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Cullen tries laying his hand over his left eye, hoping he will be able to focus on the words on the page in front of him. Outside the tent he can hear Cassandra drill the men who came from around the Fallow Mire and the Bannorn. Cassandra had taken one look at him at Council after lunch and sent him directly to his tent for paperwork. It was only part of her kindness that she even noticed the small gestures of pain he made during the meeting, understood that he used his lower register, rumbled his words when he was fighting the headache and the nausea. He should probably care that she clipped the order at him in front of the Herald, but truthfully he can’t muster the will to be annoyed.
As the words come into focus, his impatience grows:
Highever has not turned up any contacts. The Arl’s steward, while polite, was less than gracious. It appears that the Arl, although grateful for the Circles, wants as little to do with them—or the Templars—as possible.
The Crown continues to delay on our petition for an audience, and Leliana has threatened to travel to Denerim herself and ‘create’ an audience with King Alistair. The Lady Cassandra has agreed to assist in detaining her; if the Seeker is in the field, however, I may require your assistance, too, Commander. Our presence at Haven—particularly as your forces grow—treats on the Divine’s Conclave and the Chantry’s temple. As neither continues to exist, our position is delicate.
The Marquise DuRellion was a minor problem I believe fixed. But if he approaches his court contacts and Empress Celene takes his cause before King Alistair in advance of our own audience, we will quickly find ourselves without a refuge . . .
Cullen sighs and puts down the missive from Josephine. He closes his eyes and breathes through his nose, trying to calm his breath.
“You should know, when I sent you to do paperwork, I didn’t expect you to actually read every scrap of paper on that desk.”
Cassandra stands in the entrance to the tent, rubbing a towel around the back of her neck. The early summer sun has settled in hot and he winces and squints to look at her, the light glaring around the shadow of her figure. He can’t make out her expression, but he hears her snort of frustration as she turns and closes the tent flap. She crosses the tent to him, removing her gloves as she does, and moves her fingers to his wrist where his pulse hammers in time with the throbbing of his vision. She notes his gloves despite the day’s heat and clucks her tongue.
“Can you feel your toes?” she asks curtly.
“Yes,” he says softly, “it’s just been my fingers.”
“Gloves off; where is the embrium cream I brought you?”
“In my footlocker.”
She crosses to rummage in the locker for the pot of salve she’d brought from Adan a fortnight ago.
“Plate off, too,” and she stands over him where he sits at his cot and bed roll and waits for him while he unbuckles his chest plate and arm braces and moves them to the stand. In spite of the austere surroundings, he is grateful that Josephine needed the cabin he was first assigned. Having his quarters and his bed roll with his Command station on the periphery of the training encampment has made the last few months easier. Cassandra volunteered both of them to re-locate quarters and he knows it had not escaped Leliana’s attention—nor the Herald’s for that matter—but he doubted the Herald understood why Cassandra had moved them to more rustic quarters.
Once his sleeves are rolled up, Cassandra begins to rub the liniment into his hands, taking extra care to pull blood out from his shoulder and arm, down into his palm, and then into his fingers. The numbness and cold hands from the withdrawal has made them both feel edgy and cautious about his ability to wield a sword. At Cassandra’s insistence, he has been practicing with thrown daggers. It has provided a useful tactical exercise and could be the difference between life and death for him on a bad withdrawal day on a battlefield.
The sharp smell of salve fills his nose and he gratefully flexes the fingers of his left hand when Cassandra moves on to his right. The rush of feeling is like pricks of thistles, but he prefers the sensation to the numbness that keeps happening.
“How is Jonas doing?” she asks.
“Well. You were right: his experience in his family’s trade has prepared him well. I’ve stopped verifying his sums, and Josephine and Leliana have barely commented on his hand . . . certainly less so than they would have if I had been writing all of my own reports these last few days. Thank you, Cassandra, for bringing him in.”
“I want to start spending an hour with him in the evenings, Cullen. He’s not getting enough time in training with the added duties. I’ll put into Leliana to raise his pay and officially make him your adjutant. He’ll never be a foot soldier, but we can at least keep him alive on a battlefield.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to simply give the requisition request to Josephine? Won’t Leliana be more likely to sequester him if we bring him to her attention?” Cullen asks.
“I will deal with Leliana, Cullen. She cannot begrudge you a trustworthy assistant with two wits in his head to rub together.” Cassandra pauses, wiping her hands together to rid them of excess salve. “You will need to tell him about the Lyrium. It will be good for you to have someone aid you when I am in the field.”
Cullen swallows past a lump in his throat. He would have resisted such a confidence just a month ago, but in the last week he knows that if Cassandra has been in the field he would not have managed as well. He nods his agreement, and she pops the cork in the salve jar as if to seal the arrangement and close the topic.
With the warmth settling into his arms, Cullen feels himself get heavy and he lays back on his cot, one arm laid above his head. Cassandra moves to the basin and pours water over her hands and her face. He hears her cross to his desk and the shift of paper as she reads reports. To save on paper and to ensure they know the same things, they share the reports at the Command desk, Cullen saving reports that are the most urgent when she is in the field.
He hears her snort loudly. He assumes she’s read Josephine’s missive about Leliana at the sound of amusement that escapes from her throat. Neither he nor Cassandra are as convinced as Josephine that Leliana would travel to Denerim. But sometimes he wonders if Josephine doesn’t know the Nightingale better than either of them.
Stillness permeates the air. With the quiet the evening break brings outside coupled with the warmth eased into his hands, he begins to drift to sleep. It has been days and days since he has slept deeply and he can sense the lull of oblivion that wants to creep over him. He drifts there for a while—he does not sense the time—but wakens abruptly when Cassandra jumps up from the desk and swishes out of the tent.
The camp is quite still, so he assumes the company is still at mess. He rubs his brow absently as he lays on his cot and feels caught out when the tent swishes open again. It is Cassandra, entering briskly with a leather folio of papers. He recognizes the case she keeps her journal and travel documents in. She opens it on the desk and removes her journal. She scans from the end, looking for something; finding it she holds the book open with her finger and looks to a letter on the desk.
Intrigued, Cullen rises and goes to look over her shoulder. Cassandra is copying out from a letter that came for him from a merchant—a Travis Barris—from just north of Calenhad. At first, he thought the man sold arms, but when it became clear he was a druffalo trader, he had put it aside to be sent to Josephine for a merchant connection for food stores.
“Cassandra, what are you doing?” he asks wearily.
She stops, seemingly just remembering she isn’t alone. Not meeting his eye, she bends and continues to look at the letter, tracing notes from her journal, and copying out to the fresh parchment.
Watching her work between the letter, the journal, and the fresh paper, it suddenly dawns on Cullen: “it is a cipher?”
“Yes,” Cassandra answers tersely, continuing to write.
Knowing that she will share the information she finds, Cullen moves away, pours each of them a small cup of wine, leaves one on the desk for Cassandra, and moves to sit so he can watch her.
Finally, she is done. She sits back. She looks over the parchment she has copied out and then wordlessly extends her hand to Cullen, offering him the note.
For all the droning of the druffalo trader’s letter, this missive is remarkably short:
Knight-Commander
The world is upside down and the Lord Seeker turns it. There are those of us who would revolt, but we dare not fly into chaos.
We need aide.
I am afraid.
Delrin
“Delrin?” Cullen asks.
“Ser Delrin Barris, I should think,” Cassandra responds, looking into the bottom of her cup. She throws back the rest of her wine and refills the cup with water. “He was with Lucius in Val Royeaux. He will be in Therinfall, I should think.”
The tension is fetid. Cullen rescans the line of the translated cipher—I am afraid.— “Is it a trap, Cassandra?” Cullen’s voice is low. The tone of the letter is so desperate, so lost, he almost wills Cassandra to say it is.
Cassandra stares at the ground, her hands on her knees, her elbows locked as she sits, a bundle of tension and thought. Slowly, she nods her head no.
“But, the cipher?” he asks.
“One of the Seekers’; it is archaic and not widely used.”
“Could it have been fed to him by the Lord Seeker?”
“Possibly, but I think not. Barris was overwrought by what passed in Val Royeaux, and he showed the greatest openness to the Herald’s divine providence. Were the Order in its right mind, the kind of challenge Barris was issuing would be the first sign of dissension I would look for as a Seeker. No, I think the plea from him is genuine.” She looks up at Cullen, offers as explanation: “If they are at Therinfall, there are still archives there: he more than likely came across it.”
He shakes his head and protests into the gloom: “But a cipher I don’t know, couldn’t know; it is a risk, almost doomed to fail in its reliance on happenstance.” She stares at him and Cullen pauses, lapses into thought: “It is why you think it’s genuine, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Commander, it is.” Cassandra sits very still. “But I recognize that this did not come to me, but to you. I believe it is up to you as to whether you bring this to the Council and the Herald.”
Cullen’s head swims. Barris’s plea pulls at every sense of duty he has known his entire adult life. The horror of what Lambert did, dissolving the Nevarran Accord, the dissolution of the Circles: it is overwhelming. The Divine had known Lambert approached Cullen for support and that he had declined. But Justinia did not know the full sense of revulsion he felt for what Lambert set in motion.
When Cassandra first appeared in Kirkwall he saw her only as a Seeker and one of the many who were betraying everything they should all be standing for. It had only been respect for the Office of the Divine that led him to travel to Val Royeaux to give his refusal, rather than send it by courier letter and disappear into the night.
He swallows roughly. His fate could have so easily been that of any one of the Templars they have found in the Hinterlands: scrabbling for an existence, robbing and looting for food and Lyrium. He does not lie to himself to think he could have withstood the withdrawal without Cassandra’s support, her will has supplanted his own on numerous occasions when his flagged. Or worse, he thinks: he could have stayed in Kirkwall, continuing to say each day that he would leave on the morrow as he had done for months before the Divine’s call came. He would have been swept away on a tide of Red Lyrium, then, and not even the Bride herself could have redeemed him.
When he thinks of the alliance that the Inquisition must make, he is unsure he can separate his own feelings on the Order. He says as much to Cassandra and she regards him with an arched eye, “Why do you think you should? Most Holy chose you because you came from the Order.”
“You mean she settled on me,” he argues. “She wanted Hawke, Cassandra, you made no secret of who you sought in Kirkwall.”
“Perhaps,” she replies archly, “but that does not mean Hawke was a stronger choice, simply a more prominent one. Regardless, Cullen, the Divine chose you because of your dedication to the Order, to the Chantry, something Hawke never had.” He looks skeptically at her, obviously not convinced of these credentials and she grunts in frustration. “Can the Templars close the Breach?” she demands crossly.
“With the Herald? Yes, I have no doubt.” He thinks back to the time after the Conclave, fighting the rifts, pulling at the last of the Lyrium in him to push and prod the Veil, dampening the rifts, the startling feeling when the Herald closed one in front of him.
“Then what is there to contemplate, Commander?” Cassandra asks. “We must think to our next purpose. Once the Breach has been dealt with, we then will have to manage the war, but with the chaos of the rifts that have already opened. What if the Herald falls at the Breach? We know from Solas that mages can little affect Rifts—only Templars have had any success in suppressing them. If the Herald were to fall, without the Templars we would have no way to reassert order in the chaos.
“If we are to rebuild the Chantry, the Seekers—if we are to rebuild Thedas—we need the Order, Cullen. If Lucius has turned them against their natural — ” she falters, slows to a stop, her ferocity cutting into her composure.
Cullen cannot begin to imagine how Lucius could betray the Order as Delrin suggests . . . but, then, no one thought Lambert could dissolve the Nevarran Accord, either. He pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “You’re assuming they are something worth redeeming, Seeker.”
“It matters not,” Cassandra returns harshly. “We need allies for what comes next. We will make them worthy of redemption, Cullen.” He looks up to meet her unwavering gaze. “We will hold to our purpose, Ser Knight.”
“Yes, Lady Seeker.”
Cassandra nods imperiously, gathers her papers, and retreats from the tent.