Work Text:
It's not quite a debut, but there's an irresistible, terrifying thrill to attending court at the Winter Palace for the first time. Seong Trevelyan isn't yet famous enough to be invited in his own right, of course - he's nowhere near practiced enough at intrigue, nor has he made enough of a name for himself in songwriting or gossip collection just yet - but his patroness, Duchess Amelie, is generous enough to have included him in her entourage, and careless enough not to keep too tight a leash on him.
"It'll be an education for you, pet," she'd said, pressing a kiss to his cheek. "Every young bard should attend the winter court at least once, if only to say they've done it, and I must say, that Celene chit does know how to throw a party. Maybe you'll catch her fancy, my sweet."
It seems unlikely he'd catch the fancy of so august a presence as the Orlesian empress - even at a ball as grand as this one, she can only be approached by invitation alone - but there's plenty to keep him entertained. The rumours flow as readily as the wine, and a man possessed of his looks and vague sense of mystery hardly wants for dance partners, almost to his own detriment. His bad knee aches by the time he excuses himself, laughing, to seek out the refreshments table, and maybe a seat to take a rest in.
Finding a seat in the ballroom is no easy feat - it seems that courtiers are used to sitting only at the Empress's pleasure, and chairs are reserved predominantly for the elderly, the ailing, and those struggling to remain on their feet. Even the balcony settees are crowded with bodies - with the exception of the northern-most. There are people out here too, minor courtiers and lower-ranking nobles, but there is a circle of space around the most sheltered of the benches, as though there is some sort of disgrace in the area that might be catching.
The cause is obvious, when he weaves his way through the crowd enough to see the individuals being so assiduously avoided - three women are gathered on the bench: two elven, one human. The taller of the elven women is immediately easy to identify - dressed in less ornate but clearly Orlesian fashion, masked and veiled like the more modest of the courtiers that surround her. Briala, the first elven ambassador permitted at the Imperial Court, and, it is rumoured, the empress's lover. The human woman is dark-haired, in her thirties, fashionably garbed in an expensive ballgown of stunning violet, but she is not there for long - she presses a kiss to the cheek of the shorter of the elves, and departs into the crowd. It does not part around her - apparently her status is significant enough that the tarnish is not catching - but the whispers intensify.
"So she did bring her lover then?"
"They say she killed an archdemon-"
"They say so many things in Ferelden one can hardly keep up. I hear the doglords still believe in werewolves over there, can you imagine-"
The rumours identify the shorter elven woman even if her appearance did not - her mask dangles from her fingers, her hair is unveiled and mostly loose in a distinctly Fereldan style, and her clothes are Fereldan too - soft breeches and high boots tailored to reveal the shape of her legs in a style that would be scandalous if her presence were not already a scandal - Seluna Tabris, alleged former Grey Warden, alleged Hero of Ferelden, alleged lover of the Empress's newest advisor. Her tunic is deep blue silk, expensive, and heavily embroidered with a pattern of entwining trees.
He then notes how her expression sours as the whispers grow louder, and despite having too little intelligence on the mark, swoops in and sits next to her.
"My home country has many stories about werewolves," he tells her, blithely. "I was terrified of them, as a boy."
She raises a brow at either his courage or his impertinence. He hopes it's the former, suspects it might be the latter.
"So you should be," she replies, with a smile that shows off too many teeth to be real or courtly. "I'm terrified of them now." She glances at their audience with narrowed eyes. "Maybe that's why the Orlesians are so fond of masks - you can't tell which of them is secretly a wolf unless you go around pulling them off, which is apparently the height of rudeness."
"So I've heard," he chuckles, and introduces himself. "Seong Trevelyan. I'm a Marcher," he says proudly, despite Amelie suggesting he keep it under wraps, despite his fellow students who laugh behind their hands at his beloved marching songs and shanties. "A step above a so-called doglord, but only just."
"Luna Tabris," she replies, a glint in her eye that is almost mischievous, despite the lines of exhaustion in her features which make her look aged beyond her late thirties. "Doglord and elf. I'm surprised you're willing to sit so close to me. Based on the crowd, I'd say they think the pointy ears are catching."
"You will grow accustomed to it," Briala offers, with the yawn of a practiced courtier, and something twitches in Luna's jaw at that.
"No, I won't," she says, sweetly, but there is a tide of anger beneath her words that makes him recall that she's more than a scandal - she's a legend, even as far north as the Marches, "but my lovely wife requested my company, and so, alas, here I am, polluting the sacred streets of Val Royeaux with my presence. What brings you to court, Seong Trevelyan-the-Marcher?"
"Oh, good music, good company, and the thrill of disappointing my father, who'd rather I was leading Mass instead of a dance." He smiles to make it a joke, though it isn't. Without Viola's calming influence, he and his father had been clashing all summer. A servant approaches, nervously, whispers something to Briala, and she departs with a mouthed apology - something urgently requiring her attention, something that makes Luna's hands curl and uncurl into fists in her lap.
She sighs at her departure, watching after her with regret. "Maker, I wish I could be dancing right now." Her hands twist in her lap, and he can see now something tightly-coiled within her - a woman of action reduced to a wallflower at a party of nobles who don't know what to do with her - a hero, yes, but not the kind any of them want to acknowledge. "At times like these I miss Leliana - a bard, like you, I think, and the best dancer I ever met." She looks him up and down with sharp, narrowed eyes. "So, why's a young, handsome lad like you sitting with us rather than out charming the masses on the floor? If you're looking for secondhand glory, you came to the wrong place."
"I," he says, in his grandest, most I'm-about-to-tell-a-story voice before deliberately switching to deadpan, "have a bad knee. And these dowagers are voracious. But if you wish to dance, my lady, I'd be happy to oblige."
"You poor darling," she says, with a sly, crooked grin. "I bet they eat you right up - little runaway bard who should've been a good Chantry boy."
"I am a good Chantry boy," he protests, matching her grin. "But there are so many other songs besides the Chant, and I'd like to try learning them all."
"Cute answer." She winds a curl of her hair around her finger, lounges back on the seat to look up at him without craning her neck - he's not tall, but she's small, even for an elf, not built to the heroic proportions he expected. "Know any about me?"
"A fair few," he admits. "More about King Alistair, but then my older colleagues have a human bias."
"Boo," she pouts. "He doesn't even like it when they write songs about him. Gets all bashful and blush-y like a teenager who's never been kissed. Typical fucking nobles - I kill an archdemon and they still make it all about him."
That sends a gasp through the crowd, which she seems almost to revel in - her shoulders slacken, her grin becomes a little more wicked.
Seong revels in it. "I'll write one about you," he says, and tries not to sound like he's begging.
"Oh, you're adorable," she smirks. "Surely you have better things to do than appeal to an old woman's vanity."
"Old," he scoffs, in the way he's learned to do around Amelie and her friends, so they'll giggle and flatter him. "I'm afraid I can't help it, messere. My sister says I was born hungry for stories, and should eat only paper and ink. A convenient excuse for when she wanted to steal my breakfast."
She clicks her tongue, maternal, mock-disapproving. "Monstrous behaviour. Is she at court? Would you like me to scold her for you?"
"I'd like to see that very much," he chuckles. "But unfortunately she is confined to the Ostwick Circle. She had the poor fortune to be born a mage and not a bookworm." He tries very hard not to use derogatory language about the Circle at court, especially in Val Royeaux, but it always bubbles underneath.
She hisses in sympathy, and he remembers the other rumours about her - that her wife is an apostate, that during her brief stint as Warden-Commander, she recruited runaway mages wherever she found them, that one of them even succeeded her when she made her escape.
"I'm sorry," she says, with a rough gentleness that almost reminds him of his mother. "I'd offer to go and collect her anyway, but I fear the Templars see me coming these days and get antsy."
"I went there myself," he says quietly, and has no idea why he's admitting this to both a hero and a perfect stranger. Even his parents don't know. "I begged them to take me too. Apparently I'm the least magical person this side of Thedas."
She sighs, and for a moment, despite her lively energy, her beauty, her sly, wicked smile, she looks as ancient as she claims to be. "How this world takes and keeps on taking," she murmurs. "I'm sorry I didn't leave it in a better state for you."
"You did plenty," he assures her.
She clicks her tongue. "Never enough, though, right? There's always someone, somewhere, with their foot on someone else's neck. I'm sorry it happens to be your sister's." She says it, not like a condolence, but like it's her fault, like she knows she's sitting in a ballroom when she could be dismantling the Circle brick by brick. "You didn't think of signing up to stay close to her?"
"As a Templar?" He's been working on 'arranging his face', but the idea revolts him so entirely he doesn't think he can manage it. "The people my sister had nightmares about as soon as she was old enough to know why?"
"It's how they get new recruits," she shrugs, "at least the ones who go in with good intentions. They like to tell people they're there to protect mages as much as control them, but… I've seen the inside of a Circle, and the inside of too many prisons to name. There are some things that shouldn't stand."
Seong shivers. He makes sure they're not being overheard when he says: "I keep tabs on the closest ones, in case they move her. Ostwick isn't so bad. Not compared to some I could mention." He does not mention how he knows this; the offices he's broken in to while his fellow bards were drunk and distracting, the old clerk he'd let fondle his knee under a dinner table. The manifesto from Kirkwall he covets and copies for others by candlelight.
"You're a good boy- man," she corrects herself. "I'm sure- I'm certain your sister misses you as much you miss her."
"I know she does," he sighs. "We're twins. We were the same person in another life."
"Mm, I know that feeling." She sighs again, her eyes going distant. "Not twins, but- the Wardens took me from my family too. I know what you're missing. I know the fear you'll never get it back."
"So I shouldn't hope for a Grey Warden recruiter to rescue her?"
She laughs at that, a soft, bitter sound. "Maker, no. You want her to be free, don't you?" She cards a hand through her loose hair, breaking up the carefully-styled curls into a cloud of silver-white. He wonders if her hair was always that colour, or if the horrors of the Fifth Blight stripped it from her as it carved lines into her delicate features. Heroes in songs are not meant to look old, or tired, and she looks both. "I recruited mages, in my time, and they were grateful, but I don't know if I called it freeing them."
"She plays the violin," he says. "You'd be better off with me, at least I can shoot." He doesn't think about what they teach her in the Circle - maybe she can fight now, he doesn't know.
"I think you're happier here, sweetheart," she says, looking him over. "Wouldn't want to rob the Empress of her court's finest blossom, I doubt even being vaguely legendary would save me from that."
Seong laughs, and is flattered despite himself. "I'm an upstart Marcher with barely a season under his belt, and no published works fit for an Orlesian chamber hall. But you're very kind. And far more legendary than you suspect, I think."
"Don't I know it." She drains her cup to the dregs, refills it from a pitcher on the table. "Look at them, quaking in their fancy boots! You're the only one brave or foolish enough to approach me without Morrigan to act as a buffer, and if they'd rather talk to her, you know they're scared. I've seen her destroy a man's self-image with three words and a smile." She says the last with an almost-dreamy adoration. "So, did you have a move in the Grand Game planned out for this? You can tell me, I don't play."
"Let me write your story," he chances. It wasn't what he'd come here for, but he's fascinated, and it would be a triumph. "The real one. Ferelden and Elven to boot."
She laughs at that. "Sweet boy," she coos, "you'd never make your name off a thing like that. They edit out all the mud and blood and vomit, and people really won't like the ending." She sips her wine, as if to calm her laughter. "Half of Ferelden think I'm dead," she says, off-handed, "and the other half think I must have been bedding Alistair the whole time to survive as long as I did, which is honestly more offensive. He's a sweet boy, but- no."
"No-one who saw you with your wife would believe that."
"Hence my one-night-only appearance at court." She sweeps her hands out in an almost-bardic flourish. "My darling got sick of lecherous dukes eying up her cleavage, and while she's quite capable of scaring off her own suitors, she thinks it's much funnier to have me to do it." She sweeps her hair over her shoulder, pensive. "What would you put in the story?" she asks, looking at him sidelong. "What do you think are the parts that matter?"
He answers immediately. "What was the name of the person you left behind?"
She blinks, as if she didn't expect that, as if no-one's ever bothered to ask. "My family? My dad - Cyrion. He passed away a few years ago now. My cousins - Shianni and Soris, we grew up more like siblings. My- husband." She swallows, glances away, the first time her dark blue eyes have shifted from his face. "They definitely don't put him in the songs, at least the ones where I'm a hero."
Seong shrugs. "Then I'll start there."
"Hmm." She shifts in her seat, swirls her wine in her glass before taking another long gulp. "Have you heard The Bloody Bride of Denerim? I don't know if that one made it across the Amaranthine, but it's good. Got a beat you can actually dance to. Shame about the lyrics."
"I'll look it up," he promises her. "I like giving heroes a family. When they're the only character, they're easier to put on a shelf and forget about. That's not what ballads should be for."
She looks up at that, the hint of a smile creeping back into her eyes, crinkling the slight crow's-feet at the corners. "Oh, they love me on a shelf," she says, drily. "Whenever I show up in person, trouble tends to follow. As you may have noticed."
He grins. "I love trouble."
"Careful," she cautions him, "saying things like that is how you end up in my line of work, and I promise you, it's deeply unrewarding. My darling family aside."
"Who'd cast me as a hero?" He chuckles. "I'm too mouthy, and I've got a bad knee."
"I don't know," she muses, studying him as if for a portrait. "You've got the bone-structure for it. And they love a pretty, human noble boy with with strong convictions and a song in his heart. You can afford them, you see."
"Seventh son," he argues. "Scandalous second marriage. Barely counts."
She laughs at that, mocking, but almost affectionate. "Oh, darling, take it from me: it counts, when you don't have it." She sips her wine again, and he notes the pink glow in her cheeks, the looseness of her limbs, and wonders if she'd speak quite so freely if she hadn't been drinking steadily since the ball began. "I tried to fix that. Made my little cousin Arl of Denerim. You can imagine how well that went down."
"Better a Marcher upstart than an elf," he sighs. "You have my sympathy. And a standing offer for that ballad."
"Oh, I'd love the ballad," she says, blithely. "I'm incredibly vain, you know. It comes with the heroism - once you've put the work in, you really want to see it acknowledged."
It's the way she talks that astonishes him - her casual curses remind him of his mother, her broad Orlesian almost-peasant speech, but there's constant, seething anger beneath her act of the rough-edged Ferelden city girl that Armelle Trevelyan has never possessed. This is a woman with the rage that killed an archdemon, that tore a tyrant's pillars down and made a king of a man she still calls a 'sweet boy'. She may have discarded her mask, but she's still playing the role that the courtiers expect - a tiger playing at being a house-cat. He wonders if anyone has realised yet that he's having a friendly tete-a-tete with the most dangerous person in the room, possibly in the palace.
"What if you wrote it?" He asks, leaning in, intoxicated. "What's the first thing you'd put in a ballad of yourself?"
"If I wrote it? I'm not a bard, but…" She pauses, runs a pink tongue over her painted lips. "How fucking difficult they made it," she responds at last, startling a laugh out of him. "Nobles, Templars, dwarven kings, all those powerful men used to the world bending to their will, bitching and whining like spoilt children whenever anyone pointed out that a Blight doesn't go away because you order it to, or because you have other problems. The Divine has my sympathies-" she raises her glass in a mock-toast, clinks it to his, drains it dry, "-because if that's what it's like to be the Holy Mother of Thedas, she can keep it."
Seong takes his own drink, and knows he can't stop grinning. "Now that's a marching song if I ever heard one," he says. "Needs a good drum beat."
"Mm, something like-" She taps out a steady, infectious rhythm on her thigh. "Seriously, it's like the more power someone ends up with, the less they have to grow up. Drove me near mad, and now I have to sit and smile in places like this filled with people like that. Don't become a hero," she advises, "you'll get to my age and feel like biting them. Though you're probably pretty enough to get away with it."
"Noted, and thank you. I'll make that the moral - ballads have to have a moral, I'm afraid."
"Ooh, people will hate that," she says, with malicious glee. "Ballads are meant to be how you get people to sign up for this rotten work. Make sure to really emphasize how deeply annoying it is to have to explain to people that you won't be a noble once the darkspawn eat your castle."
"You Won't Be A Noble Once The Darkspawn Eat Your Castle, by Seong Trevelyan. I'll get to work in the morning," he tells her and stands up giving his leg a stretch. "In the meantime, I think we should try and really shock them." He extends a hand. "May I?"
Her eyes glitter, her restless energy at war with some unspoken reluctance. "Can your reputation survive it, Ser Trevelyan?"
"I'm a bard," he replies. "If nobody's talking about me, I'm not doing my job. And then I'll die from inattention."
She accepts, slips a small, calloused hand into his, and rises with almost-liquid grace. Her fingertips are stained with black. "In that case," she says, voice almost a purr, "let's give them something to talk about."
The dance is a volta, which would be challenging if she didn't throw herself into the air as if she had wings, requiring barely any effort from him at all. Beneath the delicate silk of her tunic, his hand rests on the corded muscles of her back, and she moves with a grace that no dancing-master has taught - if the courtiers are bright, beautiful birds-of-paradise, brought from Seheron to sing in their cages, Seluna Tabris is a tigress, and the only reason their feathers do not decorate her lips is because she did not come here to hunt. It does get him the attention he desires - there are gasps and whispers, and Amelie shakes her fan at him in delighted outrage, and he revels in all of them, in being a scandalous Marcher with a City Elf, a hero on his arm. When he bows to her at the end of the dance, she sweeps him a dramatic courtesy, and he swears that in that moment, the fire that burns within her outshines every magelight in Empress Celene's ballroom.
He is not the only person to notice - there is a tap to his shoulder, a low feminine voice says: "May I cut in?"
"Of course, Lady Morrigan," he says, and attempts to smoothly detach himself.
As he pulls away, Luna leans in close. For a moment there's a swoop of fear, as he wonders if she'll press a kiss to his cheek - he isn't sure if what little credit he possesses would survive the rumours that would spur - but instead she whispers in his ear:
"Remember what it felt like, to be nobody," she says, low and fierce and utterly unforgettable. "They'll want you to forget."
Then she releases him, slips into her wife's arms like the moon settling into the night's embrace, and he is forgotten as they take the floor together, a storybook couple, a legend given life.
He never does see Seluna Tabris again, but her words return to haunt him, when he returns to the Winter Palace with his own entourage, when he meets Briala again. He thinks of her final words to him, and his looks slip to the lesser courtiers, the servants, the shadows who hover at the edges, the people who hear everything and go unseen.
He looks to Dorian Pavus, bright, false smile affixed to his lips, fingers almost bruising-tight on his arm. He's as different to the Hero of Ferelden as night is from day, but there is the same sense of the mask-beneath-the-mask, the same sense of someone with beauty and power and renown made a scandal by their mere existence.
"Are you sure you want to be seen with me?" Dorian says, and his tone is teasing but Seong can read the nerves beneath it.
"Why wouldn't I want to be seen with the most handsome man in the room?" Seong asks, already slipping in to his airy, blasé court persona like armour. He thought he'd missed it, all this time, but it grates on him already. He's not a charming boy any longer but a soldier, with new scars that didn't come from lute strings, and grit under his once perfectly-manicured fingernails.
"You mean the Tevinter spy who crept into your entourage and is even now dripping the poison of the Black Divine into your ear?" he retorts, straightening Seong's collar with brusque affection. "I can't imagine why you might not wish to publicise this particular entanglement."
He thinks of Briala, then, Celene's mistress no longer, and her quiet, resigned unhappiness, in contrast to Luna radiant in her lover's arms in the centre of the ballroom they now stand outside, and a fierce wave of protectiveness washes over him. He will not allow that fate to befall Dorian, even if he has to draw down the disapproval of every noble in Orlais to achieve it.
"I will not hide who I am," he says simply. "I never will. And I won't hide you - as long as you want to be seen with me."
Dorian smiles at that, leans in, kisses him, right there in the Grand Vestibule, in front of half the Orlesian Court. "Amatus," he teases, "I could not bear to lose you to the horrors of having nobody talk about us."
Seong laughs, too loudly, unrefined. "I do keep telling you, I'm a bard. I need gossip to live."
Perhaps this display is what brings him to Lady Morrigan's attention once more, or perhaps the witch has lain in wait for him since first the invitation was sent, but he finds, when she steps out of the shadows to greet him, he is not surprised to see her.
"Inquisitor," she greets him, with narrowed eyes and an expression that is not quite a smile. "It has been some time since we last met. Did you ever finish that ballad you promised my little fool?"
"You remember me," he says, delighted and flattered despite himself. "I'm sorry to say I didn't - I lost all of my notebooks in the explosion at the Conclave, along with my poor lute. But I still think of her often."
She tilts her head at him, perhaps amused. "She has that effect on people. Tell me, do you still dance as well as you did three years ago?"
He's spent the last year training his martial footwork instead of his dancing skills, but he offers her a hand anyway. "Won't you try me and find out, Lady Morrigan?"
She takes his hand in hers, and there is a slight curve to her lips that could be described as a smile. "I hope for your sake you're as quick with your wits as your feet - they do not call court intrigue a knife's-edge dance for nothing."