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"Mother?" Kieran's voice asks from the bed.
Morrigan doesn't respond for just a moment, surveying her reflection. The corset of this dress is ridiculous and ugly if fashionable at the moment. She has avoided a hat, at least, or worse, a ruff or collar that blocks her ability to see her periphery. The heavy necklace, a gift from the empress, seems to be a gesture towards her usual jewelry. Certainly it matches. But it still doesn't look quite right.
She has ever looked ridiculous in clothing like this, but she recalls a suggestion from someone who might yet consider her an old friend or at least an ally: dark, red velvet; gold embroidery; a low neckline. Foolish to rely on such things to lay a finger on the scales of success tonight, but if her memory serves, this old friend could not help herself when it came to the fripperies of a past life even long after she should have been disabused of them. Morrigan's memory has not let her down thus far.
"When I get back, Kieran," she says quietly, staring at herself, "I expect you to be asleep."
"How long are you going to stay at the party?" is the plaintive reply.
Kieran is a solemn, somewhat sickly boy, or at least he is at present. Nothing serious. Morrigan did not need a court physician to tell her so, but one had been provided, anyway, and her son has been prescribed rest. Not that children will be welcome at the peace talks masquerading as a ball. Ultimately, Kieran is only consoling himself with the fiction that it is illness that bars him from participating, not his age.
"I do not know," Morrigan answers, turning away from the mirror to inspect her son, buried beneath a pile of blankets and watching her greedily. "It will be a very boring party, Kieran, that I can promise you."
"Then why do you have to go?" he persists.
He must be feeling a little better at least, if he has the energy to ask so many questions.
Her skirts shush gently against the floor as she walks to the bed, the bed creaks with her weight.
"Because I have work to do," she says, though she has said as much already this evening, when they had this conversation for the first time. She pushes some of his dark, curly hair off of his furrowed brow. "Believe me, Kieran, I had much rather go to sleep right now. As you will."
He has no retort for this, only a reproachful gaze and a mulish mouth. There is a version of herself that would have said that he never so much resembles his father as when he is indulging his petulance. She's not so different from that version of herself now, but it makes her smile instead of frown. She presses the back of her hand on his forehead, then to either cheek, then, less to gauge his temperature and more for the pleasure of touch, to his neck, which is sweaty, but no warmer than it ought to be. His fever had broken last night and has stayed away since.
"You need to rest," she tells a boy who resembles her, too, most often when he decides to be stubborn. She likes that about him. She admires it. "You have been very ill, and we may have much to do come tomorrow morning."
"Like what?"
"I do not yet know," she replies, and though this answer frustrates her child, it is nevertheless honest. She brushes the slope of his nose. He wrinkles it.
"Does it have anything to do with your work tonight?"
You are too smart for your own good, Flemeth had told Morrigan with some frequency.
Morrigan shifts, trying to be a little more comfortable, but this dress was not constructed for sitting.
"It might," she murmurs, stroking his hair again. "Then again, it might not. We shall have to see."
"You're being tricky," Kieran accuses her.
"Tricky?" she repeats. She wonders if he's picked that up from his schoolmates, the other children tutored by the whey-faced tutor. Wards of the empress. Hostages, in truth. Morrigan sighs, smoothing Kieran's eyebrow with her thumb. "Shall I make you a promise?"
He waits, scowling at her. He'd like to know if the bargain is worth it. Her lips twitch.
"If you are asleep when I return," she continues, "I will tell Monsieur de Carrouges that you are still ill, and then you and I will take a trip."
"A trip to where?"
"Where would you like to go?" she asks.
"Somewhere else," he says immediately, and she blinks and keeps her gaze down on the blankets she adjusts. He's acclimated to this strange place as well as any little boy could. He charms very nearly everyone he meets, at least for a while.
But she knows that the other children have sensed something different about him if they haven't heard him speak differently, and in the way of children, they do not have to confront him to be cruel. He spends so much time with her. She would be flattering herself if she assumed it was because he genuinely prefers her company to that of peers closer to his age — and sometimes she'd like to flatter herself. It would be fruitless to pretend that she doesn't like that they are still allies, that even stranded in civilization, he cleaves to her side and asks her questions and values the answers she gives in return. He will be too old for that one day, she knows. He will figure out sooner rather than later that his mother does not know everything.
But he should not feel as though the only safe place he has is by his mother's side. He should have friends, should want to be in the world. Safely. Sure enough in himself that being ostracized does not lead him to foolish decisions. He is just barely ten years old. Too young for him to dread every morning the way she knows he has of late.
"We will go somewhere else," she promises. His warm little hand finds its way into hers.
"Like before?" Kieran asks.
Morrigan hesitates. She supposes it's a good sign that Kieran has a tendency to romanticize the years before Morrigan had wedged her foot in the empress' door. He does not seem to remember that he'd gone hungry even when she'd tried to go hungry herself to feed him, or if he does, he doesn't dwell on it. Perhaps it's easier for a child to think longingly of the dubious freedom vagrancy had afforded him when trapped in a gilded cage such as this. Perhaps she understands that a little. Still. She will do what needs to be done to ensure that when they do leave, and if she does good work tonight, they will, it will not be as it was before.
"You need to go to sleep," she says so she won't promise something she can't ensure — there had been a time, after all, when she had dreamed of a warm bed for both of them, ignorant of the price they would pay for servants to bring warming runes to slip beneath the mattress, running water and frosting on cake and a new pair of shoes every time he outgrew his old ones. It had led her to Celene, who had offered her a hall of golden mirrors, and Morrigan had forgotten that not every lesson Flemeth had taught her had been without merit.
Her son looks up at her, stifling a yawn, and because he is ten, she pretends she doesn't notice.
"Do you wish to know a secret, Kieran?" she asks. His eyes sharpen with interest.
"Yes."
"You must not tell anyone," Morrigan says. "You must keep my secret."
"I will. I promise, Mother."
He holds himself to a high standard, her little boy. It worries her — it worries her frequently — but she bends to press her lips to his hairline before pulling back so her face is in front of his.
"I don't like it here either," she whispers.
A grin blooms on his face, at once hopeful and gleeful, before abruptly, it falters.
"You don't have to not like it just because I don't like it," he whispers back. His fingers, slender like hers, touch her necklace, fiddle with the lace at her shoulder. He squirms a little, perhaps uncomfortable with the proximity now, and so she sits back, but she adjusts his blankets again.
"I know that," she replies. "Twas not a lie, Kieran."
"But your dress," he starts, then stops.
"I will wear it for the night, and then I hope to never wear it again," she declares with a degree of haughtiness that makes him a little bit nervous, a little bit delighted, and accordingly, he shoots her a guilty grin. "It pinches me — and it prods me."
To emphasize this, she pokes around his ribs, not roughly enough to do more than tickle, and Kieran ekes out a half-tormented, half-pleased noise, burrowing back into the bed.
"But you look pretty," he protests. "I picked out the dress."
"So you did," Morrigan concedes. Granted, out of a selection of dresses carried in the arms of wincing servants. Eyes fever-bright, pointing at the velvet red dress, That one, Mother, you should wear that one.
A child's choice. He knows she prefers red and black. He knows she does not thrill at the idea of looking like a peacock or a lioness — she can turn into any animal she pleases, she does not need a mask to counterfeit it. He knows that she will display luxury with a heavy necklace, a feather broach. She wears her leather gloves, too, the ones that they took from Kinloch Hold when Kieran was only a hazy plan, the ones that are always warm, always ready. Morrigan wonders if Leliana will recognize them. The other woman, if she has not changed overmuch, always had an eye for such details.
"I will see my work through, and then I will come back and crawl into bed with you," she says, and now she's the greedy one, stroking his hair, pulling at a stray coil of it, inventorying his blinks and swallowed yawns.
"I could stay up until you do," Kieran offers with the sort of insouciant chivalry that would make her laugh if it wouldn't encourage him, and this, at least, is one behavior she would like to discourage. For the night, anyway.
"No, you will go straight to sleep," she counters.
"But I want to know what will happen."
"I'll tell you over breakfast."
"The new age is hungry," Kieran tells her. No change in his demeanor, no transition. "A mouth opens in the sky. It has teeth."
Morrigan swipes her thumb over her son's cheekbone.
"Yes," she says quietly. "And that is why you must go straight to sleep, so that you will be rested and ready for it."
"Mama?" he asks when she's pinned her hair in place, when her hand is on the door to the outer chamber that will lead to the corridor and then the rest of the palace.
He doesn't call her Mama as much. It's the Orlesian environment. She doesn't mind Mother, but she knows he really means it when he says Mama.
She turns around, fixing her own golden eyes on her son's, so he knows she's listening beyond a shadow of a doubt.
"She's going to be there, isn't she?" he asks. "That lady?"
He could mean the empress. For that matter, he could mean Florianne. He could mean someone Morrigan has not yet considered — there is a part of her, habitual and isolated, that wonders if he means her own mother.
But her instincts, which have served her well, think he might be referring to the woman who has been on Morrigan's mind tonight. It had been Kieran, after all, who had picked out the dress.
"Right to sleep," is all she says. She places a finger on her lips, and Kieran slumps back into the cushions, her eyes staring back at her in the candlelight.