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"What about you, Rook?" Bellara asks.
She looks up from her cards. Three pairs of eyes on her. “Oh. Pass.”
Davrin grins. “Come on, you’re not getting off that easy.”
“There aren’t that many to choose from, and they’re not very interesting.” Beryl isn't any good at Wicked Grace, even when she's sober, and somehow this evening she's drunk. She can't remember the last time that happened. She's tall enough that it usually takes some doing—but in retrospect, there was wine with dinner and then more wine when she agreed, for some reason, to play cards, and she was tired to start with. So now, the lighthouse library is lightly swimming around her head—even more than it usually does, that is, being ancient, elven, and magical—and she can't remember if Temerity outranks Fortitude in her hand, and she's being asked about—
"Oh, come on. Can't be worse than Neve's,” Davrin says, and Neve gives him a look of feigned offense.
—first kisses.
Beryl stares down at her cards. She has been kissed in a romantic-ish context exactly four times in her life, each time by—with?—a different person, and that number very generously includes Mallora Haldebruck, who kissed her on a dare when they were fifteen and some of the other girls had snatched some table wine to sneak back to the novices’ dormitory. Beryl hadn’t been drunk that night, both because of her body mass and (more significantly) because her fear of getting in trouble if they were caught meant she didn’t drink more than a few sips, but she’d laughed along with the others, intoxicated by the thrill of mild disobedience. What she remembers about kissing Mallora Haldebruck is being underwhelmed by the experience, and the strong smell of table red.
Neve’s most memorable first kiss, she’s just learned, happened after falling into the harbor during a stakeout. Beryl wouldn’t fall into harbors for a hobby, not least of all because she can’t swim, but as a prelude to a first kiss it doesn’t sound so terrible, especially if said kiss was with a dashing boat captain who fished one out of the water after helping inform one about the movements of various dangerous ne’er-do-wells. Boat captains are probably used to harbor-smell, which is only moderately worse than cheap wine.
“Rook…” When she looks up, Davrin’s expression is now questioning, trying to figure out if they’re pressing her on something upsetting, and if anything, that’s worse.
“Alright... It wasn’t bad, but you’re going to make a face.” Maker, she even sounds drunk. This is mortifying. She handled plenty of livers in her time in the mortuaries, large, heavy organs tucked neatly between the lungs and stomach, but she’s never had any particular reason to be dissatisfied with her own until this moment. Perhaps it’s possible to will oneself to metabolize alcohol faster. “Is it my turn?”
“What face?” Davrin looks down to Assan, at his feet, for corroboration. “Assan, do you think I would make any kind of face at Rook’s story?” Assan makes a hooting, cooing noise, which could mean anything. “See, Assan doesn’t think I’d make a face.”
“That wasn’t words,” Beryl points out. She’s allowed to be drunk—she’s certainly not fifteen anymore—but she wouldn’t do it for a hobby, either. It’s embarrassing. She tries to maintain some dignity. And what a poor example to set example for Manfred, she thinks, which makes her almost laugh, which is also a very drunk thing to do.
“It’s your turn,” Neve says, meaning the cards.
“Bellara, are you going to make a face?” Davrin continues.
“I mean, I have a face.” Bellara’s brows furrow. At least Beryl isn’t the only one who’s drunk. “I don’t think I can avoid making some kind of expression, but—I’ll try not to make a rude one, I promise.”
“It’s agreed, no faces. Lay it on us.”
Neve just settles forward in her chair, reordering the cards in her hand. “Well, now I’m really curious.” Neve is excellent at Wicked Grace. Beryl wonders if she ever played with Varric, before—“Play first, then story.”
“Yours were all—” Nice, she wants to say. Or even romantic. They were all kisses that led to something more, even if they were a little messy, or embarrassing. Not that Beryl truly regrets not having more with any of the people she’s kissed, particularly not Mallora Haldebruck, who lives (she last heard) in Perendale with a husband and four children (and good for her, truly). “Alright, let me think.”
Neve grins. “I thought you said there weren’t many. Now you’ve got to take a mental inventory?”
Beryl rolls her eyes, and plays a card, the Knight of Something or Other, in front of her at random, then draws another, this one an Angel. There’s only one kiss in her personal history which is remotely interesting to talk about, and even it’s a short, boring story. With a deep breath which does nothing to make the room stop moving around her, she begins. “There was this apprentice.”
“Oooh, alright. A promising start,” says Bellara.
If she were actually good at Wicked Grace, now would be the perfect time to cheat for a better play. She isn’t, though, for the same reason she’s about to tell the actual story coming out of her mouth, and not a better version. Too straightforward. Thinks in straight lines. Also she doesn’t remember which hands are better than which, anyway. “Apprentices from Tevinter Circles sometimes come to study at the Necropolis. There was this boy from… Vol Dorma, I think.” Aemilio Banris of Val Dorma, she’s pretty sure, but it’s been a long time, and she isn’t at her sharpest. “I would have been just eighteen.”
“So, what, three years ago?” Davrin interrupts.
“Ten years ago,” Beryl says, “almost eleven, and I didn’t interrupt any of you this much.”
“A Val Dorma boy… From an old family, I’m guessing?” Neve asks.
“Probably,” Beryl says. “I thought so. I don’t know, we didn’t talk much.” At which point Davrin begins making a very suggestive oooh noise. “Not like that—”
“Davrin, I think that counts as a face,” Bellara says, mock-serious, and the Warden holds up his hands to placate her.
“Okay, okay. Sorry, Rook. You were saying, about this boy you didn’t talk to…”
“We had some of the same tutorials, and I tried to be friendly.” Or at least, unobtrusive, since he hadn’t seemed to like her. “But he didn’t say much, and I supposed it was…” She shrugs, with a vague gesture towards herself. Adolescent experience had strongly indicated that young men, on average, weren’t interested in girls who towered over them. Girls who did that, and were descended from the people who had been attacking their homeland for ages, even moreso. Probably didn’t help if they consistently outscored them on exams in their spirit-calling practicum, either.
“Ah,” Bellara says with understanding. Then: “Oops, was that a face? That’s not supposed to be a face. Sorry.”
There’s the creak of the main door of the Lighthouse opening, followed by footsteps of various weights: Lucanis, Emmrich, and Manfred, returning from cleaning up after dinner. Maker. She would really prefer not to tell this story to—
Lucanis calls out, “Who’s winning?”
“Neve,” Davrin says, at the same time Neve says, “Play is suspended while Rook finishes a story.”
The room, which she knows objectively is quite large, suddenly seems much more crowded. Manfred hurries towards Beryl, immediately curious about the cards—Manfred likes anything with lots of little pieces or pictures—while Lucanis comes around by Neve’s side to see the hands on the table. “It’s not really important,” Beryl says, trying to sit up straighter and discovering she was already upright. “We can keep playing.”
“Oh, I was interested!” Bellara says.
“Manfred, don’t interrupt their game.” Emmrich, at least, seems content to stand away from the table, a little behind the skeleton, which puts him a little behind Beryl’s shoulder, where she’s moved aside to make space for Manfred beside her. “Leave the cards where they are, please. And the coins.”
“Does Fred know how to play Wicked Grace? We could deal him in,” says Neve.
“I would ask that you not teach Manfred to gamble for the time being, please,” Emmrich says, although they’re only playing for copper. The edges of his rolled-up shirtsleeves are damp from cleaning dishes. She wonders how much of his gold he took off beforehand. “He’s only recently begun to grasp the uses of money.”
Beryl is very aware of Emmrich’s presence behind her. She’s always aware of his presence—which makes it sound as though he puts her on edge, but it isn’t that. She thinks he’s interesting, and she likes that he seems to think she’s interesting. Of course, in this moment, when she already feels ever-so-slightly like her tongue is going to run out ahead of her and let slip something foolish, and she’s in the middle of telling a particularly girlish story, she’d rather he were anywhere else—no, not quite. She’d rather she were anywhere else, but that’s not his fault.
Since Manfred is unlikely to understand, let alone recognize, intoxication, she turns her attention to him. She likes explaining things to Manfred. The dead also tend to think in straight lines.
“I have cards in my hand, and cards on the table, there. I can tell you the names of the ones on the table, but, I don’t want the other players to know which cards I have here,” she tells him. “The ones with the men with swords are called Knights—oh, did Emmrich realign your patellae? They look very nice.” Manfred hisses happily, and she almost glances back to Emmrich before she realizes the others are trying to get her attention. “What?”
Bellara’s eyes are wide. “You have to finish your story! Oh, right. But nobody’s going to make any faces.”
“Faces?” murmurs Lucanis.
“We were talking about Bellara’s romance serials, and she asked about our most memorable first kisses. Davrin fought a pack of gurguts to impress a boy, Bellara was floating in midair, and I got fished out of the harbor.”
“It wasn’t really midair, it was really more like two or three—”
“Anyway, Rook says her story is boring, but it’s taking quite a long time to tell,” Neve concludes, sitting back against the arm of her chair, the one Lucanis is perched on. “I’m on the edge of my seat.”
“In my defense, there have been a lot of interruptions.” Beryl draws in a breath, gathering her resolve, before a thought occurs to her, and she turns to face Emmrich, which makes the room turn again. Thankfully, his eyes are already fixed steadily on her, although his brow is knit. “Does Manfred know what a kiss is?”
Which might seem like an absurd question to ask about an entity without facial muscles, but curiosity spirits can be very determined when they become interested in a new idea, and she’d hate to introduce any concepts which might cause trouble in future. Emmrich follows. “Oh—in the abstract, I suppose, but he’s had few opportunities to observe any outside of artistic representation.” Manfred chatters in the affirmative. “Thankfully, he hasn’t shown any practical interest.”
The phrase few opportunities asserts itself in Beryl’s mind for no reason in particular. Lucanis starts to ask, “How would he—” but Davrin cuts him off.
“Skeleton questions later.”
“It really isn’t… Alright.” Sit up, speak clearly. No way out but through. “The year before I took my initiate’s vows, there was a visiting apprentice from Tevinter. We barely said ten words to one another all term, and I assumed he was nervous being around a Qunari. Then at the hunt ball at midwinter he asked me to dance.” They’re all looking at her. “It isn’t really a hunt ball. Nobody in the Watch hunts anymore, that I know of.”
“Hunts?” Davrin asks.
“A Nevarran custom. Winter is the traditional season for dragon-hunting, though dragons are considerably rarer in these times,” Emmrich chimes in to clarify. “In the Steel Age, hunt balls celebrated successful dragon-slayings.” And for the Mourn Watch, by midwinter, the autumn rites which begin with All Soul’s Day and carry on through the cooling months are truly over, and there is a season of celebration with the spirits. But those rites aren’t to be spoken of to those outside the Watch, and Beryl hasn’t been able to participate since she left. “Thankfully, these days the ‘hunt’ is simply a metaphor for the pursuit of love. I’m told it was very difficult to mask the smell of a dragon head, even in a ballroom.”
“So he gives you the side-eye for months, then he asks you to dance at the romantic party?” Neve says. “Cheeky.”
“Maybe he was shy,” says Lucanis.
“I think so, yes.” He’d been quiet, and very ordinary-looking. Visiting Tevinter mages were usually showier, more competitive.
“Was he a good dancer?” Neve asks.
“Maybe? I wasn’t.” She didn’t have much practice, and hadn’t been expecting the invitation. Beryl’s preferred strategy for gatherings of any sort was to find a good vantage point and post up, watching the goings-on around her, and she had done that for most of the night, barring a few turns with friends later in the evening. She didn’t mind.
“Val Dorma boys usually are.”
“I don’t remember him stepping on my toes or anything. I might have stepped on his.” Although she’d been flattered, her principle emotion in the moment, she remembers, had been bewilderment. “And after that he asked if I wanted to step outside—the ball is always in the Hall of All Souls, which is partially aboveground, and—”
“—the monument garden outside is very beautiful in winter,” Emmrich says.
She turns back. “Exactly, yes.” It had also been, of course, very cold. But every storied royal and hero carved from granite had been dusted white with snow, and seemed to glow in the moonlight—rows and rows of them, posed in a tableau of ages, between pillars and obelisks erected in honor of their deeds, along winding paths of slumbering greenery that few outsiders realized corresponded to unseen paths fathoms below, walked only by the dead and their guardians. Emmrich knows that, of course. It’s so nice to have somebody here who knows. “Very.”
Davrin asks, “And?”
“Oh.” She turns back. “Uh, then he kissed me, that’s all. It was just a surprise.” Not an unpleasant surprise, but not one she’d hoped for, either. He must have gone up on his toes to do it. She’s reasonably sure she didn’t bend to meet him.
“An unexpected kiss in a picturesque garden, far from the crowd?” Neve grins. “Yes, very dull.”
“Well, then we went back inside, and he went back to his friends, and two days after that he went back to Val Dorma and we never spoke again,” she says. Davrin is making the face she knew he’d make, but she’s a little light-headed now and she’d rather move on anyway, so she holds up her cards again. “Anyway, whose turn is it?”
“Never?” Bellara sighs. “I don’t know, Rook. That seems pretty interesting to me. A forbidden attraction, lingering unspoken…”
“All very one-sided,” Beryl assures them. She’d tried to look within herself, to see if she was perhaps in love, or heartbroken, or even offended, but she’d just been confused. The cards in her hand are useless, as far as she can tell, though Manfred is studying them closely. “He’s probably an Enchanter now. Hopefully not Venatori.” She hadn’t thought of that possibility until this moment.
“I should certainly hope that any student who passed through our halls would have learned better,” Emmrich says. "Alas, it is difficult enough to teach some of them practical metaphysics." Which she opens her mouth to respond to, but beside her, Manfred hisses and points at one of her cards, and Beryl actually looks at it for the first time.
“Oh! Manfred, that’s actually—” Sheepishly, she pulls the Angel of Death from her hand to toss it to the table. “Sorry. That’s the game.”
Neve takes the pot—no surprise there—and the evening breaks up. Beryl walks with Emmrich and Manfred up the stairs, in companionable silence, except once when she stumbles (to her considerable mortification) and steadies herself on the necromancer’s gold-ringed arm.
“Sorry,” she laughs; she’s big, but he’s rather reassuringly strong.
“No trouble at all, my dear.”
(And in a few years, during another hunt ball, they’ll kiss by the soft moonlight reflected by the snow on the garden of monuments, while the music drifts from the warm hall below and further still the dead walk paths unseen, and they’ll both think something along the lines of, That’s more like it. They don’t know that yet; it’s the sort of surprise they haven’t even thought to hope for. But they will.)