“Huh. No fish on the menu tonight, Corff?”
“ ‘Fraid not. Mackerel’s been coming up sick, or something. We got mutton tonight.”
Varric sighed. “...Damn. I’ll just grab that for us, then. Thanks.”
Three days since we petitioned the Viscount, five hours since we finally received the letter that permitted me to begin making the arrangements, and every passing moment, the more I felt I should hit my head against the wall and allow oblivion to take me. Varric slid three bowls of stew onto our table and slipped into the chair opposite us, Harding taking hers with a smile and a thanks while I stared at my parchment and quill, too frustrated to be hungry.
Why did it come so easily to him? Every word I wrote I scratched out again. Five hours of trying.
“It doesn’t need to be anything complicated, you know.” Varric turned over the bits of meat in his stew with the back of his spoon, swirling them around the bowl to pretend he wasn’t being picky. “It’s just an invitation.”
Just. Simple or not, these people threw my mother out onto the street and left her there to die, all for a baby born out of wedlock.
“They hated mother,” I said, “they’ll hate me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“They’re high-society kalnas, and I’m––” I sighed. The air was musty, the floor was rotting, and the designated spittoon reeked if you sat too close. “Currently, living in a tavern.”
Harding spoke around the stew in her mouth, but still had the courtesy to cover it with her hand. She kicked her legs under the table, occasionally smacking one of my or Varric’s shins. “Who’re you writing to?”
“Extended family. It’s not important.”
Varric pushed my bowl towards me, but still didn’t touch his. “Eat something. Come back to it later. You can’t write on an empty stomach.”
“You first.” I glared pointedly at him until he rolled his eyes. He ate a small spoonful.
The stew was tough, and oddly dry, but I ate it anyway while the evening settled, and those who lived here returned to their rooms. Soon it was only us, save a few lingering drunks, some men and another dwarf in the corner, wearing a dark hood.
Varric ate half of his dinner then set it down. “How’s your sewing project coming along?”
The dim light in my room was difficult on the eyes. Black thread against black fabric. I felt like a fool; I was never a seamstress, but what choice did I have? Attend mother’s burial in rags?
“Fine. Slow.”
“You’ve got time.”
“I guess.”
Harding rested her chin on her closed fist, her empty bowl pushed into the centre of the table, and the spoon balanced on the uneven rim. “You never said what the dress was for.”
Varric picked up his stew again and inhaled a huge mouthful.
“Just––Just something in the city,” I said.
“Oh, is it for the Guild?”
The longer these days went on, the more I hated lying to her face. I followed Varric’s example and took a fresh mouthful of chewy mutton, nodding instead of responding, and turning my focus back to my parchment.
“Ah, right,” she said.
Ancestors, I felt sick. We laughed and danced together, and I dared to sit here, in this chair, in this bar, look at her earnestly, and lie.
I pushed my bowl away and gathered my parchment, quill, and ink. Varric let me borrow them and I would have to return them before I went to bed.
He finally swallowed his food with a pained wince. Too much, huh? Asshole. “Heading to bed?” he rasped. “Don’t wanna stay for a game?”
“Varric…”
“Yeah, I know.” He waved his hand, dismissing me. “You don’t gamble. It’s fine. Go get some sleep.”
If he knew, why did he keep asking? It was like when he called me ‘kid’––over and over––even when I told him not to, and by now I’d heard every excuse.
I climbed the stairs to my room, skipping the one rotted board. I sat down on my bed intending to sew, then fell asleep with the dress still in my lap.
I woke up some hours later, still too early for the sunrise but not early enough to be night. I stared into the darkness, the still silence, a pain in my neck from the awkward angle I slept on it, and dangerously, my needle and thread still in my hand. Footsteps and creaking passed by my door; Varric, I thought, who usually stirred around this hour, and then went back to bed until breakfast.
I shuffled underneath my blankets and tried to fall asleep again, the wind in my ears and darkness behind my eyes. I’d nearly succeeded when the thud startled me awake again.
Nothing. Just the outlines of furniture, my bed, my legs under the blankets. The Hanged Man had many patrons, many who fumbled about, drunk, at strange hours.
My room didn’t have a lock.
Dim flickering torchlight formed a thin halo in the cracks of the door to the hall. Shifting to sit upright in my bed made it creak, and I froze, as though the sound would alert the whole tavern of my presence, the drunk men and their wandering hands. Here, she’s here, she can’t fight back.
I wasn’t afraid of the dark. It was the shadow blocking that thin halo of light that frightened me.
“Varric?” I whispered. The shadow didn’t reply. It was too narrow to be Varric, too wide to be Harding. It shifted, a creak in the floorboard sounding underneath it, then, hesitating only briefly, walked away. Light footsteps travelled down the hall, away into the tavern, petering off into gradual silence, and with my heart in my ears, I crept from my bed to the door and blocked it with the nearest chair.
It wouldn’t do anything. It couldn’t stop anyone.
“So, now that we have a date for the funeral,” Varric reclined in his desk chair, craning his neck to gaze at where I sat at his dining table, “I should write to my contact and let him know what day we wanna meet.”
My frustration bordered on tears. The roll of thread, borrowed from Varric’s cabinet, mocked me from its place on the table as, once again, I steadied the seam ripper against my stitches, and seriously considered tossing the whole thing into the nearest open flame.
I had precious little time. Still no invitations written, no travel arranged. I had not even picked the stone for her burial, or commissioned the casket, and I didn’t want to think about how much coin that was going to cost me.
Varric twisted around in his chair. “Kid?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Ack. I’m sorry, it’s just a habit. So, you’re okay for me to––?”
“Yes, fine. Go ahead.”
He frowned then turned back to his desk, plucking his quill from the wood and dipping it into his ink. “Maybe you should take a nap.”
I pricked my finger and hissed. Blood formed a small bead on the surface of the skin. He was right, and I hated that he was right. He sounded angry, and I knew I’d done something wrong, just as much as he knew that he’d done something wrong, and I was angry at him.
Except he didn’t do anything wrong at all.
I pressed my forehead to the table and, closing my eyes, allowed myself to drift to sleep.
Some hours after, Harding’s cool fingers gently shook me awake, and I groaned from the pain in my neck and the pounding behind my forehead. I pressed my palm to my eyes until the world came into focus. A blanket fell off my shoulders and onto the chair––not mine, but one of Varric’s, from a shelf on the far side of his suite. Someone had folded my dress onto a chair and pinned the needle safely to the silk.
“Sorry,” Harding whispered, “I wanted to let you sleep, but it’s getting late and I wasn’t sure if you had anything to eat…”
I accepted the stew with a nod and a sniffle. Varric wasn’t at his desk anymore and the sky outside his high window was a shade of orange which cast the whole room in a vague pink glow.
“Varric’s gone out.” She slid into the chair beside mine. “You okay?”
“Fine. Tired.”
“I can see that.” She smiled, teasing, and I tried to return it, because as tired and stressed as I was, I still didn’t want to worry her. “I think you slept half the day.”
I didn’t want to tell her about the shadow outside of my door, for her to think I was paranoid, so I shrugged and had a small spoonful of the stew. Mutton again.
“He’ll be back soon?”
“Varric? I think so. Maybe. He said he was meeting a friend.”
I stood, clutching the bowl in both of my hands, and wandered to his mantelpiece, where underneath a faint fire flickered in the dark. The suite was warm, but too empty without him in it.
“All these dwarven things.” I swept my gaze over a line of carvings that hung on the wall. They told a story, when put together, but these were disjointed, out of order. “I thought he hated Orzammar.”
Harding hummed and joined me at the fire. “His family’s from there, right?”
Inherited. Of course. But why not put them away? Sell them? These could have been hundreds of years old, and here they were, on some surfacer’s wall. His furniture, too. The table, his desk, the bed behind the partition curtain. He was so uncomfortable in the mercerie––why not here?
“I wish––” I stopped before vocalising a thought, but Harding’s expectant gaze made me finish it. “I wish I knew more about them.”
“His family?”
My uncle. My grandparents. Maybe it was wrong to call them that? I didn’t consider Varric a father at all, and I couldn’t see a world where he thought of me as a daughter, but blood was still blood. Did he look like his mother? Did I look like his mother?
“Just curious. I don’t know.”
“I get it.” She shifted closer, enough for our shoulders to touch. “I’m sure you could ask.”
“Maybe.”
If only I could see a painting. They were noble, they had to have a family portrait. Maybe it was still locked away in his old estate, like the letters were?
Harding pointed to one of the carvings. “Inquisitor’s been collecting things like these. They tell a story. Right?”
“Usually, but… these are out of order.”
“What’re they about?”
I paused to consider them. They were old, even if not by hundreds of years, and time had eroded them, but… “A paragon. About his daughter––or, his son? They died. And then he took a new name to honour them. I don’t know. My mother could’ve read it better.”
“A new name…” Her voice was close to my ear.
I didn’t know the story, but I didn’t need to. The longer I gazed at the carvings in silence, the more my chest fluttered with old forgotten pride. I wished I could have seen these carvings as they once were, in the hallways of my Ancestors.
“Can’t imagine losing your baby.” Harding pressed her arm against mine, as close as she could be without physically shoving me away, her head craned so she could see what I saw. “Never watching them grow up.”
I stared at where her skin touched mine. “Right.”
“It happened so much back at home. I never even thought about it. Kinda like it was inevitable, you know? Like one day it was gonna happen to me too.”
“You want children?”
“Oh. I don’t know. I guess it depends. If my partner wanted them, maybe?”
“But… what if you have a baby you don’t want?”
She blinked at the carvings, pausing to mull over something in her head. “The village girls also talked about ways to get rid of it. But it all sounded so dangerous.”
“That’s really possible?” I thought about mother. Would she have been happier?
“I think so.” She lowered her voice. “We weren’t allowed to talk about it. But I knew a girl, she was so young, her Ma sent her to a healer, and then we never saw her again.”
“What about the father?”
Her expression grew suddenly very serious. “We weren’t allowed to talk about that either.”
I breathed a few times in the silence, perhaps waiting for her to say something so that I didn’t have to.
She didn’t.
“Was she forced?” My voice didn’t waver, and I found myself hating that more than if it had. Harding didn’t wince or tear herself away, but she did linger in the quiet for a moment longer than comfortable. Varric would’ve winced.
“We weren’t allowed to talk about it,” she said again.
No. I wasn’t allowed to talk about it, either. I gazed again at the carvings, searching for something in them that I didn’t have. Mother loved carvings, old trinkets, things that reminded her of her home. I wished I could see it.
“You know,” Harding began again, “Isana, I don’t wanna say anything wrong, so, stop me if you want. Okay?”
I nodded despite the curdling sensation in my gut. She gathered herself before speaking again.
“You and Varric.” Oh. “I was gonna say this before, but then everything on the boat happened, and I didn’t wanna upset––”
“It’s fine, just say it.”
She sighed. “Varric is my friend. But if he was hurting you, you could tell me. And we could go to the Inquisitor together.”
I couldn’t hide from this forever. I knew that since I overheard them on the ship. I needed to defend him, tell her she was wrong, and that everything was okay––I didn’t know how to do that. It was true, so why did it just feel like another lie? I could feel her eyes on me, boreing into my skin when I couldn’t muster a reply, and all it did was remind me of my mother. I tore away.
“He didn’t rape me.”
She paled. “I didn’t say––”
“But you were thinking it!” My voice rang against the stone walls. “He didn’t do anything to me! He’s helping me! It’s private and I don’t want to talk about it, so stop trying to butt in where you’re not wanted!”
I could have lied, and told myself that I didn’t mean to hurt her. Apologised, maybe, for yelling, for sounding like my mother. Instead, when she lowered her chin and nodded with pursed lips, I turned away, and only hummed when she told me she was going to bed early.
Varric wasn’t some predator leering in the darkness. I surprised myself with the trust I laid unto that thought, like pressing a seed into the dirt, not knowing if it would grow. Was I the seed or the child planting it?
Varric wouldn’t hurt me. I didn’t know if knowing that counted as trust. I hated him. I needed him. I wanted him to love me. I wanted to hate him more. I didn’t understand why I didn’t. Mother wasn’t here, but she was here, in my head, and her hatred and her fury burned in me like the forges of Orzammar, unending. What happened if I stopped hating him?
I ate my stew. Tasteless. Harding brought it to me, and I shouted at her. Why? Because of a horrid misunderstanding that was my fault to begin with? Did I need to tell Varric what she said? Would that only make it worse? Should I apologise? What kind of humiliation ritual would that be?
A necessary one. That was what Varric would say. My bowl mocked me, as empty as the suite.
With heavy feet and heavier eyes I dragged myself to my room. Harding’s door was shut, but a light flickered underneath it, and sounds of shuffling could be heard through the wall if someone listened close. I didn’t linger long enough to hear, instead shutting myself into my closed, stuffy space and flopping onto my bed, with my kirtle and petticoats and everything else.
Why did he have to leave again? Why did he keep running away? I lifted my head from the mattress. The contents of my pack spilled onto the hardwood floor where I forgot to put it all away. The gleaming grin of Varric’s author’s portrait peeked out from under my sketchbook, his eyes staring out at nothing except the air. He seemed so much younger, his red hair so much more vibrant, not the duller, faded ginger it was now.
“What are you looking at, stupid man?” I grumbled into my bedsheets. “ ‘S rude to stare.”
The painting didn’t reply. I chuckled bitterly to myself. “At least you can’t run away.”
Ancestors. This damnable tavern had finally driven me mad. I closed my eyes, tried to sleep, but when I cracked them open again and found him still staring out at me, I sighed and stood.
Even falling apart, the book was smooth in my hands. Some part of me still flinched from it, distant sensations of the sea wind battering my hand as the pages flapped like a bird against the breeze coming back to me all at once, not a memory I could see, but still just as vivid to me as the book in my hand. Its lost pages were out there, somewhere, disintegrated or rotted in the salty ocean, or maybe, somewhere safe on a shore for some distant stranger to find in the sand.
Mother burnt his books.
She wouldn’t have hesitated to throw it out that window. She never wavered.
“ ‘S not fair,” I mumbled. Whatever meaningful words of comfort the book could have were hidden somewhere inside it, and even daring to drag my thumb against the spine made my heart thump against my ribs. Mother would be angry again. Mother would burn him again. Mother would make me watch again.
Mother wasn’t here, so why did it feel like she was?
I fell back onto the mattress and held the book to my chest. On the boat, Harding said she trusted Varric with her life, but if that was true, she wouldn’t have said those things about him. What was I supposed to think about that? Did he do something bad when my back was turned? Was I not looking hard enough? Would my naivety have me on my back again, clawing and screaming at an amorphous figure and begging for the pain to stop?
A feeble knock at my door broke the silence. My fingers ached with the force I clutched the book with, and my eyes burned from staring, unblinking, into the dark. When I didn’t immediately reply, Harding cracked the door open and eyed me through the gap, wearing only her shirt and braies.
My instincts shouted for me to cry, scream, throw Varric’s book at her head. Her jaw tensed in the silence as I fought them.
“Are you awake?” she asked.
“No,” I grumbled, “I sleep with my eyes open.”
She huffed a hollow laugh. “Maker.” I sat up. She concentrated on the floor, mulling over her words in apparent apprehension, before finally settling on; “Maker, I’m so stupid.”
I tucked Varric’s book out of sight and avoided her gaze when it lifted from the floor. “You didn’t know any better.”
“But I should’ve. I already talked to Varric about this.”
And I would be more upset if she took his word over mine. I shook my head. “I know. I overheard.”
My door clicked closed behind her. “You were awake?” she asked, softly, with a flush creeping onto her cheeks. The closed door was a dark shape behind her which bled light through tiny gaps. “Why didn’t you say?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to fix it but I couldn’t.”
She blinked, was silent, then sighed like she’d been holding it the entire time. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I thought I ruined everything.”
Maybe for a second I thought she did, too. Not now. “You didn’t.”
“Still.” She flopped onto my bed, face up at the ceiling. “I was ready to pack up and leave forever.” She smiled up at me. “A little silly, huh?”
“You would’ve gone all the way back to Skyhold on your own?”
“Not actually. But I would think really hard about it.”
“I understand.” More than most, I was sure. Harding hummed, content on my bed and gazing up at the imperfections on the roof. “And…” I began again, and looked at me, “and even if he was… hurting me… I would be grateful to have someone like you.” Someone who would believe me. “I’ve never had that before.”
“A friend?”
I shook my head. Harding’s eyes sparkled a little. “Varric said you were his friend.”
That was the simple explanation, maybe. I wasn’t sure what I could call him. Certainly not ‘father’, or… dad. “He says a lot of things.” I fell back to join her in staring at the ceiling. Thump. “I don’t know how I feel.”
“He cares about you. I think. He looks at you a lot so that’s kinda why I thought… you know.”
“Looks at me?”
“The same way he looks at the Inquisitor. Ha-ha––everyone thought they were together, there was a betting pool and everything. I mean, they were close.” She sighed. “Now I don’t even think they’re friends. Especially not after the Approach.”
I rolled onto my side, my arm tucked under my head like a pillow. “Tell me what happened.”
She drummed her fingers on her stomach. “It’s not really my place.”
“Please. There’s no way Varric’ll tell me.”
“If you asked––”
“I don’t want to ask him.” I sat up, and she followed, pulling her knees to her chest and resting her chin on her forearms. “And I trust you more.”
She bit the inside of her cheek. I didn’t want to pressure her, but what was I supposed to do? Pull Varric aside, demand to talk about his dead best friend? Why would he willingly discuss that with me anyway? He’d say something like, “it’s nothing you’d be interested in hearing, kid”.
“Okay,” she finally breathed. I straightened myself up to listen better.
I knew little of Adamant. That it was an old warden fortress was about as much as anyone normal could say. Harding’s eyes went distant when she described its looming walls, hunched in a raging sandstorm like a singular obelisk, bordering the Abyssal Rift that delved into the old roads of our Ancestors. She wasn’t on the front lines, she said; she didn’t go into the fortress at all. But even through the sand and the storm, there was the roar of the dragon, the splinter of green light that lit up the sky like the sun, then the dreaded quiet that came after, like a wave crashing into the sea of sand.
She fussed with a stray strand of hair, curling it around her fingers in nervous repetitive motions, eyes cast downward.
“Everyone thought she was dead. The others too. We didn’t know where they were, just that they were gone, and we thought…” She shook her head. “Commander Cullen wanted to retreat. The Chargers refused, they didn’t wanna leave Bull behind.”
“Bull was with her?”
Sullen, she nodded. “Bull, Solas, Varric. Hawke.” She hesitated before Hawke, like speaking it out loud would summon Varric through my door. “And the King.”
The King. I hummed low in the back of my throat. Yes, of course. He was a warden too. Harding continued when I didn’t interrupt her.
“I don’t know what happened. I only read the reports I was allowed to see. Something happened when they were inside that rift. When everyone came back––” She faltered, wringing her fingers together, interlocked as if holding her own hand. “Hawke was gone. Just gone.”
Silence. Harding sighed against her hands while I toyed with my blanket. Varric said they didn’t even have a body to burn; I thought that meant it was damaged, mangled, ruined beyond recognition of a body. But gone was very different from dead.
I gathered my blanket into my arms. “Hawke gave this to me, when I was a child.”
“He did?”
“He saved me.”
Strange how such a terrible memory could be so fond to me. Mother cast me out, and Mother Margitte found me and carried me home the next morning, a bundled up, sleeping child with blue fingers and mud in her hair.
“But the patterns are dwarven.”
I looked up. Harding spread the blanket between her fingers, stretching the stitches just enough to flatten the patterns of geometric lines and shapes. Gold on red. I discarded the thought just as quickly as the first time.
“It was Hawke’s. He’s not a dwarf. I don’t see why he’d have something like that.”
“I’m not sure, maybe he bought it somewhere.”
“It doesn’t look dwarven to me.”
“It is––my Ma is a seamstress. I recognise these. Varric did too.”
I pulled it back into my arms. It didn’t make sense to me. “Well. Well, fine, he probably bought it or something.”
Harding blinked a few times, then breathed a quiet ‘oh’. “That doesn’t make it less special! It was still a gift. I’m sorry.”
A gift. I wasn’t sure if I could think of it like that. I ran off with it, maybe he’d intended to take it back, but…
I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me, but I carried him with me anyway. Now he was gone. Was it foolish––delusional––to wonder if saving my life doomed his? Of course it was. The thought lingered all the same.
I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. “Did you meet Hawke at all? While he was in Skyhold.”
“Oh, yes. He was at the bar a lot. He was nice, kinda quiet. Varric did all the talking for the two of them.”
Quiet. Yes. Soft, like the blanket. He kneeled in the mud so I didn’t have to look up at him. What would’ve happened if I didn’t run away? Maybe Varric could have found me sooner.
Ha.
“Oh. It’s getting late.” Harding gazed up at the moon through my window, full and looming like a watchful eye over the city. She stood, smoothing down her shirt. “You look tired. I should let you sleep.”
I didn’t want her to leave, but I couldn’t just ask her to stay when I’d already asked so much of her. So I just nodded, pulling my plaits loose over my shoulders, which still ached from my nap at the table.
She stood and stumbled to the door, darker in here now than when she first came in.
“Thank you, Harding.”
Half out the door, she paused, then turned back with one foot still in the hall. “Lace.”
“What?”
“Lace Harding. That’s my name.”
Lace. L-ay-ce. I mouthed the named, only remembering I should speak when it was too late; she’d already left.
Sleep came in fits, irregular dozing until I inevitably jolted awake at the slightest sound, and searched in the dark for the chair against the door.
Mother hated when I woke her up in the middle of the night, a little girl frightened of the dark. She threatened to take away my bed if I wasn’t going to sleep in it.
Something changed after the invasion. Six hours trapped in a dark closet, listening to the city burn, and emerging to find our home torn apart. The qunari frightened her too, and maybe that was why she stopped turning me away when I climbed into her bed, like we weren’t screaming at each other only hours before.
Such a stupid thing to miss. Not her bed––her voice, shrill and shaky while she dragged me down into the dirt. I wanted to tear my voice raw again, throw her stupid plates at her head, and after, wail against the wall while I cradled the red, stinging hand print imprinted on my cheek like a Brand.
Now she was gone, and I was still just a frightened little girl asking for her mama.
I jolted awake again some hours later. My candle was burnt down, now only a hardened clump of wax at the bottom of a dish. A nearby door clicked, and floorboards creaked in the room over as Lace returned to bed. Lace. I traced the letters into my pillow with my finger. It felt like some deep, terrible secret. Why hide her name? Why trust me with it? I closed my eyes and sighed. I’d ask in the morning.
A scream.
I shot up. My blanket fell to the floor. A loud thump, then a shout, a bang on my wall. A door burst open. I groped for my dagger, dropped it, watched it clatter to the floor and leapt from my bed to grab it again. I trembled in the middle of the room, both fists clutched around the hilt.
A clash. I clenched my fists tighter. The door was still but outside it flashes of shadows blocked the light from the hall.
Lace shouted. The shadow got to its feet. It fell again with a crack, and she cried out, a cry which cut off, and was silenced.
The shadow struggled. Her fingernails scraped the floor. A low voice, muffled by the door, grumbled something incomprehensible. He was going to kill her.
Varric wasn’t coming. She trusted him. She trusted me. She told me her name, and now––I let her die?
My eyes stung. I moved before I could tell myself to do it. Ramming my door open, sprinting into the corridor, the hooded dwarf looked up, and stilled as he met my eyes. His grip loosened. Lace twisted her body. In one powerful lurch, she kicked the air from his lungs.
“Isana––go!”
She tried to crawl, but he grabbed her, lifted her, and threw her against the wall, where she crumpled in a heap and didn’t get up again.
A split lip oozed over his chin into a thick beard. His heel turned. In a second he was in front of me, my dagger in his hands, and his leering, copper-scented breath next to my ear while he pushed me into the wall.
I spat. Gritted teeth bared against my jaw. The dagger pressed slowly, slowly into my side, sharper and sharper as the pressure threatened to split me in two, and as I begged him to stop, all I could think was how familiar it was.
An arrow speared his shoulder. He roared, voice crackling, and he tore from me, dropped my dagger and fell against the wall. Lace swayed in her place. She nocked the next arrow, but too late, he lunged at her. I dove for my dagger, clutched it in pale fingers, shut my eyes tight, and charged blind.