Chapter Text
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
—Adrienne Rich, from “An Atlas of the Difficult World”
Josephine tucks her cold feet under Leliana’s legs, ignores her hiss of protest, and says, “I always thought you and Andraste would have the same sense of humor.
She can’t see her, but she knows Leliana’s lips sneer against the back of her head. They are in bed, Leliana wound ‘round her like a snake as the fire in the hearth sputters and gives up. An average night in the little attic hideaway Leliana found and Josephine managed to furnish. It only takes eight of Leliana’s steps to span the room—admittedly, it takes Josephine several more, but that’s neither here nor there. The cold ripples through as though the roof is made of lace filigree. It suits their purposes. By now, Josephine will do anything for privacy.
“Andraste is laughing,” Leliana says, “but I am silent.”
Josephine groans quietly and turns over on her back. “Your sense of drama always manages to revive itself right when I most want sleep.”
“She,” begins Leliana, and Josephine knows she’s not speaking of the Maker’s Bride, but of the Herald, “might as well be playing marbles.” Her nose wrinkles in distaste. “Better a baker. Or a farmer’s daughter. But a map-maker.”
The map-maker in question is Herah Adaar, a member of a mercenary band caught happenstance at the Conclave, and now the veritable figurehead of their heresy. (They are a military organization, which should call for a military metaphor, but Adaar doesn’t wear so much as a dagger. To Leliana, it means they are a bladeless hilt, a spear without a tip.)
Today, she went missing for all the daylight hours—Sera, bribed with an entire week’s worth of ale and a kiss from Flissa (no tongues), managed to find her halfway up one of the smaller mountains. Crouched at a cliff’s edge with her sextant, scribbling notes. The Frostbacks aren’t going anywhere, Josephine thinks irritably, and the mountains,, towering above everything else, will be the first to go if the hungry maw in the sky grows any larger.
Leliana possesses many monikers for her, her favorite being a sheep in sheep’s clothing. It’s true: Adaar always dresses with painful simplicity. Trousers, tall boots, a linen shirt, a threadbare brown coat edged in fennec fur that falls to the back of her knees. Her horns bear no silver: they twist and frame her head in ashen spirals. Dark hair, streaked with grey, always bound up in a bun, occasionally in long braids trailing down her back. Dim blue eyes. Taller than the Iron Bull. All in all, a completely forgettable appearance. She is one of two Qunari for miles and miles, and they lose her constantly.
“Cartographer,” Josephine murmurs, an antidote to the anxiety beginning to curl in her stomach. “Call an artisan an artisan. They are much valued in wilder places.” She snakes an arm about her waist.
Leliana sighs. “Haven is not wild.”
“Not to you,” Josephine agrees. “It’s wild enough for me. Give her time.”
A little silence. “Perhaps an actual inquisitor would be more useful,” Leliana muses aloud. “One of those clerks from Celene’s offices. A tax collector. An investment banker. Surely that would please your coffers.”
Josephine bites her lip, strangling a laugh despite herself. “Leliana.”
“Or one of her more buttoned-up heralds,” she continues. “A master trumpeter. A booming voice to announce our arrival to the mountains.”
Josephine splays a hand over Leliana’s face—Leliana kisses the warm rise of her palm and slides her hand away.
“Truly, Josie, I wouldn’t wish it,” she says. “That kind of noise would rouse an avalanche.”
Josephine rolls her eyes. “As does your snoring,” is her reply. “Yet here I am, the last of the great martyrs.”
“Was it Threnn who asked me if I’d started sheltering the ravens in my tent for warmth?” Leliana asks, straight-faced in the practiced way of a lay sister. “’Maybe tend them in the morning, Sister Nightingale, so the shrieking won’t alert the guard rota.’”
“Lying is beneath you,” Josephine mutters, neck flushing.
“No,” answers Leliana, with an imperceptible twitch of her lips, “you are beneath—“
An attempt to smother her with both hands proves unsuccessful; Josephine will regret not using her pillow instead, but as Leliana’s hands (like ice, always) slide her nightgown up her thighs, the regret fades.
This is how it begins. A few muttered jokes, laughter, tangled together. Stray threads wrapping themselves round and round till a knot, hard as stone, makes a fist at the heart of it all.
Because—Josephine knows it will turn. Even from their conversation under a musty quilt, huddled beneath the bower of night, laughter settling in the room like dust—she knows Leliana, and nothing with her is ever slow. Even the quick-tempered envy Leliana’s swiftness in dismissal. There is no swell, no boiling over—a slow slide down a mountain, a hapless vessel sinking to the bottom of the sea. Only the edge of a cliff. One is either perched at the edge or careening off it.
None of it is unexpected. To love her laughter is to love the knife, how quickly the tilt can twist in a careful hand. You must love both. Those are the words Josephine finds, even in the moments she thinks her own heart will beat itself out of time in anger, or when despair conspires to pull her under. You must love both.
~~~
When it happens, Josephine’s not there. She’s stuck in her office, listening to Minaeve chop up a blight wolf’s liver with a rusty cleaver. The ashen-smelling offal drifts, thick as smoke, and settles permanently over her desk. She finishes a letter to one of Celene’s clerks. The letter, sealed, goes out with a runner in the afternoon.
Josephine overhears a private scuffle between friends as she passes the healers who gather outside the Chantry to warm their cold fingers and scrape gruel from the bottom of the pot. They nip at each other worse than birds do, and chatter loud enough to fill the yard.
Did you see the Herald and the Nightingale? Right in each other’s faces. Thought it was going to come to fisticuffs.
Don’t be daft. Neither is the type—
Aye. One’s venom, one’s wheat. If we’ve still got a Herald in the morning, all’s forgiven. What’d they spat about?
Someone was supposed to die.
The phrase cuts the air. She nearly stops walking; she remembers herself at the last possible moment. It’s not the act of violence itself in question—it doesn’t matter. Leliana makes her own choices. It’s the way it plays out behind her eyes, reducing the gossip to nothing.
Josephine has never watched Leliana come out on the wrong side of a battle, not unless she had the perfect reason. Never seen her left empty by a decision. The aftermath, of course—the marks of stray arrows taken to the side, the jagged skin of old knife-cuts, enemies at court pointed out with a quick glance and a dismissive description. All of them old, collected scars of a life. She has never watched Leliana make an enemy. She has never seen Leliana lose.
And today—not only did it come to pass, but there were witnesses.
Josephine walks down the steps, the talk of the healers fading behind her. They have no idea. They have no idea how the world has just rearranged itself, as completely as the mountains going flat beneath an invisible hand.
Leliana does not come to bed that night, or the night after. Josephine knows better than to wait, and stays up late with the candle at her side anyway, writing letters to her brother, her mother, even a distant cousin who remains a clerk at the court of Antiva’s king.
She knows Leliana does not sleep—she walks the perimeter of Haven, circle after circle, bow in hand. A calming habit, she told Josephine once, to know everything was in its place. Josephine knows better—it is not a habit if Leliana must do it in order to rest her head, if Leliana will wait until she thinks Josephine lies asleep to go out and do it after they make love, if there is no time.
Josephine can picture it as clearly as she can see the words she writes on the page. A tall sentinel, no stone unturned, keeping watch. She suspects it is how Leliana prefers to pray here. There are tales of holds in the deeper south where sisters walk and chant at dusk and dawn, and Haven’s chapel is small and oft-attended. This is the case, at least, since the death of the Divine.
These are the secrets Josephine keeps. In some ways, the Inquisition is not unlike the Game—they both know the same facts, but there is so little reason to speak them into existence. Josephine cannot heal it; even if she could, Leliana would hardly let her. So the wheel turns.
But the presence of a warm body at her side—Leliana’s arm across her waist, her cold nose buried in the nape of her neck—has always done wonders to fend off her dreams. If Josephine plucks strings and weaves webs, then she is most vulnerable alone, and the nights she sleeps with only the quilt for company are long.
This dream, over and over. She is towed out to sea by her wrists, bound by rope and tied to a ship. She plants her feet in the sand but is only one woman against the tide, and slides into the waves. She does not struggle, she does not drown—she is only dragged towards the horizon, her head bobbing above the water. The ship has no crew. The sails plume with warm wind. Night never comes. They just push on, and on, and on. Josephine drifts.
~~~
Adaar avoids both Leliana and Josephine at all costs.
Josephine cannot understand this for all the gold in Orlais. She has never done anything to Adaar. She smiles at her, offers her wine from the cellar, inquires as to how she settles here in the cold climes. But Adaar offers one word answers, looks just over the top of Josephine’s head. Doesn’t meet her eyes.
Her association with Leliana, perhaps, after the incident in the tent. But it’s not out of fear, or modesty. It’s simple refusal.
And Adaar likes Cullen best. Not even Cassandra. Cullen.
“He speaks to her like a tradesman,” Leliana says with a roll of her shoulders, without preamble, after a rather stolid war council meeting. “Like a man who respects his shopkeep.”
“Stop,” Josephine replies, already annoyed by the problem at hand and in no mood for Leliana’s symmetrical annoyance. “He speaks to her with respect and devotion, just like everyone else.”
“I’d forgotten this about you.” Not even Leliana’s beautiful face was immune to a dramatic sourness—in her case, a slight pucker. “You’re too fond of pretending things are the way they should be.”
Josephine merely rolls her eyes.
She knows the answer. Adaar likes Cullen best because they find each other useful. At their first meeting of the war council, Cullen dropped a knife into their grand map to permanently mark their base at Haven; she caught his wrist so quickly Josephine didn’t actually see her move.
“Do that again,” Adaar said, “and you end my time here.”
Cullen looked at her fingers curled about his wrist till she released him. “Pardon me, Herald,” he said.
“It’s fine.” She squinted at the map laid out before them all for a long pause. “This is trash, besides.”
They stared at her. Cullen, of all of them, gathered his wits first. “What do you mean?”
“Antiva’s been reduced by a third,” Adaar said, leaning over the map. She traced the borderlands with the tip of her finger. “Rivain’s missing an island. And the Waking Sea is too broad by half. Who made this?” Nobody knew, so no one answered. Adaar found the author’s mark in the corner, made a tsk tsk noise under her breath. “Lord Cortemanche,” she muttered. “A Chantry shill.”
“The Chantry’s made maps for ages,” Cullen said. “I’m sure it’s accurate.” He touches the back of his neck. “Wouldn’t, ah, someone have noticed if it was wrong by now?”
“Are you mad?” The comment from anyone else might have sparked a fight, but Adaar’s voice was calm, clear, low. Soothing and unpointed. She only raised an eyebrow. “The Chantry has every reason in the world to make you think the world is this small, and Orlais is this big,” she said.
Silence, then, but Adaar didn’t seem to notice. She tugged at the corner. “Don’t fret.” Was anyone fretting? Josephine wondered idly. “I’ll rectify it.”
(And she did. Two weeks later, Josephine walked into the war room to find the old map in pieces on the floor, a new one secured with pins and unsullied by a dagger’s blade. The border edged in painstaking etchings of elfroot and puffed, thistle heads of amrita vein. The effect isn’t lost on Josephine: what heals, what survives. There are no seals, no stamps. Just a date, and the flowered border. Josephine makes a habit of brushing the corner with her thumb, where the amrita blooms with two thistles.)
Josephine is not often wrong, but she was fairly certain that would begin a tumultuous course when it came to Adaar and Cullen’s professional relationship. But more often than not, upon entering the humble war room Cullen and Adaar are already there, going over a maps and charts. Her spectacles slipping low on her nose. They take rounds about Haven together, consulting the little leather-bound book she always carries. Josephine makes no heads or tails of it.
This is no different in the field—Leliana reports, dry as stone, in the Hinterlands, on the Storm Coast, the Herald’s party goes one way, and the Herald goes another. Cassandra is always able to follow, despite Adaar’s attempts to shake her. Josephine is no expert on how expeditions in the wild go, but she cannot imagine this is how it’s intended to work.
Both Leliana and Josephine find the lack of complaints from Cassandra on this issue astounding—Josephine goes to solve the puzzle of it one warm morning as Cassandra practices her blade-work on Thedas’ most unfortunate practice dummy. Don’t imply the burden is too much, Leliana had advised. Or she’ll just prove you twice as wrong. Go back to sleep. I should do this.
“I want to inquire about the Herald in the field,” Josephine asks her, after pausing a moment too long to admire the precise movements of her blade. Cassandra doesn’t wear her armor in the morning, and her linen shirt sticks to her skin.
Cassandra only grunts, an invitation to continue.
“She doesn’t fight,” Josephine confirms.
Cassandra nods, and her next blow chips the wood on the arm of the sorry carcass. Josephine opens her mouth to speak, then closes it as Cassandra delivers a series of elegant swipes to its side—a slice for each rib, counted and measured. Like a poet scanning a stanza. But Cassandra would hate such a description, so she keeps it to herself.
Josephine asks, “How does it work?” when she remembers how to speak. Cassandra pauses, and she offers a handkerchief from her coat pocket. “She bears no arms.”
“You bear no arms.” Cassandra wipes the sweat from her neck and brow on the lace. “You work.”
She pushes down the urge to bristle, and says instead, “I’m not in the field.”
Cassandra blinks at her, cocks her head. It occurs to Josephine she’s never seen a look of surprise on her face before. “I thought Sister Leliana would come to peck me about this,” she says. “Not you.”
Josephine narrows her gaze. Cassandra waves her hand. “Every refugee in the Hinterlands eats. She staked out the best places in the hills for them to build watchtowers to save themselves from bandits. They can track, now. Even the children,” she says, handing back the handkerchief. “They have roads again. Trade goes in and out. The civil war in Orlais began—three years ago?”
“Unofficially,” Josephine agrees.
“Their roads are still shit.” She rubs the back of her neck. “And they’ll stay that way till she fixes them.”
In its own way, it’s the highest—and only, truth to be told—compliment Josephine’s heard of Adaar.
Cassandra scratches the back of her calf with the tip of the practice sword. “She lets me work,” she says, “and I let her work.” The way she diverts her gaze to the snow tells Josephine it wasn’t always this way—perhaps it took weeks, months for her to realize what she’s about to say.
“Haven needs more healers,” she says. “Should I convince Cullen go to Adan and learn to make potions?”
“Maker, no,” Josephine says. The thought terrifies.
“Are you sure?” Cassandra twirls the practice blade in her hand. “Maybe I should. If I can break bones, I can mend them.”
The point is clear. Josephine nods. “A waste of time. Not—not completely, of course, but—”
Cassandra turns back to the dummy. “Don’t pick up a hammer to do a needle’s work.” She grimaces, as though she knows just how like a Chantry mother she sounds, and begins her drills again.
Later, when they pass each other in the Chantry, Leliana asks for an account of her conversation. Josephine reports dutifully; Leliana sighs and goes back to her tent. You put her on the defensive, she says. What else could she have said?
Leliana knows Cassandra better than anyone else in Haven, it’s true—but she is wrong.
So: perhaps Adaar abhors violence. But Josephine wields no weapon other than her pen, aims for intelligent solutions over ones of brawn, and seeks sustainability in every letter she writes, every ally she makes. It is the way Adaar might seem to do things—yet they cannot hold a conversation for more than three minutes.
The first exception is a few days later as they stand around the war table, four hours into a meeting that should have lasted one.
“We don’t choose,” says Adaar. “We go to both.” She drums her long fingers on the table. She’s taken to wrapping a linen bandage around her left hand to mute the occasional flashes of green light. She never says it hurts, but Josephine can tell when it does—she’ll slide both hands between her knees while sitting. Or like today—she’ll gently grasp the table, lean over the map. The left hand grips, the right hand merely holds. Josephine has watched her do it all morning.
“Herald,” Josephine says, examining the map. “I cannot imagine after visiting Therinfal Redoubt they will welcome us at Redcliffe.”
“They are two sides of the same whole.” Adaar rubs a temple. “The point of the war is that they both need something, and they’re not getting it. If we only help one, the balance skews and we gain nothing.”
Cullen clears his throat. “We don’t have the resources to go to both,” he informs her. “We could send two parties—have Cassandra go to Therinfal Redoubt, perhaps, or whatever we devise—but they want you.”
Adaar says, “Both.”
“Resources for one journey, Herald,” Josephine reminds.
“Then Redcliffe first.” Adaar’s tone dismisses all argument. “We will resupply here and then journey to Therinfal Redoubt without delay.”
Leliana places one of her markers at Redcliffe, and Adaar adjusts her shirtsleeves. The meeting is over.
“Before you go,” Josephine says, a question on her lips for the fifth time, hoping catching her off-guard at the end of the meeting will employ her an answer. “Our contacts in Val Royeaux are eager to hear more of who the Inquisitor is. “
No answer from Adaar.
Josephine sighs. “The Chantry demands—”
“The Chantry can choke on its demands,” Adaar says.
“If it’s unsavory,” Josephine amends, “it’s no trouble. I can make anything work. I can—”
“Tell them whatever you want.”
Josephine stands her ground. “I can’t.” She could, probably, but part of this is pulling the truth out of her, no matter how reluctant. “I am not the only well-connected diplomat in Thedas.”
Adaar crosses her arms. “Shokrakar and the Valo-Kas came to my village because she heard I was karaas, and I wanted to see the world, so I said yes.”
“I know that,” Josephine tells her, gently. “What did you do?”
“Contracts.”
Josephine is highly aware everyone around the war table has ceased moving with any kind of purpose and now merely shuffle papers in order to overhear, except Leliana, who regards them both with an unwavering eye.
“Mercenary, yes?” Josephine knows all this, as it is the very surface of detail. “But you’re not a warrior.”
“I’m a smuggler.” And this is a victory, Josephine can work with this—finally, finally. Orlais is a land of business, and if a noble or a guild doesn’t have at least four impeccable smuggling contacts, they’re not worth their weight in salt. A language the Chantry can understand, even, having made contracts with smugglers during the Blight for food, supplies, even lyrium—
“People.” Adaar says it so calmly Josephine doesn’t hear her the first time. “People.”
The air turns foul, and they’re all staring at her now. Oh Andraste, Josephine beseeches in rare prayer, horror twisting her stomach into knots, not that. Not—
Adaar, in turn, recoils. Their faces are all plain with horror. Josephine has managed to keep her face calm and blank, but not Cullen, not Cassandra.
Leliana’s emotionless face is the only touchstone. “Now we know.”
“Please,” Josephine murmurs, steady as she can, “go on.”
Adaar takes a deep breath, and says, “Civil war’s destroyed Orlais. Troops hate mercenary bands, but you need them—they take care of bandits, guard supply caravans, work clean-up. Dead useful, pay’s decent, and the work never ends, because it’s conflict.”
She pauses for a breath. “What do people want more than anything during war?” It takes Josephine a moment before she realizes it’s not a rhetorical question.
“Peace,” she says.
“No.” Adaar grips the edge of the table. “They want out. Because they know what I know: there’s peace, maybe, before war—but not after. Not for poor folks, or peasants, or soldiers. Never is. Never will be.
“It takes me half the time to figure out all the ways in and out of a place than it does anyone else,” she says simply. “We got hired to guard a new caravan route out of Val Firmin. I was out in the field, marking a map. A soldier came up to me, asked me a question about a river route.”
She rubs her chin—there’s a little scar there Josephine’s never noticed before. “I didn’t even think about it, told him the way I’d go. He tried to desert two days later—but the river was too high, and he drowned. They cut his head off anyway, put it on a pike for everyone to see.” She looks at them evenly. “I told Shokrakar. It agitated her soul. Can’t take a person’s free will to come and go. So we made a plan.”
Nobody says anything. It’s still not clear what she did and didn’t do, and none present will budge an inch till she proves otherwise.
“It became a—foil. Taarlok handled the contracts, Shokrakar handled whatever work we were actually hired to do, and I… slipped in, I suppose.” Adaar’s gaze grows distant. “I don’t have the look of a fighter, even for a Tal-Vashoth, because I’m not one. Nobody noticed me.”
Josephine thinks of how often they lose Adaar in the span of a week at Haven. How she disappears without a trace.
“A handful of sovereigns means I take you where you need to go.” She crosses her arms. “I’d sit in a fortress, or on the outskirts—and it would just… happen.” She shrugs. “Then Shokrakar saw how big the refugee camps were getting, and in between garrisons we’d make time. Charged them at cost.” Adaar flinches at her own words, but doesn’t correct them. Truth in all its aspects. “I’d guide them as far as I could.”
“How many?” The silence is too much, and Josephine must ask.
“Enough soldiers that between them they could have made their own army.” Adaar’s hands are open. “A general, once, to the Imperium.” She runs a fingernail along invisible paths on the map’s surface. “Kids. Lots of kids, sent to relatives, friends, whoever would take them in.” She exhales. “A whole generation out of Orlais.”
They sit with it. Too long, because she watches Adaar’s shoulders go tense, her dark head bent over the map.
“It was work,” she grouses, “and good work. We were a way out for people that needed it. These—” she jabs her finger onto the table, “give people a choice. Where do you want to go? Where do you need to run? This is power. Not us.” She spits it. “This is all you have left when people like us show up to your village and tell you to kneel. You get to choose which way you run.”
The vehemence in her voice stings Josephine’s face with its heat. Cassandra stares. Even Leliana, with her face of calm, cannot fill the silence.
“You decide,” says Adaar. “I don’t care.”
~~~
After, Josephine licks her wounds by establishing a new trade agreement between the Anderfels and Antiva for thread-thin silverite to make shipping cables. Leliana slides into her office and leans against the stone wall, quiet as a shadow until she lets out a dramatic huff.
The sigh Leliana gives is a diversion—Leliana only sighs when she doesn’t want Josephine to think she’s upset. The constant façade of calm is always impressive to witness. “Well?” she asks. “What shall we do?”
Josephine blinks, not glancing up from the parchment. “What shall we do?” she repeats. “I will manufacture a better story. One with hints of the truth. It will win us nothing with the nobles, to be sure.” She taps the feathered end of the quill against her chin. “But the common people hate the war. They will see her as a hero.”
Leliana makes a soft noise of agreement, and says nothing more.
Josephine, for the sake of time, takes the bait. “The treason does not bother you,” she tells her, scattering powder across the letters and gently shaking the parchment. “What complaint do you find against her now?”
“Her manner against you.”
Now Josephine smiles. “Shocking,” she admits. “But that is rather noble of you. Do you remember the Duchess of Mondevarde?”
Leliana turns to examine the detritus on Minaeve’s desk. “Of course.”
“She threw a full glass of red wine in my face,” Josephine recalls, leaning back in her chair, “at the Feast of the Pale Stag—you’ll recall what I was wearing.” Lace, from neck to ankle, accented with gold at the hem and wrists. Tenderly tooled by some Antivan grandmother Yvette had charmed into giving up the dress. White, white, white.
Josephine asks, “Do you remember your response?” and raises her eyebrow. Leliana continues her examination of the desk’s content—something with wraiths today. Josephine has learned to categorize the smell.
When Leliana doesn’t answer, Josephine adopts her accent. “A new cup of wine for the table. Sweet, if not dry.” A pause. “You made a joke.”
“I made a joke,” says Leliana.
“You don’t need to preserve my honor.” Josephine gives her a long look over her desk.
Leliana still doesn’t move. Josephine sighs and says, “She will not be led. You do not think her capable, and she will not heed you, and so you find her wanting.”
“Wanting is such a small word. She has sting.”
“How is that an undesirable quality?” wonders Josephine aloud. “She is the Herald of Andraste, the only person to stand between the end of the world and us. I hope she has sting.”
Leliana chooses her next words carefully. “You looked—astonished,” she says. “At the council.”
“I was,” Josephine answers, hoping not to sound annoyed. “For a moment I thought she was an agent of the slave trade. But you have come to me for succor.”
She narrows her gaze. “I came to see you.”
It was the wrong word to choose. Josephine should know better than to accuse Leliana of needing anything. But she has no patience for this argument. “You came to gather more evidence for your ledger,” she says, “in evaluating her unworthiness, and I have work to do.”
She ducks down to slide open a desk drawer and pull out one of her tall, red candles. By the time she lights the match, Leliana is gone.
~~~
In the evening, instead of retiring to her empty bed, Josephine knocks upon Adaar’s door. She can see the dim candlelight flickering through cracks in the windows. There’s always light here, late at night. Adaar doesn’t sleep much.
“Come in,” says that cool, even voice, muffled by the heavy door. Josephine pushes it open and steps inside the little hovel.
It’s small. The little hearth smolders, and books sit in high, ragged piles. She expected it to be more like a laboratory than anything else—like Adan’s workshop, wall-to-wall clutter, mess and half dead plants lying everywhere. But this is practically empty. Sparse of dust, even.
The bed is too short. Josephine pauses, staring at the wooden frame. She must have to sleep with her knees to her chest to fit under the blankets. Josephine makes a solemn vow to find another.
Adaar bends over a slanted desk, nose so close it nearly touches the parchment. It’s dimmer than it should be—her oil lamp has run low. She’s obviously been too entrenched in her own work to realize it. Josephine’s eyes linger on the little chest at her side, full of tools. She doesn’t recognize most of them—the compass and the sextant, yes, but others are unfamiliar. If they were in a different time, a different place, she would sit at Adaar’s side and inquire about the uses of each one, the stories of how she earned enough gold to acquire each piece. But it is the end of the world, and the clock ticks.
Adaar uses the sharp tip of a pen nib to scratch the tiniest of pin-topped thistles into the parchment. The pattern unfurls on the page, delicate as any fine, painted china in the palace. It twists at her, that Adaar takes such time to make what will be crinkled, torn, shoved in a pocket or into the sweaty gambeson of someone’s armor both beautiful and uniquely hers.
Josephine has many things she wishes to say—more inquiries about her past with the Valo-Kas, and an apology for the meeting in the war room. (That is the only apology she will make—she will never apologize for Leliana. Only Leliana can do that.) Instead, lulled by the tiny motions of her pen, she asks, “Is that your signature?”
Adaar doesn’t stop, her entire concentration on the motion of her pen, but tilts her head.
“The border,” Josephine says. “The amrita vein, wrapped in elfroot.”
She finishes the sprig before she lays down her pen, sits back on her stool, braces her hands against the desk, and rolls her shoulders, cat-like. There is an unconscious grace to her movements Josephine has only now noticed. “Yes,” she says, rotating her right wrist in slow circles. “It’s how you know it’s mine.”
Josephine looks at the wide parchment. “It’s—that’s Haven.”
“It is.” Adaar rolls her neck.
She bends, peers a little closer. “You’ve drawn the lake quite broadly.”
“That’s how big it is.” She rests her hands on her thighs. “The way it looks—it probably gets a little bigger, every year. Lots of snow to eat away the coast at every year’s melting.”
“Hmm.” Josephine cocks her head. “How frustrating.”
Adaar just raises an eyebrow.
Josephine goes on. “In a matter of years, this will be wrong. Ah—I mean.” She delicately coughs. “It will be inaccurate. And you’ll have to draw it all again.”
Adaar pushes her glasses up her nose with a long finger—she keeps her nails so short and blunt—and shrugs. “It’s my pleasure to do it,” she says, with a stunning matter-of-fact manner.
“Still. A bother.”
“Landscapes change,” Adaar says. “Lines of state find new boundaries. It’s a sign the world still works.”
The revelation is as instantaneous as a burn of the tongue. A flush rushes up the back of her neck, and she leans forward to look at the map instead of lingering. “And this,” she says, leaning forward, “this rock wall that parts the lake—“
“A rockslide, I think.” She points to it. “Maybe two ages ago. The bodies are still connected.”
Josephine squints. “How do you know that?”
“Oh,” says Adaar. “I swam it.”
The look on Josephine’s face must be truly incredible, because Adaar almost smiles. Her lips tremble at the corners before they press into a firm, near-defensive line. Underneath her disbelief, Josephine vows to make that happen at least once more. “What?” she says. “Haven’t you seen the villagers out ice-fishing? It doesn’t go all the way down.”
“Herald,” Josephine says, “you didn’t.”
“I did." She looks at her nails. “Cassandra found me a pick-axe.”
“But why?” Josephine doesn’t mean to sound so shrill. “You could have been hurt. You could have died. What good would does it serve?”
“Maybe we’ll need it someday.” She leans back in her chair. “It’s good information.”
Josephine’s eyes widen. Good information? Perhaps who’s dipped their fingers into the latest court squabble, the best supply lines for obsidian and gold, the best mercenary bands to guard a caravan, or how to sharpen a knife so that it splits a thread into two, perfect pieces—how to mend a dress with stitches so small you can’t see them, how to tell a bold Tevinter red from a mediocre Ander of the same hue, the safest land routes to the desert, the quickest waterways to Par Vollen—it means something.
“We must agree to disagree,” is all Josephine manages to say, and abandons that topic as well, which she seems to be doing at a fervent pace. “May I—”
“Why do you get to ask all the questions?” Adaar wonders aloud, crossing one leg over the other at the knee. Whatever good nature was present a moment ago has quickly withered as she tires of the game. “Is that in your Inquisition charter?” She drums her nails on the ridge of her desk. “The Herald shall be questioned without pause until she gives the most desired answer. Yield in the face of pointed retrieval.”
Josephine opens and closes her mouth. Adaar says, “Our seneschal cannot stand me. It is a problem.”
The words, sharp and true, linger in the air between them. Josephine gives a very small shrug. “I disagree on the second point,” she says. “Without her, the Inquisition would only be an idea.”
Adaar rubs at the heel of her palm idly. “I don’t question her commitment,” she finally offers. “Or her work.”
Josephine cannot help but stare. She finds the words carefully. “Is it a question of vanity?”
“No,” answers Adaar, so quickly Josephine knows for certain that it is, at least in part. “Only—I don’t know why.”
It suddenly occurs to Josephine she doesn’t understand either. Leliana cites her abstaining from arms, from most of the real work of the Inquisition, for being too self-possessed to be a puppet if she cannot be useful. For being a layman, untrained and untested in the seat of power, perhaps. But these only live on the surface.
The pit of her stomach drops. This is too crucial a detail to have overlooked. A mistake.
Adaar reads it all in her face and readjusts her endless legs in her chair. They sit in the quiet for a long while before she says, “You and the seneschal.”
Another long pause. The question is overwhelming. “How do I begin?” Then she holds up a hand. “Wait. No more questions. I should—find somewhere to start.”
It changes her, this silence. Adaar tilts her head and tells her, “I don’t think it’s a matter of starting. Anything can start anywhere.” It’s true enough. “How does… I don’t want to be rude.”
“Be rude.” Josephine waves her hand.
Adaar straightens and nudges her spectacles back up her nose. “How does it last?” she asks.
A question like a key—it knocks Josephine breathless. Not with its incisiveness or its simplicity, but with the memories it untangles. Their first meeting was so happenstance she’s nearly forgotten it over the years: a dreadfully dull party at a marchioness’ manor in Val Royeaux, a night spent drinking under the stars. All the meaningful nature of a lost handkerchief. Nothing remotely difficult or different. The pieces that follow fall into place, weaving into each other:
—They made love clothed, for the first year—quick trysts on rugs, against doorways. It took time, such time before Leliana let Josephine undress her, even when she was bound up in petticoats and green Antivan silk. It was armor, the first time: buckles and laces, simple enough. Leather, chainmail, linen. And then—knives. Buckled against her skin with leather straps. Wrists, thigh, ankles. One at the small of her back. Josephine hesitates. Leliana stills. The long pause is enough for permission. Josephine undoes the first buckle at her wrist. A bruise, made permanent from the constant reassurance of the blade, stains her skin. Josephine brushes her lips against it, drops the knife on the bedside table.
—Do you think I dream of this? Josephine spits, unable to look away from where bandages cover Leliana’s skin, where new scars curl and make their marks known. Blood and horror and never knowing where you are? Leliana looks down at her hands—in that tilt of her head, Josephine saw a younger Leliana, a youth of seventeen in the claws of a beautiful overseer, a girl with nothing but herself. The kind of despair that touches, then lingers. I don’t know what you want, she says.
—They never made a habit of dancing with one another on the floors of Celene’s palaces, but when they did so it was a complete production. The most complicated Ander reels, Tevinter dances that called for fourteen spins in a row, in unison, and a perfectly executed leap. Two kinds of grace: Leliana, slow and elegant, calligraphy made flesh, and Josephine, eager as a flower bud.
—A drunk Antivan marquis attempts to fondle Josephine in the trophy room of the Winter Palace during winter revelry. Josephine ducks away and quietly destroys his chances to stand on the Council of Heralds by the end of the evening. It is, at least, productive. Leliana waits for her on an empty balcony, the moon hazy and high. She has not seen her in months, no letters, no word, not even rumors. They do not dance—Leliana grips her waist, thumbs pressing into the boning of her corset. They do not speak—the pressure of those fingers asks every question: shall I break his hands, will you shatter his life for this, do you know how long it’s been, am I here? Josephine slides Leliana’s hand under her skirt; Leliana tenderly covers her mouth. Josephine bites into her gloved hand when she comes, her thighs shaking. (She does not know if she broke his hands. She will never attempt to find out.)
Josephine opens her mouth and closes it. “I cannot say,” she murmurs. “It has its own life.”
“I doubt that.” Adaar raises an eyebrow. “How coy. It’s plain you are bound to one another.”
“No,” Josephine replies, with surprising vehemence.
She thinks of her empty bed, a bed that will be empty when she returns to it tonight, for another week, or a year, should Leliana’s dark mood continue. The silence surrounding her as she goes through the days without her words or her touch, like the days where she would disappear on orders from the Divine. She thought that would end with the Inquisition, but Leliana’s physical presence is no guarantee. It never has been. There are no rings, no spoken vows, no heated words spoken in fits of passion to tie them together. All those machinations are too simple.
“There’s nothing to bind us,” Josephine says, and it’s true. “We do not own each other. We simply—we return.”
A long pause. “Like swallows,” Adaar offers, her eyes unreadable.
Josephine shakes her head, casting her eyes at the map—the lake it entails, the wide sea beyond its edges. “Like ships,” she says.
~~~
Another four days and Leliana returns to their attic. Josephine, wrapped in two quilts and her coat on over her nightgown, her red candle sputtering, finishes a letter to her mother. When the door groans open, she does not move. She watches Leliana undress from the corner of her eye.
Leliana is terribly messy—her boots are thrown in a corner, the chainmail left piled on a chair, the cloak hung up only because the wrinkles will be an eyesore in the morning. One glove on the bureau, the other upon her armor. The bow and quiver find their place. She undresses to linen and breaches before climbing under the quilt, her head turned towards the wall.
The silence is its own blessing. Josephine folds the letter, sets it aside. She reaches over and touches Leliana’s soft hair—fine and greying, just a tad, at the scalp. Leliana will not tolerate talk of it. She is not old, nor does she expect to live long enough to find herself so, but Josephine loves every wisp. The thought is stupid, girlish, silly. Your body wants this: to live long enough to find itself grey and brittle, she thinks. Let it.
Leliana lies still under her fingertips, her breath settling into an even rhythm. The warmth in Josephine grows to near contentment. Relief is precious enough at the end of days; she will revel in it when she can.
“Mother Giselle’s presence outside my office,” Josephine begins, “has become rather hawkish.”
A long silence before Leliana sighs and answers, “Even saints possess agendas.” She rolls over, eyes cast at the roof. “Who did she attempt to poach today?”
“Malla,” Josephine says.
Leliana pauses. “The lyrium supplier?”
“Malla of the Dawn Knives,” she recites, and feels herself smiling. “She dresses well—silk doublet, shoes from the Summer Bazaar. Even her stockings are tailored. I imagine she thought her some Orzammar heiress.”
Leliana raises an eyebrow. Josephine smooths down the quilt in her lap. “Apparently she showed her a marvelous daggers—they call it the Blood Drinker, in the Carta. Cleaning it dulls the blade.” Her own smile threatens her lips. “All the gold in the Montilyet coffers—just to see her face. But she’ll be at it again tomorrow.”
“No one is as tireless as a Chantry mother,” Leliana says.
“Just as well.”
“I know you’ve heard what happened,” Leliana continues, nearly without pause. But the words don’t pang Josephine’s heart in the slightest. She is too practiced at this to be thrown off-kilter by a mere swipe. It’s the equivalent of a dagger flung lazily across the room. It sticks in the wall, its hilt wobbling back and forth. No harm done.
(It shakes Josephine’s heart anyway, the sheer predictable nature of the topic change. For Leliana to let herself only have a moment of peace, of comfort, before launching full into the fire.)
“Half the courtyard saw you,” Josephine tells her. “Cullen did, and Threnn, and three of the healers warming their hands by the hearth.”
Leliana doesn’t answer, building up stubbornness in the silence.
Josephine casts her a sideways glance and says, “You want me to disagree with her.”
Leliana’s response is to upturn the blankets and stand, pacing back and forth at the end of the bed, which only confirms it. Josephine sighs, gathers the quilts around her again, and watches Leliana pace.
“It’s not her place,” Leliana says.
“Then why did you ask her?”
Leliana blanches, her mouth forming a hard line. “I didn’t.”
“You did,” corrects Josephine. “There’s no way she would have found out on her own; she’s hardly enterprising.”
“She overheard me,” Leliana tells her, “with an agent.”
Josephine asks, “So she heard the news?”
“No,” says Leliana. “The order for his execution.”
Of course. Someone was supposed to die. It is Josephine’s turn to sit, to be silent and patient as Leliana comes to a stop in front of the window.
“’Why?’” Leliana says, and it takes Josephine a breath to realize she’s quoting Adaar.
“Why what?” asks Josephine stupidly.
“That’s all she asked. ‘Why?’” Leliana crosses her arms. “As though she knows anything about what this Inquisition does, or must do.”
A particular feeling awakens in Josephine—the realization is a slow poison in her own veins, making each hair of her body stand at attention. “What else did she say?” she asks, voice blank.
“I told her—my people who died carried good information.” Leliana never stumbles over death. Her voice is steady as stone. “Apostates, sent to murder her in the Hinterlands in exchange for gold. Templars too. We stopped each one. She lives because of them.”
“You want justice,” Josephine supplements.
Leliana gives a terse nod, but stops. “Their lives for hers,” she says, unflinchingly, “is not a fair bargain.”
Josephine stares at her. “Melodramatic,” she says softly. “Continue.”
“She told me, ‘Honor them how you see fit,’” Leliana repeats. She sounds so tired.
She stares at Leliana’s pacing, at the barely-managed frustration—here, in this little room, the only place in Thedas where they both stand unwitnessed and alone, together, and knows that conversation for precisely what it was.
Adaar never demanded a thing of Leliana.
“She left you a choice,” Josephine says softly.
“Choice?” Leliana’s eyes flash. “There is no choice. Only various opportunities for failure.”
Her head spins. “You hold the very thing you want against her. I thought—” Josephine shakes her head. “I thought she made you spare the traitor. I thought she berated you for savagery.”
“You think the absence of a command means it doesn’t exist?” Leliana looks at her as though Josephine’s face is suddenly beyond recognition.
“Leliana,” Josephine says. “There is manipulation, and there is—”
Paranoia. The word rests on the tip of her tongue, and she will not let it loose.
Something falls behind Leliana’s eyes again. More poorly made expectations, crashing down. “Fine. Indulge her.”
“I am trying to understand her,” corrects Josephine. “You would do well to try.”
“Wonderful.” Leliana straightens. “You pursue that, and I will work on trying to open a door to the Fade in my hand. A friendly competition.”
Josephine waves her hand. “You are not yourself.”
“Of course not," Leliana replies. “Tell me what I am.”
“She traveled,” Josephine begins, resisting the bait, inhaling through her nose, attempting calmness, attempting something, “for seven years with a mercenary band. There are a thousand other things she could do if she abhorred conflict. But she doesn’t. It’s just—“ She exhales. “What do you want me to say, Leliana? What do you want of me?”
The moment the words leave her mouth, she sees something fall behind Leliana’s eyes. An expectation collapsing. It is a mistake. A mistake, a mistake. Leliana has never asked her for anything. Leliana has never asked her for anything, and when these words leave her mouth, Josephine will deny her. It unfolds, a trap of her own making.
“To stand with me.” The statement twists in her gut. It is how Leliana says it, quiet and cold. She knows the answer.
“I am here because of you,” Josephine snaps, heat prickling the backs of her eyes. “For you, by you, with you.” She swallows. “But you are wrong.”
“And the two of you are matched,” Leliana says. “The same. In defending her, you defend yourself.”
“Ascribe her faults to me and you won’t find your answers.” Josephine hardens her heart against the slight, struggles not to sound clipped and condescending; she fails. Leliana only raises an eyebrow.
“I remember tales of a lay sister. She toiled in a ransacked little refugee village before the last Blight.” Josephine volleys each sentence like arrows into a target. “She followed the Hero of Ferelden into battle and became a knife in the dark for the Divine.”
“Continue dithering around the point, if you must.” Leliana’s voice holds nothing.
“You were her, once.” Josephine’s jaw clenches. “You were her, and you hate her for it.”
Leliana turns as though preparing for battle. Preparing for a final blow. To shield herself, to stop Josephine’s mouth, but Josephine is a paper bird, flying too close to the unforgivable, all too ready to be burned.
“She never gave it up,” Josephine says. “She promised to live a certain life, and she has done it.” She doesn’t look away. “On the other hand, we have you.”
The comment is blunt, the play on words sloppy, and the poison all too effective. Leliana says nothing, betrays nothing as she pulls on her boots and her chainmail, hooks her quiver to her back. Josephine watches each line of her body with precision. She can see where the knives are strapped. When she raises her arms to pull over her gambeson, a thick scar reveals itself at her hip.
“Leliana,” she murmurs, but it is far too late and far too little. And then she is alone.
~~~
The Inquisition leaves for Redcliffe the next day. Adaar takes Cassandra, Sera, and Vivienne. They leave before dawn. Josephine watches them ride out from the Chantry steps.
Leliana, Josephine learns, left the night before with a few of her agents to clear the way. Business to take care of. Work to be done.
When she returns to her desk, a roll of parchment awaits her, tied with a blue silk ribbon. Josephine plucks at the knot with numb fingers and it unwinds of its own accord. Haven stares up at her. The roads out of the mountains wind and wind. The Chantry stands high and tall, perfectly to scale.
On the south wall, precisely above her office—a candle’s flame, drawn in gold.