Archive of Our Own

i. pinions 

She keeps a fletching from the arrow that pierces the Chantry board. Nudges it under her boot while her brother’s talking to the archer, picks it up while nobody’s looking. She doesn’t know why, at the time. Only that she wants a piece of it, of him—of the prince and his story and the burr in his voice.

The prince. He says it, she reads it in the blurry angry ink of what must be his own hand, a plea for killing more righteous than her brother’s usual take. And at once she understands his story without him telling it: the prince, wayward, lonely, soaked in blood, immaculate in white. Capable of holding contradictions and designed to hurt her right in the heart. All the moreso because it sounds like something out of—

Right out of a storybook, isn’t he, Sunshine?

She presses her lips together, shakes her head. Varric understands her too well, sees her too clearly. Storytellers lean into her. They comfort her, transfigure her. There had been a Sister in Lothering who, when Bethany laughed at the right jokes, looked at her like she had lit an extra candle on the altar. Had made a devout of her for good in the transaction.

She gives them the right audience, the right ear, the right kind of quiet. She, who was weaned on quiet in a very loud home.

Her brother’s arms are crossed, he’s shaking his head. The prince jingles when he leaves, armor and coin. But he does leave, and she feels the tension in the air, the emptiness he leaves behind.

“We have to help him,” she says.

“What’s he to us, Beth?” asks Garrett. “Another job. We don’t even know if he’s got the coin.”

“Of course he’s got the coin,” she says, “he’s a prince, isn’t he?” and Garrett’s eyes go soft. Recognizing her, or what he thinks she is.

“Ah, that’s it, is it?”

Her cheeks flush: she hates to be seen like this. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Whatever he might say, Garrett likes to think he’s doing right. And despite the muscle, the scar-tissue, the name whispered in the alley and on the edge of a knife, Garrett Hawke is a soft sell. Particularly when the seller is weak and needy. Particularly when the seller is his sister, protected, cherished, adored.

She knows the exact shape and width and heft of her family’s cherishing, the way it wraps around her. Big enough to wrap up every one of their fears.

ii. pinned 

That’s not where the story begins. Of course it’s not. It begins with Lothering smoke on the long road, with the ogre’s fist, with Carver’s skull shattering on rock. Not so thick after all.

But that’s not half so picturesque. And far in the past. Keep up: Bethany Hawke was born a reflection, yes. But one that looked back.

iii. trapped

Her brother takes the prince’s offer, like she knew he would. Not that she sees much of him, nor anything. He leaves her home for the most part. What she had to offer him—frost and fire and healing—he’s found other places. The little elven blood mage, the healer Anders. Kind and dear, both of them. Anders stands fast at her brother’s side, fixes his gaze and his heart with it, talks too much and too quickly, and she can’t fault Garrett for a minute for taking him along. There are some things she can’t do. That a sister can’t.

Nor a brother.

That she likes her brother’s friends, that they like her, lends her little comfort when she’s alone. Kirkwall doesn’t love her. Even from inside, through the thin walls of Gamlen’s shack, she can hear the metal stamp of Templar boots. 

She will not pass up the opportunity to leave.

She accompanies Garrett once his purse has grown heavy enough, trailing Varric to meet his brother. In the doorway, her brother’s forehead crinkles slightly. “Are you sure? Mother won’t like it. And you won’t be alone here.” He offers her a grin, burdened by only a little guilt. “Isabela’s hardly going delving in the Deep Roads. Merrill’s not offering to lose sight of the sky. You’ll have plenty of friends here in Kirkwall—”

“Will I?” she asks. “When you’re gone?”

The grin shifts and fades.

Those she called friends in Lothering are dead. She wrote the Chantry; she’s kept the letters. At home. She will not take them with her. In truth, she hasn’t made a friend since she learned what she was. No friend has found their way to her without her brother’s help—that’s a mark of her family’s success.

Everyone she’s ever loved has walked in the light. Hard, then, to make new acquaintances when cast so firmly to the shadows.

iv. swallowed

This was a mistake. If she doesn’t believe it after the first week of accumulated mud in her hair, then she knows it instantly when the mine door closes behind her for the first time. When she loses sight of the sun for good.

She bites her tongue. Does not complain once. Varric’s too focused to watch her for subtexts; her brother and Anders watch each other, the air warm and blue-tinted between them. A reprieve, then.

When death comes for her here she wonders if. If she didn’t fight hard enough. If she walked willingly into the jaws of the Void, what right she has to be surprised when it bites.

v. sight unseen

Bethany Hawke dies like this: standing at a distance, frost crackling over her skin, flame on the edge of her staff. Never faraway enough. Blood on her boots, the ugly black taste and smell of the blight in her mouth. 

Nothing is clean under the earth, nothing grows here but mushrooms and monsters. Not that she was ever much for growth. She was designed to kill, after all, more than heal. To freeze and burn. Anders is a defter healer than she ever was. Her purpose is—otherwise. It has to be.

His shadow falls, long, over hers. Blocks her from her brother’s view. She wonders what it might be like to cut him out of the way, if his power would sink into hers, exalt her. That force inside him, would it claim her? Or would it find her weak, uninhabitable, shrinking in the endless shadows of the Deep Roads— 

Sunshine?

She blinks. Smiles, though it’s slow to come. “That’s funny, Varric. You’re funny.”

The sun does not touch here. Yet she lays one foot after another, deeper and deeper into the earth. The storyteller has her all wrong. What is she, then? What is she?

If she split him open, would she find the answers, a book written on his bones? 

She closes her eyes, sways on her feet. This isn’t, it isn’t right—

“Are you all right?” Varric asks her, and the smile is easier this time. That, she knows how to answer from experience.

“Of course. I’m fine. I chose to come here, didn’t I?”

“And no one thinks you can’t handle it,” he says, but his eyes are slow to leave her.

As it turns out, hiding only goes so far. The darkspawn are blind here, their eyes like milk. They find her anyway, and the scent of their blood sinks deep and dense with rot into her skin and her nose and her mouth. There are enemies that do not seek her out, not for herself. Enemies that don’t even see her, that consume her all the same.

Her brother can’t stand in the way of this. All the lessons learned growing up—stay quiet, duck your head, smile, smile—are nothing to this. To a war that wages beneath her skin, an enemy that annexes her from the bones on out without a care for who or what she is. 

No thanks to you, Garrett, she thinks.

However will I repay you, she thinks.

She stands at the back of the party, staff upraised, as her brother charges forward into the next darkspawn fray. Waits for the magic to work its way through the wood and her hands, and it does, though it comes out sluggish and tinged with blackness, bleakness. Poison cups the back of her head, tingles in the soft flesh of her gums as she works. She watches her brother swing his knives through the already-rotten sun-deprived flesh of the monsters and she understands—

Carver, that’s who’s whispering in her ear, it was always Garrett and never me, so how could it ever be you? It was never protection, Beth. He got us out of the way.

The dead are wiser than the living, she thinks, and lifts her staff again. Every swing finds it heavier and heavier. Such an effort to wield all this. 

Her brother’s voice in her ear wonders, what if it was just us?

Frost cracks over her skin, purifying the outside of her, unable to sink in any further. She shakes her head. She is not the reflection of the dead. If she is to die here, and she is dying, she can feel it, she will die as herself. Bethany Hawke, uniquely, and well. As best she can.

To the Maker’s side, then.

She murmurs a verse of the Chant as the staff drops from her hands—

sunshine?

—too heavy to hold, and her body with it. Maker save her mother. She thinks her brother can make his own way. She thinks she can make hers as well. She spares no prayers for the Hawke children. Faith take and shake the lot of them.

And so death finds her here, at the end of the world, and swallows her without tasting. Her death is of no consequence here in the dark.

vi. blink

That’s not where the story ends, is it? 

No, never. Princesses never stay dead for long.

Don’t look so surprised. That’s what’s written on the label, an alternate insult and praise for how the rocky road around her brings out the steadily-paling pink in her cheeks, the overall soft look of her. Venture through the Warden cellar, take a sip of the bitter ale labeled with the date of her joining: princess piss, it says.

Storytellers don’t make the rules. They just name what they find.

But we’re getting ahead of the story. First she has to wake up.

vii. wake

Opening her eyes is anguish, but what’s one more pain variant? Bethany manages. Hoists herself up. Stares into the face of an unfamiliar man. She can hardly make him out, finds herself preoccupied above all with his moustaches. They dangle. His chin is shaved. Wherever she is, she has never been further from home.

“Maker,” she breathes. “Where am I?”

His armor is strange in cut but familiar in crest. The same crest on Anders’s maps, his old papers.

No, she thinks. That’s not—how could that be—

“You survived your Joining,” he says, and she tries again to blink herself out of it. The Fade is full of nightmares, of spirits that lie. She knows this story. Of course she does. It is not hers.

A slow lick of flame traces from her fingertip, testing the parameters of reality and her tolerance for pain. The world stays intact. The casting only hurts a little. And the man shakes his head at her. “Stop that,” he says, not in the voice of a threatened spirit but of an exasperated general. “You’re plenty impressive. We know. Wasn’t expecting you to survive.”

“Why did you take me on?” she asked, and he shakes his head curtly.

“Your brother and Warden Anders begged for your life. Made a compelling case.”

She feels her mouth turn down at the corners. Her sense of surrounding and self is a perfect blank. Thank the Maker for her brother, her family, for the willingness of the world around her to write her a future. New and unrequested every time. “Garrett always does.”

The man’s face does not change its expression; her brother’s name rings no bell whatsoever. What Garrett does and doesn’t do is no concern to him.

A finger’s weight lifts off her poisoned heart. Still-poisoned, to be sure. She can feel the taint deep in her, standing dark against the tide of force and magic that always waits within her, able to be unleashed at the flick of a finger, the right singsong syllable. She swallows, sick to the heart, feels poison and purity stand point to point within her.

Perhaps that’s the Maker’s will. That balance. She’d ask her new friend, but she doesn’t think he’d care. She could sink deep into how little he cares about the lifelong crises of the Hawke family. What a beautiful thing.

She laughs, at last, and he takes a step back.

“You well, Warden?” 

“My mouth tastes like I ’ve been washing the Void with my tongue,” she admits, and the moustached man snorts, surprised.

“You look a right flower but you might do all right here after all.”

viii. half-life

Right out of a storybook. Saved from the Void by the bright swords that fight the darkness back into the light. Given a sword, a title, a bottle of ale with her name on it. What luxuries. What freedom. What a lovely thing, this blade given for her to hack her way into a new future. One that already hides her from her old fears.

A new future, out of the light forever. Her old fears were those of a child. She had never had the imagination to think of truly awful things. For imagination, she went to her storytellers.

They had never prepared her for this.

No one had told her: blood in your hair, in the cracks of your nails and the links of your armor. She scrubs the mail and the blue cloth clean as she can night after night to no avail, breathing in the rot and ruin of every day. Every day, the same, til it sinks in too deep to wash away. She eats it, drinks it; even the harsh Warden ales hardly wash it away.

A temporary solution, and an ugly one. She is still dying, slow and certain and sure. Every one of them is. Death sips first from every tankard, eavesdrops on every conversation in the lantern-lit evenings. Deals every hand of cards, and waits. Goes to bed with them, drunk or sober, wraps around them at night. Leads them forward, holds their hand through the nightmares.

Those, guaranteed. She wakes with her mouth dry, her poisoned heart racing.

Every day, the promise of her own death. Every night, the guarantee of it.

I’m alive, she writes home, a letter to her brother for her mother to intercept. Like you wanted. It is the first lie she has put to paper.

She is nearest to alive in the nightmares, where the teeth are sharp and the whispers are next to her ear, though she can never make out the words. Except for that nagging echo, the recognizable voice.

Her brother’s voice, Carver’s. Asking, What do you think you’re doing here?

Spirits lie. She knows better. It’s not him.

But her body lies too, and the truth doesn’t have much to recommend itself, not now. The truth is too grim and ugly to look at for long; this endless lightless road is no kind of life. Certainly not when the Fade tears itself open behind her eyes every night—alit with familiar fire, fire whose reflection she can wear.

She is a mage, still. Both truth and lies take that into account, now.

Say she is free. Then she’d be a fool not to journey forth, to anywhere and everywhere her freedom can take her. In all the Maker’s realm and beyond it. If she is forced to be heroic, she’ll fight her own monsters.

ix. other half

Where’s Warden-Ensign Hawke?

Abed, sir.

What kind of rank negligence?

No, you don’t understand. She won’t wake up.

x. safe travels

Carver crosses his arms. “About time, Beth. You always were a late riser.”

“What in the Maker’s name—”

Bethany sits on the edge of her bed and takes in her surroundings. The tent is familiar, the clothes she wears worn to the shape of her body, but not together. She touches the red scarf at her neck, digs the softened leather toes of her boots into the packed dirt beneath the cot. Carver looks better in Grey Warden blues than she ever did. He looks untroubled, his eyes less sunken than her own. Last she checked, anyway. The taint seems to weigh in him less heavily. Death sits with death.

His shoulders have broadened, his big hands and feet a little more proportional now. Perhaps a trick of the armor. Perhaps one of desire. In dreams. Perhaps you keep growing after you die, she considers. Until you become as big as you were meant to be. For now, she shrinks next to him, which is a sign she’s still alive and still thinking.

She’s doomed, not stupid.

Carver puts an arm around her, awkwardly comforting. That’s familiar. She decides to think only of how nice he looks in the armor. He always did like heroic stories.

“Is this how it’s supposed to be?” she asks. “It’s all wrong for me, you have to have noticed.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says. Shakes his head. “That you were the one that lived. An accident, sure. Fair, hardly. But it’s not your fault.”

“See.” She lifts a finger. “That’s how I know you’re not Carver. Carver never started out nice. He only ever got there by accident.”

“Let me finish, Beth,” he says, looking so grumpy that she’s almost convinced again. “It’s not your fault. It’s Garrett’s. But you know that. Everything’s gone wrong since we left home.”

“We hardly had a choice,” she points out, which convinces Carver, or his ghost, or whatever spirit has stolen him, not at all. He shakes his head.

“There’s always a choice. Our brother’s lazy fighting killed me. The intrepid hero.” A shadow passes over his face. “Everything comes so easy to him. Everyone else pays. You have to have noticed—”

“Very convincing,” she says, cutting it off. Everyone deserves to be praised for doing their job well, and the spirit lies so nicely in her brother’s voice, clenches Carver’s big fists just right. She will not take the anguish it offers, the longing, the anger. If she knows what it’s doing every step of the way, then she won’t be tempted.

Her father taught her that. 

“At least you brought us back,” Carver, or the Carver-thing, says to her, and she lifts a finger. Thinks of the first Warden she met calling her a show-off. This time she doesn’t release an ounce of magic. Carver or whatever wears his face knows exactly what she can do.

In the Fade, she has nothing whatsoever to prove.

That thought won’t stay in her head: the Fade. Maps don’t want to be memorized here. She focuses on the sound of his voice, keeps her thoughts in a straight line.

“If this is a homecoming,” she says, “then you have to credit Garrett. Not me. Or Varric. Call it a gift from Varric—”

“Who?” 

Oh, Maker, he’s missed so much. And she has missed him in spite of all. Her brother, her thwarted brother; how much resentment she has had to shoulder without his help. Carver’s legacy, curdling in her next to her own. The many ways he might have found to be happy in Kirkwall. Easier than she, perhaps.

“There’s so much I have to tell you,” she says.

He shrugs, shoulders rolling under Warden blue—a bright heraldry for a grey business. “So get started,” he says, and they are not in her tent at all.

xi. stuck

Won’t wake up, or can’t wake up?

What’s it matter? We’re still down a soldier.

Should never have taken her on. Women and mages are more trouble than they’re worth.

Stick a cork in it. She’s ours first before she’s either of those.

Is she?

xii. unstuck

Carver is the only bright thing in Gamlen’s house, which is just as grimy and foul as she left it. “This?” he asks. “This is our family home?”

She feels her forehead wrinkle. “This isn’t right,” she said. “Garrett wrote me, and Mother swore she’d gotten the Amell estate back.” The minute she’d left. Of course. But she’d never set foot in it, into any truly noble homes. Only walked the streets of Hightown next to Garrett, who hadn’t cared piece one about being a lord. Was never home long enough for it to matter to him, but it had sounded passing nice to her. The will had put some color into Mother’s cheeks for a while, and that alone meant that restoring the Amell name was right and good.

Never mind the other reasons—the idea of nobility and significance, of pretty dresses and a purse heavy enough to bribe the templars to look the other way, of a name that weighed something. That stuck. That rang out louder than mage, apostate, even sister. A title she could wear by choice.

She doesn’t tell Carver that. The landscape reconfigures itself as she thinks, and they step onto a Hightown street together, but none of the houses belong to them. “You’re not very imaginative,” he sulks, falling into step beside her.

“I have to think of the real things,” she says. “Who else will? Brother’s out on adventures, nothing sticks to him. Gamlen’s a stinking liar. I don’t know if I’m glad or not that you never met him. You’d’ve punched him, and then we would’ve been out a home. He doesn’t even like the dog.” She flicks a sideways gaze towards her brother’s face. Carver to the core, it darkens predictably at the mention of the dog.

The spirit that wears him doesn’t miss a beat. He knows everything. It.

The pleasure, and the danger, of the Fade is knowing everything and nothing. Making the world in the image of your knowledge, in its limits and exaltations and warps of desire. Kirkwall is harmless here; the cobblestones form underfoot as she walks. She does not have to see any further than her nose. Than the image of her brother.

She tucks her hand into his elbow, leans against his shoulder, feels him accept her stiffly. Knows not to make her too comfortable, even as she feels so familiar with it, so loved. “And Mother was too heartsick to see straight. Over you, you know.”

“At least someone missed me.”

Very, very convincing. All the moreso because she doesn't want to think about her brother saying these things. His coldness feels truer than kindness would, fits more neatly into her new life, her new self. So much easier to be hard and unloving if the world beats her to the punch. And she needs to be: love is an inconvenience in the deeps. It brought her to this, after all.

“Mercy, you make it hard to miss you,” she says. “Maker knows why I do.”

“You don’t want a brother,” he says coldly. “You want a hero that isn’t either of us. What in the Void am I wearing?”

He shines painfully bright. She rests her cheek on sun-hot metal. “You’d make a lovely Templar,” she says. “No one would hurt me then.”

“What do you think Templar armor looks like?” Carver snaps, petulant with the details of his rewritten heroism, doubtless wishing he'd kept Warden blues. “I’ve never seen metal worked like this.”

She startles back. He wears white, brushed at the edges with gold. She feels her throat dry up, even here in the dream, feels a shock like brushing her fingertips over a lyrium vein. A kind of electric hunger, a knowledge of the infinite raw potential locked up beneath her skin. Such knowledge is dangerous.

“You’re right,” she murmurs. “That’s not right. That’s not right at all.”

“Can’t take you anywhere,” grumbles Carver, very Carverishly. “Not even the Fade.”

She flinches. “I didn’t think spirits were supposed to admit—”

“What good would it do to pass up the point?” he asks. “You know better. You came here on purpose. Because you thought I was a better bet than darkspawn or Deep Roads. Because Father taught you to listen and look around you, and you thought that meant you wouldn’t come to harm.” 

“Won’t I?” She wonders how bound this thing, the Carver-that-might-be, is to Carver’s behavior, his desires. He always wanted to play the hero, to protect her. Now he’s angry because she’s styled him against his preferred stories; still: “With your protection?”

He grimaces at her. “You know better,” he says. “You might have tricked yourself for longer if you had a more vivid imagination, but I’m not getting any sense of Kirkwall at all from you.”

“Fine,” she says coldly. “If you don’t like it, then take me back to my tent.”

Carver shakes his head, dwarfed by the armor she has imposed upon him. Embarrassment doesn’t come to her easily in dreams; still, she knows better. “Not how it works,” he says. “You’re here until you find a way back out. Not Kirkwall. Here.”

“How do I get out?” she asks, and he asks her in turn:

“How did you get in?”

“My brother didn’t tell riddles.”

“And yet,” he says, with a shifting smile altogether new to her brother’s face, “I haven’t lied. Spirits never have to, you know. Not when truths are on offer. You got in by wanting. How do you think you’ll get out?”

She watches him clank off, sun-shining metal all the way down to his boots. Despite the midday sun, the road ends in unseasonal fog that swallows him whole. Darkness waits around the corner, lit in the wrong colors—a luminous toxic green at odds with Kirkwall’s sandstone and sunbleach, its ocean blues and rusty stains.

“I love you,” she says once he’s gone, once she’s sure it won’t bring him back. She knows better. Still, he told her to want, and once the wanting starts it never stops. Even here, within this Maker-forsaken dreamscape where she can make anything and feel nothing, she knows that.  Desire is tangible; it eats its way into her belly, makes her fingers shake. “I hope you know that. Knew.”

xiii. untried

One of the houses in Hightown is more real than others. Has a doorway that opens when she looks at it. The air is smoky, half-violet.

Desire is tangible. Even when it is not hers.

Demons, she thinks dispassionately. Well, she was bound to run into them some time. The Fade places her in the crossroads of Purpose and Desire more often than not, spirits balancing demons, good balancing ill. Neither can  touch her, not if she knows better. Not if she refuses to take their bargains.

She steps over the threshold and her brother’s voice hits her square in the hollow centre of her chest.

Her living brother, that is. Garrett.

A test, she thinks, until she hears that he has company.

She entered the house knowing that there were demons present; how like Garrett to get there first, to clear away the danger she’d sensed without giving her a chance to fight it off herself. Maker’s sake, even when she’s been doing nothing but fighting, even in the Fade, in her Fade, she’s not given the chance to show it.

But that’s a Carver echo, knowledge of thwarted desire that exists parallel to hers. She can call it his, Carver’s, her brother’s, her twin’s, dead—and so it does not have to be hers. She does not claim this desire.

The rooms around her are passing fine. Carver, or the spirit, is right: she hasn’t the imagination to make it up wholesale. Wanting strips her clean from within, clean of detail and innovation, of anything but wanting, wanting. She could not invent the tapestries on the walls stitch by stitch, the fine tile of the floors. This house must be real. She does not claim this desire.

Her feet scrape along broken tile, and she listens to the house call her forward. Her brother is here, alive and questing. The house echoes this, promising nothing but ghosts.

But her brother never quests alone. Without her, he’s brought Varric—to tell his tales, of course—Anders—of course he’s brought Anders—and one more. One more, and the candlelight in the room casts the shine of him all the way down the hall. She hears the brogue before she sees him and she understands in pieces.

Her brother kept him around.

She feels a shock of desire and remembers: demons present. Remembers to stay on her guard. Her brother didn’t care a whit for the prince, that was plain. Otherwise the prince would have joined the company, whether he meant to or not, would have ended up drinking at the Hanged Man while she sat at home and soothed their mother, cleaning Kirkwall’s streets clean and filthy alike. He could have been there when—

when she died, yes, that’s all right, that’s fine, she slinks away from the room cat-footed before the figments can hear her. Out the front door of the false house, the way she came, knowing better than to believe it all the while. Desire demons leave their signature a mile off. She’s always been able to see them coming: no one knows what she wants clearer than she.

xiv. traveler 

She walks back the way she came.

It’s a long road. She has plenty of time.

xv. sister

We’re glad to see you.

Well, I had an appointment to keep. Heard there was a part of the Deep Roads worth my looking at.

Hawke, says another male voice, accented and admonishing and familiar. On the other side of the tent flap, the sleeping body of Bethany Hawke turns on her pallet. Listen to the fellow. He said something about—

My family, yes, what do you think I’m after, Vael? This whole endeavor’s a family matter, the Carta’s made sure to let me know that.

In a new voice: You’ve family living, Hawke. Here, even. Don’t forget to catch a glimpse of Sunshine before we go further into the dark.

xvi. somnia

Bethany Hawke is no somniari, to warp the Fade while she sleeps and, with it, the world. The road in her dreams is long and unformed around her, leads sometimes here and sometimes there and all along the way she only walks toward what she sees. Always forward, rather than back; always walking, rather than looking. Carver speaks up sometimes, but he’s content to be heard and not seen. Which is a good way to tell that he’s not real. She never left the Roads, never re-entered Kirkwall, never slipped in a door that her brother left open in his wake. Certainly not one to a haunted estate, one full up with the prince’s secrets.

Nevertheless, she’s not the only Hawke with a space missing in her heart. Perhaps a magnetism that draws desire demons runs in the Hawke blood, laced in with that current of magic, dormant or no. Malcolm, who might know, is dead. Garrett, who killed the demon in the Harriman estate, is no mage. Bethany, living and clever and toe-to-crown full up with power, sleeps. And won’t wake. Plain refuses, Stroud says. We’re not like to throw her out, nor cut her out. But Warden mages are rare for just this sort of reason, just this sort of adverse effect, and rarer still since that friend of yours left—and just yesterday there were Carta fighters in the roads. Come after her, calling her by name. I didn’t bring her in to do the Hawke family a favor. You figure something out to do with Princess, here, he says, and Hawke’s companion startles in his bright-shining armor, casts an uneasy look down at the sleeping girl, the tousle of her black hair, the pink of her cheeks and the peaceful cast of her lids and lashes. They look familiar to him.

Hawke sits by his sister’s pallet with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, thinking. And Sebastian tries not to speak of his own history, of Hawke beside him while he spoke to the demon that killed his family. An act of friendship, that, the least of which he can do to repay is be silent now. And not speak his thoughts aloud, which are with his own demon, his own dead—

for there was a moment in the Harriman estate wherein the desire demon turned her face from him and looked on Hawke, and in that moment even the demon saw nothing but Hawke, thought of nothing but keeping and captivating Hawke. And in that moment, in her, in it, he saw Hawke’s family in the shifting face of the desire demon: the mother, grey and careworn, the demon pinkening her cheeks and restoring some of her losses; the uncle, made clean; the brother, made living; and the girl. With just this hair, and he wonders what her eyes might look like when she opens them. What this face might smile like when she wasn’t offering the unholy world to Hawke on a platter.

Varric says, “You know, there’s a couple tales up from the Anderfels this brings to mind.”

“Any of them got a cure?”

“You know,” Varric continues, thoughtful, “if you give me a moment to talk to Choirboy, I think we might think one up. You think we can scare up a couple bottles of Warden ale? I tell better stories when I have a drink in hand. And Choirboy’s going to want one, too.”

Even the sleeper might have been able to hear Sebastian swallow.

xvii. glass coffin

The tales from the Anderfels are popular enough all over Thedas. Before Varric spoke this one in her sleeper’s hearing, Bethany heard it at the Chantry, from a sister with a lilting voice that sang secular stories into being with the same joy she spoke the Chant of Light. Sister Leliana told her tales of sleeping princesses in snow-wrought mountains, woke with a kiss.

She knows them well enough to dream them into being.

Playing along with a dream is not the same thing as taking a demon’s bargain. It’s a matter of knowing the rules. Once she knows the story, she knows the rules. She knows where in her mind this came from: her memory and her revisionist heart. Very well.

She lies back on a clear pallet, arms crossed, and lets her eyelids drift shut. The last thing she sees is the prince leaning in; the last thing she feels is his breath on her lips. She is inventive, in this if nothing else. She understands the tenets of this story and how badly she wants—this, the knife-echo smoothness of a clean-shaven cheek, the roughness that threatens beneath, the softness of his mouth at the centre of it. The delicacy of the way the lips press against hers, a breath caught in his mouth with a kind of fear. So specific.

So perfectly wrought that she knows better than to believe it.

Her knowledge cracks a clean line through the Fade vagueness around her, like a knife through fog.

On the other side, she can see a familiar nightmare, one she’s long avoided, all needle teeth and rot on the wind. And when she recoils, the world is waiting for her at her back.

xviii. wake

A sweet dream, the bitterer to wake and remember she’s dying. 

Bethany stretches on her pallet, limbs cracking, eyes full of sand. The echo of Warden ale furring on her tongue, which makes sense of the heaviness of her head. And gives a sense of adult verisimilitude to a dream straight out of her girlhood. She runs her tongue over her teeth. Kissing princes indeed.

When Stroud walks into her tent she manages a smile, if closemouthed, which is more than most days. The dream stands between her and the nightmare, dulling the shock of it. The Blight is a breath away, which is farther than it is most mornings.

“Awake at last,” he says.

“Have I slept past breakfast?”

“And longer than that, Warden-Ensign,” he says, and she feels her heart stop midleap. “You’ve missed—ah, Void take it. Your brother’s here. Talk to him first. You’ve got my dispensation to join him.”

“My brother?”

Stroud leaves. A moment later, Garrett pokes his head through the flap. Really, here, in the flesh.

Her smile disappears.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came,” her brother says, nudging the tent flap back with his shoulder and entering her tent, filling the space at once and easily, “because a dwarf crew’s after my blood. Our blood, you might say, literally. They’ve been saying, literally. Thought you might want to come along for the bloodletting. Theirs, not ours, that is, no matter what they ask.”

“I can’t.” She crosses her arms. “I’ve got a duty here. Or didn’t you ask the Wardens what they did before you left me here?”

Her brother’s eyebrows bunch. So little touches him, so little cuts him deep, that he’s never learned to hide it when it does. “Of course I asked. I know. Anders told me—”

“Anders, I suppose, had a choice.”

“D’you think so?” her brother asks softly, and she feels her cheeks flaming, angry.

“He didn’t wake up like this one day!”

“It was this or death, Beth—”

“And you didn’t ask me which I’d prefer!”

All she can hear is her brother’s breath, loud in her ears. There’s no space in the tent when he’s around. No space anywhere.

Even so, his voice stays quiet. “If you feel that way you can stay here and wait for the Carta to come. But I hoped you’d come with me. If only so I could have your company for a little while.” 

She blinks, hating the way it stings. She can’t look at him, not when it hurts this much. “You missed me?” she asks, and he laughs. Damn him to the Fade, he laughs so easily, even now.

“You want to know how much?” he asks. “I’ve been traveling with the prince of Starkhaven just because I knew it’d please you. Believe me, not because it’s to my taste. Even when I’m killing for the man I come away feeling like someone’s personally cleaned my hands.”

“That must make for a change of pace,” she says, and he laughs again.

“There’s that.”

They part pleasantly. His shoulders twitch forward, arms half-rising, before he goes to leave, but she doesn’t step in and he doesn’t demand the embrace. When he’s left, she breathes into her hands, slowly, once, twice. Every breath a reminder.

Brought him along with Varric, not that Varric was thrilled with the choice. Given I cut down the mercenaries that killed his family, figured I’d at least give him the chance to return the favor.

The favor. Murder, casual rather than righteous in her brother’s voice. Murder for bloodlines, like what’s after them now. What might have cut her to shreds while she slept, even here in the belly of the earth, cheek to jowl with the Void. Death and grudges find a way.

As do old debts, old stories, old dreams. She traces a finger over her lips, thrice, four times, the chapped shape of them, before she can bring herself to leave the tent. But she straps her staff to her back, cleans and smooths her blue jerkin, takes what money she can, and swears as she leaves that she can feel the fletching-feather burning between the coins.

She has so little to her name. But she’ll take what she can get.

If nothing else, the sky waits outside the mouth of the Deep Roads. The sun.

xix. seen

Varric is happy to see her, always was, always is. She feels the story wrap her back up, an unbroken tale, for all that she’s been out of it for so long.

The sight of her brother stops feeling like a slap in the face the first day. She’s weathered worse affronts. She’s not Carver, for all that she can hear him whispering. In dreams, only in dreams, and the dreams don’t take her. Not now. Perhaps Carver infected the demons that borrow his features with his own peculiar kind of chivalry: as they try to tempt her, they stand between her and the nightmares. A perverse kindness, that allows her to be kind without perversity when she wakes.

Sebastian Vael—yes, Prince Sebastian Vael, she tests his title aloud and finds that he takes it on lightly—looks at her, looks and looks and looks.

It makes her uncomfortable, puts pins and needles in her cheeks and up the back of her neck, uncast fire under her skin. No one’s meant to look at her, the mage in hiding. No one’s supposed to see her now, the sacrifice. But his eyes are clear and blue and startling. And, well. If someone has to look.

She does not know what he sees.

xx. spoken

If there’s something good or beautiful in any of this, please, enlighten me. 

There’s you.

xxi. whispered

They make camp in the Vimmark Mountains. Her brother and Varric split a hand of cards, a skin of ale. Back in the Warden camp, she drinks, but here she doesn’t want them to watch her knock back the cups, comment on her strength, wonder at her tolerance, ask her how it’s been. He’s used to a sister who’s not there when he’s in his cups and jests, so she settles herself by the fire.

Sebastian is abstaining too.

“Are you any good at cards?” she asks him, and he shakes his head. Catches a smile before it forms all the way.

“I used to be. But not now.”

“You used to?” she asks, and the smile disappears entirely.

“I used to be a—” He stumbles, slightly, but rights himself in a moment. That surprises her. He seems so surefooted when they’re on the march. “A reprobate. I was sent to the Chantry for my sins, and now I look back and see that it was rightly done. Without the Maker’s hand to guide me, I’d be as I was. Dicing and gaming, grinning like an idiot, soaked in wine, bedding every—”

The heat of the fire is nothing to the tangible heat coming off his face. “I apologize. I spoke crudely, of a crude life.”

“I’m a Warden,” she points out. “I hear cruder every day.”

“A curse in a Warden’s mouth is as good as a prayer in a Sister’s,” he says, card-poor earnestness written all over his face, and she snorts. For a moment, she wishes she was drinking after all.

“I know the Chant backwards and forwards, and you won’t find that anywhere in it.”

He blinks, surprised, she doesn’t know by what—that she knows the Chant, that she knows it well enough to swat back. Instead of wondering, or worrying what she’s said wrong, she focuses on him. His face, the fine-carved edge of his nose, made for a coin to stamp. His lashes, the way the firelight catches the red in them, reddish like his hair. They cast long, almost maidenish shadows down his face, but the skin around his eyes is worn thin, etched at the edges with lines that might have come from laughing or great care. A prince, but not new, not untried or unwritten. A prince who’s navigated at least three tales. Lived-in.

So’s she. She feels it, her armor bunching densely behind her knees as she leans in: the weight of all the lives she’s had to carry, the things she’s had to become.

“But it’s true,” he says. “There’s no honor like the life of a Warden. No sacrifice more pure.”

“I didn’t seek honor,” she says softly. “Nor glory. That’s my brother’s suit. And I hardly think the sacrifice gets me any credit if I didn’t seek it out.”

“I was given to the Chantry,” he says. “I didn’t seek it out. Will the Maker overlook my penances and my acts of charity because I was ushered in through the back door?” He shakes his head. “He will not. He placed me there Himself. And you too, I cannot doubt. You could wear any duty gracefully, that much is plain. And if it’s plain to me, then I can only imagine what He in his wisdom sees in you.”

She flushes, looking down at her blue-clad knees. Even weighted down, her body wants to lean in, to the praise and to him. To the light casting off the metal of his armor, holy in his brightness. Instead, she keeps her eyes down, even as she can’t help smile a little. “You seem to have taken to Chantry life.”

“Purpose is one of the greatest gifts the Maker can bestow.”

“And the throne of Starkhaven is not purpose enough?”

Beneath his armor, she sees him stiffen. At once, a thousand placations leap to her tongue: I’m sorry and I didn’t mean and did I offend and, and—but she isn’t the soft girl, the crowd-pleaser in hiding, forever dancing on a knife’s edge. The knife’s come down now, and she is what she is, harder and surer. She waits, at least, to see the outcome.

And he exhales.  “Secular purpose is different from divine.”

“Yet if we’re where we’re meant to be, if that’s fate, then—”

“I don’t know,” he says, soft and frank. A confessional voice. “I wish I could trust that I would be good even wearing the crown, but I’ve felt differently. I’ve felt lust.”

His eyes are on hers, on her, and she can’t help looking up into them. The dark blown pupil, swallowing the clear blue around it, sucking in the light. She takes a breath, he blinks again, looks away again. “For power, I mean. Of course. It was a desire demon compelled a woman to kill my family, you know,” he says, words tumbling out one after another. “For power, for that lust, unslaked and endless, right in the pit of the belly. I can’t pardon her, but nor can I pretend I don’t understand. The demon looked at me too, and I know what she saw.”

Bethany tilts her head, looks herself. And Sebastian shivers, almost flinches under her gaze.

“A good man,” she says. “One it couldn’t break. You’re here now, aren’t you? Just to help? And you’re not corrupted.” Her hand lifts. There is a shadow at the edge of his cheek she wants to brush away like a spider. And with it, she could brush away his worries. Her fingers hover over the edge of his cheek, until she can feel the warmth of his skin, its own warmth, unlike the fire but no less scalding against her fingertips. “I’d be able to feel it if you were.”

Her fingers land.

His lips part; then he stands. Motion takes him to his feet, too suddenly for her to draw back. Her hand hangs in the air, between them. Near his knee, now. She’s face to face with Andraste, who stares at her in judgment from his belt—oh, there’s nowhere good to look at all. Nowhere to turn, not to his face and not to Hers.

“I am sorry,” he says, voice formal and solid between them like another layer of metal. “I hate to leave you but we ought to sleep for the morrow and I need to go—think. And pray. In my tent. Alone.”

“I would never follow you to your tent,” she says, a frown creasing her forehead, she may be a Warden and a soldier but she’s still got a sense of decorum—and he coughs.

“Of course not. I merely—” He’s midstep, but he pauses and looks back. “If you do pray—”

“Of course I pray,” she says indignantly. “I ask the Maker what he means me to do every morning and every night. Now, as to getting answers—”

“I meant, someday, we might pray side by side.”

“Oh,” she says, and again. It’s all she seems to be able to say. “Oh.”

“Peace shared between souls is nobler than that sought alone,” he says. “Just not tonight. I am not sufficiently—peaceful, to succeed in creating such communion, not now.”

She watches him go, his steps startling and swift. Full of purpose. That, he does not lack. Whatever he might think otherwise. She can see this much: the path he thinks is right, he’ll follow straight and sure. As, at present, the path away from her.

For her part, left alone by the fire, she finds she doesn’t want to ask the Maker for advice. Not now. Instead she slips a hand into her purse and runs her fingers over the feather there, considering omens, considering fate.

If you need the Maker to tell you what you’re doing at every turn, she thinks, you’re not worthy of calling yourself faithful.

xxii. tale-telling

They don’t get around to it—praying, that is. She does what she needs in private. Praying, that is. And presumes he does the same. Outside the tent, she feels self conscious—about that, her brother’s no ardent Andrastian, she’s shocked the Chantry lets him in their front door. To say nothing of Varric, who is enthusiastically writing an epic devoted to Sebastian’s belt, just to see him blush. Which he does, despite the fact that he ought to be above such things by station and the fact that his face is sun-brown and weatherworn, that he should know the sort of things Varric says and know better than to show it.

Instead of the Chant, the talk. Stories, always stories. Varric’s domain, but Varric gets quiet nearer the Deep Roads, she remembers this. Quiet for Varric means two tales rather than five, but the nights stretch on and he deals himself and Hawke a hand of Wicked Grace. Offers to deal her in, and Sebastian, though he asks them in two very different voices, but she mostly declines. Varric means every smile he sends her way, but now that she’s got the stench of the Deep Roads on her and never gets to see the sky he no longer knows what to call her. How to write her. What or who she is.

Sebastian seems to have made a swift judgment as to her worth. Overvalued her, possibly, but she wants to listen to him draw her up in lists and words and traits. Tell her what a good thing he sees, how possibly.

But he is so free with his praise, so very casual. Beside the firelight, low and glorious, it takes nothing from him to tell her that she is beautiful, is full of grace.

“You look at me like you know me,” she says, once, teasing, which is of course the thing that makes him look away. “Really.”

For he does, and constantly, even moreso when he thinks she isn’t paying attention.

“You look very familiar to me,” he admits, and she laughs—is that all?

“Well, I was there in the beginning. That first day you put up the notice. I read it right next to my brother.” She smiles. Feels shared history tie them together, neat and tight as bowstring. Her eyes flick up toward his quiver, where he’s set it down beside him, to the feathered shafts nestled inside. A pleasure, watching him shoot day after day—not even enemies, they haven’t found those yet. Meals only, hares and birds to roast over the fire. The fine lines of his arm and elbow, the soft zinging sound as the arrows cut through the air.

“You were?” he asks. “Then I must have seen you. But just then, when I was half-mad with grief and fury—”

“And my brother makes an ostentatious entrance,” she laughs lightly, but Sebastian shakes his head.

“Half-mad, and not fit to be seen, else I would have remembered you. Why did you never travel with your brother—with his lot—why did I only see you the once?”

She looks down. The answer is ugly, best left behind in the shadows.

For all that she has marveled at, delighted in, his aim, he has not seen the same from her. Oh, he know she’s mage-born, all right, has told her it doesn’t matter. Told  her the Maker made that way, and his voice dropped in such a way when he spoke of the Maker’s making her that he had  her blushing over her own religion. But for all that, he hasn’t had the opportunity, or the necessity, to watch her cast. Not yet. It’ll be different, she thinks.

She doesn’t want to think about that. Surrounded by all the kind men in the world, all perhaps-three of them, she wants their company to be enough, just like this. Their enemies seem very far, and the staff on her back might as well be for looks, or for tapping rude men on the knee when they get too close. The pallor of her cheeks, the uncertainty of her sleep, it might all be love, not death.

She says instead, “I didn’t get much time adventuring, before—” 

Before.

“And now you put us all to shame,” he says, and she exhales, hard, through the nose.

“You don’t know what the life’s like.”

“I’ve read the tales,” he says. “King Alistair of Ferelden is a Warden and a hero.”

So he is, though she never forgets that Ferelden’s beloved king was a templar first. She bites her tongue, now. King Alistair’s heroics are not for her, no matter how famously kind and charming he is. Thoughts of the templar king will not sweeten her life underground.

Sebastian looks at her sidelong in her silence. “His queen, too.”

Her mouth, at once, goes stone dry. When she swallows, she can hear the sound it makes, rough and wanting. “Yes,” she says at length, testing her words. She sounds lovely, and normal, she thinks, not at all as though she can taste her thoughts, no indication that she’s remembering a prince’s lips on hers. Misremembering. “The Hero of Ferelden. Her sword split the archdemon’s skull, and she didn’t die. After that, a crown’s a small thing. Even she’ll always be Warden first, you see.” The bitter dreams always swallow the sweet in the end. The spectral press of his—not his, her dream’s—kiss cedes to the memory of echoing darkspawn whispers. “First and last. Why would anyone do that to a country?” she asks aloud. “They won’t bear children, heirs. They’ll live a sweet half-life and then die in the belly of the earth, and Ferelden will, I don’t know. Go to war, I suppose. Burn.”

That’s the truest Ferelden she knows, her nearest memory: the burning one.

When she blinks the remembered smoke out of her eyes, and the real stuff too, grey from the embers at their feet, Sebastian is looking at her as though—Maker, as though the dream was real.

She puts her fingers to her lips. “Did you—” She pauses, looks at him straight. She’s not a storyteller; even if she knows what story’s in her head, she’s not an enchanting speaker, not a weaver. No Varric, not even an Isabela. In an Isabela tale, he’d certainly have done more than kiss. “I remembered you,” she says instead. “And I dreamed of you. Right before you came. A peculiar thing—”

Her fingertips stay on her lips, and his eyes on them. Again, he is the first to rise, to leave. “You talk of dreaming,” he says, “and prudently, too. I should be off to sleep, we both should. Bethany—”

Her name sounds refined and ragged when he says it. Simply the work of a new accent, no credit whatsoever to the late hour, the length of their talk, the smoke of the fire, nothing else behind it. All the same, the fire heats her cheeks to embers from within.

“I’m not returning to Starkhaven, you know. I’m not—” He clears the smoke from his throat. “I’m remaining at the Chantry. I’ve taken vows. They hardly equal yours,” he says, with a smile of glancing charm and some sadness at the edges, “but they are mine.”

I didn’t choose mine.

I certainly didn’t choose celibacy.

“We do our best with the lives the Maker gives us,” she says with a loose shrug that rattles her armor. She hasn’t it in her to be hurt. “That’s what I’m doing, in any case. If you do the same, and if it pleases you—”

“Pleasure doesn’t enter into it,” he says abruptly, and she looks up, the tone of his voice like a tug on her chin, reprimanding as it pulls her in.  Still blushing deeply, the tingle in her cheeks and her lips, she studies what she sees: the fine heroic angles of his face, the fastidious skyward gaze. Fastidiously away from her.

“I don’t see why not,” she replies slowly. “Those that can should pursue their pleasures for those of us that can’t.”

“I squandered my rights to pleasure long ago,” he says. “I will not find it again, neither on the throne nor in the Chantry. Other sentiments show me the way forward now.”

“Serving Andraste doesn’t please you?” she asks, and her fingertips itch, wanting to touch the smooth serene face on his belt. Built by the craftsmen of Starkhaven in the throne’s honor. To seek forgiveness, hot skin against the cool metal. Prayer, made tangible.

She knows better.

“Peace is not pleasure,” he says carefully. “It is, in certain respects, its opposite.”

“Then sleep in peace,” she says, letting him go.

Nothing has happened to disturb the peace, after all. Andraste has blessed their camp as much as she blesses anything, even if they are a cadre of mixed belief, even if they are here to kill a set of killers. Perhaps it is only a blessing for Bethany, a reprieve from the endless work, the deadly toil of her life. She shakes such thoughts off: she is no better than the rest of them, no more deserving. Certainly no more holy. Not with her cheeks still so scalding hot as she watches him leave.

Silly girl, she thinks. The fire’s as hot inside you as without. That’s why you need to be careful.

xxiii. be as you are 

The Carta finds them as much as they find the Carta, but the Carta dies easy. Harder to kill with a clear conscience: their superiors.

The woman that meets them wears Warden garb.

Claims their father’s aid, and Bethany feels her own place take shape in Warden history, storied now. Hawkes and Wardens and her own predestined position between the two points, the two historiographies. She never had a choice. The Maker weaves in simple steady patterns, back and forth, present and past and future pulling toward the same points. Her father shut a door she is forced to open, as her brother charges forward, calling order. There is no time to drag her feet, in their Warden-issue boots, no opportunity to protest.

Here in the fortress is fate, here is another reason to be angry with both Maker and family, with her father now as well as her brother. These men handing over their blood to these forces in blue, again and again and again. This room ringed with statues, staring in stone judgment at the follies of the Hawke family. Their choices come to nothing, again and again, against the forces of nature, the constants of the Maker’s design: cities burn, gods rise. Wardens refuse to count or name their dead.

There is no time to be angry.

The magister rises from the altar, from where their father trapped him—their father—but Void take their history, her brother charges forward, Varric and Sebastian flank her on either side—this is how she died, once, claimed by the Blight while her brothers in arms fought on faithfully at both sides, but she does not think of it now. Only of her, of them, of what it will take to get out of the room and to the other side of the story, of discovery. She does not think of the dead, does not listen to Carver. She stays in the room, which comes to constant life around them. Keeps her eyes forward, on the magister, twists her staff and wills—

stay in place—

and the floor, the room itself, is with her, the floor opening up around him to swallow him up to the hips.

It doesn’t stop him.

A bolt of the magister’s power slices past her, lights up the pillar at her back, which comes to furious flaming life. Through the fire, she can see Varric on the far side of the room, the next pedestal, shooting, and nearer her: Sebastian, the statue’s fist clenching down toward his head.

She casts.

A blast of ice neutralizes the fire, and her own fire knocks the statue to the floor. An arrow rests in its stone throat. She doesn’t have the time to check on the man on its other side, not when the magister keeps fighting, when the statues keep coming to life around them.

The god remains unstoppable, ceaseless, until he isn’t. His absence leaves the room smoking, silent. All of them have saved each other’s lives at least once. Never time for specific thanks. It doesn’t matter.

Her brother wraps her in his vast fighter’s arms, larger and denser with muscle than their father’s ever were, and for the first time since their reunion, she lets him. Leaning in, cheek to the rasp of his beard, she closes her eyes and tries to pardon their father’s ghost, to think of their father as she knew him—wiry and kind and magic and theirs. Not here, not in this room, not tangled with the Wardens and their heedlessness, their constant cost of life. She is Malcolm Hawke’s daughter beneath the blue, not in it. Deep beneath, where fire and frost waits banked in her bones, waiting to be cast out into the world. And in her head, where she keeps them back.

And Garrett is his son, which is far easier to see, far easier to love.

“I’m glad you were here,” Garrett says to her, and she closes her eyes, willing herself to look at nothing and no one.

“That’s why you brought me along,” she says. “Family above all, right?”

That that has been proven a lie by every member of the Hawke family, dead and living, doesn’t matter. It sounds good now, feels right when she says it, when he nods.

xxiv. fares well

She is returned. She will be Warden once more—Warden Hawke, with no competition for the name. There’s that. 

But not yet. She can see her brother’s steps slowing. In the distance, the Warden camp makes itself known, blue-grey and smoking austerely on the horizon. “Let’s make camp here,” says Garrett, and she knows: this is a kindness and this is a selfishness at once. For him, one more night with family, one more night like he didn’t forsake her. But forsaking and secret bargains with the Wardens seems to run in the family, and she isn’t angry. Much. Not when he starts to build a fire, when Varric shucks the bag off his shoulder and gets to building a tent even though he’s always quickest to complain when manual labor is involved. Quickest to complain and most capable with his hands. They are losing an extra day, so her brother can keep her, so she can stay sister for an extra day. The old model. She’ll take it—if it’s not quite freedom, it’s still a reprieve from the darkspawn. At least as long as she’s awake.

Her brother gathers wood for the fire, Sebastian goes to hunt for dinner, and for her part, she helps Varric bring up the tents. It’s the least she can do, if this is for her.

“Least you look good in blue,” he says, unprompted.

She lets a small smile tug her lips. “There’s that.”

“Like bluebells in the Anderfels,” he says, “to get a fellow rhyming. They’ve got different flowers up there, little but hardy against the cold. The mountains are prettier than you’d expect, with the Vimmark wastes for comparison.”

His kindness is a gift, meant as one, but she doesn’t want to hear about the Anderfels. Not the home of the Warden fortress, and not their stories. The things they find beautiful. (Princesses, in glass coffins, sleeping amongst the flowers, waiting—)

“Or,” he says, butting into her thoughts at just the right time, “maybe just like the sky on a nice day.”

“Sunshine?” she quips, and he nods.

“You carry it with you, whether or not you’re looking at the sky.”

Several retorts rise to her tongue; she can feel the darkness seething through her veins and her thoughts, poison and death and underground monstrosity—but she bites the tip of her tongue and keeps the smile on. That’s one way to keep going. Bright even in the dark.

By the time the tent is assembled, her brother and Sebastian have returned from the wood, hares ready for skinning under her brother’s knives, the wood-pile arranged and waiting. “Care to do the honors?” Garrett asks, and Bethany flicks her fingers toward the tinder. Sends out a lick of flame, and the dry underbrush flares into friendly orange fire.

“That’s more like it,” says Garrett with a sigh. “It’s good to have a primal mage with us again.”

“Yes,” she says wryly, “at camp. You make do without me.”

“Doesn’t mean we don't miss you,” he says, and she looks away, the heat of the fire too close, suddenly, warming her cheeks to crisps.

We. Through the spark and crackle, she flicks her gaze—she can’t help it—toward Sebastian. So he's seen her in battle now. A mage, living proof of the need for Andrastian restraint. At the very least, no lady. But through the flame he’s looking at her familiar, still. Familiar and soft.

“I’ll have to thank you,” he says, “for saving my life.”

“Saved the Prince of Starkhaven’s life,” Garrett says cheerfully, “there should be a title for that, or at least a reward. Defender, Champion—”

“Hero,” says Varric, like the lightest touch of pen to paper. She almost flinches.

Then he laughs. Sensible, as ever, of his audience. “Ah, shit. You might get tarred with the same brush, Hawke.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” says her brother, his teeth gleaming in the firelight. All fire aside, he outshines her, and she cedes both name and heroic claim at once. That’s not her—Hawke, hero. Not quite Warden, not quite sunshine, nor, precisely, monster. What’s left in the middle, she’s not sure.

They eat. Drink: to life, to the Hawke name, to each other, one by one. She takes a sip of wine from one of Varric’s proffered skins, finds it easier on the wash down than Warden ale: she cannot forget, she’s been made iron on the inside, no matter how much she’s abstained. Fireproof within, throat to belly. That, at least, she was made for.

“You’re sure you don’t want us to deal you in, Sunshine?” Varric asks, and she smiles.

“I’m sure.”

It is she and Sebastian left, at last, the last, again, for the last time. She watches him wince down a swallow of wine, ceremonially tolerated. “Used to better?” she asks.

“My tolerance isn’t what it used to be.”

In his life before: right. The reprobate. He doesn’t seem drunk now, nowhere near.  The look in his eyes is heady but sober. Not new on him. Not new to her. She could wear his gaze like a dress. Starkhaven silk. Or whatever Starkhaven’s known for, other than the husk of their accents and the gloss of their armor. Details like their fabric exports, or their relative kindness to mages, she doesn’t have on hand.

“Walk with me,” she says impulsively. “I want to ask you a question.”

Unsupervised, she doesn’t have to say. The wine has warmed her blood, though not clouded her thoughts. It lets her smile, teasing. “I’ll protect you from the wolves.”

“I was serious,” he says, rising. He offers her a hand that she does not need but is only, painfully, too glad to take. “If ever I return to Starkhaven, and if you ever make your way there, you deserve a boon.”

He does not discard her hand, so she lets him keep it. It is softer than she would have expected from a warrior in her brother’s company but harder than she would have expected from a prince. Calloused fingertips, but a palm smooth as money, used to the touch of gold. Her own heats at the contact, and she hopes—for once—that he will think of it as a mage’s hand, used to casting fire, and not that of a girl blushing under every inch of her skin.  “Are you returning, then?” she asks lightly, and feels him shrug at her side.

“Your brother thinks there’s little sense in my staying. And I think—well, whatever I think, there’s little sense in preaching to him.”

“That’s true enough,” she laughs. “He’s hardly devout. But will you go simply because he’ll see you off with a kick in the trousers?”

“He’s been more than kind,” Sebastian says, and she swallows the last of her laughter. Thinks: He’s told me why he’s so kind to you. But it would be a cruel thing to repeat, even as it makes her want to stand closer to him. A gift for me, even from far off.

“Yes. He means well. He makes a good friend.”

They stand at the edge of the footpath he trod with Garrett when the sun was up, branches broken underfoot and leading them on between the trees. “What keeps you from it, then?” she asks. “I’d only like to know. If I had that kind of home waiting for me, no vow in the world could keep me from it. Not from a whole country wanting me.”

A throne wouldn’t let her go to sleep without nightmares, but at least it would let her sleep in a bed, one nearer the sky than the centre of the earth. Maker, she’d take the Amell seat. Her brother’s home, and her mother’s, hard-won with her efforts, too late for her to see.

She’d take the Lothering cottage, and two brothers rather than one.

He pauses. “Lady Hawke—”

“I know,” she says, sharper than she intends, “from vows. They stand between me and that title. It’s only you that calls me that, because it’s a lie against my life.”

He sighs. “Your life is a noble one,” he says. “When they write your tale, they’ll know you’re good simply from the blue on your body, the life you’ve lived. You’ve a straight path to the Maker’s side.”

“And suppose I’d like to stray from the path every now and again? If only to pick a flower or two?”

Anderfels blue, she thinks. Her armor designed in Weisshaupt, in emulation of its skies or its bluebells, one or the other. Not that her fellow Wardens are much of a flowerbed. But alone, in this particular company, she lets herself think of it—lets herself want to be delicate. In his eyes as well as her own.

The Anderfels and their tales that snake through Thedas for the retelling, of princesses and queens and maidens fair. Kirkwall prefers adventurers and tricksters and bawdy songs, but they have maidens in Ferelden too. There’s not much of any storytelling, not much of anything, in the Vimmark Mountains as far as she knows. She wonders what tales they tell in Starkhaven.

“Bethany,” he says, voice low and rough with her name.

“Did you kiss me?” she asks. “While I was asleep?”

She can feel the heat coming off him like a second fire, like a cast spell. The moonlight isn’t much for color detail, but she has learned that he blushes, and how: knows where brown will shade to red on his cheeks, at the tips of his ears. He lets her hand slide from hers. “We oughtn’t—”

“There’s an old story about a sleeping—” Princess. “Maiden. Woken by a prince’s kiss. Stroud told me I’d been asleep for ages back there, and maybe I meant to be. Not to sleep, but to—to not be there, and to not be stuck in nightmares all the time.”

“You were lost in the Fade?” he asks, horror pushing his shame out of the way, and she shakes her head.

“Not lost. There’s lots of empty space you can wander without running into demons, without killing or becoming an abomination. But you’ve got to really hate the waking world to put up with it.” Her throat is thick, tight. This isn’t what she came out here to talk about. “So I did. Until the dream turned sweet, and you showed up in it. I thought I heard Varric talking about stories.

“Did you kiss me?” she asks again. “To wake me up? Because you’re a prince?”

Silence shrouds him. She keeps her eyes on the shining breadth of him, his bright shoulders, Andraste’s marble-white face on his belt, the moonstruck glitter of all that fine metal saving her from watching his face.

Andraste stays put, and the rest of him with Her. He doesn’t leave, at least.

He says, at length, “After five bottles of Warden ale, it seemed—” He shakes his head, sighs. “That’s why they preach temperance, you know. It seemed—”

He falters, fidgets with his hands, starts again. “We didn’t have anyone that could have healed you, not with potions nor poisons, nor your brother’s apostate friend. Not with us. Just a tale-spinner and a prince. And if it was to help you, then it didn’t seem a breach of vows.”

Biting her lip inside her closed mouth, she runs her tongue over the mark of her teeth, tasting the memory of it, with the knowledge that it was true. Even if she wasn’t there at the time. Not really.

“I want it back,” she says.

He blinks. “What?”

“The kiss you took,” she says. “If you give it back to me, then you won’t take it back to the Chantry with you.”

Sebastian looks her over slowly. Despite the density of the wood around them, the thickness of the night, all she can see is light. His armor and the clarity of his eyes.

“Andraste forgive me,” he says, the same swift prayer she’s heard him speak before charging into battle or hunt, and then he slides a finger beneath her chin. Tips it up. She’s built tall, like her brothers, and he doesn’t have far to go.

She’s awake this time, and she keeps her eyes open.

His lips are soft, gentle on hers, and she can’t taste the wine at all. Gentle, too gentle, even as she opens her own mouth, breathes into it. Even as he winds the forefinger of his free hand into a curl of her hair.

When he pulls back, he makes a sound as he does, as though she’s bit him or burnt him—soft and wretched and wounded. She breathes into the absence of him, resists the urge to lick her lips.

“There,” she says, “you can go home free.”

He does not look free.

She drops her eyes down to her boots, studying the briar and thistleweed scratching at their worn leather. “I’ll go, then.”

“Wait.”

She does.

“If I am a prince—I mean,” he says, “if—if that’s what I am to you—”

“It wouldn’t have worked if you weren’t, would it have?” she asks.

Of course she would have woken eventually. Wound her way back from the Fade and stretched back to resigned life once she got tired of the Carver ruse and the unmade roads. The sound of her brother’s voice, and Varric, and the man (the prince) she had wanted so fiercely back in Kirkwall might have pulled her to the surface early. It doesn’t need to be a story, a spell that saved her, a pair of lips pulling her up to the surface and teaching her how to breathe fresh air once more.

But it will ease his heart if it is one, and she grants him the succor, her lips tingling.

“Then,” he says, “if nothing else, Starkhaven owes you a boon indeed. Remember this, if ever you should find your way there.”

“I’ll remember that while I’m underground.” She tilts her head, looks up to the sky, wonders if the Maker is watching. The same moon and stars sits over the Vimmark Mountains and Kirkwall and Starkhaven alike, and the same god behind them. “It’ll make the world above seem wider.”

“You will be rewarded,” he says with startling intensity. “Trust in the Maker. He will make you free.”

“As he has made you?”

He is without words, then. She watches him run his tongue half-heedless over his lower lip in the silence, before he realizes what he is doing. “I’ve got to think that one over,” he says. “I’m bound to ask him. But I’ve got you as evidence of his steady hand, haven’t I?” He runs a hand over the back of his head, tousling the red-brown hair where it touches down against the edge of his gorget. “I’ll keep you in my prayers, Bethany Hawke.” His laugh comes out lurching and uneven, half-swallowed, and he presses his lips together, shuts his soft mouth hard. “I don’t think I’ll be able to help your presence.”

“Thank you,” she says softly. She’s never turned down a prayer.

And she can’t imagine turning down anything he offered her.

xxv. fledgling

Back in camp, the fire is burnt to embers. Her brother sleeps by the edge of it, snoring heavily enough that he’s like to be the one that snuffed it out. Varric’s tent is lit; she can see the scribbling shape of him within.

The next morning, they return to the Wardens before the sun’s come all the way up, the camp close enough to breathe on.

“Princess’s back,” Stroud says with unforgiving gruffness, and she can feel Sebastian flinch at her back.

She doesn’t, won’t look back. Not as she salutes, not as she takes her place in the blue ranks. She’ll disappear here. Let it be so. The world is simple when they part ways, all of them: her brother goes without guilt, Varric with a new story, Sebastian absolved. Her teeth dig a furrow into her lip, biting back the wanting, the call toward his back—any of theirs. Take me back, let me be the Amell daughter, Sunshine, princess—

But that’s who she is here, not there.

Behind her back, she slips her fingers into the mouth of her purse, lets the fletching tickle her fingers. When they’re gone, she drops it onto the road for the wind to take. They are free from each other; they have to be.

But she dreams that night of the kiss more than she dreams of the darkspawn or of Carver, and when next they venture into the deep roads, the world is wider up above her. She knows that. The map is only as wide as her knowledge, after all. Only as big as she knows is there.

There are places in the world that wants her, whether or not she’ll ever see them. That’s not nothing.

He looked back as he left. That’s more.

A flick of her fingers, and a new little flame springs to her fingertips to guide her through the oncoming dark.