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Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.
The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
—Here I Love You, Pablo Neruda
—
“Well,” Adahla says, struggling valiantly not to laugh, “I like it.”
“Then I am pleased on your behalf,” Solas says, though his voice is flat as the earth.
Now Adahla does laugh, her breath hanging in grey puffs in the wintry Minrathous night, and she tucks herself against Solas’s side. “Generosity itself. However shall you bear it, emma lath?”
Solas snorts, though his arm comes around her shoulders with gratifying promptness. The new leather coat—a gift from Dorian, long to the knees and heavily worked in the latest Tevinter fashions—smells wonderful in the crisp, cold air, though even she can admit the bunched leather tassels chafe against her cheek. “A measure of your fortitude, perhaps, borrowed for myself.”
“Stolen.”
“Stolen,” Solas agrees, though his holds much less amusement, and his arm tightens around her. The new guards at the east wall give swift, respectful nods and throw open the side gates, allowing them passage to the city beyond. Adahla doesn’t know how much Dorian has told them, but it’s still a pleasant improvement from their first visit, when “knife-ear” had been the kindest insult hurled and more than one flagstone had cracked clean through from the pressure of leashed magic.
The streets are crowded tonight with Satinalia revelers, masked and unmasked, and Adahla tips her head back against Solas’s shoulder as they walk. The eluvian stands no great distance from Dorian’s home, a modestly sized—if very expensively decorated—manor on the outskirts of the palace grounds. The tattered chunks of the floating palace still float unrestored and uninhabited above them; Dorian had placed its rebuilding quite firmly at the end of the list, and despite the anxious remonstrances from magisters and politicians alike, Tevinter’s coffers had been emptied into the surrounding city instead. Even now, endless scaffolding serrates the skyline, and neat piles of stone and lumber lie stacked on every street corner for the next day’s work. Here and there the cool blue moonlight softens to a warmer gold as someone throws open the door to an inn, or windows are unshuttered to cool an overheated gathering of friends.
No stars tonight, though, not with a city’s worth of smoke and torchlight between. Still, Minrathous’s industry is itself a comfort; they are not so removed from the specter of total annihilation that Adahla can begrudge the signs of survival. Besides, Dorian had been pleased at dinner tonight as he’d discussed the city’s progress. Proud, too, and a little unsure of it. But Bull had put a hand on his hand, and Dorian had grown strong again, slipping back into a comfortable smugness that lasted through three courses and most of dessert. She’d been glad for him.
Even when he’d given a gift completely at odds with the recipient’s taste, Adahla thinks, sliding one finger along a seam of Solas’s coat. Beautiful workmanship, yards of dark leather worked to a soft, brilliant shine—and every hem riveted, tasseled, or fringed within an inch of its life. The collar stands high enough to touch his ears even without the sheepskin lining; his face as he’d opened it had been a peculiar display of stoic horror, and Adahla smiles again at the memory.
“Vhenan?”
“I was only thinking of how pleased Dorian was at your dismay.”
Solas sighs. “He has always been easily delighted by his own petty satisfaction.”
“As if you aren’t already plotting your revenge.”
His pace hitches, just barely, between one step and the next. “I’m certain any plans, were they being formed, would never be kept from you.”
“Don’t bring me into this. He gave me four volumes of original Alamarri manuscripts. I refuse to jeopardize such a valuable historical resource.” A group of dwarves across the street bursts into well-lubricated song; ahead of them, three awed children crowd around the glass of a golden shopfront. “Besides, I’m sure you can belt some furs to your shoulder and feel right at home again.”
Solas laughs, surprised, and the sound thrills through her, as always. “The idea had not occurred to me. But the Iron Bull wore enough tonight for three men; perhaps he could spare some, should I ask.”
“Win them off him in your next chess game.”
“Our current game has run for months. By then, we’ll have reached the height of summer.”
“With furs grossly out of fashion.” They turn together down the unassuming lane that houses the eluvian; another pair of guards salutes and lets them pass. “Besides, I’m sure his servants didn’t really burn your cloak. He’ll miraculously discover it in a rag-bin a few weeks from now and send it along, cleaned and mended.”
“The Archon is magnanimous indeed.”
“Especially to his friends,” Adahla says, meeting his level look with one of her own. Solas only shakes his head as he opens the door at the end of the lane, and they go together into the darkness of the small guardhouse. The eluvian barely fits inside, its ornate golden frame scraping against the rafters, but the mirror’s surface glows a sudden, brilliant white at their touch as it always does. Adahla steps forward; Solas catches her hand.
“Solas?”
“Vhenan,” he says, and for the first time all night, he sounds uncertain. “I would like…would you permit me to show you something?”
“Of course,” she says, surprised; he touches the eluvian again, a ripple of power passing through its surface, and when it settles she sees not the dim halls of the Lighthouse but a frozen white wood instead.
“Come with me,” Solas says eagerly, and she does.
—
The frozen air strikes her like an open hand. Wherever they are, it’s much colder than Minrathous; she shudders, wrapping her furred cloak closer around her, and peers into the dark. A mountainside, she realizes, the eluvian tucked improbably between two great boulders jutting from a cliff’s face. The clouds are broad enough she still can’t make out the stars, but from a glimpse of the moons through a cloudbreak she thinks they’ve traveled very far south.
South, where? The snowy pines and birches spread out before her in a rolling slope, dipping down to a frozen lake likewise covered in snow before rising sharply again on the eastern bank. Her boots have disappeared almost to the knee beneath the soft, frozen drifts; in a few places—at the edge of the lake, along a harrowing mountain path hewn straight into the stone, high on the opposite cliff—she can catch glimpses of distant, tended fires.
“The Frostbacks,” she says with a white plume of breath. “The Basin.”
“Yes,” Solas says. The rocky outcropping on which the eluvian is perched stretches out like an upturned hand above the hillside; she takes a few steps towards its edge, kicking away the snow before each footfall, and surveys the quiet, moonlit forest. Behind her, Solas asks, “When was the last time you were here?”
“Three years,” Adahla says, fishing a glove from her pocket and tugging it over her hand. “Almost four. The time we stumbled straight into that Venatori camp in the middle of the night, only to find them all drugged and sleeping in a ring of lit torches.”
“You spared their lives, as I recall.”
“I imprisoned them without a trial and sent them to fortify a bridge near Gherlen’s Pass.” She shivers in the frosty air. Solas approaches behind her, and she leans back against him gratefully. How predictable he has become, even in these short months: his affection rarely proffered without her invitation, constant adoration without the temerity of imposition. She wishes he would presume more, and she understands why he doesn’t; her own footing has been rocky enough, even without a dozen years of denial on her conscience, and if he were to push her away now, after everything, she’d—well. Hardly worth thinking about.
Instead, she says, “Was it magic, or medicine?”
“The latter. At the time I had an herbalist in my service who excelled at sleeping tonics, and he created a mixture that gave off a potent smoke when burned. We laced the firepits while they were gone.”
“Did they ever ask why, your followers? Why you were helping the Inquisitor when all she did was hunt you?”
Solas’s chin comes to rest on the crown of her head. Below them, a white-winged owl lifts away from the spearing tip of a pine with a rush of snow. It glides silently for several seconds above the trees; then, without a sound, it dives down near the edge of the lake and disappears. “Yes,” Solas says at last. “They asked.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Very little. That my plans would be better served if she were alive; that she must be allowed to move freely.” He hesitates. “That if she were harmed, the attacker’s life would instantly be forfeit.”
“Mm. Very little indeed.” The clouds have thickened in the past few minutes, the large moon’s glow grown dull behind them. At the edge of the lake, a second speck of fire sparks to life, sputters, and grows steady. “Breadcrumbs again, emma lath?”
She does not try to hide the bitterness. Solas says nothing, though he pulls her closer in his arms; she sighs, letting the bitterness go with it, and laces her gloved fingers through his. “Never mind. There was an astrarium we solved here, many years ago. Do you remember it?”
“Yes,” Solas says promptly. “Fulmenos. The Thunderbolt, I believe.”
“You believe correctly,” Adahla says, turning in his hold so that she can see his face. “I wonder if it’s still there. Could we solve it again, do you think?”
“Ah,” Solas says in an entirely different voice, his cheeks reddening from something other than the biting cold. “I fear…it’s no longer within those trees, vhenan.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I…” His eyes slide above her head, his expression positively tortured, and then he squares himself like a man facing down an Archdemon. “I had it removed. To the Lighthouse. There is a room there—a place where I have kept things important to me.”
“Did you?” she asks, studying his face. “What else is in there, I wonder?”
He gives a tormented sigh. “Many things. Instruments I once played. A copy of the Inquisition’s charter. The orb Corypheus shattered, when it became clear I could not reforge it.”
“My left hand,” Adahla offers.
Solas sucks in a sharp breath through his teeth. Adahla lifts an eyebrow; he searches her face, then rests his forehead ruefully against hers. “No,” he says, and he sighs again. “Not that.”
“It would have been an embarrassment of riches anyway,” she tells him, and she cups her prosthetic palm to his cheek. Solas leans into the gesture, her polished wooden fingertips sliding along his cheekbone, and shuts his eyes. “I’d like to see this room, Solas.”
“I will take you. If Rook has not rifled through things which don’t belong to her.”
“Hypocrite,” she says without acrimony, bringing up her other hand to frame his face, and she kisses him. He kisses her back immediately, a fire banked, as always, unless she stokes it into roaring flame. Some fox calls out in the dark; in the ensuing silence, a nearby branch gives way with a crack, and its snow falls in a hushing heap to the hillside below. “Solas,” she murmurs against his mouth when it is over, “you may not feel the cold in that lovely new coat of yours, but I’m freezing.”
“Yes,” he says, looking more than a little dazed, but he follows when she takes his hand and leads him back to the eluvian, the glass shining in the icy night.
—
“This is not the Lighthouse,” Solas says, surprised.
“I’ve always loved that sharp mind of yours,” Adahla says, though she squeezes his hand to soften it. “I told you: I have spent many years traversing the Crossroads without you. I may not have the mighty power of your Vi’Revas, but I can usually get where I need to go.”
“Formidable indeed.” His voice is very fond. “This is…Orlais? Val Royeaux?”
“Correct in one. Well done.” She links their fingers, drawing him out from the tiny attic of this forgotten hillside manse to the spindly, dilapidated balcony that overlooks the city. Not nearly so frosty as the Basin, and much more peopled besides; far below them, in the great torchlit square before the Summer Palace, stand three thousand or more Orlesians in bright, festive apparel, overflowing into the streets beyond. The city itself has been draped crown to toe in garland and white lilies, and white banners emblazoned with gold wreaths hang from the palace windows. “Have you been here before?”
“On Satinalia? No.”
“Then you’re in for a real treat,” says Rook, and Adahla nearly slips off the balcony.
“Rook!”
“Inquisitor,” Rook says brightly from her perch atop the crumbling roof behind them. Lucanis, his outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, lounges next to her. Neither is armored, though they’re both armed, and Adahla’s not fool enough to miss Lucanis's hand resting casually on a hilt at his hip. “Happy Satinalia!”
“And the same to you both. How are you?”
“Oh, wonderful,” Rook says, and she pats the shingles beside her. “Come on up; the water’s fine. Nice coat, Dread Wolf.”
Solas winces, but he inclines his head at Adahla’s questioning look, and they clamber up the narrow ladder to join them atop the balcony roof. Adahla dusts off the shingles—a hopeless endeavor, worn as they are from decades of disrepair—and sits beside Rook. After a moment, Solas follows, setting their bags aside. “How long have you two been here?”
Rook leans back to glance at the sky, her shadow long and lean in the moonlight. “Only a quarter-hour or so. We would have been here earlier, but Spite got hold of some wax fruit, and it took a while to talk him down.”
“No. Juice,” Spite says bitterly. “Tasted like. Lies. And candles!”
Lucanis makes a disgusted noise as Spite recedes, shaking his head. “I tried to tell him. Unfortunately, he saw Manfred eat a pear last week, and now I have wax in my teeth.”
“Was it eating, really?” Rook asks pensively. “I think it was more like—Manfred chewed on it a bit, and then I fished it out of his costal cartilage before the juice could stain his valise.”
Lucanis grimaces. “What she isn’t telling you is that she ate the rest of the pear after.”
Solas chokes, but Rook waves away the image with a dismissive hand. “Never mind that. You’ve come for the lamp-lighting, have you?”
“Yes,” Adahla says, smiling. “I’ve wanted to see it since I was a child reading Orlesian storybooks, but it’s never worked out until now. You’ve seen it before?”
“We happened to be in Halamshiral last year. Varric, Harding, and me.” Rook draws up her legs, resting her chin on her knees, but her voice is light. “I’d never seen anything like it. Harding kept teasing me, saying my eyes were like saucers. I was telling Lucanis about it, and he said we ought to come again—though of course it had to be held here this year, instead of the Winter Palace.” She tips her head sideways on her bent knees and looks over. “Have you heard of it, Solas?”
“Lamp-lighting in general, certainly. In the context of an Orlesian holiday ritual—no, I am not familiar.”
“Well, point your snobbish purple eyes down towards that overstuffed square in about four minutes, and you’ll see what all the fuss is about.”
Lucanis snorts; Solas bristles. “Snobbish—an unfair accusation, I think.”
“Solas, if you can get through the entire ceremony without comparing it even once to some ancient Evanuris ritual designed to siphon power from the innocent, I’ll jump right off this roof.”
“Please don’t,” Lucanis says sharply, immediately followed by Spite crowing, “Yes!”
“I’m quite sure I’d be fine,” Rook says, waving her hand again, “and even if I weren’t, there’s enough unlikely magic up here someone would catch me. But chase that worried frown off your face, my dearest. I won’t jump. Even if Solas is determined to make it awful.”
“I am not determined to make it awful!”
“Solas,” Rook says, the word drawn out with such impatient longsuffering Adahla can hardly help but laugh. Still, it’s the second time he’s worn this look of affronted dignity tonight, and she has enough pity for him here to break the siege.
“Shall I vouchsafe his enthusiasm?” she offers, taking Solas’s hand in hers. “I promise, I’ve seen him quite absorbed in observing such things before. Occasionally even smiling at them.”
“That depends. Were any of these events—” Rook ticks them off on her fingers “—not a powerful magic ritual, not an elven ceremony from a thousand years ago, and not involving you?”
Solas, leaning against a pillar at Halamshiral, loose and smiling as she’d never seen him; Solas listening intently to the Avvar augur as he described the passage of a spirit into and out of the world again. Solas at the astrarium in the Basin, eyes fixed on her like he’d never seen her before, a wonder there that made her blood race like lightning and her heart pound in her chest—
“Yes,” Adahla says, and she clears her throat. “I’m sure of it.”
Rook throws her a knowing look, but before she can speak a roar rises from the crowd below. The braziers lining the courtyard have begun to blink out one by one; the torches along the Summer Palace walls flicker and go out. Even the surrounding mansions and towers darken. In a matter of seconds the courtyard is black as pitch, not even the moonlight enough to overcome the brilliant afterimage of fire. The crowd falls into a hushed, anticipatory silence.
Then, atop the grand stairs sweeping up to the palace: a single spark of light. No more than a candleflame, and yet visible to their rooftop even from this great distance. One light, and a vast and silent dark.
Celene—identifiable only by the enormous golden collar to her gown—lifts the candle above her head. She says something Adahla can’t quite make out, even with her voice’s magical augmentation, though Rook nods in apparent understanding. Celene bows her head, then lowers the candle and lights a second one held by a slim figure beside her. Adahla hadn’t noticed her in the shadows, but now, even from here, she can see—
“Briala,” she says, surprised, and Solas squeezes her hand in agreement.
In turn, Briala lights the candle of the man to her left. Celene does the same on the other side, and then each of those to another two, and another two, and another. Candlelights, tiny and brilliant, spread one by one across the vast waiting crowd, growing with exponential speed, following a path Adahla cannot see. So silent, and so very beautiful—
The lights reach the far edges of the crowd, jammed as they are into the courtyard, but the rumbling murmur tells her this is not the end of it. At some unspoken signal, a dozen lamplighters fire the end of a dozen lines, and candleflame races up a dozen wax trails strung around the courtyard’s edges. Every few inches another wick catches, steadies, and burns, and then another, and another, until the lines reach the rooftops of the surrounding mansions with a hundred lit candles trailing behind them. Then: across the courtyard, high above the breathless crowd, lacing back and forth over their heads in a brilliant spiderweb. A thousand flickering lights, warm and gold and beautiful; then another strand catches, stretching from a southern edge of the courtyard to reach even further south, away from the crowd, sending the candlelight deeper into the city.
Another candle-string at the end of the avenue catches fire. Another. Firelight spreads like strung pearls down every major thoroughfare until they turn out of sight, though the gentle glow continues to rise street by street. Her mouth has gone dry as bone.
In the silence, Celene asks a question. Adahla still can’t quite make out the words, but the crowd answers as one, and Rook with them: “Andraste, Bride of the Maker, who sang hope into the world.”
The strike of a match hisses on the roof beside her, followed by a yellow gleam at her elbow. Adahla looks over to see Rook holding a lit candle in a tall brass fitting; she smiles, brow lifted, and hands Adahla a second unlit taper. Adahla takes it, surprised by her own emotion, and lights it from Rook’s steady hands. Celene speaks again; Rook, eyes trained on the ceremony below, recites the empress’s words with her.
“As she stood unafraid before the dark, so do we stand today. What is the light she carried?”
The crowd answers again. “Mercy in our hands, truth on our lips, courage in our hearts. When the shadows press close, we seek our Maker who watches over us.”
The outermost streets have at last begun to shine with the rest, one by one; she can hear the rippling murmur of an endless city of voices, their rhythm offset from the heart of the courtyard but no less fervent for the distance. Celene lifts her candle once more. “Let our doors be open, our judgments gentle, our faith a beacon against fear. We cannot be claimed by despair when we hold fast to the light.”
Lucanis cups his hand around Rook’s where she holds the candle. His quiet baritone joins the crowd, just loud enough to hear.
“Thanks be to the Maker, and Andraste who walked with us. Hope endures.”
Adahla leans into Solas's chest, and his mouth presses to her hair. Maker-Bride, my gratitude for the use of your name all these years. I hope it’s done more honor than harm.
“Hope endures,” she echoes, and blows out her candle alongside the thousands of souls below. Her heart thunders in her throat.
One last caught breath—and it’s over. The lights strung above the courtyard continue to burn, but they are not enough in the sudden dimness of three thousand extinguished candles, and the large braziers are refired one by one until the courtyard is lit once more. Celene begins her perfunctory conversations with nearby dignitaries in the ceremony’s wake—Adahla recognizes those gestures well, even from here—and the crowd begins to disperse with laughing cheer.
“And that’s that,” Rook says, though there’s a relief in her smile that Adahla doesn’t think is feigned. “Well? What did you think?”
“Nothing! Burned!” Spite complains. “Let me. I want to! Hold a candle!”
Rook obediently passes Lucanis her extinguished candle; Spite curls his hands around it with fascinated glee. Adahla says, meaning every word, “It was lovely. Everything I’d hoped for and more.”
“Good.” Rook looks out again over the crowd, smiling. “It’s much shorter than the Satinalian rituals at the Necropolis, of course, but…it has its appeal.” For an instant her face falls with visible melancholy, but she shakes it off a moment later and looks to Solas. “And not a single sarcastic remark from you the whole time. I confess, I’m shocked.”
He curls his lip. “You think so little of my ability to restrain myself on solemn occasions?”
“No, but of your ability to hold back a lecture when handed a captive audience? Absolutely.”
“Actually,” Adahla cuts in, “there are certain similarities here to an early Alamarri ritual called the firespread. Of course, this was pre-Andraste and more commonly performed on the night of the winter solstice, but—”
“No, no,” Rook says, laughing, covering Adahla’s mouth with her palm. “Bride’s bones, he was bad enough when all I wanted to do was sleep. Don’t you start too, or I’ll—”
“Don’t say you’ll jump off the roof.”
“I promised you I wouldn’t!” Rook tells Lucanis, who looks only marginally mollified. “Besides,” she adds, taking her candle back from him and turning it in her fingers, “it was Varric we came for, really, back then. He didn’t think much of the Chantry, but he—liked this. Dramatic lights and all. He said it felt like there was something real in the middle of it.” She picks at a bit of wax near the base of the brass, then gives Solas a crooked smile. “I suppose that sounds foolish to you.”
“No,” Solas says, very low, very firm. “Not at all. I am glad it gave him comfort.” He hesitates, then adds, “And you.”
“Yes,” Rook says distantly, and her eyes turn to the place where Celene lit the first candle. She lapses into silence, her mouth drawn tight; Lucanis touches her hand, and she startles back into the present. “Well! Real or not, I suppose we ought to be getting back to the Lighthouse. Lucanis is cooking a grouse—”
“—pheasant—”
“—and if I ruin the timing neither he nor Davrin will ever speak to me again.”
“That part is correct, at least,” Lucanis mutters. He lingers as he watches Rook, seems to steel himself, and glances back at Adahla and Solas. “You should stop by, if you’d like. I can guarantee there will be plenty to eat. More than even we can finish.”
“Not to mention it’s still technically your house,” Rook adds.
“Thank you,” Adahla says, touched. “But we’ve eaten already. It’s so kind of you to ask.”
“For dessert, then,” Rook offers, and she takes Adahla’s hands in her own. “Please come. Even if just for a few minutes.”
“No! Wax! Eugh!”
“Of course we will,” Adahla says, squeezing her hand with the one that can still squeeze, and then she pushes to her feet. Rook rises with her; Adahla returns her candle, her chest oddly tight. “We’ll see you soon, then.”
“Good,” Rook says staunchly, giving them both a brisk wave as they collect their things and make their way down the ladder. “Inquisitor. Fen’harel.”
“Rook,” Solas sighs, but he’s smiling as they pass back through the tiny attic and he touches the eluvian. It wakes into brilliant light, reflecting over the attic walls like water, and they step through together.
“Oh!” comes Rook's muffled call, right as the mirror-glass closes behind them. “Hey, Solas, ask her about the hair thing—”
—
“The…hair thing?” Solas asks once they can speak again, but Adahla hardly hears him. She’s been blinded all at once, dazzled by an endless host of—
Stars.
Everywhere—everywhere she looks. An unbounded night sky, clear as crystal, uncountable stars flung horizon to horizon. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands, more than she’s ever seen in her life. And impossibly beneath her, too, stretching out from her feet like an unfurling carpet, reaching as far as she can see. Is this the Fade? How—how—
Her foot shifts, some unconscious half-step. Ripples spread out from her boot in broad, quick circles, billowing through the stars below her until they reach some distant black shore and rebound back again, smaller.
A lake. A mirror set into the earth, gone still as glass if she lets it. Where—the Silent Plains? She can make out a thin strip of black trees surrounding the water now, the only interruption to a perfect sphere of light. Behind her, the eluvian dwindles back into darkness in the rushes, relinquishing its magic for the moment, leaving her to drown in a glittering sea.
The eluvians had entranced her once; now they seem like nothing at all. All the magic in the world—every marvel ever crafted by the Evanuris, every floating crystal spire—could never—never—compare to this.
“Where are we?” she asks, hushed. The air is cool here, but not so frozen that she can see her breath. No snow; no ice creeping along the lake’s bank. A faint wind in the trees—the sound of distant animal movement. Fulmenos, Judex, Equinor, each right where she expects. Not the Fade—she’s sure of it. This is somewhere real.
“Nearly nowhere,” Solas says, just as quiet. “The nearest city is Nessum, two weeks due south. There is a small village ten days from here, but they do not welcome visitors and have no roads to reach them. I suppose we technically fall within the western border of Tevinter, though I doubt even they would claim it.”
“And the gods put an eluvian here.”
“No. I did.”
As she’d suspected. Still, to hear it said aloud—an ache pierces through her heart so suddenly she must press her hand to it. She knows he loves her—she does—and yet every act of it is as startling as a bird darting from the brush into her path. A jolt straight through her, poleaxed by surprise, her eyes full of beating wings—
“This is—” she tries, but her voice catches, and she has to start again. “This is very like the lake I dream of. From when I was a child with the clan.”
“Yes,” Solas says. He sounds, she thinks, unaccountably nervous. “I…grew fond of it over our meetings. I do not think it exists, not exactly as you remember it, but this was as close as I could find.”
He looks so different in starlight. Not small—even in beige homespun he had never looked small to her, even when trying to be less than he was—but here, with his hands clasped tightly at his back and his brow creased as he looks at her, wearing a beautiful coat he hates because it was given by a friend, she is reminded of what she’s always known: that at the heart of him he is only a man, ready to move heaven and earth for those he loves.
Adahla laughs. She can hardly help it, overwhelmed by how much she loves him. His brow creases further, but she takes his hands in hers before he can chase himself too far into the doubt. “Don’t ever break the world for me, Solas.”
A flash of surprise—then a tentative, answering smile. “No? What would you prefer, in that case?”
“I’ll let you guess. I suggest you start small.”
He steps closer with a spread of ripples. One hand comes up to cup her face, his thumb stroking over her cheekbone. For a moment she remembers Crestwood, and a shattered promise, but somehow it comes with very little pain. Impossible to imagine there has ever been pain, not when Solas—here, real, here—smiles at her like this.
Then he bends his head and kisses her, and the last wrong thing in the world is made right.
Mythal’enaste, she loves how he kisses her. His fingers sliding into her hair, his whole body bent in towards her, over her, an arm sliding around her waist to bring her even closer. And still not close enough—they break apart just long enough she can see the stars reflected in his wide eyes—and then she wraps both arms around his neck and gives herself up to him completely.
How long? How long—a decade and more of an endless sea, of searching for somewhere to land and finding no home at all. And now—and now all the black water has filled to the brim instead with starlight, showing her the place where she can set her heart down to rest at last. He doesn’t deserve the patience, she knows—Dorian’s admonishments ring in her ears even now—but her heart chose him long ago and has never wavered, and the waves will smooth over in time.
They have time.
“Solas,” Adahla says eventually, when the kiss has at last ended and they stand together instead at the center of the world, her chin on his shoulder, his arms tight around her back. “I love you.”
She can feel how hard he swallows, but his answer comes instantly: “Ar lath ma, vhenan.”
“I’m afraid your gift is much less magnificent.”
He laughs. “I would treasure anything you choose. As you know.”
She smiles into his shoulder. He would, she knows, but she’s tried for him all the same: a broad selection of plaster pigments from a number of master artisans and apothecaries across Thedas. She’d spent hours poring through imperious critiques and dry, stodgy technique studies until she felt sure she knew what she wanted; then she’d spent several hours more writing artists with more vainglory than sense for their suppliers. She’d waited two months for a particular shade of indigo blue from Laysh, thanks to an Anderfels avalanche that had cut off the city’s only mountain pass.
She hopes he likes it. She wants him to like it, which is almost worse, and, shocked at her own weakness, she presses her suddenly-damp eyes to his shoulder.
“Vhenan?”
“Nothing,” she says, muffled in his coat, and lets out a laugh that surprises her. “I’m happy and afraid of it. I love you, emma lath. This leather may smell wonderful, but it’s terrible for taking up tears.”
That catches his attention, as she’d known it would, and he draws her back until he can wipe the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs. His face is so gentle her heart hurts. “Vir shiral malasa.”
She manages another wet laugh. “Bellanaris.”
“I promised you once that I would ask you to dance under the stars with me again.” His palms slide with painful tenderness to her shoulders, then back up again to her cheeks. “Will you do so now?”
Halamshiral. A lifetime ago, when the love had been simpler. “Yes,” she says, and lets him take her hand in his.
No music here, but she doesn’t need it. The wind keeps time for them instead, hushing through the pines, fluttering among a nearby stand of rushes, gliding with a pair of nighthawks across the moon before turning back again. Birdsong from a nearby tree: once, and then again.
Endless stars everywhere she looks, dancing with the ripples, even in his eyes.
—
Later, much later, after they have returned to the cottage, left again for the Lighthouse, and come home once more, Solas comes to lean on the back of the sofa above her. She’d sequestered herself there with a stolen slice of Lucanis’s orange cake, fully intent on spending the rest of the evening nose-deep in a stolid but thorough Towers-era exploration of the Chantry schism. She looks up instead, narrowly avoiding smearing sugar on the page as she marks her place with her thumb.
Creators, he’s handsome, even the wrong way around. His new coat has been shed to a chair by the door alongside her new books, leaving him in rolled shirtsleeves and an unlaced collar. He knows it, too; he watches her eyes flick to his throat and back again, and his lip curls into a smile.
Ruined. She’s simply ruined. “Can I help you?”
He braces his hands on either side of her head, one eyebrow lifted. “What Rook said. I haven’t forgotten.”
“As much as it pains me to admit it, emma lath, I must confess it’s true. You are—occasionally—a terrible snob.”
“The hair, vhenan.”
“Hm? I’m sorry, the wind must have picked up outside. I couldn’t make that out.”
He gives her a fond smile and bends to kiss her upside-down on the forehead. “Forgive me. I should not have pressed.”
“No—I—you wretched man. How awful, that the quickest way for you to get what you like from me is to stop trying for it.” She kicks off the woven blanket and sets the book and cake aside, already hot at the collar. “You’ll laugh, and I’ll be horribly embarrassed.”
He straightens, affronted. “I could never laugh at you, vhenan.”
“Dread Wolf eat you whole if you lie.” Adahla fishes her nature journal from the stack on the table at her feet, flips to a page near the middle, and shuts the book around her finger before he can see it. She can’t meet his eyes; instead she addresses the great bay window across the room. “Rook and I wrote often last year. About what we saw, the state of the war, the places where the Blight had begun to overrun.”
“Yes. I am aware.”
“She wrote to me once of a memory she had seen in the Crossroads. One of—one of your memories. From long ago, during the war with the Evanuris?”
Her voice turns up in question against her will, and she despises herself for it. Solas, toying now with the long tail of her hair, seems unperturbed by her turmoil. “I’m not surprised. The Crossroads has always been prone to lingering on certain powerful memories.”
“Yes. Well. Rook mentioned to me that in the memory she saw, and in others as well, that you…” Truth on our lips, courage in our hearts. If he can face down an Archdemon, so can she. The words tumble out like a spilled jar. “That you had hair, back then. Long hair. I could hardly imagine it, so…”
She still can’t look at him. She opens the journal for him instead, lifting it up so he can take it, and buries her face in her hand.
She’s never been skilled at portraiture. She’d tried anyway, idling away a few spare hours while waiting for news near Denerim. Two dozen sketches of his face, all turned roughly three-quarters, all with wildly different stylings of every haircut she could imagine.
The first few had been more practical: long to his shoulders, shorter and pulled back halfway, a high tail with shaved sides. A single thick braid resting over his collarbone. She’d been pleased enough with those. Then, as the waiting had stretched on, she’d grown bored, and the sketches had grown commensurately ridiculous.
Two high buns on either side of his head, just above his exaggerated ears. A horsetail squarely centered atop his forehead, the long strands hanging in his eyes. A hundred inch-tall spikes from nape to crown; a wild riot of curls that overspilled his shoulders and off the page. She doesn’t even remember the rest, though she knows she’d done very little to spare his dignity.
The silence is agonizing. She dares a peek, can only see his eyebrows arched nearly off his face, and surrenders back into humiliation. “Never say I didn’t think of you, emma lath.”
“These likenesses are…” He turns a page, then trails off, apparently shocked into silence. “I am not certain this one is even possible.”
She snatches the book from his unresisting hands and snaps it shut. “Even if Dorian does send back your cloak, I’m burning it instantly.”
Solas leans back down on his elbows, cupping her face from behind. Her cheeks are so hot his fingers feel like ice. “To be drawn by you is, and always has been, a great honor.”
“I can hear you smiling, you terrible—ugh. Tel’athim, pala adahl’en—”
“How vulgar, Inquisitor,” Solas says, gently tipping back her head, and he kisses her. It doesn’t last long, but it’s filled with enough raw affection to twist her heart to shreds. When he lets her go, his eyes soft as snowfall, she blows out a sigh frustrated enough to shift his fondness to faint worry. “Vhenan?”
She reaches up to tug at his collar. “You’ve undercut all my hideous shame, and I still don’t even know which it was. Did I guess right at all?”
His mouth goes carefully flat. “The longest curls, I assure you.”
Adahla bursts out laughing. She can hardly help it, even when Solas bends to kiss her again, even as she wraps her hand behind his neck to hold him in place. “You are the greatest fool in Thedas,” she tells him, laughter pressing at every word.
His eyes are still so soft. “I like to listen to you laugh.”
“I like the idea of you with hair.”
He snorts. “I was younger then. Impetuous. Often reckless.”
“I’m young. Impetuous. Reckless.” She is none of those things—her Keeper had once accused her of being born sixty—but Solas only smiles at her. “Perhaps I’ll try the spikes for myself.”
His turn to laugh, and she's pleased at the lightness of it. “I will show you what I wore, then, if you like.”
“Promises, promises.”
“Or you could ask Rook, as it seems she has little hesitation in sharing others’ secrets.”
“As if I could ever trust her again.” She trails her fingers over his cheek. “I like it when you keep your promises to me.”
His amusement dims a little, as she’d known it would, but he kisses her again, longer than before. A promise in itself, clear and strong as a shout—but Satinalia is an evening made for promises, no matter if they’re in the Frostback Basin or the Archon’s dining room or here: a small cottage built from nothing but memory and hope in the heart of the Fade.
A future with Solas. A future where Solas loves her; a future where he stays. That there's even a chance is enough to fracture her clean through with joy.
She leaves her eyes closed after, savoring the moment as long as she can. He kisses her twice more, carefully, and at last she looks up to find him watching her with steady, unhurried warmth. She says, “Dance with me in that lake again, next year.”
Solas smiles, his eyes bright. “I will.”
—
end.