We crept into our quarters with quick quietness, tip-toeing and whispering to not wake Varric, whose mouth was hung open slightly as he slept. Harding climbed into her hammock, but didn’t lie down. Neither did I. After a brief, uncertain silence, she faced me.
“We should tell Varric.”
My hands in my lap clutched each other like lifelines. If she had noticed my trembling, my frantic backwards glances as we sped through the hall, she never mentioned it.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” I said, “maybe it’s just a normal chest.”
Her forehead wrinkled as she frowned. She glanced at Varric, his breaths deep and slow. “I don’t know.”
“And, if it is lyrium, then so what? It can’t get across the sea all on its own.”
“But it was empty.” She tugged on one of her plaits, loosened from sleeping on it. “And there aren’t any templars in Kirkwall anymore.”
No. I had forgotten that. I gathered my blanket into my arms and shivered.
“I don’t want to cause trouble.”
“But––”
“Please.”
She cast one last uncertain glance at Varric’s sleeping frame. Her eyes followed the up and down rise and fall of his chest, and her little frown thinned into a line that said, fine, you win.
In the late evening on the second day, the boat stopped. I raced to the deck, hoping to find the Gallows greeting me, but it wasn’t Kirkwall. A looming, dark, abandoned tower, hunched on an island with the setting sun behind it, cast a long, deep shadow over the waves and the ship.
Jainen. I had heard of it, seen it in passing only once. The circle towers were long abandoned, picked over, a shell of what they once were. The Captain lumbered past me, one foot dragging behind him with a harsh limp.
“Why have we stopped?”
I regretted the words as soon as he faced me, his skin shining with a faint feverish sheen of sweat.
“You should stay below deck, dwarf.”
“You––You said you would take us to Kirkwall.”
“Aye. And I will. But for now, you need to stay below.”
I didn’t need telling a third time. Below the deck, near the galley, I found Varric and Harding each hunched over their hands of cards, and they looked up.
“Isana,” Harding said, surprised, while Varric was silent, “are you feeling better?”
I cast a long look up the stairs that led above, then back again, hesitant to meet the curious gazes that waited for me.
“We’ve stopped. Outside Jainen.”
“What?” Varric stood. The chair legs scraped the floor.
“He told me to stay below the deck.”
“He say why?”
“No.”
Harding slipped from her chair, but stagnated next to it, one hand still on the backrest. Varric brushed past me, hooking his crossbow onto his back, and I caught his hand.
“Where are you going?”
He stared at our hands. The leather of his glove clenched slightly, before he pried it gently from my fingers. “I’m just gonna see what’s going on.”
“But what if it’s dangerous?”
“Then he’ll hear from Bianca. Don’t worry. You stay with Harding, I’ll be right back.”
“Varric––”
“Soon. Yeah?”
Harding opened and shut her mouth. We stayed in silence until we could no longer hear his footsteps above our heads, and finally, she looked up at me.
“Do you wanna play?”
The cards were strewn across the table, Varric’s winning hand face-up next to a small pile of coppers.
“I don’t gamble.”
“Right. Sorry.” She sat again, a small breath escaping her as she did. Moments passed. “We should tell him.”
“No. I just––I just want to get to Kirkwall.”
“But he should know.”
We tell Varric about the chest; then what? If the Captain knew that we knew… what would stop him from killing us? Throwing us over? Worse? Drunk men didn’t think. They see a threat, they stab it with a blade or with their dick, whichever was closest. I tugged at my hair, the long plait that sat over my shoulder. My blanket was heavy, like the weight of the world all at once, and if I closed my eyes, it wasn’t my blanket at all, but firm hands, pressing me down until I buckled beneath them.
Opening them again, I found Harding’s brown eyes staring out at me, as honey in the firelight.
“Do you really trust him?” I asked her.
She leaned forward. “Of course. With my life.”
With her life. There was no one I trusted that much. Did I envy her? I supposed I did.
Distant thuds then muffled voices, the Captain’s interspersed between them, sounded somewhere above our heads, too muffled to hear what was said, but just clear enough to distinguish each speaker.
Harding listened. “What are they saying?”
An argument?
“I don’t know. I can’t tell.”
Her fingers caressed a card. She leaned into her chair as thuds, like stacking crates, filled the silence between deep murmurations. Was Varric in there?
“How?” I asked.
“How what?”
“How can you trust him?”
“You don’t?”
I stayed silent. There were no words in this language or the next that could make her understand.
“Isana,” she began, in a way that curled my gut, “is something going on?”
Everything, always, all at once, and yet nothing at all. That wasn’t what she meant. I flinched from a heavy thump above my head and the harsh curse that came after.
“Isana?” she urged.
“I’m fine, just––”
“You’re not fine.”
No. Of course not. When had I ever been? She stood, careful not to scrape her chair, and crept close to me until she was at an arm’s length.
“Varric’s my friend. But if––”
The door at the top of the stairs swung open. Light spilled into the galley, and with it a tall, sharp shadow that descended on the creaking steps.
“I heard voices,” it said. Harding pulled me into the shadows. “You said you were alone.”
“Aye,” the Captain grumbled from the top of the stairway; he swiped his forehead with a red swatch of fabric. “ I am. ”
Harding closed us into the pantry as the dark silhouette peered into the room. Darkness was split only by a slither of flickering light in the cracks between the hinges.
“You lying, Captain?”
“You trying to insult me, mage?”
Footsteps searched the room then stopped suddenly. “I suppose you were playing cards on your own, then?”
Hesitance. “Aye.”
“Practise?”
“Am to find a way to beat you somehow.”
“ ‘Aye’.” they mocked. “Elf. You lot can see in the dark. Search there.”
Light, barely perceptible, and quick feet pattered across the floor to the galley and stopped just beyond the threshold of the closed pantry door. Harding gripped my dress the way mother had smothered my mouth when the qunari raided our home.
“I don’t want your slave near my food, mage.”
The Captain was ignored. “Elf?”
A quiet, lilted voice, similar to Iowen’s but not quite the same, rose from behind the barrier of wood. “I don’t see anything.”
“Check inside.”
The handle turned. No room to run, to hide. Was this it? Death at the hands of some mage, stowed away in a smuggler’s pantry? Harding’s arms shielded me. I’d left my daggers in the pack under my hammock. What would’ve been the point? I didn’t even know how to use them.
Two large, watery eyes stared at us through the small gap in the open door.
I had never seen a slave before.
I wasn’t sure how I thought one might be. Chained, bound, on their knees with their faces in their hands, like those statues in the Gallows. She was none of these things, and yet somehow, all of them at once.
“What do you see elf?”
She gazed at us in quiet fascination, huddled, hiding, and pleading with our eyes.
“There’s nothing.” She shut the door, and once again we were in darkness. I melted against Harding, my knees weak beneath me. “It’s empty.”
The Captain’s voice was terse. “Hearing voices, Vint? Are you sure you’re not possessed?”
“You look pale, Marcher. Catch a fever?”
“It’s probably from the stench of your foul robes. Any sacrifices recently?”
“There may be soon, if you don’t watch your tongue. Show me what you wanted to show me, I’m tired of this charade.”
We waited until all was silent, and then waited more. Not until Varric’s voice called out from the darkness did Harding finally throw open the door.
“Varric––”
He raced at us in a blur of movement. “Are you girls okay?”
“I am, but…”
I slid down the wall. “He had a slave.”
Varric knelt in front of me, his face only an outline in front of the hair draped over my eyes like thick curtains. “Who did?”
“The mage. The Tevinter mage.”
“Shit. I knew I saw… I shouldn’t have left.” He stood again, dragging a fist through his hair. “Harding, tell me what you heard.”
Their voices were only murmurs in the back of my mind.
A slave. A real slave. Not a story, not a frightening tale in the Chantry, or from the alienage. She was real, and she was here, on this boat, right now, and she lied, straight to the mage’s face, for us.
“Can we help her?”
They looked down at me, hushed whispers cut off, and suddenly silent.
“I’m sorry, kid. There’s not much we can do.”
Kid. There it always was again. How many times did I need to say it? Why did I even have to?
“But you have your crossbow.”
“There’s at least six of ‘em up there with staffs. Not even Bianca can handle that many mages on her own.
“Harding?”
She shook her head. I bit my tongue. Where was she now? Still on the deck? Already gone, stuck on that island, or on another boat to be carted back to Tevinter?
Neither of them stopped me from racing out of the room. I didn’t care where I was going, what direction I sped in, I needed to be alone.
Tevinters in the Free Marches. Slavers in the Free Marches. All those years and all that talk about how it was an Imperium problem, and here, under the real Divine, we would never keep slaves. Now look at us, a dead Divine, the world torn apart, and a Starkhaven traitor working alongside the very people we were sworn against since birth.
Why?
I shoved into a darkened room, some kind of infirmary, hidden away in a small part of the ship. I wiped my eyes and looked up. From the floor, the Captain’s round eyes stared back from the darkness.
My breath stalled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…”
Deep red veins stretched like webs under the skin of his outstretched leg, spindly and gaunt and distended from the muscle, where if you dared to look close enough, it almost seemed to pulse. On the sole of his foot, there was a wound, healed and scabbed, but scarred with thick, white tissue that mangled the skin of his heel.
His feverish glare bore into my skull.
“You’re Blighted,” I whispered.
He bunched dirty and discarded bandages into a loose ball in his fist. His silence was his answer, which I took as a chance to flee, but as I stepped one foot out the door, he spoke.
“The dwarven Carta wants an example made of you and your father.”
I clutched the doorframe with my back still turned.
“Aye,” he said, “I know who you are. I don’t work with them, but my friends do. You’ll want to run far away from Kirkwall.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m warning you.”
I ducked my head, and ran. And in my quarters, curled into my hammock, I sketched the elf girl’s soft, sad face until my wrist burned.
Seagulls woke me in the early morning, when the sky was a shade of pink outside the window, and Varric and Harding whispered in the corner of the room. As I sat, their whispers stopped, and steadily Varric crept toward me.
“Hey,” he murmured, with the nervous tone of a man with a lot more to say than ‘hey’, but was scared to say it.
I rubbed at my eyes. “Hi.”
He shifted weight from foot to foot. “Get dressed quickly. We’re gonna row one of those small boats to the Gallows. Okay?”
I blinked blearily up at him. “Why?”
He dragged a fist through the loose hair over his shoulders. Having not shaved since Jader, his stubble was dark, ragged, and made his eyes look even more tired than they already did. The breath he let out through his nose was slow and measured.
“Captain died in the night.”
A coldness like falling through the cracks in a frozen lake suddenly engulfed me.
Dead? But he was just…
Varric dropped my pack in my arms. “Get dressed. We’ll leave in a minute.”
He left. I dropped my pack to the floor again and hurried to where Harding folded and embroidered shirt into her pack.
“Is he telling the truth?”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“I don’t know.” I knelt next to her. “I don’t know.”
Harding could have told me she’d aged five years since I saw her the previous night, and I would have believed her. She took out a shirt, unfolded it, folded it again, and put it back.
“I found the body,” she said. “Heard a crash. Went to see what it was.” She withdrew. “I’ve seen corpses before. We’re in a war, I’ve hurt people. I don’t know why I’m…” Shaking, she tied up the pack and roped it over her shoulder, then her bow over her chest and her quiver to her back.
“You saw his body?”
“Yes.”
“Then you saw his skin?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know he was Blighted.”
She glanced around the room, then peered under the cracks in the door. When she spoke again, it was with a whisper.
“I don’t think it was Blight.”
I leaned back onto my heels. “What do you mean?”
“When you’re with the Inquisition, you see a lot of weird things. I got to thinking you were right, that we shouldn’t worry about the lyrium. But when I found his body, he had crystals growing out of his skin.”
“Lyrium doesn’t do that.”
“No, but it was red. It was red lyrium.”
Lyrium wasn’t red. Why would it be? What could make it be? But Harding’s eyes were earnest, and afraid, and maybe Varric was a liar, but she never was.
“So… so what does that mean?”
She bit her bottom lip. “It means we need to tell Varric.”
“No…”
“He deserves to know.”
“No!”
It was too late now. A man was dead. We couldn’t change it, or fix it. Telling Varric wouldn’t bring the Captain back to life, and the thought of being sidetracked now, when we had come so close, made me nauseous.
“Isana,” Harding breathed, exasperated. Her judgement made my skin crawl, but in the spirit of my mother, and all the stubborn mothers before her, I didn’t budge.
“Let’s wait.”
“Wait?”
“We can tell him later. When we’re finished in Kirkwall. Right?”
Her frown deepened. “I don’t know.”
“Just until we’re done. And then we can talk about it. It’ll be fine.”
She stared at her hands. “You want me to lie to my friend.”
“It’s not lying. We will tell him.”
She closed her eyes, sighed, and nodded.
The ship faded into the fog like a dull memory as we coasted over the steady waves that led up to the Gallows. We were quiet passing between The Twins, the oars breaking the water and Varric’s heavy breathing as he rowed, the only sounds that intercepted the silence.
The Gallows themselves were still. Abandoned, ghostly, like a graveyard, and in a way, it was. We stood back while Varric explained what had happened to the Guardsmen still stationed there, and then ushered us through to the other side where we were boated to the Lowtown docks.
The first breath back on Kirkwall stone was the deepest of my life. The smoke, the smog, the salt of the ocean in the air as the waves hit the docks. Warehouses and chimneys towered over the boats in the water, and though the sun was barely in the sky, merchants, ship crew, and fishermen bustled around us on their daily march life.
Varric stepped up next to me and took the same deep breath I had, in through his nose and out through pursed lips.
“Why’d I ever leave?” he mused aloud to himself, then cleared his throat and shook his head. “Okay. I’ve got some business to look into in Hightown, but I can check you two into The Hanged Man before I head out.”
“The tavern?” Harding asked, breaking her long, thoughtful silence.
“Probably best to keep us all close, since… yeah.”
I felt weightless, navigating the streets again. Harding perked up the further we trekked inward, her head swivelling like a bird to catch a glimpse of everything we passed as we passed it.
(“It’s not that interesting.”
“It is if you only ever get to scout out trees and sand.”
“But you’ve seen cities. We just left Jader.”
“I don’t know. It’s just different.”)
She was near skipping when we approached The Hanged Man, and as she and Varric went inside, I hesitated on the precipice.
“Coming?”
The last time I was here, I ran away with Hawke’s blanket, the very one wrapped around my shoulders now. It was so long ago, and yet I remembered every thought and sensation as though it happened only moments ago, and with Varric’s furrowed brow staring back from the door, it flooded me.
“I need a minute,” I managed.
“Sure. We’ll be inside.”
The door closed. I was alone on the street, a silly little girl in a red dress and bloodstained chemise. If I ran, I could end this bullshit now and go back to living my normal life.
But it wouldn’t be normal, would it?
I smoothed down my dress, my hair, and pushed in to the tavern.
Not much had changed, since last I’d seen it.
Stepping under the threshold held an air of strange familiarity, amidst the smell of alcohol, smoke, sick, and faintly, piss. We didn’t linger long in the bar, and had porridge delivered to Varric’s suite at the top of the stairs, where it was cleaner and quieter, and where I could stare at his dwarven decorations.
Somewhere between stepping off the boat and arriving at the tavern, I’d lost my appetite. My bowl was still mostly full by the time Varric and Harding were finished.
He stood and stacked their bowls.
“I’m gonna head out. If anyone comes knocking, don’t let ‘em in, they’re probably Guild.”
I tore my gaze away from a stone-carved mosaic on the wall. “Where are you going?”
“Hightown. Some stuff I gotta look into. It’s not important.”
“Oh.”
“You can come with, if you want.” His boots shifted on the stone tile. “You want to?”
I shook my head.
“Right. Well, don’t throw any parties while I’m gone.”
Harding watched him leave with her arms on the table. When he was gone, she rested her chin on top of them and closed her eyes. The excitement had caught up with her.
I pushed the porridge around with my spoon, then finally deciding I didn’t want to finish it, stood from my seat. “I’m going to change. Don’t look.”
“Why?”
“I’m going out.”
“Oh.” Even with her back turned, I could feel her frown. “Why?”
“A couple places I need to visit.”
“Shouldn’t you wait for Varric?”
“I’ll be fine.”
I shucked off the layers of my dress and replaced them with my trousers. I couldn’t afford to get snagged on some spike, or treaded on, or pulled on by the hem into some dark alley.
Harding twisted in her chair to face me again just as I sheathed my daggers onto my belt. She went to speak, swept me up and down with her eyes, and swallowed.
“Maybe I should go with you.”
“Through the city?”
“It might be safer.” Her skin flushed. “I mean, I can protect you.”
I grazed the hilt of a dagger with my thumb. Never used, probably blunt. Going out alone would be stupid… but I was always alone before.
But maybe I needed her. I’d never let Varric come with me, and––Ancestors forgive me––I needed a break from his stupid face.
And if we were quick enough, he would never know we left.
“Okay,” I said. She smiled with barely contained excitement. “But it’ll be a lot of stairs.”
Ask any noble how big Lowtown was and they’d lowball their answer. They had this idea of a small slum, like an alienage, packed and over-crowded with criminals and spinsters, but once you were actually in it…
There was a saying, in the area I grew up in; if you knew your way with Lowtown, you could find your way anywhere. Darktown looked complicated, but it was just pillars and beams, no houses. Lowtown’s streets trapped you in a maze of unclimbable stone.
But only unclimbable if you didn’t know where to look. Up was where I wanted to go, so up I went, with Harding trailing behind like a loyal puppy. I helped her off a rusted old ladder and onto a flat roof, where she stopped to catch her breath.
“Maker, you move quick,” she huffed.
“Sorry. I forget not everyone’s native.”
“No, it’s okay. It’s fun. I just kinda wish I warmed up first.” She smiled and stood tall. You couldn’t see much of anything from here other than more buildings and a few windows that no one bothered to look out of. At best, it was a nice place to watch the stars, if you could see through the smog.
“I take shortcuts where I can. Being alone, even during the day…”
“Running along rooftops is a shortcut?”
“No, but it lets me find them. Like climbing a tree to see where you are.” I pointed down at a small alley, filled with old crates. “Those have been there since the Blight. I use them to jump down.”
“No one’s moved them?”
“They’re empty. No one cares. Maybe if we were a bit higher up someone with money would complain, but…”
“Right.” She followed me into the alley. “I didn’t realise Kirkwall was on a slope. Like, there’s Lowtown and Hightown, but I kinda thought it was more of a metaphor.”
“It is now. The lowest part of Hightown is level to the highest part of Lowtown. My mother lived there, before…”
I trailed off.
It was too easy to say too much.
“Before?” she prodded.
“Nothing. Never mind. We’re here.”
We stopped outside a small door under an open veranda, hidden away in a dark corner nook. Most would pass by it and never know it was there.
“Do you live here?” She stepped into the shade. She peered in through the tiny window, but from here, there wouldn’t be much to see. “Cozy.”
“Small, you mean.”
“Well, those go hand in hand, right?”
“I suppose.”
I hesitated.
Why?
This was my home. I belonged here. Leaving was hard… why was coming back harder?
No. This was ridiculous. I dug the key out from its hiding spot and unlocked the door.
Inside was exactly how I’d left it. The perfect picture of domesticity. A fireplace, a chair to lounge in, a sprawling rug, and shelves cluttered with trinkets, baubles; most dwarven, many very old.
I supposed they all belonged to me, now.
Harding made a circle about the room.
“I know it’s not much,” I said.
“I love it.”
I’d never spent enough time in the room to admire it. My things were in mine, so I stayed there, and I didn’t, I hid away in taverns and watched the world go by.
Mother was just fine with that.
“Most of these are from Orzammar. My mother’s.”
“Were you born there?” She inspected a small carved statuette, her hands behind her back, so as not to be tempted to touch. I crept around the room, one foot after precarious foot to dodge the floorboards that creaked.
“No. I wish I was.”
“I guess I think about it sometimes. But Ma and Da are happy up here. I guess I am, too.”
“You guess?”
“Well. You know. We’re at war.”
“Right.”
I lowered myself into mother’s cushioned chair. She would lounge here with a book in her hands and her feet pointed to the fire. Now she’d never sit in it again.
Harding sat on the rug at my feet. The position was familiar, but I remembered it the other way around.
“It’s kinda funny, though.” There was no flame, but she regarded the fireplace as though there was. “I joined so I didn’t have to stay home and… get married and be a sheep farmer.”
“I can’t picture that.”
“It might’ve been nice.” She shrugged. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Any… Any special people?”
‘Special’ people. What a strange way to put it. There was nothing special about playing pretend for a man who never cared about you.
I stood. “No.”
“Oh.” She followed me. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to––”
“It’s fine. I’ll get what I came for, and we can go.”
“What did you come for?”
I ignored mother’s bedroom and made straight for mine, a small, messy room with a small, messy bed, and only enough wardrobe space for a few dresses and shirts, now emptied aside from just one forgotten and abandoned box hidden in its darkest corner.
The black silk lifted from it like a rug being unfurled. It was too dark in my room to see the swirls and patterns embroidered into the fabric, but I knew they were there, could feel them under my fingers. Harding ogled it from over my shoulder.
“That’s beautiful,” she murmured.
It took a long moment for me to find my voice again. “I thought about selling it.”
“Why?”
So I could run away and never look back. “It’s from Orzammar. Mother let me borrow it. She didn’t ask for it back.” I stood and held the dress to my body. How long since I last wore it? Five years, more? “Does it look like it would still fit?”
“I think so. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.”
I supposed I would find out. I rolled it back up again, placed it carefully back in its box, then lifted the box into my arms. “I’m done. Let’s go.”
“We’re heading back?”
“Not yet. Just… just one more stop.”
Leaving now was no easier than it was the first time, but I left nonetheless, and hid the key in its proper spot. Harding, at least, was a bright light in the corner of my eye, as the streets darkened with the clouds overhead. My destination revealed itself to me on the final turn of a recessed street.
I shoved down my hesitation. When Harding tried to follow me inside, I stopped her with an outstretched hand.
“Wait out here? Please?”
“Okay.”
There were many things I shoved down, in those following minutes.
Nausea. Dread. My hand into my pocket to stop it from trembling. These rooms, which were more familiar to me than my own home, dull and dreary and dry with trapped heat with nowhere to rise to, a heat I used to find comforting, and which now suffocated me. I found the coin purse on the small table I used to draw at, the weight of it on my belt foreign as I clipped it next to my dagger.
I could have left. I could have let it be a memory. I could ask myself why I didn’t, why I had to turn the handle, why I had to see, but that wouldn’t fix it. And as the door creaked into the dark abyss, and the clouded, unblinking, pleading eyes of his rotting body peered at me from the darkness, I shoved down my vomit, and I ran.