Harding’s voice was miles away. Carried by the wind, muffled by the spit of rain, the little cold droplets that dripped down my shoulders. She knelt on some stone steps, one hand to stabilise herself against them, the other on my arm. My legs, stretched over the stone, led my eyes to the street below, where my box had slipped from my fingers and fallen the rest of the way into a puddle of mud.
She said my name. Twice, three times. Her hand crept up to my shoulder and I wrenched away, as if burned.
“Isana?”
I extended my fingers and turned over my hands. Dirt under my nails, a scratch on a knuckle. Real things, like the stairs beneath me, the rain on my skin, and her voice in my ears.
“What’s wrong?”
I blinked. Sound and sensation returned with the revulsion and the acid burning the delicate lining of my throat. I’d barely a moment to scramble to the top of the stairs and throw up what little breakfast I’d had onto the pavement.
Harding pulled back my hair. She held it loosely, just enough to keep it from falling over my face. Gentle hands coaxed me to stand straight again after I spat the last of the bile from my lips.
“Let’s head back, okay? Let’s get out of the rain.”
She guided me back through the streets, one hand with a grip on my arm, the other clutching my muddied box with the dress still inside. She led like the scout she was, with quick steps and a strong memory, retracing steps we hadn’t even taken. The Hanged Man was a blur of light and noise, shadows of tall men that shook with raucous laughter, and long legs like trees in a forest. Varric, at the bar, whipped around at the sound of the door, and stormed through the tables and long-legged humans to block Harding in the doorway.
“Where the hell were you?”
His anger—fear?—sent a jolt through my body. Suddenly all the world was on him, a focused tunnel, with darkened blurred edges.
Years, upon years, upon years. Where was ‘I’? How about where was he? Ever?! In his fucking suite, languishing on wine and cakes while mother rationed scraps?!
“I—” Harding faltered, “We were just—”
I shook my arm from her grip. “Out.”
“I told you to stay put.”
“I had errands.”
I took my box and pushed past him, to the stairs that led above. He trailed my heavy stomping.
“I thought something happened!”
“I’ll leave a note next time.”
“How about, next time, you stay where I tell you to?”
“You can’t lock me up in your stupid suite.” With food, water, warmth, and so much dwarven history, it made my heart ache. Did he even know what he had?
“I’m not trying to lock you up! I want you to be safe!”
Harding caught up to us. “Isana was careful.”
“The hell did you even go?”
I dropped the muddy box onto a chair in his suite. Damn him. He could clean it himself, I didn’t care.
“Nothing that concerns you,” I said. My mouth still tasted like vomit, acrid and bitter on my tongue, and everywhere I looked, I saw pale rotted eyes staring through me.
“I can’t protect you if I don’t know where you are.”
He’d never protected me before. He couldn’t protect me now. Why pretend? What was the facade even for? “ Harding was protecting me.”
“Not that she needed it,” she murmured, low enough to miss if you weren’t listening, and Varric wasn’t. He paced past his desk, then back again, then stopped just short of it to face me and inhale.
“Harding, can you go down ‘n ask Corff if he’s got any of that strong Antivan wine down in the cellar?”
Harding kicked her heel against the stone floor. She hesitated before nodding. When the door shut gently behind her, and her footsteps faded away, Varric turned his back to rustle through his desk, in silence.
“Despite what you seem to think,”—I held my chin up high—“I’m not stupid.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“Don’t coddle me. You lost your chance to treat me like a child.”
The drawer slammed shut. I jumped. His fingers curled around the edges of his desk, holding him up as he leaned forward against it. The sight was familiar.
“Should probably stop acting like one, then.”
Me? A child? I could have screamed at him. I nearly did. What right did he have? The poor unfortunates of Kirkwall didn’t have a right to be children.
“You—” I spluttered, fists clenching at my sides, “You’ll never—”
“You about to tell me I don’t understand? Save your breath. I heard that shit enough from Blondie. I got the reply from my Carta contact, so you wanna sit down and talk about that, or are you gonna stand in a corner and sulk?”
He faced me with a letter in a tight hand. I stared at that rather than the hard glare in his eyes, too painful to even try, and frightened of breaking down if I did. I wouldn’t cry. Real adults didn’t cry, or sulk, or stand in corners.
I huffed a few quick breaths, and released them all slowly through my nose. My voice was nasal and stuffy.
“What did he say?”
Shoulders still tense, he unfolded the parchment from the already cracked wax seal. “Something something empathy for your plight, something something concerning situation. Says he’ll meet us in some cave in the mountains. It’s close to Skyhold.”
I sniffled. Thought for a moment. Then frowned. “Isn’t the Inquisitor former Carta?”
He was silent for a moment. “Didn’t know that was common knowledge. Yeah, why?”
“Are you contacting them through the Inquisitor? If they’re close to Skyhold already.”
He sighed. Deeply. Dramatically. “I’m not gonna tell you that.”
“So you are.”
“Don’t push it. I’m not gonna play loose with the Carta.”
The sounds of Harding’s footsteps creeping back up the hall cut off my reply. I turned away as she came in again, a bottle in her hand, and took my muddy box to the far side of the room, as far from Varric as I could.
The next few days passed in a cold silence.
I didn’t know when we would talk to the Revered Mother. Varric made no plans to. He slipped out of The Hanged Man at early hours, and came back angrier than when he’d left.
He had never been so quiet.
Eventually, he paid for our own rooms in the tavern. I was both grateful and afraid of the window high above my bed, and spent most nights staring up and out of it, wishing I were in my own bed, and simultaneously, happy I wasn’t.
I used to find the moon so beautiful.
I would sneak out in the night and spread out on the roof like a starfish, and watch it go by with the stars and the clouds; now, as it crept across the skyline, all I saw in it were those pale, yellowed, rotted eyes; in the moon, in the stars, in pricks of candlelight and in the lights of distant windows.
I had never been so quiet.
I knocked on Harding’s door one evening, with my box, the mud dry, under my arm. Music—strings, percussion—rose from the main floor. She answered in her undershirt and bloomers with frazzled hair and puffy eyes.
“Is Varric back?” she asked, hopefully, and deflated when I shook my head.
“Can you help me with my dress?”
She let me in, smoothing down her hair. The plaits were haphazard, and one was half done, like she’d given up half way. “Is it too small?”
“I think… once it’s on…”
Wishful thinking, or stubbornness? It was hard to tell, as she fumbled with the laces, and I braced my hands against her wall, blew out my breath, and sucked in my stomach. But five, ten, fifteen minutes later, I shucked it off with a shout.
“ Stupid thing!”
She stared at the heap of fabric that I kicked across the floor. “I’m sorry.”
“I thought—“ I threw my hands up into the air, not really knowing what I thought. “I needed it. I don’t have any other—“
“Black dresses?”
I wrapped my arms around my body. I would not cry. Adults didn’t cry over dresses.
“Maybe,” she started, slowly, “you could sew on some new fabric?”
“It’s silk! I can’t afford that!”
…couldn’t I?
My reflection in her mirror stared back at me. I couldn’t afford it before. But the coinpurse—still attached to my belt, which hung loose off a book on my wall… deep red fabric, like a pool of dried blood on a dark oak floor.
Mother died for that coin.
I hadn’t even counted it. I doubted he did, either. Some nights I wondered if his spirit would claw from the Fade to strangle me with its pursestrings—a giddy spitefulness bubbled inside me, at the thought of spending it on something as frivolous as silk.
Harding picked up my dress and folded it. Careful hands brushed over the intricate embroidery, using the pads of her fingers, not her nails, which had dirt underneath them. The bar below clapped and whistled to the thrum of the music, the time of night which brought the lowest degenerates and the rowdiest drunks. Varric had been gone since early afternoon, and by nightfall, still had not returned.
“Sounds like they’re dancing.” Harding smoothed her hands against her thighs. If I concentrated, I could feel the thumping of the wood beneath my bare feet. “Sometimes I visited the tavern back home. Not very often. It was so far from the farm, you know?” She smiled, wistful. “But at night, it used to get like this, with some of the village boys and girls, and sometimes I even joined in, but then they trampled my feet and tripped me over!”
“On purpose?”
“No, they just couldn’t see me. I was so small.” She caught my eye through the mirror. “A human boy asked me once. It was like dancing with a clown!” She giggled. “He tried to kiss me!”
I made a face. “How terrible.”
“I liked him. He was handsome.” She settled on her bed, and I sat next to her, separated by the black dress, the mattress sinking beneath us and the coarse sheets rough beneath my hands. She sighed. “Ma wanted me to get married. I thought I would. Now here I am.”
“To the boy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I tapped the wood floor with my toe that only barely reached the floor. “My mother wanted a husband for me. She didn’t want to have to see me anymore.”
Harding stared. I went on.
“She didn’t care who it was. Dwarf, human, elf. I could’ve married a fucking qunari. The first man I found, she said—“ In my best imitation of my mother’s voice, I only ended up sounding like myself; “ ‘Maybe I’ll finally be able to take the rest of my life back!’ “
And now here I was.
No husband, no mother, barely even a father. If I couldn’t convince the Revered Mother, I wouldn’t even have my culture—just a fading Stone Sense with nowhere to use it.
Harding jumped down from the bed and outstretched her hand to me.
“Let’s dance.”
I followed the clusters of freckles up her arm and to her eyes. She’d tugged her plaits out, and her hair—frizzy, curly—hung loose over her shoulders. With all the thoughts racing through my head, the only word I could manage was,
“What?”
“Come on!”
She took my hands. My feet were on the floor again, the music underneath them. She led me across it, her fingers on mine, and the candlelight in her hair.
I had seen the working girls dance in taverns and brothels. That was not like this, a clumsy rendition of something Ferelden, with spins and twirls I struggled to follow and feet kicking up invisible leaves, making my soles sting as they hit the hardwood floor, and my shift twist around my legs. If I closed my eyes, I could be dancing around an open flame, the stars above me and the grass under my toes. Or maybe under the earth, in the darkest cave and tunnel, with the Stone and the Ancestors encasing and protecting me.
We spun faster, until the room was a blur and we were both giggling with our hair in our faces. When the music stopped, so did we, and we came crashing down to the floor in a breathless heap until the world stopped spinning. The clapping below could have been for us, if I allowed myself a moment of pretense.
Harding pressed her spine against the wall. She breathed heavily as she caught her breath. I spat my hair out of my mouth and joined her.
“Ancestors, I’m exhausted.”
“My Ma used to dance with me like that. As a kid.” She nudged her shoulder against mine. “Expels all the pent up energy!”
“My feet hurt…”
“That’s half the fun.”
The exhilaration faded and a low lying nausea replaced it. I cleared my throat to push it away. “Your Ma sounds nice.”
“Maybe one day you can meet her. I mean—“ She flushed. “If we’re still friends after you’ve left.”
After I’d left.
Right. Of course.
I wrung my hands in my lap. “I’m sure we could write.”
“Yes!” Her eyes lit up again. “Let’s do that!”
I wasn’t good with letters. I never had much to say all on my own, let alone on a piece of parchment, where everything I wrote was permanent and unchanging. It was never like I had anyone to write to, anyway. “Yeah. Okay.”
“And maybe you can send me some of your drawings! If you wanted. And I can send you some of my favourite recipes.”
“Oh. Maybe.”
“And then maybe meet up again once the war is over.”
“We could.”
“You could show me around Kirkwall properly.”
“I don’t think I’ll be in Kirkwall anymore.”
She faltered. The hardwood underneath her creaked. I regretted speaking at all. “Why not?”
A door slammed outside. A dog barked, and a distant, unseen man shouted at his wife as she fled into the streets. That could’ve been my answer, if it wasn’t lost on Harding entirely.
“There’s just,” I dragged one finger along a crack in the floorboard, spine aching against the wall, “nothing left anymore.”
Everyone I had ever loved was cruel, or dead, or both. Maybe the city was cursed, or maybe it was just me. It was going to hurt to leave Harding behind.
“What about your Ma?”
“Even if she didn’t hate me,” my throat was tight again, “she’s dead.”
“Your Da?”
Heavy, angry footsteps stalked up the hall, stopped briefly outside my door, and then continued up into the suite.
“I don’t have one.”
A soft knock on the door woke me up in the earliest of early mornings, the first sign of life since Varric came back and disappeared into his suite in cold, harsh silence. He came in silently as I sat up, a stack of papers in his hand and a bowl of porridge in the other, and shut the door with the softest click.
“We’ll, uh,” he cleared his throat, still facing the door, “we’ll go talk to the Chantry mother soon. You know, if you…”
“If I?”
“I don’t know.”
He turned, put the porridge on the small table next to my bed, and sank into the mattress at my feet. It was difficult to describe his expression. Lost somewhere, far away, any remaining anger from the last several days exhausted from his system, the puffy eyes a symptom of the night he’d had.
“Don’t know shit anymore,” he said.
“No, probably not.”
He flinched from the reassurance I didn’t give him. I didn’t touch the porridge.
“Did I tell you about my brother?”
I pulled my blanket further around my shoulders, like a cocoon. “You said to ask you later.”
“Right.”
“Now is later.”
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath. One finger caressed the parchment in his hands, ungloved; his necklace dangled over them and swung subtly back and forth. “I’ve been visiting the old Tethras Estate. Sold it a while ago to some minor noble in Rivain, but there’s still some of my family’s shit floating around in some nooks and crannies.” He thumbed the corners of the pages. “My brother… my own damned brother hid these from me.”
“What are they?”
With his gaze cast in shame at the floor, he held them out for me to take.
The parchment was rough, brittle on the edges from age, yellowing and bound in an old red ribbon. Varric removed a ring from his finger and turned it over in his hands.
“What are they?” I asked again.
“Just look.”
I did.
Thin, delicate writing brandished the pages in small letters and long paragraphs, written with a careful script, and a darkness to the ink. As they went on, letters became spindly, and mistakes appeared on the pages with aggressive crossings out, some torn from frustration. Tear-stained, blood-stained, one ripped in two. I flipped through them all, front to back and back to front, and watched the anger, spite, and fear lift from the pages. On the last, no more than a sentence, too painful to read aloud, signed by my mother’s name.
Her letters.
All of them.
From the seven months prior to my birth, to the ten years following it. Some, I remembered from her desk. Others, I had never seen before.
I would later blame the smoke for my watering eyes. In the moment, I didn’t care.
“Why?”
He still refused to look at me. ‘Why’ could have meant many things. I didn’t need to specify which.
“ ‘Cause he was a bitter, sad, greedy son of a bitch.” Varric sniffed. “And Javarel’s standing wasn’t good enough for him, maybe. I don’t know.”
“She…” Every word I had trailed off my tongue, but I had to say something. “They disowned her. She wasn’t married, so they disowned her. And your stupid brother––”
“It’s not my fault.”
“Your stupid brother ruined her life!”
“Well, he’s dead, so if you were looking for a grave to piss on, be my guest.”
“Dead!” I laughed. “Why should I even believe you?”
“Are you joking?” His voice cracked. If I wasn’t careful, he would burst into tears here and then, and some terrible side of me rejoiced in this. “Are you serious? What, you, you think I spent four days turning my old house upside down for the shits and the giggles?”
“You could’ve had these all along.”
“I was eighteen! I wasn’t even living at the damned estate, I was here!” His breath shuddered. “She could’ve found me at any time. I would’ve helped.”
“Would you have married her?”
When I walked through those gates of Skyhold for the very first time, my hopes were low, and my expectations lower. I’d never imagined that even those could be ripped up, torn apart, and ground to a paste under Varric’s heel.
He faltered, tried to answer, and then didn’t. Or couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
I shoved the letters back into his hands. He held them to his chest, pressed against his necklace. His black clothes made him seem almost a ghost, in the dark.
“Read them. Then you can come talk to me about how sorry you are.”
I was there, the day that the apostate mage blew up Kirkwall’s Chantry.
I bought apples from a vendor on the street. I cut through Hightown, to avoid Lowtown’s dark alleys. It was such a mundane little thing––I stopped to stare at my reflection in a puddle. It rained a previous day, and the dandelions were in bloom on the streets, little spots of colour in the cold and the dark, and just as I bent down to pick them, and my hair dangled into the water, the sky went up in flames.
Ask anyone what they would do if their whole world collapsed around them, and they won’t have an answer. I would’ve run, but my legs were frozen. I would’ve hid, but the debris crushed the buildings I might’ve sheltered in. So I was still. Stuck, with a cry in my throat that couldn’t come out as the city screamed and burned in my ears, and a templar murdered a little girl with circle robes and white bows in her hair.
The Chantry cathedral stood now as a ghost of what it once was. The Grand Cleric’s death was felt in all corners of its darkened, dreary halls. Enough construction had progressed now that there were no longer holes in the roof above our heads, but it still leaked puddles of water onto the tiled floors, and drew weeds––dandelions––up through the cracks in the stone.
Varric’s discomfort radiated from him in waves. Harding was too marvelled by the architecture to notice or care.
“Can’t believe this was a pile of rubble,” she breathed, her gaze upon the ceiling, which used to be adorned in a mural of Andraste, and now was no more than a sight of wooden beams struggling to hold the structure together. “Maker. The Chantries at home were nothing like this.”
“They were churches,” I said. “This is a cathedral.” Outside, through a window with new curtains, I caught a glimpse of the graveyard, flattened in the aftermath of the explosions, and even after several years, still a mess of dirt and crumbled headstones.
“I didn’t know there was a difference.” She ran one finger across the wall and came away with dust. “Why did we come here? I mean, I’m not complaining.”
“Just,” Varric clicked his tongue, shifting uncomfortably on his feet, “you know, checking up on the repairs. Merchant Guild has its fingers in all the reconstruction efforts up here.”
If that was true, there wouldn’t be any leaks in the ceiling. Harding plucked out a dandelion and twirled it in her fingers.
“That’s nice. I’m glad. It’s pretty.”
Any guilt I felt for Varric’s lie quickly faded with the sound of soft approaching footsteps. Chantry shoes had a distinct click to them, flat and wide shoes that were to give the Sisters and the Mothers the impression of being barefoot, just as Andraste was when she was led to the pyre.
The Mothers were always kind to me. They fed me, kept me warm, let me sleep under the pews when I refused to go home. As a young girl, they were my friends in a cold, unforgiving, brutal city.
The uncertainty in Mother Margitte’s eyes as I sped towards her gave me no pause.
“Isana,” she said, sounding breathless in her age, and her lungs still unrecovered from the dust of the explosion, “Maker, but it’s been so long.”
I flung my arms around her waist. The warmth of the Chantry robes, and the soft fabric against my cheek, was a sensation I wouldn’t trade for the world.
“I had to go away,” I said.
“...Yes.” She didn’t look at me when I pulled away, but at Varric and Harding behind me. “I heard about your mother.” When she finally glanced down, it was with pity.
Varric crept closer while Harding lingered behind. Maybe he told her to, or maybe she was just too transfixed on the architecture to give a care what he and I were doing.
“We’re looking for the Revered Mother,” he said.
Mother Margitte’s expression hardened. “You.”
He sighed. “I’m not here as an arbiter of doom. I promise. Just helping out a friend.” Then low, under his breath, “I’m not the one who blew up the damn building…”
“A friend?” she glanced between us.
“Please,” I said, “I need to speak with her. It’s about––”
“I know,” she interrupted, with a small cough, “what this is about.”
“Then you’ll help me?”
I had vivid memories of being curled up on these floors, or sleeping in their storage, being brought food and water by the initiates and the sisters. I couldn’t remember not knowing Mother Margitte.
Many things I expected from her. Hesitance wasn’t one of them. Her face, half lit from a nearby window, was shadowed by a shattered statue of Andraste.
“Her Reverence isn’t here.” She withdrew. “You will have to wait.”
“Not here? But…” I huffed, “but when will she be back?” And why would she leave?!
“I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“But where did she go?”
She coughed again, into a handkerchief. “She was called urgently to Ostwick.”
“But––”
“Hey.” Varric slid a hand onto my shoulder. I wrenched it away from him. “She’s not here. Let’s go.”
“No. I have to talk to her.”
“We’ll figure something else out.”
“Ostwick isn’t far, right?”
“We’re not going to Ostwick.”
“And I’m not letting my mother burn!”
My voice, pitched like a hawk’s screech, rang on all sides of the large, empty cathedral. I bit into my hand and I ran. No one stopped me, not even Harding, who I grazed with my elbow, and whose eyes followed me as I fled.
Outside, on the stairs, with my head between my knees and a familiar feeling sinking into my heart like teeth, Varric sighed and sat next to me with a click in his knees.
“Told Harding to hang back.” He outstretched his legs. “So much for discretion.”
I sniffled.
“You know,” he continued, “this is actually a good thing. We can go behind her back. Talk to someone else.”
I raised my head to glare. “No we can’t.”
“No Grand Cleric. Revered Mother not at her post. Who do you think is next up?”
Not the Mothers. Not the Templars. Not the Guard. “The Viscount?”
“And hey, wouldn’t you know it?” He grinned, for the first time I could recall since Jader. “The current one owes me a favour.”