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“How is she?”
From the look on Anders’ face, Scarlet could guess.
“She’s resting,” he said shortly. There was a smear of blood on his sleeve, crusty brown and dark red against the goldish fabric of his mage robes. The spell to clean it was well within Anders’ capabilities; she wondered if he had left it there on purpose, as a form of protest. She wondered what the Templars thought of that. She wondered what Irene thought of that.
“Can I--”
“She doesn’t want visitors.”
That stung more than it should have. Scarlet Marrak and Irene Amell weren’t friends or anything—Irene, like Anders, was already Harrowed, and the Enchanters, as a rule, did not make friends with baby apprentices still waiting on their first period. Irene wasn’t even friendly. Apprentices called her Irene the Ice Queen when she wasn’t around (not Scarlet, though she did think it was funny). She was, to be blunt, fucking scary.
Maybe that’s why it had hurt so much? seeing her get punished?
Two weeks since the whipping, and Kinloch Hold was in a state of shock. The threat hung over every infraction, but nobody had actually been whipped in Scarlet’s two and a half years (two years four months five days but who's counting) of imprisonment. Irene wasn’t nice (Irene the Mean), but she led a remedial Rune Studies class that Scarlet had been made to attend because her regular classwork was so bad, and it was a good class. When word went ‘round that the templars had finally released Irene from the solitary cells, the whole class had gathered up their desserts as a welcome back present and elected Scarlet to deliver them.
Thus, she stood in front of Anders, who blocked the door, carrying a handful of Korcari molasses candies, wrapped in a napkin.
Scarlet had cried a lot over the last two weeks, hiding her face under her blankets or behind the huge books she pretended to read. Don’t let them see you cry was one of the first things she had learned, advice whispered from bunk to bunk in the apprentice dorms (so much of which was about not provoking the templars; Call them Ser; Step aside to let them pass in the hall; Don’t look them in the eye. As if you could even find the eyes through their stupid helmets. Sometimes it made Scarlet want to scream and scream until her throat bled and her lungs burst and the constant, terrible pressure against the back of her mind either went away, or finally just exploded). She really didn’t want to cry again, so she shoved the little bundle into Anders’ hands, suddenly and painfully aware how pathetic it looked in the grubby little napkin. Irene liked things as elegant as she was.
“Can you give her this?” she mumbled. “The runes class...we thought…”
Anders looked down at the handful of candy. Scarlet shifted from foot to foot, imagining what he was thinking: Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Candy won’t fix this. Nothing will fix this. Nothing except blood and death--
She pinched her inner elbow, focusing on the sharp little moment of pain to drive out the voice that had started to sound less like Anders, and more like the shadows that haunted her nightmares.
“You know, it’s likely to be another year before we have molasses candies again,” Anders said lightly.
Scarlet couldn’t help a wistful sigh. “I know,” she said, which made Anders smirk for some reason.
“I’ll pass them along. I’m sure she’ll be very grateful. Now run along before you miss curfew.”
Irene didn’t stay hidden for long. She reappeared in circulation the next morning. Scarlet, sitting with Cal and Ellendre and Valenth and Rodaine, didn’t notice until Ellendre said, “Maker’s breath, she’s back!”
Scarlet swiveled in her seat, craning her neck to see over the heads of the hundreds of mages between them. Irene strode into breakfast with her head high and her expression as elegantly disdainful as always. Behold, fellow mages! Scarlet imagined her saying, I return! Unbowed, uncowed, well-moisturized, and unbothered! She cast a sweeping glance around the dining hall, mesmerizing eyes settling on Scarlet like a physical weight.
“Oh no,” Ellendre said, as all the apprentices realized that Irene was striding towards them. “She looks so mad. Is she mad at us? Are we in trouble?”
“Why would we be?” Cal retorted, but they did so in a whisper. “We didn’t do anything wrong, did we?”
“That’s really convincing,” Scarlet whispered back, prompting Cal to kick her under the table. Scarlet kicked back. Cal flipped a spoonful of oatmeal at her, and Scarlet wasn’t quick enough to dodge, so that when Enchanter Irene Amell stopped in front of the table of apprentices, palms flat against the tabletop and expression deeply unimpressed, Scarlet looked up (and up, and up) with a glob of oatmeal on her chin.
“Apprentices,” Irene said. You couldn’t tell that she’d only recently been whipped half to death. You really couldn’t. She reminded Scarlet of a marble statue of Andraste: cool and beautiful and untouchable.
“Good morning, Enchanter Irene,” they all replied in a ragged chorus. Cal’s voice cracked. That’s what you get, Scarlet thought viciously, wiping oatmeal off her face.
“None of you were at Runes class this morning.”
If the apprentices had been nervous before, they were terrified now. “Um?” Scarlet said (squeaked). “I...we thought...you wouldn’t be up to it?”
“I do not need to be coddled, apprentice. You, however, are in dire need of help with your runes.” When Rodaine snickered at Scarlet’s misfortune, she turned her steely gaze on him. “That goes for all of you,” she snapped, which shut Rodaine up pretty quick. “If you do not pass your Runes exams, I doubt any of you will reach your Harrowing at all.”
Scarlet was already attuned to temperature variations. She was pretty sure she wasn’t imagining the drop in temperature at the word Harrowing.
“We will convene after dinner. I expect you all to be present, or there will be consequences.”
The gifted molasses sat on Irene’s bedside table, the candies rich and dark, begging to be savored. The fiery stripes of pain in her back, ever-present even after everything Anders could do, throbbed in time with her heartbeat, an uncomfortably quick thump thump thump as she contemplated the gift and the apprentices who had given it.
She wasn’t a fool. She knew that the younger mages found her...intimidating. She was fairly certain that Marrak was pants-pissingly terrified of her (Anders liked to snark it was more like puppy love, which frankly Irene couldn’t even begin to think about). A Circle mage’s life had so little joy in it. Yet the young apprentices—the children, not a one of them older than 11, had willingly, voluntarily given theirs up.
For her.
“It’s not going to eat itself,” Anders said. He blotted a damp cloth along the deep, ragged furrows left by the whip, the cool sensation of healing magic seeping from the fabric to her skin. Under other circumstances, she would have treated it as a come-on.
Instead, she thought of the apprentices. They were bright children, talented and full of promise. Only six or seven years their senior, yet she felt a thousand times their age.
“I worry about the apprentices,” she said.
“I worry about these wounds getting infected,” Anders groused. Irene found it difficult to draw enough breath for a proper sigh, so she settled for a dark look out of the corner of her eye. Anders muttered something under his breath, then admitted, “I worry about them too. But there’s nothing you can do about it at the moment, except eat the blasted candy they were so anxious to give you.”
Aggravated, but unable to muster any argument, Irene broke off a tiny corner of molasses and set it on her tongue. Molasses was an odd candy: sweet, yes, but at every turn, the sweetness inexorably haunted by bitterness. Like love and grief. Like joy and pain. Like trust and betrayal.
The pillow beneath her cheek was growing damp.
“How many of them will survive their Harrowing?” It was like poking at a wound, and she couldn’t stop. “How many of them will make it to their Harrowing? Will I turn a corner one day and find Marrak with that damn brand on her forehead? Will--”
“Andraste’s ashes, stop,” Anders half begged, but Irene had already choked to a halt, drowning in the ocean of pain that was the Circle. “Just...stop it. You can’t—you can’t do this to me, not when you’re—you’re…”
Anders pressed his lips to her temple, desperate and hard. Tears, burning hot, streaked down her face. She didn’t know if they were hers, or his, but honestly, it didn’t matter.
How can we protect them if we can’t even protect ourselves?
“Better. Again.”
“I’ve done it a hundred thousand times."
“And you will do it again."
“It’s almost midnight!”
Irene, serene, dipped a piece of molasses into her coffee. (She hadn't even said anything about it.) “Then you should stop wasting time, shouldn’t you?” she said, and Scarlet, scowling as hard as her face muscles could arrange themselves so that she didn’t start to cry, bent her head over the stupid desk again, and with both hands cramping, with inkstains up to her elbows, with a burgeoning headache, began to copy out the stupid rune sequence. Again.
“Tik-tock, Marrak.” Irene, unbothered, turned another page of her book. “Tik. Tock.”