I had to do it.
There wasn’t a choice.
I could sit here and talk about how sorry I was, how afraid I was, how much I blubbered and wailed, and how the guilt and shame would wrack me for decades to come and decades more.
I would be lying.
I had to do it.
Do you understand?
Lace’s eyes were haunted, her face pale, bloodied handprints a trail behind her as she crawled, painfully, achingly, to a wall to hold herself on. I only registered Varric’s voice in the back of my mind, and then a woman’s timbre drawl somewhere further back. Lace said some words I didn’t understand or, maybe refused to. So far away, muffled by some distant ringing, or humming, or––it could have been my own heart beat. I wasn’t sure.
Blessed are they who stand against the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter.
Blessed are they who… who…
“Isana.”
I blinked and opened my eyes. I was in Varric’s bed, pillows behind me, stacks of blankets weighing me down, into the mattress. Varric knelt at the bedside, one knee up and his torso twisted to be as close to me as he could without breathing my air, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t smell his. Alcohol.
He took my hand and patted it. His gloves were gone.
The one who repents, who has faith, unshaken by the darkness of the world… what’s the next line?
“Harding?” was the first thing I said.
“Some cracked ribs. She’ll be fine.” He sniffed. “Could’ve been a lot worse.”
She didn’t get up. I thought…
“He was going to kill her.”
He nodded. Man of a thousand words, and that was all he had, a quiet hum to acknowledge the reality he failed to prevent.
I folded and unfolded my fingers around Varric’s warm hand.
“Is he dead?”
Varric turned his head away. “We got him tied up down in the cellar. Think Rivaini’s down there with him.”
I wondered if I should be relieved.
He wasn’t dead. I didn’t kill him. But Varric still refused to look at me, and that frightened me more than any relief I could have felt. He wasn’t dead yet.
I took a deep breath. “I want to see him.”
“Mm. Hm. Not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Are you going to stop me?”
He helped me out of the bed. “I don’t think I could stop you from doing anything, honestly.”
Something stung my side underneath a small tear and a patch of blood on my chemise, a shallow puncture where the tip of that dagger pierced me. If he hadn’t stopped to savour it… why did he stop at all?
Varric didn’t mention it. He guided me through the tavern and then behind the bar, where Corff sat at the counter, still in his nightclothes and looking grim. He acknowledged Varric with a tight nod.
Behind a door, the cellar stairwell was dim, but light spilled in at the bottom, along with quiet murmurs which sounded like hiding in my room when mother had guests. Before the last step, Varric snatched my arm into a death grip. It hurt.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“You don’t want me to do this.”
He ignored that. “If you wanna go back up––no one’s gonna judge you.”
I did want to go back up. I wanted Lace. I wanted my blanket. But I wasn’t doing this to prove a point, I needed it. “You already know what I’m going to say.”
“That I lost my chance to treat you like a child?” My own words echoed back at me made me flinch. “Yeah. I’m right behind you.”
But when I stepped forward again, he pulled me back.
“Wait. I’ll… go first.”
“Make up your mind.”
He shuffled past me, flat against the wall so he didn’t touch. As the cellar light spilled over his face, his posture shifted, and he pulled back his shoulders.
“He behaving for you, Rivaini?”
He stepped inside, but without him behind me, I didn’t know how to continue. I was a meek little girl trailing after him like a lost puppy, not the confident woman I thought I was only seconds prior. But if he could put on an act and be okay––I could too, right?”
“Better than some other men I’ve tied up in basements. The bar is low, trust me.”
The cellar was a cold rush of air, ice boxes stacked on each other and tall wine racks looming behind them, old and rickety and ready to collapse. At the centre of the room, with Lace’s arrow in his shoulder and my dagger in his ribs, was the black-haired dwarf tied to a chair, hunched and pale as death, a blood nose and the cut on his lip oozing over his beard and caking into the hair. Pale blue eyes glazed over Varric and snapped directly to me.
A pounding headache worsened at the base of my temples.
“He talked?”
“Working on it. Not much for conversation, this one. Reminds me of someone else I know.”
“Come, now, Rivaini. Not when Broody isn’t here to defend himself.”
“If you don’t tell, neither will I.” She grabbed a fistful of the dwarf’s hair and pulled it back. The apple in his exposed throat bobbed up and down like a fishing line. She grinned down at him, white teeth against dark skin, and let his scalp go again to let his chin fall to his chest. “He’s Carta, right? Maker. That brings me back.”
“You’re telling me. We’ve had a bit of trouble with these assholes on the road. Don’t need to tell him that, though; I’m sure this duster knows all about ‘em.”
“I’m not a duster.”
A gravelly, unsteady voice came from snarled, bloody lips, words spat like poison with flecks of red saliva.
Varric only smiled. My ears rang louder.
“I got it from here, Rivaini. Get yourself a drink and let Corff know I’ll be back up in a bit.”
“Don’t have too much fun without me.”
“Cross my heart.”
She left, smiling down at me as she went, and tilting her head with curiosity I wasn’t going to escape later. Then, with the door at the top of the stairs slamming shut, we were alone with him. Varric moved closer to him like stepping over an invisible line etched into the stone, and he bowed down to force the dwarf to meet his eyes.
“You got a name?”
“What’s it matter?” A gurgled, bitter sound came from somewhere in his throat, something that could have been a breath, if he had proper lungs left to breathe with. “I’ll be dead by morning.”
Varric glanced him up and down, dagger and arrow protruded from him like darts on a board. “Not if we get you to a healer.”
“You won’t.”
“How you figure?”
“ ‘Cause I don’t have what you want.” He swayed in his seat. Another gargled wheeze. “I got a job. I did the damn job. If I knew the sodding Inquisition was involved I wouldn’tve… wouldn’tve…” he trailed off.
“What makes you think we’re Inquisition?”
“That…” he wheezed, “that ginger girl. The other one. Put up a fight. Tried to choke me with a belt that’s got that buckle, that, that little symbol on all the pamphlets.” Lace… a red-haired dwarf girl, sleeping in a tavern, alone, vulnerable, unprotected. His eyes found me again through the shelf. I slunk further back into the shadows, but it wasn’t enough to escape him. I felt faint. “Shoulda known I picked the wrong bitch.”
Varric slapped him.
A hard, sharp, back-handed strike which rung out in the cellar and made me yelp. The dagger shifted with the jolt of the dwarf’s body and he rose again from a fit of coughs and bloody splutters with a red mark and a cut across his cheek from the ring on Varric’s finger that now shone with fresh blood. He stared at it and his splayed-out fingers. I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t want to. His frame trembled with weeks’ worth of rage boiling to the surface.
“The only reason,” he said, and grabbed the dwarf’s jaw to hold up his head, “that you’re not bleeding out, is ‘cause that dagger’s still stuck in your ribs. So, are you gonna cooperate, or am I gonna have to take the kid out the room ‘til you do?”
“You’re not gonna kill me.” A wheeze. “You won’t. You won’t.”
“No?”
“N––No. No, ‘cause, I know your type, and you,”––wheeze––”you don’t wanna scare the girl.”
“Yeah? Know what I think?” Varric wrapped a closed first around the arrow in his shoulder––”She has more balls than you ever will.”––and ripped it out.
I covered my ears. Nausea brimmed in my throat. Maybe if I screamed the Chant loud enough in my head, I wouldn’t have to hear it, that howl of pain as tissue tore from muscle, or the clunk when the arrow hit the ground and slid across the tile, black, bloody, and barbed.
The one who repents, who has faith, unshaken by the darkness of the––unshaken by––
I wasn’t a child.
I knew death. I saw it every day. Rats, dogs, a crushed spider in the corner of a room, or a snail under my boot when I forgot to pay attention. I saw bodies pile in the streets when the Chantry went up in flames. Mass graves, mass burnings, wailing on every corner, dead mages, dead templars, dead little girls with bows in their hair. A dead man rotting in his bedroom.
I wasn’t a child. I was just a coward. But unlike everything else in my life––that was something I could control.
Sound flooded back into my ears. The dwarf wailed––that was the right word, not yelled, or seethed, or stoically masked his horrific pain. He wailed. Blood pooled from an unseen wound behind cloth and leather armour, and Varric stumbled back from it, shaking his head like trying to get out a song that wouldn’t unstick and pressing the back of his hand to his forehead, leaving behind a smear of red when he let it fall again.
The dwarf spat words I barely recognised, indecipherable between Common and Orzammarian, with cracks in his voice and wide, watery eyes that searched for me and begged me to make him stop.
Varric forced out a measured breath. “Let’s start over, yeah?”
“Fuck––fuck!”
“Who hired you?”
Pale blue lips struggled to form the right words. “I don’t know! I told you, I don’t know! They didn’t tell us, they said––they said it was some old family and they didn’t want to tell us!”
“Us? Others?”
Me, and, and a couple of the younger ones, and that man, that human man, I don’t remember his fuckin’ name, I swear, I promise. She knows him! Ask her!”
My heart clenched, but Varric shook his head. “She’s not part of this. You tell me what you know and I let you walk out of here alive.”
“You won’t kill me?”
For the first time since I entered the room; genuine fear, and I understood at the same time that he did; Varric wasn’t bluffing. I could stop all of this, if I just said the word, if I played the part of scared little girl, but––
“I’m not going to kill you.”
My head hurt. So heavy, so tired. So angry. I wanted it to stop and I didn’t care how.
“The––my job was for the girl’s mother. That Coterie human was supposed to get the information the Carta wanted, then––”
“What?” I whispered.
“––and then he could do whatever he wanted with her.”
“You killed my mother?”
I’d emerged from my hiding space behind the shelf. Varric held out his hand, telling me to stay where I was, but I didn’t listen.
“The Coterie was supposed to hurt you, or, or scare you, I don’t know why. But then––” Wheeze. “––after you left the city, they found that human dead, so they sent me back to kill you ‘cause they were up their tall asses about some dwarf kid killing one of their higher-ups.”
“The kid didn’t kill him,” Varric said. “The Carta did.”
“What? You think we’re stupid? The Carta isn’t gonna start a gang war over one little girl!”
I felt near tears, tight throat and stuttering breaths. I couldn’t look at Varric. Mother… “You killed my mother.”
“I don’t know who or why someone wanted her dead. I was just doing my job!” Wheeze. “I was just doing my job.”
He couldn’t even face her. He shot her with an arrow in the middle of the street because he couldn’t even face the woman he murdered, and then he waited until we were alone to kill us in our sleep like cattle for slaughter.
“You’re a coward.” My chin quivered, but I refused to cry. “I hope your soul rots inside your corpse.”
It would have been a grave enough insult for a human. But he wasn’t a human, he was a dwarf, and I had wished death and torment on him, on his children, and his children’s children, until the end of Thedas and all of reality. I revelled in the mix of rage and pain that flashed across his bloodied face. I wanted to make it worse. I wanted him to suffer.
Varric grazed my arm with his hand, a surprisingly gentle touch, and I forgot I didn’t want to look at him. Sad, old, brown eyes stared up at me, and he asked me in a very low and soft voice,
“What do you want to do with him?”
The dwarf struggled against his bindings. “You said you’d let me go. I told you everything. You promised. You promised me.”
Deals. Promises. Once again I found myself staring down at Varric Tethras and boiling him down to his bare essentials.
Varric was a liar.
Why me? Why make me choose? Another life in the hands of my mercy, but it wasn’t the same as before, I didn’t have a choice. I had to do it. It wasn’t my fault. Andraste, please, it wasn’t my fault.
I wasn’t a child, but sometimes I wished I was. Everything still hurt, but at least you were allowed to cry about it, and at least you knew why you were crying at all. I wanted this dwarf dead. I didn’t know it was possible to want that. I knew the world was cruel, dangerous, violent, but somehow deep down I’d always thought that people only ever did what they needed to do, like templars and mages.
Maybe Varric was right. Maybe I was still a child after all. I wanted to scream, stamp my feet, throw chairs and glasses at the wall. Where would I be then? Right back to where I started? It wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t fair.
“I want my dagger back.”
The one who repents, who has faith,
Unshaken by the darkness of the world,
She shall know true peace.
Two ornate daggers gleamed on a dining room table, one untouched, unused, unspoiled, and the other sheathed in a thick layer of a dead man’s blood.
If Varric minded the dagger on his clean table, he didn’t say anything about it. He draped my blanket over my shoulders and set down a hot mug of some kind of floral tea which made me sick just from the scent. I sipped it anyway, if only for the burn as it went down my throat.
“Listen,” he began.
“Stop,” I said. His mouth closed. “Whatever you’re going to say, I don’t need it.” The metal mug burned my skin. I stared up at him, where he stood with his bloodstained hands clutching the back of a chair. “I’m fine.”
He hummed. Thought. Then pulled the chair out and lowered himself into it.
“Harding was asking for you. Wanted to know if you’re okay.”
“I’ll… I’ll go see her soon. She should rest.” Maker knew I wanted to, but guilt wracked me like a fever. “She’s alright? She’s recovering?”
“She’ll be just fine. Just, maybe don’t go dragging her around the city anytime soon.”
“I don’t want to go outside, much less…” I shook my head. Everything hurt so much. “It was broad daylight. You know? When mother died. It was a busy street. He shot her,” I tapped my throat, and felt it constrict, “right here.”
Varric leaned closer. “Did you go to the Guard?”
“No…”
“I’ve got a friend in the Guard. She would’ve helped if she knew what was going on.”
“What would she have done?” I put my mug on the table with a quiet thunk. “It’s the Carta. And now the Coterie. What has the Guard ever done about that? Even Hawke––” Varric flinched. “Even Hawke couldn’t––”
“Hawke was one man.”
“But he had you! And you have that huge crossbow!”
“Trust me, Bianca’s good, but not ‘take down the Carta’ good.”
I scoffed. “Never even seen you use it. Starting to think it’s just for show.”
He raised a brow. “The day you get to see Bianca in action is the day I fucked up. Immeasurably. Look,” he ran his tongue behind his teeth, and his sudden hesitance made me shrink back into my blanket, “you’re gonna be pissed, but maybe we should––”
“I told you no.”
“Andraste’s ass, Isana.” He put his elbows on the table. “You’re uncomfortable. I fuckin’ get it. I am too. But there’s a whole lot of shit you’re not telling me, that I shouldn’ have to learn from some Carta grunt in a cellar!”
“You’re such a hypocrite.”
“Damn right I am. At least I can admit it. If you want me to piss off––fine, Rivaini’s waiting for me downstairs anyway, but I need––” he faltered. His leg bounced under the table, and he seemed like he wanted to run and hide. “Just let me––”
“It’s not about you.”
He pressed his palms into his eyes. He looked younger like this, ruffled red hair, those dark eyebags and deep laugh lines hidden behind his hands.
“Just let me help,” he breathed. “I wanna help.”
I stared at the daggers again. They taunted me. There was blood on my hands now, but… there already was, wasn’t there? It just wasn’t literal until now. I hated seeing him. Everywhere, all the time, in pinpricks of light, in the moon behind the clouds. I wished I could dream, but sometimes I was so glad I couldn’t. As a child, I didn’t understand when the little elf girl who lived in the alienage woke up screaming, or recoiled when one of the boys got too close, but I did now, and Maker, I would give anything to change that. For her and for me.
“When,” I croaked, and cleared my throat, “When was the first time you ever killed someone?”
Varric leaned away again, hands back in his lap, and shoulders limp like a deflated sack of air. He was old again. “Been so long. I barely even remember. Younger than you,” he squinted, “or I could’ve been ‘round the same age. The years blur together after a bit.”
“What happened?”
He sighed, wistful. “Nothing exciting. Classic story, got mugged in an alley, not even I could spin that. Didn’t have Bianca yet and I was never good with the knives.” He shrugged. “Punched the kid a little too hard. That’s all.”
I tapped the rim of my mug, staring into the wavering liquid instead of up at him. “Do you think he deserved to die?”
Varric was silent for a moment. “Which ‘he’ are you talking about?”
“Whichever you want.”
He sighed again, a little more exasperated this time, but didn’t push. I was done making choices today and he knew it. “The kid who mugged me? Probably not. Felt like shit for a couple months. Had a crisis, broke some mirrors, shaved my beard… uh, those were unrelated, though.”
“You felt guilty.”
“Of course.”
“Do you still feel guilty?”
He drummed his fingers on the table, a muffled sound of shifting fabric indicating his discomfort, and I knew I was treading dangerous ground, but I also knew he wasn’t going to let me stop, either.
“Yeah, sometimes,” he admitted, with a tightness in his voice. “Why?”
“But you kill people anyway?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“You had a choice.” I finally looked up. “You made me make it. Why would you do that to me?”
He pouted, face flushed bright red like an embarrassed child. “ ‘Cause I didn’t––I wanted––I thought––”
“If you know how it feels, why would you?” Because he didn’t think. Because he wanted it to be me. Because he thought I was ready. I wasn’t even actually angry, but something about how he looked at me––I wanted to pummel him into the fucking sun. Pathetic, stupid little man. Those thoughts sounded suspiciously like mother.
Thump. I threw my arms over my head and planted my forehead hard onto the table.
“ ‘M not mad,” I grumbled against the stone.
“Could’ve fooled me.” An amused statement without any attempt at humour.
I listened to my own breath for a little while. Varric didn’t leave, but he did shuffle a few times when the silence stretched for longer than comfortable, like he was stuck in the middle of awkward small talk, and not… whatever this was. When I sat up again, he had his hand covering his mouth, and he was staring at the other side of the room in distant thought.
“The human,” I said. His eyes flicked to me. “The Coterie one.”
“Mm.”
“That dwarf was right. I killed him.”
After a beat, Varric nodded. “Figured that out long before tonight, kid.”
Of course he did.
I asked for a piece of parchment, which Varric pulled from his pocket, some old scrap with nothing on it. I scribbled a name and an address.
“He’s still there,” I said. I was calmer than I thought I’d be. “I think he might’ve… fused to the floor…”
He took the parchment and stuffed it away again. “I’ll get someone to take a look.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure if I felt better or not. Thinking about Varric seeing his body in that room scared me, like letting him peer into a locked box of my private things and watching him rummage around inside. What if he didn’t see me the same way anymore?
Varric stood from his chair. “I’m gonna head back down. Get some rest, sleep in my bed tonight. I’ll be up until morning if you need me.”
I didn’t argue.
I dozed, maybe, for some thirty minutes. Varric’s bed was fluffy and warm, and with the candles snuffed and the divider curtains drawn closed, I was in pitch black, and the silence so heavy I could hear my blood rushing past my ears, but even with all this––I couldn’t just go back to sleep like nothing ever happened, like I didn’t still have dried blood on my fingertips. And beyond that, I didn’t want to be alone.
I wanted to see Lace, but I didn’t want to face her. So instead I slipped past her room with my blanket wrapped like a shawl around me. Just before the last few steps on the stairs to the bar, I stopped to listen.
“––hell of a kid. She’s handling this shit better than I would’ve when I was that age.”
“Picking up strays, Varric?”
“Hush, now.”
“Sounds like someone else we know.”
“Ha. Sure.”
I stepped down onto the landing where the loud, creaky floorboard announced my presence. Varric looked up from his cards, the Rivaini woman sparing just a glance before turning back to hers.
“You okay?” he asked. “You need something?”
I didn’t know how I looked. Terrible, probably, with my tangled hair and bloodstained shift. “I can’t sleep,” I said. “Can I sit with you?”
His eyes lit up. If he could glow, he would. “Of course.”
Sometimes, when I was young and mother had guests, I was permitted to sit near the fire and play in silence until they left late at night. This was what that felt like, barefoot and tip-toeing across the empty tavern floor. I sat next to him, nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with a full view of the cards in his hand. Coin sat in the middle of the table.
“Rivaini. This is Isana. I’m helping her with some business in the city before we head on back to Skyhold.” I imagined he’d already told her this, and was only repeating himself for my sake. “Isana. Meet Isabela. A mutual friend of Hawke.”
“A ‘mutual friend’, he says.” She toyed the corner of one of her cards. “That’s just a fancy way of saying that you’re stuck with me.”
“Well, sure, but if I actually said that, you’d have my hide.”
Isabela. The name sounded familiar, somehow, like a distant memory, but I didn’t know any other Isabelas. I stared at her while she gazed at her hand, dark skin and black hair taking on a faint orange hue in front of the lone flickering candle on the table. Before, I didn’t stop to look at her beyond a passing glance while I had so much else to focus on. Now…
Ancestors, but she was very… very… breasts.
I stared at the table instead. Two more silvers were tossed into the centre. That could buy a meal, I thought.
“Varric,” Isabela reclined in her chair, and if he missed her stuffing a card up her sleeve, I didn’t. “You keep avoiding the question. Tell me about the fancy Inquisition of yours.”
“Okay,” he shook his head, “a couple things. It’s not ‘my’ Inquisition. And I’m not avoiding anything, there’s just not that much to tell. It’s cold, wet, and sometimes, we kill things.”
“Not that much different from right here, then.”
“Ha! I suppose not. But really. It’s a whole lot of grandstanding and official nonsense. Those little pamphlets make it sound much more exciting than it actually is.”
“Varric. You’re fighting god.”
“A god. A self-proclaimed one, at that. And you fought him too, remember?”
I sunk further into my chair, picking absently at a splinter of wood underneath it. I felt like an outsider next to Varric and his friend, so close and familial in a way I’d never had with anyone. He discarded a card and drew one––no, two?––from the deck. Did she not see, or was she just pretending? I blocked out their conversation and watched the rounds, the back-and-forth raising and calling, until Isabela played the Angel of Death, and they both revealed their hands.
“Ha!” Varric slid the small pile of silvers towards him. “Can’t get me that easy.” He’d noticed after all, then, but why not say something? Did he not care? Did he think he could win, anyway? Isabela shrugged, not half as disheartened as I’d expected her to be, like some men I’d seen after they lost their coin.
“Do you always play for coin?” I asked.
Varric gathered and shuffled the cards again. He was quick, proper quick, like a professional dealer. How did he do that with those gloves on? “Usually. Sometimes other shit, though, like––”
“Like clothes,” Isabela said.
“––information.”
“Information?” I echoed.
“A truth, a story, a secret. That way it’s win-win for everyone. O-kay… Rivaini, ready to win back your dignity?”
“Are you accusing me of having dignity? I’m hurt, Varric. I really am.”
They played again.
There was something almost relaxing about it, the sounds of paper shuffling and rustling fabric while they built their hands, the candle slowly burning down until it was a fraction of the height that it was before. Isabela liked to cheat, and Varric liked to pretend he didn’t see just to take her coin in the end anyway. It was a long, long night, but eventually the world started to wake up again, and by then, my limbs were heavy, and my eyes were drooping.
I don’t know when it happened. Or why, or how. In the afternoon I would wake and stare in mortification at the ceiling until someone came to fetch me, but as they played their final round, I leaned over, rested my head on Varric’s shoulder, and closed my eyes.
Sensations of being lifted, carried, and tucked under soft, heavy blankets were distant, and I’d think they were a dream, if I knew how to.