. They stroll beside Cora, their manner subdued, and cast occasional glances up at her. It takes most of the half-mile journey for Alice to burst out, “But are you really a witch?”

Obrianna gasps and gives her sister a gentle shoves, and (loudly) whispers, “Mum and Da said–"

“It’s alright,” Cora says, laughing. She doesn’t mean to – it’s long been a personal rule not to let children believe that she is making light of their questions or fears, however silly they might seem to her – but it escapes before she can think to restrain herself. Both girls stop and stare, more confused than offended by this response. “Did you know I used to mind children just a mite older than the two of you, once? I’m rather used to questions. But to answer yours, I first need you to answer mine.” The twins gaze at her with rapt attention.

“What,” she asks, looking from one to the other, “is a witch?”

“Like in the stories,” Alice says. “You know, like with Prince Aethelford, or the tricky rabbit, or the Pirate Queen, or–”

“There are witches in all the stories,” Obrianna adds. “Or…a lot of them.”

“They do spells on people – to make them sleep for a very long time, or to turn them into a goat!”

“And not just people, because Prince Aethelford asked the witch to make the river stop flowing, remember?” Obrianna asks her sister.

“Right! And she didn’t! She said she would, but she made it go even more until the whole valley was under water and all the people drowned–”

“Or with the dragon, when–”

“Witches will pretend they want to help, but they don’t really,” Alice says, her expression beginning to darken. “They’re…bad. They’re evil.” Though she regards Cora with the same curiosity, her posture and tone betray a loss of courage.

Cora puts on a pensive expression. After a moment, she nods back toward their home, looks inquiringly to the girls, and says, “It seems to me that your mum and da are quite smart.”

Alice and Obrianna look at one another for a moment, clearly puzzled by the turn of the conversation, before starting to nod in near-perfect unison. It’s so sweet, their tandem movement, that Cora must restrain herself from grinning once again. Instead, she continues: “Much too smart to be tricked by that sort of nasty person.” The girls consider this for half a second before resuming their nodding. “They’d not let someone like that into their home, let them anywhere near their children.”

“No!” Alice exclaims. She looks like she’s just bitten into a lemon.

"No, I don’t think so, either,” Cora agrees. She waits a beat, then tilts her head to the side and regards the twins. “So, do you think I’m a witch?”

They look at one another again, and the Inquisitor sees a silent debate unfold in their eyes. Eventually, just as their toes touch the tips of the shadows of the trees, they seem to come to an agreement.

“No,” Alice declares. “We think you’re just a lady.”

Cora smiles. Just a lady. She quite likes the sound of that. Not a witch, or the Inquisitor, or an Enchanter of the Circle, or even Lady Cordelia Trevelyan. Just a lady. Just Cora.

---

“I don’t suppose you remember how to use a hoe after twenty years with a sword in your hands,” Mia says, tossing a grin over her shoulder at her younger brother.

“Twenty!” Cullen scoffs. “I’ll have you know I spent my share of time in the gardens as a recruit.”

“Oh, well, then pardon me, ser,” she replies with mock penitence. She takes the tool in question, along with a pick and a shovel, from its place on the wall of the barn. “Fifteen, then.”

“Give that here,” he says. The demand carries an undercurrent of something akin to petulance, and he realizes that, for just a moment, he had become himself at age eight, goaded by his elder sister into getting their chores done. A smile comes unbidden to his lips, and he nearly fails to catch the hoe that Mia has tossed his way.

“Do you remember the year you convinced Mum to let you plant the radish seeds?” Mia asks as they walk toward the sizable garden situated between the house and barn.

“I…” His throat begins to constrict as panic seizes him. He had known there would be a moment like this, a request to recall some perfectly memorable thing. He had known, too, that he might find only a dim, empty box in his mind where that thing ought to be. His childhood memories are so scant now, so full of holes. They are not the nothingness of some later memories – the months of his life in Kinloch or Kirkwall that are almost entirely gone – but they are nonetheless woefully inadequate for this sort of thing.

In his periphery, he can see Mia looking at him with an indecipherable expression. After several terribly long seconds, she continues, as though nothing were amiss, “You were quite young, I think – only expected to do the weeding, nothing too difficult – but you were adamant that you wanted to help plant seeds in the garden that year. I always thought Mum must’ve known you were up to something, because you specifically wanted to do the radishes, and–”

“And I hate radishes,” he finishes, almost to himself. It is as though these words are an incantation, for his mind is immediately flooded with the memory. He blinks with the shock of it, of this, this thing that he knows so well, has always known, dancing around his head. “I didn’t plant them,” he says, his voice near to a whisper at the wonder of suddenly knowing precisely how the story ends. He looks at Mia, who is grinning back at him, eyes bright with joy.

“You pretended like you did! You told Mum and Papa you’d done it, told me you’d done it!”

“But they didn’t come up in the garden when they ought. And then Mum found a patch of radish shoots sprouting by the stream, where I’d gotten rid of the seeds.” Cullen laughs. “She made me pick them all when they were ready, and then made me eat one every day for a month.”

“Only the smallest ones, though,” Mia says. Cullen does not recall this detail but soon understands why. “I watched her set them aside for you, the wee ‘uns. She didn’t tell you so because she wanted you to learn your lesson about dishonesty, but she knew you loathed them something fierce. Couldn’t stand to watch you suffer more than was necessary.”

He can picture it, his mother sorting through a pile of muddy roots for runts. This image does not have the same quality as the real memory he’s just recalled; it is rather one of those strange, in-between thoughts that is neither recollection nor dream. The elements are real: Anfreyd Rutherford as she looked when he was young, her ruddy brown curls even wilder than Mia’s, standing over the butcher block in the family’s small kitchen. The light coming through that long-ago window. The laugh of a younger child somewhere in the distance. The smell of soil and rosemary and rain. Cullen has no doubt that these things truly existed, that his remembrance, if not entirely accurate, was perceived as such by his boyhood self. It is merely the sum of the parts, the tableau as a whole, that is a fiction – at least insofar as being something he himself witnessed.

“Do…you remember her, Cull?” Mia asks, her voice uncharacteristically tentative. They’ve reached the timber-and-wicker gate to the garden, which she unlatches and pushes open.

“Of course,” he says immediately. Does she really think I’m so far gone, to forget my own mother as quickly as that? As he turns to latch the gate behind them, though, the not-quite-memory returns. There she is, standing over the radishes, sorting them into piles. There is the sunlight, gilding the edges of her hair. He wills her to turn round, to look at him, to speak. But she, figment of his imagination though she is, does not obey. She will not show her face, nor will she open her mouth, and Cullen realizes that it is precisely because she is a figment that she will not yield. She is an amalgamation wrought from his mind, and her face and voice are no longer present there.

The siblings plod across the lumpy, fallow ground for several long seconds before Mia speaks again. More quietly than before, she says, “I…I’ve started to forget things. About her. About both of them. Ten-odd years hardly seems long enough, you know, but I…well. I’ll try to recall Papa’s laugh, or which of Mum’s hands had the big, jagged scar, and I just…I can’t, sometimes. And Bran and Rosie remember even less, which means that there are things that might be gone forever. Unless you…”

He knows that he cannot give her what she seeks. However much he wishes otherwise, he cannot help her keep even this whisper of their parents alive. He looks at her, tears burning behind his eyes, and sees that her own are already rolling down her cheeks. She wipes them away with the back of her hand, then lets out a dry laugh. “Maker, look at me. A grown woman crying because she isn’t sure where her mum’s scars were.”

“I wish that…” he begins before trailing off. There is no explanation he can give, nothing he can say without speaking of the lyrium. And he cannot speak of the lyrium without telling her, even vaguely, about Kinloch. As much as he cares for his sister, he has disclosed so little to her. Out of a desire to keep her from worrying, he has always reasoned; but he knows that the silence is in equal part due to shame.

At the end of the remains of the northernmost row, Mia drives the shovel into a massive dirt clod. She plants one boot on the step and presses down, and it breaks into a hundred pieces. Cullen steps toward the second row, pulls on his gloves, and grasps the hoe. He takes a deep, steadying breath before swinging its blade into the ground and pulling up the roots of a squash plant that would’ve perished with the first freeze. When he lifts the tool again, a squeal of delight rides the breeze toward him. He stops and follows Mia’s gaze to see its source. In the distance, at the forest’s edge, he spots three figures running around one another. Another squeal, and then the familiar sound of Cora’s deep, contagious cackle. He watches the tiny figures take turns tagging and running from one another, and he realizes that he is grinning like a fool. Mia, too, is smiling, and when she returns to her work, he follows suit. He inhales, exhales, and makes a decision.

“I…want to tell you something, Em. About…well, about the Order. And me. About all of it.”

---

A mere five minutes after passing the treeline and wading into the corsberry-laden bushes that comprise the underbrush, Alice and Obrianna look more like they’ve been bathing in a tub full of fruit rather than picking it. While a part of Cora feels guilty for the state of her charges – she is already mentally composing an apology to whichever parent will be on laundry duty – another part is overwhelmed with joy at the wild excess of their freedom. Neither she, as a child, nor her students had been allowed outdoors apart from brief opportunities to run about the Ostwick Circle’s walled yard, a small, muddy space devoid of color. Soiling one’s clothes or person while at play was generally punished, as were squeals and laughter (lest the townsfolk on the other side of the wall think the Circle was being soft on its inhabitants). Maker, what she wouldn’t have given for her students to be allowed even a few minutes of the reckless delight the twins are experiencing now.

“Alright,” she says with a smile, “if you come back with more corsberries on your frocks and faces than in your baskets, your mum will be too cross to make any pies.”

The girls giggle conspiratorially but nonetheless settle down and begin their gathering in earnest. Cora’s own basket is already half full, so she slows her pace. The point of all this was to buy Cullen and Mia some time to talk alone, after all.

It takes a while for the children to grow as comfortable with Cora as they had been prior to Branson’s accusations last night. Their whispers and quiet laughter slowly grow more carefree and ebullient, and they eventually return to peppering their visitor with questions and regaling her with half-remembered stories of last year’s Wintersend. She realizes, as they do competing impressions of a jester they watched perform in the market square, that she has missed this, spending time with children. She does not miss having a life consumed by it, does not long to be a mother or even, really, a caregiver in the way that so many seem to. But picking berries, playing, telling stories, teaching a new skill or fact, quelling a fear, offering solace – all of this is as enjoyable as it is exhausting.

She thinks, then, of Palum. After conferring with Ersk a final time before leaving Skyhold, she had written to tell Luci that, yes, there would indeed be a little school at the keep, and yes, it would be directed by that Aequitarian Enchanter from Tantervale with whom Kael had corresponded after the fall of the Circles, and no, there would be no former templars involved. Most importantly, she had written in an ink viscous with drops of her own blood, she would be so very, very pleased if Palum wanted to come be a part of it.

Palum’s wanting to be with her at Skyhold is a given, though, and both Cora and Luciana know this. What she had really meant was that she would be so very, very pleased if Kael decided to trust Cora – not as his friend but as the head of an organization that includes both mages and former templars, and as the lover of the former Knight-Commander of Kirkwall – with Palum’s care. But she had not stated this because she hadn’t needed to. Luci is her oldest living friend, and half of their conversations are had in subtext – even when those conversations are letters.

Kael may need some convincing, but she’s hopeful that it won’t be too heavy a burden on Luci’s part. The unfortunate reality is that a young mage as singularly gifted as Palum requires instruction. Were he less powerful, he might be able to go on with the limited tutelage that Luci and Kael, with their attention divided and their apostate village unguarded, can provide. For all the Circles’ many sins, Cora must admit that its plethora of dedicated teachers, wards against experimental casting mishaps, and impenetrable walls had their advantages. Palum needs a place to safely learn his craft, and Skyhold is undeniably better than the alternative.

And then there is the other, admittedly selfish reason, that Cora wants Palum to come to the Inquisition’s school: she misses him. She firmly believes, however Luci might protest, that her friends have been better caregivers to him than she could ever hope to be. Still, the same part of her that feels so light of heart as Cullen’s nieces regale her with tales of their more memorable dragon-Mabari conquests also longs to spend time with Palum again.

“It sounds to me like Daisy is an exceptional dragon,” Cora says as Alice concludes an account. Daisy, detectable only via the rustling of bushes some yards away, gives a cheerful bark at the sound of his name.

“He’s not scary enough sometimes, though,” Obrianna says, “and Papa won’t train him to growl when we say.” Cora imagines the massive hound being made to frighten people at the whim of two children and decides that this was a good decision on Jor’s part.

“I suppose not everything can be exactly like it is in the most exciting tales,” Cora concedes. “Do you have a favorite story about dragons?”

“Ser Corin and Ser Neriah!” Alice pipes up immediately, eyes wide and task entirely forgotten. Cora blinks at her, momentarily taken aback. She’d been expecting the girls to name a chevalier tale or fairy story, something from a children’s book or rhyme. Hearing the names of two famous Wardens who slew an Archdemon is a bit of a shock.

“I…don’t think I know that one,” Cora lies. Of course she knows it. She must have heard it a hundred times during her own childhood. The Enchanters who bent toward dogmatic Andrastianism and Chantry loyalty particularly relished telling their charges of Neriah, the mage who sacrificed herself so that her fellow Grey Warden, Corin, could slay Zazikel and bring an end to the near-century-long Second Blight. If only more of the Maker’s cursed children had such an opportunity at redemption for the sin of their birth!

Fortunately, the version of the story the twins know is a sanitized one: two warriors defeated an evil dragon and died in the process, but they saved many, many people. There is no Archdemon, no Blight, no ninety years of Darkspawn ravaging the continent; nor is there any mention of Neriah’s having been a mage, or of she and the non-magical Corin having been lovers. This last bit was absent from the Circle’s telling as well; there could be no question of Neriah’s sacrifice being made for any reason but devotion to the Maker and protection of Thedas.

Once Alice has concluded her tale (and remembers that she’s meant to be picking berries), Obrianna furrows her brow and wonders aloud, “Why do dragons always want to hurt people?”

“Because they’re fearsome!” Alice replies as though this were an explanation and not just a description.

“But why are they fearsome?” Obrianna asks. She turns her focus from a clutch of corsberries just out of her reach to Cora. “Are they always that way, even when they’re small?”

“I think so,” Cora answers. She thinks of a particularly nasty dragonling burn she had healed on the Iron Bull but then recalls something Professor Frédéric of Serault had told her during one of their conversations in the Western Approach. “But I’ve also been told that they’re rather different when they’re alone.”

Obrianna’s head tilts sideways in such a perfect picture of curiosity that the Inquisitor smiles. “Do dragons not like other dragons?” she asks.

“No, I mean when they’re only with other dragons. When there aren’t any people about,” Cora explains.

“Why?” asks Alice, though her attention is more focused on a little green caterpillar she’s just spotted in her berry bush.

“Well, do you think you’d like a stranger throwing open your door and tramping about in your home without permission?”

“Mum and Da and Daisy wouldn’t let them!” Obrianna says. Then, after half a beat, a look of comprehension settles over her face. “And dragons are like that, too!”

“Exactly right,” says Cora.

Obrianna sits back on her heels and considers this in silence for several seconds. “Maybe they only hurt people because they’re frightened,” she says in a quiet, contemplative tone that reminds Cora so much of Palum that her chest tightens.

“Yes,” the Inquisitor says as she drops a final handful of corsberries into her nearly-overflowing basket, “that’s often the way of things.”

---

“Maker’s bloody breath,” Mia manages on a rasping, shaky exhale. She blinks and looks up from the newly-tilled ground to her brother. They are sitting up against two fence posts in the corner of the garden, muddy tools propped nearby. Short streaks of dirt crisscross the tops of Mia’s cheeks where, over the course of Cullen’s account, she had used a gloved knuckle to swipe at tears. He imagines his own face is similarly painted from wiping away sweat.

He had not told her everything, of course. The only person who has come close to hearing the lot of it is Cora, and he has no desire for that to change. But he’d said enough. Enough to explain (though not, he emphasized, to excuse) his absence, both physical and otherwise, over the years, and his decision to leave the Order, and his rotten memory.

“You would hear folk talk of a ‘mad old templar’ every once in a great while, but I always assumed – everyone assumes – it was just a…a consequence of a life spent under, well, under stress. On guard. Who wouldn’t go a bit mad after seeing mages become abominations? And then having to…to…” Mia shakes her head slowly with the wonder of a person whose understanding of the world has just shifted. “Did you know about the lyrium before you were made a full templar?”

“Not really,” Cullen says. He pulls his right knee toward his chest and begins to massage the side of the joint with his thumb. He’d been so focused on breaking up the soil and getting through his story that he’d barely registered the quick, sharp warning pangs. Now, a deep and angry ache has bloomed there. “We knew that we would eventually take it, of course, and that it would require care. We understood that overconsumption could pose a danger to us just as it does to anyone who isn’t a dwarf.”

“The fucking gall of them,” his sister replies, nostrils flaring. “To lure in a…a child. To chain them up without their understanding, knowing full well that they’re sending them to an early grave…” She lifts a handful of the soil she’s been raking between her fingers in a bid to stay composed, and she hurls it away with a disgusted noise. It breaks into pieces that rain down several yards away from them. Then, after a beat, she looks at him again. “I am..so sorry, Cullen.”

He shakes his head. “I am not angry about it, not truly. I was, I think, but…it does not seem worth it anymore.” Dropping his voice, he adds, “And any harm I’ve suffered, well…I’m sure I’ve inflicted it on others twofold.” He had elided these details somewhat – not to save his sister’s good opinion of him, but because she had stopped him from going into specifics.

“I…read several accounts of…of Kirkwall,” she had said when he began to speak on the subject. It was the only time she had interrupted him. “The ones from those apostates, that were published illicitly in the pamphlets. I’m sure they were a bit hyperbolic, but–”

“No,” he had replied, “no, they…were not.” He’d found one of them lying on a table in the mess of the ship he’d taken to the south with Cassandra and Varric. He made it through three-quarters of the thing, stomach churning from more than just seasickness, before the Seeker snatched it out of his hands. “It is the past,” she had said simply, then sat a tankard of watery ale down before each of them.

Now, taking a deep breath, Mia says, “You know I’ve never been a great lover of the Chantry, but this, Cull?”

“I’m not particularly fond of it either, these days,” he says with a sigh. He grits his teeth against a stab of pain that comes from applying too much pressure to his knee. Mia sees this and glances from his face to the joint and back again before apparently deciding not to say anything about it. Small gesture though it is, he feels profoundly grateful.

“I have to admit,” she says, tone lightening a touch, “that you’re the last person I would’ve guessed might say that. You…do still believe, don’t you?”

He nods. “I do. At least…mostly, I do. In the Maker, and Andraste, I do. There are other things, though, that I…I am not certain of.” He thinks of all he’s learned these past few years: the history of which parts of the Chant became canon, the truth about Tranquility, the full account of the Exalted Marches. And what he’s come to understand about magic that he did not allow himself to see for most of his life. He blinks and regards his sister. “And you? What do you believe these days?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You know me – I don’t think about it much,” she says. And while he isn’t sure that he does, in fact, know his sister – their relationship still being a work in progress after his years-long silence – he feels relieved that this trait has remained unchanged. So much so that he is able to pluck a memory about it from his mind.

“I would get so upset with you, the way you snuck a book into the Chantry every time Mum and Papa took us all to a service,” he says with a chuckle. “The one time the Revered Mother caught you, I was terribly pleased with myself, you remember?”

“But her eyes were full of cataracts, so I just told her I was reading the Chant!” Mia finishes gleefully. “Maker, I’d completely forgotten about that. The look on your face after she walked away! Ha! What a pious little snot you were.”

"What are you secreting away to entertain you during services these days? Tethras novels? You can’t imagine how pleased he would be to hear it.”

“No, no,” Mia replies, “I’ve not been in a Chantry since Bran’s wee Tadgh was Blessed. To be honest, I would have been grand not to even bother with the girls’ own Blessings, but Jor wanted to do it, and I’ve no quarrel with it. Just…indifference, I suppose.”

“Jor practices, then?” Cullen asks. He begins working at his other knee, which has tightened considerably since he first sat down, and wonders whether he might find an opportunity to duck away and take one of Cora’s elfroot draughts soon.

“In fits and starts. He goes to the Chantry on festival days, and takes the girls, so they’ve some idea what it’s all about – and to let me sleep in, I think. He might say the odd prayer at times. Mostly, though, I think he wants to show the sisters his gratitude. They gave us food and shelter when we first arrived, and found us the work on the Derfels’ land. And then of course they cared for dear Ben when the Blight began to take him. And sure I’m grateful as well, ‘course I am. But I also…well.” She sighs. “There was a moment, the morning after we made it to South Reach, when one of the sisters is asking me about our home, and do we have any family here, and how long were we traveling, and I was…Maker, I was so tired, Cee…but I tell her because you can’t just say, ‘I’m not in the mood for a chat, thanks,’ when someone’s just brought you your first meal in two days. And after I answer her questions, she says to me, ‘Praise the Maker for delivering you to us safely.’” Mia scoffs and shakes her head. “And I was furious. I didn’t show it, of course – I wouldn’t have had it in me, even if I’d wanted – but underneath, I was blazing. ‘Praise the Maker’? Where was the Maker when my parents were shot through with darkspawn arrows as we ran from Honnleath? Where was the Maker when I didn’t eat for nearly a week because Rosie’s clothes were falling off her little body, and she needed it more? Where was the Maker when Jor’s brother was infected with Blight? The bloody Maker didn’t deliver us to safety – I did, and Jor, and Ben.” She heaves a great, shuddering sigh, then says, voice softer, “And now to hear about the way they’ve…about the templars…” She shakes her head. “I’ve a mind to keep the girls away entirely.”

“That is…your decision, of course. As their mother. But even with…” Cullen glances in the direction of the treeline, from which the odd delighted yelp and spurt of laughter has continued to issue. He thinks of the fragile peace he still feels when he speaks to the Bride of the Maker, of how he has watched trembling young Inquisition soldiers find the courage to face untold horrors after kneeling in prayer, of the dreams that Cassandra has for pulling something good from the corrupted foundation on which the Chantry now precariously sits. He thinks, too, of how the first real conversation he had with the woman he loves began when he asked about the icon of Andraste hanging at her wrist. “Even after all of it. After everything, I believe that there is something…worthwhile in the Chantry. Something to cling to. Though I’m sure you think I sound naive.” He lets out a dry laugh.

Mia studies him for a while before responding. “Cullen, you might be the least naive person in Thedas.”

He chuckles again. “You’ve not heard me put my foot in mouth a thousand times since I left Kirkwall.”

She grins and taps his right foot with her left. “I’m so glad you came. Both of you.” For a moment, he thinks that she will add, “And glad you stayed,” but perhaps she is not quite as omniscient as he thought. Still, her mind must be bending in the same direction, because her smile soon falters. “And I’m so sorry, Cee–”

“Branson is a man fully grown, Mia. He can apologize for himself. What happened was no fault of yours.”

She looks ready to refute this but, after a beat, nods. They return to their labor shortly thereafter, this time pulling up the remaining weeds and pebbles from the soil. After a half dozen sidelong glances at her ever-more-slowly-moving brother, she tries to set him on a different task – checking the seed gathered last year for rot – but he waves her off. He had alluded earlier to certain…difficulties…he’d experienced after ceasing lyrium, but he hadn’t gone into detail. It’s foolish, of course, to continue working alongside her like this when his lower extremities are aching so; he knows that he will pay for it tonight. Still, he cannot bring himself to disclose this. The garden needs planting, and his sister will see it done even if at her own detriment. Besides, the work will go more slowly once the girls are tired out and come shambling back home in need of food, and water, and washing, and the hundred other things an undistracted young child seems to require at any given moment.

Perhaps no longer able to ignore the sweat pouring from his forehead or his poorly-disguised limp, Mia eventually opens her mouth with the clear intent of ordering him to rest. In an effort to forestall this, he asks the question that, though he hadn’t intended to voice it, has been gnawing at his mind all morning.

“Has Branson been angry with me all this time, Mia? For not coming home, not seeking you out during the Blight? Or is it truly about my leaving the Order?”

She grunts as she pulls at an especially stubborn weed. After its roots come free, scattering bits of soil about, she tosses it over the fence and sighs. “In my opinion, he’s not really angry with you at all. Or if he is, it’s just a…a consequence of the rest.”

“'The rest?'”

“I said last night that he’s an angry man, but…that isn’t the right word, really. It’s not as though he’s raging at everyone all the time. I’ve never seen him do what he did at dinner, not once, and judging by the look on Sophie’s face, she hadn’t, either. I think he’s…well, I know that he’s frightened. He’s frightened, and the anger’s just an attempt to hide it.”

Cullen recalls Mia saying something similar the night before. Rosalie had been skeptical of the assessment, and, though he knows his older sister understands Branson far better than he ever could, he cannot help but feel the same. He’s spent much of his life in the company of others’ rage. Most of the templars with whom he served – whether due to personality traits, lyrium, or both – tended toward anger; indeed, it is one reason many Circles were such horrid places. But, he wonders, was that anger not also a consequence of fear? There were a handful of naturally sadistic templars, of course. Any vocation that includes sanctioned violence is bound to attract the like. But the vast majority of templars were normal folk who were tasked with literally living beside their greatest fear. Perhaps, he thinks, terror and rage are natural bedfellows. He files this away to ask Cora about later; her perspective will be interesting.

“And what,” he asks, echoing Rosie, “is he so afraid of?”

She does not answer right away, instead gnawing at her lip and looking elsewhere. Eventually, she says, “There’s no excuse for his behavior. I wouldn’t have you think that I’m trying to make one.”

“I don’t think that, Em,” he says slowly as he tries to discern why she’s hedging about this particular point.

His sister frees another weed from the ground and tosses it over the fence. She stands, wipes her forehead with the least-soiled part of her sleeve, and regards him with, he thinks, a measure of regret, as though she would prefer not to say this next bit.

“A year or two before the Blight, Mum and Papa sat me down for a wee chat. There was this fella in town – do you remember the Bosence family? It was their youngest boy – who was sweet on me. One of those crushes young people get when they’ve got the body of a grown person but not the mind, quite yet. I wasn’t interested in him, not my sort, but we were of an age where marriage wasn’t entirely out of the question, and Mum and Papa said they thought it was time to speak to me about it.” A smile cracks her serious expression. “I was mortified, of course – thought they were going to explain where babies come from as though I weren’t already eighteen. But no. You know Papa’s mother died when he was a boy, right?”

Cullen nods. “She’d married very young, if I recall. And died a year later, from a pox or somesuch?”

“Ah, well, that’s the thing,” Mia says. “It weren’t a pox. Just after Papa was born, she had an…incident. That’s what he said his father called it.”

“An ‘incident’?”

“She set their house on fire, Cull.”

“Maker’s breath! On pur–”

“On accident. With her hands.” Mia looks at him pointedly. He blinks several times, uncomprehending. “Her bare hands.”

Cullen opens his mouth to respond but finds that he does not have the words. His sister, he thinks, is having him on, and rather cruelly, considering what Bran said to Cora last night. Of course, it isn’t uncommon for someone to learn of a secret mage tucked away in the family tree – a second cousin who, it turns out, hadn’t been killed by wolves as a child, or a great uncle who hadn’t actually sneaked aboard a Tevinter-bound ship in his youth – since Cullen himself shares his bed with one. But his…his own grandmother? A mage? And his father hadn’t breathed a word about it?

“But…but why keep such a thing secret?” As he struggles to articulate his confusion, an alarming possibility dawns on him. “ Unless he…he hadn’t wanted Mum to know? Would she…not have…have agreed to marry him? Because of the risk…”

“No, Maker, no!” Mia replies quickly. “Papa was an honest man. Don’t worry yourself on that account. No, he didn’t learn the truth himself until his own father was on his deathbed, which was after you and I were already in the world. But…can you imagine it, Cull? Starting your life, marrying, having a child, and then suddenly finding that you’re a…that you can…” She shakes her head in wonder. “Papa said it were a blessing she perished in the fire. I know, I know – a hard and awful thing to say, but think what they would’ve done to her, a woman who’d nearly killed her own babe with uncontrolled magic. She’d have been fortunate to be sent to Kinloch; she was more likely to be murdered by an angry mob.”

They contemplate the horror of the tale in silence for several long moments before Cullen remembers what led Mia to recount it in the first place. “So…Mum and Papa, they wanted to, er…to warn you. About magic in the bloodline.”

“Just so. They obviously hadn’t made much of it – they had two more children after they found out – but they thought I deserved to know. Sure, they would’ve told the rest of you as well, eventually, but then, well, the Blight.” She sighs. “It went completely from my mind until Bran fell in love with Sophie. When I told him…Maker, but he was terrified. Sophie’s family aren’t nobility, but they do have money and a fair amount of influence in South Reach. We were parentless Blightfolk with hardly a copper to our name, back then. Her father was less than thrilled about the match as it was, and Bran was sure she – or her family – would turn him away if they knew about our grandmother.”

“But…surely he told her?” Cullen asks, incredulous.

Mia presses her lips together and shrugs. “I don’t rightly know. I’d like to think so. But…I can’t say for certain. Either way, after Eimear was born…he changed. He’d always tended toward the spiritual, maybe from looking up to you as a boy, but he’d been more…measured, I suppose, in his belief. These past few years, well, there are times when he seems near to fanaticism. And maybe it’s not related, but…I think he believes that, if he just…just does everything right, the way the Chantry says, the way he thinks the Maker demands, if he can prove his devotion to Andraste, then surely the Maker wouldn’t afflict his children with magic. As though it were all just some…divine bargain. As though folk haven’t believed such tripe for hundreds of years, only to be proven wrong.” She makes a noise of disgust and shakes her head.

“The Maker would never abide his breaking bread with an apostate and an oathbreaker,” Cullen says, bringing his sister’s explanation to its logical conclusion. He lets out a humorless laugh. “Not without taking the opportunity to rebuke us.”

“I should’ve anticipated it, Cull.”

“Nonsense.” He waves a hand at her.

“Do you think Cora was terribly wounded? By what Branson called her?” Mia, who has remained relatively unmoved throughout their discussion about their younger brother, regards Cullen with deeply furrowed brows.

“No,” he replies with the hint of a sardonic smile. “Heart of stone, that one. She was the one talking me down last night.” As if summoned, the hearty cackle of the woman in question, accompanied by the girls’ delighted laughter and shouting, again rings in the commander’s ears. He turns to see the trio attempting some sort of synchronized skipping, Daisy prancing around them, a mere fifty yards away. Cora, apparently noticing his attention, gives a wave.

In spite of everything – the tale of his grandmother’s tragic end, Branson’s behavior, his own insufficient memory and ailing body, the arduous road ahead for the Inquisition and southern Thedas – he is so content in this moment that he feels a stinging at the backs of his eyes. He sees Mia shift in his periphery and turns back to see her studying him with utter self-satisfaction.

“You’re absolutely mad about her, aren’t you?” she asks, though there is not enough doubt in the sentence for it to really be a question.

“Am I so obvious as that?” Cullen chuckles, though his words, too, are a statement; he knows how dreadful he is at hiding his feelings when deeply moved. He would only look foolish if he tried, and he finds, sitting here with his sister, that he does not want to.

“I’m afraid so, little brother,” she says with a grin as she hauls herself to her feet once more. She tucks a stray curl into the scarf tying down her hair, then holds out a hand toward him. With one hand using the hoe as leverage and the other accepting her offer of help, he hauls himself to his feet with a small grunt and, he hopes, an even smaller wince. Mia seems on the verge of commenting on it again but thankfully chooses otherwise.

“Muuuuuum!” Obrianna (or Alice? At this distance, they’re completely identical.) shouts with glee, breaking into a trot as she sees her mother. Mia gives a wave before turning to her brother.

“I never dreamed I’d see you this happy, Cull,” she says, regarding him with a joyful sort of pride. “A bit more meat on your bones, your mind at peace, and lovesick, to boot.” She shakes her head and returns her gaze to her approaching children and their keeper. “Maker, but we are fortunate.”

Chapter Text

“Can you lace me up?” Cora asks, turning her back to Cullen and pulling her braid over her shoulder and out of the way.

“I should be delighted,” he replies. She feels him tighten the green cording midway along her back, then work his way down until he reaches the yet-unthreaded grommets near the base of her bodice. “Is that too much?” he asks after pulling it tight again.

“No, not at all.” She turns her head until she can see him in her periphery. His hair is still damp from the bath, and the gold in his curls catches the light emanating from the hearth in their room. Focused as he is on the laces of her kirtle, he does not seem to notice her spying. “Was it foolish of me, spending coin on this? Am I going to look like I’m…trying too hard?”

In truth, she’s felt uncomfortably self-conscious since the moment the dress caught her eye. She and Cullen had taken the girls to wander about the great, weeklong festival market, not intending to buy anything but perhaps a sweet or two. And then, just as they were ready to turn homeward, a breeze had rifled the bright goldenrod skirt of a dress hanging at a nearby stall. Though not generally one to put much thought into clothing, she had been immediately smitten.

Cullen had seen the delight on her face. He had also spotted the abashed uncertainty that had swept it away. He’d glanced at the vendor, looked back at Cora for a long moment, and then, with all the ease in the world, had struck up a conversation with the woman. “Are you the craftswoman, madam?” he had asked, motioning to the garments hanging about.

“Aye, so,” the woman had replied with a nod and no little pride.

“Your work is beautiful.” He had surveyed several nearby items before reaching out toward the chemise and kirtle that had started the whole interaction. “Is this Amaranthine wool?”

Cora had not really heard the rest of their conversation; she was too preoccupied with hiding a sudden rush of emotion from the merchant and her pair of sticky-fingered charges. Cullen had not cared about the dress, not really; apart from matters of utility, he knows less about clothing even than she. Yet here he was, exchanging pleasantries and plying the vendor with questions because he had read both the want and the reluctance on her face.

She recalls the first time he did this. They had been at a banquet in Halamshiral, naive to how tumultuous things would become at the next night’s ball. Some Orlesian noblewoman had spoken flippantly of the Circle, or had asked Cora some ignorant question to that end – she cannot remember the precise circumstances now – and the Inquisitor had seized up. When she tried to speak, she found that she could force no sound from her mouth. And Cullen, who hated every minute of being in that place as vehemently as she, had deftly stepped into the conversation until she could collect herself.

Adaptive though Cora is, she nevertheless sometimes becomes painfully aware of having lived the majority of her life in another world. She will speak too casually of the Circle, or mention having never heard some common children’s rhyme. Or perhaps, as in that moment, she might realize that she doesn’t know how to haggle at a market because her templar escorts always did such things so that townsfolk would not be forced to speak to her. At such times, she is suddenly seized by fear that those around her have forgotten until now that she is a mage and that she will make a misstep that reminds them. They will look upon her with the derision reserved for mages, their body language suggesting violence. She will become nothing but an apostate once again. A threat. A stain. A curse.

Though Cullen has shielded her in this way a number of times now, his ability to sense precisely when she needs it is still a wonder to her. Now, as she runs her fingers over the embroidered greenery splashed across the dress bodice, she feels a lovely ache deep in her chest at the memory of his asking the dressmaker whether they might be able to have a closer look at “that yellow one, with the lilies sewn on the front.”

“Of course not,” he replies, glancing up to meet her eyes for a moment before returning to his task. “You saw how crowded the market was yesterday. Plenty of folk buy or make something for Wintersend. And besides, all that matters is that you like it.” He gives the laces one more pull, then expertly triple-knots them. As he steps back to admire his handiwork, she half-turns toward him. His gaze travels from the lacing down to the hem of her skirt, then up again to her face. She can feel her face warming at his smile. “Although I admit that I quite like it as well.”

Cora laughs and begins to give an experimental twirl before she feels Cullen cry out and wrap a hand around her forearm. She stops, alarmed, and he pulls her gently toward him while looking past her to the fireplace. “Perhaps save that for outdoors. Or…further away from open flames, at least.”

“My hero,” she says in a breathy, twinkling falsetto.

He shakes his head in false exasperation and, with a smirk, leans down to kiss her. She smiles against his lips for a moment before returning it. When she brings a hand to his chest to brace herself as she leans further into him, she is reminded that he hasn’t yet fully dressed. She splays her fingers and runs her palm up to the tawny curls growing at his sternum. His own hands have now begun pressing into the small of her back and hip, respectively, and a low rumble from his causes his lips to vibrate against hers. At this, a fire ignites in her lower belly with the speed and intensity of a practiced mage summoning flame. It quickly travels downward and becomes a throbbing between her legs.

They’ve hardly touched one another in weeks. Such a stretch was common before they defeated Corypheus, but the long winter at Skyhold let them grow accustomed to reaching for one another as often as they wished – which, apart from the few weeks when Cullen’s pain was particularly severe, was quite often indeed. Thus, their abstinence since starting this journey has been both strange and frustrating. It made some kind of sense during their travels, between Cullen’s anxiety about reuniting with his family and discomfort with Cole’s wandering, invasive mind. In the past week, though, both lovers’ overtures have ended poorly. They have collapsed, physically and emotionally exhausted, into their little bed at the end of each day. One night, Cullen had pulled Cora’s nightshirt down to reveal her shoulder and had begun kissing from there to her neck only to find that, when he reached her face, she had fallen asleep. The next, Cora had pulled him atop her before meeting his worried gaze and realizing that he was shaken from ruminating again on his brother’s outburst. It feels, she thinks, like they are two musicians reading the same score and playing the same tune but unable to match their tempos.

It therefore takes only a minute or two for their soft touches and gentle kissing to become wild, frantic, ravenous. He lifts one of her legs, and she wraps it around his waist. He presses his sudden erection against her pelvis while simultaneously gripping the bottom of her thigh with one hand and, with the other, fumbling to undo his work from minutes before. Cora, meanwhile, tries to untie his breeches without pulling any part of her body away from him.

It’s hardly surprising when, entangled and single-minded as they are, a sudden knock at their door sends them both tumbling onto the floor in a heap of limbs and billowing golden fabric.

“Cull! Cora!” cries Rosalie’s voice from the hallway. “Mia’s asked me to come fetch you. They’ve started carving up the lamb, and latecomers only get the gristly bits!”

The couple has fallen such that Cullen’s head is hovering just above the side of Cora’s torso. He lets his forehead drop against her hip in defeat; then, heaving a sigh, he looks up at her with a mournful, sardonic smile. For all her irritation with the interruption, the Inquisitor can barely contain her laughter. She claps a hand over her mouth and ducks her face away as Cullen, in a fair attempt at nonchalance, cries, “Right, yes, we…we will be down directly!”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you!” Rosie teases. Only once they’ve listened to her footsteps disappear do they let their laughter burst free.

Gripping the nearby bedpost so that he doesn’t fall directly on top of Cora, he brings himself upright again. “This is getting to be ridiculous,” he huffs as he stretches out a hand to help her from the floor. Though mostly light, his tone now has a slight edge. At least, she thinks, they are entirely in agreement on this.

“We’ll manage,” she sighs as she dusts her skirt off. She nearly adds, “We’ll be alone again soon enough,” before catching her tongue and then inwardly chiding herself. The Rutherfords have been nothing but kind, welcoming, gracious, and generous – with the exception of Branson, who Cora began leaving out of her mental picture of the family earlier this week – and here she is, looking forward to the road again. How childish of her–

“It…might be churlish of me,” Cullen says quietly, interrupting her self-flagellation, “but I…well, I must admit that…” He pulls on his tunic, then reaches for the vest meant to fasten over it. When he opens his mouth again to finish the thought, he seems to decide against it, instead pressing his lips together and shaking his head. A Chantry bell rings in the distance, indicating seven o’clock and, therefore, the start of the feast. The commander looks at her with a smile and holds out his hand. “Shall we, then?”

As they make their way toward the great bonfire roaring on the heath just outside the city gate – one of half a dozen celebrations throughout South Reach and its environs tonight – Cora finds herself growing inexplicably uneasy. It hardly makes sense; she’s looking forward to the festivities, especially with the holiday’s religious aspect having officially concluded with the setting of the sun. The anxiety she felt earlier in the day, she thinks, ought to have set with it.

She had risen with Cullen in the wee hours of the morning, the memory of an unpleasant dream swiftly retreating from her mind. “You really needn’t get up yet, love,” he had whispered into her ear before kissing it. An hour or so before, he had accidentally woken her with an elbow to her shoulder whilst thrashing about from a nightmare of his own. “You know Mia won’t take offense.”

They had decided yesterday that she would join Mia for some early tea and cake, a precursor to the larger breakfast they would eat with their men, Rosie, and the twins once the larger group returned from Wintersend service at the Chantry. As on other holy days, South Reach’s Revered Mother would lead the massive crowd of celebrants in reciting the Chant of Light at the exact moment when the sun’s first rays pierced the east-facing stained glass of the Chantry. And as on other holy days, Mia would be sitting comfortably in her own home, watching the dawn come through her own window. “I’d love the company, if you don’t fancy going to the service,” she had said to Cora, who had immediately accepted. This had been followed by protestations from Alice, who was not at all looking forward to listening to the drone of the Chant for an hour, but to no avail. “Sure, it’s good for you to learn about it, and it’s important to your father.”

For his part, Cullen had seemed content to attend just as Cora had been content not to do; they hadn’t even discussed it. But as they had risen and gone through their morning ablutions, Cullen had paused behind the wash basin as she had soaped her face and had met her gaze through the mirror. “You…you know that my going to the Chantry is no reflection on you, Cora?” he had asked apropos of nothing.

“What?” she had replied with confusion, blinking her bleary eyes at him in the glass. “What are you talking about?”

“I only mean that…” His tongue had darted over his lip and he had run a hand through the yet-untamed forest of curls on his head. “With what happened…with…Branson, I mean…and I…” He had stopped, closed his eyes, and taken a deep breath to steady his mind. “I worry that you might take it as a slight. My going to the service.”

“Oh, love,” she had said as she wiped her face clean. She had turned to him then and smoothed a wrinkle from the front of his burgundy cambric shirt. Holding his gaze, she continued, “I know you, Cullen. I know your heart. I know there’s room enough for me and Andraste both.” At this, the scar on his lip had inched upward as a smile began to form. Placing a hand on his cheek, the Inquisitor had studied him for a moment before adding, “Your brother is not the Maker, Cullen. Your devotion is your business alone. Don’t let him or anyone else taint it.”

Easier said than done, she thinks now as the smells of mutton, smoke, and rosemary pull her back to the present. For a part of her, as she had bid Cullen and the others farewell that morning, had longed to go with them. Not because she preferred the drone of the Chant to Mia’s conversation – far from it, having come to adore Cullen’s elder sister more than she would’ve thought possible in a mere five days – but because trudging to the Chantry in the early hours of a holy day with one’s family is such a normal thing. Indeed, Cullen, with neither the armor nor the bearing of the Commander of Inquisition Forces, had fit perfectly into the little group making its way up the road and through the city gate. Hardly like a visitor at all.

It is here, as that same commander gives her hand a squeeze, that she begins to understand her disquiet. She looks up at him, and he nods toward a large crowd-queue from which folk are slowly emerging carrying trenchers of steaming meat and turnips. He moves fluidly through the throng with the occasional, “Pardon me, friend,” or “Might we get past?” His voice and body are all ease and comfort.

Cullen had never so much as passed through South Reach prior to their visit, and yet everything about him here fits. Apart from the early uncertainty, apart from Branson, he has looked perfectly content each time Cora has met his gaze. She has rarely felt so happy for someone as she has for him these past few days, and yet a knot has begun forming in her stomach. An ache, though selfish and shameful it may be, at the realization that he was made for a world that she cannot inhabit.

She can try, of course. She can say little of herself, laugh easily, pick berries, run about with children. She can light her fires with tinder, talk of silly novels. Share a pot of tea. Buy a dress from the market.

She might convince them, for a while. Might even convince herself. But life is not a fairy story, and even the most cunningly-disguised witch is always found out in the end.

---

“Me again!” Alice demands, thrusting her arm into the air beside Cullen. Her twin sister, giggling and dizzy from being spun about, tries to steady herself on his other side. For the past two songs, he has been “dancing” with his nieces. This, by their request, has mostly consisted of raising a hand over their head from which he can twirl them in circles.

“I think it would be wise to take a break,” he says. Obrianna, in spite of how she protested against him stopping, is looking rather green.

“But–”

“What’s say we give your uncle a wee rest, my loves?” says Jor, appearing suddenly with a tankard of ale in hand. Cullen gives him a nod of thanks before stepping away to fetch a drink of his own and – blessedly – a place to sit. He’s been on his feet for hours, and his knees have begun to scream.

Kneeling for half the Wintersend service certainly didn’t help, either, but it was worth it. As the Chant had washed over his tongue and hummed against his ears, he had felt a serenity that he rarely associates with the Chantry these days. Even the fidgeting of the twins beside him had not broken the meditative spell of the recitation. He had emerged from the sanctuary with his heart full and his mind at ease.

Unfortunately, that lightness of spirit barely made it past the Chantry threshold. Prior to the service, congregants had placed their seed tithes onto a pyre in the yard; when they had emerged from the Chantry, they had gathered around the mass of kernels. Branson now stood beside it. Cullen had hoped that the size of the crowd might hide him from his brother’s view, perhaps even allow them to leave before the rite began. It was not to be. Bran, in surveying the gathered faithful, had spotted and made eye contact with his older brother.

The commander does not, as a rule, go out of his way to avoid conflict. Though he finds it unpleasant and often anxiety-inducing, he prefers that disagreements be voiced. Stewing on grievances helps no one. This belief is a point of commonality between himself and Cora; a great strength, he thinks, of their relationship. Yet it was because of her that he had hoped he might not have to speak with his brother again anytime soon.

Nothing to be done for it now, though, he’d thought as he settled in for the ceremony.

“Do you have a moment, Cullen?” Bran had asked after the prayers were said and the pyre lit. He had struggled to hold his older brother’s gaze, though it had taken Cullen a moment to deduce why. Shame, he had realized. An emotion he’s more accustomed to feeling himself than to recognizing on others’ faces.

“Er…yes,” he had said, and the two had put some distance between themselves and the crowd of people now animatedly discussing the day’s festivities.

“I, er…” Bran had willed himself to look up from his boots. “I wanted to apologize. I made an arse of myself.”

Cullen had worked to keep the surprise from his expression, and the tightness in his chest had begun to ease. Perhaps, he thought, he ought not have judged his brother so harshly.

“I…wish I had known. About what you did for us. But then, I…suppose I oughtn’t have assumed that…” Branson had cleared his throat. “I am sorry.”

Cullen had allowed himself a moment to gather his thoughts. He had felt so moved by this unexpected penitence that his words were coming together more slowly than usual. “Thank you, Bran,” he had managed. “I…well…thank you.”

Bran had nodded and, taking a deep breath, had furrowed his brow. “I let my anger get in the way of my concern for you, and that was wrong of me. I realized it this morning, during the Chant: that if I hadn’t lost my head, I might’ve spoken to you like this, as brothers. That I’d lost my chance. But then I saw you in the yard, and I knew I could make it right.”

The remaining tightness in Cullen’s chest had slowly sunk into his stomach. Concern for…?

“It’s often hard to see the truth in the face of our wrongdoings. Blessed Andraste’s words helped me to do so. Perhaps she has given you clarity as well.” Branson had surveyed his elder brother with something like expectation. After a few beats of silence, he continued, “Whether or no, it…it would be wrong not to speak the truth to you. I care about you, Cullen, and I think…I know that you have been surrounded by a…a number of folk who have turned away from the Maker, even if they do not realize it. And He is merciful when the wicked lead us astray, but…only for a time. Eventually, if we are truly faithful, if we do not scorn Andraste’s sacrifice, we must heed Her words.”

“And what words are those?” Cullen had asked, though he already knew what Bran would say. He has heard the verse, read it, spoken it, meditated upon it so often throughout his life that it feels as much a part of him as the marrow of his very bones.

“‘Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him.’ And yet you have allowed it to rule over you.”

In truth, Cullen does not properly remember the rest of the conversation, if indeed it had continued at all. He had been filled with such sudden, blinding rage that he had thought only that he must turn around, must walk away right then, or he would cause a scene.

Jor must have been looking on, he realizes now, for his brother-in-law had appeared seemingly out of nowhere and placed a hand on his shoulder, asking jovially, “Shall we shove off? Breakfast don’t make itself, brother.”

He had not mentioned the incident to Cora. He will eventually, but she’d been nervous enough about tonight that he’d thought it best not to add to her fears. She does not often name her worries or even show signs that they exist, but her uncertainty about participating in the festival had been unsurprising. Though taking off the mantle of the Inquisitor has been a boon, it has also left her vulnerable. If she is not the savior of the world, then she is simply an apostate. It would take only one loose-lipped person to expose her.

Cullen does not think Branson would be that person, if only because it would harm his reputation if people knew that his wayward older brother had brought a mage into their midst. Still, telling Cora of Bran’s admonishment would have done nothing to ease her mind.

A flagon of cider from the last of the autumn apples, however, had done. That, and the Rutherford women’s insistence that she come learn how to dance a Fereldan reel.

“Sorry, Cull,” Rosie had said with an impish grin as she’d hooked an arm through one of Cora’s, “No boys allowed. Sisters only.” She and Mia, already tipsy from starting their night with swallows of whisky, had giggled at the silliness of this. Cora, too, was grinning, but he saw something else in her expression as she let herself be hauled away toward the massive bonfire. She had been deeply, unmistakably moved by Rosalie’s words – or, rather, word.

Sisters.

Cullen has never believed in fate. Even as a child, lover of stories though he was, the idea of destiny did not appeal to him. There had not been a moment when the sun suddenly burst through the Honnleath Chantry’s stained glass window that depicted the first templars, blinding his young eyes with the radiant light of the Maker. He had never heard the voice of Andraste as he prayed (the one close call had, of course, been Mia playing a prank). He had not single-handedly hefted a fallen horse off a helpless old woman with some miraculous reserve of holy strength. The strong arm of destiny was fine for tales, but he had never believed life to be a fairy story.

No, his choice to train with the Order and, later, to become a full Knight-Templar were decisions born of intense devotion and conviction, but they had still been his to make. He had never regarded his path as an inevitability; such a thing would have cheapened his love for the Maker and His Bride.

There had been a brief time, just after Uldred’s imprisonment, torture, and murder of many of the templars in Kinloch Hold, when he had wavered. Knight-Commander Greagoir had attempted to comfort him with the assurance that his “ordeal” had been preordained by the Maker so that Andraste might fulfill Her holy purpose of begging mercy for one of her beloved knights. “And those who were slain?” he had wanted to ask, for he alone had survived of the dozen Uldred had taken. “Were they less beloved than I?” He had said nothing, choosing instead to reflect on the Knight-Commander’s words as though they had come from the mouth of the Divine Himself. Was doubt of the Chantry’s teachings not the very thing that had put Uldred on his path to abomination, after all?

In Kirkwall, Meredith had been quick to disabuse him of Greagoir’s notions. “Absurd,” she had said when Cullen had discussed it with her. “Heretical, even. That the Maker would even think of wasting His infinite wisdom and power to direct the affairs of mortals like some layabout pushing pieces around a chessboard! Hubris.” For all of their many differences, Cullen had been inclined to agree. His time in the City of Chains had reaffirmed this. Nearly every occurrence in Kirkwall – the upheavals, minor rebellions, and murders; the running aground of a fleet of Qunari dreadnoughts and the quiet occupation that ensued; the attempted overthrow of the Chantry-sanctioned government and slaughter of the viscount; and the unearthing of the primeval red lyrium that would plague Thedas for years to come – had been so chaotic as to feel untethered from reality. There had been no fate at work there, no ordination of events.

Even his joining the Inquisition had been arbitrary. He still cannot explain why he agreed to it, not really. Cassandra’s arguments had been powerful, but hardly more than his hopelessness was. It was no more likely that he would accept her offer than that he would reject it.

But he hadn’t rejected it. And then, well…

He hears, above the considerable noise of the festivities, the familiar half-cackle, half-bark of Cora’s irreverent, contagious laughter. She must have tripped during the reel, for Mia and Rosalie have each clasped one of her arms and are hauling her to her feet, their own laughter coming out in gasps as they try to catch their breath.

She is dripping with sweat, and her cheeks are flushed a deep, splotchy red. Pieces of dark hair are falling out of the wild knot piled atop of her head, and the flower she tucked into it earlier has lost most of its petals. Her legs are muddied past her ankles, as is the hand’s breadth of fabric at the hem of her skirt. She is an utter mess, and she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

Cullen does not believe in fate. But tonight, as he watches Cora, he is certain that right here, adoring from afar this woman he loves almost deliriously, is precisely where he was always meant to be.

He loses sight of her amidst the dancing crowd. Several minutes later, after the fiddler plays a final, protracted note to end the song, she reappears, striding toward him with a broad, delighted grin on her face. She sits down heavily beside him, and he leans in for a kiss.

“I probably stink like a bog,” she laughs, still breathless from the last dance. Her words have the melodious cadence they tend to acquire on the rare occasion when she indulges in more than a flagon or two. It tickles Cullen, but he also knows that she’s likely more sober than he at this point.

“Not as far as I can tell,” he says. He pulls the nearly-bare flower stem from her hair and holds it out to her. “Enjoying yourself?”

“I really am,” she says, taking the stem and using it to tap the tip of his nose. “It looked like the girls were having the time of their lives, earlier. You’re a very good uncle.”

“Taking my ease and watching you dance is rather easier on my knees, though. And my eyes.”

Cora smirks. “My, my, but the commander’s words are honeyed tonight,” she says before pressing her lips against his.

The sound of a hand drum signals the start of the next song, and the fiddle and piccolo soon join in. After Cullen fetches them both something to drink, the couple sit, leaning against one another and watching the dancers. The music’s tempo picks up. The onlookers begin to clap and shout encouragement, giving the whole scene a joyfully raucous accompaniment.

Out of his periphery, Cullen sees Cora looking at him. He isn’t sure what to make of her expression. Before he can ask, she begins to speak.

“On the road here,” Cora says, her voice louder both so that he can hear her above the din and because she’s not usually one for whisky, “I was so nervous, and I thought that it was for the same reason you were nervous: that seeing your family might go awry somehow. But I think…I don’t think that my concern was so selfless as that, if I’m being honest.” She takes a sip of cider and then, after biting her bottom lip for a moment, regards him with a melancholy smile. “I think that I…I think that a part of me was worried that everything would go off perfectly, and that you would be happier than you could have imagined, and that you’d not want to leave, and that I would see it in your eyes forever after that – the longing to be here, with your family, around normal people with normal problems, instead of…well.”

“Cora, wha–”

“But as it turns out, watching you with these people who love you so dearly, it just…it makes me so happy to see you happy that all of those worries seem…well, they’re not important. Because I want that happiness for you no matter what it might mean.” With her free hand, she reaches out and cups his cheek. Her eyes have grown shiny with unshed tears, but she is beaming at him. “I love you so, Cullen.”

His mind is working even more slowly than hers, no doubt, and he wishes that the comfortable haze of drink would vanish for just a moment. Perhaps he misunderstood her just now, or maybe she’s misunderstood him. He’s been perfectly content most of the time; yes, even happy, as she said. But how could she possibly think that…why would she believe…

Maker, but he cannot properly finish a thought while this many drinks shy of sober. Frustration overtakes him as he searches his sluggish mind in vain for the right words. After several long moments of this, he instead plunges his face toward hers and kisses her. It takes a beat for her to respond, sudden as it is. It’s sloppier than he meant, and he worries that because of that she might not feel its gravity. Still, she kisses him back with eagerness that matches his own. He pulls away just enough to look into her eyes and, though his knees will do their utmost to make him regret it tomorrow, says, “Dance with me.”

And dance they do – or attempt to do, at any rate. He has never had a particularly strong sense of rhythm, to his late drum-playing father’s disappointment, and he is saved from total ineptitude at leading a dance partner only because the movements feel like distant relatives of swordplay. Still, Cora is so clearly surprised and delighted by his invitation that she hardly seems to notice his missteps. Her grin as they first join the fray quickly becomes a tipsy giggle, and by the time a hurdy-gurdy joins the reel, their laughter rivals even the loudest packs of hyenas that roam the Western Approach.

When, panting with exhaustion and thirst, they step away from the bonfire and gulp down some water, he meets her eyes over their raised tankards. There is a shine of mischief there, he thinks, and perhaps something more. A man and woman, giggling like children who’ve just absconded with sweet rolls cooling on a windowsill, stagger past them toward one of the ale kegs. The revelers have bits of straw in their disheveled hair, and the knees of the man’s breaches are dirt-stained. Cullen glances in the direction from which they’ve come and sees the outline of a building – a barn, it looks like, or a stable – in that distant darkness. When he looks back at Cora, he sees that she has followed his gaze and is now grinning wickedly at him.

He cannot say whether it’s the liquor or lingering adrenaline from dancing, but he impulsively grasps her hand and pulls her in that direction.

“Cullen!” she laughs, trailing behind him for half a second before fully processing his intentions. She skips to catch up and squeezes his hand.

As they walk hurriedly toward the building, he sees folk flitting about in the shadows of other such structures to the left and right. The rustle of clothes, the creaking of doors, laughter, and shushes drift on the breeze during the quiet between songs. This is absurd, isn’t it? Sneaking about with only darkness to cloak them because he wants her so? But his inner arguing is interrupted by Cora passing him, and now she is the one doing the pulling. If they’re going to do something ridiculous and juvenile, he thinks, at least they’re of exactly the same mind about it.

They stumble their way behind the barn, where the light of the distant bonfire cannot reveal them. Only the moon allows them to find the wall, which Cora backs against while pulling Cullen to her urgently. He complies, pressing himself against her and covering her lips with his own. They pick up where they left off in their room at the inn, all scrabbling hands and searching tongues. Eventually, he pulls away to catch his breath and sees that she, though panting, is grinning up at him.

“Oh, I have missed you,” Cullen murmurs into her ear as he dips down toward her again. Strands of hair too short to join the pile atop her head tickle his nose and lips, and he leans in further. Tilting his head down and nuzzling into her neck, he inhales the sharp scent of sweat. Without even thinking, he puts his barely-parted lips to her skin. He kisses her, then pushes his tongue forward and tastes her.

“And you’ve chosen the moment when I’m a disgusting mess from dancing for two hours straight to rectify this?” she asks. Her tone is teasing, but there is an undercurrent of concern in it.

“I’ve chosen the moment when I could not wait any longer,” he says as he pulls back to look at her. The truth is that she could crawl directly out of a bog and he would still make love to her. The truth is that the sight and smell and taste of her like this rouses something in him that feels almost animalistic. The truth is that he would like very much to have her right here, against the damp, smoke-scented wood paneling on the outside of some South Reach farmer’s barn. But he does not say any of these things, because he is certain that they would sound contrived and false, as though he’s reciting dialogue from the latest Swords and Shields.

She puts her hands on either side of his head and regards him, as best he can tell from the moonlight, with naked ardor. “I love you,” she says after a beat. Then she pulls his face to hers and kisses him fervently once more. Her mouth is already open when it meets his, and her tongue flicks immediately against his lips. He parts them, inviting her in.

His hands tighten reflexively onto her hips, but it is not enough. After sliding them up and around her, he pulls her body against his. Yes, he thinks as the softness of her, from breasts to thighs, melts into him, Maker, yes. He feels something akin to relief when they are wrapped around one another. Ridiculous, but there it is.

Just as Cullen is maneuvering one of his legs between hers and she is moving her hands to grasp at his back, a peal of drunken laughter rings out from not a dozen yards away. They both jerk their heads up, wide-eyed in the darkness. A shape is stumbling along toward the nearby copse of trees. It takes a moment for him to tell that the dark mass is actually another pair of lovers half-walking, half-groping.

“We certainly aren't not the only ones with questionable judgment tonight,” Cora whispers, a poorly-suppressed laugh in her voice.

He turns back to her. “I may not be entirely sober, but my judgment is just fine,” he replies with a grin.

She eyes him skeptically. They have shared the occasional kiss on the ramparts when no one else is around, yes, and there are the brief touches – a hand at her lower back during a meeting, a squeeze of her fingers beneath the dinner table – but Cullen is otherwise careful not to engage in public displays of his affection. Their first kiss (if one does not count the liaison at Adamant, and Cora generally doesn’t) outside his office had been the talk of the keep for days.

“I should not have…that is…” She recalls how he had spoken with her later, wracked with anxiety and guilt. “I do not want to undermine who you are as our leader. As my leader. And with the former templars…I mean…well, I lived in a barracks for most of my life, and I…I know how people talk. I just…”

“Cullen,” she had said, her voice and her fingers at his cheek both gentle. Even in those early days she had known how to recall him to himself.

He had taken a deep breath. “I do not want people to think, even for a moment, even because of idle gossip, that my influence on your decisions extends outside the War Council.”

Cora had agreed with him, of course, but not only for herself. She had worried that talk of their relationship could similarly influence the Inquisition’s former templars to doubt their commander’s integrity. If he had to hand down an order that seemed to favor the mages – as often happened, though the inverse was just as common – would whispers turn into resentment? The peace within the Inquisition’s ranks was too tenuous to risk it.

She thinks over this now as she studies his face to gauge whether he is indeed of sound mind. True, neither of them is completely sober; but neither is quite drunk, either. Not on the festival’s offerings, anyway. No, their snogging behind a barn is the result of something headier, more nebulous: freedom. In South Reach, they are just another pair of relatives visiting to celebrate Wintersend. There is nothing but a vague notion that Cullen was a templar and now serves, perhaps, some arl or thegn. Cora is not the Inquisitor here, not even a mage; she’s just a woman from the Free Marches, and the romantic partner – or maybe wife? – of the eldest Rutherford sibling. Every person they’ve met outside the immediate family assumes that they are, as bizarre as it feels to Cora, normal people. And they’ve watched no small number of normal people sneak away from the bonfire tonight, hands grasping at one another, to find some nearby secret place.

“I want you so, my love,” he murmurs, breath ragged, and she returns to the present.

She slides her hand up and over the tunic covering his chest until she’s reached his collar. Grasping the fabric between her fingers, she pulls him down to her and presses her mouth fiercely against his. She feels the rumble of a near-growl against her lips before his tongue has pushed between them. With the same desperation, his hands squeeze at her hips. In an instant, his leg has pushed between hers once again, and he is kissing her with an intensity she has neither felt from him nor exhibited herself in months.

She tugs up at the skirts of her kirtle until they are bunched at her waist. Cullen holds the fabric there and slides his knee forward until it rests against the wood of the structure behind her. Coming down from her tiptoes, she puts her weight against his thigh and gives an experimental roll of her hips. Her sweat-damp smallclothes are thin enough, but his breeches are a thick twill. She huffs in frustration.

She can feel Cullen’s lips curve into a smile against hers, and he pulls away, panting, to grin at her. “Not used to fumbling around in the dark with your clothes on, are you?”

“Well, I’m an adult, and this is not a Circle library, so, yes, you could say I’ve gotten a bit rusty at this,” she snarks back. “I suppose templars never quite get past the ‘groping in dark corners’ phase, do they? Wouldn’t want to be caught unarmored in a crisis, and all that?”

“You’re awfully cheeky for someone who’s supposed to be exhausted from dancing,” Cullen says, moving his mouth gradually closer again until it brushes Cora’s. She parts her lips slightly as though preparing for a kiss, but he goes no further. After a moment, she realizes that he’s teasing her. She huffs and crushes her mouth against his with an insistence that makes him chuckle.

As he pushes his tongue against hers, she rolls her hips several more times, trying again to find the right combination of pressure and friction. He eventually pulls back from their kissing and says, breathing heavily, “Shall I lend you a hand?”

“Ever the gentleman,” she says with a smirk. As he delves under her skirt with one hand, she tilts her hips to make room. She shivers when his searching fingers brush against her damp smallclothes, and again as he moves the fabric aside with his thumb. His calloused fingertips graze first against curls of hair before sliding between her labia. A sharp exhale escapes her, and he begins stroking a finger slowly back and forth between her opening and her clit. She realizes then how very, very desperately she needs to have him. Will have him, right now, against the wall of an old barn, and there’s nothing that’s going to stop h–

The boards at her back suddenly shake with the force of something being thrown up against the opposite side of the wall. She jumps a foot in the air and shrieks, then comes down against an equally-startled Cullen with enough inertia to send them both toppling to the muddy ground.

“What was that?” comes a muffled voice from inside the barn.

“I didn’t hear nothing,” replies another. “‘Cept your moaning when I touched y–”

“Shut your mouth and get back over here.”

Cullen and Cora regard one another in silence as they listen to the lovers’ conversation just a few feet away. They’re both barely suppressing laughter, Cora even having pressed her forearm against her mouth. It’s a comfort, she thinks as Cullen helps her to her feet, that they aren’t the only two adults behaving like randy adolescents. A whole swath of farmland, and they can’t even find a private spot.

She must further work to keep quiet when she gets a good look at Cullen. His entire right side is absolutely dripping with mud. When she follows his own laughing eyes, she sees that she hardly fared better. He reaches out and swipes his thumb across her left cheek, then brings it away caked in dirt. They grin, join their least-filthy hands, and begin trudging back toward the celebration. Halfway there, now letting their cackles ring out, they veer off in the direction of the inn.

“We might be cursed,” she says.

“Yes, well, this time tomorrow we’ll be leagues away, in a tent, entirely on our own. Perhaps you can put some sort of ward around the campsite so we might attend to our business in peace,” he replies.

“Are you advocating the use of magic for pleasure, Commander?” Cora asks, pretending to be utterly scandalized.

She sees a blush come into his cheeks in the light emanating from the windows of the inn. He stops and turns to her with a mud-spattered smirk. “Desperate times, my love.”

Chapter Text

“Overall,” Cora says as she bends over slightly to wet her washing cloth and bar of soap in the knee-deep water, “I think that went rather well.” She wrings out the rag and begins working up a lather, turning back toward the shore where Cullen has stepped out of his breeches and into the stream that their map insists on calling a river.

“You’re very forgiving, you know,” he says with a smirk. He closes the distance between them in two strides. When he lifts his hand to cup her cheek, the light of the rising gibbous moon falls across his arm. The dark golden hairs there shine temporarily silver, and the goosepimples tell her that he too feels the chill of the spring evening.

“Oh, yes, so very magnanimous of me to allow myself to be surrounded by good company and stuffed with sweets while I shirk my duties for a week,” she replies sardonically, punctuating her sentence by pressing the bar of soap into his chest. He takes it with a kiss, then bends down to dunk his own washcloth under the frigid water.

They departed after breakfast this morning. There had been crying and hugging and general carrying on, though this was slightly subdued thanks to the adults’ scant few hours of whisky-sodden rest. Having stayed awake far too late themselves, the twins had been nearly inconsolable as Cullen and Cora had said their goodbyes. Cullen had quelled the girls’ hiccoughing sobs only with repeated promises to return as soon as he could and, in the meantime, to send them two of Harritt’s finest drakeskin sword belts. Unlike Alice and Obrianna, however, Daisy would not be mollified. The hound had howled forlornly until the visitors had disappeared from sight.

As she lets suds run down her skin and into the river, Cora conjures a flame in her palms. She bends over to suspend it just above the surface of the water upstream. When she stands, the water running into and around their legs is a touch warmer.

“Oh, that is nice,” Cullen says with a smile as he scrubs his forearms. “Thank you.” He holds the soap out to her. She takes it, their eyes meeting and their fingers brushing against one another. His face, barely illuminated from the moon above and arcane flame below, is difficult to read. There is a hunger about him, though it is tempered by something else that she cannot name.

As she works soap into her hair, Cora wonders whether he can sense her yearning, too. Foiled yet again in their feverish attempt at coupling the night before, they had returned to their room at the inn, washed the sweat and mud from one another, and then immediately fallen asleep. A rooster’s crow had jolted them awake not three hours later. Still, in spite of being bleary-eyed with exhaustion, Cora finds her gaze wandering across the body of the man beside her. She shivers.

For a while, they bathe in silence. Though a delicious tension fills the air between them, she nonetheless suspects that Cullen’s mind is periodically elsewhere. He has been like this all day: mostly present, but occasionally distracted, as though working through some snarl in his mind. More than once, she has turned to find him looking at her with what she can only call contentment. It isn’t unwelcome – on the contrary, it tickles her to see him blush when she catches him staring – only a bit odd.

They finish their bathing and step out of the stream. They towel off in front of the small, dying campfire over which they had earlier warmed the hand pies Mia packed for them, then rifle through their respective bags for clothes. Partly as a result of her exhaustion and partly from the comforting chorus of treefrog and cricket song, Cora’s mind feels pleasantly fuzzy, as though she’s had a finger of strong brandy on an empty stomach. Neither of them has spoken in many long minutes when Cullen’s voice joins the sounds of the forest.

“Cora,” he says, holding his tattered sleep tunic in his hands but not yet moving to put it on. “Last night, you said…well” – he rubs the back of his neck sheepishly, looking down for a moment – “I had, er, had a bit too much whisky to remember the exact words, but…you saw something in me, as it were, while we were in South Reach, and you…thought it might mean that I…felt some sense of belonging, or peace, or…being home, I suppose, in a way I’ve not been at Skyhold.”

The Inquisitor feels her mental fog dissipate and her heartbeat quicken. Dropping her gaze, she pulls her dressing gown tighter around her body as though indecently exposed. She had likewise been too drunk to cement the precise conversation in her memory, but the sense of impending loss that had accompanied it is roiling in her stomach once again.

“But…” Cullen continues, and there is an undercurrent of joy, of laughter in his tone that draws her eyes to him again. “Love, it had nothing to do with South Reach. Or very little, at any rate.” His tongue darts out to wet his lips as he takes a beat to collect his thoughts. “I…do not think I would have made the journey, or seen my family again…perhaps not ever…without you beside me. I spent a decade believing that I had caused them too much grief to ever hope for any sort of…of reconciliation, and I carried that fear until the moment Mia greeted us. I thought I would lose my breakfast on the road that morning from the nerves. But I knew that, even if we arrived and she decided that she’d changed her mind, that there could be no forgiveness, and turned us away, I knew that I might be heartbroken from it, but…you would be there. That you would tell me to shake the dust from my feet, and I would carry on. We would carry on.”

Cora feels her eyes burn with budding tears. He is right, of course. She knows every terrible thing that he’s done, that he’s capable of doing; she has since the beginning. And, as she has reminded him on days when his self-doubt is paralyzing, or he is haunted by the spectre of some harm he caused, she is still here. His own family could have decided he was not worth redeeming, and she would have reacted precisely as he has just said.

He takes a step toward her, tunic still hanging from his hands. It is too dark to properly read his expression, but she can feel the affection radiating from him. “It wasn’t being in South Reach,” he says softly. “It was…it was the freedom of not being Commander Cullen, or the paramour of the Inquisitor, or the former Knight-Commander, or an oathbreaker to the Maker. And you, watching you talk and laugh and…and rest, for all love!” They both laugh, and Cora swipes at her eyes. He throws his tunic over one shoulder and places his hands at the sides of her arms. With a sigh, he says, “I know that there’s a great deal of work ahead of us yet. I am sworn to this cause, and I welcome it. I do. But…well…” His eyes dart away, and she would bet the riches of a virgin thaig that his cheeks are reddening. He takes a deep breath and meets her gaze once again. “More and more, I find myself dreaming of…of what life might look like someday.”

Cora’s heart begins to race once more, but not from fear. Tears continue to blur her vision, and she feels a lump in her throat. While the nervous energy in Cullen’s tone has not dissipated, he seems nonetheless confident, assured about his words.

“Cullen…” she begins before realizing that she is not sure what to say. One of his hands moves to her cheek, and his thumb wipes at a tear running down her face.

“I do not know what the future holds,” he says, voice barely above a whisper, “and I would never want you to feel…restrained, or…or limited…but…I hope you know that I want nothing in the world so much as I want to be with you. To make whatever life we wish, on our own terms, for…well…forever.”

She opens and closes her mouth several times, then blinks, her eyelashes heavy with tears. After her third failed attempt at speech, Cullen says, “I am not asking…I mean…this isn’t a…well.” He closes his eyes, gulps, inhales deeply, exhales, and regards her once more. With a slight panic, he continues, “You needn’t respond. I…I am not asking anything of you, Cora. And I apologize for…I truly did not intend to say…it was not intentional, my bringing all of this up. I’ve felt this way for such a long time that it…well, it does not seem novel to me anymore. But I should have–”

In one swift movement, she places a hand behind his neck and pulls him down to her in a messy, desperate kiss. After a moment of shock, he returns it in earnest. His hands move from her cheeks to her hips. He grips the mounds of flesh there but finds his efforts frustrated by the worn, slippery fabric of her dressing gown.

They stand there, bodies pushed against one another, arms entwined, and lips crushed together for several minutes that feel like mere seconds in their feverish state. Cora’s fingers are hooked into the waistband of Cullen’s breeches, giving a teasing tug every so often. She moves her hand down until her palm is flush against the half-tied laces that are both holding up his pants and restraining his hardening cock. Her thumb grazes a patch of warm, velvety skin that’s peeking out, and she feels him take a sharp breath against her mouth.

She pulls back from the kiss to look at him. She wants desperately to pull him down onto her right here, on this riverbank, finally; to push his head down toward the throbbing between her legs, and then to ride him until they’re both dripping with sweat and too exhausted to move. But there will be time for that. They are alone again, after all, and breathing easily. And though her body pleads for him, she tells it to wait.

Since the night when Cullen stood before her on the rampart at Skyhold and asked whether they could start again and “do things properly,” she has been so careful, so cautious in their relationship. And he has been the picture of patience, even when it has meant bearing some fragile part of his heart without knowing whether she would do the same. He has made himself vulnerable to the point of discomfort on countless occasions just to show that he is worthy of her trust. She does not regret this, does not regret having taken her time or waiting for her fear and uncertainty to dissolve. Does not regret wanting to protect herself when she doubted whether there was really such a thing as a former templar. Does not regret wanting to protect him when she was sure that killing Corypheus would kill her as well. Circumspection is rarely unwise.

She realizes now, though, that she does not need it any longer. More than that, she does not want it. Not with Cullen. As the Inquisitor, as an apostate, she must exercise caution constantly and in a thousand different ways. She would rather this not be one of them.

“Yes,” Cora says, taking a massive, steadying breath. Cullen, his own breathing likewise heavy, looks at her with confusion for a moment as blood begins flowing to his brain again. She sees understanding dawn on him as she continues, “Whether you’re asking or not, the answer is yes.”

A smile has begun spreading across his lips. It widens until the crows’ feet at his eyes appear and squeeze out the moisture accumulating there. As he swipes at the tears, his grin becomes a laugh. Cora finds that she, too, is now both laughing and crying with such utter joy that she thinks her heart might burst.

The commander tightens his arms around her and leans in to kiss her once more. In a few moments, the swell of passion has returned. They scrabble at one another with increased urgency until Cullen breathes, “The…tent.” She makes a noise meant to signal agreement. He seems to understand this, as they push-pull each other toward the shelter they erected earlier. The laughter, the fumbling and tripping, the mingling of desperate need and gentleness – it all reminds Cora of the first night they properly made love, in the inn near Aptois. Wrapping herself around him as they half-tumble into the tent, her chest tightens with something very like what she felt then.

Very like, but not the same, she thinks as she shrugs off her dressing gown while Cullen, breeches slipping down, fastens the ties of the tent flap. The trepidation of that first night is gone entirely. In its place is something else that she cannot name, at least not while her mind is half-blitzed with desire. Her lover turns and nearly stumbles onto her as he pulls off his breeches.

“I’d really prefer you not injure yourself just now,” she teases while conjuring a small, enclosed orb of flame and suspending it near the ceiling. She lowers herself to where their bedrolls lay side by side and, propping herself on her elbows, watches Cullen toss aside the pants. “I don’t think I can take another interrupted attempt at sex.”

“Oho, love,” he says, smirking devilishly as he drops to his knees and begins crawling atop her, “there’s not a thing this side of the Veil that can keep me from you tonight.”

He moves over her until their faces are nearly touching, and they regard each other silently for several long moments. When the air grows so thick with tension that Cora can hardly breathe, she whispers, “Then take me.”

He crushes his parted lips to hers, and she answers with equal fervor. In short order, his mouth is at her jaw, then her neck, collarbone, shoulder. He did not shave tonight – not uncommon when they’re traveling – and the full night and day’s worth of stubble scratches pleasantly against her skin. As he shuffles his body down a touch to suck at one of her breasts, his cock momentarily grazes her leg. No wonder he’s moving more quickly than usual; he’s already completely erect.

As though he can read her mind, he takes his lips from her nipple and, gazing up at her, takes a deep, steadying breath. She moves one of her arms from where it’s propping up her torso to behind her head, lying back to take him in. With the other, she reaches down to thread her fingers through his damp curls. “Maker, but I have missed you,” he says before starting a trail of kisses down her stomach. He punctuates each sentence with his lips on her skin. “Missed the feel of you. Missed the heat of you. Missed the taste of you.”

He spends no time teasing her with kisses on her hips or inner thighs as he is often wont to do. No, tonight he works in feverish, fluid motion. He takes one of her legs over his shoulder, parts her labia with his fingers, and dives into her with the hunger of a starving man.

“Fuck,” she exhales, taken somewhat by surprise with the quick desperation of it all but pleased that they are of one needy mind. She runs her fingernails along his scalp as he laps at her cunt, letting her mouth fall open and eyes close. Just as she begins to ache for more, he focuses his attention on her clit. Though her thoughts are growing increasingly muddled, she wonders how he knew, how he so often knows, what she desires. Perhaps her fingers tightened in his hair, or she shifted her weight – some subconscious movement that he has learned to read.

It isn’t as though they no longer give one another explicit direction during sex – time has only made them more comfortable doing so – but they have, in a thousand tiny ways, come to know one another’s bodies such that words are sometimes unnecessary.

So it is now. Cullen flicks his tongue against her with increasing speed before - again, how had he known? - pulling his lips together and beginning to suck. She feels the hint of an orgasm building in her lower abdomen and scratches lightly at his scalp.

“Not yet,” she says. She lacks the force of breath for the ts, so it comes out sounding more like, “Noh yeh.” Cullen blinks up at her rather dazedly, before lifting his face to look at her fully. His chin, lips, jaw are glistening in the light of the dim flame she cast minutes ago; she isn’t sure if this sight or the absence of his mouth on her moves her more. “Inside me,” she says after a deep exhale. “I want to finish with you inside me.”

“I will not last long tonight, you know,” he says. It is both a warning and an apology. Not that she needed either. She knows by now that both exhaustion and abstinence affect him so, much as he knows that intense frustration or worry make it more difficult to awaken her body.

“I don’t need you to,” she replies with a smile. As he rises from prostration, she snakes her legs from either side of him and turns to lie on her side. After a full day’s riding and walking, she won’t have him on his knees - and she’s grown too tired to climb on top of him. “Now come here.”

Cullen smiles. In spite of the dark circles under his eyes, there is a twinkle in them. He slides onto the bedroll pallet and spoons himself around her. Her head and torso half-turned back toward him, she raises her chin slightly. He leans forward and kisses her, gently, fully, deeply. As he slides his tongue into her mouth, she rolls her arse back against his cock. He lets out a sort of sighing growl before pushing his top leg between hers. Almost reflexively, she swings her top leg back and over his hip.

“Comfortable?” he asks with a ragged breath.

“Nearly,” she replies, taunting him with another wiggle of her hips.

With a dry, low chuckle, he kisses her cheek, then her jaw, before sliding a hand down along her back until he’s dragging a single finger through the wetness between her labia. In another moment, he’s taken himself in hand to position his cockhead there. He moves his hand to her thigh and pulls it gently back and over his own leg, then slowly enters her.

“Mmmm,” she hums at the feeling of being stretched open and lets out the anticipatory breath she’d been holding.

“Oh, my love,” he murmurs into her neck. He pauses, waiting for an indication from her that he should push deeper. Though their position restricts her movement somewhat, she is able to roll her pelvis back enough to take more of his cock inside her. At this, he buries himself until his pelvic bones are pressed into her arse.

As Cullen finds a slow, steady rhythm, his hand slides over her hip and down between her legs. He threads his fingers through her coarse curls and over her clit. They pick up where his tongue left off, drawing quick circles around and on top with an intense pressure that recalls her body to the climax it was nearing.

“More or less?” he half-pants into her ear.

“Just like that,” she says, cupping her own breast and flicking her thumb across the nipple. After a minute of this, she stops – she’s so close, too close, would prefer to draw it out just a bit more – but to no avail. The orgasm crashes upon her, spreading from Cullen’s hand through every inch of her body. She tips her head back, mouth falling open, and he kisses her neck as she comes.

“Fuck,” she gasps, and he lets out a satisfied chuckle.

“Let me have a full night’s rest, and I’ll give you another three of those in the morning,” he says. She can tell he’s wearing a mischievous smirk just from his tone.

“And you?” she asks. He answers with a playful bite of her shoulder and low growl; now she’s the one laughing.

This is not Cora’s favorite angle when it comes to depth, but, Andraste’s sagging tits, she loves feeling the full length of his body pressed against hers, loves how he holds her leg up and back while he thrusts into her, loves his bicep cradling her head as his hand stretches down to her breast, loves the sound of him panting against her ear.

“Oh, darling,” he says, punctuating the words with kisses on her lower neck and shoulder. His thrusts begin to grow deeper, more intentional, and, eventually, faster.

After a time, Cora lifts her head and turns her face back toward him. When their eyes meet, she whispers, “Will you come for me?”

“Fuck, yes,” he growls, crushing his lips against hers. A bolt of electricity speeds from her belly down to her center. She is never more aroused than when he curses while he fucks her. Oh, she adores it.

Her mouth half-stifles the shuddering cry he gives as his body follows the promise of his words.

Some minutes later, when they are clean, and clothed against the chill of the night, and entwined beneath a thin wool camp blanket, she brushes her mouth against his earlobe. “I love you, Cullen Rutherford,” she whispers.

“And I love you, Cordelia Trevelyan,” he replies before pressing his lips to her forehead. They fall asleep in moments, and though Cullen eventually wakes them both with his thrashing, the night terrors feel somewhat dimmer in view of the future’s glow.

---

The next two days of their journey west, though often quite wet, are not at all unpleasant. Not having promised the Theirens a specific date of arrival in Redcliffe, they do not rush. Cora appreciates having the time both to spend with Cullen and to refocus her mind on the tasks before her, and she gets the sense that he feels the same.

A day and a half out of Redcliffe, they wake to a chorus of songbirds welcoming a cloudless sunrise. The horses seem even more pleased than she and Cullen as they make their way into the familiar territory of the arling’s Hinterlands. Her people are fewer here than in the Inquisition’s early days with so many having been sent to Orlais to deal with the unrest there, but it nonetheless feels comforting to ride through the rolling heath. For all the tumult that’s marked most of her time in Ferelden, she finds that she’s grown quite fond of it.

“If I didn’t know any better,” Cullen says with a sly sidelong glance, “I might think that you were becoming something of an honorary Fereldan.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she says coyly.

“Soon enough you’ll be insisting on bringing a Mabari to Skyhold.”

“Ugh,” she replies, giving her best impression of Cassandra. “Absolutely not.”

“I saw you scratching behind Daisy’s ears under the table,” he teases.

“It was only the once!”

Cullen’s smile suddenly falls away. He squints toward the horizon, where, Cora sees upon following his gaze, two riders have appeared from behind a knoll. “Slow down a bit,” he says, voice low in spite of the great distance still separating them.

“What…” It takes her several seconds to understand his reaction. They’ve met a good few travelers on their journey, between folk visiting family for Wintersend and the seasonal return of full market days in the larger villages. Each interaction has been perfectly pleasant. As ever, the pair are dressed in the garb of Fereldan commoners, armorless and nearly weaponless apart from a battered old sword strapped to Cullen’s saddle (“Not your Inquisition sword, and not carried at your waist,” Leliana had demanded when negotiating with the commander on this point prior to his first journey with Cora so very long ago). Her having a staff, of course, is completely out of the question.

His caution soon makes sense. As the riders grow closer, she sees that they are wearing full armor – and no simple leather cuirass or even the iron breastplate of a bann’s guard, but steel. They grow ever more imposing as they approach, though the sigils on their chests remain indiscernible.

“I do not like the look of them,” Cullen says. His eyes remain locked on the figures as he continues, “We ought to move off the road. But at a leisurely pace, as if we mean to rest.”

“There, beneath that oak,” the Inquisitor says, nodding to a large tree some hundred yards to the right.

He nods, and they steer their horses into the clearing. Cora resists the urge to turn and look at the riders as they amble toward the oak. Cullen, meanwhile, keeps his gaze fixed upon them peripherally, his jaw tightening all the while. He lets out something between a sigh and a growl just before they stop, and when she sees the figures again as she dismounts, she sees why. The sigil etched into the riders’ breastplates brings her stomach into her throat: the flaming sword of the Order.

As panic wells within her, she forces herself to take several deep, steadying breaths. None of that, Cordelia, she mentally chides. There is no reason the men – for men they are, at least one of them not much older than she and Cullen, with lank hair and unkempt beards – should recognize her, not like this. They have none of the wretchedness of Red Templars about them, and no apostate hunter whom she has encountered these past years has lived to remember her face. Cullen, however…she glances at him and considers the odds of either rider having been at Kinloch during the commander’s relatively short time there.

The former Knight in question is unfastening the ties binding his sword’s sheath while pretending to inspect the saddle. “If they approach us,” he half-whispers, “stay as far from them as you can without making them suspicious, and keep me between you at all times.” He is all business, speaking to her in the decisive, almost short tone reserved for discussions of strategy at the War Table.

“Cullen, you cannot possibly expect to take on–”

“If it comes to violence,” he interrupts, “you must get on Moira and make all haste toward Redcliffe. The road will only grow busier in that direction, and I do not think they would risk attacking an unarmed woman in broad daylight in full view of other people. Especially if those people do not know you are a mage.”

Core feels her cheeks grow hot with anger. He can’t be serious, telling her to leave him to fight two templars who have almost certainly found a lyrium source and retained their abilities. The chances that he would walk away from such an encounter alive… “Don’t be ridicu–”

“Listen to me, Cora,” he snaps, turning to face her fully. His eyes are hard. “I will not risk harm to you. My duty, above all else, is to protect the Inquisitor. You know this.”

“And if I,” she spits out in a hoarse whisper, “as your superior, tell you that–” She stops short as she sees the riders slow and look in their direction. Keep riding. Please, just keep riding.

A plea as empty as it is silent. The templars turn off the road and, at a pace so casual as to be languid, begin to ride toward them. The panic that has been building in Cora’s mind suddenly disappears; or, rather, it is eclipsed by the beginnings of a plan. She thinks it may be her greatest strength, this ability to numb her emotions and allow her most pragmatic self to take control in moments of crisis. One does not survive long in a Circle without a strong and nimble mind.

“We’re returning home to Redcliffe after visiting family in South Reach,” she whispers.

Cullen looks, for a moment, as though he wants to settle the point of their previous discussion, but he apparently thinks better of it and gives a small, if uncertain, nod. The prospect of pretending to be someone else for any length of time seems to make him even more nervous than combat. And with good reason, the Inquisitor thinks: he’s the worst actor she has ever met. Remaining stone-faced and silent is a less daunting task, however, so she will attempt to do the talking.

Which she ought to start since the men must nearly be in earshot. Just as she resolves to open her mouth, though, Cullen says, as near to conversationally as he can manage, “Some water, my love?” He opens one of his horse’s saddlebags and begins rooting around.

“Oh…yes. Yes, please,” she replies, her voice just a touch too high. “And have we got any cheese left?”

“Ah…” He circles around his mount to check the other saddlebag, and Cora understands the reason for his question. Though acting like he has not yet seen the riders, he now has them in his line of sight rather than at his back. He pulls both his waterskin and an oilcloth packet out, saying, “Here we are!”

She gulps the water greedily; she hadn’t realized how dry her throat had been. She has to stop herself from draining the whole skin. When she hands it back to Cullen, he trades her a piece of Gwaren white cheese that he’s cut from the wedge in his hand. “I suppose we ought to press on home and take a late dinner rather than stop for a meal now, oughtn’t we?” she asks as he drinks his fill.

“It would be best to be closer to the city when the sun sets, I think,” he says with a nod. He is looking everywhere but straight ahead, trying to wait until the last possible moment to show the riders he’s aware of their presence.

“I can’t wait to sleep in our own bed again,” she says before popping the cheese into her mouth with what she hopes is nonchalance.

“Nor can I. I wager I’ll be gone before my head hits the pillow.”

“But it was so wonderful to see–”

“Hello there!” Cullen cries. She wonders if the men waved, or are perhaps so close that Cullen could avert his gaze no longer. Whatever the reason, the suddenness of it means that she does not need to feign surprise when she turns to face the visitors, who are now a mere ten yards away.

The templars have the weathered, rugged look of men who have not slept beneath anything more substantial than canvas in months. They are gaunt, with red-rimmed, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. If they were otherwise well-groomed, she would attribute it to lyrium withdrawal, which would make this situation much less frightening. No such luck. Their hair – a ratty, clubbed ponytail on one and stringy, loose locks on the other – is thick with oil, and the clothes peeking from under their armor are visibly soiled. Both have the sort of grizzled beard that is a clear sign of disregard for appearance rather than conscious choice.

It is the state of their armor, though, that leads Cora to believe the men are in the grips of early lyrium madness rather than withdrawal. Their Chantry-issued breastplates are in impeccable condition. Yes, the armor is old, with cracked leather straps and dents in the steel, but it also looks like it was polished this morning. The flaming sword etched black onto their chests stands out violently in the midday sun.

She recalls the aging templars at Ostwick, those whose minds were consumed by lyrium before their bodies could be. The crazed roll of their bloodshot eyes as they searched every inch of the Circle for abominations that existed only in their heads. How they would mumble to themselves, their habitual recitations of the Chant becoming full conversations with Andraste, as though the Bride of the Maker were patrolling the corridors alongside them. The shhhhh of oilskin cloth on steel as they cleaned their blades for hours at a time.

“A good day to you,” calls the taller of the two men as he tugs at his horse’s reins. His companion, whose face is crossed with wrinkles and no small number of scars, does likewise.

“And the same to you, friends,” Cullen replies. He takes a bite of cheese. Silence falls over the lot of them (excepting the horses, which are obliviously munching on spring clover) for the thirty-odd seconds it takes for the men to dismount and approach. Cora feels she ought to say something, anything, but each option that runs through her mind might either raise suspicion or invite questions from the men. Questions that she and Cullen could fail to answer correctly. She raises another chunk of cheese to her mouth, but the nervous sweat on her fingers causes it to slip from her grip. Moira quickly plucks it from the ground, then nuzzles Cora in thanks.

Surely, surely she can find something to say. Something anodyne. Had she not just assured Cullen that he could rely on her to handle this? The weather! her fear-scattered brain finally comes up with. It’s a beautiful day! Say it, you idiot! But she finds that she cannot force her clenched teeth apart, cannot command her mouth to open.

“A…a fine day to be abroad,” says Cullen. He coughs as though some cheese has gotten lodged in his throat.

“It is indeed,” the younger templar replies with a nod. His smile is broad; it would be warm, even jolly, if it reached his eyes. “Warmer than I might’ve reckoned for spring, too. The name is Ser Canice, and my companion here is Ser Daithí.” As though he wishes to show a modicum of respect without any deference whatsoever, he inclines his head. Behind him, the older templar barely nods.

“Er…Wogan,” Cullen says, placing a hand on his chest. The old pseudonym rolls off his tongue with surprising ease, all things considered. “Llewelyn. And this is my wife.” He gestures to Cora. “Alina.”

“Ma’am,” Canice says to her with a nod. Cora returns it, giving what she hopes is a winsome, open smile. He glances between her and Cullen and asks, “Could we trouble you for some water, perchance?”

“Of course,” Cullen says, turning to untie their second (and last) waterskin from his saddle.

The request only further alarms the Inquisitor. The idea that the men, their boots road-muddied and their mounts laden with itinerant soldiers’ heavy packs, have no water is patently absurd. Every river and stream they’ve passed since descending the Frostbacks has overrun its banks, to say nothing of the wells at the center of the dozens of villages dotting the Fereldan countryside. Feigning a need for water can be nothing but a ruse; an excuse to approach them. The knot in her stomach tightens.

As though he can hear her guts clenching, the younger templar looks her way again. He rests his hands on the pommel of his sword, though not in the way of one making a threat. Not yet, anyway. “Have you and your husband been traveling for Wintersend?”

Please, she begs silently – of Andraste, or the Maker, or the disembodied force of justice in the world – please give me words.

And She, or He, or it – does.

“Yes,” Cora says, her voice breaking only slightly, “yes, we’ve been to see family in the East.” She clears her throat. “Thank the Maker, the weather’s been a great deal fairer on our return journey.”

“Here you are,” Cullen says as he thrusts the waterskin toward Canice.

“Many thanks, Master Wogan.” Canice tilts his head back and, its spout suspended above him, tips the skin toward his mouth. He drinks relatively little for someone carrying no water on a warm day. Because he is.

As he turns to pass the skin toward his silent companion, Cullen says, “I…admit that I have not seen a templar in some time now. I had wondered whether we might meet one on the road as we got farther from home – thought that perhaps Redcliffe was an outlier, you know, with the templars having gone – but we never did. Until today, I mean.”

What in Andraste’s fucking name are you doing? Cora glances at him out of the corner of her eye but cannot properly get his attention or even read his expression without the templars noticing.

Canice grimaces and shakes his head mournfully. “Alas, I can’t say as I’m surprised to hear it. There’s precious few of us still in Ferelden. And in Redcliffe, well…” He seems to consider expanding on this but, nostrils flaring, presses his lips tightly together.

Ser Daithí, after taking only a bit more than his companion, holds the waterskin out toward Cullen. When the commander reaches for it, Daithí’s expression changes slightly. His eyes appear to focus, his brows knit together, as though he has been sleepwalking until this moment and has suddenly snapped awake.

“But then you must know all about the state of Redcliffe,” Canice continues, his tone cordial again despite the tension still running through his words, “if you call it home.”

“We do,” says Cora. “The arling, that is. Not the…we are not from the village proper.”

“Time was, a man was safer inside the city walls than out. Before the arl flooded the city with apostates and all but signed it over to this…Inquisition.” The templar spits the word out like a piece of gristle that’s ruined his steak. Cora fights to hold his gaze. She is certain this man knows that she and Cullen are not who they appear to be, and she is equally certain that she’s being ridiculous. The vitriol in his tone is not pointed; she’s heard it countless times when talking to folk who haven’t a clue who she is. Of course, she thinks, any man still calling himself a templar would detest the Inquisition.

“But…the apostates fled the city. The king and queen co–…rumor had it that the king and queen commanded them away,” Cullen says as he stows the waterskin once more. He still holds half the cheese in one hand, but, she sees, is no longer eating. She realizes that she, too, has stopped.

“Ha! An army of apostates commits treason and nearly destroys the city, and the king responds with a slap on the wrist. No, mark me: more of them willl return, and with all the Marcher whore’s footsoldiers behind them. Paving the way for demons or Orlesians, and it’s hard to say which is worse. Killing the Divine, slaughtering the Order, consorting with demons to rip open the bloody sky – that were only the beginning.”

“Maker preserve us,” Cullen says quietly after a beat.

“But,” Canice says, brightening just a touch, “we ain’t going to make it easy on them. If the king won’t beat them back, we will. One apostate hidey-hole at a time.” A malicious grin crawls across his face, and Cora sees that half the teeth in his mouth are black with rot. It feels a bit too on-the-nose, all of these outward manifestations of Ser Canice’s moribund soul, as though he ought to exist only in the pages of a children’s storybook.

“And…is that what brings you into the countryside?” Cullen asks. “Apostate…’hidey-holes?’” His tone has changed – at least to Cora’s ears – but Canice doesn’t appear to notice. The commander’s voice is lower, weightier.

“Aye,” the templar replies. He scratches his horse behind the ear. “We–”

“Was you at Kinloch?” The gravelly bass is so unexpected that Cora and Cullen both give a start. Canice, presumably used to hearing his traveling companion speak, merely looks from Daithí to the couple with mild interest. Daithí, meanwhile, is eyeing the commander with a more intense curiosity.

“I…I’m sorry?” Cullen manages after a pause. His hand has tightened around the mess knife he’s been using to slice off hunks of cheese.

“Are you a templar?” Daithí asks. He turns and spits a black cud of tobacco to the ground, his gaze never moving from Cullen.

“I…” Cullen gives a forced laugh. “No, ser. No, I…I’m just a farmer.”

“My husband? A templar? Ha!” Cora grins at the men even as she tastes bile at the back of her throat. “You’d not ask such a thing if you’d ever seen him wield a sword. Or try to, rather.”

At first, Canice chuckles; but the laughter quickly dies as he sees the grave expression on his partner’s face. Daithí does not seem to have heard Cora at all.

“No,” the wizened templar says, nodding slowly, “no, you was at Kinloch Hold. I remember that face.”

The next several seconds are silent but for the ambient spring birdsong and the pounding of Cora’s heart. She curses her panicked mind and slow tongue, her sudden inability to do this simple thing that has been second-nature to her since she was a child. However desperately she wants to look at Cullen so that he might see the apology in her eyes, she wills herself not to. They can still salvage this. She can still salvage this.

“At Kinloch Hold? The old Circle?” she asks with an incredulous laugh, turning from Daithí to Canice as if to say, Your mate’s gone mad.

The younger man at first seems inclined to join her. Charmed, the corners of his mouth creep upward until he registers how unmoved his companion remains. Though somewhat dazed, Daithí’s watery, yellowed eyes are still fixed on Cullen. He gives another nod, slow but sure.

“Wogan, you said your name was?” asks Canice, now frowning as he turns toward Cullen.

“That’s right,” the commander replies. He is trying so very hard to stay calm, to remain expressionless. Do the templars notice, Cora wonders, the set of his jaw, the forced control in his breathing, the white of his gloveless knuckles as they clench at cloth and cheese and knife because they have no sword pommel to grasp? Can they see his fear as transparently as she can?

A beat, and then Daithí speaks once more in his low, gravelly half-whisper: “Rutherford. Was on the tip of my tongue. Cullen Rutherford.”

The vague curiosity with which Canice has regarded Cullen becomes, for a moment, confusion. His eyes shift to Cora, then back to the commander; and in that instant, the Inquisitor sees the glint of sudden understanding behind them.

Several things happen very quickly even as, by Cora’s reckoning, time stops. In her periphery, she glimpses Ser Canice’s gauntlet-clad hand move from resting atop the pommel of his sword to wrapping around its worn grip. His posture closes, knees bending and chin tilting down. The change is so swift, so natural – a soldier’s reflexes – that she would not make note of it if she hadn’t seen and reacted to such a shift a hundred times by now.

But of course she has, or she would be long dead. And she has learned, in dozens of skirmishes small and large, not to attack the foe who stands ready. In half a second, a dagger of ice grows in her hand; in another, Ser Daithí is reaching for where the frigid knife is embedded in his throat.

The Inquisitor takes a deep, steadying breath and holds it as her mind alights on a trickle of furious energy across the Veil. Dorian had taught her this, the practice of quieting every controllable muscle in one’s body for a count of two prior to engulfing an enemy in flame. In that moment, she can see his staff striking the earth in tandem with his exhale. She finds time in that half-second to miss him so deeply that her breath might catch if she were not holding it.

She turns her gaze and intentions upon Canice then only to see Cullen driving the blunt cheese knife into the gap between the man’s front and back armor plates. Canice’s grip on his half-drawn sword loosens, which Cora quickly understands to have been the point of the maneuver. As blood begins to trickle over his right hand from his twisting the knife, his left finds the hilt of Canice’s weapon. He pulls it free, using the hilt of the cheese knife to push away from the knight.

“Wait!” the templar chokes, arms outstretched in front of him, one open palm facing each of his opponents. Cora’s eyes widen as she realizes what she has allowed to happen. She braces herself for the electric, paralyzing suffocation of a spell purge.

Instead, she feels the warm spatter of blood on her face as Cullen, in one swift, horizontal arc, opens Ser Canice’s throat with the end of the templar’s own blade. The sudden violence has startled the men’s horses, which are now trotting across the distant road and into the meadow beyond. As their hoofbeats recede, she can hear nothing but the pounding of blood in her temples and Cullen’s ragged, unsteady breathing.

She surveys the corpses that were, a scant thirty seconds ago, standing before her. A preemptive strike had been wise, she knows – is likely the reason she still draws breath – but the fact of taking a life feels no less strange for it. It is not angst, really, or sadness, and certainly not regret. But killing is always…unsettling. Solas had hypothesized that even a single death, if violent or otherwise untimely, can cause the Veil to shudder. If he was right, and such killing draws her closer to the Fade, then her disquiet makes perfect sense.

The clatter of Cullen throwing Canice’s sword to the ground causes her to start. She turns toward him and sees a rare emotion writ upon his face: anger. He turns his gaze from the bodies still hemorrhaging blood to her, and the rage subsides – mostly. They stare at one another for several seconds, both trying to catch their breath, before his shoulders slump and he says, “When he…I thought that…you could’ve…”

So the same terror had flashed through his mind when Canice had raised his palms. Of course it did, she thinks. That had been his reason for wanting her to turn and flee rather than attempting to fight in the first place. Two foes, even skilled swordsmen, are no match for a mage with even a modicum of control over their power, but a single templar with quick reflexes is enough to bring her to her knees. Had she been incapacitated, Cullen, armorless and wielding an ancient, unbalanced sword, could not have defended her from them both.

“He didn’t,” she says, as though this will placate him when a scant half second was the difference between this and getting them both killed. But surely he doesn’t really believe she would have, under any circumstances, abandoned him?

He wants to reply – she can see it in the twitch of his lip, the way he determinedly sets his jaw against allowing his mouth to open – but instead, he simply gives a single, short nod, before turning away under the guise of wiping his face on his upper sleeve. Once more, the only sounds are their breath, birdsong, the chirp of a cricket, the swish of the horses’ tails.

“Burning the bodies so close to the road will draw too much attention,” Cullen says finally, “and there is not room on the horses, not for both. I suppose we could transfer all of the saddlebags to Moira, take off the armor, fit one of them on the back of Eachann.” He is not talking to her so much as thinking aloud. “Or I could walk, load them both onto him, but we would not reach Redcliffe by–”

“Is that it?” Cora asks, words clipped.

“What?” He looks at her once more, and she can still see emotion flash in his eyes.

“That’s the end of it? We’re just…moving onto the practicalities?”

“We can hardly stand here all day, a hundred yards from the road with two dead templars.”

“You’re angry,” she says. It is not an accusation but a simple statement of fact.

“I…” His tongue darts out over his lower lip, then he presses his lips together. Cora feels frustration build quickly within her, almost frightening in its intensity. Strong emotion is common after combat, but it is generally laced with relief at surviving rather than this…this anger.

“Why won’t you just…let yourself be upset with me?” she asks with obvious intense irritation.

“What happened, happened,” Cullen replies tersely. “There is hardly any point in–”

“Maker’s breath, Cullen! Get angry!”

“Why do you insist on picking a fight?!” he snaps.

“Because those templars could just as easily be having this conversation as we are!” she half-shouts. If he won’t engage, then she’s going to have his side of the argument for him.

“Do you want me to condemn you?” he asks, his scar twitching upward into the snarl that comes out on those rare occasions of visible rage. “Is that what you’re after? For me to berate you for being so hardheaded? Treat you like you’re one of my men? Is that it?”

She realizes that she does not actually know what she wants from him. She glances at the bodies, at the insignia of the Order now bathed in blood on their breastplates, at the gaping throats from which that blood has finally stopped pouring. She might’ve chosen a different spell, she thinks, or aimed her missile elsewhere. Shouldn’t she be troubled that these thoughts did not even occur to her at the time? That she never considered mercy, not for a moment, not until now? And that she had never entertained actually heeding Cullen, who knows close combat so much better than she? She would not have fled as he had requested, no, but she might have gotten out of range of a spell purge. She is far deadlier from a distance, anyway, even without a staff.

Yet she had thought about none of these things. Had not properly thought at all. She had simply been single-mindedly determined to eliminate the threat they posed.

“I…I don’t know,” she says quietly. “I just…no, you’re right. We ought to…” She inhales deeply and shakes off whatever this frustration, this…uncertainty is; she can revisit it later. “Burn them, I think.”

Cullen’s own frustration has fallen away. For a moment, he looks at her with concern, but it, too, disappears in favor of the more pressing issue before them. He surveys the meadow around them and peers toward the treeline some ways off. “We need to move them farther from the highway first.”

It isn’t as though they’ve committed some crime that needs concealing, really. They did not strike the men without cause, and Cora would bet every Crow in Antiva that the rogue templars are wanted for a dozen capital offenses by the Fereldan Crown, the arl, or both. Indeed, she plans to report the encounter when they reach Redcliffe.

No, when they heave the corpses onto the horses’ backs and lead their mounts toward the grove of trees, and strip the men of their etched breastplates, and gather the driest branches from the forest floor, they have a tacit understanding of their aim: to prevent a witch hunt. The burning corpses of two grown men will be dismissed as brigands – or, alas, the unfortunate victims of such folk. The bodies of two templars, though? Well, any fool knows their like can only be killed by one sort.